Dead Silence

by Randy Wayne White

  Stop there and I could have allowed myself to be believe that Nelson A. Myles was incapable of kidnapping a child. On the mantle were pictures of a son and a daughter, along with swimming medals and soccer trophies they had won.

  I could have gone away convinced the man was a rock of stability: civic awards, photos of Myles with two presidents, plaques of recognition from charities. I’m sure other visitors had been won over.

  But the office also contained hints of discontent that, when viewed in context, provided a more powerful lens.

  There were no golf clubs or any golf accoutrements, yet mementos from Skull and Bones and his years at Yale dominated the décor. Why had the collegiate golfer given up golf?

  Out of the dozens of photos, there was only one of the children’s mother, Connie Myles, a recent shot, but the woman was part of the background, a vague presence. Drunken eyes, a lost expression on a face that had been stretched and glossed by cosmetic surgery. And there were no photos of a new significant other, a secret lover, the clichéd confidante who was “just a friend.”

  The absence of golf clubs could be explained: a bad back, like the cop. But the absence of a girlfriend told me he was probably involved with the woman who had let me into the house, Roxanne Sofvia, the off-season manager. She was a thirty-four-year-old college student, working on her master’s via the Internet when she wasn’t overseeing this twenty-acre estate and its fifty-eight-room castle.

  “You have no idea, the upkeep,” Roxanne had told me as she steered me into the kitchen, and handed me a mug of coffee. “It makes me tired to talk about it.”

  She preferred discussing her computer problems or her field of study.

  “Marine biology,” she’d said. “It’s something I’ve wanted to do since I was a kid. But it’s not all playing with dolphins and saving the planet, like some people think. And there’s zero money.”

  I’d replied, “Oh? No kidding?”

  “You’re surprised. Everyone is.”

  She resembled a woman I knew. No, a woman I had recently met. The Tomlinson caretaker, Greta Finnmark. Milkmaid breasts beneath a wool sweater, blond hair tied back, Nordic cheeks and chin and glacial Nordic eyes. She had a vague sensuality that confused the pheromone responders, a slow-acting chemistry that invited a second look, then a third. The kitchen had smelled of tea and baking bread, the room too warm because of a clanking radiator. They became catalysts as the woman’s face took form, a solemn angularity on a body that swelled, then retreated, in curvature beneath wool and denim.

  “Sofvia,” I’d asked her, “isn’t that Slavic? Or Jewish, I suppose,” which was a clumsy attempt to find out her maiden name.

  “You’re not allowed to talk about computers but you’re allowed to discuss race?” she’d replied. I could sense her mind working. Either I was a Zionphobe or too inquisitive to be a telephone repairman. I got the impression a Ph.D. could have asked the same thing, though, and it would have been okay. As cultures mix, an affected sensitivity has replaced racial swagger. Ethnic posing—twenty-first-century mimicry and probably a healthy precursor as we evolve into an American race.

  “I have a friend,” I told her. “Her last name was Pettish until she married a pharmacist. A guy with a name that sounded a little like Sofvia. He arrived four years ago from the Czech Republic and already owns a couple of stores.”

  “I see,” Roxanne said, giving me a chance to squirm as she stared. If she saw anything, she saw the truth because it was the truth.

  There were a couple of other things that I believed were true: Roxanne Sofvia was Greta’s daughter. She had inherited a full dose of maternal genes. The similarities were striking. Roxanne, I felt confident, was having an affair with Nelson Myles, lord of this castle and also her boss.

  “We need to restore the coach house,” she had told me. “We need to change the entire landscape theme,” she’d said. “When I finally find the right person to run this place,” she had confided, “I’ll be able to concentrate on what I should be doing. Getting my master’s degree. A full-time staff, that’s what we need—”

  Roxanne, the master’s mistress, was already talking as if she was mistress of the house. Her confidence, though, was forced. I got the impression the relationship had banged a rock or two.

  Because the woman followed me every step I took, I had to find a way to get rid of her. It wasn’t just because I needed time alone to gather information, though I did. Roxanne’s physical presence was distracting. It wasn’t because she wasn’t beautiful, although she was attractive in a bony, sleepy sort of way. She was even pretty by Hollywood standards. But Roxanne had a . . . scent, that was the word, an odorless scent that was atomized by her eyes, the pitch of her voice, her attitude, and by her body, too.

  Mostly, by her body. It was key to her slow-acting chemistry. First look: bland face, vague shape. Second look: interesting eyes, bony hips, and—Hmm—the inference of a bulky sweater that wasn’t bulky. Now when I looked at the woman, I saw an ovular symmetry, breasts and hips, and skin that was translucent as lingerie. The effects were cumulative.

  The few women—very few—who are born with that chemistry don’t lose it. Doesn’t matter their age. Greta was an example. Symptoms are a twitching, internal awareness that, ultimately, disconnects the brain as the body shunts blood to a less sophisticated command center.

  Distracting? You bet. I needed space.

  Roxanne had discovered a useful female finesse: Accidentally touch her breasts to a man’s arm and she would get what she wanted. Turn my back to her and there she was, her body pliant, communicating with mine.

  “Are you too warm? It’s that damn radiator system. We need to completely remodel this place.”

  No, I’d told her. In fact, I wanted my coat back. “Fixing your computer just moved to the top of the list. How’s that sound?”

  She had smiled. “Are you serious? I would be so damn thankful.”

  Me, too. After a few minutes alone with Greta’s daughter, I felt shaky. So I had returned to my truck and switched the DSL wires. But I didn’t fix the partial ground.

  “Check the phone,” I said when I returned to the kitchen.

  “The static’s worse than ever,” Roxanne had replied, her tone impatient.

  “What about your computer?”

  “The phone’s still screwed up, why bother trying?”

  I lied. “I rigged an experimental thing, just to get the computer working. You mind?”

  She sat at a desk and I watched her fingers parachute over the keys, attempting a dialogue with the Internet. It took a few seconds for her to smile. The glacial eyes brightened. “You did it! I think it’s even faster than before.”

  I grumbled, “Well, we’re getting there,” and headed up the stairs.

  Two minutes later—just enough time to orient myself in the rich man’s office—I saw the police cruiser slow and the cop with the bad back step out. He was peering through my driver’s window as I dialed 911.

  “What’s your emergency?” Beep.

  I didn’t try to disguise my voice. “It’s not an emergency. Maybe I’m imagining things but is there a women’s group in the area—nudists—who do the polar-bear thing? You know, jump in the water when it’s cold?”

  “Excuse me?”

  I said, “I’m no prude, but I’m thinking women shouldn’t be parading around naked on the beach behind mansion row. One girl, maybe, but four or five—it’s too much. Not at eleven in the morning.”

  “You mean South Hampton?”

  I said, “Right on the beach. The cheapest place would cost me, what? Ten million? For ten million, a family expects protection. There’s gotta be some kind of law against public nudity.”

  “Sir, are you serious?”

  Watching the cop test the door to my truck, I said, “I’ve never been more serious in my life. Even if it’s a sorority party or some sort of initiation—whatever—the girls should be wearing bikini bottoms. Or towels. It’s January!”
/>   “You are serious.”

  I said, “More serious by the second,” watching the cop try the passenger door.

  “What did you say, five college girls? I need your name, please.”

  I lowered my voice to tell the woman, “My wife’s upset, that’s the only reason I’m calling. But I don’t want to make the girls mad if they’re my new neighbors. See what I mean?”

  I turned off the phone and watched. It wasn’t long before the squad car became animated with blue strobes. The officer with the bad back jumped in, moving faster than he had before.

  Some people can’t let go of the good old days. Maybe Nelson Myles was one. His emotional attachments to Yale and his fraternity were reaffirmed by every wall. Inside his office desk, too. I had pried the lock and was going through drawers.

  The man’s picture was in front of me. A recent shot, Myles and a former governor standing near a Learjet, the same as the model Learjet on the desk.

  Myles was a disappointment. I expected square-jawed ascendance. Wealth, breeding, confidence. Instead, Nelson looked dour in his Wall Street suit and European glasses. His face sagged as if he’d sprung a leak. Maybe he had—many people do after college. The grinning fraternity boy I had seen in the Skull and Bones photo had lost his smile, along with his hair, a lot of muscle and some of his vision. But the man’s loyalty to his alma mater was intact.

  I could picture Myles on autumn weekends, wearing his varsity jacket and a yellow tie, watching his Bulldogs on cable. Or maybe he took the ferry to Connecticut and joined fellow Bonesmen at the stadium.

  Yes, he had tickets in the file drawer. I found the invoice for season box seats. Expensive for the average man but not for a man who had a hefty stock portfolio, accounts with three banks, several million dollars in savings and more than half a million in a checking account. To a man like Myles, having ready cash was more important than a decent interest rate.

  In recent weeks, there had been three sizable withdrawals, each for seventy-five thousand dollars, and each had been converted into euros. Cash. So . . . he had bought more horses or part interest in another jet.

  Interesting, but I was looking for something that connected him to an intelligence agency or the Cuban Program. Or some indicator of mental instability. Fear or insanity: It had to be one or the other if Myles was involved with the kidnappers.

  He was a qualified pilot, with a stack of FAA licenses and correspondence, all neatly filed. But there was nothing to indicate he’d had military training, as I’d hoped. Pilots get shot down and become prisoners of war. Some are assigned freaks as interrogators. Not Myles, though.

  No connection.

  I found copies of prescriptions for Valtrex, Allegra, Xanax and Valium. Myles had allergies, and somewhere along the way he or his wife had picked up genital herpes. I wondered if Roxanne knew . . . or perhaps it was she who had gifted him. It could explain the tranquilizers. Presumably, the pills were for anxiety, but that didn’t mean the man was crazy.

  No connection . . . or was there?

  I glanced around the room and realized I had made an error that good field observers aren’t supposed to make. I had failed to note what I did not see. What this private office did not contain was alcohol. There were no rare single malts or brandies. No martini shaker, no books on vintages. A man who bought and sold million-dollar horses would be expected to keep a private stock for clients. Fraternity boys drink, even adults who are also pilots. Nelson Myles was using prescription tranquilizers but not the world’s most common: alcohol. There had to be a reason.

  “I am referring to the singular incident of the dog barking in the night,” a London detective once said.

  “But the dog wasn’t barking,” his assistant pointed out.

  “That is the singular incident,” the detective replied.

  Why had the dog stopped barking? Something had caused Myles to change his lifestyle. The leading candidates: alcoholism, pathology or a powerful event.

  I went to the bookshelves. The only self-help books were business oriented. Nothing on addiction or dealing with liver disease. My hasty conclusion: Something had happened. An event had caused the man to quit drinking. Maybe quit golf, too.

  A judge would have laughed at the flimsy implications. The police wouldn’t have wasted their time.

  There was a calendar in the top drawer. As I reached for it, I heard a car door outside. I looked, saw a mail truck, and relaxed a little. Opening the calendar, I turned so I could keep an eye on the driveway while studying Myles’s schedule.

  Myles had been in the office eleven days ago, Tuesday, January thirteenth. On the January fourteenth block, he’d written Return S. I’d found documents related to a home he owned near Sarasota.

  He, too, was a compulsive circler. Maybe he had marked the magazines in Norvin Tomlinson’s room—Bonesmen, after all, would enjoy brotherly rights when it came to sharing property. And Greta Finnmark still wasn’t talking, even when interviewed by the FBI.

  Flipping through the calendar, I noticed an oddity. The numbers 7 and 8 were used often, always singularly and in contexts that made no sense. Ferrier scheduled? 8. Yale/Harv. 7. Buy tickets. 8.

  It was a substitution cipher. Sitting at the man’s desk, the first key that came into my mind might have been the first that came into Nelson’s mind. H-o-r-s-e-s? No. B-u-l-l-d-o-g-s? No.

  Then I got it. Fifteen new voting members were inducted into Skull and Bones each year. Never more, never less. Eight votes was a positive, seven a negative.

  Ferrier schedule—yes. Yale/Harvard game—lost.

  Less cryptic was a single exclamation point—!—penned beneath January twenty-second. The date was circled, an important day.

  Yes, it was. That was two days ago, a Thursday. Will Chaser was kidnapped.

  I paused to check my watch. Seven minutes: That’s how long it had been since the squad car pulled away. The house was too solidly built for sound to carry from the first floor to the second. But the stairway was marble, and even if Roxanne used the elevator I would hear her coming. I allowed myself three more minutes and went back to work

  There were several folders dedicated to Skull and Bones. Because I did not expect them to be labeled, I found them faster than Myles would have hoped.

  Women being inducted into Skull and Bones had been an issue. There were copies of letters to an attorney discussing a court order to block their admission. There were copies of articles about William F. Buckley, the famous writer, who had successfully gotten the courts involved and stopped an earlier attempt.

  Inevitable, Myles had scribbled on the last document in the file. The man had tried but gave up.

  I found a Skull and Bones roster from the man’s senior year. The fraternity assigned nicknames. On a roster, Myles had written the names in ink, along with notations. Long Devil—long! Boaz—football capt. Gog—fag, I think. Pancho Villa—spook, gin martinis. Capt. Morgan—distilleries, fruit. Clark Kent—airline.

  Myles’s nickname was Magog. Beside it he had written, Can’t help myself! Was it a plea or was he boasting? Boasting, I decided. Gog was gibberish, but the name had been assigned to someone of ambiguous sexuality. Magog, with its prefix, would be the opposite: a heterosexual trooper.

  Myles had been a hound and was proud of it. The script for Valtrex confirmed he was still a womanizer, and if he hadn’t liked the nickname he would have scribbled it out. That’s what he’d done to Norvin Tomlinson’s nickname. Myles had used a different pen—no, two different pens—to blot it out. He wanted that nickname gone.

  Why? They had been neighbors as boys.

  I held the paper up to the light. Unreadable, but the length was right, the number of letters. Some of the nicknames were rooted in family wealth: oil, distilleries, airline stock. The Tomlinson fortune had been manufactured from small metal parts: steel, iron, brass, tin.

  Tinman.

  “Tenth Man,” Choirboy had pronounced it through chattering teeth, revealing the name of his Ame
rican contact.

  There it was.

  Finally, I knew the truth, but it wasn’t the truth I had expected to find. I expected to discover some link between Nelson Myles and an intelligence agency or the military in particular since he was a pilot. It would have been enough to keep me on track.

  Because there was no link, my other inferences collapsed. I had been wrong about the golf clubs and the abstinence. I had been wrong to demand that the graves be exhumed and wrong about Nelson Myles. Maybe Myles had been used in some way, but the man who knew where Will Chaser was buried was Norvin Tomlinson.

  Damn it.

  I glanced from the window to the door, then at my Rolex: nine minutes. Time to lock the desk and go. Roxanne would be checking on me soon.

  Turned out I was wrong about that, too. The woman had just returned with the mail and was on the cell phone with her lover and boss. It wasn’t conjecture. I could hear her yelling at Myles as I descended the stairs.

  “How could you do this to me. You sonuvabitch! Even when I suspected, even when I gave you the chance to tell me the truth, you lied to me!”

  Roxanne’s office was off the kitchen. To spare us both embarrassment, I decided to leave through the front. It was also a prime excuse to get the hell out. I had wasted too much time following my idiotic instincts. Because of a rock—absurd! But the woman stepped into the hallway as I crossed the great room, too angry to notice me at first. She had the phone in one hand and a sheet of paper in the other. It wasn’t personal stationery.

  I walked faster, hearing her say to Myles, “No . . . No, it is not possible. Yes, I have the occasional glass of wine. So what? It doesn’t make me a drunk. And it doesn’t mean I whore around. Stop with the excuses. For once in your life, goddamn it, accept responsibility, Nelson. You did this to me!”

  A lab report, that’s what she was holding. Home pregnancy tests are inexpensive and the results don’t arrive in the mail. There was only one explanation: Myles had given her herpes.