Autumn Dreams (24 page)

“It won’t get there until Monday,” the clerk said. “Tomorrow’s Sunday.”

“Exactly when I need it,” he said, paying cash. As he waited for his change, he brushed the bushy mustache he wore glued to his lip.

He didn’t use his own name for his ticket purchase. He’d lifted the license and a credit card from the wallet of the guy in front of him at the bar in a dark, crowded taproom last night. The guy had been about his height
and coloring, so his license picture matched Tuck’s appearance well enough, and he was drunk as a skunk, feeling no pain. Bump, lift, slip out the license and card, bump, replace. The guy would be none the wiser until it was too late to do anything about it. Tuck repeated the action at another dreary, dark bar, stealing another identity.

Again considering security, Sunday he brought nothing suspicious with him on his cross-country trip, just a backpack full of a pair of jeans, a sweatshirt, a heavy rugby shirt, and three changes of underwear. He wore a heavy jacket over his sweater and jeans and carried a paperback he lifted from Hank’s library, a murder mystery. He loved the private joke of it.

When he boarded his plane at the crack of dawn, he held out Ken Whalin’s license and the ticket in Ken Whalin’s name. The attendant smiled and passed him through. As he walked down the jet way, Tuck smirked. Served Ken Whalin right, wherever he was. Such identity theft was exactly why they told you not to put your wallet in your back pocket, especially in a crowd.

Tuck landed at Philadelphia International Airport with no trouble. The parents thought he was on a short vacation trip to Hawaii, and so did everyone at the office. He expected no one to call to check on him. He smiled. No one cared enough. As he passed a trash receptacle, he tossed Ken’s IDs and his return tickets inside.

At the airport car rental counter Tuck showed the second license and the MasterCard belonging to a Carl Filbert. He couldn’t imagine what it was like for Carl to face the world named after a nut. Carl’s IDs went into the trash container in the men’s room. He’d steal a new identity for his trip home, even though it meant buying another round-trip air ticket. What was another ticket to a millionaire?

He left the airport and pulled into the first motel he found. Bushy mustache firmly in place, he walked up to the counter.

“Hey,” he said, just like he’d talked with the girl in the navy blazer before. “Can I borrow a phone directory for a minute? I need to look up an address, and I hate to go back to my room.”

She passed the thick city directory to him and he found what he wanted, a costume rental business whose ad said it was open seven days a week and which his map indicated wasn’t too far
from the airport. With a smile he handed the directory back and drove to the shop where he purchased some props with cash.

Driving down the Atlantic City Expressway, he went over his plans. First, he needed to find out who was calling. If by some fluke it was Sherri, still alive and kicking, part two of his plan would kick in: Deal with her.

He grinned as he swung south onto the Garden State Parkway not far from Atlantic City. He had his own version of the final solution in mind, though he’d need to make another purchase to carry it out. He’d been unwilling to mail bullets, and he certainly couldn’t carry them onto a plane these days, so he needed to buy some. No biggie.

If it wasn’t Sherri calling but some lunatic, he’d leave whoever it was to it. She could call to her heart’s content. If the pressure made Patsi lose what little mind she had left, so what? She wasn’t his worry. The two million was.

Tuck drove over the Ninth Street Causeway and into Seaside. He couldn’t say he was impressed. The island was all stores, restaurants, and houses from what he could see as he searched for SeaSong. He took it on faith that there was probably a beach out there somewhere, and if he had time, he’d search it out. He liked to watch the ocean. It reminded him of himself, all motion and hidden depths.

There it was. The SeaSong. He pulled to the side of the road a block past the big, old Victorian, then strolled back to study it. He wasn’t worried about Sherri recognizing him. He was wearing his fake mustache and a baseball cap with a wig attached that gave him a ponytail, just one of the new props he’d gotten at the costume store. Besides, the last person she expected to see in New Jersey was Tucker Best.

There were lots of lights on in the house. Even in the dark Tuck could tell it was a first-class operation. How was Sherri able to pay for staying there? He knew for a fact that she hadn’t used any of her credit cards. Nor had she withdrawn anything from her rather substantial bank accounts. Hank had always been generous with her, and she never seemed to spend it all, something he never understood. Money was for spending. But she hadn’t touched any of her money for the whole year. That was one of the major reasons the authorities thought she was probably dead.

It never failed to amaze him how thoroughly she had disappeared along with that boyfriend of hers, Kevin Grayson. Not a trace! The police had searched for days all over California and found nothing, nada, zip. False sightings had Sherri and Kevin in Las Vegas for a quickie wedding, in Yellowstone camping, up in the San Juan Islands boating. Someone even reported seeing them on a Caribbean cruise. All leads petered out. Sherri and Kevin had vanished as completely as the dodo and the passenger pigeon.

Tuck had always believed they were dead because he didn’t think either she or Kevin was smart enough to pull off so clever and complete a disappearance. Besides, why would they disappear of their own free will? It made no sense.

When they vanished more than a year ago, Tuck was as surprised as everyone. When the police began their questioning, he was more than relieved to have an airtight alibi. He had been in Chicago with three others from the Best Electronics sales team. His every hour was accounted for, even the hours he was alone in his room because of the X-rated videos he rented when he had trouble sleeping.

Kevin’s car had been found abandoned in downtown L.A., its motor cold, his and Sherri’s school papers in a mess on the backseat, their laptops and other personal paraphernalia gone. Immediately everyone thought abduction and ransom. After all, Granddad Cal and Hank were wealthy men. The police as well as the family waited for the ransom call, but none came. When the search finally sputtered to a halt, Tuck thought murder.

Only Patsi kept hanging on to the hope that Sherri and Kevin were alive. Wouldn’t it be ironic if basket case Patsi was right?

Tuck walked back to his car from the SeaSong. He’d come back tomorrow when he could see. He drove absently around the island for a while. He entered an area called the Gardens, if the sign was to be believed. Here the houses seemed less like B&Bs or boarding houses but more like single homes. The lawns were still small, but they were nicely landscaped and tended.

He pulled to a stop when the road ended at what was obviously the beach. He climbed out of the car and walked along a narrow path between a couple of sand dunes. In the light of a quarter moon he saw the black water, the waves limned in white
foam. In the distance the lights of a city—Atlantic City?—shone in the dark.

Smiling, he walked to the ocean’s edge. He let the roar of the water fill his ears and the scent of the sea his nostrils. A brisk wind tugged at his baseball cap, pulling it askew. He tugged it down lower on his head. The last thing he wanted was for the hat and the attached ponytail to go blowing across the beach, even if there was no one to see.

He took several deep breaths to let the crisp sea air cleanse the L.A. pollution from his lungs. When he settled on his Caribbean island, he’d never again have to worry about smog and its effects on his body.

He glanced over his shoulder and jumped when he realized he wasn’t alone. A guy with a white ponytail was swinging a metal detector over the sand, but his eyes weren’t watching the machine. They were watching Tuck.

Nonchalance. That was the key.

He walked to the man. “Hi. I’m Ken Whalin. What are you doing?”

D
AN
WATCHED JENN
in amazement in the aftermath of her disastrous date, at least disastrous to her. Never having been around a teenaged girl who felt herself wronged, to say nothing of deeply embarrassed, he couldn’t believe her ability to hold a grudge. She stormed to bed on Saturday night without a word to anyone, face set, fists clenched, hurt and resentment pouring off her in waves. Then he watched on Sunday morning, fascinated, as she deliberately turned her back on Jared when he entered the kitchen.

“Imagine my surprise when I learned that a double date wasn’t four people but five,” she said to the room at large as she poured herself a glass of orange juice. She then pointedly returned the juice to the refrigerator when Jared reached to take it from her.

Jared just rolled his eyes and got out the juice again.

“What can a person say when her own brother plots to ruin her life?” she asked as she locked the doors to the backseat of Dan’s car so Jared couldn’t sit next to her on the way to church.

Jared just smirked and moved to the front seat, forcing Cass into the back, much to Dan’s displeasure.

“I don’t think it’s too much to ask that a girl have a nice evening with her date without unwanted company tagging along, do you?” she asked the cousins quite loudly at dinner after church.

The cousins all laughed and spread their sympathy along sexist lines, the boys sitting at a table apart from the girls, the girls leaning in and whispering who knew what calumnies about men in general and Jared and Paulie in particular.

It was a relief to Dan to escape to his room when they returned home. He refused to consider that it might also be cowardly. After all, Cass had given her blessing to his retreat.

“Go upstairs,” she’d said, resting a hand on his arm, the golden chain with its butterfly and key shining on her wrist. “There’s no reason you should have to put up with her moods. After all, you’re our guest.”

He realized as he booted up his laptop that he was getting to hate that line of Cass’s. Surely he was more than a guest, wasn’t he? He’d sat up with Cass last night waiting for the kids to come home, not that it had been a hardship. None of the other guests sat with them.

Feeling disgruntled, he checked his e-mail more for something to do than because he expected to find anything in particular. The amount of daily electronic correspondence had shrunk drastically when people realized he was serious about closing the Harmon Group. Conducting due diligence to determine companies that would make good financial risks had been the sole mutual concern of Dan and his clients. If he couldn’t talk business with them, what could he talk about? Nothing. He had learned over the past year or so how few friends he actually had.

A message from Andy captured his attention. He smiled. For the past couple of weeks, ever since the day he’d opened that portfolio for Andy, he and his brother had been writing frequently. Not that Andy knew about the money set aside for him and his kids. Rather, it was that Dan had taken the time to respond to his brother’s e-mails promptly. In return Andy had answered quickly too, and suddenly they were talking more than they had since they lived under the same roof as kids.

Dan knew the emotional distance that had developed between him and Andy over the years was his fault, unintentional as it had been. He’d been too busy, too preoccupied with business, too obsessed with making the Harmon Group the best on the Street for there to have been time for something as mundane as writing his brother.

Just another sign that the problems in his life were relational. Just in case he was too dense to figure it out by himself, God had set Cass in his life. She threw his failings into sharp relief with her love and concern for her family, a family that didn’t appreciate her nearly as much as they should, in his opinion. A family that took her for granted. Yet her love never faltered. Her involvement never lessened.

In that moment he understood what a great gift it would be to be loved by Cass Merton. She would be constant, her love never wavering, her commitment absolute. He also understood that he, selfish and self-absorbed as he’d been, didn’t deserve her love. Not that her family did either, but they were family. That relationship alone was enough to warrant her affection. He was nothing but a rudderless, former due diligence whiz, an unemployed vet.

The phrase made him think of her, and he couldn’t help but smile. She was something else. Warmed by thoughts of her, he turned to Andy’s e-mail.