Black Swan (A Sam Acquillo Hamptons Mystery)

by Chris Knopf

  The next two hours of door-to-door activity yielded nothing. Most of the houses were empty, and the people in the others were no help. As I reached various intersections, I chose a route that took me in the direction of Gwyneth Jones' place. When I got there she was in the yard with her bulldog, looking up at the sky.

  "What's your prediction?" I asked.

  "Clear for a day or two, then there's another wingdinger headed this way."

  "Do you see the signs?"

  "No, I hear the marine forecast from those dunderheads at NOAA. But I think this time they're right."

  "How come?" I asked.

  "I see the signs."

  I asked her if she'd seen Axel Fey, describing him as best I could. She regretted telling me no.

  "Tell me more about him," she said. So I did, in detail, not sparing his family's privacy. She listened carefully, then shook her head.

  "I'm thinking runaway, and I'm thinking there're a few dozen houses within easy walking distance that're empty and at least somewhat stocked with things you can eat."

  "That's what I'm thinking," I said. "Axel's no survivalist, so forget the woods. He'd be one to find a comfortable location and hole up. Without a cop on the island, we can hardly search house-to-house."

  "What do you mean, no cop?"

  I told her about Trooper Poole and my efforts to secure a replacement. She looked very unhappy.

  "This doesn't happen here," she said. "No matter how ornery or mental we can get over the winter, the state cop is untouchable. I like that woman. Reminds me of my mother. No nonsense. What happened to your pretty girlfriend?"

  "She had to go. Took the boat over to New London and caught the big ferry home."

  She seemed to ponder that for a moment.

  "Lovely hands for a rough-water sailor," she said.

  "It's all in the gloves."

  I asked her to keep her eyes out for Axel and to tell her friends and neighbors to do the same. I was about to continue on when Hammon's Town Car pulled up behind me. He and 't Hooft both got out.

  "Fey just told us about Axel," said Hammon. "Any luck?"

  He looked genuinely concerned, though I didn't know him well enough to judge how genuine.

  "Not so far. All I know is he headed east after leaving the Swan at about six this morning."

  "Helluva thing. Kooky kid," said Hammon, more exasperated than angry. "We need to call the cops."

  "Cop," I said. "Can't do that now. She's indisposed."

  "Fine time for that," said Hammon. "So what do we do now?"

  "Drive around and look," I said. "I'll go east, you go west. The odds are just as good that he went that way after hitting the first intersection. I'm banging on doors and looking for witnesses, but that's a personal decision. You do what you want."

  Hammon nodded and looked around Gwyneth's front yard, trying to make sense of the buoyant eccentricity.

  "Interesting," he said.

  "Not to the enlightened," she said.

  "Of course," said Hammon, as he and 't Hooft climbed back into the big, black Ford and swooped off down the narrow, light-dappled street.

  "Hoodlums?" she asked.

  "Entrepreneurs," I said. "Close enough."

  (

  I drove around, knocked on doors, refined my presentation till I was bored with it, and got nowhere. When I started hearing from people that two other strangers in a Town Car had already asked the same questions, I gained some confidence that Hammon meant what he portrayed-the legitimate concern of a family friend.

  I soldiered on until dusk, after which it seemed imprudent to further test the xenophobia of the island's residents. As I drove back to the Swan, I was cheered by the sight of lighted windows, however sparsely distributed. The Swan itself was lit up from stem to stern, as if celebrating the return to normalcy. I parked the Mercedes out front next to Hammon's Lincoln. The hood was hot to the touch, so he'd only beaten me home by a few minutes.

  Inside the hotel there was no one to be found until I checked the rear patio, where everyone had assembled. The evening was cool, but after the stormy mess of the last few days, I could understand the impulse to get outside. Strings of white Christmas lights hung above the tables helped the atmosphere, though the main work was done by the floods up under the eaves. A rolling tray had been filled with cold snacks and another held beverages, among which I was delighted to count a bottle of Absolut.

  Expectant faces turned toward me as I walked between the tables, but I quickly shook my head.

  "No dice," I said. "How 'bout you guys?" I asked Hammon.

  "Nothing," he said. "A few people in town reported seeing a teenager or two, but they were likely locals. Tomorrow we need to pass out copies of his photograph."

  Two great minds, same thought.

  "Do you think he's still on the island?" asked Del Rey. "I mean, he could've grabbed a boat and gone ashore."

  "That's certainly true," said Hammon. "As I could have grabbed a rocket and flown to the moon."

  "Axel can't swim," said Fey. "He's afraid of the water.

  "Oh, yeah," said Del Rey. "I forgot that."

  I helped myself to the vodka and sat down next to Hammon. His slight, spidery frame looked ill at ease in repose, as if anything less than soaring flight was inherently unnatural. His long fingers rotated his cocktail glass in quarter turns. He looked over at me with a look both curious and bored.

  "Fey tells us you're an N-Spock aficionado," he said.

  "That's not exactly it," I said. "I used to run an R&D shop that used the application. Back when you were only at 2.5. We liked it."

  "That's nice to hear," he said, though not quite bowled over by the niceness of it all. "How many users in your operation?"

  "About a thousand. More if you count Lucerne and Dubai. I had a woman who kept track of it all. The point for me was what the computers did, not necessarily how they did it."

  "That big," he said. "What was the company?"

  "Con Globe. The late and great. I would have thought the Feys had told you."

  "Oh," he said, his cool poise slightly undone. "They were one of our largest customers. I sold it in myself."

  "I wouldn't know," I said, taking a casual sip of my drink. "I left that sort of thing to procurement."

  His fingers stopped spinning the drink and started tapping on the table.

  "The successor company has yet to sign up for 5.0," he said. "Know anyone there?"

  "Not anymore, but I know a few guys at East End Building Supply. I'll put in a good word."

  "Amusing."

  He went back to looking around the hotel grounds.

  "Any guesses on Axel?" I asked. "You knew the kid when he was growing up."

  "Not really. Del Rey and Sanderfreud took an interest, but I'd rather play golf. If I wanted a pet I'd get a goldfish."

  Del Rey's face tightened up and she got out of her chair and left.

  Charmed as I was by him, when I saw Anika enter the patio I thought I should join her. I excused myself and caught her at the drink trolley. I asked how she was doing.

  "I'm too shook-up to know," she said.

  "Any theories? About Axel?"

  "I'm too shook up for that, too. You might think all the scary excitement would have driven him away, but that's not Axel. The more anxiety he feels, the closer to home he wants to be. I was surprised he hadn't just locked himself up in his room, though with the power out, there wasn't much he could do in there."

  "No computer."

  "Sometimes I wonder if computers made him the way he is. It's all he's known for his whole life. The digital environment is his natural habitat, the only place he's utterly at home."

  A good case could be made for that, once I thought about it. A motherless child with a distant computer genius for a father, socially isolated, slightly agoraphobic, touched by savantism-who could know where cause and effect started and stopped.

  "I still don't own a PC," I said. "Though I've tried out a few. I can see th
e appeal. And the seduction for information junkies."

  "It's more than that," she said. "When you write the code, you don't just process information, you control it, and by extension, the people who use it. You rule over the thinking and behavior of anyone ensnared in your application. You own their minds."

  She said this so calmly, so matter-of-factly, that I almost missed it. She looked up at me, as if suddenly aware that I hadn't.

  "That sounded horrid. Sorry. I'm only trying to explain what it's like to be Axel. Lost in the delusions of computerland."

  The lights that lit the patio from above spread enough to render the docks beyond in a colorless outline of piers and walkways. I could see all the way to where the Carpe Mariana had been docked. The empty space gave me a fearful little jolt. Once again, I excused myself, and walked back out to the street where I could radio Amanda without being overheard.

  This strategy wasn't fully realized, since Del Rey was out on the lawn smoking a cigarette. Her left arm held her midriff and supported her right, and one hip was slightly cocked, locking her in place.

  "Sorry about Derrick," she said when she saw me approach. "He can be a creep sometimes."

  "Sometimes?"

  "I can't think like that if I have to live with him," she said.

  "You don't have to. The world's a big place."

  "I used to believe that. Now the world's shrunk down to peanut-sized. No big career. No youth. No kids, no family."

  She took a deep pull off the cigarette.

  "You made it sound like the Feys were family. It must have been tough when they moved away," I said.

  She brushed her hair with the back of her arm, the cigarette in her hand trailing smoke like a festive ribbon. I breathed it in through my nose.

  "The kids, yeah. Christian's no big treat. Got the sense of humor of a tree stump. And zero parenting skills, which worked out for me, since I got to have so much quality time with Anika and Axel. Like a maiden aunt, though that's okay. Better than nothing."

  "Sounds like you weren't the only one who chipped in."

  "Myron was always eager to look after them, even though he had a daughter of his own. Bought things for them, took them to the park, out to eat, that kind of thing. Grace didn't like it so much, so a lot of the looking-after happened at the office. Or on his boat. He kept a little day sailer on a lake nearby. Anika loved it, but Axel stayed with me on those days. Afraid of the water. Myron was such a good man. I can't understand why he'd want to kill himself."

  "You think that, too?" I asked. "I don't get it."

  She leaned in toward me so I'd hear her lowered voice.

  "Things aren't so peachy keen at Subversive these days. It weighed on him really bad. All he'd done was green light 5.0, but when things started going haywire, he took it all so personal. He kept it all bottled up inside and put on a good front. But I knew, because he talked to me."

  "Having the kids move away must have been hard on him, too."

  She shook her head, impatiently, then dropped the exhausted cigarette on the ground and toed it to extinction.

  "Right about the time Anika hit puberty she totally rejected poor Myron, and for some reason, got attached to me. You know how teenaged girls get. She went from talking to Myron every day to ignoring him completely. I don't think she even saw him again until he showed up here. Axel had to go along, too. I asked him, 'What's up with Anika and Myron?' But he didn't know."

  "And he didn't have a say?" I asked.

  She responded with thinly veiled ridicule.

  "Axel doesn't take a pee-pee without Anika's permission."

  "Headstrong girl," I said.

  "Worse than that," she said, then seemed to regret it. "Don't get me wrong," she said, touching me on the arm to make sure I was listening carefully. "I love her, like a daughter. Which she's been to me."

  "I've got a daughter of my own, so no reason to explain," I said.

  "Good," she said. "So you understand."

  With that she left me and went back to her peanut-sized world, a swirl of mystified disappointment following in her wake. I watched until she disappeared into the shadows and pulled out the VHF.

  "Hello," said Amanda, returning my hail. "Nice to hear your voice. Scratchy and garbled though it may be."

  "So you made it."

  "It's a lot choppier in West Harbor than it looks from back there. But yes, we made it fine. Cute little spot. No lights anywhere around. And now that the wind's down, the water's like glass. I pulled the shades and just have one little lantern going. Eddie and I swam to shore. The water's actually quite warm. He found a tennis ball. We brought it back to the boat. He's so proud."

  I told her about meeting Professor Featherstone and my fruitless canvas of the west end of Fishers Island. She asked me what I asked Anika-any theories on Axel?

  "It's pretty sure he left on his own, which is contrary to his normal behavior. He's a house cat, but a very smart one. Other than that, there's too much I don't know."

  I gave her a rundown on the status of Subversive Technologies and the status of N-Spock 5.0. Amanda was a patient woman, never more evident than in the way she listened to me when I'd launch into an intricate tale of technological imbroglio. Mindful of that, I trimmed the story to its essence.

  "I have no idea what you're talking about, but it sounds problematic," she said.

  "It is," I said, then asked if everything was okay on the boat. She mentioned a few things, which I talked her through, adding some additional advice and gentle cautions. She complimented my attention to operational detail and asked me if I'd be returning to the boat, or should she be researching funeral options. And if there was a will.

  "Whatever it takes for Eddie to live out his life on Oak Point. The rest goes to my daughter."

  "You're not kidding, are you."

  "I never kid a kidder."

  After signing off with Amanda, I spent a while walking around the hotel grounds and the Harbor Yacht Club next door. The moon was big in the sky, turning everything colorless and cool. I had to arbitrate between competing impulses. Part of me, the more insistent part, wanted to get in the dinghy and ride out to Amanda, board the sturdy sloop, greet the gregarious mutt and sail back to the South Fork. I could see them anchored in the lagoon, motionless, the stars reflected on the surface of the black water. Nocturnal chirps and chatters on shore, the occasional flip of an insect-hunting fish.

  I had no stake in this fight. There was nothing in it for me. I didn't know what was really roiling below the surface, but for sure it wasn't any good. I had no reason to care, no percentage in trying to care, no upside whatsoever. I was on the cusp of getting my own unruly life somewhat under control. There were blessings there I couldn't deny, but they were on loan, with permanent status contingent on responsible possession.

  I brooded over what Amanda had said about Anika. I'd never put much of a premium on being honest with myself, preferring to let avoidance and denial work their soothing charms. But standing there in the chill October night, I let the walls fall and asked the hard question.

  The answer was more felt than heard.

  "Dammit," I said out loud, and wishing I had a cigarette, walked back to the Swan to try and get some sleep.

  Somewhere around four in the morning, Anika crawled into my bed. As my dream-addled mind swam through the muck toward consciousness, my body contended with the shock of softly silken female nakedness.

  "Goddamnit, Anika, would you knock it off," I mumbled, turning away from her. She put her arm over my shoulder and squeezed into me, spoon-style.

  "You're right about marooning myself on an island. I'm so horny my eyeballs are starting to float out of my head."

  "I'm not the solution."

  "I don't understand why not," she said. "I don't care how old you are."

  "I don't care how old I am, either. You don't know this yet, but people can decide that the person they're with is the person they're with and that's that."

  "You'r
e right," she said. "I don't understand that."

  She pressed herself into me and worked her hand in a southerly direction. I caught her wrist.

  "So go put some clothes on and come back and I'll explain it to you, as long as you stay on top of the sheets."

  "No one will know," she whispered.

  "I will."

  "You're in great shape," she said. "I knew it." She moved her hand within the range permitted by my grip. "I know you want it."

  Part of me did, including the part Anika was trying to reach for. I squeezed her wrist.

  "I do," I said. "But I'm not gonna."

  She shoved herself even closer, got close enough to my ear to nibble on it before saying, "Not yet."

  Then she got out of the bed and left the room.

  She was gone longer than it took to get dressed, though there was no danger of going back to sleep before she showed up again, wearing white panties and an oversized sweatshirt with CARNEGIE MELLON INSTITUTE OF GIZMOLOGY written on the chest.

  "Tell me why you got fired from your big-shot job," she said. "And why you never tried to get another big-shot job. Corporate politics, I bet."

  I waited for her to get settled on top of the bed before answering.

  "Politics is too weak a word. For some people, the purpose of an organization is to provide an environment within which to wage internecine combat. Whatever product or service the firm sells is secondary to the goal of personal enrichment at the expense of one's fellow human beings. It's not enough to succeed. Someone else has to fail in the process."

  "God, that's cynical," she said.

  "You asked."

  "I just can't stand it."

  "Why'd your father leave Subversive Technologies?" I asked.

  "Nosy again."

  "You teed it up."

  I sat up in bed and used the pillows to support my back. Anika sat cross-legged at the foot of the bed, her hair, unbrushed, hanging to either side of her face. A faint glow appeared outside the window, calling an end to the night and any hope of further sleep.