A Man Overboard (7 page)

“She was still drunk?”

He nodded.

“Why did she need the internet at that particular time?”

“She said she wanted to see how Joseph was doing, said her cell wasn’t getting a signal.”

“Joseph is your son?”

“Yeah. He was staying here with my mother-in-law.” He shook his head. “As soon as she left, she got a text message. Figures.”

Johnson began working the inside of his lip. “And was that the last time you saw her?”

“No. She came back.”

“You said you were asleep? How do you know—”

“She woke me up.”

“For…”

“Yeah.” If the admission of passionate copulating made Johnson uncomfortable, he didn’t show it.

“And what condition were you in at this point?”

“I was pretty out of it, I guess. It was dark, I was still drunk, and I’d just been woken out of a deep sleep.”

A pause. Then Johnson asked, “Are you sure it was your wife?”

His brow pinching, Jack looked at the man. “Of course I’m sure it was my wife.” But he had to revisit the few images he could still bring up in his mind’s eye to make sure. Yeah, it was her. “Why?” He couldn’t pinpoint the true source of the questions.

“I don’t know if I can help you or not, Mr. Green. But if there’s any chance at all, I need to establish as many facts as I can. I don’t know you. I don’t know your wife. So the way I see it, the possibilities are limitless. I’m trying to eliminate certain scenarios just as much as I’m trying to establish others. Okay?”

Jack nodded.

“Okay, and then what?”

“Then we fell asleep.”

“Your wife was right beside you?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, go on.” He adjusted his tie.

He’d been so distressed over Stacey’s disappearance that he hadn’t really revisited the actual assault in any great detail. Doing so now sent a series of chills down his back. “Next thing I know, someone is sitting on my chest. I thought it was Stacey again, and I was starting to get annoyed now. Then I noticed the hand covering my mouth had a glove on it, and by the time I realized it wasn’t Stacey, I was being carried out of the room by three men.”

“You saw them?”

“The moon was full and shining directly into our room. They were wearing masks.”

“Did you see your wife at any point during this?”

Jack wagged his head. “No, she wasn’t in the bedroom with them.”

“How big was the suite, could she have been in another room?”

“I guess so.” He stood up. “Excuse me for a second.” He left the room, closing himself in the hallway bathroom. Sitting on the toilet, he tried desperately to get a handle on himself. He could feel stuff unwinding and knew he was about to fall apart again. In one sense, talking about it was like relaying scenes from a movie he’d seen…an outlandish story comprised of fictional characters. Not
his
wife. And yet, on the other hand, talking about it was reintroducing the terror that had gripped his heart as he was falling overboard and screaming her name. Real and unreal, reality and dream, the two playing tug of war with his mind.

A knock on the bathroom door startled him, and he wiped his eyes.

“You okay, Mr. Green?” the agent asked.

Sniffling, Jack muttered, “Sure.” He leaned over the sink and splashed some water in his face.

“The people in the masks, they threw you overboard?” Johnson asked from the other side of the door.

Jack wiped his face off with a towel. “Yeah.”

“It’s a miracle you survived.”

Jack wasn’t sure if he’d just imagined a hint of skepticism in the agent’s voice or not. When he opened the door, he answered, “Maybe.”

“What do you mean?”

“Depends on how this all plays out, I guess.”

Of course it was the bitterness talking, the unfairness of having a loved one snatched away with no rhyme or reason as to why. But Johnson wasn’t about to psychoanalyze him, so he moved on to his next question. “Tell me about the note.”

Jack walked back into the kitchen. “Security found a suicide note in our room. It looked like Stacey’s writing.”

“You think they forced her to write it?”

“Of course.”

Johnson walked around the perimeter of the kitchen, silent.

“What?” Jack asked.

“Doesn’t make sense.”

“What doesn’t?”

“That it was random.”

Jack lowered his head, his hand pausing on the refrigerator handle. “I was thinking mistaken identity.”

Johnson nodded his shaved head. “A hit meant for another couple in another room. Could be.” He paused again. “Do you have the note?”

He opened the fridge and grabbed a beer. “Yeah. Security didn’t even notice that I took it, and the police in Nassau never even asked to see it. You guys should really do something about that, the whole cruise thing, I mean. It’s pathetic.” Leaving the kitchen, he headed back up the steps. “I’ll get it.”

When he returned, he found Agent Johnson scrutinizing the framed photos that were lined up across the shelves of the entertainment center. “Here,” he said, making his presence known.

Johnson turned and took the letter from him, taking a few seconds to read it over. When he finished, he looked up. “She had cancer?”

“Yeah, we’d just found out. That’s why we were on the cruise, to get away for a couple weeks before…” He trailed off, focusing on one of their wedding photos. It seemed like a hundred years ago, yet the first day of their cruise had bridged the gap like only a time machine from some future world could. He tried not to imagine what the rest of the trip would have been like.

“Anyone else know that she had cancer?”

“Just her mother.”

“That’s it?”

“She didn’t want to go through chemo. She was planning on pursuing other treatments and didn’t want everyone’s two cents about it.”

He frowned. “Kind of odd that she would want to make the note seem more authentic than she had to.”

Jack’s mouth was already open in response, but it ultimately fell shut without anything to say.
Why the hell
would
she mention the cancer?
The men wouldn’t have known about it so why make the note that much more convincing by revealing an unknown truth? And why would the men who had gone through the trouble of planning the thing even leave their cover story up to
her
imagination? None of it made sense. “Maybe she knew she was about to die, and this was her way of saying goodbye…” But it didn’t seem like something Stacey would do, though he’d never witnessed her in such a situation before.

“You think these men came into your suite, took your wife out of the bedroom, and then came back for you?”

The agent was right. There’s no way that Stacey would have sat there next to the bed he was sleeping in while constructing a carefully concocted suicide note for three intruders who were going to kill her anyway. She would have screamed. Would have fought. No, if they threw her overboard, it had to have been after they tossed him, not before.

Johnson asked, “Do you have her cell phone? I’d like to see that text message she got.”

“No. I don’t know where it is. I was just looking for it myself, hoping her mother left a message letting her know where she took Joseph.”

“You don’t know where your son is?”

Jack raised his arms, defenseless against the question. “We weren’t supposed to be back for another ten days. The neighbor saw them loading up her car with luggage the other day… I can’t get a hold of them on the phone. I guess I’ll drive over to her house after you leave. Maybe she just took him there.”

Walking back to the mantle, Johnson touched the wedding photo Jack had been staring at. “How long have you been married?”

“Five years.”

“How long did you know each other beforehand?”

“Not long at all, actually.”

“What’s your mother-in-law’s name?” He left the picture.

“Viktoriya Arsov.”

“Russian.”

“Yeah.”

The agent looked out the window. “She been here long?”

“In the northeast? As long as I’ve known her.”

“Which hasn’t been that long.”

Jack was confused by this sudden string of questions. “I don’t understand how that’s relevant.”

“Like I said, at this point I have no idea what is and isn’t relevant. Do you mind if I pull your phone records, to see where that text came from?”

“No, I guess not.”

“Email?”

The Jerry in him was starting to tingle. Glancing at his books, he tried smiling. “Don’t you think you’re monitoring them already?”

“I doubt you made the cut,” he quipped. “Go check your mother-in-law’s house. In the meantime, I’ll see if I can get the security tapes from the ship before they erase them.”

“Thanks. I appreciate your help. I didn’t know where else to go.”

Johnson nodded his head toward the books, and Jack figured he’d had his eye on the one about the FBI setting up the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. But that was something that had been reported by the
New York Times
and Dan Rather and was a matter of public record now that the transcripts between Emad Salem and his FBI handlers were out of the bag. “Guess we’re not all that bad after all,” Johnson said.

Jack forced a humble smile. “No, not all of you.” He walked him to the door.

Before stepping outside, Johnson looked him in the eyes. “Listen,” he said. “I may be way out of line by saying this, but I think I’d want to hear it if I were in your shoes.”

“What?”

“From everything you just told me, there is no actual evidence to suggest that your wife is dead.”

That stunned him. “They searched the whole ship…”

“Security and the Nassau police? Doubt it.”

Unbelief and a flare of hope flickered in Jack’s chest.

Recognizing it, Johnson held up his hand. “Don’t go jumping for joy. I just don’t want to see you do anything stupid. Also, you should be careful what you tell your son. Give me some time before you write her off, okay?” He handed him his business card. “You don’t know anything yet.”

All Jack could do was nod and accept the information.

After the FBI pulled away from his house, Jack closed the door and leaned his back against it. Sliding to a sitting position, he hugged his knees to his chest. He wept there for fifteen minutes, the arctic terrain inside melting away and returning to an emotional jungle full of life and pain. When he finally wiped the last tear from his eye, he got up and headed out the door. He was pretty certain that he wouldn’t find Viktoriya or Joseph at her house, but he didn’t know where else to look.

He made sure to lock the door behind him.

12

The sun was nowhere to be seen, and only the faint afterglow of twilight was left to illuminate the skies over Viktoriya’s home some twenty-five minutes away. Jack pulled the Sonata into her driveway, the headlights reaching out in front of the car and sweeping over the small house before settling on the white garage doors at the top of the asphalt stretch. He turned the ignition off and got out of the car, studying the property for a few seconds. Nothing seemed out of place, but as he walked to the front, he knew that the house was entirely too dark for anyone awake to be there. He rang the doorbell.

No answer.

He skirted around the house, careful to avoid short rows of bushes and flowers before coming to the green chain-link fence separating the front yard from the back. Flipping the latch, he quickly went to the patio and tried the back door.
Figures she locks her own door
. He didn’t know of any hidden key kept under a gnome or a doormat and looking around, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. The patio was clear, not a single thing on it capable of hiding a key. He wondered when she’d gotten rid of the outdoor furniture and the plastic flamingos. But peering through the window, not entirely unaware of how his behavior might appear to watching neighbors, he was confronted by yet another mystery.

What in the…

The living room was empty. And not empty as in no one was in it, but empty like…
empty
.

Throwing aside all reservation, he kicked the glass window above the doorknob, cracking the pane into big diagonal pieces that shattered when they hit the patio. There was nothing more recognizable than the sound of breaking glass, whether a bottle, a window, or a windshield, and any neighbor that heard the noise would ID it for sure. But he was beyond caring. Though an encounter with the police and the time it would take to explain things wouldn’t help his mood any.

Reaching through the broken glass, he unlocked the door from the other side. When he pulled the door open, more pieces of glass fell out of the window frame and exploded at his feet. A dog barked a few houses down.

“Viktoriya? Joseph?” he called out, stepping into the kitchen. It was completely empty, the cabinets all open and displaying nothing but vacant shelves. The humming of the refrigerator was the only indication of…
anything
. The stove wasn’t plugged in, its digital clock blank. There were no other clocks, calendars, pictures, or measuring cups on the wall, no droplets of water trickling lazily from the faucet positioned beneath a now curtainless window. No trashcan, coffee pot, microwave, toaster, paper towels, napkins, hand or dish soap. He opened the freezer. No ice cube trays. She was gone for sure. When the ice cube trays were missing, no one was coming back. But the refrigerator was still running. Why unplug the stove and not the fridge? He knew that it was recommended the appliance be left plugged in up to three weeks even without use, so was she planning on returning? Or maybe unplugging the fridge just hadn’t occurred to her. Or whoever she got to clear the place. It was obvious she hadn’t moved herself out. After all, she was too old to even run.

He went to the sink and ran his finger underneath the faucet, feeling for any trace of water. It was dry. He turned both knobs on full and was rewarded with nothing. The water was shut off.

Walking quickly through the rest of the house, worry finally began to set in. It was hard to avoid thinking that his mother-in-law’s abandoned house was somehow related to the masked men on the cruise ship, if only because both were unexplainable and had touched his life within a few days of each other. It didn’t
feel
like a coincidence, and his failure to make contact with the rest of his family became all the more unsettling.