Scott Mariani - The Sacred Sword

‘Me neither,’ Ben said.

‘Let’s go. This place is depressing.’

It was a long time before they were able to catch a return ferry to Martha’s Vineyard. They’d wasted a large chunk of the day, and now Ben was concerned about time slipping away from him, not to mention the prospect of exhausting their list of lighthouses and coming away empty-handed at the end of it. They had a lot of miles still to cover in order to reach the fifth and final spot on the map, inconveniently situated as far away as possible on the island, all the way from east to west at its broadest point. Ben pushed the car on fast, but it still seemed like an endless drive and his watch appeared to tick the time by at double speed as they sped westwards past the towns of Chilmark and Aquinnah. Eventually, a mad dash along the promisingly named Lighthouse Road took them to Aquinnah Circle and their destination, the Gay Head Lighthouse.

The stubby red-brick tower stood among scrubland overlooking rocky cliffs. They climbed out of the car, scrambled through the long grass to the best vantage point nearby and scanned the horizon. To the landward side, there was only empty countryside and the long road snaking off into the distance. Not a single house or farm to be seen. Bare trees quivered in the wind.

‘It’s not here,’ Ben said.

‘But this was our last chance,’ Jude said. ‘How can it not be here? Did we miss something?’

‘We didn’t miss anything. We were careful. But I was wrong about the lighthouses. We’re going to have to start again.’

‘Great.’ Jude looked up at the sky, which had darkened as the biting wind pushed a slab of cloud over the face of the sun. The afternoon would soon be turning into evening. ‘Let’s get back to the car.’

Ben was silent for nearly five miles as he sped back eastwards along the coastal road that skirted the long, almost flat south side of the island. His thoughts were as black as the clouds overhead. They didn’t brighten when the wind parted the cloud cover momentarily and the sun sparkled brightly across the endless miles of sea to the right.

‘Maybe it’s my fault,’ Jude muttered. ‘I might have misled us about the whole Martha thing. I mean, maybe she was a woman after all. Holland could be anywhere, really, if you think about it.’ He threw a nervous glance at the zipping road, then another at the speedometer, which was hovering steady over the ninety mark. ‘You could try easing off a little.’

Ben kept his foot down. ‘Shut up, Jude. I’m trying to think.’

‘Me too.’ Jude paused, doing his best to ignore the speedometer. ‘Thing is, though, Hillel did say “tower of light”. What else could that be? Why don’t we phone him and ask him what he meant by-’

Jude never finished the sentence. He was hurled forwards against his seatbelt as Ben took his foot off the gas and stamped hard on the brake pedal. The Jeep screeched to a halt in the middle of the empty road.

‘What did you do that for?’ Jude yelled, sprawling back in his seat.

‘Look,’ Ben said. He pointed out of the passenger window, towards the sea. Jude frowned, then followed the line of his finger.

‘See it?’

‘See what?’

‘About a mile out. The sunlight caught something. There it is again.’

Jude had spotted it too, just a faint gleam in the distance before the clouds scudded back across the face of the sun. ‘What is that?’

Ben grabbed the binoculars from the back seat and brought the distant object into focus. It was some kind of tall fixed structure out to sea, built on three massive yellow tripod legs, with a platform like a miniature oil rig and a latticework tower pointing up into the sky. It was hard to tell at this range, but Ben guessed the structure was about a hundred feet high.

‘Let me take a look,’ Jude said, grabbing the binoculars as Ben put them down to study the map. Ben traced his finger along the south side of the island near Gay Head, back towards Aquinnah. Whatever the thing was, it didn’t feature on the map.

‘I know what it is,’ Jude said, focused on it. ‘It’s a coastal observatory tower. Unmanned, used for meteorological analysis. I’ve learned about them at Uni.’

‘Tall enough to be a risk to low-flying aircraft in the dark,’ Ben said.

Jude understood his line of thinking immediately. ‘Which would mean it would be lit up at night, wouldn’t it?’

‘The tower of light shining on the water,’ Ben said. He took the binoculars back from Jude and scanned the landward horizon. Trees. More trees. Grassland. And then — his heart gave a jump.

‘And to think we’d have driven straight past it,’ he said.

The majestic house was nestled among its own grounds close to the beach, overlooking a splendid bay and the observatory tower in the distance.

‘Give them over,’ Jude said, making another grab for the binoculars. He quickly saw what Ben had seen. ‘That’s got to be the place.’ He turned excitedly to Ben. ‘We found it!’

They left the Jeep and waded through long grass and rustling reeds that grew in clumps among the dunes, cutting around the side of the property to approach it from the beach. Ben trained the binoculars on the tall windows that overlooked the sea.

And behind one of them, gazing across the beach towards the whispering ocean, stood a figure of a man. He was short, with white hair and a neat white beard, wearing cords and a cardigan.

Ben was finally looking at the billionaire, Wesley Holland.

In a strange way, Wesley thought in a fleeting moment of relaxation as he contemplated the sea and stroked his beard, his being here, his being safely tucked away where nobody could ever find him or his treasure, was all thanks to Giselle.

Ah, Giselle. They’d lost contact long ago. He knew she was still appearing in movies, but he hadn’t seen any of them.

Looking back, Wesley and his fourth and last wife had been completely mismatched right from the start. She’d been too young for him, too impetuous, too absorbed in a burgeoning acting career that dominated her every move and decision, and, for the three and a half years the marriage had endured, limping on, Wesley’s every move and decision as well. For a man whose natural tendency was to shy away from the hubbub of the world, the constant prying of press hounds had been unbearable. Whenever Wesley opened the door, there was a camera poking into his face trying to steal a snap of the celebrity couple. He couldn’t go to the bathroom or undress for bed without fretting that he was being watched through a long-distance lens. As for trying to go anywhere or eat a quiet meal in a restaurant, forget it.

Giselle had adored the attention, of course, feeding off it like a butterfly on nectar. But to Wesley the intrusion into his hallowed privacy was the death of his very soul. The last straw had been when he’d found his dear wife conducting a guided tour of the Whitworth Mansion for journalists from Persona magazine.

That was when, driven to distraction, Wesley had made a secret bid on a (for him) modestly-sized, yet tolerably luxurious, beach hideaway on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, off Cape Cod. Through the remainder of his marriage to Giselle he’d escaped there whenever humanly possible, always on some flimsy excuse about making a business trip — Giselle had never cared that much where he was, anyway — and after the inevitable divorce had come and gone it had never once occurred to him to sell it. The deeds were held in the name of an obscure trust he’d set up decades earlier and never developed into anything, so that the real owner was quite untraceable.

Wesley so relished the serenity of his island bolt-hole that he’d always been very reticent about telling anyone about it. Not even his longtime lawyer, Bob Mooney, had any idea about the place. Coleman Nash had been in on it, and Wesley had also confided in Simeon Arundel once, after a few glasses of wine. The secret now rested with the dead.