Camino Island

  The FBI had stopped by a month after the Fitzgerald heist at Princeton. Of course, Joel knew nothing. A month later, they were back, and he still knew nothing. After that, though, he learned a lot. Fearing the FBI had tapped his phones, Joel had disappeared from the D.C. area and went under deep cover. Using prepaid and disposable cell phones, he had made contact with the thief and had met him at an interstate motel near Aberdeen, Maryland. The thief had introduced himself as Denny and his accomplice was Rooker. A couple of tough guys. On a cheap bed in a double room that was worth seventy-nine dollars a night, Joel took a look at the five Fitzgerald manuscripts that were worth more than any of the three could imagine.

  It had been obvious to Joel that Denny, undoubtedly the leader of the gang or what was left of it, was under enormous pressure to unload them and flee the country. “I want a million dollars,” he’d said.

  “I can’t find that much,” Joel had replied. “I have one and only one contact who will even talk about these books. All the boys in my business are extremely spooked right now. The Feds are everywhere. My best, no, my only, deal is half a million.”

  Denny had cursed and stomped around the room, pausing occasionally to peek through the curtains and glance at the parking lot. Joel got tired of the theatrics and said he was leaving. Denny finally caved and they completed the details. Joel left with nothing but his briefcase. After dark, Denny left with the manuscripts and instructions to drive to Providence and wait. Rooker, an old Army pal who had also turned to crime, met him there. Three days later, and with the assistance of another intermediary, the transfer had been completed.

  Now Denny was back in Georgetown, with Rooker, and looking for his treasure. Ribikoff had given him a good screwing the first time around. It would not happen again. As the gallery was closing at 7:00 p.m. on Wednesday, May 25, Denny walked in its front door while Rooker pried open a window to Joel’s office. When all doors were locked and all lights were off, they carried Joel to his apartment on the third floor, bound and gagged him, and began the ugly business of extracting information.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE BEACHCOMBER

  1.

  With Tessa, the day began with the sunrise. She would drag Mercer out of bed and hurry to the deck, where they sipped coffee and waited with great anticipation for the first glimpse of the orange glow rising on the horizon. Once the sun was up, they would hustle down the boardwalk and check out the beach. Later in the morning, as Tessa worked in the flower beds on the west side of the cottage, Mercer would often ease back into bed for a long nap.

  With Tessa’s consent, Mercer had had her first cup of coffee around the age of ten, and her first martini at fifteen. “Everything in moderation” was one of her grandmother’s favorite sayings.

  But Tessa was gone now, and Mercer had seen enough sunrises. She slept until after nine and reluctantly got out of bed. As the coffee brewed, she roamed around the cottage in search of the perfect writing space and didn’t find one. She felt no pressure and was determined to write only if she had something to say. Her novel was three years past due anyway. If they could wait for three years in New York, then they could certainly handle four. Her agent checked in occasionally, but with less frequency. Their conversations were brief. During her long drives from Chapel Hill to Memphis to Florida, she had loafed and dreamed and plotted and at times felt as though her novel was finding its voice. She planned to toss the scraps that she’d already written and start over, but this time with a serious new beginning. Now that she was no longer in debt, and no longer worried about the next job, her mind was wonderfully uncluttered with the nagging irritations of everyday life. Once she was settled and rested, she would plunge into her work and average at least a thousand words a day.

  But for her current job, the one for which she was being handsomely paid, she had no idea what she was doing, and no idea how long it might take to do whatever she was supposed to do, so she decided there was no benefit in wasting a day. She went online and checked her e-mails. Not surprisingly, ever-efficient Elaine had dropped a note during the night with some useful addresses.

  Mercer typed an e-mail to the Queen Bee: “Dear Myra Beckwith. I’m Mercer Mann, a novelist house-sitting on the beach for a few months while I work on a book. I know virtually no one here and so I’m taking a chance by saying hello and suggesting we—you, Ms. Trane, me—get together for a drink. I’ll bring a bottle of wine.”

  At ten on the dot, the doorbell rang. When Mercer opened the front door an unmarked box was on the porch but there was no delivery guy in sight. She took it to the kitchen table, where she opened and unpacked it. As promised, there were the four large picture books by Noelle Bonnet, three novels by Serena Roach, the rather slim literary edition by Leigh Trane, and half a dozen romance novels with artwork that fairly sizzled. All manner of skin was being groped by gorgeous young maidens and their handsome lovers with impossibly flat stomachs. Each was by a different author, though all were written by Myra Beckwith. She would save those for later.

  Nothing she saw inspired her to pursue her own novel.

  She ate some granola as she flipped through Noelle’s book about the Marchbanks House.

  At 10:37 her cell phone buzzed, caller unknown. She barely said “Hello” before a frantic, high-pitched voice declared, “We don’t drink wine. I do beer and Leigh prefers rum, and the cabinet’s stocked full so you don’t have to bring your own bottle. Welcome to the island. This is Myra.”

  Mercer was almost chuckling. “A pleasure, Myra. I didn’t expect to hear from you so soon.”

  “Well, we’re bored and always looking for somebody new. Can you hold off till six this afternoon? We never start drinking before six.”

  “I’ll try. See you then.”

  “And you know where we are?”

  “On Ash Street.”

  “See you.”

  Mercer put the phone down and tried to place the accent. Definitely southern, maybe East Texas. She selected one of the paperbacks, one supposedly written by a Runyon O’Shaughnessy, and began reading. The “savagely handsome” hero was loose in a castle where he was not welcome, and by page 4 he had bedded two chambermaids and was stalking a third. By the end of the first chapter, everyone was exhausted, including Mercer. She stopped when she realized her pulse was up a notch. She did not have the stamina to blitz through five hundred pages.

  She took Leigh Trane’s novel to the deck and found a rocker under an umbrella. It was after eleven, and the midday Florida sun was beating down. Everything left unshaded was hot to the touch. Ms. Trane’s novel dealt with a young, unmarried woman who woke up pregnant one day and wasn’t sure who the father was. She had been drinking too much during the past year, had been rather promiscuous, and her memory was not that sharp. With a calendar, she tried to retrace her steps, and finally made a list of the three likeliest suspects. She vowed to secretly investigate each one with the plan to one day, after her child arrived, spring a paternity suit on the real daddy and collect support. It was a nice setup, but the writing was so convoluted and pretentious that any reader would have difficulty plowing through. No scene was clear, so that the reader was never certain what was going on. Ms. Trane obviously had a pen in one hand and a thesaurus in the other because Mercer saw long words for the first time. And, just as frustrating, the dialogue was not identified with quotation marks, and often it was not clear who said what.

  After twenty minutes of hard work, she was exhausted and fell into a nap.

  She woke up sweating, and bored, and boredom was not acceptable. She had always lived alone and had learned to stay busy. The cottage needed a good cleaning but that could wait. Tessa might have been a fastidious housekeeper but Mercer did not inherit that trait. Living alone, why should she care if the place wasn’t spotless? She changed into a bathing suit, noted in the mirror her rather pale skin and vowed to work on the tan, and went to the beach. It was Friday, and the weekend renters were arriving, though her stretch of the beach was almost
deserted. She took a long swim and short walk, then returned to the cottage and showered and decided to find lunch in town. She put on a light sundress and no makeup, except for lipstick.

  Fernando Street ran for five miles along the beach, and next to the dunes and the ocean it was lined with a mix of old and new rentals, budget motels, fine new homes, condos, and an occasional bed-and-breakfast. Across the street, there were more homes and rentals, shops, a few offices, more motels, and restaurants offering up bar food. As she puttered along, adhering to the strict limit of thirty-five miles per hour, Mercer thought nothing had changed. It was exactly as she remembered. The town of Santa Rosa maintained it well and every eighth of a mile there was a small parking lot and boardwalk for public beach access.

  Behind her, to the south, there were the big hotels, the Ritz and the Marriott sitting beside high-rise condos, and the more exclusive residential enclaves, developments Tessa had never approved of, because she believed too many lights interfered with the nesting of green and loggerhead turtles. Tessa had been an active member of Turtle Watch, as well as every other conservation and environmental group on the island.

  Mercer was not an activist, because she couldn’t stand meetings, which was another reason to stay away from campuses and faculties. She entered the town and eased along with the traffic on Main Street, passing the bookstore with Noelle’s Provence next door. She parked on a side street and found a small café with courtyard seating. After a long, quiet lunch in the shade, she browsed through the clothing stores and T-shirt shops, mixing with the tourists and buying nothing. She drifted toward the harbor and watched the boats come and go. She and Tessa came here to meet Porter, their sailing friend who owned a thirty-foot sloop and was always eager to take them out. Those had been long days, for Mercer anyway. As she remembered things, there was never enough wind and they baked in the sun. She had always tried to hide in the cabin but the boat had no air-conditioning. Porter had lost his wife to some horrible disease; Tessa said he never talked about it and had moved to Florida to escape the memories. Tessa always said he had the saddest eyes.

  Mercer had never blamed Porter for what happened. Tessa loved to sail with him and she understood the risks. Land was never out of sight and there were no thoughts of danger.

  To escape the heat, she stepped inside the harbor restaurant and had a glass of iced tea at the empty bar. She gazed at the water and watched a charter boat return with a load of mahimahi and four happy and red-faced fishermen. A gang of jet skiers set off, going much too fast in the no-wake zone. And then she saw a sloop easing away from the pier. It was about the same length and color as Porter’s, and there were two people on deck, an older gentleman at the wheel and a lady in a straw hat. For a moment it was Tessa, sitting idly by, drink in hand, perhaps offering unsolicited advice to the captain, and the years disappeared. Tessa was alive again. Mercer longed to see and hold her and laugh about something. A dull pain ached in her stomach, but soon the moment passed. She watched the sloop until it disappeared, then paid for the tea and left the harbor.

  At a coffee shop, she sat at a table and watched the bookstore across the street. Its large windows were packed with books. A banner announced an upcoming author signing. Someone was always at the door, coming or going. It was impossible to believe the manuscripts were in there, locked away in some vault hidden in the basement. It was even more far-fetched to think that she was somehow supposed to deliver them.

  Elaine had suggested that Mercer stay away from the store and wait until Cable made the first move. However, Mercer was now her own spy, making her own rules, though still without a clue. She wasn’t exactly taking orders from anyone. Orders? There was no clear game plan. Mercer had been tossed into battle and expected to adjust and improvise on the fly. At 5:00 p.m., a man in a seersucker suit and bow tie, undoubtedly Bruce Cable, walked out of the store and headed east. Mercer waited until he was gone, then crossed the street and entered Bay Books for the first time in many years. She could not remember the last visit but guessed she was either seventeen or eighteen, and driving.

  As she always did in any bookstore, she drifted aimlessly until she found the shelves for Literary Fiction, then scanned quickly through the alphabet, about midway down to the Ms, to see if either of her books might be in inventory. She smiled. There was one copy of the trade edition of October Rain. There was no sign of The Music of Waves, but that was to be expected. She had not found her short story collection in a bookstore since the week it was published.

  With a partial victory in hand, she wandered slowly through the store, soaking up the smells of new books, and coffee, and, from somewhere, the hint of pipe smoke. She adored the saggy shelves, the piles of books on the floors, the ancient rugs, the racks of paperbacks, the colorful section for bestsellers at 25 percent off! From across the store she took in the First Editions Room, a handsome paneled area with open windows and hundreds of the more expensive books. Upstairs in the café, she bought a bottle of sparkling water and ventured outside on the porch, where others were drinking coffee and passing the late afternoon. At the far end, a rotund gentleman was smoking a pipe. She flipped through a tourist guide for the island and watched the clock.

  At five minutes before six, she went downstairs and spotted Bruce Cable at the front counter chatting with a customer. She seriously doubted if he would recognize her. His only clue would be her black-and-white photo on the dust jacket of October Rain, a novel that was now seven years old and had generated only pennies for his store. But she had been scheduled to sign here during her aborted book tour, and he allegedly read everything, and he probably knew her connection to the island, and, most important, at least from his viewpoint, she was an attractive young female writer, so perhaps the odds were even that he would spot her.

  He did not.

  2.

  Ash Street was one block south of Main. The house was on a corner lot at the intersection of Fifth. It was old and historic with gabled roofs and two-storied gallery porches on three sides. It was painted a soft pink and trimmed in dark blue on its doors, shutters, and porches. A small sign over the front door read, “Vicker House 1867.”

  From her past, Mercer could not remember a pink house in downtown Santa Rosa, not that it mattered. Houses get painted every year.

  She tapped on the door and a pack of yappy dogs erupted on the other side. A beast of a woman yanked open the door, thrust out a hand, and said, “I’m Myra. Come in. Don’t mind the dogs. Nobody bites around here but me.”

  “I’m Mercer,” she said, shaking hands.

  “Of course you are. Come on.”

  The dogs scattered as Mercer followed Myra into the foyer. In a screech, Myra unloaded a “Leigh! Company’s here! Leigh!” When Leigh failed to instantly respond, Myra said, “Stay here. I’ll go find her.” She disappeared through the living room, leaving Mercer alone with a rat-sized mongrel that cowered under a knitting table and growled at her with all teeth flashing. Mercer tried to ignore him or her as she sized up the place. In the air there was a less than pleasant odor of what seemed to be a mix of stale cigarette smoke and dirty dogs. The furniture was old flea market stuff, but quirky and engaging. The walls were covered with bad oils and watercolors by the dozens, and not a single one depicted anything remotely connected to the ocean.

  Somewhere in the depths of the house Myra yelled again. A much smaller woman emerged from the dining room and said softly, “Hello, I’m Leigh Trane,” without offering a hand.

  “A pleasure. I’m Mercer Mann.”

  “I’m loving your book,” Leigh said with a smile that revealed two perfect rows of tobacco-stained teeth. Mercer had not heard anyone say that in a long time. She hesitated and managed an awkward “Well, thank you.”

  “Bought a copy two hours ago, from the store, a real book. Myra is addicted to her little device and reads everything on it.”

  For a second Mercer felt obligated to lie and say something nice about Leigh’s book, but Myra saved her the tro
uble. She lumbered back into the foyer and said, “There you are. Now that we’re all good friends, the bar is open and I need a drink. Mercer, what would you like?”

  Since they didn’t drink wine, she said, “It’s hot. I’ll take a beer.”

  Both women recoiled as if offended. Myra said, “Well, okay, but you should know that I brew my own beer, and it’s different.”

  “It’s dreadful,” Leigh added. “I used to like beer before she started her own brewery. Now I can’t stand the stuff.”

  “Just gulp your rum, sweetheart, and we’ll get along fine.” Myra looked at Mercer and said, “It’s a spicy ale that’s 8 percent alcohol. Knock you on your ass if you’re not careful.”

  “Why are we still standing in the foyer?” Leigh asked.

  “Damned good question,” Myra said, flinging an arm toward the stairway. “Come with me.” From behind she looked like an offensive tackle as she cleared the hallway. They followed in her wake and stopped in a family room with a television and fireplace and, in one corner, a full bar with a marble counter.

  “We do have wine,” Leigh said.

  “Then I’ll have some white wine,” Mercer said. Anything but the home brew.

  Myra went to work behind the bar and began firing questions. “So, where are you staying?”

  “I don’t suppose you remember my grandmother Tessa Magruder. She lived in a little beach house on Fernando Street.”

  Both women shook their heads. No. “Name sorta rings a bell,” Myra said.

  “She passed away eleven years ago.”

  “We’ve been here for only ten years,” Leigh said.

  Mercer said, “The family still owns the cottage and that’s where I’m staying.”

  “For how long?” Myra asked.

  “A few months.”

  “Trying to finish a book, right?”

  “Or to start one.”

  “Aren’t we all?” Leigh asked.

  “Got one under contract?” Myra asked, rattling bottles.

  “Afraid so.”

  “Be thankful for that. Who’s your publisher?”

  “Viking.”

  Myra waddled out from behind the bar and handed drinks to Mercer and Leigh. She grabbed a quart-sized fruit jar of thick ale