The Vanishing Expert

by David Movsesian

  He turned and looked at Ben again, the emotion now wrung from his face. “He’ll be floating in a kayak about fifty yards off the far side of Burnt Porcupine Island just after dark.” James paused, not because he was worried about Ben’s reaction, but because the words seemed to stick in his throat. He locked eyes with Ben as he tried to find his voice, and he saw Ben nod to him. It was just a slow dip of his chin, but he realized that Ben was urging him to continue. Ben Jordan understood what James needed to do, perhaps even before James was certain of it. Something passed between them in that nod of his head that released the words James was struggling with.

  “I’m gonna run him down,” James said grimly. “It’s the only way.”

  Ben nodded again, slowly, and James drew a quick breath as he heard his own words echo back to him. He watched as Ben’s gaze went blank. This time it was Ben that turned and looked out at the rose hedge. The flowers were just beginning to bloom, the morning sun urging them open. He remembered his long-departed Rose, and thought again how desperately he missed her. The two sat in silence for some time until Ben, his eyes still fixed on the roses which had always given him comfort, began to speak.

  “I never told you about my Rose,” he said, his voice catching slightly as he spoke her name. “I’ve told you some, but I never told you how I lost her.” He thought for a moment. “I don’t think I’ve told anyone in some time,” he said.

  James listened silently as Ben recounted the events of that hot July day some forty years earlier when Rose was attacked. He described finding her curled up on the bedroom floor, covered with a light sheet, her eyes vacant, forever fixed on the man who had violated her as if he was always still there in the room with her, coiled to strike again. Her beautiful brown eyes never saw Ben again, not really.

  Ben stood up and walked through the screen door into his house, reappearing a moment later with a bottle of scotch and two glasses. He handed one of the glasses to James and poured the amber liquid into both of them.

  “I’m gonna need this to get through the rest of this story,” he said. “And if there’s a soul on this earth who needs a drink as much as I do right now, it’s you. So drink up.”

  He sat in his chair again, and raised the glass to his lips, pausing to breathe in its aroma before taking a drink. He held that first taste in his mouth for a moment, less to savor it than to gather his thoughts— and his courage— to proceed with his story. He was in no great rush to recount those final months with Rose, the Rose he was left with after someone had stolen the best of her from him. When he spoke, his voice was quieter, more subdued, as if she was in the next room and he was worried she might overhear him speaking ill of her. James had to lean closer and focus his gaze on Ben’s face as he spoke in order to hear every word.

  As Ben spoke, James was so completely drawn into Ben’s misery that he briefly forgot his own troubles. He witnessed the anguish cover Ben’s face like a shadow as he told of those final weeks, and he saw Ben’s eyes glaze over as he recounted walking into the darkened bedroom on that last night. Ben raised his hand and he seemed to helplessly watch his fingers floating there in the space before him as he described reaching for the light switch and then choosing to ignore it. But even as he spoke forty years later of that fateful decision, his hand lingered in the air, hovering near the light switch that only he could see, as if his aged fingers could still somehow alter the outcome— as if he could still save her.

  He drew a long breath and closed his empty hand into a tight fist, returning it to the arm of his chair.

  “In the morning, she was gone.” His lips became taut as he fought to suppress his anger and his anguish, still fresh despite so much time having passed. “I prayed to God every day during those months that He would bring her back to me. I begged Him to just let me touch her and kiss her again. It seemed like such a small thing to ask.” He raised his glass to his lips again, quickly swallowing what remained in it. “She hadn’t let me touch her in so long, and when I finally did, her skin was cold. I kissed her for the first time in months, but her lips were blue and unaware of me.” He stared at the empty glass in his hand. “God’s cruel joke,” he finally added.

  James picked up the bottle of scotch and poured it into Ben’s glass until it was nearly half filled. “I’m sorry, Ben,” James said as he set the bottle between them. “I had no idea.”

  A sailboat gliding slowly out of the harbor caught their attention, and they sat quietly watching it, a brief respite from the violence and the heartbreak of Ben’s tragic story.

  “There’s no way to describe the feeling you get when someone you love takes their own life,” Ben finally said. He took another sip of scotch. “To know that the one person who matters to you most in this world is so hopeless and so desperate that she chooses death over life with you— to know that you couldn’t even make life bearable for her. That’s not something you ever learn to live with.”

  In the time he’d known Ben Jordan, it was the first time he’d opened up to James about Rose, which he knew was a sacred topic. He knew Ben still loved and missed Rose, but he had no idea how much he still suffered.

  “You have to do whatever you need to do to protect the people you love,” Ben said. “You almost never get a second chance.” He looked intently at James. “Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

  “I think so,” James said.

  Ben looked at him gravely. “I don’t think you do. You think I’m telling you why you need to go through with this plan of yours.”

  James looked quizzical. “Aren’t you?”

  Ben shook his head. “I’m trying to explain to you why you need to let me do it.”

  Ben’s offer to drive the boat that night wasn’t entirely selfless. He wanted to help his friend, of course; to help James protect his family, as Ben believed he’d failed to protect his own four decades earlier. He had no way of knowing what good would come of it for James. If there really were two letters on their way to Gloria and the Augusta detective, James might have some slim chance at an alibi, but he was still likely to be exposed as Edward Moody. That would have to play itself out, but there would be no way for Beauchampe or anyone to prove that James had killed Joe Tibbits.

  Ben couldn’t even truthfully say he was doing it entirely for Rose, or for all the women, and all the families, that Joe Tibbits had ruined. Nor was it a simple act of revenge, though revenge was most definitely on his mind.

  In the end, it was all of those things, but above all, it was a chance to purge himself of at least some of the anger and the frustration and the self-doubt and the helplessness and the hopelessness that he’d carried inside him for the last forty years. He hoped that Rose would be looking down upon him as he rid the earth of a man as evil as Joe Tibbits, and she would forgive him for not being there for her when she'd needed him most. When he spoke Rose’s name at that critical moment as he accelerated and pointed the bow of his boat at Joe Tibbits’ flashlight beam, he was hoping to get her attention, just for a moment, and to ask for her forgiveness yet again.

  Joe Tibbits’ last angry cry hadn’t even registered with Ben as being a human sound; it was muffled by the roar of the boat’s engine as it revved higher at that final moment, and then the thud and the crack and the scrape of the heavy wooden hull effortlessly carving through the kayak and its doomed occupant. To Ben, it was all a single violent crescendo that was almost instantly rewarded with a gratifying silence.

  Now, back at his mooring, the scotch and the slow rolling sea beneath him were a soothing contrast to the violence he’d orchestrated an hour earlier. In the distance, he could hear music emanating from one of the other boats. It was an old lilting melody that drifted across the calm water, brushing across his face like a warm breeze. He didn’t immediately recognize the tune; it came to him like a distant memory, emerging slowly as if out of a dream. He closed his eyes, taking it in, and he pictured Rose’s lovely face smiling at him as they danced. She wore her hair u
p, exposing her slender neck, draped with her mother’s favorite pearls. Her smile gleamed as bright as the moon and the stars.

  It was their wedding day, and the two of them moved gracefully about the dance floor, blissful and perfectly joined, the music swirling about them. The smiling faces of their family and friends, sharing the joy of the moment, were a distant blur to him, then and now. He could see only Rose, as perfect a vision as he’d ever known.

  Sitting on the deck of his boat, a tumbler of scotch in his hand, he was certain she’d been watching; he was certain she’d heard him. The music that drifted across the harbor— the song they’d danced to at their wedding— was her response. He felt suddenly lighter, not just from the alcohol— that would take a bit longer to numb him— but from the great weight that was finally lifted from him after forty years.

  He raised his face and looked up into the clear night sky, the stars blurred by his tears. “I love you, Rose,” he said.

  He sat quietly in the darkness, listening to the music and to the water lapping at the side of his boat and it occurred to him that, at long last, he could make his peace with that stubborn sea, which had finally revealed its plan for him. He leaned back and closed his eyes, his mind swimming with alcohol and his newly-discovered bliss, completely unaware of the trace of a smile that graced his face.

  Just before he drifted off to sleep, he imagined that the sounds of the sea were Rose’s soft voice whispering in his ear; that the warm breezes ruffling his thinning hair were really her light breaths as she held him close in their bed. He sighed and then uttered one last sound before he retreated into his delicious dreams of her, his voice nearly inaudible except to the two of them.

  “Goodnight, Rose.”

  32

  The First Letter

  At the last moment of Joe Tibbits life, James Perkins had been sitting at Francisco's, an Italian restaurant at the far end of Cottage Street, with Jean, Peter and Annie. It was a departure from their Sunday evening tradition of dining at home alone, but James had seemed eager to spend the evening in town with their friends. They dined and shared two bottles of wine as his companions laughed and joked and toasted to their good fortune. If James occasionally appeared distant or preoccupied, no one appeared to notice. Even as he sat nursing a beer and attempting to make conversation, his thoughts kept returning to those two letters that were sitting in a mailbox somewhere, waiting to go out with Monday morning’s mail. He could only speculate as to what was in the letters, but knowing that Joe Tibbits was not a man to make idle threats, he had to assume they existed.

  James had thought about spending the entire night searching for the letters that Joe Tibbits had left behind. Once he'd observed Joe Tibbits paddle the kayak around the far side of Bar Island, he looked in the obvious places. He was certain that, out of arrogance, Joe Tibbits would have chosen the mailboxes deliberately, so James tried to imagine those locations that his tormentor would have taken the most delight in disclosing to him. He checked the mailboxes in front of his own house and at the garage. He checked at his old apartment, and the mailbox in front of the house he and Peter were working on. He checked those and about two-dozen other locations, any one of which would have provided Joe Tibbits great pleasure in revealing. By the time he stopped his search to meet Jean at the pub, he'd decided that wherever the letters were, Joe Tibbits had chosen his locations randomly. Assuming that Joe Tibbits’ body would be found in the early morning hours, most likely by some passing fisherman on his way out of the harbor, Ben had convinced him it was best to establish his alibi there in the restaurant with his friends.

  But even as he listened to the cheerful conversation of his companions, he couldn’t help but think that in just a few hours, those two letters would be on their way to Gloria and the Augusta detective, and the life he’d built would come to an end.

  Once again, Kate found herself in the uncomfortable position of having to help her brother keep his secret. It started three years earlier when she reluctantly agreed to play a role in his deception in the first place, venturing out on Narragansett Bay in the midst of a May storm to retrieve him from his boat and deliver him ashore. That alone was more than he ever should have asked of her.

  Then there was her dedication to Tracy when the woman was distraught to the point of suicide. Kate convinced her brother to help Tracy that time, but it was Kate who invested many hours, including many sleepless nights, and a good deal of money in seeing Tracy through those difficult times.

  When her brother wanted to visit their father in his final hours in the hospital, it was Kate who had to arrange to keep Kenny and Gloria distracted when all she really wanted to do was to sit by her father’s side and hold his hand.

  Each time Edward needed something, he called on Kate. And each time he called, Kate dutifully responded. There seemed to be no end to it. And now, here she was again, doing what was asked of her.

  On Wednesday afternoon, Kate stationed herself on Douglas Road, nearly a block from Gloria Kendall’s house, where she sat in her parked car, waiting for the mail truck to appear.

  James had called her on Monday to tell her what had happened— that Joe Tibbits had, in all likelihood, mailed a letter to Gloria informing her that the husband she believed had drown off the Rhode Island coast three years earlier was living out his life under a new name in Southwest Harbor.

  “Why would he do that?” Kate had asked him.

  Her brother told her the story of Joe Tibbits’ brief visit and his attempt to blackmail James into helping him elude the police by taking on a new name and vanishing in much the same way Edward Moody had vanished three years before. The letters, he explained, were Joe’s leverage, but James refused to help him.

  “And you couldn’t talk him out of mailing the letters?” Kate had asked him. “I thought you could talk anybody into doing anything.”

  “I never got the chance,” James told her. “He’s dead.” He described the scene as he knew it to his sister. There was a long silence when he was finished.

  “Oh, Edward, please tell me—”

  “I didn’t do it,” James said, interrupting her. “But please don’t ask me any more questions.”

  Another long silence followed.

  “I need you to do something for me,” James said.

  “So what else is new?”

  James disregarded the remark. “I need you to intercept that letter before Gloria sees it.”

  “And just how the hell am I supposed to do that?” Kate asked.

  It was James who proposed waiting for the mailman to deliver the mail and then plucking it out of the mailbox before Gloria retrieved her mail. Since Gloria should be at work all day, Kate would have all afternoon to retrieve the letter.

  They argued for several minutes, but in the end, Kate relented and, as was her lot in life, she was now sitting in her car waiting for the mailman.

  The mail truck appeared on the street shortly after noon, parking at the far end of the street, the mail carrier making his way from house-to-house on foot. All of the mailboxes were attached to the houses near the front door, so Kate waited for nearly an hour until the mailman had delivered the mail to Gloria’s house and then moved on far enough down the road where she knew he wouldn’t see her. She pulled up in front of Gloria’s house and walked briskly up the brick walk to the front steps. She rang the bell to be certain that Gloria was not home, but it was the middle of the day and as she expected, there was no answer.

  Kate flipped up the lid to the mailbox and removed the stack of mail. There were three pieces of junk mail, and two bills— one from the electric company and another from the phone company— but nothing else. She opened the lid of the mailbox again and was in the act of replacing the envelopes when the front door opened.

  Kate gasped as Gloria Moody appeared in the doorway. She held up an envelope, showing it to Kate through the screen door.

  “Is this what you’re looking for?” Gloria asked. She
regarded the envelope casually, more interested in observing Kate’s reaction to the discovery than she was in the letter itself. Their eyes met and locked, and at that moment, the expression of complete distress on Kate’s face only confirmed what Gloria already knew to be true.

  Edward was alive.

  And Kate had known all along.

  She’d believed that for so long now that it didn’t come as any great revelation to her.

  A few months after Bud Moody passed away, not long after Gloria had driven to Lake Winnipesaukee with Tom Kendall, Tracy had stopped by Gloria’s house to tell her in person that she was leaving. Tracy had decided to leave Rhode Island and move to Florida where a friend had an apartment and a lead on a job for her. It was a fresh start in a new place, something she felt she desperately needed.

  Gloria approved. “It’s a brave thing to leave everything you know behind and start again someplace new,” Gloria said to her at the time. “Edward would be very proud of you, I’m sure.”

  “If he can do it, I guess I can, too,” Tracy said. For the moment, Tracy had forgotten that she was speaking to Gloria and not to Kate. Even so, it was a perfectly innocent remark, and had she been a more proficient liar, she could have easily covered it over. But Tracy was uncomfortable with secrets because she knew they often spilled out of her at the most inopportune moments. Two years earlier, when she first visited James in Bar Harbor, she’d almost exposed Edward’s secret to his friends, the beautiful divorcee and her far too beautiful daughter, both of whom Tracy regarded at the time as rivals for Edward’s affection. Edward had been there to salvage the situation. Now, when she desperately needed him, he was nowhere to be found.