Hank spoke up, lounging back in his chair. “Jed and I figured we’d leave Renner, Vaden and Guthrie together in your mother’s pantry for the time being.”
“While we sort out the story we’re going to give Kelso,” Jed added by way of explanation. “Sit down, honey, this is going to take a while.”
Amy sat and took a fortifying sip of her wine. Her eyes were on Hank. “Tell me what happened all those years ago, Hank. I have to know. I’ve got too many bits and pieces of the puzzle. If I don’t find out the truth, I’ll go crazy.”
“That’s the problem with her kind of imagination,” Jed put in as an aside.
Hank nodded understandingly. “I don’t see why I can’t tell you the whole thing. It’s true, the government slapped a top secret clearance on the Orleana Project as they called it, but that was twenty-five years ago, and what are a few government secrets between friends? The main reason the subject’s never been discussed much is because your dad didn’t want it talked about. It was his wishes I respected, not the government’s. But since you already seem to know a lot, you’d better know it all.”
“Tell me about my father and Michael Wyman.”
“They were friends and partners, Amy,” Hank said gently, “until they started getting successful. Wyman couldn’t handle the fact that it was your father’s business sense that was making them rich. He couldn’t stand to share the glory. He wanted, no, he needed to be the star attraction. He was like an artist who demanded full credit for the completed painting, if you know what I mean. He started drinking. Started spending pretty wildly. Took more chances in the sports he favored.”
“What did my father do?”
Hank shrugged. “Tried to weather the storm, I guess. But I don’t think he ever realized just how wild and dangerous Wyman really was. Or how much Wyman came to hate your father. Then one day the government agents showed up on your father’s doorstep. They told him they suspected Wyman was in the process of making a deal with the Russians. There was money involved. A lot of it, they told Doug. It seems they had an agent working for them on the inside. He told them Wyman was to be paid in emeralds and that the plans for the new aircraft wing design were to be exchanged for the stones in Hawaii. The government wanted your father’s cooperation in case they screwed up the bust. They wanted Doug to make sure the wing design plans were altered, just in case. Doug agreed to do that much, but he wanted no part of trapping Wyman.”
“Did he believe Michael Wyman was really setting up the deal?” Jed asked.
Hank shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. He didn’t want to believe it. But I guess the government men showed him photographs of Wyman having secret meetings with a man the agents identified as a Russian spy. Doug flew to Hawaii about the time the transaction was supposed to take place. I think he wanted to see for himself if Wyman really showed up to go through with the deal. But the government men fouled up the arrest. They moved in too late. Oh, they managed to get the Russian at the airport, but they missed Wyman. To tell you the truth, I think Doug was secretly glad Wyman escaped. After the bust fell through, Doug decided that as long as he was as far as Hawaii, he’d fly on to Orleana to check up on the house.”
“He got here and found Wyman waiting for him, right?” Jed asked.
Hank nodded. “Right.” He looked steadily at Amy. “Wyman was desperate, Amy. He knew the agents were hot on his trail. He had the emeralds but they weren’t any good to him until he could get them sold. But he was afraid to emerge from hiding long enough to risk trying to sell them. He needed help and he turned to his old friend.”
“My father.”
“Doug said he couldn’t help him, that he’d be better off surrendering. Wyman turned nasty. He threatened to blackmail your Dad. I’m not sure what he used and I never asked. But it must have been something pretty foul. Your Dad drew the line at that. He’d put up with a lot from his old partner but he wouldn’t let Wyman blackmail him. There was a struggle out there by the caves. Wyman had brought a gun along. It went off during the fight and Wyman died. I never understood why Wyman and Doug were at the caves when the fight occurred. Your dad said Wyman had dragged him out there but the struggle took place and Wyman got killed before Doug found out why Wyman took him there. We always assumed he’d been planning to kill Doug if he didn’t cooperate. Maybe Wyman thought he could make the death look like a diving accident.” Hank broke off to glance at the metal box on a nearby table. “Now I can guess why Wyman headed for the caves with Doug. He’d already hidden the box and probably intended to show Slater just what sort of blackmail material he had.”
“But things never got that far,” Jed concluded. “Wyman died before he told anyone about the box in the caves.”
“He must have told someone,” Amy pointed out. “Because Renner knew about it.”
“True.” Jed was thoughtful for a moment. “Maybe the girlfriend. What was her name? Vivien?”
“Vivien,” Hank mused. “I remember her, I think. Sexy little blonde Wyman brought to the island once. Yeah, that was her. Vivien. I don’t think I ever heard her last name.”
“Finish the story, Hank.” Jed cradled his glass between his palms and stretched his feet out in front of him.
“Not much more to tell. The night Wyman died, Doug came to me and told me what had happened. We decided to contact the agents who were supposed to have handled the Hawaiian setup. There weren’t many private phones on Orleana in those days. I had one of the few on the island. Doug called the number he’d been given by one of the agents who originally asked for his cooperation. The government men gave instructions that we were to sit tight and not say a word until they arrived.”
“That must have been a little easier said than done,” Jed observed wryly. “What the hell did you do with Wyman’s body? I can imagine how unpleasant things would have gotten in this heat and humidity.”
Amy winced, thinking about it. “How awful. What did you do?”
Hank took a sip of his Scotch. “Packed it in ice from your mother’s freezer. Christ, what a night that was. Fortunately the government men arrived early the next morning. They told your dad they wanted the whole thing hushed up completely. It would be better, they said, if Wyman just disappeared. Your father agreed.”
“Because he didn’t want the press getting hold of the story,” Amy said with sudden insight. “Not only would it have been bad for the firm, which was going to have a tough enough time surviving as it was, but he probably feared that whatever Wyman was using to blackmail him might come out into the open.” She remembered the letters from her mother that were in the box. And the photos. Which of those two damning bits of evidence had Wyman used? Amy had a hunch it must have been the letters. She didn’t want Hank knowing about them. “Once the reporters started investigating, there was no telling what kind of scandal might have developed.”
“Exactly,” Jed put in blandly. “The simplest thing to do was have Wyman disappear under normal circumstances.
Lost at sea. But dumping a body at sea is always a risk. Bodies sometimes wash ashore, and in this case there would be the bullet hole to explain. If Wyman’s body ever surfaced that would be the end of the lost at sea story. So Slater took the body down into the caves.”
“Right. And I took care of the boat,” Hank admitted. He looked at Amy. “Your dad figured he could keep people out of the caves for as long as it mattered. After all, he owned them. The government agents hushed up the whole thing, swore Doug and me to secrecy and left the island.”
“What about the emeralds?” Amy asked.
“Nobody was too worried about them,” Hank assured her.
“Why not? They were worth a fortune.”
“Not unless the price of green glass has skyrocketed in the past twenty-five years,” Hank said with a small grin.
“Glass!”
Hank nodded. “Afraid so. Remember I told you the government had an inside man working on the deal?”
“Yes?” Amy prompted.
/> “Well, he told his contacts that the Russians had been planning to cheat Wyman all along and had the glass cut into classic emerald shapes. Wyman left Hawaii with six perfectly cut pieces of green glass. Even if the agents had known he’d hidden them in that box, I doubt they would have bothered trying to find them.”
“I think it’s time we took a look in that box,” Jed announced. He rose lithely from the chair and headed for the table before Amy could think of any logical excuse not to open the box.
“Jed,” she tried, thinking of the letters, “I don’t think we should open it. Let’s just throw it away and be done with it.”
“Remember what I told you, honey. No loose ends.” He examined the locked box. “Where’s the key Renner had on him?”
Amy got to her feet, accepting the inevitable. “I’ll get it.”
Ten minutes later Jed raised the metal lid. Amy glanced around his arm, trying to see inside. Hank hadn’t moved from his chair across the room. He was placidly sipping his Scotch, watching them.
The letters were still tightly sealed in the waterproof pouch. Jed didn’t lift them out of the box. But he did pull out the packet of stones and the photos. Amy watched anxiously as he fanned the photos out on the table. Her father as he’d looked years ago was as recognizable as he had been back in October when she’d first opened the box.
“Jed, please,” Amy begged in a tight voice. “We’ve got to destroy these.”
Jed scooped them up and studied them. “There’s no need to worry about these, Amy. They’re fakes. Bad ones at that. Wyman must have been in a hurry when he made them. Look, you can still see the lines where he tried to put them together.”
She stared at them. “Wyman doctored these photos of my father talking to that man?”
“And did such a bad job of it, most people wouldn’t be fooled for a minute.”
“Unless,” Amy suggested weakly, recalling her hurried examination of them in October, “someone was viewing them in the middle of the night with only a flashlight.”
Jed glanced down at her as he tossed the photos to Hank. “Under such bad light, I guess they might look real,” he said gently. “Especially if someone had other things on her mind at the time.” He closed the lid of the box, leaving the packet of letters still inside. “What do you think, Hank?”
Hank was examining the photos. “You’re right. They’re bad. But this explains what Wyman tried to use to blackmail Doug.” He shook his head again. “So what the hell are we going to tell Kelso?”
“I think,” Jed said thoughtfully, “that since the government created this mess, we ought to let those nice folks in Washington, D.C. clean it up. I’ll call my boss, Cutter.”
Hank looked confused. “Cutter? Your boss? But I thought Amy made up that story about you working for someone named Cutter.”
Jed grinned. “Truth,” he declared, “is sometimes a lot simpler and more straightforward than fiction.” He reached for the phone.
Chapter 19
A couple of hours after Renner, Vaden and Guthrie had been delivered to the tiny cell that served as Orleana’s jail, Amy sat down in front of the metal box, reached inside and pulled out her mother’s letters.
Hank Halliday had gone home to Rosie to be severely scolded by her for his unexpected disappearance. Kelso and any other interested townspeople who bothered to inquire were given the story Cutter had advised Jed to use. Renner, Vaden and Guthrie were three off-islanders who had gotten together to rob the Slaters’ home. Several locals shook their heads and declared gloomily that the incident was one of the many problems Orleana was going to face as the island became more popular. The price of being discovered, as it were. Things had been different in the past.
“I’m not so sure just how different they were,” Amy said quietly as she sat looking at the small pile of envelopes in her hand. “There seems to have been plenty going on here twenty-five years ago.”
Jed watched as she tapped the envelopes against the table. He was sitting in a chair near an open window, making no effort to view the contents of Gloria Slater’s letters to Michael Wyman. “What are you going to do with those, Amy?”
“Burn them. I should have done it that night in October, but I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
Jed shrugged. “I’m not so sure about that. You had to work fast that night and not leave any evidence of what had really happened. A fire, even a small one, might have raised some awkward questions if it had been discovered. Where would you have built it? In your dad’s barbeque grill? I can just see your father finding charred remains of envelopes in the grill the next time he lit the coals. No, on the whole, you probably did the best thing by hiding the box in the caves again.”
“But the best thing wasn’t good enough. It left loose ends.”
“Sometimes that’s the case,” Jed said gently.
Amy rose from the chair. “Let’s go build a fire.”
Jed didn’t argue. He got to his feet and followed her out onto the veranda where he started a small blaze in the pit of the barbeque. When he had it going he stood back and waited for Amy to toss the letters into the flames.
She did so, burning the letters steadily until only one remained in her hand. She hesitated, clutching the final letter to Michael Wyman. “I only read one of the letters that night, Jed. Just enough to know for certain my mother had written them and that she thought she had fallen in love with Wyman. I have no right to read any of the rest, but I wonder about this last one…”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because it’s so short. Only a single page.” She held up the envelope. “Do you think it might have been a good-bye letter to Wyman?”
“You’re hoping she broke off the relationship of her own accord? Amy, I know she’s your mother, but she’s human. Don’t get your hopes up.”
“There’s something different about this letter. I can feel it.”
“Don’t ask me for permission to read it, Amy. It’s not my business,” Jed said.
Amy set her teeth and pulled the single page out of the envelope. She had to know. She had gone through so much for the sake of these damn letters, she had to know the truth about this last one. She scanned the single paragraph and grateful relief washed over her.
Jed watched her changing expression and smiled faintly. “Good news, I take it?”
Amy nodded vigorously, stuffing the last letter back into its envelope and tossing it into the fire. “I had a hunch it would be. My mother is a strong woman. I knew that in the end she would have done the right thing. She told Wyman she’d been a silly, discontented idiot. She said that even though she was having problems with Doug, deep down she loved him and would never leave him or the children. She asked Wyman to understand and forget her foolishness. It wouldn’t happen again.”
“Feel better knowing that?”
“Much. I’m not sure why, but I do. It’s nice to know she didn’t intend to run off with him. He was such a bastard. I wonder if my father ever knew?”
“About his wife’s temporary aberration? Probably.” Jed poked the coals, making sure the last of the letters went up in smoke. “I’d sure as hell know if you were falling for someone else.”
Amy blinked in amazement. “You would? How?”
“I don’t know how exactly. I’d just know. We’ve gotten too close to each other, Amy. Secrets like that would be impossible to keep for long.”
Amy was afraid to comment on that. Did Jed realize just what he was saying? she wondered. What he was admitting? Probably not. Some psychologists said men seldom analyzed their own emotions or reactions the way women did; men were inclined to accept their feelings, even act on them, but not dissect them.
Amy coughed delicately. “Do you think Wyman used the doctored photos or the letters that night to try to blackmail my father?”
“My guess is he used both. He probably wasn’t sure if the letters would work. There was always the chance Slater would simply dump his wife and say the hell with
her. Wyman had the photos as double insurance. A man might walk away from a woman, he’d figure, but he wouldn’t walk away from his career.”
Jed went on, as if he hadn’t heard her dismay. “But Wyman was judging Slater by his own standards. Your father was different. I’ve had to make a lot of snap judgments about what motivates people under pressure in the last eight years, Amy. I’ve got a fairly good track record.”
“How do you know you’ve got a good record?” Amy couldn’t resist the question.
“Because I’m still alive.”
Amy swallowed at the unarguable truth of that statement. It said so much about the kind of life he led. “I see. So what do you deduce about how my father might have acted under the pressure of blackmail?”
“Do you really want to know?”
Amy hesitated and then said in a small rush, “Yes, I really want to know.”
Jed put down the barbeque tool he had been using to stir the flames. “He would have told Wyman to go to hell and find his own way off the island if Wyman had threatened him with the photos. But if Wyman used the letters, your dad would have been furious. He would have done whatever was required to stop Wyman.”
“And that’s what the struggle was about that night?”
Jed looked down into the last of the flames. “I imagine so.”
“You seem very sure of your reconstruction of the scene,” Amy said a bit tartly.
Jed glanced up, his eyes gleaming in the faint light that shone through the windows of the house. “Maybe I’m sure of it because I know that’s what I would have done under the same circumstances. I wouldn’t have let any man walk away with letters like those if the letters had been written by you, Amy.”
He didn’t have to spell it out, Amy thought. She got the point. Without a word she moved into the circle of his arm and together they watched the fire die.
“I’ll empty the ashes tomorrow,” Jed told her. “There won’t be anything left in the barbeque pit when your father gets home.”
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