Second Sight

by Philip R. Craig

  Drummand came back and put a cup down in front of me.

  “Thank you, Hale,” said the woman.

  He made a small bow. I had the impression that his teeth were pressed tightly together. He went into the house.

  Evangeline poured coffee into her cup and mine. Even while doing such a simple thing she radiated a glamour I’d rarely experienced. I saw that it would be easy to become a knight-at-arms, alone and palely loitering. Perhaps Hale Drummand already was.

  She removed her glasses. Her eyes were a hypnotic pale gray, slanted slightly upward at the corners.

  “Agent Spitz has told me about you,” she said in her contralto voice.

  “I’ve been told something about you as well,” I said.

  “He said you know this island well, and that you’re married to a woman you love and that you have children.”

  “That’s true.”

  “He said something else that’s even more important. You can be trusted.”

  I said nothing.

  “I want to see your island but I also want to find a man who’s living here,” she said. “I need someone who can find him and say nothing about it afterward. Someone who can be discreet.”

  “I can probably manage that.”

  She sipped her coffee. “You don’t make too many extravagant claims about your virtue, do you? Should I have you take an oath?”

  “I don’t have much faith in oaths. It’s the honor of the person that guarantees the power of the oath, not the other way around.”

  She smiled and nodded. “Very good. Another question, then. Do you have a pistol?”

  “Jake Spitz suggested I carry one, but he was pretty vague as to why.”

  “Because now I can leave Hale at home with my daughter when we go for our rides. He can protect her and you can protect me.”

  “From what?”

  “Rich people and famous people always need protection,” she said in a matter-of-fact voice. “And I’m both of those. Let me find a wig and a sweater and we’ll be on our way. Finish your coffee. I’ll be right back.”

  It was good coffee. It was true that rich and famous people often needed protection, but I wondered if there might be more to her situation than that.

  She was back in a very few minutes sporting a reddish wig that, combined with her huge dark glasses, made her look like a day-trip tourist if you didn’t look twice. If you did look twice you could see that she was nothing at all like a day-tripper or any other kind of tourist, but that she was a woman unlike any you’d ever seen before.

  “Very Vineyardish, Mrs. Price,” I said, getting up. “Where would you like to go first?”

  “Call me Ethel, J.W. How about the grand two-dollar tour?”

  Hale Drummand did not look happy when Evangeline informed him that he’d be staying at home with little Jane.

  I got a map out of my truck, unfolded it, and gave Evangeline a brief geography lesson before handing the map to her. Armed and dangerous, I then drove us to Edgartown and through its lovely, narrow streets, past the flower-filled yards and great captain’s houses. I pointed across the harbor.

  “That’s Chappaquiddick over there. You can get there by that little three-car ferry, the On Time. One story is that it’s called the On Time because it doesn’t have a schedule and is therefore always on time.”

  “Is Chappaquiddick worth a visit?”

  “It is to fishermen, and the Dyke Bridge is still the most famous tourist spot on the Vineyard. We can go over there later, if you like. Out on the far beaches there’s good fishing. Are you a fisherperson?”

  “I have a salmon stream on my property in Scotland. I lease some of it to an angling club. Are you a fisherman?”

  “I am.”

  I showed her the twenty-two-million-dollar house out on Starbuck Neck, and she said it was very nice but she didn’t comment on the price as most people do. Why should she, when she owned a Scottish castle?

  I drove her through the Oak Bluffs Campground and then around East Chop and West Chop, giving her a running commentary as we went. She asked intelligent questions and was interested in little things such as the four-color paint jobs on the campground’s gingerbread houses.

  Then we went up-island to Menemsha, where I got the island’s best fried clams and calamari from The Bite and we ate them in the car. When the fries were gone, we drove on to Aquinnah, where, to my surprise, I actually found a parking space at the cliffs.

  “Do you want to get out and take a look?” I asked. “Or would you rather not?”

  She adjusted her wig and glasses. “Let’s get out.”

  We walked up between the souvenir shops and the fast food shops until we got to the top. It was a good day for looking, and I pointed out the Elizabeth Islands to the north, Point Judith, Rhode Island on the far western horizon, and Nomans Land to the south. The blue sea was alive with boats.

  Tourists, mostly silver-haired or bald, were all around us, but not one seemed to notice that Evangeline was among them.

  “This is as far west as we can go,” I said to her. “Now we’ll head back toward home.”

  “Can you take me to Indian Hill Road?”

  The request surprised me. “Sure. There’s a terrific stone wall being built there. My favorite one on the whole island.”

  “Let’s go there.”

  “Shall we sightsee on the way?”

  “All right. You live on a beautiful island.”

  I drove back through Chilmark and down to West Tisbury, where I stopped and we walked among the dancing statues in the field across from the general store.

  “Can I buy some of these? They’re completely charming! I know just where to put them on my grounds!”

  “I’m sure you can,” I said. Everything is for sale if the price is right.

  “You can bring me back here another day, and I’ll do it.” Her smile was brilliant. She took my arm in hers. “I love them all!”

  When she became aware of her arm in mine and stepped away, I felt a sense of loss.

  “Is it far to Indian Hill Road?”

  “No part of the island is far from any other part. Do you want to go there now?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll show you on the map.”

  I did that, then drove through North Tisbury toward Vineyard Haven and took a couple of lefts. “This is it,” I said.

  She seemed both uneasy and excited, and looked this way and that as we drove. I pointed out the long, lovely stone wall that had been under construction for years, and told her how stone wall builders were now in such popular demand on the island that stones had to be imported from New Hampshire to keep them all busy. But she wasn’t interested in stone walls, she was interested in driveways.

  But she didn’t see or didn’t recognize the one she wanted. When we came to the end of the paved road, I turned the car around.

  “Are you looking for someone or some place in particular?”

  “Yes. Alain Duval. I thought he had a place on this road, but I don’t see his name anywhere.” She touched her teeth to her bottom lip and for a fleeting instant looked like a young girl.

  The name was a familiar one. I was sure Duval was the person she had mentioned that morning. “I can probably find him for you,” I said.

  She gave me a look of gratitude that would have made a slave of Caesar. “It’s important to me that I see him.” Then she added, “But I don’t want anyone to know. It’s…a private matter.”

  “I’ll see what I can manage.”

  She had a sense of distance and space, and she could read a map. By the time we got back to her house that afternoon, she seemed to know where she was and where she’d been.

  And I hadn’t had to shoot a single person.

  “See you tomorrow, same time,” she said as I was going toward my truck.

  A small girl came running from the house and Evangeline stooped to catch her and swung her up in her arms. In the doorway Hale Drummand watched and then turned back
out of sight.

  Zee was already home when I got there. I kissed her, then did it again, to make sure.

  “Well, well,” she said, smiling up at me. “That was very nice.”

  “I agree. Do you happen to know how to find Alain Duval?” I asked. “My client wants to visit him.”

  Zee raised her brows in recognition. “The Guru of the Stars? Isn’t his summer shrine up-island someplace? His Temple of Light is out in Hollywood, I know. I read once that it’s made mostly of glass. He may have an ad in the local papers. Try looking there. Or maybe he’s in the phone book. Even holy men have cell phones these days.”

  Duval wasn’t listed in the phone book and I didn’t find any ads for his shrine in that week’s papers, but I figured I could find him anyway. After all, thousands of other people had managed it over the years. Of course their quests had been spiritual and mine wasn’t, but so what?

  Chapter Four

  Brady

  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.”