Deadout

by Jon McGoran

  “If anybody notices, they’ll probably just be glad I’m gone. It can’t be much more than a few hours each way. I could be back for dinner.”

  “It’s two hours, depending on how long you have to wait for the ferry.”

  “I wonder when the next ferry is.”

  She looked at her watch. “Next one leaves in thirty-five minutes.” There was a gleam in her eye, and I got the feeling my going to Providence hadn’t been purely my idea.

  The waitress was walking by, and I motioned her over. “Can I have that cheeseburger to go?”

  47

  The clouds parted as the ferry churned its way out into the harbor. I tried to soak up some of the meager warmth from the sun, eating my cheeseburger on the deck despite the cold wind tearing at the foil wrapper. As I watched the island shrinking slowly away from me, I felt uneasy leaving Annalisa and Nola and Moose there, alone.

  It didn’t help that when I looked off to the east, I saw Archie Pearce’s massive yacht, anchored like a pirate ship waiting to plunder the island. It helped even less that when I looked off to the west, I saw Renfrew’s compound. I had no idea what state Renfrew was in, but my sense was that it wasn’t good. I could practically feel the enmity between the two of them, and out on the deck, I felt a compulsion to stay down low, in case a shooting war broke out between them.

  In Woods Hole, the bus took me to the parking lot. My car was there, just as I had left it. It felt strangely familiar and unfamiliar. It had only been a few days, but I was somehow surprised that it started right up and went where I told it.

  Driving away from Woods Hole, I once again felt like I was leaving things behind, anxious about what would be going on in my absence. And even though I’d only explored the tiniest bit of the island, I felt a strange sense of agoraphobia with an entire continent yawning in front of me.

  I called Nola, told her I had to take care of something off island.

  “Off island?” she said, her voice alarmed. “Where are you going?”

  “It’s nothing. I just have to look into something. Are you okay?”

  “Well, yes, but … when are you coming back?”

  “I’ll be back in a few hours. Why?”

  “Well … I don’t know. It’s just, I…” I thought she was going to say she missed me, and my foot eased off the gas pedal, in case I needed to turn the car around right there. “Things are getting weird on the island.”

  My foot resumed its pressure on the gas pedal. “How do you mean?”

  “Well, a month ago, this place was an environmental Eden, and suddenly its about to become Stoma’s Bee-Plus showroom.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “It just feels like the beginning of the end of something. Something beautiful.”

  I wondered if she was in some way talking about us. “Right,” I said softly.

  She sniffed on the other end, and I wanted to put my arms around her, tell her it was going to be okay. But instead, I was driving away from her at eighty miles an hour.

  “Call me when you get back, okay?”

  “Okay. Just a few hours.”

  “Okay,” she said, her voice cracking into a breathy whisper as the phone went dead.

  I pressed down harder on the gas, anxious to get to where I was going, do what I needed to do, and get back to the people I cared about.

  Swinging through New Bedford, I was struck by how urban it felt, jarring after the Island. Providence, which barely seemed to rise above ground level on the way up, now felt positively metropolitan.

  The address for the Ostermans was a well-maintained stone house with a two-car parking area carved into the front lawn. I parked on the street, the only car on the block to do so, and rang the bell.

  No answer. I tried two more times. The street felt deserted, and I looked at my watch. It was a quarter after three. I drove the car halfway down the block and turned around so I could watch the house.

  Then I waited.

  I was usually pretty good at waiting, turning off my brain, or at least the part of it that got impatient, and sitting tight until something happened.

  This time, it wasn’t so easy. My mind was spinning thinking about Nola and Annalisa, about Teddy and his father, about Stoma and Thompson Company, and about the bees. I generally didn’t get too worked up about environmental issues. The notion of global warming was frightening and unsettling, but not in a concrete way. Not enough to make me stop driving my car, which I guess was part of why the world was so screwed.

  Except it was starting to feel different. Maybe my time with Nola and being friends with Moose had changed me. Or seeing what had happened to Dunston. Maybe it was seeing Pete Westcamp breaking down, or all those dead bees.

  Whatever it was, I couldn’t stop thinking, and I felt myself getting angry. It was an amorphous anger at the world, and the more I stewed, the more that yacht of Archie Pearce’s seemed to personify everything that was wrong in the world: rich beyond belief, ostentatious beyond any possibility of self-awareness, sitting there off the coast, pulling strings to make things happen. As much as I appreciated the hilarity of parking your behemoth yacht in the middle of your nemesis’s thirty-million-dollar view, I couldn’t get past the realization that Stoma was evil.

  It was four-thirty and Providence P.D. had buzzed me twice when I saw two women coming up the block, a mother in her early sixties and a daughter in her mid-twenties. They maintained physical contact as they walked, the mother’s arm interlinked with the daughter’s.

  I sat up in my seat for a better look. I’d Googled their images and was pretty sure this was them. When they reached the house I was watching, they headed up the front steps.

  I waited until they were inside. Then I gave it another few minutes, so they wouldn’t think I’d been watching the house.

  The younger one opened the door. She was heavyset but solid, like an athlete. She had a smart face, smiling when she opened the door, but with a wariness in her eyes.

  “Hello?” she said.

  From the other room her mother called out, “Who is it?” but we both ignored her.

  “Hi,” I said, smiling back. “Is this the Osterman household?”

  “Yes, what can I do for you?” she asked.

  “Well, I was actually trying to find Claudia Osterman.”

  Her mother’s voice got louder and closer. “Beth, close the door.”

  Beth’s eyes narrowed and hardened. She looked like she wanted to take me apart. She looked like she could do it, too.

  “What’s this about?” she asked.

  “Um, I just want to ask her some questions.”

  “About what?”

  “Beth!” her mother’s voice snapped. “Close the door.”

  Beth shook her head, turning to look back inside, her eyes momentarily flickering hatred and disgust with such intensity I took a step back. When her eyes returned to me, they were wet with anguish.

  “She can’t…” Her voice was swallowed up by a gulping sob. “We can’t…”

  Her mother appeared at her elbow, her face red and her eyes glaring. “Close the door!” she practically shrieked. Her eyes met mine, just for an instant. Then the door slammed shut. The house shook from the force of it.

  I stepped back, realizing I’d been holding my breath. After a few seconds, I turned and went back to the car. But I didn’t start the engine. Maybe I was stunned at the reaction I’d received, or maybe I was waiting for something else to happen. Sure enough, ten minutes later, the daughter came out of the house. She walked down the steps and paused on the sidewalk, then turned and walked toward me. We made eye contact as she approached, and as she walked past me, she said out of the corner of her mouth, “Follow me to the park.”

  I looked past her and saw a wall of green at the end of the next block.

  I waited until she was almost at the corner. Then I drove past her, to the end of the block, then the block after that, parking on the corner near the entrance to the park.

&n
bsp; She seemed like she was going to walk right past me. Then she abruptly turned her head and came over. As if I had called her.

  She leaned toward the window.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  I showed her my badge. “Doyle Carrick. I’m with the Philadelphia police, but I’m not here on official business.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “That’s a good question. I was hoping to talk to Claudia.”

  “Claudia’s dead.”

  I was stunned but not surprised. It was a lot of coincidence that the two women whose data had been faked were both dead, and I fought hard not to betray my alarm. “… I’m sorry to hear that. Can I ask how she died?”

  “Go to the end of the block, make a right, then a left. Walk up the path into the other side of the park and I’ll meet you.”

  With that she turned and walked into the park. I did as she said, parking next to a grassy area across from the river. The sun had come out, and it was noticeably warmer than on the Island. I crossed the street, past a line of benches and some flowers along the sidewalk. Walking across a small grassy area toward the woods, something about the place tickled the back of my mind. I looked around me, trying figure out what it was, but as I entered the woods, I saw Beth standing among the trees.

  48

  She gave me an awkward wave, and I walked over to her. “Probably not the best place to meet someone I don’t know,” she said, “but I guess if they wanted to kill me, they’d just do it.”

  “Who’s that?”

  She stared at me for a second. “Let me see your badge.”

  I handed it to her and she studied it closely. Then she looked inside the wallet. I resisted the urge to snatch it back from her. She looked at a couple of credit cards, then handed the wallet back to me. “Sorry,” she said. “I don’t even know what I’m looking for. I just need to be sure, you know?” Her voice thickened for a second, but she cleared her throat and gave her head a good shake. “Sorry. You said you had questions. What do you want to know?” She turned and started walking.

  I fell into step beside her. “What happened to Claudia?”

  She let out a bitter laugh. “We don’t know. I never got a good answer.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’re not supposed to talk to anyone about it. That was part of the deal. In fact, we’re not even supposed to talk about the fact that we’re not supposed to talk about it. But the fact is, I don’t know what happened to her anyway.”

  “What deal?”

  “Are you working for Stoma?”

  “No.”

  She closed her eyes and nodded. “Claudia was working at Stoma. It was always kind of secret, but she was working on some sort of program on a deserted island in the Caribbean. She was making good money, but she wasn’t allowed to talk about it.”

  I nodded. “So what happened?”

  She sighed and looked away from me. “She never came back. They said there was an accident where she was working, that she was lost at sea.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She nodded.

  “They never recovered the body?” I asked.

  She shrugged and wiped her nose. “They said they never recovered the body.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She took a deep breath. “After they told us what happened, or, you know, what they said happened, they gave us this big box with all of Claudia’s effects. And her Saint Christopher’s medal was in it.” She stopped and looked at me for emphasis. “She never took that medal off. Ever. Our grandmother gave it to her. She gave us each one. We swore we would never take them off, but also, I know Claudia got a lot of comfort from knowing that she was wearing that medal. I think the job was pretty intense, the people she worked with and the place she worked. Like I said, she made good money, but it was a hard job. Stressful and scary and lonely.” She paused to collect herself. “Claudia would never have taken her medal off.”

  “So what do you think happened?”

  “Something else. She died in some way that they didn’t want us to see the body. Like maybe she was disfigured or … assaulted or something. I don’t know. But I think they had her body, and they took the medal off it.”

  We walked quietly for a moment. “They told us in person,” she said. “They sent three of them, to tell us to our faces that she was gone. It nearly killed my mom. My dad had just died a year earlier, so losing Claudia so soon, it hit her hard. Me, too.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Anyway, when they told us, they offered to make a cash settlement. They said part of it was insurance, but that they also wanted to express how sorry they were, to help ease our pain and suffering. They were really nice. The settlement was big, really big, and my mom had been in a tough spot financially. My dad wasn’t the best financial planner, you know? But the deal included us agreeing that there were no more questions, and we weren’t allowed to tell anyone what happened, or what we thought happened, or what they told us happened. We had to be silent. My mom said yes, because she was in such a bind, and neither of us were in any shape to be thinking critically. But later, just a couple of days later, we started thinking, and started wondering, and we had questions. And then they weren’t so nice anymore. They made it clear, they would come back for the money. They also made it clear they would come back for more than that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean they made it plain, they could go from nice to not nice, to really, really not nice, if we didn’t keep quiet.”

  “So that’s why we’re in the woods?”

  “Mostly so my mom doesn’t see us, because she’s terrified they’re going to find out and come after us. Take the house away from us, or come after me. I honestly don’t care about the money. I just want to know what happened to my sister.”

  “Are you scared?” I said quietly.

  “Scared of Stoma?” She laughed bitterly. “Of course I am. You should be, too.”

  * * *

  We each walked out of the park the way we had come in. I was in a daze, processing what she had told me. But as I cut across the grass, I realized what had struck me on the way in: bees. Not a lot of them, but enough. Half a dozen as I looked around me, floating, zipping, meandering. They wouldn’t have been noteworthy in any way except that they were alive, and it made me realize how starkly absent they were on the island.

  49

  As I drove out of Providence, I called Annalisa. A line of dark clouds had formed low on the southern horizon. She was quiet when I told her about my conversation with Beth Osterman.

  “Did you know Claudia well?” I asked her.

  “Hardly at all,” she said in a whisper. “But it’s still sad. And scary. What does it mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did they kill her?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Beth said Claudia never took off her Saint Christopher medal. That says to me, whatever happened, they didn’t want anyone seeing her body.”

  “We probably shouldn’t talk about this on the phone. I have some news, too. Can you meet me at my place, when you get back?”

  “Sure. I’ll let you know when I get off the ferry.”

  Before I left the Impala in the parking lot, I opened the trunk and the safe and took out my Glock. I held it in my hand for a moment, enjoying the feel of it before putting it into its holster and wrapping it around my ankle.

  I gave the Impala an apologetic shrug, feeling vaguely guilty leaving it behind once again. I don’t think it expected anything more from me. I liked the car fine, but there was no pretense to anything more.

  The line of dark gray clouds had followed me back to Woods Hole, creeping a little bit higher. By the time the shuttle dropped me off at the terminal, it was a solid gray wall taking up a quarter of the sky.

  I waited outside the ferry terminal next to a large planter of pansies. A lone honeybee was going from bloom to bloom, doing the nectar and pollen thing. I watched with n
ew fascination, wondering if it had any notion of what was going on in the world around it.

  A few minutes before we boarded the boat, a car pulled up next to me. A misty-eyed middle-aged couple got out of the front and their twenty-something daughter got out of the back, holding a bouquet of flowers. The dad lifted a couple of small suitcases out of the trunk and the daughter tucked the flowers into a side pocket of one of the suitcases. They all hugged and stood together awkwardly until boarding was announced a couple of minutes later.

  The parents drove away, and as we started moving forward I noticed that the bee had finished with the pansies and succumbed to the temptation of the bouquet, thorax-deep in some kind of lily. The flowers shook as we moved, and I expected the bee to fly away, but it hung in there as we ascended the gangway. I wondered if I should warn it that it might be headed to its death, or if somehow this bee was the island’s last hope. When we got onto the boat, the girl made her way to the dining area and I lost sight of her and the bee.

  Up on the deck, the wind was already picking up, so I headed back inside. As soon as I sat down, the sound of Archie Pearce’s Outback Steakhouse accent caught my attention, and I turned to see his face on the television next to the snack bar.

  “We’re deeply saddened by the turn of events,” he was saying. “Our hearts go out to this disturbed young man, Teddy Renfrew, and to his father, Darren Renfrew, and the rest of the Renfrew family, and everyone at Thompson Chemical Company. Obviously we condemn any destruction of property, but while we were not directly harmed by this senseless act, we were its target, and we will be increasing security accordingly. But I want to make a pledge to the farmers on this island, who depend on honeybees for the pollination of their crops: while this act of vandalism has hastened the decimation of honeybees on the Island of Martha’s Vineyard, we at Stoma Corporation are prepared to make our Bee-Plus bees available to any farmer who asks, at no charge. And to the farmers facing this plight across America, who are asking when Bee-Plus will be available to save their farms, the answer is: just as soon as possible.”

  I texted Moose: ARE YOU WATCHING THIS?