David Baldacci: The Forgotten

Jerry drove her to her house on Orion Street and saw her inside. A typical residence for this part of Florida, it was a two-story structure with cinderblock walls covered in beige stucco with a red terra-cotta roof and a two-car garage. The house had three bedrooms, with hers right off the kitchen. It was thirty-one hundred square feet in an efficient footprint, far larger than she needed, but she had no interest in moving. This would be her last home. She had known that for a long time.

She had a palm tree out front and some grass and decorative rocks in the yard. In the back a privacy fence ran along the property line, and she had a small reflecting pool along with a bench and a table where she could sit, drink her coffee, and enjoy both the cooler mornings and the final rays of the evening light. On either side of her house was another house pretty much exactly the same. All of Sunset by the Sea was pretty much the same, as though the builder had some large machine to spit the houses out off-site to later be transported and erected here.

The beach was behind her house, just a short drive or long walk to the sugar-white sand of the Emerald Coast.

It was summer and the temperature was in the low seventies at nearly six in the evening. That was about twenty degrees cooler than the high for the day, which was about average for Paradise, Florida, at this time of the year.

Paradise, she thought. A silly, conceited name, but she also couldn’t say it didn’t fit. It was beautiful here most of the time.

She would take heat over cold any day. That’s why they had invented Florida, she assumed. And perhaps Paradise in particular.

And why the snowbirds flocked here every winter.

She sat in her living room and gazed around at the memories of a lifetime. On the walls and shelves were photos of friends and family. Her gaze rested longest on a picture of her husband, Lloyd, a natural-born salesman. She had fallen in love with him after World War II. He had sold her a bill of goods, too, she supposed. He always claimed to be more successful than he was. He was a good salesman but a bigger spendthrift, she had found. But he was funny, made her laugh, didn’t have a violent bone in his body, never drank to excess, and he loved her. He never cheated on her, though with his job and the traveling involved, he certainly had had chances to wander from his marriage vows.

Yes, she missed her Lloyd. After he’d passed away, she’d discovered he had a sizable life insurance policy he’d kept in force. She’d taken the whole of it and bought two stocks. Apple and Amazon. This had been way back. The two A’s on her report card, she liked to call them. The investment return had been enough to allow her to pay off the mortgage on this house and live very comfortably on far more money than Social Security alone would have allowed her.

She had a light supper and some iced tea. Her appetite wasn’t nearly what it once was. Then she watched some TV, falling asleep in front of the screen. When she awoke she felt disoriented. Shaking her head to clear it, she decided it was time to go to bed. She rose with the aid of her walker and headed toward her bedroom. She would sleep for a few hours and then get back up, start her day over again. That was her life now.

She noticed a shadow of movement behind her, but had no chance to feel alarmed about it.

That was to be Betsy Puller Simon’s last memory.

A shadow behind her.

A few minutes later there was a splash from the backyard.

The timing was as good as it would ever get. He performed a few more strokes in the water until he finally felt the earth beneath his feet.

He had lucked out and been picked up by a small fishing boat about two hours after his escape from the platform. The men had asked no questions. They gave him some food and water. They told him their location, and by reversing that course he got a better fix on the platform out in the Gulf. He could not forget all the prisoners housed there. They would be gone before he would ever return there. But there would be others to replace them.

The fishing boat could not take him all the way to shore, they told him, but they would get him close enough. They chugged along slowly for what seemed a long time and he helped them with their work as part repayment for their helping him. They could not make a beeline for his destination. They were out here to work, and work they would.

His great strength was marveled at by the fishermen, and they seemed sorry to see him go.

They pointed in the direction of land when they got to the place where he needed to get off. They gave him a better-fitted life jacket and he slipped over the side of the boat and started swimming toward land.

As he turned back he saw one of the men make the sign of the cross over his chest. Then his sole focus became reaching something he could stand on.

By the time he arrived on shore his muscles were tight, knotted, and he was once more dehydrated. Water had been all around him for such a long time and yet he had not been able to drink even a drop of it. Fish had nipped at him. Singly that was not a problem. Cumulatively, his legs and arms were covered in tiny cuts and welts. And his head and shoulders hurt from the beating he’d taken from the guards and from his plunge off the platform. He could feel the bruises and cuts on his face from these impacts.

But he was alive.

And on land.

Finally.

The darkness covered his high-stepping through the last few breakers until he reached the sugar-white sand of the Emerald Coast in Florida’s Panhandle. He looked right and left up the beach for any late-night beachcombers. Seeing none, he dropped to his knees, rolled onto his back, and drew in long deep breaths as he stared at a sky so clear there seemed to be no space between the billions of visible stars. Paradise was a small town with long beaches, but its downtown area was built right along the sand. The central business district was farther down and to the west. And luckily it was so late that there was no one out on the boardwalk that ran parallel to the beach where he was.

He thanked God for allowing him to live. So many hours of swimming, and then being picked up by the boat. In the vastness of the Gulf, what were the odds of that without divine intervention? The sharks had also miraculously left him alone. He had to attribute that to his prayers as well.

His captors had not come after him.

Prayer again.

Thankfully, the beach was deserted.

Well, not quite.

God must have missed that one.

He hunkered down in the sand as he heard the people coming.

Then he flattened himself to the beach and burrowed in, allowing his over six-foot-six-inch, 290-pound frame to blend into the white grit that people from around the world came to lie on during the course of a year.

It was two people. He could tell by the different voices.

One man. One woman.

He lifted his head a bare inch and stared in their direction. They were not walking a dog.

Prayer, again. A dog would have found his scent by now.

He would not act unless they spotted him. And even then, they might just assume he was simply lying on the beach enjoying the evening. He hoped they would not see him, and that if they did they would not panic. He knew that after his long journey at sea he must look pretty bad.

He tensed his body, waited for them to pass by.

They were within forty feet of him. The woman looked in his direction. The moonlight was not strong, but not weak either.

He heard her exclaim and then say something to her companion.

But then he realized that she was not actually looking in his direction.

As he watched, a lithe figure came out from behind the cover of sand dunes.