Useless Bay(22)

ten


HENRY


The sun was coming up behind us on Monday morning as Dad and I sat on the patio and answered questions. Meredith hovered, trying to get Dad to come inside. “Please, at least get warmed up and have a cup of coffee. Hannah’s made a fresh pot.”

“No thanks,” Dad said. “I need to see this through.”

“This” meant Lyudmila’s body being carted away on a backboard.

Joyce hovered, too, talking into her headset. “Good news, Rupe,” she told Dad. “There’s a vacant plot in the cemetery where Jimi Hendrix is buried. Do you want marble or granite for the headstone?”

I failed to see how this was good news.

Dad stared blankly beyond her to the lapping waves. “You decide,” he said.

“Marble, then,” Joyce said. “Granite’s more for kitchen counters. Do you want a particular poem or a line from a song engraved along with her name?”

Dad looked at her without really seeing her.

“Maybe something with a firebird in it,” I suggested. “That was her signature dance.”

“Excellent choice,” Joyce said, as if I’d picked out a vintage wine. She walked off to make the arrangements.

Me? I stayed outside with Dad, almost wishing I could be as numb as he was.

Lyudmila’s story may have been over, but we still had no idea what had happened to Grant, and that worried me.

There were five round scars on the palms of my hands. They were old and thick and didn’t fade. Sometimes when I was under stress, like now, I picked at them. I had to content myself with levering up the skin around the edges, but if I could, I would pull back full sheets of skin and leave my hands completely raw.

Where was Grant?

It was around seven, the tide was out, and there was still no sign of my little brother. Where Dad and I sat on the patio, we were protected from the rain but not the wind. We watched people comb the beach for something worse than sand dollars.

I felt lower than the waterline.

After Lyudmila’s body was taken away, we stayed there.

I tried to remind Dad that Grant had run away under worse circumstances and that we’d always gotten him back.

“Remember the boy soldiers in Sudan? Remember them? And what about that cartel in Venezuela? The fried guinea pig on a stick?”

If Dad needed cheering up, this wasn’t the way to go about it. Not with his dead wife being carted away to the coroner’s. He couldn’t take another tragedy.

But Grant wasn’t a tragedy yet, just a ticking clock. “The first few hours are critical,” people in uniform kept saying, but it was a sliding scale as to what “few” meant. The last time anyone had seen Grant was when Pixie had rowed him out to the bay the day before, around eleven A.M. When we mentioned this fact to law enforcement officials, they started acting squirrelly and telling us not to give up hope.

They asked us what shoes he was wearing, as if he were a toddler swiped at Disneyland. That didn’t sound right to me. Grant was ten years old and an active boy. If he were kidnapped, it wasn’t going to be by someone who wanted to raise him as their own. It would be by someone who wanted lots of cash.

I thought of Lyudmila.

Maybe he had seen something he shouldn’t have.

Maybe whoever it was didn’t want cash. Maybe they wanted his silence.

“So we’re definitely treating this as a kidnapping and not a second killing?” I asked Sheriff Lundquist. I didn’t really want the answer, but I needed information.

“Right now, we’re not ruling anything out,” he said, which didn’t seem particularly helpful. I wanted him to have at least some answers, but he didn’t.

I didn’t have a lot of confidence in the guy to solve a case of this magnitude. I’m sure he was a nice man, but he seemed completely overwhelmed.

And he wasn’t the only one.

Dad, a man who had goals and a mission, and made sure we had our own goals and that we revisited them each year, stared blank-eyed across the water to Point No Point.

But then a man came into our lives who seemed to know what he was doing.

He was large, but not in the carved-from-the-mountains way the Grays were large. This guy had extra padding around the middle, gelled hair, and a trim mustache. He came out to the patio, flashed a badge, and introduced himself as Special Agent Wade Armstrong, FBI.

The guy did not blink. It was unsettling. I felt as though he knew every single lie I’d ever told my entire life.

I picked at my scars, digging more deeply into flesh.

He pulled up a patio chair without being invited. “I know you folks have already been through a lot. I’m sorry for your loss.”

Dad nodded absently.

“But I’m going to ask you to retrace your steps one more time for me.”

Dad was silent, having retreated into whatever world he was in where his wife was still alive and his three children safely accounted for.

Agent Armstrong looked to me.

“Henry, is it? How about you? Could you walk me through the timeline of yesterday between eleven and five thirty?”

“Of course,” I said. “Dad was off-island at eleven. He’d forgotten a meeting. There was a kid from Rwanda in town who wanted to bring electricity to his village. It was a big photo op. ‘The Kid Trying to Save Africa with Electricity.’ So Dad took the helicopter to the mainland. Grant wanted to stay here, so Lyudmila and the rest of us stayed with him.”