As I drove back to Boston from my visit with Mike and Neddie Doyle, I tried to imagine going two years without hearing from one of my sons. It was unimaginable.
Most runaways, I knew, were fleeing unbearable family situations. They had drug problems, or abusive parents, or the wrong friends, or babies in their bellies. Often all of those things. They headed for big cities. Los Angeles was the number one destination for runaways. More than a million teenagers ran away every year. Three-quarters of them were girls, and nearly half of them ended up as prostitutes. A large number of them were never found. Those that were often turned up dead.
Tracking down Christa Doyle—if she was still alive—and convincing her to go home to say good-bye to her dying father promised to be a difficult and unpleasant job with an unhappy outcome, and I wished Mike and Neddie hadn’t asked me to do it. But there was no way I could’ve turned them down.
When I got back to my apartment on the Boston waterfront, I made myself a tuna fish sandwich, poured a glass of Sam Adams, sat at my kitchen table, and opened the manila envelope that Neddie had given to me.
I looked at Christa’s photo again, and again I saw a pretty teenage girl with her arm around her father’s waist. Nothing in that photo made me think of drugs or pregnancy or abuse.
The investigator in Eugene, Oregon, was a guy named Harold Rubin. His report was sketchy and designed, it seemed to me, to justify his fee. He charged $200 per hour plus expenses. He claimed to have spent seven hours and forty minutes on the telephone. He racked up 1,459 miles on his car’s odometer and fifty-nine hours on the road. He spent three nights in motels and ate thirteen meals away from home. He sent out thirty-two faxes and placed notices in seven newspapers.
Rubin had been dogged enough. He talked with all the police departments, hospitals, and morgues in eastern Oregon, checked out all the bus depots and shelters and youth hostels from Eugene to Portland, showed Christa’s photo to all the pimps and predators and street people he knew and offered them a thousand bucks for a lead that panned out.
A bus driver thought he recognized Christa, said he’d taken her to Corvallis. There a cop remembered seeing a girl who resembled her hitchhiking east. A waitress at a café, and then a gas-station attendant, and then a motel clerk, and then a truck driver directed Rubin to what he called “a hippie commune” in the Willamette National Forest.
None of the hippies would admit that they’d ever seen Christa. Rubin didn’t believe them. He offered them money for information. They took the money and told him that, well, yes, now that they thought of it, Christa had been with them for a while, but she’d left a couple weeks ago in the company of some man they said they couldn’t name or describe.
Rubin suspected they were lying. He figured either they’d never seen her or that she was still there, hiding from the well-dressed stranger who’d pulled up in the brand-new Lincoln Town Car.
Rubin spent two days hiding in the hills with binoculars trained on the grubby settlement of tents and lean-tos and never spied Christa Doyle.
And that was that. The trail had dried up. If she’d ever been there, which he concluded was doubtful, she wasn’t anymore.
I put down Harold Rubin’s report and stared out the glass sliders that looked down from my sixth-floor apartment onto Boston Harbor. A brisk afternoon breeze riffled the water, and the gulls and terns were wheeling on the thermals.
I found the envelope that held Christa’s last letter to her parents. It was handwritten and covered both sides of a sheet of blank typing paper. Most of it was an angry rant that amounted to an indictment of her parents’ wealth and their failure to give their daughter spiritual and moral guidance. It sounded canned, as if she were paraphrasing some slick New Age self-help psychobabble.
Was it possible Christa was still with the hippies in the Oregon woods? The fact that Rubin had spent two days spying on them without spotting her didn’t mean much. They could easily have known he was still lurking around and kept Christa out of sight until he’d left.
I looked at my watch. Two in the afternoon, which would make it 11 A.M. in Eugene, Oregon. Rubin’s phone number was at the top of the letterhead on his report. I dialed it and got his voice mail. It announced that Mr. Rubin was out of the country for the month of August and gave the name of an agency the caller could contact. It didn’t say whether Rubin was checking his voice mail or not.
On the chance that he was, I left him a message reminding him of the Christa Doyle case. I told him who I was and what I was doing, and I told him Mike Doyle was dying fast, that time was, as they say, of the essence, and asked him to call me back as soon as possible if he got my message.
I figured I wouldn’t hear from Harold Rubin. Strike one.
I went to the refrigerator for another Sam, fetched my portable phone from the living room, returned to the kitchen table, sighed, and took out the list of names Neddie had given me.
There were twenty-seven. Neddie had identified each one with a word or two: “friend from school,” “teacher,” “neighbor,” “cousin.” Most of them were friends from school from the days when the Doyles lived in Belmont, Massachusetts. If they were Christa’s age, they’d probably be out of high school now.
In my business, I’ve dealt with a lot of private investigators. They all say the same thing about their work: It’s always boring, sometimes dangerous, rarely rewarding, and terminally soul-killing. Private investigators spend most of their professional lives speed-dialing telephones, surfing the Internet, and slouching in parked automobiles. They drink too much Coke, eat too many Tums, tell too many lies, dream too many nightmares, alienate too many of their friends and relatives.
Well, it had to be done.
I took out my Greater Boston phone book, started at the top of the list Neddie had given me, and began calling. More often than not I got voice mail or an answering machine, not surprising in the middle of a Saturday afternoon in August. I declined to leave any messages. I scratched an X beside those names. I’d try them again, and keep trying until I talked to somebody.
When anybody answered, I said the same thing: “My name is Brady Coyne. I’m a lawyer working with Mike and Neddie Doyle, and we hope you might be able to help us. We’re wondering if you might have talked to or heard from their daughter, Christa, lately.”
They all said about the same thing: They remembered Christa but had lost touch with her when she moved to New Hampshire. All of them asked what the problem was. I told them it was a family matter, and I used a tone that suggested I had no intention of elaborating.
I had only four names left on my list when a “friend from school” named Alyssa Romano hesitated a couple beats too many before she said, “Christa? Um, no. I haven’t heard from Christa.”
“Alyssa,” I said, “Christa’s father is dying of a terrible disease. He’s got about a month to live, and he’s desperate to know that she’s okay. If you know anything at all…”
There was a long pause at the end of the line. I was afraid she was going to hang up. Then, in a soft voice, she said, “I promised her I wouldn’t tell.”
“Christa? You talked to her? Have you seen her?”
“Is that true? Mr. Doyle is dying?”
“Yes, it is. That’s why I’m trying to reach Christa. Please. What can you tell me?”
“Geez. He was a pretty cool guy.” She hesitated. “She made me swear I wouldn’t say anything to her parents.”
“I’m not her parents,” I said.
“But you’ll tell them, right?”
“Yes, I will. Don’t you think they have a right to know? They’ve been worried sick about Christa for two years.”
“I don’t know what I should do. I wish you hadn’t called me.”
“Alyssa,” I said, “you have the opportunity to do a good thing. The right thing.”
“But I promised.”
“You promised you wouldn’t tell her parents. Telling me is different.”
“Not really.”
“Where is she, Alyssa?”
“I don’t want Christa to know I broke my promise.”
“I won’t tell her. I give you my word.”
“Her parents must be awfully sad.”
“They are,” I said. “Terribly sad.”
She hesitated, then said, “Christa’s down on the Vineyard.”
“Martha’s Vineyard?”
“Yes. She called me a few days ago. She’s been calling me every now and then ever since she…she left home. We were best friends when she lived around here.”
“What has she told you?”
“Nothing, really. It’s like she doesn’t want me to know anything. Honestly, I don’t know why she calls me. It’s like, I don’t know, she needs a friend or something. She just asks what I’m doing, that’s all. When I ask her about herself, she just goes, ‘Oh, nothing much, it’s boring,’ and changes the subject.”
“What’s she doing on the Vineyard?”
“Like I said, I don’t really know. She kind of let it slip that she was there when we were talking. Said something about the Celebration for Humanity, that world peace thing they’re having on the Vineyard, all the singers and famous people. When I asked her something about it, she clammed up.”
“Do you have a phone number for her?”
“No.”
“An address? The name of somebody? Do you know which town she’s in? If she has a job?”
“No, no, Mr. Coyne. Nothing like that. All I can tell you is, she was on the Vineyard a few days ago. I said I’d like to go down, spend a day or two with her, or maybe go to the Celebration with her, and she said no, that wouldn’t work. That’s all I know.”
“It wouldn’t work,” I repeated. “As if she might be leaving?”
“It didn’t really sound like that. More like she was busy, had other friends. I guess she just didn’t want to see me. I don’t know what’s up with Christa. She’s pretty weird.”
“Weird how?”
“I don’t know. When I knew her, when she was living here in Belmont, she was fun, you know? We made jokes and stuff. We laughed a lot. She had a great mom and dad. I used to be a little jealous. Anyways, since she left, whenever I talk with her, it’s like, she hates her parents, and everything is so serious.”
“You mean you talk about serious things?”
“No, not like that. Just her tone. She sounds serious, you know? We don’t really ever talk about anything.”
I asked Alyssa Romano a few more questions, but she didn’t have any more insight. As far as she knew, Christa was on Martha’s Vineyard for the Celebration for Humanity, and that was it. I gave her my phone number and urged her to call me if she thought of anything, and I asked her not to tell Christa she’d spoken to me if they talked again. She promised.
I hoped she’d keep her promise to me, even if she’d broken her promise to Christa. Now that I knew where she was, I didn’t want to spook her.
For a minute or two I felt triumphant. In about two hours I’d discovered that Christa Doyle was alive, which all by itself was a cause for exultation, and I’d narrowed my search for her down from the entire world to a little island less than a two hours’ drive and a forty-minute ferry ride from my apartment. That, I thought, was damn good work for an amateur sleuth.
Then I began thinking about the work I still faced. Finding somebody who didn’t want to be found on Martha’s Vineyard in August, when the island swarmed with Summer People, was needle-in-a-haystack stuff. And this particular August, when the Celebration for Humanity, or whatever it was called, was coming up would make it even harder.
Well, if anybody could do it, it was J. W. Jackson.
J.W. was an ex–Boston cop who’d gotten shot, retired on his disability, moved to the Vineyard, married a beautiful islander named Zee, and sired a couple of nice kids. If you asked J.W. what he did, he’d tell you he was a fisherman, but I happened to know that he did some investigating now and then. He and I were friends. We fished together a couple times every year. Once we even worked on a case together.
I called his number. No answer, naturally. I didn’t really expect the Jacksons to be home on a pretty summer Saturday afternoon. They’d be out with their kids in their catboat or surf casting off the Chappie beaches or raking quahogs in one of the saltwater ponds.
I kept trying, and a half hour later Zee answered. She sounded happy to hear my voice and asked if I wanted to come down, do some fishing. The bonito and false albacore had started to show up, she said, and there were always stripers around.
I told her I’d rather wait till after Labor Day, when the Summer People went back to America, and she said she didn’t blame me, it was Grand Central Station down there. Anytime I wanted. They always had a bed for me at their house.
“I bet you want to talk to J.W.,” she said.
“Is he around?”
“Nope. He’s driving his, um, friend Evangeline around the island.”
“Evangeline?” I said. “You mean the singer?”
“Yep. Can you believe it?”
“Sure. Some people have all the luck, and J.W. is one of them.”
“Don’t tell anybody,” she said. “It’s supposed to be hush-hush. I’ll have him call you when he gets in.”
J.W. called an hour later. “What’s up?” he said.
“I’ve got a job for you. Right up your alley.”
“I’m retired, remember?”
“So what are you doing driving the world’s most glamorous singer around? They paying you for that?”
“Bet your ass,” he said. “You don’t think I’d do something like this for nothing, do you?”
“Listen,” I said. “What I’ve got is a more important job.” I told him about Mike and Neddie Doyle, how I’d tracked Christa down to the Vineyard, and how all I wanted was for J.W. to locate her for me so I could go down and talk to her.
“For the next week or so,” he said, “the best I can do is keep an eye out for her. You want real sleuthing, I can’t help you. I’m joined to Evangeline at the hip for about ten hours a day, seven days a week.”
“One hip or two?”
“Ha,” he said.
“That doesn’t sound so hard,” I said. “She’s an attractive woman.”
“Oh, she’s attractive,” he said. “That doesn’t make it easy.”
“You can’t do this for me, then?”
“Brady, believe me, I would if I could.”
“Know anybody who can?” I said.
He was quiet for a minute. “Every cop and spare security man on the island is working overtime, babysitting important people, guarding mansions, stuff like that. You send some PI down here who doesn’t know his way around, he’ll never get anywhere.” He cleared his throat. “There’s only one guy I can think of who might be up to the job.”
“Yeah?” I said. “Who’s that?”
“Stick out your forefinger,” he said, “and aim it at your face.”
“Me?” I laughed. “Hell, I’m no investigator. Anyway, I did my part of the job. I found out Christa was down there.”
“You know your way around here as well as any off-islander,” said J.W. “You’ve got a place to stay and a car to use and a couple of savvy local consultants.”
“The consultants being you and Zee.”
“Right.”
“The place to stay being your place.”
“Of course. Anytime.”
“Your car?”
“It’s just sitting there rusting. They’ve given me a nice new Ford Explorer to drive the lady around in.”
“I really don’t want to do this,” I said.
“Ah, we’ll have a good time. Maybe even get out in the evening, catch some fish.”
“You’ll help me?”
“Like I said, I’ll consult with you, and so will Zee. I’ll make some phone calls for you, if you want. I can’t sleuth around, except maybe after dark when I’ve tucked Evangeline in for the night.”
I hemmed and hawed, but in the end I told J.W. I’d be on the noon ferry the next day. He said he’d have Zee pick me up at the dock in Vineyard Haven, and he’d meet me on their balcony for martinis around suppertime.