Nine Lives, page 20
In one of the articles, the names of Faye’s immediate family were mentioned. The father was John Grant, an insurance executive from Hartford, Connecticut. Faye’s older brother had probably been named after his father, since the newspaper referred to him as “little Jack Grant,” and the mother was Lily Grant, née Lily Radebaugh, originally from Baltimore.
When Sam had read those words, an electric shiver had passed over the skin of his arms and the back of his neck. “Little Jack Grant” could be going under the name of Jack Radebaugh. If Faye had been his sister, then the List of Nine would have something to do with her death. Probably revenge. Frank Hopkins, who would have been at the Windward Resort when Faye had died, had been drowned by the jetty. The other names on the list, all people too young to have been present for Faye’s death … well, Sam had no idea why they had been targeted. His best guess was that they were somehow related to someone that Jack believed to be guilty. Maybe one of their parents. The dates would work.
After sending an email to both Detective Mary Parkinson of the state police and to Agent Ruth Jackson of the FBI with JPEGs of all the relevant articles, Sam was now studying the notes he’d taken on the victim’s families. And it was all starting to fall into place—there were more similarities between the parents of the victims than the victims themselves. They were all white, all middle- or upper-middle class, all clustered around New England. And there was something else, something Sam had noticed a week earlier. On the list of nine names there were six men and three women. He’d wondered about that. If Jack Radebaugh, or someone else (it was possible), was murdering the children of people he considered complicit in the death of his sister, then not only would he try to make their deaths painless, but maybe he’d also pick sons to murder and not daughters. Jessica Winslow was targeted, of course, but she was an only child. And Caroline Geddes, while not an only child, had one brother who lived outside of the country. Mind racing, Sam went and got another beer from the fridge, not even bothering to look at the football game on television.
When he returned to his study he thought about Alison Horne, who had never been found. Was she dead already? Probably not, he thought, because if she’d died there would have been a police report, a death notice, something to alert the FBI. Maybe she was dead, and her body hadn’t been discovered yet. But someone surely would have reported her missing. No, Sam assumed she was still alive, and he wondered where she was, and if she knew how much danger she was in.
2
MONDAY, OCTOBER 31, 3:03 P.M.
Jonathan Grant was going to text Alison from the airport to let her know he was back in Bermuda and would be at the house in thirty minutes, but decided not to. He thought he’d surprise her, despite the fact that he knew her well enough to know she was not big on surprises.
He let himself into the house on Church Folly Lane and shouted a “hello” as he wiped his shoes on the inside mat. The house was quiet, and he wondered if Alison was down at Tobacco Bay or out for a walk. But then she appeared on the stairwell in a long white nightgown, and for a strange moment, Jonathan felt like he was looking at a ghost.
“I’m back,” he said.
She came down the stairs and embraced him, saying, “I’m glad,” followed immediately with, “You could’ve called first.”
“I thought I’d surprise you. You seem thin.”
“Oh,” she said, and looked down at herself in the sheer nightgown. “Living on yogurt and fruit, I guess. I really am glad you’re back.”
“Let me unpack and shower and then we can go out for a big meal.”
They went to the Swizzle Inn, Jonathan complaining, as he did every time they’d gone there, that it was now a tourist trap that sold T-shirts and specialty glasses. But still, he had a favorite table that they had managed to get, and he ordered the chowder as an appetizer and then the liver and onions. Alison ordered a salad.
“Tell me about your trip,” she said.
“I’m done with all that, now.”
“What do you mean?”
“Commitments. Money. All that. Tell me about Bermuda. What’s it like without me here?”
Alison took a sip of her rosé, and said, “I thought I’d like it, but I’m not sure I do. Did I ever tell you how I have ESP?”
He lowered his brows. “No, I don’t think so.”
“It’s no big deal but ever since I was girl, I’ve gotten feelings, almost like a cold chill goes through me, whenever bad things are going to happen. Or sometimes when they have happened.”
“Tell me more. I’m interested.”
She told him about how she knew her grandmother was going to die before it happened, and about the time in high school when she’d passed Missy Talbot in the hall on a Friday afternoon and she’d felt as though all the warmth had been sucked from her. Missy died that Saturday night, thrown from a car when her boyfriend careened off Pope Road coming home from Brian Sherzinger’s party. She didn’t tell him that she’d had the same feeling of coldness on the night that Jonathan had asked her if she wanted to get a glass of wine with him after her shift. But she did tell him that after he left Bermuda, and she was alone in his house, she’d been swamped with bad feelings, cold feelings.
“It wasn’t like a premonition, exactly. At first, I thought it might be, but I think it’s maybe the house, that being alone there … maybe I was picking up on some things that happened in the past …”
“You’re preaching to the choir,” Jonathan said, and he took a long sip of his gin martini. “There’s some history there. Not just my family, but probably from before that.”
“Or maybe I was just lonely.”
The waitress came to clear their plates, calling Jonathan “hon.”
“How long have you been coming here?” Caroline asked him after the waitress had left.
“My whole life. Since I was a kid. This is an old restaurant. It’s been here about a hundred years.”
“Can I ask you a personal question?”
“Sure.”
“I’ve been poking around the house, as you know, digging through closets, and I found some more pictures you might be interested in. And I noticed, not that it’s any of my business, but the only pictures I’ve found of your sister are when she was very young.”
“She died very young,” Jonathan said. “I didn’t tell you that?”
“You told me she was dead, but, no, I didn’t know when or how it happened.”
“She died when she was ten years old and I was twelve. That was a long time ago.”
“Still, I’m sorry to hear that, Jonathan. What was her name?”
“Faye.”
“How did she die?”
“She drowned. In Maine. We’d gone as a family for one month to a resort in Kennewick. There was this stone jetty at the beach, like a breakwater, and at low tide there were all these tide pools to explore, little caves where the granite blocks didn’t perfectly meet up. She got trapped in one when the tide was coming back and that’s how she drowned.”
“Oh, that’s terrible.”
“It was,” Jonathan said, and something in his voice made Alison think that he was done talking about this particular subject.
Back at the house they had a nightcap in the living room, and Alison stood looking at the oil paintings of Faye and Jonathan above the fireplace.
“She was pretty,” Alison said, almost to herself.
“She was,” Jonathan said. He was standing by the drinks table, a carafe of whiskey in one hand.
“Where did you pose for those pictures?”
“Not here, I’m pretty sure. In West Hartford, where we grew up. I don’t remember much except that my mother insisted on the sailor suits, and I was old enough to be mortified by that.”
“Well, you both look cute in your sailor suits. Little Jonathan, or little Johnnie … What were you called then?”
“Jack, mostly.”
“Oh. When did that change?”
“When I changed it, I guess.”
“When I was growing up everyone called me Ali. Everyone but my father, who always called me Alison, which made me feel grown-up and sophisticated. When I got to college, I told everyone that I was an Alison, and now that’s who I am.”
“That’s similar to what happened to me,” he said, “but I actually made it legal. After my sister died, neither of my parents handled it well at all, but my father, in particular, decided that the best thing would be to pretend she never existed. I never really forgave him for that, for his weakness, so as soon as I was able I actually changed my last name to Radebaugh, my mother’s maiden name. These days some people know me as Jack Radebaugh, and some, like you, as Jonathan Grant. I don’t care about my name anymore. I guess enough water has passed under that bridge.” Jonathan put the carafe down on the table. He hadn’t filled his glass.
“Blood under the bridge,” Alison said.
“Huh?”
“It was something my father used to say. ‘That’s all just blood under the bridge.’”
“Well, he was right. That’s all it is, now.”
“That name is so familiar to me,” Alison said, her eyes off to the side.
“What, my name?”
“Yes, the last name. No, the whole name. Jack Radebaugh.”
“I did write a book once. And it was published under that name.”
“What kind of book?”
“A business book. It did very well, but—”
“No, that probably wasn’t it.” She sat down on the closest chair, upholstered in a blue fabric with tiny white anchors.
He watched her, wondering if she was going to remember where she’d seen the name Radebaugh, wondering if she even remembered the list she’d received, but after taking a sip of her wine, she smiled and said, “It’s Halloween.”
“I know. Do you like my outfit?”
“What are you?”
“A man in the winter of my years.”
She jutted out her lower lip. “Autumn, maybe, but not winter. God, I’m exhausted. Should we go to bed?”
“Yes, let’s go to bed.”
3
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 1:10 A.M.
Jack Radebaugh—known by Alison Horne, and a few other people, as Jonathan Grant, the name he’d been given at birth—walked carefully down the creaky hall to the bedroom that used to be his father’s, so many years ago now. He stepped into the narrow closet that smelled of cedar and dust and reached up to where the .22 rifle was held in place by two nails. He pulled the rifle down, checked to make sure that it was loaded, then walked back to the bedroom. Alison was asleep on her side, a hand tucked up under her cheek. He stood over her, a little concerned that even at point-blank range, the bullet might hurt her before it killed her. He’d heard of bullets ricocheting off skulls, but that was certainly rare. He doubted it would happen if he aimed the gun correctly.
Maybe I should have drugged her drink just to make sure she didn’t suddenly wake up, he thought, the way he’d drugged Caroline Geddes and Ethan Dart. But he told himself not to worry about it. He’d gotten to know Alison Horne, and one thing he knew about her was that she was a deep sleeper. He braced himself, the barrel of the gun two inches from Alison. He didn’t love her—he wasn’t sure he truly loved anyone, at least no one currently alive on the planet—but he did like Alison quite a bit.
He thought back to a year ago, when he’d first walked into that awful steak house she was hostessing at, just to get a look at her. At that point he had fully planned everything but was still not entirely sure he was going to go through with it. He’d already written the list of nine names—nine potential victims, unaware that they’d been marked for death. The private investigator he’d hired to provide biographical information had handed him extensive files on all of them. In a way, going to see Alison Horne in the flesh had been a way for him to test himself, to see how he felt about playing the role of God. He sat at the bar in his best suit and watched her at her hostess stand, trying to imagine what it would feel like to end her life. He thought of Grace, his only child, who would be around Alison’s age right now if she hadn’t been hit by a drunk driver the year after she’d graduated from college. She’d been driving home after working the dinner shift at a swank French restaurant. She hadn’t needed to be a waitress, especially since she’d landed an entry-level job at the Ithaca newspaper she’d interned at her senior year at Cornell, and, besides, if she’d needed extra money Jack would have been happy to give it to her. But she’d always been independent, and she loved being a waitress, ever since she’d gotten her first job at a catering company in New Jersey her junior year of high school. And he remembered her telling him that she made more in one night of waitressing than she made for the whole week at the paper.
She’d been inordinately pretty, his daughter, and Jack had imagined the way that men dining at Salt Bistro would’ve noticed her. And he worried about her leaving the restaurant late at night and walking to her car. But the things we worry about are not the things that eventually happen. The drunk driver who hit her crossed four lanes of traffic, missing other cars, then ramming Grace’s GTI so hard that it went through a guardrail, flipped over twice, and landed upside down in the parking lot of a strip mall. She had been less than a minute from her own apartment complex.
Watching Alison at the steak house Jack had wondered if, like his own daughter, she loved working there. Somehow, he doubted it. She was nearing forty, he knew, but still sexy enough to get away with the cropped top and tight leather skirt. She caught him looking at her and smiled brightly at him. Maybe he should get to know her more intimately, if that was possible. I’m thinking of killing this woman, he’d thought, so getting to know her first would be the right thing to do, both logistically, but also maybe morally. He realized, of course, that he had no intentions of getting to know his other victims, but they weren’t right in front of him, in smiling distance.
He’d returned several times to the steak house, eventually asking her to join him for a glass of wine. And then he’d suggested the idea of her becoming his mistress. It had been easy, and except for her prettiness, and her job at a restaurant, there had been nothing else that reminded Jack of his daughter. She was just a random human being alone in the world like we all are. Not particularly good, and not particularly bad. He didn’t want to hurt her, but he did want to kill her. She was a small piece of machinery in an incredibly complex system, and he needed to make an adjustment. He was restoring karma to the universe.
He carefully aimed the barrel of the rifle at the back of her skull and pulled the trigger.
ONE
1
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 3:45 P.M.
Instead of flying from St. George’s Airport in Bermuda to Portland, Maine, as he’d planned, Jack Radebaugh had changed his ticket and was now descending in a half-filled Airbus A320 toward Bradley International Airport. He knew it was a potentially disastrous mistake, especially when he was so near to the end, but suddenly he didn’t care. He had decided to return to West Hartford for one hour, two at the most, then head to Maine. At least this way, he’d be able to take his own car.
Jack’s mind these days was like a slideshow he had no control over. Images and thoughts and fixations ran rampant, but he’d learned to live with it, to control it for the most part. It also helped knowing that soon he’d be snuffing out those thoughts like blowing out the candles on a birthday cake.
A taxi took him from the airport to West Hartford. He moved rapidly through his house, changing his clothes so that he was wearing something more appropriate for the cold, blustery weather. He pulled a few items from his travel bag that had come with him from Bermuda, and went downstairs to the basement, where he added a few more items that would help him deal with his next-door neighbor. That was the real reason he had come back to West Hartford. Since having dinner over a month ago with his lovely neighbor Margaret and her smug, son-of-a-bitch husband Eric, he’d kept thinking about them, kept fantasizing about what he wanted to do to Eric. Maybe it was simply that Margaret, with her long hair and slender neck, and her timid wit, reminded him of his sister. Or maybe it was that she was simply a good person, and Eric wasn’t. And maybe since he was now so close to completing his life’s work, he thought that he might as well do one last favor for Margaret. Did he even know her last name? He couldn’t remember ever hearing it. He did, however, remember talking with her about her part-time job at the library. “I work evenings Monday through Wednesday,” she’d said, “and then all day on Saturday. Just about the worst schedule.” Maybe he’d remembered her schedule because he’d been planning this all along.
After locking up his childhood home for the final time, Jack crossed to his neighbor’s house, and rang the doorbell. What would he do if Margaret answered the door? He supposed that he would simply let her know that he was going away for a while and he’d come to say goodbye. And then he’d be off. It would look strange, but what did that matter in the big scheme of things?
