One-Way Ticket (24 page)

But I’d done it. I’d gotten away with it. Me, Phil, from Marine Engines in Beverly with a recall notice for engine parts.

I was glad Dave hadn’t asked me which engine parts, or who manufactured them, or what was wrong with them. I wasn’t sure I could name any part of a marine engine, never mind one that was a likely candidate for recall.

I leaned back in my chair for a couple of minutes. I decided not to be Phil anymore. I wasn’t sure I wanted Dave and Sandy comparing notes on some guy named Phil.

I pecked out the number for the Kettle Cove Marina on my cellphone.

A woman answered. “Kettle Cove. This is Sandy. How can I help you?”

“Yeah,” I said, “how you doin’, Sandy. This is Frank, here at Danvers Marine, and I’m about to head over your way to take a look at Mike Warner’s Bertram, but I seem to’ve lost the number for his slip. He says she’s been running rough and he’s in a big hurry to get it fixed. Help me out, willya?”

“Frank, is it?”

“You got it.”

“That’s funny,” she said. “I saw Mr. Warner just a couple days ago, and he never mentioned anything about his boat running rough. It’s a pretty old boat, but he takes good care of it.”

“Well,” I said, “he’s trying to take good care of it now. I got the work order right here in my hand, which means I got a job to do. I just need his slip number so I can take a look at her, you know?”

“Hang on there a minute, Frank,” Sandy said. “Let’s see what I can do for you.”

I waited with my fingers crossed.

She came back on the line a minute later. “Frank? You there?”

“Yep. I’m waiting.”

“Do I know you?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “My loss.”

“Where you from? Danvers Marine, you said?”

“That’s it,” I said. I held my breath.

“Hm,” she said. “I don’t think we’ve ever done any business with you.”

“Well,” I said, “it’s about time we did, hey?”

“Sure,” she said. “I guess so. Thing is, I’m not supposed to give out information about our clients. You know what I’m saying?”

“Oh, absolutely,” I said. “I understand. I could be anybody. It’s just, I been trying to call Mr. Warner, and all I get is his voice mail, and I’m really backed up over here. I don’t wanna get you in trouble. All I need is the damn slip number.”

Sandy paused. I was afraid I’d blown it. Then she said, “Well, okay, Frank. What the hell. I don’t see any harm. You wanna write it down?”

“Yep,” I said. “I’m ready. Fire away”

“Mr. Warner’s Bertram is in slip G-9. You’ve been here before, right?”

“Not lately. You know how many marinas there are on the North Shore, Sandy? I been to all of ’em one time or another. After a while one starts to look like all the others, you know what I’m saying? You better remind me how to find G-9.”

“Sure,” she said, “okay. Slip G-9 is on wharf G, which is the last one out off the main dock. Even-numbered slips on the left, odd numbers on the right. So G-9 is the next-to-last slip on the outside on the right. Make sense?”

“Got it,” I said.

“You know Mr. Warner’s boat?”

“One of the other guys used to work on it,” I said, making it up as I went along. “He quit, so now it’s me. A Bertram, is all I got written down here.”

“A Bertram, right,” Sandy said. “She’s a thirty-eight-footer.
Dot Com
is her name. White with blue trim. Nice old boat. Sleeps four. Mr. Warner and his wife have been going out quite a bit lately. They do a lot of fishing. Funny that he never said anything about her not running right. I mean, folks usually mention it to me if somebody’s coming over to look at their boat.”

Dot Com,
I thought. A cute name for a boat. So the dot-com boom was how—and when—Mike Warner made his money. I wondered if he was one of those people who hit it big, didn’t get out soon enough, and was now finding himself squeezed.

According to Dalt, Mike had exhausted his resources trying to track down his missing son. A boat could be a giant money pit.

“Well,” I said to Sandy, “all I know is, he’s in a big hurry. I got a rush on this. The fishing must be pretty good these days.”

“Very good, what I’m hearing.”

“Okay, well, thanks a million, there, Sandy. I’ll be over sometime this afternoon, take a look at Mr. Warner’s boat.”

“You’ve got to sign in at the office,” she said, “get the security code. When you do, be sure to say hello.”

“You bet,” I said.

I hung up the phone and blew out a long breath. That had been way easier than I’d expected. Gordie always said you couldn’t overestimate the gullibility of the American public, and the billion-dollar annual sales from telephone and e-mail soliciting and television infomercials bore him out. He said, tell somebody you’re a reporter or, even better, a novelist, and they’ll just spill out their life story to you. Mostly, Gordie said, people like the idea of being helpful, and they’re flattered when somebody asks them for help.

Dave and Sandy were both nice, friendly, helpful people. Why should they mistrust Phil with the recall notice or Frank the marine-engine mechanic? They were just good old boys trying to do their jobs.

I printed out Mapquest directions to the Kettle Cove Marina in Gloucester, then went out to the kitchen. Henry, who’d been snoozing on the daybed in my den, scrambled after me. I found some sliced ham and made myself two ham-and-cheese sandwiches. I ate over the sink. Henry sat on the floor beside me. He looked up at me. Patience and loyalty and love glowed in his liquid brown eyes.

I gave him half a sandwich. He swallowed it in one gulp, then resumed gazing hungrily at me.

“That’s all you get,” I said. “The rest is mine.”

He lay down, dropped his chin onto his paws, and refused to make eye contact.

“It’s all about food with you, isn’t it?” I said to him.

He rolled his eyes up, looked at me for a minute, then sighed and closed them.

“Listen,” I said to. him, “I’m going to be gone for a while this afternoon, and you can’t come with me. Sorry.”

His ears flattened against his head. Henry was a master at reading intonation and body language. The only word I’d just spoken that he understood was “sorry.” He’d learned to equate “sorry” with disappointment and abandonment. Flattened ears meant he was worried and depressed.

I reached down and scratched the sweet spot on his forehead. “I’ll be back before you know it,” I told him. “You guard the house, okay? Don’t hesitate to bark at strange noises.”

He narrowed his eyes at me, then got up and walked back into my den.

I’d have to make it up to him. He’d been abandoned quite a bit since Evie left.

I followed Henry into the den. I changed into a pair of my most faded and threadbare blue jeans, a green work shirt, an old pair of sneakers, and a blue windbreaker.

I threaded the leather holster for my big Leatherman multipurpose tool onto my belt. It unfolded into a sharp three-inch blade, or a Phillips or flat-head screwdriver, or pliers and wire cutters, or can and bottle openers, or a saw blade, or a file, or an awl. I put a cigarette lighter and a Mini Mag flashlight into a pocket in the windbreaker. I set my cell phone to vibrate and slipped it into my pants pocket. I draped my binoculars around my neck. From the vast hat collection on my closet shelf I found a faded and fish-blood-stained cap with the picture of a big oceangoing sportfishing boat on it.

I didn’t know if this outfit would enable me to pass myself off as a marine-engine mechanic. For one thing, aside from the Leatherman, I didn’t have any tools. Nor did I have a business card, not to mention the fact that I drove a four-year-old green BMW instead of a panel truck with the Danvers Marine logo on the side.

I figured there’d be some more social engineering and pretexting in my future before I managed to get a look into the cabin of the old thirty-eight-foot Bertram called
Dot Com
that was owned by Mike Warner and moored in slip G-9 in the Kettle Cove Marina in Gloucester.

T
HURSDAY-AFTERNOON COMMUTER TRAFFIC
was what I expected—bumper-to-bumper, stop-and-go all the way from Mt. Vernon Street to Cambridge Street, then on Charles out past the North Station in Boston, over the bridge on Route 93, and all the way to Beverly. When I picked up 128 east, a straight shot out to Cape Ann, the traffic seemed to thin out a little.

The rain had been just a misty drizzle in the city, but as I traveled north and east it became a steady, hard summer rain under a low oatmeal-colored sky.

I guessed I was ten or fifteen minutes from Gloucester when something vibrated against my thigh. It felt like an angry bee had bumbled into my pants pocket, and it took me a second to realize it was my cell phone.

Adrienne? Dalt? Teresa?

The kidnappers?

I remembered that I’d called Becca Quinlan in the morning. She hadn’t called back. Maybe it was her.

I pulled over to the side of the road, turned on my emergency flashers, fished the phone from my pocket, flipped it open, and said, “Yes?”

“Hey. It’s me. Your wayward girlfriend.” Evie.

My throat got tight, just hearing her voice. “You’re hardly wayward, honey.” I paused. “I can’t even begin to tell you how good it is to hear your voice.”

“You, too,” she said. “You doing anything?”

“Nothing important,” I said. “Nothing as important as talking to you.”

“I called your office. Julie said you’d taken the day off. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “A mental health day, you know?”

“You’re not home, either,” Evie said. “I tried our house. I thought you’d be home.”

“Nope,” I said. Her next question would be: Where was I on this rainy evening, then, if not home? I surfed my mind frantically for a believable lie. Everything I came up with sounded false. “I’m not home yet, no,” I said lamely, a lie itself, of sorts, implying that I was on my way home from somewhere instead of on the road trying to track down a kidnapper. “So do you have some news?”

I waited. She didn’t say anything, didn’t follow up on the where-are-you question.

“Talk to me, babe,” I said finally.

“Ah, shit,” she said. “I’m trying to be all upbeat and brave and sweet for you, and it’s not working.”

“You don’t have to pretend anything for me,” I said. “Tell me what you know.”

“It’s bad,” she said. “Bad, bad. I expected it, you know? But still, when you hear it…”

“I’m sorry” was all I could think of to say.

“They wheeled him into the operating room at seven this morning. Ed. My daddy. It was supposed to be what they call exploratory, meaning they didn’t know what the hell they were going to find. All the wonders of modern fucking medicine, and half the time diagnosis is still a mystery. He was in there all morning. Nobody told me anything. Me, a big-time hospital administrator, and they made me feel like a bag lady who’d snuck in for the crappy coffee. I finally got to see him in recovery just a few minutes ago. He’s still unconscious. All pale and thin and hollowed out and hooked up to machines.” She sucked in a breath, let it out. “I’m sorry. I’m kind of a mess. It’s been a long day. You gear yourself up for the worst thing, but deep down inside you believe that it’s going to be something better than that, as if you can fend off the really bad things by inventing worst-case scenarios. You understand what I’m saying?”

“Sure,” I said. “It’s like, if you can make yourself imagine it, it won’t happen that way.”

“Yeah,” Evie said. “Well, I’m here to tell you, sometimes it does.”

“Tell me.”

“Worst-case scenario,” she said. “They didn’t know what they’d find. Or at least, so they said. Maybe they knew all along. A lot of the time they just don’t tell you what they think. I’ve been around doctors enough. I asked all the right questions, and I got all the predictable evasions.” She paused and blew out a long breath. I could hear that she was smoking a cigarette. “It’s a stage four pancreatic cancer. That’s the worst stage. It means that it’s spread all over the place. Lymph nodes. Other organs. He’s going to die. The doctor said he couldn’t operate. Only about one in five of these things is operable anyway, he said, as if that would make me feel better. He might want to do chemotherapy or something. He wanted me to thank him, I think. Funny thing was, I almost did. Your father’s going to die, lady. Oh, thank you so fucking much, kind doctor.”

“I wish I was there with you,” I said.

“No,” she said. “It wouldn’t do any good. You can’t help me. I’m sorry. That sounded shitty. Do you understand?”

“Sure,” I said, although I didn’t.

“I’m going to stay here. With him. Until…”

“Okay,” I said.

“It might be six months. Maybe a little more, but probably less. They can’t tell me.”

I was sitting there in my car on the shoulder off Route 128 on the way to Gloucester. My headlights were on, and the windshield wipers were swishing back and forth. Raindrops were pattering down on the roof and dancing on the hood. When the cars and trucks went slamming past me, my little BMW rocked in their wet backdraft.

I didn’t know what to say to Evie. She was my love, and I couldn’t think of anything to say to her.

“Brady?” she said after a minute. “Are you there?”

“I’m here, honey.”

“I do miss you, you know.”

“I miss you, too.”

“And Henry,” she said. “You’ll give him a hug for me, okay? Tell him I love him.”

“I will.”

“Hey?” she said.

“What?”

“Please don’t think about coming out here.”

“Okay,” I said. “I understand.”

“No,” she said, “I mean really. It would be just like you to show up sometime.”

“I won’t if you don’t want me to.”

She was quiet for a while. Then she said, “What’s going to become of us?”

“We’re solid,” I said. “We’ll be good.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t think about us right now. I’m sorry.”

“I want you to do what you have to do,” I said. “Don’t worry about me. We’ll worry about afterwards when the time comes.”

“That’s the thing,” she said. “I’m not. Not worried about you, I mean. I’m worried about my daddy. And about me. I can’t even think about afterwards.” She paused. “I’ve got to go. I want to get back with him. I just stepped out to the parking lot for a minute. I needed a cigarette. I didn’t want the damn doctor to know he made me cry. And I wanted to call you. I wanted you to know what’s going on.”