Man Overboard

by J. A. Jance

  Not Owen. When it came to trees or dares, the boy was a shrinking violet. In Harold’s opinion his son was a mama’s boy of the first water. Harold had thought that sending him off to school in a year or so would help turn him into a regular kid, but Irene had nixed that idea. There was this newfangled trend people called “homeschooling.” Although since Irene wasn’t the do-it-yourself type, she had already found a fully qualified kindergarten teacher who would come to their home in the fall and tutor Owen there.

  Now, knowing what Harold knew—that he’d never be there in the bleachers watching Owen play Little League or varsity football—he decided maybe the home tutoring option wasn’t such a bad idea after all. If Irene was going to be left to make all those decisions on her own, she could just as well start doing so now without any second-guessing or interference from him. Besides, that way, Irene wouldn’t be left alone in the huge house on Via Vistosa—she’d have her boy with her. The last thing Harold wanted was for Irene to be lonely.

  Harold walked along the shore for the better part of an hour, watching the sea and thinking. He made several decisions in the course of that hour’s walk: the next day he would notify his attorney that he was willing to accept the buyout offer that had been presented a week earlier; he would talk to an estate attorney about setting up an irrevocable family trust that couldn’t be hacked into by the first gold-digging jerk who came along; and he’d set up a trust for Owen, too, one that would guarantee that when the boy reached his majority, he wouldn’t be left out in the cold.

  When Harold got home that night, and Irene asked him what Dr. Richards said, Harold made no mention of his real diagnosis. He claimed the doctor had told him that he had a strained tendon in his arm and needed to wear a wrist brace for a while. The next day, he accepted the buyout offer and then held his breath during the following two months, which was how long it took for the sale to close. In the meantime, Harold stopped taking his vitamin pills and started flushing them down the toilet, because they were too hard to swallow. He started losing weight, too, because eating was becoming more and more difficult.

  By the time his new will and accompanying trust documents were drawn up, Harold knew he was running on empty. Once they were finalized and signed, Harold left the lawyer’s office—just up the street from Dr. Richards’s office—and stopped by Burger King for a Whopper. He thought about driving back by the house one last time just to say goodbye, but he didn’t. Instead, he got back on the 101 and returned to El Capitán State Beach.

  It was late Thursday afternoon at the beginning of Fourth of July weekend. The parking lot was crowded. It took a long time before he found a place to park. He sat in the Corvette and choked down what he could of his burger, then he used a pen to scribble a one-word suicide note on a fresh paper napkin: SORRY.

  Stuffing the note in his pants pocket, he retrieved his grandfather’s ancient Colt M1917 from the glove box and tucked that into the back of his pants, out of sight under his sport coat.

  The cold wind blowing in off the ocean did nothing to deter the crowds. Harold walked for what seemed like forever, but still there were kids here and there, playing in the water and building sand castles. Along the way he saw a trail of abandoned beach blankets and coolers awaiting the return of die-hard swimmers and surfers. The only thing Harold wanted was to be far enough away from all of them to be invisible.

  At last, he found a slight indentation in the shore, a place where an unnamed creek—unnamed to him, at least—drained into the ocean. Harold staggered through the loose sand far enough to be out of view from the people back on the beach. Weak and out of breath, he sank down on a piece of driftwood. Behind him he heard shouts of merrymaking, and he worried that what he was about to do would leave whoever found him traumatized for life.

  But at least that person wouldn’t be Irene. Or Owen. By doing it here, he wouldn’t leave behind a trail of blood and gore inside the house or in the yard to haunt his wife and child forever. As far as Harold could tell, what he was doing was best for all concerned. Irene and Owen didn’t have to live with him through a long and terrible decline. That single word SORRY was the best he could do—the most loving thing he could do. And if Darrell Richards was a man of his word, they never would know the truth.

  When Harold finally recovered enough to tug the weapon out of his waistband, he was surprised by how heavy it was. He had thought about abandoning the wrist brace back at the car, but he was glad now that he hadn’t. He needed the splint to help support the weight of the gun. His grandfather had used it to deadly effect on marauding rattlesnakes in the woods of northern California and southern Oregon. The weapon had been bequeathed first to Harold’s father and had come to Harold only after Leif’s death.

  From then on, the weapon had languished in the safe in the library of the house on Via Vistosa. The night before, Harold had taken it out and then carefully cleaned and oiled it the way both his father and grandfather had taught him.

  Harold had found a partial box of .45 caliber bullets in the safe along with the weapon, but he had no idea how old they were, and he didn’t trust them. On the way to the lawyer’s office that morning, he had stopped off to purchase new ammunition. It had been annoying to have to buy a box with fifty rounds in it when all he really needed was one, but he paid the price without voicing a complaint, pocketed the ammo, and walked out.

  For weeks now, he had imagined holding the weapon to his head and calmly pulling the trigger. But when push came to shove, the gun was too heavy and his weakened hand too compromised to hold it steady. Instead, he put the weapon in his mouth, resting the metal against his teeth and gagging at the bitter taste of the residual oil that still lingered on the barrel.

  When Harold finally pulled the trigger and blew his brains out, he thought of it as being the final and most loving thing he could do for his wife and for his son.

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t the right thing for any number of other people, Roger McGeary included.

  3

  Odin loved the simplicity of the Venn diagram. Frigg didn’t require inter-connected shapes or subsets to understand what was needed, but Odin liked them. They made things simple and elegant. The first task he’d given Frigg was to locate the names of all people who had committed suicide in California between the years of 1960 and 1990.

  Obviously the resulting list was incomplete. Many motor vehicle victims, especially the ones who died in single-car rollovers, were most likely undeclared suicides. Ditto for many reported drug overdoses. And then there were the families for whom suicide was a mortal sin. Many of them, especially the ones with money or some amount of political pull, managed to have their loved one’s death declared accidental or even undetermined. For Odin’s purposes, however, Frigg had sought out only the ones where cause of death was unequivocally and officially declared to be self-inflicted.

  Frigg was a tireless worker. She plowed through astonishing amounts of public records before she came up with that original list. Then Odin tasked her with finding any children—living or dead—of that collection of suicide victims. That made up his first Venn diagram set. Not surprisingly, Odin found his own name—Owen Hansen—on this list.

  Political pull notwithstanding, Irene Hansen hadn’t been able to pass her husband’s death off as something other than suicide. After all, blowing your brains out on a public beach was pretty damned definitive. But it was the next name on the list, the one just below Owen’s, that caught his attention. Melvin H. Hanson, Jr. was listed as deceased. Further examination had revealed the cause—a self-inflicted gunshot wound. And the name below that? Melvin H. Hanson, Sr. When Owen compared the father/son death certificates, guess what? Both victims had perished by their own hands, and, by sheer coincidence, also on the Fourth of July.

  As Odin’s own father had discovered, when it came to declaring your independence, that was one way to get the job done.

  Owen’s father may have been
a great provider—he left his widow and son wanting for nothing—but he had not been a particularly involved father. When Harold abruptly disappeared from his son’s life, he did so with barely a ripple in the four-year-old’s universe. Owen’s mother—something of a distracted scatterbrain—was no one’s idea of a devoted mother, but that didn’t mean Owen lacked for attention in the sprawling mansion on Via Vistosa.

  His beloved nanny, Dolores, and the cook, Sarah, competed in spoiling the boy rotten. He happily dogged the gardener’s footsteps from morning until night and was ecstatic when Manuel gave Owen his very own set of child-sized gardening tools. A swimming instructor was summoned who came to the house to give him lessons until Owen, who took to the water like a fish, was deemed “pool-worthy.” The kindergarten tutor, Miss Kate, was a sweet pushover, but she taught him how to read and write. Two years later, she was replaced by the stern-faced Miss Anderson, who was a lot more demanding but who also found Owen to be surprisingly adept at math—including multiplication and division, which should have been far above his skill level.

  Owen was seven when his mother decided it was high time he joined a swim team. The chauffeur, Mr. Logan, was the designated driver who delivered the boy to the Cathedral Oaks Tennis and Swim Club for practice sessions and meets. There Owen discovered that most of the other kids had mothers or fathers—mommies and daddies—cheering from the sidelines. He did not, and for the first time he realized he was different.

  When he came home from one of his first meets, he immediately sought out his mother, who was never once called “Mommy,” and asked her a very pointed question: “Do I have a daddy?”

  “You did,” she said. “Once.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s gone.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He died.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means he’s gone, he’s never coming back, and there’s no point in discussing it further.” Irene was not a particularly motherly mother. Telling her son that Daddy was in heaven with Jesus was a long way outside her wheelhouse.

  Dissatisfied with the answer he’d been given, Owen had gone to the other members of the household, asking the same question in hopes of getting a different take on the matter. By now, Owen should have been well beyond needing a nanny, but Dolores stayed on, looking after him and keeping him occupied during the hours that weren’t taken up with his tutors. When he asked Dolores and Sarah about his father over lunch the next day, he noticed the wary glance that passed between the two women before either of them answered.

  “What did your mother say?” Dolores asked.

  “That he’s dead and he isn’t coming back.”

  “That’s it, then, isn’t it,” Dolores said. “No further discussion is required.”

  Still, Owen had continued his quest by asking Manuel. The gardener frowned before he answered. “You see that grasshopper over there?” he asked, pointing.

  Owen nodded.

  “What happens if you step on it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Manuel reached out a booted foot and smashed the offending bug flat. “He’s dead now, see?” he said. “He can’t breathe or move around no more. He’s over.”

  “That’s what happened to my daddy? Someone squashed him?”

  “Not exactly,” Manuel hedged. “But your daddy can’t move around no more, neither. If you want to know more than that, you should ask your mother.”

  But Owen had already asked Irene that very question, and he didn’t bother asking again. From that moment on, Harold Hansen became the looming elephant in every room at the house on Via Vistosa, a dark, hovering presence who was always there whenever Owen and his mother were together. He was also the one thing they never discussed.

  Without having had those critical questions answered in a satisfactory manner, from age seven on, Harold Hansen’s death became Owen Hansen’s obsession. He became a pint-sized detective. He learned how to listen at doors in order to pry out his mother’s secrets. Irene obdurately refused to discuss her dead husband with her son, but that didn’t keep her from jawing about him at length with even casual visitors, especially if she’d had a bit too much wine at dinner or maybe one after-dinner cocktail too many. It was during one of those overheard conversations, when Irene thought her eight-year-old son safely asleep in bed, that Owen heard her mention the word “suicide” for the first time.

  Miss Anderson, convinced she was dealing with a math prodigy, had urged Irene to give her son a Dell computer for his birthday, while Miss Anderson herself had presented the boy with a small paper-bound dictionary. The night of his birthday, while his mother entertained guests downstairs, Owen stayed up late, dismantling the computer and putting it back together again. Two nights later, when the term “suicide” surfaced in conjunction with his father’s death, Owen used the dictionary to find out that it meant his father hadn’t been squashed by somebody else. He’d done it himself.

  Harold Hansen was dead because he wanted to be dead. No wonder Owen’s mother didn’t want to talk about it. And now, neither did Owen.

  4

  “So what are your thoughts on the matter?” B. Simpson asked.

  It was just after one in the afternoon in Cottonwood. B. was attending an international cyber security conference in Paris and had called Ali once he got back to his room after an evening meeting. She had spent the better part of half an hour bringing him up to date on Julia Miller’s earlier visit.

  “She offered to pay us up to $500,000 to look into the matter. I tried to explain to her that High Noon isn’t designed to function as a private investigation firm.”

  Earlier in the conference room, it had taken Julia Miller several minutes to regain control after her emotional outburst. Once she did, she sat up straight, wiped her eyes on her shirtsleeves, and then lifted the lid off the banker’s box. Reverently, she removed a laptop computer, a pair of cell phones, and a rat’s nest of power cords from the container. She put the equipment down on the tabletop and then pushed it over to where Stuart Ramey was sitting.

  “Please,” she said. “I looked up High Noon Enterprises on the Internet. It says you do cyber stuff. Roger lived and died with his computer. His whole life—his non-work life—is most likely contained in these machines, and the reason he died may be found here as well. I have no idea what his passwords are or how to access any of it. I have a hunch you do.”

  Stuart swallowed hard and then reached out to place a careful hand on top of the pile of equipment, almost as if he were touching some kind of holy relic—as if there were still some trace of his friend lingering in the tangle of electronics.

  “What else is in the box?” he asked.

  “Not much,” Julia answered, shoving the container in Stuart’s direction so he could paw through it on his own. “His high school yearbooks. That’s where I found your business card, by the way, Stuart. As I mentioned before, there’s a copy of his last will and testament, along with his birth certificate, his parents’ death certificates, and the program from his mother’s funeral, even though he wasn’t able to attend.

  “By the way, Stuart,” Julia continued. “As far as the will is concerned, you’re one of the named beneficiaries. His condo was stuffed to the gills with graphic novels—thousands of them. He wanted you to have them. When we emptied the condo to list it, I put them in storage. If you’re not interested . . .”

  “No, please,” Stuart said, clearly moved by the gesture. “I’d love to have them.”

  “I’ll need a shipping address, then.”

  “Sure, you can send them here.”

  One at a time, Stuart removed items from the box. After examining them, he passed them along to Ali. One was a faded color photo of a man and a boy in a rowboat, posing with a fair-sized trout.

  “Roger’s dad?” Ali asked.

  Julia n
odded. “James was a good father until Eloise drove him away. He wanted to take Roger with him, but Eloise wouldn’t hear of it. Not that she wanted Roger—she didn’t, but she didn’t want James to have him, either. Dog in the manger kind of thing.”

  As Stuart continued to sort through the remaining items, Ali was saddened to think that Roger McGeary’s life on earth had been boiled down to the contents of this box along with whatever records remained inside that stack of electronic devices.

  The last thing Stuart held up was an orange and white and obviously much used Betty Crocker Cookbook.

  “A cookbook?” Stuart asked in apparent disbelief. “Roger actually knew how to cook?”

  “He learned,” Julia said. “I taught him myself, and he got to be pretty good at it eventually. I gave him the cookbook after he got out of Napa.”

  “Napa?” Stuart repeated. “Roger went to school in Napa? I thought he went to school somewhere in L.A.”

  “Not school,” Julia said, shaking her head sadly. “The Napa State Hospital.”

  “A mental hospital?” Stuart asked.

  Julia nodded. “It was after the suicide attempt I mentioned earlier. He tried cutting his wrists right after high school graduation, and Eloise had him committed. I don’t know what kinds of stories she told the doctors to keep him there, but she must have convinced them that he was a danger to himself and others. I wasn’t able to spring him until after she died when a wrong-way driver hit her head-on.

  “By then Roger was twenty-eight years old. He had never lived on his own—never had an apartment, never driven a car. There was only a small inheritance left by his mother, but then Roger received a sizable insurance settlement from his mother’s fatal accident. Once he was out of the hospital, I brought him back home to Arizona and let him live with me at the ranch in Payson until he could get on his feet. I helped him enroll in the community college and got him started taking courses in computer science. I remembered that he’d been interested in computers as a kid, but during the ten years he’d been out of commission the world of computers had changed a lot. He more or less had to start over from scratch.”