“That’s impossible.”
“You think I’m making it up?”
“No, but—”
“We’re going. Now.” Frank’s voice overrode our conversation.
I waited until Hannah was holding the railing and climbing, then caught up with him on the stairs. “Do you really think we’ll find her?”
“A helicopter’s not that easy to hide. Small craft aren’t required to file a flight plan if the weather’s good and they’re flying under VFR conditions. Visual flight rules. They’re supposed to set their transponders to a certain frequency so they can be tracked on radar, but if they don’t, they don’t . . . Radar doesn’t work below a certain altitude anyway. And helicopters can fly very low.”
“You mean no one can see them?” The stairs tilted under my sandals and I reached for the wooden rail.
“We‘ll find them if they go through Islip’s airspace. Or Republic’s in Melville. Everyone’s been notified.” He sighed and looked back out across the beach. “Everything was set up for a boat. Or if they tried to hide out here, that’s what the device was for. But a copter?” Frank shook his head.
Lack of imagination. Lack of thinking outside the box. And not just on their part either.
We climbed each step slowly, a tired procession. The sun was disappearing for the day and Fire Island was already chilly. Once it was dark it would get very cold. I needed to hurry, but I felt weak as a tissue doll. When I looked back to Hannah, she seemed exhausted too.
When we were nearly to the dock, Ruth Carew said to me, “The police launch will take you back to Patchogue. That’s where your car is, isn’t it?”
“Where are you going?”
“Same place.”
I nodded. She didn’t need to know that I had no intention of climbing in my van and driving home.
As soon as we had boarded the white launch and were settled on the seats inside, I called Colin. When he answered, I handed the phone to Hannah.
“Daddy?” I heard her say. “Yes, it’s really me. I’m with Mom. No, I’m okay. But we can’t find Elisa! She’s in a helicopter but we don’t know where.”
She listened, then said, “No, I’m not coming home with you. Mom—we need to find Elisa!” A pause. “No, I’m fine. We’re with the police. Love you, Dad.” She clicked the phone off and handed it back to me. “He doesn’t get it.”
Hannah was returning to herself.
But my phone rang immediately. “Delhi? You’re coming in at West Street?”
“That’s where my—”
“I know, I’m here. And I’m taking Hannah home.”
“You’re at the dock?”
Colin sighed at my surprise. “Where else would I be? You told me where you were leaving from. I’m looking at your van right now.”
“We’re just crossing the bay. We’ll be there soon.”
I put my phone away. My arm still around Hannah, I said, “Dad’s at the pier. He’ll be hurt if you don’t go home with him.”
“But Mom—”
“We don’t know what’s going to happen, how long it will take. And I don’t want you anywhere near those people again!”
The police launch, smaller than the ferry, skimmed the water so rapidly that some of the time I felt we were airborne. When we had slowed enough to enter the canal, Frank came from the front and hopped down to the benches where we sat.
“Can you tell me what happened?” he asked Hannah.
She nodded. “These men came to my house and kept asking me where Elisa was. Then they said that she was in trouble, that she needed to see me.” A quick, guilty look at me. “I know. How could they know she was in trouble if they were asking me where she was? And I shouldn’t have gone with them after Elisa warned me. But I was worried.”
“Do you know who they are?” Frank asked urgently. “Was Dr. Crosley there too?”
She frowned. “But he died in the fire.”
“Give her more time, she’s still confused.”
Frank ignored me and leaned closer to her. “Did they use any names? Did they say why they wanted your sister?”
“No-o.” It came out as a wail. “No!”
Frank may have thought it was his questions upsetting her. I knew she was starting to understand that things were very wrong with Elisa.
“You were on a yacht the whole time?” Frank asked.
“I think so.”
“How did they treat you?” I demanded.
“Okay. They just wanted Elisa back.”
And now, God help us, they had her.
THE CONFRONTATION I had expected with Will at the ferry terminal did not happen. When the police launch arrived at the dock a moment later, the building was already locked for the night. Hannah and I climbed off shakily and walked around the grassy side to the parking lot. At every moment I expected Will to appear, to rush at us demanding to know where Elisa was. But it was Colin who ran toward us, who stopped short and held out his arms for Hannah, enveloping her in a fearsome hug. They held on to each other like people reunited after a catastrophe who hadn’t been sure they’d see each other again.
I couldn’t help myself. I moved over and pressed my body against theirs, hating the tears that ran down my face in streams. I hadn’t let myself think fully about Elisa, but now I couldn’t help myself. “Never again,” I sobbed. “Never again,” though I had no idea what I meant.
When our family hug ended, Hannah said to me anxiously, “You’re coming home too, aren’t you?”
“Soon,” I said. Frank and Ruth Carew were already at the edge of the parking lot, about to cross the street to a police cruiser.
“Wait!” I shouted. Colin and Hannah jerked, startled, but I motioned them on.
Frank and Ruth turned to their right to stare at me as if in a choreographed dance.
I beckoned them urgently. After exchanging a look, they moved toward me.
When they were close enough, I pointed and said, “That’s Will Crosley’s car.”
The black Mazda sports coupe sat forlornly in the row behind my van in the deserted parking lot.
Ruth Carew gave me a so-what? blink.
“He brought Elisa here, but he didn’t want her to go through with it. He was waiting for us to get back. So where is he?” I couldn’t account for the bleakness that enveloped me when I looked at Will’s car. It was true my emotions were raw, but this was something else.
“Maybe he went to get a drink,” Frank suggested.
“And risk missing us? He was completely opposed to Elisa’s going. It was almost this macho thing, as if she was disobeying his orders.”
Frank walked over to the car, peered in, then took a pair of vinyl gloves from his pocket and opened the door. We leaned in behind him. The car was empty, but a set of keys dangled from the ignition. The sunglasses tossed on the passenger seat seemed ominous.
“Shit,” said Frank, pressing his lips in a disappearing line and looking heavenward. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“What?” demanded Carew.
“You don’t go off and leave your keys in the ignition in West Patchogue. Not with this kind of car. Not if you’re as street smart as he was supposed to be.” He turned to me. “Do you remember what he was wearing?”
“Yes.” I closed my eyes a moment. “A red polo shirt like a golf shirt, jeans I think. And the sunglasses.”
“Who’s in the squad car?” Frank asked Carew.
She gave him two names.
“Good. We’ll take the car and they can search this area.”
He jerked his head and she started to walk.
I followed them.
Ruth Carew must have sensed me behind them because she turned at the curb. “Ms. Laine, go home. Police personnel only.”
“Wait a minute.” I was ablaze with a fire I
had been keeping under control. “I promised Elisa the police would keep her safe and you didn’t. Now I don’t know if I’ll ever see her again. I’m not going home until you find her!”
We faced off in the shadow of an elm tree.
Carew appealed to Frank. “She can’t come with us. This is an official investigation.”
“She knows who the perps are.”
“They’re the people in that chopper.” Her pale face was reddening. “We don’t need her. You may have seniority, but this is my case.”
Frank gave her a flat, unfriendly stare. “I do have seniority. And this kidnapping case is mine. Let’s just go.”
Her eyes shifted to me, furious. But then she looked back to Frank and I saw not the anger I was expecting but a flash of desire.
Wonderful. I wanted to tell her that he and I had only recently become friends. Just friends. But my feelings were so overwhelming right now, my need to see Elisa so strong, that I couldn’t tell what I was feeling for anyone. Even though I had been sure earlier that my marriage was over, holding on to Colin on the dock had weakened that idea as well.
AND THEN WE sat, crowded uncomfortably in the squad car, waiting for any direction, any information. Frank was tense in the driver’s seat, Carew fiddling with the GPS and tracking screen, me hunched in the back. I saw a blue-uniformed policeman appearing and disappearing in the woods beside the parking lot. Would he find Will’s body? The Crosleys had to know he had given them up to the FBI. Perhaps they had been looking for him all this time too. I couldn’t escape the horror of Will lying motionless on his back, a blood-edged hole on his forehead like a red scar. If they knew he had been hiding Elisa as well, what reason was there to let him live?
Chilled, I turned my attention to the gray bungalow we were parked in front of. It had probably been built in the 1930s judging from the fat-columned porch and crumbling stone flowerpots. I half expected to see a metal box for milk deliveries by the front door.
I didn’t know how much longer I could sit and wait. There was no point in driving around blindly until we had some idea where the Crosleys had gone, but this was getting unbearable. Carew had already informed us of what I had guessed, that Elisa’s device wasn’t tracking.
When the news came it was not from the screen, but a crackling voice from the radio. “Aircraft down. Aircraft down!”
I leaned forward in terror.
“Give me the coordinates.” Frank’s voice was calm.
A pause, then the voice rattled off numbers. The second time Carew finished punching them into the GPS device.
“Helicopter?” She leaned toward the radio.
“Affirmative.”
“Did it land?”
“Crashed.”
“Oh, no!” It was my voice that filled the car in a wailing protest.
Ruth jerked, startled.
“Where did it crash?” Frank asked.
What did crash mean? Just a hard landing? Or . . .
Ruth turned to the second, smaller screen. “Eastport.”
Eastport? They were flying east? I had pictured the helicopter heading in the opposite direction, toward JFK, the Crosleys abandoning it in a nearby lot and, and boarding a commercial flight out of the country. But perhaps The Beautiful Past was moored in Southampton and they had been heading there to lie low for a few days. In a week or so, when surveillance had eased up, they could have left the country with forged passports, slipping away forever.
And now?
Frank had already pulled the cruiser away from the curb and into traffic. I could hear the siren he had turned on and imagined the red and blue lights flashing.
I pressed forward. “Can you find out how—bad the crash was?”
Frank’s eyes locked on mine in the rearview mirror. “Do you really want to know?”
“I have to know.”
He nodded toward Ruth Carew. A soft sigh, then she spoke to a dispatcher who patched her through to an officer at the crash scene. The officer’s voice crackled as he identified himself.
“Carew here. We’re on our way. How bad is it?” She lowered her voice to where I could barely hear her.
But his answer was clear enough. “No survivors.”
I pressed back against the seat, too stunned to breathe in. Was this how my life would finally end? I knew I would never recover this time. Thank God Hannah isn’t here. She would be inconsolable. The thought of her arriving at the scene and seeing Elisa’s body . . . She would never survive that. I doubted that I could.
Hold it together. Don’t scream. Think about what you do now. Yet I couldn’t stop the thought that knowing Elisa again had been like a visitation from an angel. I had been given the rare chance to find out what my daughter would have been like as an adult, given time to make peace with her, and say a longer good-bye. Thank God I had had a chance to tell her how much I loved her and had missed her all these years.
But it was not a visitation, not a dream. It was a nightmare.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
I FOUND I was sitting with my fists clenched, eyes closed and my body rigid as a board with the effort not to think. Not to feel.
In the front seat there was a beeping.
I opened my eyes and saw Carew give her head a shake. “What am I getting here?”
Frank veered onto the median shoulder. We had just entered Sunrise Highway and rush hour traffic was clotted around us. “What? Where is it?”
“Not in Eastport. It’s closer to us, in East Moriches. It could be anything, of course.”
“No. It’s a discrete signal. Key it in.”
I tried to picture the distance between East Moriches and Eastport. They bordered each other, but Moriches came first. So Elisa’s transmitter couldn’t be from the debris. Had they discovered the device on Elisa and tossed it out? Could you open a window on a helicopter? I thought of incidents on commercial airlines where passengers had been sucked out of planes by air pressure. But helicopters weren’t pressurized. Or planes.
What if . . . I thought of something so crazy that I nearly kept quiet. But I could never keep quiet, especially now. “Can you radio and ask how many people there were in the crash?”
“Why?” Carew said, then as she understood it added, “That’s not a bad idea.”
She did something I couldn’t see, then said, “Carew and Marselli, we’re on our way. How many vics and ages?”
The cop on the scene didn’t have to check. “One male, one female, mid-forties.”
“That’s it? No one ejected nearby?”
“We’ve secured the entire area.”
“Okay. Roger.”
I put my hand over my mouth as if I were going to be sick. I had suddenly remembered the movie The Good Shepherd, where a young woman had been deliberately thrown out of a small airplane, cartwheeling down to her death. Dear God, no.
But helicopters didn’t fly that high. She could still be alive, just badly hurt.
If that was even what had happened.
We were moving again, siren screaming. Other cars were veering onto the shoulder, but it was still taking much too long. Maybe she was only hurt. We had to save her! I cursed a silver SUV that blocked our path until Frank pressed on the horn as well. Sitting forward, I craned to see the screens. Our sedan was a blue arrow. Then Ruth zoomed out beyond street names and I could see something round and red throbbing in the distance.
Breathe in. Breathe in.
We had just passed the green DOT sign for Mastic Beach and Shirley at William Floyd Parkway when the radio came to life again. A static voice reported, “Crash scene, helicopter crash scene. ME is here. Vics died on impact, but the pilot was shot in the chest first. Could be why the craft went down.”
“Any sign of a weapon?”
“Still checking.”
Ruth and Frank
exchanged a rapid look. Not in their playbook.
Not in mine either. But I was in an emotional red zone and couldn’t consider anything else.
We screeched off the highway at Center Moriches and raced north on Old Schoolhouse Road. By looking over Carew’s shoulder, I could track our progress to the pulsing red object. Hang on, Elisa, hang on. Carew pressed a button and the screen switched to a satellite view, trees and open farm fields. Could that tiny quarter-sized piece I had pressed on Elisa be this powerful?
“Here. Stop here!”
Frank swerved onto the side of the road, spewing dirt and pebbles into an irrigation ditch he nearly drove into.
“In there.” Ruth pointed at the field. “It’s in there. Somewhere.”
“Okay. We’ll find it.”
I had a moment of panic when I couldn’t open my door. Locked in the backseat like a criminal. Would they make me wait in the car? I wouldn’t, of course. I saw myself climbing into the front seat, freeing myself, and running after them. But Frank came around to pull the door open. He took my arm and helped me out, my legs weak and stiff.
I had hoped that the field would be hard brown earth so that we could see across it, find Elisa faster. Despite no evidence, I was convinced she was here. But as we started in, Ruth holding the screen close to her chest, knee-high cornstalks started blocking our way. They were almost low enough to see over—but not quite.
“Over here!” Ruth was peering at the screen.
The ground kept getting softer, my sandals sinking into mud. We pressed on. Then to the right I saw a large piece of white cloth splayed out and crushing the cornstalks, as if a family of giants had spread a picnic cloth. Was some metal device attached to it that had fooled us into thinking it was Elisa’s? I can’t bear this.
Then Marselli just ahead of us was kneeling down. “Here!”
Pushing closer, I realized that the cloth was a parachute. There was a body still attached to it, a body that did not move.
“No!” I wailed.
“Easy, it’s okay, she still has a pulse.” Then Frank was on his radio, calling for medical help.
I WAS KNEELING behind her, resting her head and upper shoulders on my knees when she opened her soft blue eyes and stared into mine. Carew had objected, but I had been careful not to disturb Elisa’s back.
A Bookmarked Death Page 20