“Not really,” Stone said, “but I find it very suspicious that they seem to be trying to create a false alibi.”
“I see your point,” Rawls said.
“Sergeant Young has just gone over to Caleb’s house to see if they’re there,” Stone said. “I’ll be interested to hear what he finds out.”
SERGEANT TOM YOUNG pulled up to the Stone house, a rambling shingled house sagging with age in places. He walked up onto the front porch and rang the bell.
After a long wait the door opened. “Yes?”
“Mr. Caleb Stone?”
“Yes?”
“I’m Sergeant Young of the Maine State Police. We spoke on the phone yesterday. I’d like to speak to your sons, Eben and Enos, please.”
“I gave you their cell phone number yesterday, Sergeant,” Caleb replied. “It hasn’t changed.”
“Yes sir, and I spoke to one of them, but I haven’t bearable to confirm their whereabouts.”
“Well, I’m sorry about that, Sergeant, but I don’t see how I can help you. The boys are not here.”
“Sir, we have information that four people slept in your house last night. I assume that two of them were your wife and yourself. Who were the other two?”
“We, ah, had houseguests. They left this morning.”
“Did they take the ferry?”
“No, they came and left by boat; they’re cruising the coast and just stopped in for the night.”
“May I ask their names?”
“Bill and Julie Robertson.”
“And the name of their boat?”
“I don’t really know the boat’s name,” Caleb replied. “It’s a sailing boat, pretty good size, but I don’t know its name.”
“How can I contact the Robertsons?”
“Why do you want to contact them?”
“I need to verify their presence here last night.”
“Well, I suppose you’ll have to wait until they return to Boston in the fall. They’re cruising all summer.”
“Mr. Stone, would you mind if I had a look around your house?”
“What for?”
“I’d like to see for myself if your sons are here.”
“All right. Go ahead,” Caleb said, standing aside and holding the door open.
Sergeant Young stepped inside the house, and he heard the door close firmly behind him.
Chapter 53
STONE FINISHED HIS LUNCH and pushed back from the table. “I’m going to look for Sergeant Young,” he said.
“Take it easy, Stone,” Lance said. “He’s only been gone for an hour, and we know where he went. Relax and have some dessert.”
Stone tried to relax. “Ginny, how are you coming with Esme’s diary?”
“Slowly,” she replied. “I can go faster, if you don’t care if I destroy it.”
“Please do it as you see fit, Ginny.”
“It’s just that it’s all these thin sheets, and they’ve been mashed together by water and the pressure of the cover. If I use the heat from the hair dryer too much, they dry too fast and crumble.”
Lance spoke up. “Ginny, if it’s too difficult, I can send it back to Langley and let the experts have a go at it.”
“We don’t have time for that,” Stone said.
“You mean Holly doesn’t have time for that,” Ham said. It was the first time he had spoken during lunch.
“I can do it, Lance,” Ginny said, “but it has to be done slowly, and I don’t think your people at Langley could do it any faster. I know it would be nice to do this in a lab, to better preserve the diary as evidence, but we have a different priority here, and that’s to get Holly back as quickly as possible.”
Stone stood up. “I’m going to go call Tom Young and see if he’s all right.” He left the room.
Ham watched him go. “I think Stone is almost as tightly wound as I am.”
Stone came back. “I got his voice mail. I’m going to wait another half an hour, and then I’m going over to Caleb’s house.” He sat down and tried to eat the apple pie in front of him.
“There are dead spots on this island,” Lance said. “Maybe Tom is in one of those.”
The doorbell rang, and Stone got up and went to the front door. A moment later he came back into the kitchen with Sergeant Young.
“What happened over there?” Lance asked.
“Let’s take a look at those thermal images,” Young said.
Stone went to get them and spread them on the kitchen table.
“I searched the whole house,” Young said. “Caleb didn’t give me a hard time; he seemed to be happy for me to look around.” He tapped a finger on two of the sleeping figures. “This is the twins’ room,” he said, “and it would appear that they’re sleeping there. However, there’s a guest room one floor up, directly over the twins’ room, and Caleb says they had people sleeping there last night.”
“Who?” Stone asked.
“A couple named Bill and Julie Robertson from Boston. I checked, and there’s a phone listing there, and I got an answering machine. Caleb says they’re spending the whole summer cruising the coast in their sailboat and that they came in by sea yesterday and left the same way early this morning. He didn’t have the boat’s name or description, so I can’t ask the coast guard to look for it. I’ve got somebody checking the Massachusetts yacht registry for the information we need to launch a search.”
“So, we’re back where we started?” Stone asked.
“I wish to God we could nail down the twins on Nantucket and confirm the past four days of their alibi. I’m beginning to get the feeling we’re wasting valuable time on those boys.”
“Funny,” Stone said, “I’m getting the feeling that they are less and less of a waste of our time.”
HOLLY JERKED AWAKE, feeling pain. She felt it again; somebody had slapped her sharply across the face. Then she heard an odd, mechanical-sounding voice.
“Listen to me carefully,” it said. “I have decided to accept your offer for your freedom. I’m going to remove the tape over your mouth, and I want you to answer my questions. Say nothing else, just answer. Do you understand me?”
Holly nodded.
“My question is, what do you need to accomplish the transfer of funds?”
The tape was ripped off. Holly panted for a moment.
“Answer me.”
“I need a computer and an Internet connection.”
“That’s it?”
“That and for you to find a way to convince me, beyond any doubt, that the moment I complete the transaction, I will be freed.” She heard the rip of duct tape being torn, and a fresh strip was slapped over her mouth.
“I don’t know if I can convince you of my intentions,” the voice said, “but I will promise you this: If we can’t make this happen quickly, you will be dead in less than twenty-four hours.” She felt the man leave the room.
Holly felt less drugged than usual, and she forced herself to start planning. First, she had to convince the man that she would cooperate with him, to the extent that he would untie at least one hand. She could still feel the weight of the small 9 mm pistol on her belt under her sweatshirt, and if she could get at that, she would not hesitate to shoot anybody who stood in the way of her freedom.
For the first time, she began to feel something like hope.
She took deep breaths, sucking as much air as possible into her lungs, and her brain began to work.
Chapter 54
LIEUTENANT JAKE POTTER stood outside the dockmaster’s office in the Nantucket marina and trained his binoculars on
Hotshot.
The marina was a hive of activity, as crews readied their yachts for the start of the next leg of the race. Engines started; sails were hauled on deck, shaken out of their bags and bent onto spars and forestays; boats began to leave their berths and motor toward the open harbor.
Hotshot
was no different from the others. Jake counted five young men in the cockpit or on deck, each working furiously, and no large blond twins were among them. He had been had. What he would have enjoyed most would have been to remove his Colt Cobra from its holster, empty it into the yacht’s hull just below the waterline and watch it sink.
Instead, he drew his cell phone from its pouch and punched in a number.
“Sergeant Young,” a voice said.
“Sergeant, this is Lieutenant Potter of the Nantucket police department.”
“Good morning, Lieutenant.”
“I wanted to let you know that the yacht
Hotshot
has just left the marina here for the start of the race, and the Stone twins are not aboard. And I haven’t been able to find them anywhere in the village. I’ve had all our people on the lookout for them, and they are not here.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Young said.
“One more thing: Two young men answering their description left here in a small, private airplane yesterday afternoon. There was no flight plan filed, and I don’t have a tail number, but the airplane departed to the northeast, in the direction of Provincetown. That’s consistent with a flight to the Maine coast.”
“Do you know what kind of airplane?”
“It was a Cessna, nobody could identify the model, but it was not based on Nantucket.”
“Do you know if it refueled at your airport?”
“It did not refuel; otherwise, we’d have five casualties.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant.”
YOUNG CLOSED HIS CELL phone and turned his car in the direction of Dick Stone’s house.
STONE WATCHED AS Ginny came down the stairs, clutching the diary and several sheets of paper.
“I’ve got something,” she said. She spread her papers and the diary out on the coffee table and sat down beside it while everyone gathered around her. “I finally realized that I still hadn’t gone far enough back in the diary,” she said. “Then it occurred to me that Esme had been in London with her parents all winter, not here on the island, so what I was reading was mostly irrelevant, so I went back even further to last Labor Day.”
“And what did you find?” Stone asked.
“The pages were very messy, and the ink had faded or run, but I’ve written out what I could read. This one entry was a page and a half long, which was unusual for ESE; she ordinarily wrote a couple of paragraphs about her day. Here’s what I’ve got.” She picked up a sheet of paper and read:
“”Day started blank.“ Where I couldn’t read a word, I just wrote down ”blank.“ Then there are two or three paragraphs that are completely illegible, then this: ‘X and blank said blank blank”—several words unreadable—then ’blank house, blank blank blank drinks. Z wanted blank blank go, so I said okay.“ Then more unreadable paragraphs down to the last one: ”Z blank crying, me too. Blank blank Y laughing, drunk. Z threw blank, and I got her out blank blank.“ Then the only whole sentence I was able to get: ‘Z swore me to secrecy.”“
Lance spoke up. “I want to send the diary to Langley and see if they can recover more of those pages.”
“I think you should,” Ginny said. “I don’t think I can get any more of this particular incident.”
“Do you have an interpretation of all this, Ginny?” Stone asked.
“It sounds to me that there are four people involved: X, Y, Z and ESE. It sounds as though Z and ESE were persuaded to go to somebody’s house for drinks, then got drunk and Z threw up, and ESE got her out of there.”
“Z could be Janey Harris,” Stone said, “and X and Y could be Eben and Enos Stone.”
“Could be,” Ginny said,“ but there’s nothing here that I can read that identifies X and Y. It could be two other boys on the island or two other girls or even two men. Wouldn’t be the first time grown men tried to lead teenaged girls astray.”
“All right,” Stone said. “Here’s a theory: Labor Day is everybody’s last day on this island. When I spent that summer here, the day after Labor Day, everybody abandoned this place as if it were a sinking ship. By five in the afternoon, the island was practically deserted.”
“What’s your point?” Dino asked.
“Something happened to the girls while they were there— maybe they were raped—but Z, or Janey, swore Esme to secrecy, so she didn’t tell anybody, and the next day they left the island with their parents. Dick and Barbara took Esme back to London, and Janey went home to Boston with her parents.”
“Okay. Say you’re right, then what?” Dino asked.
“X and Y are the twins, and they went back to Yale for the fall semester. Neither of the girls told anyone. Maybe they talked on the phone and reinforced their secret that way. But somehow, Dick Stone learned what had happened. Maybe Esme’s mother read her diary.”
“Mothers will do that,” Ginny said. “Mine did.”
“So Dick is furious. On his way from London to Washington, Dick stops in Boston and confronts Caleb with this information. Maybe Caleb doesn’t believe it or believes it and refuses to do anything about it, so Dick, in a fit of pique, draws a new will disinheriting Caleb and, by extension, the twins, and sends the will to me.”
“Wait a minute,” Dino said. “Are you saying that the twins murdered Dick, Barbara, and Esme because they were disinherited?”
“No. What’s more important is that
they didn’t know they were disinherited.
They wouldn’t have known, because Caleb didn’t know until I told him.”
“So they killed the whole family thinking they would inherit Dick’s wife’s money? That seems like a stretch, Stone.”
“No, no, at least not directly. Esme had talked, or at least her parents had read her diary, so they were at risk for being sent to prison for two rapes.”
“So they killed both the girls, and Dick and Barbara were either collateral damage or killed because they knew about what happened. What about Don Brown?”
“Janey must have told him about the gapes, or at least Eben and Enos thought she did.”
“Well,” Dino said, “your theory covers most of what we know, but what about Caleb?”
“What about him?”
“If his boys raped these girls, then, according to your theory, he knew about it because Dick told him. Do you think he wouldn’t do anything about it?”
“I don’t think he would send his sons to jail for rape,” Stone said.
“How about five murders? Would he take exception to that?”
“It’s hard to imagine he would,” Stone said, “but maybe he didn’t know the boys were connected to the murders or at least was in denial about them.”
“Then there are the other two women or the island who were murdered,” Dino said.
“Right,” Stone said, “and four more in New Haven.”
“Christ,” Ham said suddenly. “That just doesn’t sound possible. If your theory is right, then these boys from a nice Boston family have murdered, what, eleven people?”