Dear Irene,

by Jan Burke

  The driver’s-side window above me was broken, but jagged edges made me loath to try to go through it. I tried opening the door. It wouldn’t budge. I’d have better luck with the window. I took my jacket off slowly, afraid that if I moved too much I’d end up in the water with Jimmy Grant.

  Finally it was off. I covered my arm with it, awkwardly bracing myself as best I could, and smashed out the remaining pieces of glass. For a moment, I thought I heard a voice, but it was lost in the roar of the water. I shouted back, hoping someone could hear me over the noise.

  Now I faced a dilemma. If I loosened the seat belt, and didn’t have the strength to pull myself out, I’d fall into the channel. If I didn’t, the belt would continue to hold me to the seat, but I’d never be able to crawl out of the window.

  I gripped the edge of the window sill with one arm, and loosened the belt. My legs braced me for a moment, and I put the other hand up. I tried to push myself up. I slipped. In one arm-wrenching motion, I was left hanging, my arms above me, my legs in the cold water, the rest of me getting splashed with it. My headache was suddenly galloping through my skull. There was something soft beneath my feet. With alarm, I realized it was Jimmy Grant.

  The horror of standing on him brought a surge of energy to me. I used my legs to scramble up on to the console between the seats and out of the water. I rested a moment, then straightened my legs. Gradually, pulling with my arms and pushing with my feet, I managed to get myself through the window. Sick and dizzy, I crawled out on to the side of the van.

  I lay there shivering, utterly exhausted. I heard my name.

  “Irene!” I rolled on to my side and looked over at the bank. Frank was standing there.

  I waved a tired arm at him.

  “Are you okay?” he shouted.

  “I’m okay!” I shouted back, even though it made my head hurt.

  “Stay there, help is coming.”

  Stay there. I wanted to laugh. I guess he thought I would try swimming ashore. I could barely move. Even if I had the strength, I knew not to try it.

  Frank was pacing the bank like a tiger in a cage. I could tell he wanted to do something, was frustrated.

  “Relax!” I shouted.

  I could hear him laugh. A nice sound.

  Soon I also heard sirens. Red lights pulsed as police and emergency vehicles pulled up. Spotlights were turned on and aimed at the van.

  A helicopter arrived. They lowered a man down, who wrapped me in the welcome warmth of a big blanket. He helped me into a harness, and I was taken up into the hovering helicopter.

  I was a little pissed off that my first helicopter ride was such a short one, but I was anxious to reach Frank and reassure him. Paramedics stepped in before I could do much along those lines. They talked about taking me to the hospital, but I managed to convince them that I wasn’t suffering anything worse than bruises and a headache.

  The rescue workers had warmed me up again with more blankets and warm liquids. I was battered but lucid, no longer suffering the worst part of the cold-water soaking. Eventually I answered questions from some of Frank’s coworkers. They seemed to believe they’d know where to find me if they had more questions. I didn’t want to stick around to watch Jimmy being taken from the water.

  I knew Frank was really shaken, because he didn’t talk much while all of this was going on; he just took my hand between his and held onto it for a long time. Finally, someone said I could go home. We were both ready for that.

  We crawled into bed together and he rubbed my sore muscles while we told each other stories about our evenings. He had been walking away from Steven Kincaid’s room when a nun came running up to him and told him I was in danger. Good old Sister Theresa. She hadn’t missed a thing. Jimmy Grant just didn’t know what he was up against. The holy card hadn’t just been a stalling tactic, she told me later. St. Jude is the patron saint of hopeless causes.

  * * *

  EVEN THOUGH WE were both worn out, Frank and I talked for a long time that night. We fell asleep spooning, and all things considered, I’ll take spooning with Frank over a helicopter ride any old day.

  * * *

  THE NEXT DAY, the Express ran a short story on the death of Death, or Thanatos. It provided details Mark Baker had worked hard to gather: Jimmy Grant/Justin Davis had rigged his own fuel mix in an attempt to draw suspicion away from himself. As Justin Davis, he had provided software for some of the computer security for Mercury Aircraft, and made sure he had access to it as long as he needed it. As the police were already learning by the time he abducted me, Davis had also done work for Las Piernas College, including providing a card key system for employee access. It wasn’t difficult for him to get into Edna Blaylock’s and Don Edgerton’s offices. He planted the voice synthesizer in Edgerton’s office.

  While Edgerton was the buyer of a hunter’s slingshot, the police suspected that during the time Jimmy Grant was stalking his intended victims, he learned of the purchase. He obtained a similar one.

  Edgerton, it turned out, was trying to write a baseball book on the rise and fall of the Pacific Coast League, a strong minor league that had boasted the likes of Joe DiMaggio in the days before the Dodgers or the Giants moved west. Edgerton, self-conscious about his writing, had become nervous when he saw me getting near his manuscript. He later hired Mark Baker to help him write the book.

  * * *

  THREE DAYS AFTER my helicopter ride, Steven Kincaid came home from the hospital, worried about a scar that only made his handsome looks more dashing. Bea Harriman was looking in on him for me.

  I told Bea about a young woman named Helen, from a sporting goods store, who had agreed to help out with Steven during his recovery. Bea promised to make sure they at least laid eyes on each other.

  Jack was taking care of the dogs, and Barbara, who seemed to be worried about a decline in Jack’s attentions, was stopping by to feed Cody. She had insisted.

  * * *

  AS FOR ME, I was driving the Volvo home from Las Vegas. The desert air was warm, the windows down, and from the tapedeck, Duke Ellington provided a delicious rendition of “All the Things You Are.” Mr. and Mrs. Pete Baird were cuddled up in the backseat together, snoring in unison. On the seat next to me, my husband slept with a smile on his face.

  1

  Sunday, June 3, 11:35 P.M.

  Las Piernas Marina South

  Blissfully unaware that the moment everything would change was near, they were bickering.

  “You should have to do the kitchen, Seth,” Mandy said, drying a tumbler. “I shouldn’t have to do it just because I’m a female.”

  “Female,” Seth scoffed, securing the latch on a compartment beneath a berth. “Not like anyone could tell you are. You’re still an ‘it.’ ”

  “An it!” Mandy snapped the towel at the seat of his pants. She hit her mark, then squealed in dismay as he turned and easily grabbed her weapon away from her.

  He grinned as he saw the belated realization dawn on her face—it had been a mistake to attack him within the confines of the yacht. She cowered, waiting for his retribution. He laughed and tossed the towel in her face. “Half the other girls in ninth grade have bigger boobs than you do, Pancake.”

  She shoved at him, and as he fell back in mock surrender, he knocked over a set of cookware she had not yet put away. In the silence after the crash and clatter, they each covered their mouths and repressed laughter.

  “Quit the horseplay down there!” their father’s voice called.

  Seth glanced at the companionway, but their dad was too busy with his own work above to continue scolding. Seth looked at his watch. They probably wouldn’t be at their dad’s house until almost one o’clock in the morning—they had a lot to do before they could even take their dad’s new boat back to number 414, its own slip.

  Seth knew that some boat owners would have taken their yachts into the slip at any hour and cleaned up there, but his father never showed such disregard for others. Whenever he got into the ma
rina after nine or ten o’clock at night, Trent Randolph, in consideration of the live-aboards whose boats occupied the slips nearest his own, always docked here first, next to a bait shop at an isolated point on the far end of the marina. “You wouldn’t turn on bright lights and wash and vacuum a car at midnight on your driveway at home,” he would tell friends who asked about this habit. “People live even closer together here.”

  They hadn’t taken friends with them this time. This weekend’s sailing trip to Catalina Island had been fun—especially, Seth thought, because it had just been the three of them. Trent Randolph had finally dumped Tessa, his lowlife girlfriend, not long ago. Seth hated her. She was the one who had split his folks up two years earlier, but that wasn’t the only reason he didn’t like her. She bitched about Seth and Amanda constantly, and Seth was almost positive she was playing his dad. He had no proof, but once or twice when his dad wasn’t around, Seth had overheard her talking on her cell phone in kind of a lovey-dovey voice, all sexy and everything. And he knew she hadn’t been talking to his dad. So maybe his dad had caught her at it, too—or just finally wised up.

  He knew his dad wouldn’t get back together with his mom. He knew they weren’t happy together. And he wished he could stop wishing they would get back together anyway.

  Better to think of good times. Like this weekend. Seth, Mandy, and their dad even spent a night camping on the island, something they had not done since the divorce. “It was like he could be a dad again,” Mandy confided to Seth when they left Avalon. He had rolled his eyes, not willing to agree openly with her. One reason he liked the new boat was that he figured his dad had used it to get rid of Tessa—Seth recalled that she had been just about as pissed as his sister had been pleased with the yacht’s name—Amanda.

  “I still say you should help with the kitchen,” Mandy whispered now as they picked up the fallen pots and pans.

  “It’s a galley, not a kitchen,” Seth corrected. “You always say it wrong.”

  “Whatever. You should have to do it.”

  “Quit whining or I’ll make you clean the head.”

  “The bathroom?”

  He nodded.

  “Why call it ‘the head’ and not, you know, something like ‘the ass’?”

  “Don’t be a trash-mouth, Mandy,” he said, turning away so she wouldn’t see him laugh.

  “It’s not trashy. Even donkeys are called asses.”

  He wouldn’t take the bait, and so they worked quietly for a few minutes. They heard their father’s footsteps as he moved overhead, heard the thumps and thuds and other sounds of gear and life vests being stowed, rigging secured, decks hosed and scrubbed. Seth carried two duffel bags filled with camping gear toward the hatch, setting them near the companionway to be carried up later.

  He was athletic; broad-shouldered and tall for sixteen. Dark-haired and green-eyed and a little shy. Mandy could make him blush furiously by using one of her nicknames for him: Mr. Babe-Magnet. “Every girl who becomes my friend develops a major crush on you,” she once complained to him, “unless she already had one on you and became my friend just so she could get next to you.”

  “No, they like you for yourself.”

  She shook her head and said, “Right. Try to catch the next flight back to planet Earth.”

  He still thought she was wrong. At fourteen, she was slender but gawky, more bookish than he. The only reason he had started lifting weights was because he worried that without his father in the house, the duty of fighting off her unworthy would-be boyfriends would fall to him. He expected them to arrive by the busload once his redheaded little sister filled out a little. The only after-school fight he had ever been in—the one their mother chalked up to “Seth adjusting to the divorce”—had actually started when the other kid made a “see what develops” crack about Mandy. Seth had pummeled him.

  “Where does this go?” Mandy asked, startling him out of his reverie. She was biting on her lower lip as she held up an oven mitt. Fretting over exactly where everything belonged. He didn’t blame her. No use shoving things any-old-where they would fit. Their dad was a neat freak. Seth showed her the compartment where such things were stored and went back to work cleaning the head.

  “Mom’s probably called Dad’s house,” she said as Seth started polishing the mirror. When he didn’t respond, she added, “She’s going to be mad.”

  “Mom’s always mad,” he said, not pausing in his work. “He’ll take us to school on time tomorrow, don’t worry. She doesn’t need to know we’re up this late on a school night—right?”

  “Right,” Mandy agreed. “But if she calls—”

  “Even if she finds out, she’ll still have to let Dad take us every other weekend.”

  Mandy gave a little sigh of relief, a sound not lost on her brother.

  A noisy boat pulled up nearby. They could hear the loud thrumming of its engines. A little later, above them, mixed in with the engine noise, they heard voices. Male voices. Their father and another man.

  “Who could that be?” Mandy asked, moving toward the companionway.

  Seth shrugged. “The guy from the other boat, probably.”

  The voices grew louder. They heard snatches of conversation, their father’s voice as he strode angrily past the hatch: “ . . . trouble . . . get up . . . not what police should . . . you think I’m going to . . . then . . .”

  “I’m going to see who it is!” Mandy whispered.

  “Some politico,” he said, using a term they applied to most of their father’s newest associates. “Can’t you tell? Dad’s making a speech to him.”

  “At midnight?”

  “They bug him at all hours. Stay put.”

  They both listened, but the men seemed to have stopped talking.

  “I’m going to go see,” she said. She was up the companionway before he could stop her. The men were still quiet, so he thought Mandy was too late anyway—the other man had probably left. He squirted some toilet bowl cleaner into the bowl and began to scrub—let Mandy get in trouble for not working.

  He heard a loud thud and wondered if his dumb sister had tripped. He listened and could hear quick footsteps—too heavy to be Amanda’s. His dad running? He thought he heard her yelp. He stepped out of the head, listened. Hell, maybe she did fall.

  He started toward the companionway just as she came stumbling down the ladder. Her face was white, and she was clutching her throat. A bright red wash of blood covered her hands, her arms, the entire front of her body.

  “Mandy!”

  Her eyes were wide and terrified, pleading with him. Her mouth formed some unspoken word just before she collapsed in a heap at the foot of the ladder. As she fell, her hand came away from her throat, and he was sprayed with her warm blood.

  “Mandy!” he screamed.

  There was a cut on her neck—blood continued to spray from it in smaller and smaller spurts.

  “Dad!” he yelled. “Dad! Help!”

  He heard hurried steps and looked up, expecting to see his father.

  A pirate stood at the top of the ladder.

  The man who looked down at him was wearing a black eye patch over his left eye and carried a glinting piece of steel—though it was a small knife, not a cutlass—and the man’s dark clothes were modern.

  Seth turned and ran in blind panic toward the bow. But there was no escape except through the hatch, and no shelter—except the small head. He dodged into it, turning to close the door on his attacker just as the knife came slashing. He raised his hands in defense, and the knife cut across his fingers. Screaming in pain, he whirled and threw his back against the door, catching the attacker’s arm. The attacker shoved hard, moving one step in. Seth ground his heel into the man’s foot. The man gave a grunt of pain and pulled the foot back even as he slashed with the knife, cutting across the front of Seth’s neck. Only as he reached up with bloodied hands to cover the wound did Seth catch his own reflection in the mirror. Realizing that this was how the man had aimed the
blow, Seth jammed his shoulder against the man’s arm, pinning it to the wall, then hit the light switch. He felt dizzy, but forced himself to stay on his feet. With a fumbling grasp, he used his less injured left hand to pick up the open plastic bottle of toilet bowl cleaner on the sink counter. He put it up to where the man’s good eye was peering in—and squeezed the plastic bottle between the wall and his palm.

  He didn’t think any of the chemical had hit the man—who must have seen it coming, because he jerked back, cutting Seth’s shoulder as he pulled the knife arm from beneath him. Free of this obstruction, the door slammed shut and Seth’s weight held it closed. Seth dropped the cleaner even as he struggled with the lock, his fingers slippery and barely functioning. He managed to grab a towel, to hold it against his neck, but soon he could not stand. The pain was intense, and he felt himself weakening, his own blood warm and sticky and dampening his shirt. He wedged himself between the hull and the door, even as the attacker began slamming against it.

  The door shook beneath the blows. It would give, Seth thought. He tried to yell, but found he couldn’t make a sound.

  The pounding stopped. The small room swam before him. Seth bent forward, trying to fight the feeling of faintness. No sooner had he moved than the wood where he had rested his head splintered inward with a bang—split by a small ax. The attacker must have taken it from their camping gear. The man yanked the ax from the wood. Seth tried to drag himself away from the door before the second blow came, but found he could not. He brought his hands back to the towel at his throat, wondering if the ax’s third blow would slice into his back.

  Suddenly, he heard music—not music, really, but a short series of tones, a repetitive, insistent, three-note call—the sound of a pager or of an alarm on an electronic watch.

  Do-re-mi-do-re-mi-do-re—

  Seth heard the sound cut off. He waited, every muscle tense, for the ax to strike again—but the third blow never came.

  Over the next few minutes, Seth drifted in and out of awareness, but a low rumbling made him open his eyes. The other boat was leaving.