Fishermen's Court

by Andrew Wolfendon

  “We practically had to beat it out of him,” says Billy, “but he finally told us you never gave him the letters. The story he heard, says him, was that one of his development partners, the one who was in for the biggest wedge of the pie, got wind of the letters. He was afraid some of the other partners might be swayed by a bunch of sob stories, so he paid you off to lose the letters, leave the island, and never come back.”

  “Miles told you this?” I say, ready to blow a brain-valve.

  “We had to drag it out of him, but yeah.” He adds with a sheepish note, “You did disappear from the island, Finn, and you didn’t come back.”

  “I left the island because I broke up with Jeannie and because my mother was dying and needed care. I told people that. Why did you believe him over me?”

  “Guess it was the way he told it, the way we had to wring it out of him, the way he begged us to spare you, not him. I mean, you’d have to be an absolute world-class liar to play that the way he did.”

  “Yes, Billy,” I say. “Yes, you would.”

  I run off.

  . . . . .

  The story Billy just told me is gnawing at my belly like an ulcer, but I have to focus on Jeannie’s safety. I’m trying to decide where to search for her next when a text comes in on my phone. It’s from her!

  The text has obviously been typed in a hurry or under duress. It reads, They haven. Fucking auto-correct. A few seconds later her fix comes through: Have me.

  They have me?

  Blood starts pounding in my ears. I type, Who has you? Where?

  The reply comes flying back: Can’t.

  I assume that means she can’t answer right now, but I try anyway: Jeannie, who has you? Where did they take you? No reply.

  I type, Jeannie? and hit Send again.

  I pace back and forth in the middle of Island Avenue, willing a reply to come in.

  Nothing.

  Something feels wrong to me about Jeannie’s texts, but I can’t put my finger on it. I close my eyes and try to let it come to me. An image pops into my memory. Shit!

  I run the stone’s-throw distance back to Pete’s, fling the door open, and race up to the bar. I look into the back room where I saw Jeannie’s belongings earlier. There it is, sitting in the outside pocket of her bag: her phone in its kelly-green case. She doesn’t have it with her! So how did those texts...?

  I gesture for permission to go behind the bar, and Pete waves me around. I grab the phone out of Jean’s purse. The Messages screen is open. I see our most recent text exchange on it. What?

  “Pete, who’s been back here?” I ask.

  “No one but the ghost of Captain Bradish.” An old bar yarn.

  “You sure?”

  “Oh wait, the Patriots were doing team sprints in there a while ago; I forgot. Hell yeah, I’m sure. I’ve been standing right here. No sign of her yet?”

  “No, I’ll let you know when I find anything.”

  I consider taking Jeannie’s phone with me but slip it back into her purse. I barrel full-speed out of the bar, caroming off L.L.Bean dad as he’s entering, almost knocking him off his feet. He looks at me as if I’m a crazy person. He might be on to something.

  As I’m about to jump into Miles’ cart, I freeze. I realize Pete, and Pete alone, has had access to Jeannie’s phone the whole time the text exchange has been going on. I recall the disheveled state of his office—signs of a struggle? I turn around and march back into the bar.

  My phone pings another text. One word. From “Jeannie”: Help.

  Pete hasn’t budged from his place at the register. Jeannie’s phone hasn’t moved either.

  WTF? How could text messages be issuing from her phone all by themselves?

  Have I mentioned that I’m a giant freaking idiot?

  The answer slams me in the head like a falling air conditioner. I recall the way my own phone has been behaving. Dropping calls in an odd way, feeling warm to the touch when I’m not actively using it, going in and out of service at key moments. I’ve been chalking it all up to the Musqasset cell-phone gods. But now, Jeannie’s phone sending phantom texts?

  How could I have been stupid enough not to think of this?

  I run to Miles’ cart and drive off toward Enzo’s.

  Before approaching his door, I ditch my phone outside in an empty flower pot. If I’m right about what I’m thinking, such precautions have become essential.

  Enzo spots me before I can knock and lets me in. I quickly fill him in on Jeannie’s disappearance and then say, “Remember those spy programs you were telling me about? Is there any way to tell if someone has planted one on your phone?”

  “Has your phone been acting funny?”

  I reply that it has and tell him the myriad ways. “I thought it was just Musqasset cell service in a storm.”

  “You have an Apple, right?” he asks. I nod. “Like I told you earlier, someone would need to have access to your physical phone, and they would need to jailbreak it.”

  I don’t know what jailbreaking a phone means, but I nod as if I have an embryonic clue.

  “Has your phone been out of your physical possession?” he asks.

  “It has.” It was sitting in my parents’ house the whole time I was in the hospital. Someone could have planted the entire digitized Library of Congress on it. I’ve left it in my room a few times on Musqasset too.

  “The only way to know for sure if you’re infected is to dig directly into the phone’s root file system. That’s tricky to do with an iPhone; it doesn’t have the right tools built in. But you don’t want to do that anyway—if you’re really being spied on, you’d tip off your spies that you’re on to them. Remember, they can see everything you do on your phone.”

  “There’s no way to look into the files remotely?”

  Enzo’s eyes twinkle. “Well, look at you, getting all tech savvy. Actually, that’s sort of the only way to do it.” He leads me to his computer wall. “All the files on your phone are probably backed up remotely on the Cloud.”

  Okay, sure. We figure out how to log into my Cloud account from his iMac, and, sure enough, we find the backup of my phone’s files. Using the basic file-search tools available on the computer but not on the phone, Enzo is able to dig into the phone’s file system. He pulls in a breath when he spots a well-hidden file with the seemingly harmless name ASAN20.

  “Holy crap, I’ve read about this one,” he says, duly gobsmacked. “High-level, pro-grade stuff. Illegal as hell. It’s not just spyware, it’s a full phone hijacker. There’s a tiny chip that goes into the phone when you install it. With the hardware/software combo, you can remotely turn the person’s phone on and off, track their location even when the phone’s off, listen in on phone conversations, read their texts and emails, send texts and emails, delete files, track their online activity, even turn the mike and camera on.”

  Translation: someone’s been tracking my every move, my every word—probably since I left the hospital. Manipulating my calls and files too. Like that recording from the ferry that suddenly vanished. I tell Enzo about the “ghost” texts I’m getting from Jeannie’s phone, and he concludes her phone may be infected too.

  “You’re being seriously watched, my friend, by some serious people.”

  Not good news but good to know.

  At this point, my spies don’t know I’ve discovered their spyware, so I may be able to turn that to my advantage. But from now on I will have to monitor everything I say and do. Obviously, I should have been doing that all along.

  “You’ll need a burner,” says Enzo, “in case you have to talk confidentially.” He digs i
n a drawer where he has several old phones. He finds a wiped smartphone, a couple of years out of date, with a new phone number assigned to it. Thank you, Enzo’s paranoia.

  He quickly figures out how to import my Contacts list from the Cloud onto the burner phone so I’ll have all my important numbers, including his, then hands me the burner. “Let me look for a charger for that.”

  “No time.” I’m already out the door.

  “Go find her, man,” Enzo shouts after me. “I’ll do what I can from my end.”

  I retrieve my regular phone from the flower pot outside—no new texts from “Jeannie” yet—and then I’m off in Miles’ speedmobile.

  Chapter 39

  I drive a frantic circuit around Greyhook, asking everyone I know, friend and frenemy alike, if they’ve seen Jeannie. Along the way, I send several texts to fake Jeannie, such as: “Where R U?” “Are U safe? I’m worried!” “Jeannie?” I know she’s not really seeing my texts and that if I do get a response it won’t be from her; it will be from her captors. But still, I have to play dumb. Not a stretch for me.

  I run into The Rusty Anchor. The fishermen stop talking at once and turn to stare at me, but when I shout, “Jeannie’s gone missing!” they jump out of their seats, buzzing with questions, their drinks forgotten. As I’m heading back out, a sign on the wall nails my attention. Printed in huge black lettering, it reads, “Be 21 or Be Gone.”

  My unconscious mind starts sending up flares again. I suddenly realize why my first encounter with the three young beer-buyers has continued to needle me. The eldest of the trio claimed to be twenty-one: the age one would be now if one had been three years old in 1999. From the get-go, Miles and I have been asking, Why would someone wait eighteen years to seek payback? Could the answer be as simple as because he needed to grow up first?

  As I jog toward Miles’ cart, I replay the meeting with the wannabe beer-buyers. The name of the oldest one—the one with the toothy smile—was spoken aloud by his wheeler-dealer friend. What was it? I’m trying to drag the name from memory when a new text comes in from “Jeannie.”

  Instantly I forget about the beer boys. I read the fake Jean text with a critical eye. The first text bubble reads, In cave at robs head; the second, No come 2 dangerous. Then nothing.

  Rob’s Head. I know where that is. Okay, so by telling me, as Jeannie, No come 2 dangerous, her captors are obviously baiting me to come. They know I won’t be able to resist. And, of course, they’re right. They probably have loads of fun surprises in store for me when I arrive. And it’s doubtful Jeannie is even in this “cave”; they just want to lure me there.

  . . . . .

  Rob’s Head is a roundish, protruding cliff face on the north side of the island. I have done my share of exploring there. I know of several small caves where gulls nest but not a cave large enough to hold adult humans. It’s possible such a cave exists, though, and I just never found it.

  Now... if I were possessed of intelligence, which clearly I am not, what I would do at this juncture is throw together a posse of Jeannie’s friends and march en masse to Rob’s Head.

  What I do do is run off half-cocked into the woods, alone, armed only with the fish-skinning knife that’s still strapped to my shin. The trail to Rob’s Head is not accessible by vehicle, so I have to travel by foot. I know I can’t storm the enemy’s lair single-handed—I’m not quite that stupid—but I’m hoping maybe I can get close enough to the cave in question to survey the situation, then call in reinforcements, if necessary, on the burner phone. Wish I still had Danny’s binoculars with me, but I’m not about to go fetch them now.

  I make good time running along the network of trails that leads from Greyhook across the island’s central wilds. By the time I reach the trailhead to Rob’s Head Trail, though, my lungs are stinging. I need to slow down and metabolize some oxygen.

  “Old dudes, so pathetic,” comes a voice to my right. I turn to see Leah stepping out of the woods with a lopsided grin. And lo, what is she holding but a pair of binoculars? The Beans of Maine, it seems, are birdwatchers. Reading my anxiety level, she drops the levity and looks sharply into my eyes. “What’s going on, Finn?”

  For some crazy reason, I trust Leah, though she’s practically a stranger. “Someone I care about very much is in trouble with some very scary people,” I tell her.

  “Would this be the love interest you passed up a roll in the hay with a gorgeous twenty-three-year-old for?”

  “It would.”

  “How can I help?”

  It’s an earnest offer, and I’m in no position to refuse it. “I’m looking for a cave at Rob’s Head, one big enough for people to hide out in.”

  “I think I might know of one,” she replies, and dashes off down Rob’s Head Trail. My breath restored, I run after her.

  Within a few minutes, we’re drawing near the head. Leah stops and points down a twisty, muddy trail that leads around to the cliff-face and the water’s edge.

  “The cave I’m thinking of is down that way. Hope you brought climbing shoes, ‘cause it’s about twenty feet up the—”

  “The people we’re talking about are dangerous, Leah. We can’t just stroll into their hideout holding a three-bean salad.”

  “Oh, right, duh. Hey, I know a place where we might able to scope things out from a distance first, without being seen. It’s out on Crane Neck.”

  Crane Neck is an outcropping of high, rocky land northwest of Rob’s Head that hooks out into the Atlantic like, well, a crane’s neck. Because of the way it curls back on the island, there might indeed be some locations from where we can spy on the face of Rob’s Head.

  “This way.” Leah is off and running again. The old dude keeps up pretty well.

  Five lung-shredding minutes later, we’re at the base of Crane Neck—far enough from Rob’s Head that we shouldn’t be noticeable by Jeannie’s captors. Leah hands me her binoculars.

  To test the lenses, I focus on a boat anchored a few hundred yards offshore. A beast of a luxury yacht. If the yachting set is braving the open ocean again, I muse, the ferry should be running tomorrow. Will I be on it?

  “Come on, Finn.” Leah leads me down a jagged trail that runs along the landward-facing side of Crane Neck. Seeking a good vantage point, she steps up onto a rounded rock and points out a flat area a few yards ahead, a bit lower on the trail, surrounded by bushes. “Try looking from there,” she says.

  As I start to climb down to the lookout spot, a thought slams into my mind, freezing my limbs in place: both Cliff and Jeannie herself have tried to warn me that Jeannie is involved in something that will hurt me. Till now I’ve taken that to mean emotional hurt, but maybe the meaning was more literal. What if there are no “captors” in this scenario? What if Jeannie has not actually been taken at all? What if I’m being played in a more insidious way?

  “Something wrong?” asks Leah.

  “Just thinking about how careful I need to be.” I step down to the flat lookout space Leah has shown me. As I plant my feet and lift the binocs, a cloth sack is pulled over my head.

  Around my neck I feel the same rock-muscled arm that held me in its pipe-like embrace nine days ago and hear the voice of Chokehold say, “Miss me, Finnian?”

  . . . . .

  After a short jaunt across choppy waters in what feels like a skiff, and then a blind ascent up a boat ladder, I feel myself standing on the deck of a seemingly large craft. My hands are bound in front of me with nylon cuffs. Chokehold marches me, roughly, along a carpeted corridor, then down a set of stairs into a lower room. He shoves me onto a padded bench where I land awkwardly, my skull smacking into a wooden wall.

  T-Bone! The name pops into my head unbidden, as if jarred loos
e by the blow. That was the name of the eldest beer-buying kid, the one with the creepy smile. T-Bone, T for short. T as in Theo? As in heir to the Abelsen estate?

  The bag/blindfold is yanked from my head and I see I’m in a sparsely appointed, sunken room with slatted wood walls and a series of portholes. The only furnishings are a couple of bolted-down table-and-chair units and the wall bench I’m sitting on. Still, it’s clear that the vessel I’m on is a luxury yacht, a fairly massive one.

  When I see the trio sitting around the table in front of me, my mind seizes up in incomprehension. The entire L.L.Bean family: Mr., Mrs., and daughter Leah.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Carroll,” says Mrs. Bean with her mouthful of small, even teeth. The tone and cadence are instantly familiar. Trooper Dan. That voice, which was in the high-talker range for a man, and which I thought sounded a tad prissy, is completely normal for a woman, I realize. Strange how I didn’t pick up on that before. The fake beard she must have worn that day at my parent’s house—and yes, her blatant violent cruelty—flipped my brain to assuming, without question, she was a man. I think they call it premature cognitive commitment.

  “Our instructions are to treat you civilly,” she says. “So we will remove the handcuffs... If you can assure us there won’t be any idiocy.”

  I nod. Chokehold, aka Mister Bean, cuts the polymer restraints with a razor tool.

  “Take a moment to get your bearings,” says the missus.

  I look left and right, and it’s only now I see who’s sitting on the bench beside me. Jeannie. Arms folded, wearing an unreadable face.

  It’s true, then? Jeannie in cahoots with these guys?

  My response to this realization, oddly, is a rush of relief; at least her life’s not in danger. Relief evaporates when I notice the animal terror in her eyes. No, she’s not in with them. She’s a captive too, like me. She and I exchange a silent, guarded look. Chit-chat isn’t exactly appropriate, given the circumstances, but I try to project calmness toward her.