Nine Lives(68)

Sam, having reread the Christie novel twice in recent weeks, remembered that the killer was torn between wanting to leave behind a perfect mystery and also wanting the world to acknowledge his artistry. He thought about that constantly. He’d learned a lot about Jack Radebaugh since his body had been found wedged into the base of the jetty on Kennewick beach. All of his victims, with the exception of Frank Hopkins, had been children of previous guests at the Windward Resort, and although the dates hadn’t been entirely confirmed, the parents had all been guests when they’d been children themselves, back when Jack’s sister Faye had drowned. It was Daniel Horne, father of Alison Horne, who’d had the best memory of the drowning of Faye. He had told the investigating FBI detectives that there was a group of children who called themselves the Pirate Society and that both Jack and Faye had been part of it.

“Same again?” Shelly said, her hand on the beer pull.

“Not right now, but I’ll be back. I need to go check out the library. Is it unlocked?”

“Should be. What’s someone gonna steal? A book?”

The door to the library was unlocked, and Sam had to search the wall just inside the door for a light switch. The room flickered into being, a windowless space not much larger than a typical hotel room. A few vinyl club chairs were scattered around on the burgundy wall-to-wall carpeting. The room smelled of musty books and mustier carpet.

He decided to work clockwise, scanning the shelves. He wasn’t exactly sure what he was looking for but was hoping he’d know it when he saw it. A book about drowning, maybe, or about pirates. It was a long shot, he knew, but maybe Jack Radebaugh did write that confession, but then decided to hide it somewhere it was unlikely to be found. The first section was hardcover fiction, indicated by a faded handwritten sign. The books were alphabetical by author, mostly fiction that had been popular about forty or fifty years ago. Lots of Michener and Leon Uris. A whole row of Catherine Cookson books. Here and there was something a little more modern. There were quite a few John Grishham novels, and a ton of Stephen King hardcovers.

He moved on from fiction into history, then biography. Then there was a large section of paperback novels, mostly thrillers and romances. In the Ross Macdonald section he spotted a paperback called The Drowning Pool and pulled it out to flip through the pages. Nothing there.

Then he thought of Agatha Christie. It took him a while, but he found a high-up shelf that contained about twelve of her books. And there it was: Ten Little Indians. He pulled the pocket-sized book off the shelf. It had a blue cover and showed a wooden statue of an Indian getting chopped in the neck with an ax. He shook the book out, then flipped through its pages. Nothing there as well.

The last section was kids’ books, at least on the lower shelves. Sam crouched and scanned the titles. Lots of Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys, plus even a few Bobbsey Twins. The picture books had such narrow spines that it was hard to read all the titles, and Sam found himself simply skimming through them. Many of the books were familiar to him from his own childhood, including an Enid Blyton book, Five on a Treasure Island, that transported him back to his grandmother’s house in Yorkshire, which had an enormous collection of Blyton. He pulled it out—wondering how it had ever ended up in Maine—and started to flip through it, getting caught up in the story before telling himself that he needed to keep looking through the shelves. For whatever reason Sam thought that his chances of finding the note, now that he hadn’t found it in the Christie book, were best here in the kids’ section. If Faye Grant’s drowning was the event that sparked the entire murder spree, then that had happened when her brother Jack was only twelve years old. Sam kept looking.

He’d pulled out several books, anything that looked as though it might have been here in 1956, and was about to give up, when he spotted the spine of a book that was familiar to him. Walt Disney’s Peter Pan, it read. One of his cousins from Alabama had it when he was a kid. It was the companion book to the animated film, and Sam had loved anything Peter Pan–related when he’d been young. And it was about pirates. Not only that, but one of the things Sam always remembered was the part where Captain Hook tried to kill Tiger Lily by drowning her in a rising tide. Sam’s heart beat a little faster as he recalled that detail.

He pulled the book off the shelf and opened it. Three folded-up pieces of paper slid from the book and landed at his feet.

To Whom It May Concern,

I suppose that someone, someday, will read this letter. Maybe that first reader will be an astute police officer or federal agent, or maybe it will be someone many years from now, a mother, maybe, who has picked up this book at a tag sale and found this piece of forgotten history.

Whoever you are, I apologize in advance for both my handwriting and for the subject at hand. But I did want to explain why I did what I did. Maybe I want to explain to help in the understanding, or maybe I simply want to explain it to myself in writing. I suppose I hope that someday someone will read these words, but if they don’t, I’ll never know about it.

Let me begin.

In 1956, my mother took my sister, Faye, and me to the Windward Resort for the months of July and August. We lived in Hartford at the time, and my father came up most weekends to join us. Back then a few families still did this type of extended vacation, but it was a custom that was soon to go out of fashion. Nowadays, you can’t take a two-month vacation if both parents are trying to hold down jobs.