Nine Lives, page 22
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.
Faye and I were in heaven that summer. The resort was right on the beach, and we were free to roam, just so long as we met our mother for lunch and then for dinner. There were multiple other kids staying for the summer as well, and we soon formed a tight-knit group. I remember that time of my life more for the feelings it evoked than the actual specifics of the day-to-day. I was a twelve-year-old boy who had never had that many friends. Now I had about ten of them.
We were quite the gang. I’d have never remembered their names, of course, not all of them, but as a bookish boy, I had taken to keeping a journal. More of a notebook, really—filled with drawings and lists and blueprints and plans. And that summer I must have brought the notebook with me to the third-floor library at the Windward, where the members of the newly formed Pirate Society would meet after dinner, because it was there that I wrote down all their names under the heading “Windward Resort Pirate Society.”
Jack Grant
Meg Gauthier
Danny Horne
Gary Winslow
Deborah MacReady
Wayne Coates
Art Kruse
Paula Shepherd
Frank Hopkins
Under that list of names I had skipped a line and then written my sister’s name, Faye Grant, followed by the word apprentice. The members of the Pirate Society weren’t quite ready to afford a ten-year-old full membership in our group.
I don’t remember if we named ourselves the Pirate Society before or after someone had pulled out the Peter Pan book to look at. I do remember that we all felt a little old to be calling ourselves pirates, so we added “society” in order to make it sound more sophisticated. And I also remember a bunch of us flipping through that book, Wayne lying and telling us he’d seen the movie the summer before, even though we all knew it hadn’t played in a movie theater for years.
What I don’t remember is who got the idea that we should initiate Faye into our society by tying her up and putting her into the secret cave at the base of the jetty during low tide. Someone must have come up with it while we were looking at the Peter Pan book, because it was the way Captain Hook tried to kill Tiger Lily. I’ll never forget the illustration of Tiger Lily just barely holding her head above the water as Peter Pan and Captain Hook fight with swords. It is an image forever burned into my subconscious.
But someone did come up with the idea.
If Faye could survive the rising tide, as Tiger Lily had, she would become a full-fledged member of the Pirate Society.
And we all, every last one of us, agreed that it was a perfect plan. We told it to her during one of our secret meetings in the library, and she immediately agreed to take the test. I think, or rather I know, that she would have agreed to anything to be made a full member of our group.
In my mind this all happened during the course of a single day, but I can’t be sure of that. What I do know is that Wayne Coates had a tide chart and told us all that there would be a low tide in the middle of the afternoon, when we were all free to be on the beach between lunch and dinner. In my memory it was an overcast day, spitting rain, and we had the beach practically to ourselves. Danny had brought a length of rope that he’d found snarled up in a half-submerged lobster trap, but Faye initially refused to be tied up. One of the girls, and I want to say it was Meg, told Faye that she didn’t have to be tied up but in order to pass the initiation test, she had to stay in the cave until the very last moment, until the water went over her head, and only then would she be allowed to leave.
“If you come out one minute before, we’ll know, and you’ll never get to be a pirate.”
Those are the words I remember, and I also remember all of us saying it again and again to Faye, who stood there in her loose one-piece bathing suit, wide-eyed, stick-limbed, long hair plastered to her frail shoulders, nodding ferociously, desperate to please the older kids.
We formed a circle around her, all chiming in to let her know that if she emerged too early, if she panicked and left the cave before the tide reached her, we wouldn’t even talk to her for the rest of the summer.
Not one of us said something different.
No one told her it was just a game.
No one, in my recollection, even smiled at her, or winked to let her know it wasn’t real.
We all watched her crawl into the cave, the water already starting to fill up the crevices and tidepools at the foot of the wall. She lay down on her back with her hands down by her sides.
And then we forgot about her, running off, laughing. It had started to really rain at that point, so we went to the game room at the resort and played board games all afternoon.
It was only around cocktail hour that my mother asked me if I knew where Faye was. I told her I didn’t, of course, then quickly spread word around to the other Pirates that no one should mention what we had done to my sister. I must have been worried at that point, worried about Faye I mean, but for some reason I thought she’d be just fine, and that maybe she was hiding somewhere else to get us all into trouble.
Word spread fast that Faye was missing, and several of the adults fanned through the resort grounds and the beach to look for her. My group all met together in the half-filled dining room and pledged to never say a word.
It was after dark by the time they found her body, still in that little cave. The tide was already going out again.
That was sixty years ago, and I’ve never forgotten what I and those eight other kids did to her. We might not have tied her hands behind her back, as we’d planned, but our words did the trick just as well.
My whole life I’ve thought about Faye in her final moments, and what it must have been like for her to die alone in the rising tide. I wonder if she tried to get out from under the rocks, or had she been determined to wait until the last possible moment, hoping to impress the older kids who’d already forgotten about her. Or maybe she’d gotten so cold lying there in the frigid water of the Atlantic Ocean that her muscles could no longer move. And I wonder who she thought about as she died. Our parents, I imagine. Our Mum. Or maybe it was me she was thinking of, her big brother who knew where she was. Maybe she was waiting for me to come back and rescue her.
Two years ago, I hired a private detective to find the members of the Pirate Society. Surprisingly, they were all still alive, and except for Frank Hopkins, they had all had children. At that point, I had begun to form a plan. I was old enough to know that there is no justice in the world. Bad people go unpunished all the time. And innocent people suffer outrageously. My own parents were never the same, not even remotely, after Faye’s death. They lost faith in the world, and I’m not sure either of them ever truly felt joy again. I decided that the best punishment—the only punishment—for the people responsible for my sister’s death was for them to lose a child as well.
It wasn’t simply revenge. It felt like something much more than that. Karma, maybe. I had the money, and I had the will, to do what the natural world would never do. I could set the world to rights, in one small way.
Was it fair that these people would lose a child because of a single careless act they did at the age of ten or eleven? Of course it’s not. But life is seldom fair to anyone. It wasn’t fair to my parents, having their beloved daughter taken from them, and life hasn’t been fair to me, either. I lost my own daughter when she was on the cusp of a happy life, and now my brain has turned against me in multiple ways. My ex-wife, I am sure, will tell you all about it.
I didn’t like killing those eight innocent people, but I decided that it was the only thing to do. In the long history of humans inhabiting this planet, my small act of retribution was minuscule, I know, but it was something. And for those of you who say that two wrongs don’t make a right, then I suspect you’re a person who has never been wronged.
My hand is cramping up, and it is past midnight, so I’ll be quick with the rest. When you’ve made a million dollars many times over, a lot of doors open up for you. I won’t name names, but my money bought me not just information, but surveillance on all of my targets. I knew where they’d be, and when they’d be there. I knew their weaknesses, and strengths. And I was able to buy them painless deaths. All except for Frank Hopkins. I drowned him right near Faye’s watery grave, and I even whispered her name into his ear as he died.
Matthew Beaumont was Debbie MacReady’s son. She’d been a mousy thing who barely talked, although I remember her almost hysterical giggle, especially as Faye slid underneath the rock that would be her final resting place.
Matthew was quite wealthy himself, and it made me wonder if he’d hire a private security detail to protect himself after receiving the list. For that reason I took him out quite early. That was me in the woods in Dartford, shooting him in the back. He looked quite peaceful on the orange mat of fallen pine needles.
Arthur Kruse Junior was Art Kruse’s boy, and I heard through my sources that Art had already abandoned his son because he was gay. Not surprising since I remember the young Art as the most enthusiastically fascistic of the pirate society. He’d been sorely disappointed when we decided as a group to not tie Faye up. His son, Arthur, by all accounts, seemed to be a decent man. I almost considered killing the father and not the son, but that would have gone against my plan. And if there’s one thing I like in my life, it is order. Still, I made sure Arthur would have a painless death, dying in his sleep while the police watched his house. A source who shall remain nameless provided me with the canister of carbon monoxide and the ingenious timing mechanism.
After killing Arthur Kruse, I traveled to Albany, where I planned on attaching an explosive device to Jessica Winslow’s car. But as soon as I got there it was clear to me that her townhouse and her vehicle as well were being very carefully watched. She was an FBI agent, after all. I’d made a mistake, I realized, and should have killed her earlier.
Jessica was the adopted daughter of Gary Winslow, who was the oldest member of the Pirate Society, and I had often thought that he should have been the one to stop us from doing what we did. Either him or me, of course. But we all listened to Gary, and I remember him saying once—and maybe this is a false memory—that although we were pirates, we were the good kind of pirates.
A lifetime as a successful businessman and consultant has taught me many lessons, one of them being that you can’t do everything yourself, and that sometimes you need to hire experts. That is what I did in order to dispatch Jessica. I’m a little ashamed to admit that I subcontracted that particular death, but I knew that she had left town, and that my chances of finding her and killing her without getting stopped or caught were slim. I paid a lot of money to have it done right.
Killing Jay Coates was comparatively easy, and I did that one myself. I’d learned enough about him to know that he hadn’t fallen far from the tree that was his psychopath of a father. I remember just how much glee Wayne Coates had taken in the initiation rite of making my sister survive the tide. And I also remember that he stayed joyful even later on that terrible day when it became apparent to all of us that something had gone very wrong.
The FBI never located the real Jay Coates. I wonder if he even got the list in the mail, because I did hear that a Jay Coates in Georgia had stepped forward to say that he had received one. It doesn’t matter either way, but it did make Jay’s death one of my easier tasks. I followed him around Los Angeles on a Saturday night, just waiting for an opportunity, and unless I imagined it, he was stalking someone as well. A young inebriated woman that he’d followed from a bar. I wonder if my killing Jay prevented something terrible from happening to that girl. Maybe the karma I was returning to the world was already paying off in dividends?
Caroline Geddes was the daughter of Meg Gauthier (my first kiss, also that summer), and Ethan Dart was the son of Paula Shepherd, the quietest of our bunch. How odd that the list brought Caroline and Ethan together just before the end.
Arranging their deaths was not easy. But I knew in advance that they would be together in Makanda, Illinois, and then it was just a matter of two very large bribes, one to a local police officer and one to an employee at the Rolling Brook Cabins who provided me with a master key. The hardest part was lying underneath their bed and listening to their final moments together. But as in the killing of Arthur Kruse, I made sure that neither Ethan nor Caroline suffered any pain. And I do know for a fact just how happy they were in their final moments. Maybe I’d done them a favor, ending their lives then. I wonder what I saved them from: A crushing breakup? A bitter divorce? A loss of a child? I certainly saved them from something. Happiness is always a temporary state.
And Alison Horne, of course, was the daughter of Danny Horne. Not only had Danny helped orchestrate Faye’s death when he was twelve years old, he would eventually abandon his own family for a tawdry love affair. I wonder what Danny’ll think of all this if it comes out that his old childhood friend had an affair with his daughter before murdering her in Bermuda.
I felt bad about Alison, of course. It was a pleasure to spend time with her in Bermuda. I’d been wanting to go back there for years, and it was nice to see the old haunted place through her eyes. And it was nice to be able to tell her about my sister, about what happened to her. I suppose the psychologists out there will say that was what I was doing all along, that my entire plan was an elaborate way to tell the world about my sister. They’ll say I wanted to get caught, and maybe that is true as well.
I know that I’ve left some questions behind that have not been answered in this letter. Like why did I even bother to mail the letter to myself and then give the FBI information about the Windward Resort? I don’t really have the answer to that question except that it felt like the right thing to do. I am guilty, as well, in the death of my sister, and I deserved to be on the list, just as I deserve what is about to happen to me.
Maybe you will wonder why I even wrote the list in the first place, sending it to the victims. It made my job harder, and it made their final moments more filled with dread, but, again, all I can tell you is that it felt like the right thing to do. Their deaths were an attempt to add order back to a chaotic world, and the list itself was just part of that order. And being on that list only told them something that they should already have known. That death is coming for us all.
And what about Eric Miles, my neighbor in Hartford? All I will say about him is that he deserved to die, more than most of us. Think of me as a garbage man, just out doing my job of picking up the bagged garbage left along the side of the road. Eric was just a piece of trash that floated into my path at random. It wasn’t a whole lot of effort for me to throw him into my truck, as well.
My time is up, I think, and I won’t bore you any more with self-reflection. I’ll hide this letter in an appropriate place, then take my remaining whiskey out to the jetty. I’ll be joining Faye soon. I don’t mean in heaven, because I don’t believe that such a place exists. I mean that other place. The cold nothing that awaits all of us when we finally leave this world.
May your gods have mercy on all your souls.
Sincerely,
Jack Radebaugh né Jonathan Borland Grant
June 21, 1944—November 2, 2014
ONE
1
SUNDAY, MARCH 19, 5:14 A.M.
She’d been hearing voices for so long—some she recognized and some she didn’t—that they had begun to mean nothing to her. But then some of the voices began to break through, and one of them said, “Her eyes just opened.”
Or maybe she’d dreamed it.
She was in the darkness again, but there had been a flicker of light.
One of the things she liked about the darkness was that there was no pain.
But then she heard a voice she recognized—her mother’s voice—the words floating in her head, and she remembered that once upon a time she had opened her eyes. So she tried to open them again, and this time there was nothing but darkness, and the sound of machines. The sound of the room she was in, doing whatever it was that rooms do.
When she next heard voices, and felt a hand on her arm, she opened her eyes again and this time a face looked back at her. She didn’t recognize it, but it smiled. A woman’s face, dark freckles along the hairline, a razor thin scar on her chin. “Why, hello, you,” she said.
