by Matt Lincoln
“That would be great,” Rachel said with a wide smile that had quite a bit of bite to it. Luckily, the woman had already turned around to lead us through the house and didn’t notice.
“How do you know Emmett?” the woman asked.
I closed the door behind us and brought up the rear of the little procession, moving slowly so I could take a good look at the house as we moved through it. The place was clean, though there was a bit of clutter scattered around, giving it a lived-in feel. Books heaped in tiny piles on almost every surface, most with bookmarks hanging out at random intervals, and the art on the walls was colorful, mostly abstract, filled with shapes and life. The furniture was eclectic but still fit together somehow. There was a lot of warm, rich wood and easy earth tones, making the spacious rooms seem cozy and welcoming.
“College,” Rachel lied, answering the woman’s question. It was a safe enough answer, assuming Dowell had gone to college. The woman smiled and nodded, accepting the lie. I wondered how deep her relationship with Dowell went, how well she knew him and his past. She hadn’t acted confused when Rachel called him Emmett, so I guessed she was still in the dark about his true identity.
We passed through the kitchen, and the woman opened the back door. We stepped out onto a three-season porch laden with comfortable looking chairs and several leafy green plants. The yard beyond it had been turned almost completely into a huge garden with well-tended rows and trellises pushed into the ground for the taller plants to crawl up. Wildflowers mixed in with the herbs and vegetables, and I thought I saw a few berry bushes as well near the back, by the sprawling cucumber plant.
A man knelt in an aisle between the rows, his back to us, a sunhat perched on his head. He had a pair of garden shears in hand and was carefully combing through his tomatoes, snipping off some small branches.
I glanced over at Rachel. A nauseating mixture of anxiety and excitement churned within me, mixing poorly with last night’s heavy meal. But Rachel’s face had gone absolutely still, though her fingers still trembled at her sides. She bunched them up and stuffed her hands in her pockets to hide it.
“Emmett, hon, you’ve got guests,” the woman called, and Dowell’s head rose. Even from the porch, I could see the newfound tension in his back. The woman turned to us. “I’ll bring y’all some lemonade. Are you hungry? I can break out the cheese and crackers.”
“No thanks,” I said, because Rachel was still staring daggers at Dowell’s back.
The woman smiled, missing the tension in the air, and left us on the porch to reenter the house. Dowell rose slowly, those sharp garden shears still in his hand, and turned as Rachel shoved open the door to the porch and stepped out into the sun. I followed her out and flanked her, making sure we were a unified line just in case Dowell tried anything.
His wide-brimmed hat hid most of his face from view, but he slowly pushed it back until it hung off his neck by its cord. It was definitely him. I’d had a moment of uncertainty while his back was to us, suddenly certain that this was some perfectly innocent man actually named Emmett Till, but now, I recognized him from the photos within the old case files, though the years had changed him somewhat.
His hair was disheveled from the hat, more gray than brown at this point, and he pushed it back from his face, his garden gloves leaving a smear of dirt across his forehead. His features were angular, his nose sharp and his lips a perpetually suspicious slash across his face. His stubble accentuated the hard lines of his cheekbones, and one ear was mangled, missing a large chunk out of the side. He was well-muscled underneath his work shirt, and chicken legs stuck out of the bottom of his cargo shorts, black Crocs on his feet. Even in the faintly ridiculous outfit, he still managed to radiate danger. Maybe it was because I knew the truth of his path, or maybe it was the shears he still gripped in one hand, or maybe it was the hard way he stared at us, waiting for us to make the first move.
Rachel descended the three steps from the porch to the lawn and started toward him, her stride confident and self-assured. I started after her, the row just barely wide enough for us to stand abreast. Rachel stopped ten feet from Dowell. I was glad. I didn’t want to be within striking distance of those shears.
Dowell squinted at us, still trying to place where or if he knew us, his suspicion rapidly mounting as he came up empty.
It only got worse when Rachel looked him right in the eye and said, “Frances Dowell?”
His reaction was immediate. His face stoppered up and grew hard, his eyes like flint, his lips turning white, and his grip tightening around the shears. His stance shifted, ready to attack or defend or flee if the circumstance called for it. I tensed beside Rachel but didn’t reach for my gun, not wanting to set him off any more.
“Who’s asking?” Dowell ground out. He was still searching our faces, looking for any hint of familiarity. He wouldn’t find any.
“My name is Rachel Bane,” Rachel said, and he recognized her name in an instant. Fear flashed through his eyes, and he lunged forward, lashing out with his shears. I seized Rachel’s arm and dragged her back so that she just barely stumbled out of the way of the silver blades.
“Stop!” she cried. “We’re not here to—!”
But Dowell cut her off with a right hook toward her head, and she was forced to duck out of the way, staggering to the side and into the plants which tangled around her legs and threatened to bring her down.
There was a crash by the house—the woman, no doubt—but there was no time to spare any attention to her because Dowell was spinning toward the back of the yard, using Rachel’s entanglement as a chance to get away.
I leapt after him. He slashed out behind him with the shears, and I checked my forward momentum, swaying out of the way, and then snapped back into motion, flinging myself to the ground in a baseball slide so that I skidded forward painfully and knocked Dowell’s legs out from under him. He crashed to the dirt, flattening a bed of herbs, his shears flying from his hand and disappearing amongst the leaves. He tried to scramble upright, but I seized the collar of his shirt and flung him back the way we came as hard as I could. He hit the ground and rolled, limbs flailing.
Rachel had regained her feet and moved to stand over him, gun drawn and pointed down at his head. She panted, chest heaving, a smudge of dirt on her cheek and the shoulder of her jacket.
“Frances Dowell, you are not under arrest!” she said, which I thought maybe wasn’t the best way to phrase it because Dowell would probably only hear his name and the word arrest and would assume the worst. “We just need information.”
Dowell’s partner rushed down from the porch with a metal tray in her hands, headed right for Rachel.
“Rachel!” I called as the woman raised the tray high over her head. Rachel glanced back just in time to duck and bury a well-placed sidekick into the other woman’s stomach. Her air left her in a rush, and she staggered back, dropping the tray.
“Would everyone just calm down?” Rachel snapped. “We’re not here to harm you.”
“Yeah? That’s not what your actions say,” Dowell muttered, still on the ground, glaring up at Rachel and the barrel of her gun.
In a show of good faith, Rachel stepped back and holstered her weapon, and I loosened my ready stance, though I was still prepped for trouble. Dowell and his partner remained on the ground, waiting for a signal that it was safe to stand.
“I—you know who I am,” Rachel said, and Dowell nodded. “Did you hear that Simon Ward escaped prison?”
Dowell’s face went white beneath the dirt, and his throat bobbed as he swallowed. Slowly, he shook his head, rendered mute by the news. Rachel took a deep breath and then offered him her hand to help him stand. Dowell stared at it for a long moment, weighing the gesture. Then he reached out and took it, and Rachel heaved him upright. I tensed again. He was very close to her and much larger than he’d seemed while we were standing on the porch, but Dowell just stepped past her and helped his partner stand. She looked absolutely bewildered, her eyes d
arting between him and us as if they couldn’t decide where to settle.
“Why don’t you go inside?” Dowell suggested softly. “I need to have a chat with these people.”
She nodded, glanced at us again, and then scooped her tray up and fled into the house, casting looks over her shoulder every few steps.
Once the back door was shut, Dowell turned back to us, his shoulders slumped, a distraught cast to his face.
“Ward escaped? Really?” he asked.
“I’m afraid so,” Rachel said, eyes dropping to the ground.
Dowell shook his head and heaved a sigh, running a hand through his hair. “I’d hoped that day would never come. I didn’t help him if that’s why you’re here. I don’t want anything to do with that man.”
“That’s not it,” Rachel replied. “But we do need your help.”
Dowell cocked an eyebrow and waited for her to continue.
“He took my daughter. I was hoping you could help us find him.”
“And why the hell would I do that?” he scoffed. “I just said I don’t want anything to do with him.”
Steel flared in Rachel’s eyes, and she pushed her shoulders back. “Because Ward told me that if I framed you for a crime and got you put away, he’d give me my daughter back. Because even if I don’t go through with that, he’ll find you sooner or later, and I’m sure you don’t want that.” She stalked toward him, each step deliberate, pressing into the dirt, grinding plant leaves beneath her heel. “And because you don’t want to find out what I’ll do to you if you don’t help me.” She jabbed a finger into his chest, and he actually flinched. “Are we clear?”
He read the determination in her eyes and nodded. I shifted my weight from foot to foot, watching the exchange. This was a side of Rachel I hadn’t seen before, and I suddenly understood how she had climbed the ranks to director so quickly. There was a ruthlessness to her that, when activated, would be merciless.
“Good,” Rachel said, slipping back into good cheer as if her threats had never happened. “Is there somewhere we can sit? It’s awful hot out here on in the sun.”
“We can go to the porch,” Dowell answered, nodding toward the house. His partner was peering out the window, but she disappeared as soon as she saw us looking and jerked the curtains shut.
Rachel motioned for Dowell to lead the way, and the three of us headed back up to the porch. There was shattered glass and spilled lemonade splashed across the floor, and we skirted around it carefully to take our seats. Rachel and I sat down across from Dowell, who settled into his wicker chair with an all too obvious attempt at a casual air. Rachel folded one leg over the other, and I perched on the edge of the seat, still expecting this to go bad somehow.
“So, what exactly do you want from me?” Dowell asked, cutting straight to the point. “Because I’m not leaving here with you.”
“Information,” Rachel replied smoothly. She leaned forward, bracing her elbows on her knees and fixing Dowell with a stare that I doubted he would be able to resist answering. “How can we find him? You were his right-hand man. You know his patterns best. What would he do? Where would he be?”
Dowell couldn’t hold her intense gaze for very long, and he soon slanted his eyes away. There was movement at the curtains behind him, but I was the only one who saw his partner twitch them open and peek out, then disappear again before she could be spotted. I didn’t blame her for her curiosity. I was sure I would act the same way in her situation. She’d known Dowell as Till for so many years, and now people were calling him by another name and getting into fights with him in the backyard. I felt bad for her. Her life was probably about to tip right on its head.
“He took Malia from my ex-husband’s home and knocked my ex out,” Rachel explained, and I pulled myself away from the woman at the window and back into the conversation in front of me. “We think he was driving a gray Subaru hatchback, but we haven’t had much luck tracking it down. A few days later, he sent me a video with the blackmail. Judging by the sound of the engine in the background, we believe he’s on a large boat. We’ve been trying to track down some of the vessels that used to be associated with him, but no luck there either. Please, is there anything I’m missing? I need to find her. She’s been gone for so long.” Desperation colored Rachel’s voice there at the end, and she wrung her hands together in front of her. I didn’t know if Dowell had an empathetic side to appeal to, but she was certainly trying.
Dowell sighed and shifted in his chair, scratching at his hairline. “Ward always did like boats,” he said, and then fell silent, thinking. Rachel and I waited with bated breath for him to continue, and my stomach churned, worried that he was about to tell us that he couldn’t help us.
“You won’t have any luck keeping an eye out for suspicious boat activity,” Dowell continued. “Ward knows how to keep all his ships squeaky clean. He wouldn’t use any of the boats y’all have on record, either. But…” He trailed off and bit his lip, and there was a small war going on across his face, though I couldn’t quite see what the two sides were. “He had two boats that he kept secret from everyone but me. He kept them stashed away in case he ever had to make a clean break and disappear. I’d bet that he’s on one of them. Can I see the video?”
Rachel was startled by the question and the sudden shift from his explanatory tone. She blinked once and then located her phone, pulling up the email with Ward’s blackmail video in it. She passed the device over to Dowell, and we waited while he watched. I’d heard the message before, but the sound of Ward’s pleasant, golf-course-voice still sent chills down my spine, and I could see Malia in my mind’s eye, bound to that chair, her eyes wide and wet. Rachel flinched, listening to it. I reached over and lightly placed my hand on hers, offering her a smile when she looked at me.
Dowell finished watching the video and gave Rachel her phone back, a thoughtful look on his face. “You sure didn’t listen to that bit about ‘don’t tell anyone,’ did you?”
Rachel shrugged. “Why should I play into his hand?”
“And yet you’re still thinking about blackmailing me.”
Rachel didn’t have an answer for that.
“Anyway,” Dowell continued, waving his previous statement away. “There’s not much in that video, at least in terms of identifying the ship he’s on, but my best bet is that he dug the Wanderer’s Heart out of storage. It was stashed not far from Houston. It would have been the closest thing to him after he busted out of prison.”
Dowell’s face went white, as if he’d finally fully realized what Ward’s escape meant for him. Especially if we didn’t catch the man. But I was sure that we would. My heart had swelled within my chest when Dowell told us about the Wandering Heart, a tangible, solid thing that we could look for out amongst the waves, something that our friends in the Coast Guard could probably easily track down.
Rachel perked up as well, straightening in her chair and scooting right up to its edge so that she almost fell off.
“What can you tell us about this ship?” she asked eagerly.
“It’s a luxury yacht. A big one,” Dowell answered, brow scrunched up in concentration. “White, most of them are. It’s a humongous thing. I honestly don’t know how he kept it as well hidden as he did. I guess he just didn’t take it out as much. It can spend weeks, maybe months, out on the open ocean before it has to dock again. I don’t know what your search radius has been, but you’ll probably want to expand it.” He shrugged. “That’s about all I know. I only saw the thing once because Ward wanted to show it off to someone. He called it his contingency plan, offered me a spot on it if things went to shit.”
“How did you get out?” I asked, butting into the conversation for the first time. The question had been burning inside me for a while.
Dowell turned his heavy gaze toward me, and in it, I saw the weight of all the things he had done over the years, though there wasn’t much regret, just acceptance. “I gave Ward up, and Amherst let me disappear, even gave me some
cash and new papers to do it right. I owe him my life.”
“I knew it,” I said, feeling oddly vindicated, though it wasn’t like the answer to the question mattered all that much in the end.
“How the hell did you two find me?” Dowell demanded. “I thought I managed to disappear without a trace.”
“We spoke with Richard Mann. You sent him a letter with your address on it,” Rachel answered.
Dowell lightly pounded his fist against his thigh. “Damn, I knew that would come back to bite me in the ass some time.”
“So why’d you do it?” I asked.
Dowell gave me a look that told me to mind my own damn business, but answered anyway. “The way I treated him after Ward came into the picture… it’s my one regret. He was my best mate, and I wanted to make it right in the end. He never replied, though. I’m glad to hear he kept the letter. Maybe there’s still something there then.” His voice grew softer than I’d heard it since we’d arrived, and he smiled faintly before he shook himself and banished the old memories.
“Is there anything else?” he asked us, his brusque tone back in full force.
“I think that’s all,” Rachel replied. “Unless there’s anything else you can think of that might help.”
Dowell’s eyes were dark, a shadow falling across his face. “Only that you crossed him once and got away with it, but you’re not likely to do so again.” I shivered as he spoke, suddenly unable to feel the sharp warmth of the sun on my back. Dowell stood abruptly, the movement jerky, stilted. “Now, I’m very sorry about your daughter, but please get the hell out of my life and never come back.”
He opened the door to the kitchen, and I saw a brief flash of movement as his partner scurried away from wherever she’d been spying on us. Rachel and I rose quickly. It was obvious we’d overstayed our welcome. Dowell walked us through his house to the front door to ensure we got there quickly and without detours. He poked his head outside and glanced in both directions, his eyes narrowed.