Тимоти Уилльямз - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 126, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 769 & 770, September/October 2005

Nadia darted a glance at him, and Katharine gasped a little.

“We can afford it, Lon,” she told him.

“Really? Then why did you need me to pay for all of us today?”

Katharine looked bewildered. “We didn’t—”

Michael put a hand on top of hers. “I told him we’d pay him back—”

“Out of what?” Lon sneered. “It’s finally coming home to roost, isn’t it? After all these years, we’re finally seeing who has been the smart one, after all. For so many years, ever since we graduated from college, you’ve mocked me for being a corporate guy. You and your free spirit, right? Never going to be tied down, always just delighted to go to your own work every day, never reporting to any boss...”

“Where did this come from?” Michael said, looking stunned.

“Where did it come from? It came from all these years of you being so smug about being a stupid artist...” He glanced at Katharine. “...and writer. Like either of you is ever going to have any real success! You draw the equivalent of box tops, for God’s sake.” Again he glanced at Katharine. “And you, you write ad copy for chewing gum. Yeah, there’s so much integrity in that, right? You’re both such artists. And now, guess what? After thirty years of actually getting out of bed and going to work every day, after working our tails off and earning every penny, Nadia and I get to retire with several million bucks apiece. And what do you get to retire on, Michael? Katharine? Oh, that’s right, you don’t ever get to retire, do you? You’ll still be drawing your stupid box tops when you’re eighty years old. Katharine will still be trying to find ad copy to write when you’re both senile and she can’t string two words together...”

“Lon, stop it!” Nadia tried to take one of his hands, but he jerked out of her grasp.

“Nadia and I will still be taking any trips we want to take,” he plunged on, ignoring her. “And what will you be doing, Michael? You’ll be walking from one end of the hall in the Medicaid nursing home to the other end of the hall...”

Katharine pushed her chair back and stood up.

Michael shook his head, as if to clear it, and then he stood up, too. In a voice that trembled with emotion, he stared across the table at his best friend and said, “Go on up on that ridge, Lon. Take all the chances you want, buddy. You want to take a hike, Lon? Fine! Take a hike, buddy. Take a long walk off a short ridge. Go see your sunset. I hope it’s the last one you ever get to buy.”

He put an arm around his wife and pushed her ahead of him.

They were gone by the time the entrees were placed on the table. At the far end of the bar, Manuel Noriega exchanged glances with the bartender. Lon’s voice had easily carried over to them. The bartender, a Polynesian, smiled slightly, as if to say, “Tourists!” Manuel shook his head, as if in agreement, but he paid for his drinks soon after that and left without ordering dinner.

Manuel found Katharine Peters sitting alone on a side patio of the residencia.

“Is everything all right, Senyora?”

When she looked up at him, her face was in shadow so he couldn’t see her expression clearly, but there was unhappiness in her voice. “Some things never change, do they?”

“What do you mean?” he asked her.

“From one century to the next, we pretty much behave just the same. Everybody gets along fine, and then before you know it, we’re knocking each other down. Did we make fools of ourselves back in the restaurant, Manuel?”

His face was shadowed, too, so she couldn’t see his smile. “Not all of you.”

When she didn’t respond, he turned quietly and walked away.

The noise of a car engine woke Katharine up with a start that set her heart pounding. Instinctively, she turned toward the other side of the bed to touch Michael, but when she put her hand where his chest should be, he wasn’t there.

Katharine turned on a lamp on her side of the bed. Their travel clock said: 4:00 A.M. Her husband’s side of the bed was empty, the sheets pulled back.

She got up and turned on more lights. They revealed that the clothes he had taken off to come to bed were gone. It appeared to her that some time after she fell asleep, Michael had slipped out of bed, gotten dressed again, and then left their room without waking her, or telling her where he was going.

Katharine looked around for a note from him, but didn’t find one.

She opened the door and looked out into the darkness of the backyard of the guesthouse. Michael wasn’t on the back porch. After she had walked all around the house in her nightgown, she knew he wasn’t on any of the patios, either. She saw that the big van was not in the driveway, and one of the bicycles the home kept for its guests was gone as well.

There is no crime on Easter Island...

Katharine decided to believe that, and to believe that Michael had gone out — safely — for a walk along the safe, deserted streets of the town. Maybe he had indigestion, either from some of the food they’d had that day, or from the things that Lon had said to them.

She went back to bed, but didn’t get back to sleep.

Shortly after dawn, the door to the room quietly opened.

Katharine shut her eyes.

She heard someone come in and slip off clothing. Then the bed covers next to her stirred and her husband lay down beside her. She realized that if the sound of the van’s engine had not awakened her, she would never have known that he had come and gone.

“Where have you been, Michael?”

She could feel how startled he was to hear her voice.

“Oh, I’m sorry. Did I wake you?”

“Where’d you go?”

“I couldn’t sleep, so I went for a walk.”

Usually, Katharine could tell the minute he dropped off to sleep, because Michael snored. But although she lay with her eyes open for another hour, she never heard him make a sound until the sun was high enough to stream in through the windows.

At breakfast in the residencia’s dining room, Nadia told them that Lon had taken the van out during the night in order to drive himself back to the volcano.

“I couldn’t stop him.”

She sounded more angry than worried, even though she said he had left at four in the morning, and it was by then already eight A.M.

Katharine didn’t want to ask the obvious: Shouldn’t he be back by now?

When Lon Reynolds still had not returned with the van by ten, and the owner of the residencia needed it to make an airport run, he called his friend Manuel Noriega for assistance. “Can you drive out there and look for him?” he asked. “And if you find him, tell him to bring my van back as soon as possible.”

By eleven A.M., when neither Manuel nor Lon had appeared, Nadia was frantic.

“I’d call the police,” she said, “if this godforsaken island had any!”

Upon hearing that, Katharine Peters burst into tears.

Ten minutes later, Lon Reynolds drove up to the guesthouse in the van, got out, and walked casually over to the frightened little band of people on the back porch.

“You all look as if you’ve just seen a ghost,” he said. And then, “You missed a hell of a show. I walked the entire rim of that crater and saw the most spectacular sunrise I’ll ever see in my life.”

“Where have you been?” his wife screamed at him.

He looked at her as if she had lost her marbles, and shrugged. “Since I already had the van, I drove all the way around the island to see the rest of it. Why? Is there a problem?”

Manuel Noriega stood at the airport fence watching the LAN CHILE jet take off for Santiago, taking “his” tourists with it. There was a fresh check for $1,000 in his pocket, to match the one he had taken from Katharine Peters’s handbag when she had “accidentally” left it behind in the airplane on the day of their arrival. She was a nice, caring, efficient woman, he thought. When he had gone up to the LAN CHILE ticket counter at the airport in Santiago, his prepaid ticket to Easter Island was there for him, just as she had e-mailed that it would be.