Stuart Woods - Dark Harbor

Hotshot was no different from the others. Jake counted five young men in the cockpit or on deck, each working furiously, and no large blond twins were among them. He had been had. What he would have enjoyed most would have been to remove his Colt Cobra from its holster, empty it into the yacht’s hull just below the waterline and watch it sink.

Instead, he drew his cell phone from its pouch and punched in a number.

“Sergeant Young,” a voice said.

“Sergeant, this is Lieutenant Potter of the Nantucket police department.”

“Good morning, Lieutenant.”

“I wanted to let you know that the yacht Hotshot has just left the marina here for the start of the race, and the Stone twins are not aboard. And I haven’t been able to find them anywhere in the village. I’ve had all our people on the lookout for them, and they are not here.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Young said.

“One more thing: Two young men answering their description left here in a small, private airplane yesterday afternoon. There was no flight plan filed, and I don’t have a tail number, but the airplane departed to the northeast, in the direction of Provincetown. That’s consistent with a flight to the Maine coast.”

“Do you know what kind of airplane?”

“It was a Cessna, nobody could identify the model, but it was not based on Nantucket.”

“Do you know if it refueled at your airport?”

“It did not refuel; otherwise, we’d have five casualties.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant.”

YOUNG CLOSED HIS CELL phone and turned his car in the direction of Dick Stone’s house.

STONE WATCHED AS Ginny came down the stairs, clutching the diary and several sheets of paper.

“I’ve got something,” she said. She spread her papers and the diary out on the coffee table and sat down beside it while everyone gathered around her. “I finally realized that I still hadn’t gone far enough back in the diary,” she said. “Then it occurred to me that Esme had been in London with her parents all winter, not here on the island, so what I was reading was mostly irrelevant, so I went back even further to last Labor Day.”

“And what did you find?” Stone asked.

“The pages were very messy, and the ink had faded or run, but I’ve written out what I could read. This one entry was a page and a half long, which was unusual for ESE; she ordinarily wrote a couple of paragraphs about her day. Here’s what I’ve got.” She picked up a sheet of paper and read:

“”Day started blank.“ Where I couldn’t read a word, I just wrote down ”blank.“ Then there are two or three paragraphs that are completely illegible, then this: ‘X and blank said blank blank”-several words unreadable-then ’blank house, blank blank blank drinks. Z wanted blank blank go, so I said okay.“ Then more unreadable paragraphs down to the last one: ”Z blank crying, me too. Blank blank Y laughing, drunk. Z threw blank, and I got her out blank blank.“ Then the only whole sentence I was able to get: ‘Z swore me to secrecy.”“

Lance spoke up. “I want to send the diary to Langley and see if they can recover more of those pages.”

“I think you should,” Ginny said. “I don’t think I can get any more of this particular incident.”

“Do you have an interpretation of all this, Ginny?” Stone asked.

“It sounds to me that there are four people involved: X, Y, Z and ESE. It sounds as though Z and ESE were persuaded to go to somebody’s house for drinks, then got drunk and Z threw up, and ESE got her out of there.”

“Z could be Janey Harris,” Stone said, “and X and Y could be Eben and Enos Stone.”

“Could be,” Ginny said,“ but there’s nothing here that I can read that identifies X and Y. It could be two other boys on the island or two other girls or even two men. Wouldn’t be the first time grown men tried to lead teenaged girls astray.”

“All right,” Stone said. “Here’s a theory: Labor Day is everybody’s last day on this island. When I spent that summer here, the day after Labor Day, everybody abandoned this place as if it were a sinking ship. By five in the afternoon, the island was practically deserted.”

“What’s your point?” Dino asked.

“Something happened to the girls while they were there- maybe they were raped-but Z, or Janey, swore Esme to secrecy, so she didn’t tell anybody, and the next day they left the island with their parents. Dick and Barbara took Esme back to London, and Janey went home to Boston with her parents.”

“Okay. Say you’re right, then what?” Dino asked.

“X and Y are the twins, and they went back to Yale for the fall semester. Neither of the girls told anyone. Maybe they talked on the phone and reinforced their secret that way. But somehow, Dick Stone learned what had happened. Maybe Esme’s mother read her diary.”

“Mothers will do that,” Ginny said. “Mine did.”

“So Dick is furious. On his way from London to Washington, Dick stops in Boston and confronts Caleb with this information. Maybe Caleb doesn’t believe it or believes it and refuses to do anything about it, so Dick, in a fit of pique, draws a new will disinheriting Caleb and, by extension, the twins, and sends the will to me.”

“Wait a minute,” Dino said. “Are you saying that the twins murdered Dick, Barbara, and Esme because they were disinherited?”

“No. What’s more important is that they didn’t know they were disinherited. They wouldn’t have known, because Caleb didn’t know until I told him.”

“So they killed the whole family thinking they would inherit Dick’s wife’s money? That seems like a stretch, Stone.”

“No, no, at least not directly. Esme had talked, or at least her parents had read her diary, so they were at risk for being sent to prison for two rapes.”

“So they killed both the girls, and Dick and Barbara were either collateral damage or killed because they knew about what happened. What about Don Brown?”

“Janey must have told him about the gapes, or at least Eben and Enos thought she did.”

“Well,” Dino said, “your theory covers most of what we know, but what about Caleb?”

“What about him?”

“If his boys raped these girls, then, according to your theory, he knew about it because Dick told him. Do you think he wouldn’t do anything about it?”

“I don’t think he would send his sons to jail for rape,” Stone said.

“How about five murders? Would he take exception to that?”

“It’s hard to imagine he would,” Stone said, “but maybe he didn’t know the boys were connected to the murders or at least was in denial about them.”

“Then there are the other two women or the island who were murdered,” Dino said.

“Right,” Stone said, “and four more in New Haven.”

“Christ,” Ham said suddenly. “That just doesn’t sound possible. If your theory is right, then these boys from a nice Boston family have murdered, what, eleven people?”

“Ham,” Stone said, “when you learn about serial killers on television or in the newspapers, what do people who knew them say after the fact?”

Ham nodded. “That they were nice boys.”

The doorbell rang, and Stone let in Sergeant Young.

“I just had a call from Nantucket,” he said. “The Stone twins didn’t sail on the yacht when it left this morning, but two young men answering their description left Nantucket airport yesterday afternoon in a light airplane, some sort of Cessna.”

“You’d better take a seat, Tom,” Stone said. “We have some things to tell you.”

CALEB STONE GOT INTO the big Boston Whaler tied up at his dock, started the engine and motored slowly out to open water, then he increased power and headed for the southern end of the island. Once clear of the island he turned for Camden and increased his speed to thirty. It was a sparkling clear day, and the water was flat.