Dead Silence

16

At ten, Tomlinson banged at my hotel door and said, “Demons have returned to the bell tower. Want to go for a drive? I was twitchy to begin with. Now I’m having visions. I think he’s there.”

“The boy, you mean. Where?”

“I mean my brother. Or father. Maybe both-God help us.” He had the keys to the rental car and rattled them in his hand. “I should have told you about the missing girl Fred mentioned, but I never let myself be convinced.”

Earlier, he’d made only a vague reference to her after admitting that he knew his father had not sold the family estate. Their only contact over the years had been a few phone calls and cards. “The day I began to suspect was the last time I set foot on the property.”

Not long afterward, his father, a gifted paleontologist, and his brother, a Yale graduate with two years at Johns Hopkins, both left the country while Tomlinson was still at Harvard. Now he wasn’t even sure they were alive.

Standing at my door, he said, “I swore I’d never go back. But everything in its time, man. The dream was bizarre, now it’s like a tractor pulling me home.” He looked over my shoulder into the room. “You mind grabbing an extra jacket? It’s freezing out here.”

I was awake. I had spent two hours cross-referencing new information related to William Chaser’s abduction. E-mails from Barbara’s staff and one from Harrington. Now I was trying to get my mind off the puzzle of the boy’s disappearance by reading an article in National Geographic Adventurer about the puzzle that is the precise magnetic navigation system in sea turtles.

I closed the magazine and tossed it on the desk. “Someone could be living in your old place. Maybe it’s been leased, you don’t know. And it’s late.”

“Tell that to my demons. Last I heard, Dr. Tomlinson was working in Brazil and my brother was growing poppies on the far side of the world. But it doesn’t mean they gave away the family jewels.” He rattled the keys.

Tomlinson’s manic reaction to alcohol mixed with guilt takes many forms, most of them familiar to me by now. This was different. His eyes were wild but not glazed. He was dressed in layers: jeans, shirts and at least two pairs of socks-a scarecrow’s costume for most but for him bedrock proof that he’d given the matter sober consideration.

Fifteen minutes later, I was standing outside a hedged compound, a deserted hulk of a house that Tomlinson said was once his family’s estate. MEL-VILLE PLACE read a weathered sign at the stone entranceway-the author had spent part of a whaling season here. When Tomlinson said the family had money, I’d assumed millions, not hundreds of millions. There was a light on in a staff cottage. He asked me to wait while he went to the door.

I watched the door open. A buxom woman in a housecoat appeared. I heard a hoot of surprise, then watched the woman hug Tomlinson. He lifted her off the floor as if they were dancing.

“It’s okay,” he yelled. “Give me a minute!”

As the door closed, I could hear the woman weeping.

I walked to the back of the property to a dune overlooking the sea. I was there for only a few minutes when I noticed the silhouette of a man approaching. I looked at the house, then at the silhouette.

Physical characteristics in a family vary, but the person coming toward me was Tomlinson’s ectomorphic opposite: broad and squat, not tall and lean-unlikely it was his father or brother. And his movements were mechanical, like a robot tracking unfamiliar ground.

I looked far down the beach. No lights. The nearest estate was two miles away. Even so, I wondered if it might be a neighbor sleepwalking.

No… the man was awake. His course didn’t vary. I realized it was because he saw me. As he approached, I expected a signal of acknowledgment, at least a tentative greeting, typical of strangers meeting at night in an isolated place.

Nothing. The closer he got, the faster the man walked. Maybe he expected me to turn and leave-or run.

I didn’t.

“Are you him? The liar that says his name is Thomas?”

When the man spoke, I backed up a step, couldn’t help it. By now he had breached what academics call the alarm perimeter and hadn’t slowed. Friends stop at three feet, acquaintances at four, strangers at nine. He kept coming. It wasn’t until I stepped toward the man that he halted.

“You scared, bub? I’m waiting for an answer.” The man was a local, his accent similar to the horse trainer’s.

I said, “Here’s the way it works: You introduce yourself, then I explain my name’s not Thomas. Afterward, we both go on our merry ways.”

“Didn’t say that. I said you was the liar pretending his name was Thomas.”

The man stepped closer.

Wind blew off the ocean, topping the dunes. I could smell creosote and diesel, odors I associate with commercial fishing. Not a tall man but big. His face was shadowed because the sea was behind him, a pale band of beach where waves boomed, water blacker than the squall-black sky. Age was in his voice and the way he moved, not old but getting there.

I wondered if he could see my face. Realized he couldn’t when he said, “If you don’t remember me, bub, maybe you need glasses.”

My foul-weather jacket wasn’t zipped. I said, “Maybe we both do,” as I took off my glasses and cleaned them on my sweater. “If you’ve got a problem, mister, I can’t help unless I know what it is.”

The mansion behind me was five stories, all the windows dark except for the lights on the porch and in the windows of the cottage. I turned toward the cottage, the mansion to my left, the sea to my right.

After a moment, the man said, surprised, “You’re not him,” but it was also an accusation. He looked at the mansion, took a few steps toward it, then stopped. “You must be the other guy. The one who’s a cop looking for some missing boy. Only strangers come out on this point in winter. Alone anyway.”

I said, “Because it’s private property? Maybe I should be asking the questions.”

The man took another slow step toward the house, his anger draining along with his certainty. “I was sure you were him. Fifteen years, I’ve waited.” He stopped and turned. “Always knew what I was gonna do when we finally come face-to-face.”

I said, “So I see,” because I could make out details now. He had the gaunt eyes, thick forehead, the nose, skin and ears a distant mix of slave islanders and North Sea fishermen. He wore suspenders beneath a heavy coat. In his hand was a gaff, a steel hook lashed to a handle.

“If you’re going to use that, I should at least know your name.”

After a long silence, he said, “Sylvester. Virgil Sylvester,” before repeating, “Fifteen years, I’ve watched this place. In summer, it’s a rental. Billionaires and film stars. But winters, it’s just him who sneaks in.”

I couldn’t bring myself to ask who because I expected him to add a name: Tomlinson.

“Word used to travel fast on the South Fork. Now there ain’t many locals left. Those still here are afraid to tell me who comes ’n’ goes at this place. He killed my Annie-you know that, bub? We never found her body, but it was plain what happened. He raped her, then beat her to death with a golf club. A golf club.”

I had never heard such bitterness attached to these words.

“A rich kid. One of the summer brats. He used my girl like some damn country-club sport before taking the luxury bus back to college. A plaything to screw, then put on a tee.” His chest was heaving. “He’s up there, ain’t he?”

I said, “I have children. What you just described, it’s the worst imaginable. How old was your daughter?”

“Thirteen. Pretty girl. She’d read me little poems and stories sometimes.”

“Something like that sticks. I’m sorry, Virgil.”

“Yeah, yeah.” The man still faced the mansion but his breathing was slowing. “Since that morning, I’ve been a dead man just waiting for the lights to go out.”

I glanced toward the cottage, hoping Tomlinson wouldn’t choose that moment to exit and call my name. I was calculating the possibilities. Virgil Sylvester would either come at me with the gaff, or charge the house, or realize that attacking was pointless and contrive an excuse for doing nothing.

I relaxed a little when he turned and said, “You really a cop?”

“No. Someone asked me to help find the boy. He’s fourteen. Lives in Minnesota, but has an Oklahoma accent.”

“Why tell me?”

“He might still be around.”

The man nodded as if it made sense. “I can’t picture anybody being friend to a child killer.”

“I’m not. I don’t know the person who killed Annie.”

“Looking for a missing child, it’s the only hell I believe in. You think one of the summer people took the boy?”

“If I was sure, I think I’d ask to borrow that gaff.”

Sylvester faced me, and I could smell his clothing again. “Sounds like you mean it. But you don’t. You’re just trying to talk me out of it.”

“I’d want someone to talk me out of it. Kill a man for revenge and he lives with you the rest of your life.”

“Let the cops handle it, I suppose?”

There wasn’t much I could say to that.

“You don’t know what it’s like out here. The power these summer people have.”

On the drive to this remote peninsula, we had passed estates that were small sovereignties, mansions as ornate as cathedrals, visible only because their twelve-foot hedges were frost-barren.

“A man can’t fight that kind of power. Since Annie died, I’ve visited family in California… Texas, too. Rich people everywhere, but it’s spread out. Not like here, the Hamptons. I saw an iceberg once, fishing in Nova Scotia. It comes into my head when I try to tell people. Peaks lit up like fire at sunrise, but the ocean was dark under the surface, a whole mountain of ice down there, and cold. It’s that kind of power they got. Even when they use it, you don’t see it.”

Sylvester looked at the mansion. “Is someone up there? Besides the caretakers, I mean.”

“A friend of mine.”

He said, “One of the Tomlinsons.” It wasn’t a question.

“My friend didn’t kill your daughter. Even if he’d lied to me, I would know.”

Because I had provided a reason to retreat, I wasn’t surprised when Sylvester used me as a target for self-contempt. “If you’re such a fuckin’ genius about who did what, why is that boy still missing?”

I said, “You’ve got a point. I shouldn’t be standing here wasting time.”

The man said, “Hah! Cops”-I was watching the way he held the gaff-“they sell coffee and doughnuts uptown at the 7-Eleven.”

“Probably my next stop-once you’re gone.”

“Uh-huh, now you’re tellin’ me to leave. I’m fifth-generation Bonnacker. My people killed whales on this beach.”

I said, “Virgil, if I ever hear anything about your daughter, I’ll find a way to get in touch. I’ll let you know, okay?”

The man appeared to sag. I had robbed him of his anger. “You cops, you think you know so much. Let me tell you something about them Tomlinsons. They’re evil. Big brains and dried-up hearts. You know how the old man made his fortune?”

I did, but he didn’t expect an answer.

“It’s blood money. Three generations fed on it. Everything crazy all rolled into one family, that’s the Tomlinsons. I should know. I worked for those sonuvabitches. When one of them murdered my Annie, they gave me a month’s bonus and fired me after they was all safe, gone back to Florida for winter.”