And the Sea Will Tell (19 page)

Bernard Leonard, who had listened closely to Shishido’s interview of Jennifer, was finding it almost impossible to remain silent. He believed Mac and Muff would never tell anyone to “make themselves at home” on the
Sea Wind
when they weren’t there. And the idea that the Grahams would make such an offer to Roy and Jennifer,
of all people
, was preposterous.

Moreover, Leonard had quietly fumed when Jennifer now claimed that the
Iola
had gotten hung up on a reef at Palmyra while it was being
towed
by the
Sea Wind—
a direct contradiction of her story to him just minutes earlier that she and Roy had intended to leave Palmyra on the
Iola
, and while attempting to sail it, not tow it, out of the channel, it went aground, necessitating their returning to get the
Sea Wind
. Obviously, she had changed her story because he had scoffed at it.
She’s a liar
, he thought.
And undoubtedly a murderer, too
.

Shishido handcuffed Jennifer and escorted her off the cutter.

By then, the news media had gotten wind of the action at the Ala Wai, and newspaper photographers and TV camera crews eagerly filmed Jennifer as she was led off the cutter on her way to FBI headquarters for further questioning. Her arrest—the opening volley in what promised to be a big story—made the lead of the evening news and the following morning’s front pages.

Later that afternoon, Jennifer was booked into the Honolulu jail on charges of stealing the
Sea Wind
and four hundred dollars cash from Mac and Muff Grahamn. Bail was set at twenty thousand dollars.

A
FTER HIDING
under the dock an hour or so, Buck heard a group of more leisurely footsteps and quieter voices approach. As they passed overhead, a woman’s voice asked, “What in the world has been going on around here?”

“Someone said they’re looking for a murderer,” a man answered.

But no one was there to see Buck Walker when, around noontime, he finally emerged from the water—chilled to the bone, exhausted, desperate, frightened.

T
HE NEXT
day, Cal Shishido headed for the Drug Enforcement Administration’s office in Honolulu’s federal building. He was following through on a hunch. Jenkins and Allen weren’t your regular yachties. They were hippie dropouts, with all that that might imply. No large quantities of heavy-duty drugs had been found on the
Sea Wind
, just some marijuana seeds and stems in a small plastic bag. Even so, the couple had arrived in Hawaii on a boat that didn’t belong to them—drug runners often used stolen boats to cover their trail when smuggling drugs in these waters—and Shishido suspected there might be a drug connection in the case. He needed any leads he could get on the mysterious Roy Allen.

At the DEA, Shishido showed the Roy Allen driver’s license to the first agent he came across.

“Hey, that’s Buck Walker,” said the surprised DEA man. “Where did you get his picture?”

“You know him?”

“Yeah, we’re after his ass.”

Shishido couldn’t believe his luck. For the very first DEA agent to know the fugitive’s identity was more than he could have hoped for. Some aliases hold up for weeks, even months.

The agent walked over and handed the license to a colleague seated several desks away. “Tell Shishido who this turkey is,” he said.

“Buck Walker,” said the deskbound agent without a moment’s hesitation. “He sold to an undercover agent, pled out, and skipped before sentencing.”

“When?” Shishido asked.

“About six months ago. You got a lead on him?”

“He jumped off a dock at the Ala Wai two days ago and swam for it when he saw us coming,” Shishido said.

“Whaddaya know. Buck Walker’s back.”

S
UNNY HAD BEEN SO
conscientiously tending her roses that she nearly missed the phone. “Hello,” she gasped, out of breath from hurrying into the house.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Jennifer—thank God!” Sunny exclaimed. “Where are you?”

“Hawaii.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes and no. I’m not hurt or anything, but I’m in jail.”

“
Jail?
Jennifer, what for?”

“For stealing a boat,” she said. “Only we didn’t really steal it. See, Mac and Muff, this nice couple on the island with us, died in a boating accident. We sailed their boat to Hawaii and the cops arrested me for boat theft. Will you bail me out?”

“Where’s Buck?” Sunny asked warily.

“I don’t know. He ran away.”

Sunny thought quickly. If Jennifer got out on bail, she might well hook up with Walker and take off again.

“I’m not going to get you out, honey. Not now.”

“Mom…”

“No,” Sunny said firmly. “You’re safe and sound. At least I know where you are. That’s the way I want to keep it for now.”

O
N THE
morning of October 30, San Diego—based FBI special agents Darwin Wisdom and Earl Harris drove out to see Muff’s mother, Rose King, who lived in a modest bungalow on Meade Avenue in San Diego.

The visitors settled on the couch in the sensibly furnished living room. Mrs. King, frail and white-haired, sat with her hands clasped like a vise in her lap. She knew that her daughter and son-in-law had been out of touch, and their sailing friends in Hawaii were very concerned. Like any worried parent, she had tried to avoid thinking the worst. Surely, they would show up. They were so well prepared for anything.

Also present was Muff’s sister, Peggy Faulkner, a demure woman in her mid-forties who was slimmer and taller then her sister.

Both women listened intently as the agents briefed them on the previous day’s events in Hawaii. It sounded like the plot for a television show, not something that actually touched on the lives of one’s own family.

For Mrs. King, the most frightening part was that the
Sea Wind
had been found in the hands of strangers, with her daughter and Mac nowhere around. They would
never
abandon their boat. “Where
are
they?” she asked forlornly.

“We don’t know,” Wisdom answered. “All we know is that your daughter and her husband are missing. With the Coast Guard’s help, we’ll be searching for them, of course. In the meantime, it would be helpful if you could provide us with some information.”

After Mrs. King gave the agents a physical description of LaVerne, as she called Muff (“born on December 18, 1932, in Pueblo, Colorado, blond hair, blue eyes, 5-foot-3, 135 Ibs., appendectomy scar,” etc.), she gave them several letters Muff had sent from Palmyra. The agents also borrowed a recent photo of Mac and Muff, smiling and holding hands, aboard the
Sea Wind
.

“Just a few other matters,” said Wisdom, sensitive to the worried mother’s distress.

Mrs. King nodded.

“Do you know how much cash they had when they departed for Palmyra?”

“My impression is that they took four or five thousand dollars to Hawaii,” Muff’s sister answered for her mother. “I don’t know if they intended to take that much with them to Palmyra. They had enough food and supplies on their boat to last them two years.”

“Did either Mr. and Mrs. Graham drink?” Harris asked.

“Rarely.” Peggy Faulkner seemed to have put up her guard. “Neither was a heavy drinker.”

“There was that ticket, honey,” Mrs. King said quietly, peering over the top of rose-hued bifocals at her daughter.

“My sister was arrested for drunk driving just before she and Mac left on their trip.”

The agent was scribbling away in his pad.

“But it was very unlike her,” Peggy added with conviction. “Really.”

Muff had had a bad case of hepatitis when she was in her late twenties, Mrs. King explained, and the doctors had advised her to avoid alcohol.

“Do you know if anything was bothering her around the time of the drunk driving?” asked Wisdom, his curiosity roused.

Simultaneously, mother and daughter shook their heads no.

Muff had never told them of her fears.

A
T
4:30
P.M.
on November 1, some forty hours after Jennifer’s arrest at the Ala Wai harbor, the
Tattarax
, an oceangoing tugboat skippered by Martin Vitousek, chugged into the Palmyra lagoon he had earlier flown over at Curt Shoemaker’s request.

Aboard the dirty, rust-splotched hundred-foot tug was a ten-man search team that included the FBI’s Shishido and Tom Bridges, Honolulu Assistant U.S. Attorney William Eggers, a representative of the U.S. Department of the Interior, several Coast Guard divers, and Jack Wheeler, who would be their island guide.

The trip from Honolulu had not been easy. Climbing aboard a Coast Guard C-130 at 7:00
A.M.
on October 31, the expedition had flown from Oahu’s Barbers Point Naval Air Station through an overcast that hung down the mountainsides like a dark, heavy blanket. Four and a half hours later, they landed at Fanning Island, where they boarded the tug for a twenty-two-hour trip to Palmyra, 175 miles to the northwest. Halfway there, a pump broke down and the toilets couldn’t be flushed. A compartment below deck offered half a dozen bunks, but no one had slept much as the vibrating old tug plowed through choppy seas.

When they moored at the dolphins in the Palmyra lagoon, there were no other boats there, nor could prosecutor Bill Eggers, from where he stood on the deck of the tug, see any sign of people on the island. He had already noted, as they came through the channel, that there was no sailboat hung up on the reef where Jennifer Jenkins had claimed the
Iola
had gone aground and been abandoned. Almost certainly, she had lied, and he was pretty sure he knew why.

Taking charge of the mission, Eggers suggested they immediately begin a thorough search, even though some of the others wanted to rest from their journey. Once ashore, they paired up to fan out in different directions. Their objectives were obvious. First and foremost, to find the Grahams—alive, or dead. And second, to gather any physical evidence that a crime had been committed.

The jungle rose only a few yards away, yet there was a collective pause before anyone in the search party made the first move. No one looked forward to whatever awaited them inside the dense growth. And the raucous squawking of the birds was somehow strangely daunting.

Eggers himself, a square-shouldered veteran criminal prosecutor with a boyish grin during happier times, had a nasty intuition about this stifling-hot place. He hoped he was wrong, but he believed, as Shishido now did, that a monstrous crime had been committed here. People didn’t give up a boat like the
Sea Wind
in a desolate place like Palmyra without a struggle. Whatever had happened to Mac and Muff Graham must have involved force and violence.

Eggers teamed up with Wheeler for the search. They walked around the West Lagoon’s shoreline to the
Sea Wind
’s former anchorage. When they came across an old campfire site, Eggers found a stick and poked through the charred mess. At first, he uncovered only some empty, unmarked prescription bottles.

Mopping his face with a rolled-up sleeve already soaked with sweat, Wheeler watched the prosecutor jab at the refuse.

“My God…” Eggers muttered.

They were both shocked to see what looked like a mass of human hair among the ashes.

Eggers reached cautiously for the hair. It was coal-black.

When he separated the hair from the other debris, Eggers was relieved to see it was actually a wig—a type of “fright wig” worn by Halloween tricksters.

Probing deeper, Eggers retrieved several bits of cotton cloth—possibly from a shirt that had been burned—and two eyeglass lenses, one from nonprescription dark glasses and one clear prescription lens. He placed the recovered items in a gunnysack he’d brought along.

Wheeler led the way to the site of Roy Allen’s camp, where the tent still stood. Inside, they found a bare cot, an armchair, and a bedside table upon which lay the beginnings of a homemade braided belt and a sketchbook with drawings of sailboat designs. In a corner of the tent a small bookcase held a variety of books and magazines.

Outside, on a bench, were quite a few tin cans and paper cups, all half-filled with dirt. Nearby, on the roof of the Refrigerator House, was a thriving garden of foot-high marijuana plants.

That afternoon, they all met back at the tugboat for ham and cheese sandwiches and chilled beer. Eggers asked the divers to gear up to check out the bottom of the lagoon near the dolphins. He didn’t have to spell out what to look for. Two Coast Guardsmen, outfitted with scuba tank, face mask, and flippers, dived off the deck, while another stood guard with an automatic rifle. The sharks of Palmyra could be seen circling in the blue lagoon.

When nothing was found near the dolphins, the divers took a dinghy to the small cove where the
Sea Wind
had been anchored and searched the bottom carefully. Arousing the aggressive instincts of the sharks, the dive was soon suspended for safety reasons.

Eggers assigned each team new quadrants to search. He and Wheeler took a dinghy across the lagoon and beached it, then set out to wade across a stretch of knee-deep water—too shallow, they thought, for sharks.

Wheeler was the first to notice a sleek, gray shark at least six feet long circling lazily in the crystalline blue of the lagoon. “I don’t think it’ll attack,” he said with a definite edge in his voice.

Suddenly, as if it had heard and was determined to disprove Wheeler’s assessment, the shark moved soundlessly toward them, its curved fin breaking the surface like a submarine periscope. The wide snout left no doubt the creature had a mouth big enough to amputate a leg in one quick chomp.

They could not outrun it to shore!

Wheeler spotted a coral head nearby, and they ran awkwardly toward it, splashing and floundering about like a flight of wounded birds fighting to get airborne. Their tormentor brushed closely against their coral perch. Eggers saw a pair of eyes beneath the surface reflecting an eerie golden light. Now that they were out of the water, could the shark still see them?

Apparently not. And for this big fellow, out of sight was out of mind, as it swam on and was soon gone.

When they regained their composure, Wheeler and Eggers waded quickly back to where they’d left the dinghy. There would be no more dips in the lagoon this day.

By dusk, the searchers were back at the boat, thoroughly drained by the hot sun, the humidity, and the jungle. Wheeler and Eggers mesmerized the others with the story of their run-in with the “man-eater.”

Gathered on the tug’s deck as sunset shimmered over the water, they discussed what they had and had not found. There was not one shred of evidence that the Grahams were still on the island, dead or alive, nor had anyone found any physical evidence of any kind that even vaguely suggested foul play. Eggers and Wheeler had found and photographed a hatch cover on the beach near the dolphins, and Wheeler was sure it belonged to the
Iola
. But that didn’t seem very helpful.

At dawn the next morning, the
Tattarax
left Palmyra. En route to Fanning, the tug sent a radio signal to a ham operator in Honolulu who had Mac Graham’s sister standing by waiting to hear from the search party. Calvin Shishido identified himself.

“This is Mary Muncey,” said a woman’s unsteady voice over the radio. “Are my brother and sister-in-law alive…or dead?”

“I don’t have an answer for you one way or the other, Mrs. Muncey,” Shishido said, not telling Mac’s sister, of course, that the searching party had expectantly brought along two body bags. “All I can tell you at this point is that we were unable to find any sign of either of them.”

Mac and Muff Graham had vanished, not leaving so much as a footprint on Palmyra.

D
ARK-HAIRED, ATTRACTIVE
Mary “Kit” Graham Muncey had flown to Honolulu the day after Jennifer’s arrest. No one sitting next to her on the plane could have guessed that this self-contained woman was experiencing a family tragedy. Divorced (since 1969) and living in Seattle, she’d once been married to Bill Muncey, at the time the world’s most famous boat racer. After years of watching her husband—the father of her three sons—hurtle across the water at two hundred miles an hour, Kit had learned to conceal her deepest fears beneath a placid exterior.

While waiting in Honolulu to hear word from the search party, Kit had surrendered to nostalgic reminiscences of her life with Mac. As a little brother, he’d been a terror. While growing up in Connecticut, they had been highly competitive and fought a lot. But everyone noticed that when Mac and Kit—shortened from Kitten, her father’s pet name for her—weren’t arguing, they were sharing toys and playing together like pals. They spent much of their time exploring the countryside around their home, using back roads and staying out of sight. When they’d come across a horse in a pasture, they’d climb aboard with no saddle or reins. “Oh, Mac, we had such great fun,” she would have liked to remind him now. As adults, brother and sister had remained close. Kit was so pleased when Mac had found, in Muff, a loving woman to spend his life with. Mac had been just as supportive of her. Bill Muncey was a man’s man—Mac’s kind of guy—and her brother had been pained by her divorce from Bill, but he’d let her know that her happiness was paramount.

She had last seen her brother and sister-in-law six months earlier, in April. Knowing they were preparing to leave for a long voyage to the Pacific, she’d flown down to San Diego to spend a few days with them. Mac had been feverishly excited about this new adventure, but Muff, in a moment of girl-talk candor, had confided to Kit that she really didn’t want to go. Alone with Mac, Kit gently chided him for not being more sensitive to Muff’s feelings. This trip was very important to him, he had replied, and he was confident that once they reached their island paradise, Muff would end up enjoying it, too.