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.”
“Who else was here?”
“From the family?” I said. “Meredith. Also our travel team: Joyce, Hannah, Edgar, Yuri. Come to think of it, if you’d had a meeting, Joyce should’ve been with you, shouldn’t she?” I asked Dad.
Dad rallied enough to act uncharacteristically cagey. “Normally, yes,” he said, “but she’s just been through a tough breakup. She said she wanted a few hours to walk along the beach. It’s the least I could do. Joyce is my admin,” Dad explained. “She never takes time off.”
“I see,” agent Armstrong said. “So everyone was here but you. And you came back when?”
I opened my mouth to tell him three, when I noticed something.
Twenty yards down the beach, one of the Gray brothers stopped inspecting the beach, stood up, and looked toward the lagoon.
Fifty yards away, another Gray did the same thing, as if some kind of sonar had pinged him.
The two Grays started running toward the lagoon.
“Something’s happening,” I said, and took off after them.
I sprinted down the patio and around the house.
There was a bunch of people crowded behind a police cordon at the edge of our property. As soon as they saw me, the questions started flying like bottle rockets. “Henry! Over here! Henry! Do you care to comment?” I heard the word lies. I heard the name Marilyn. I heard the word diet, or maybe just the word die.
I stopped at the trailhead that led to the path through the lagoon. Where were the Gray brothers? It wasn’t like they were easy to miss.
There. All four of them were down in the lagoon itself, waist-deep in the muck. I hadn’t seen them at first because their hair looked like beach grass. I ran down the trail and parted the branches of the Scotch broom, afraid of what I’d see.
I looked closer. The muck itself wasn’t all brown. Parts of it were tinted red. They were examining something that was floating. From the tilt of their heads, I could tell it wasn’t good. This wasn’t their “Interesting . . . a bird of prey dropped a spiny dogfish” head tilt. This was much, much worse.
Oh no. I wanted to look away, but I couldn’t. This was no horror movie. This was real. They had my brother down there, and he was so bad off that Frank wasn’t even trying to revive him.
“Dean?” I asked softly.
One of the four heads shot up.
“You don’t need to see this, Henry,” Dean said.
I was tired of hearing that.
There was no easy path down, just rocks covered with barnacles. Finally, I got down on my butt and slipped down, tearing my jeans and skin. Soon I was waist-deep in the muck with them.