Monday morning Christa and I exchanged hugs and good-byes with Zee and the Jackson kids. Then we climbed into J.W.’s old Land Cruiser, and he drove us to the landing in Oak Bluffs, where we boarded the ferry.
We were going home. For Christa, it was the last leg of a long journey.
I was looking forward to seeing Evie. I’d called her Sunday night. She said she missed me. That was nice. She’d be waiting at Woods Hole for us. She’d drive us to my place in Boston, where Christa and I would get into my car, and I’d drive her to New Hampshire.
When the ferry pulled away from the slip, we found some space at the railing up front on the top deck. We leaned there side by side and gazed at the mainland of America.
I found I had no desire to look back at the green mound of the Vineyard as it receded behind us, and I guessed Christa felt the same way. It had turned out to be a place where evil walked, and for me, at least, it would take a while before I’d be able to see J.W.’s blessed isle any other way.
Maybe in a month or so, when the annual bluefish and striped bass fishing derby began. J.W. and I had a date for that.
“You doing okay?” I said to Christa.
She looked up at me, smiled quickly, nodded, then returned her gaze to the water and the sky and the distant mainland. I let it go. She hadn’t done much talking since I’d found her in the sound truck on Saturday night. I couldn’t imagine what she was thinking. She hadn’t seen her parents for over two years.
I had a lot of questions I wanted to ask her, but I figured I could live without knowing the answers. She’d share what she wanted to share with whomever she wanted to share it. It was more important that she talk with Mike and Neddie than with me anyway.
Saturday night, after Spitz and I found the claymore mines that Frank Dyer had rigged in the speakers, Christa and I were taken in separate cruisers to the state police headquarters in Oak Bluffs, where we were deposited in separate rooms. Jake Spitz, Olive Otero, another state cop, and two other Feds whose names and affiliations I didn’t catch took turns asking me questions. I assumed that my interrogators were moving back and forth between me and Christa, checking to see that we were telling our own versions of the same story.
They fed me coffee and I talked into a tape recorder. I never sensed that they intended to charge me with a crime, although I had killed a man that night.
One of the Feds told me about the minefield that Frank Dyer had laid out at the site of the Celebration. It was a lethal design. Dyer had set up the speakers so that they surrounded the area where the audience was sitting. Each speaker was armed with claymores, and each claymore was armed with seven hundred steel balls, a pound and a half of C-4 explosive, and a blasting cap.
The caps were wired to the fat cable that snaked into the sound truck, the cable that Christa was supposed to plug in at the beginning of the fireworks display. When she pulled the lever, the mines would explode simultaneously, each one spewing its charge of steel balls over a sixty-degree arc waist-high on a standing adult. It would’ve been the equivalent of a thousand machine guns firing at once.
Those mines, the Fed told me, have a killing range of about a hundred meters. Hundreds of people in the Celebration audience would have been killed, including all of the special guests and celebrities in the front few rows. Thousands more would have been maimed and wounded.
The Fed explained to me that claymores—and machine guns and rocket launchers and just about anything else you might need if you wanted to kill a lot of people—are readily available on the international black market if you can pay the price. Sooner or later they’d figure out where Frank Dyer bought them and how he smuggled them onto the Vineyard. There were, after all, only two ways: by air or by sea. Thousands of boats prowled the Vineyard waters in the summertime. A smuggler would have little challenge.
They finished interrogating us several hours after sunrise on Sunday. Spitz drove us to the Jackson house. I sat beside him in the front seat. Christa rode in back.
Zee was standing in the driveway waiting for us. She opened the back door of Spitz’s car, and Christa stepped out. Zee put her arm around the girl’s shoulders and led her into the house.
I turned to Spitz. “I’ve got a question.”
“Only one?”
“Several, actually,” I said. “Princess Ishewa. I feel responsible for her death.”
He shrugged.
“Can you tell me what happened?”
“I don’t see why not,” he said. “We rounded up those Simon Peters. They were pretty talkative.” He hesitated. “This is strictly between us, right?”
“Absolutely,” I said.
He peered at me for a moment, then nodded. “That night—the night she died, the night after you showed her Christa Doyle’s picture—she showed up at Duval’s place. The princess and the guru knew each other. What led her there, I don’t know. Second sight, maybe. She was hellbent on rescuing the girl, thought all she had to do was ask Duval and he’d let her go. Anyway, she was stopped in the driveway by a couple of Simon Peters, including Sullivan—the one you shot—and they took her to Frank Dyer instead of Duval. The princess didn’t know any better. Told Dyer she wanted to take Christa with her. Said she was having these terrible visions. Dyer promised her he’d talk with Duval about it, see what he could do. Told her to check back with him tomorrow. So she left, and Dyer sent Sullivan after her in one of those Range Rovers. We found it in Duval’s garage. Had a big scrape and paint from that Pinto on the side.”
“But why kill her?”
Spitz shrugged. “Simple solution to a complicated problem. If the princess had asked Duval, he probably would’ve let Christa go. He didn’t keep people against their will. Dyer couldn’t afford to lose Christa. She was a key player in his plan.”
“So Duval had nothing to do with it.”
Spitz shook his head. “Nope. It was Dyer.”
I thought about all that. “It was my fault, then.”
“You could look at it that way, I guess. But Frank Dyer was the bad guy. Don’t forget that.”
I looked at him. “Was he?”
“What to you mean?”
“Was Dyer the only bad guy?” I said.
He gazed out the side window of his car for a minute. Then he turned to me. “You’re thinking about international terrorism,” he said. “Al Qaeda or something.”
“Logical thing to think, isn’t it?”
“Sure,” he said. “No evidence of it, though.”
“Dyer was on his own?”
“He and his Simon Peters,” he said. “They were loyal to Dyer, but as far as we can tell, none of them really knew what he was up to. Frank Dyer was just another damn fanatical assassin. Except on a grand scale.”
“That’s a profound relief,” I said.
I started to slide out of the car, but Spitz grabbed my arm. “One more thing,” he said.
“I’m pretty damn tired,” I said. “You kept me up way past my bedtime.”
“You shot a man dead,” he said. “What the hell did you expect?”
“He was a bad man. He was about to murder me.”
“Listen,” he said. “This is a big story. It’s bound to get out.”
“As it should,” I said.
He nodded. “As it will. But we want to get it right. We don’t want wild rumors flying around. Do you understand?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know much.”
“You know a lot,” he said.
“The truth will come out sooner or later.”
“Yes,” said Spitz. “It will, and it should. We just want to be sure it is the truth. Not pieces of the truth, not one man’s version of the truth. The whole truth. We haven’t got the whole truth yet. But we will get it. When we do, you’ll read it in the newspapers, I promise you.”
“And meanwhile?”
“Meanwhile, you’ll probably see stories that you know are inaccurate. Trust us. And don’t, for Christ’s sake, breathe a word to anybody about those damn claymores.”
I shrugged. “All I want to do is get Christa home to her dying father.”
Spitz nodded. “Well, good. I hope it goes well.” He reached over and held out his hand. “We’ll be in touch.”
I shook his hand. “If we’re not, that’ll be okay by me.”
He held on to my hand and grabbed my eyes with his. “Believe me,” he said, “we will be in touch.”
I decided that Jake Spitz was a scary man.
When I went into the house, Zee put her finger to her lips. “Christa’s asleep in the guest room,” she whispered.
“Already?”
She nodded. “Out like a light.”
“What about me?”
“Use the sofa. We’ll take the kids to the beach for the afternoon so you can sleep.”
That sounded good to me. I went into the living room, picked up the phone, and rang Neddie and Mike’s number in Hancock, New Hampshire. When Neddie answered, I said, “It’s Brady. Christa’s with me. We’ll be home tomorrow.”
She hesitated. “Really?”
“Yes. Really.”
Neddie didn’t speak for a long time. Finally, she said, “Oh, Brady. I can’t believe it.”
“How’s Mike?”
“He’s…he’s hanging in there. Every day, waiting to hear from you.”
“I didn’t want to call you earlier, give you false hopes.”
“I understand. Thank you.” She hesitated. “How is she? Can I talk to her?”
“Christa’s fine, Neddie. She’s been through a lot. She’s sleeping right now.”
“I want to know all about it.”
“I think that should be up to Christa. She’s ready to go home.”
“I’ve got to go tell Mike right now. I’ll see you tomorrow, then?”
“Tomorrow, yes. Sometime in the afternoon.”
“Thank you, Brady.”
“It’s truly my pleasure,” I said.
A little before three o’clock on Monday afternoon, I turned onto the long, dirt driveway that led through the woods to Mike and Neddie Doyle’s house on the hilltop in southwestern New Hampshire.
“We’re here,” I announced redundantly.
Christa had been silent during the two-hour drive from my apartment on the Boston waterfront. She fiddled with the car radio now and then and kept her gaze out the side window. She had a lot on her mind. I didn’t try to make conversation.
When the Doyles’ house appeared through the trees at the top of the driveway, she said, “Please stop here, Uncle Brady.”
I stopped.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” she said. She turned and looked at me, and I saw the apprehension in her eyes. “I’m not the same person. They don’t know me at all. I don’t know what they expect.”
“I’m sure it will be hard for all of you.”
“I’ve been so awful to them.”
“What’s done is done,” I said. “They’re desperate to see you again.”
“They really hired you to find me?”
I nodded.
She cocked her head, looked at me for a moment, then smiled. “You did a good job.”
“Thank you.”
She leaned toward me and kissed my cheek. “Okay,” she said. “I’m as ready as I’ll ever be. I think I’ll walk the rest of the way. Do you mind?”
“You’re not going to skip out now, are you?”
“No. I promise.”
“Tell your parents I’ll call them sometime this week,” I said.
She nodded, then opened the door and slid out. She came around to my side of the car. “Thank you, Uncle Brady. You rescued me.”
I waved my hand. “You’re welcome, Christa. Any time you need rescuing, let me know.”
She smiled, turned, and walked toward the house.
I sat there and watched. Christa was still thirty yards away when the front door opened and Neddie came running out. Christa hesitated, then ran toward her.
The two women hugged each other, and I could hear them both squealing and crying and laughing. After a minute or two, they linked arms and went into the house.
I smiled, then turned my car around and headed back to Boston.