In-Laws and Outlaws (16 page)

That was the moment Joel chose to come charging in through the deck doors proclaiming that he was dying of starvation and what did we plan on doing about it? He was wearing shorts and a tee shirt that said
To hell with the prime directive; let's kill something
.

Elinor nodded approval at the semicolon and told him to help himself. When Joel had disappeared in the direction of the kitchen, she laughed and said, “Why is it all fifteen-year-olds are such whirlwinds? Well, back to business. Nancy, we'll need the standard recommendation form for the board. Then a polite-regrets letter for the Organization for the Advancement of Street People.”

Notifying the foundation's board of directors was only a formality; the members had been chosen for their willingness to rubberstamp Elinor's decisions. She and Nancy moved on to the next petitioner, and I started looking for a tactful way to escape.

Joel came back in chewing on a sandwich and announced, “Tom's here.”

Tom Henry followed his nephew in and raised his eyebrows when he saw me. “Gillian! You're helping distribute alms to the worthy?”

“Just sitting in for a moment,” I said, standing up.

“Hello, Tom,” Nancy said in a tiny voice.

“Tom, I'm glad you're here,” Elinor said. “Gillian wants to go back to Chicago tomorrow—you must talk her out of it.”

Both Tom and Joel said
Oh no
and started listing reasons why I shouldn't go. I half listened to them and half watched Nancy. She was gazing at Tom with a tentative smile on her lips and a glow in her eyes that gave away much too much of what she was feeling. Tom spoke to her courteously but distantly. He had to know, it was so obvious.

“So you see, you
can't
go,” Joel announced firmly, and brought me back from speculating about Nancy.

I moved toward the deck doors. “Elinor and Nancy have work to do.”

“Right,” said Tom. “Come on, Joel, we'll work on her outside.”

“Goodbye, Tom,” Nancy said faintly.

It wasn't until we were on the steps down to the beach that it hit me. Elinor excuses herself from the room and five minutes later Tom Henry shows up. Just like that.

She'd called him. She'd called him, to come over to the house … and do what?

11

Joel got it into his head that another hour or two of windsurfing would make me change my mind about going back to Chicago. Tom went with him to set up the boards; I wanted a word with Oscar first.

Uncle Congressman Oscar Ferguson was basking in the sun on the beach and still talking on a phone—using his politician's voice, I noticed. I sat down on the sand next to him and waited until he'd finished charming whomever he was talking to. He wound up his call and pushed the antenna down. “Well, Gillian. Glorious day, isn't it?”

“It is indeed. A good day to declare your candidacy.” I grinned at him. “Congratulations.”

“Why, thank you. But that won't be until tomorrow.”

“If you're thinking about the family conference, that's going to be tonight. My fault, I'm afraid. I may be going back to Chicago tomorrow.”

He shot me a look. “Oh, I hope not. You just got here.”

“Business.”

“Can't be taken care of by phone?”

I shrugged. “How do you plan to announce your candidacy? Press conference? In a speech you're scheduled to give somewhere?”

Oscar smiled. “The word is ‘address'—politicians don't make speeches, we deliver addresses. As to when and where, that's one of the things we'll have to decide tonight.”

“Then it's settled you're going ahead with it?”

“Pretty much. About time, too.”

I drew a picture of a sailboat in the sand. “I was wondering about that. I'd have thought you'd have made your move long before this.”

Oscar shifted his weight in his beach chair before answering. “I was on the verge of declaring my candidacy once before—about four years ago. We'd talked it over and were all ready to go.” He stopped talking and pressed his lips together.

“What happened?” I knew Connie's version; I didn't know if it was right.

He made a rumbling noise, not quite a sigh. “Theo happened. The kidnapping and the murder … they pushed everything else aside. Declaring then was unthinkable.”

Atrocious timing; of course he couldn't announce he was running for the Senate while all that was going on. “But later?”

“Even a year later people were still talking about it. We were afraid if I announced then, I'd be regarded as exploiting my nephew's death to gain public sympathy. And a year after that, a lot of my support had slipped away. There's no such thing as a lifetime commitment in politics. So I had to start rebuilding.”

Theo, Theo—even now his death was affecting this family. “Oscar, I want you to tell me the truth. Do you think the people who killed Theo are the ones who're responsible for what's been happening this year?”

“No.”

“You said that awfully fast.”

“No.”

“But what makes you so sure?”

He lifted his sunglasses and stared at me. “I
know
they're not responsible. Because they're dead, Gillian. All three of them.”

That astounded me so, I had to ask Oscar to repeat part of what he said next. It seemed that the three men who killed Theo were nothing more than sadistic, second-rate criminals. They were Lebanese—at least two of them were; there was some question about the third. But they'd been trained somewhat in the ways of terrorism, and had in fact been expelled from one of the more “respectable” terrorist groups—good god!—for unreliability and lack of discipline.

“How do you know all this?” I asked.

“CIA investigation.”

“CIA? How'd they get involved?”

“I called them,” Oscar said simply.

So after being expelled, the three pseudo-terrorists had decided to strike out on their own. They made up a name for themselves, the People's Alliance for Justice, and proceeded to work an extortion racket on whatever Europeans they could convince that the PAJ was a large organization for which they three were only the contact men. Their victims were small merchants, mostly, people without the resources or the connections to fight back. The three political terrorists manqués proceeded to kill and dismember two men who'd resisted, as an object lesson, obstensibly; the CIA thought it more likely they simply enjoyed their work. One of the two who'd been killed was the owner of a small fleet of fishing boats, a Norwegian.

That's what had brought the three Lebanese (one questionable) to Norway, where the presence of the rich American infidel Raymond Decker gave them the idea of trying their hand at kidnapping. The CIA had no hard evidence that these three had killed Theo, at least no evidence the authorities in Norway would recognize; but there was no question in the American agents' minds that those particular men were responsible, and those three alone. Maybe the three of them thought they'd be welcomed back by the terrorist organization that had expelled them if they could demonstrate, once again, the helplessness of the American government in the face of foreign harassment; the CIA had turned up some slight evidence to that effect.

Or, maybe they just wanted the money.

Whichever it was, the CIA reported to Oscar that the three didn't get to enjoy the ransom money they'd extorted from Raymond. The car they were driving south through France went over a cliff; all three men were killed instantly, a convenient and timely solution to an otherwise insoluble problem. Oscar said the CIA had not exactly been forthcoming with the details.

I shivered in the sunshine; it was a cold story Oscar had told me. “The
Globe
said Theo's killers were never caught.”

“Well, they weren't. Three Levantines die in a driving accident in France. Taken at face value, there's nothing to connect that with Theo's murder.”

I shivered again. “Do you think the CIA …?”

Oscar slowly levered himself out of his beach chair and stretched his arms over his head. “I don't know, Gillian. And I don't think we want to know. But those three men never even got their names in the European papers. To the faithful, that's even worse than going to meet Muhammad wrapped in a pigskin.”

I stood up and brushed the sand off my backside. “How much was the ransom?”

“Some outrageous sum. Twenty million, I think.”

“Twenty million!”

“They had something to prove, you see. Maybe they thought they could buy their way back into that group, the United Armies of the Prophet or whatever the hell they called themselves. It might have worked, too.”

“What happened to the money?”

“The CIA recovered most of it. The rest … who knows? Gillian, it's over and done with now. Don't dwell on it, and for god's sake don't start talking about it to Connie.”

“Don't worry, I won't.”

“I have to go in before I start looking like a lobster. Are you all right?”

I was sick to my stomach, angry, dizzy, and frustrated. “I'm fine.”

“Look, there's Joel—I think he wants you to go windsurfing.”

The windsurfing was a bust. I couldn't concentrate on what I was doing, my head was so full of images of the CIA tracking down those three men who'd killed Theo and … doing what? Raymond's millions hadn't been able to save his son. The money didn't matter when put in balance against a life; but it seemed pretty clear that no powerful, well-organized terrorist group was behind the three kidnappers/killers and was now out for revenge against surviving Deckers.

The board and sail I was struggling to control seemed slippier and less manageable than the other time I'd tried Joel's favorite water game. What had been so exhilarating my first time out was now just plain rocky and precarious and a little bit scary. When I got dumped into the water for the third time, I gave up. I dragged myself and the board up onto the beach where Tom stood watching.

He wasn't alone. Elinor must have released Nancy Younger from her chores, for there she stood talking animatedly to Tom in her little-girl voice. Tom looked
very
glad to see me and ran to help with my board. Any other time I would have found that funny.

“What happened?” he wanted to know as I wrung the water out of my hair.

“Oh, just couldn't get going. Joel's going to give me an
F
for today.”

“I thought you did very well,” Nancy whispered generously. “Joel's coming in too.”

I watched my nephew making his graceful approach to the beach, thinking again of how vulnerable he was out there on the water. He hopped off his board, lowered the sail, and shook his head at me sadly. “Not good, Aunt Gillian. You weren't concentrating.”

“I know. I had something on my mind.”

“But you don't feel beaten, do you?
Do you?
” He repeated it so insistently that I hastened to assure him no indeed I was not discouraged. “You have to expect a setback or two,” he said. “You're making a good go, Aunt Gillian, honest. Now Tom here—he's too chicken even to try.”

“Am not,” Tom said in mock indignation. “It's just that I prefer sitting down when I'm handling a sail.”

“Uh-huh,” said Joel.

Nancy spoke up, as much as Nancy ever spoke up. “I was telling Tom about a restaurant in Vineyard Haven that's under new management. It's really a first-rate place to eat now. Really.”

Tom took a deep breath and said, “Yes, it sounds good. What do you say, Gillian? Want to give it a try? We'll have time for a bite before the conference tonight.”

I saw the look of disappointment on Nancy's face and thought Tom could have found a more subtle way of rejecting her. “I don't know, Tom. Connie—”

“Is eating at our place tonight,” Joel interposed. “I heard Mom talking to her on the phone. You go ahead with Tom—I'll tell 'em where you are.”

“That's settled, then,” Tom said with ill-concealed relief. “Come on—I'll wait for you while you get dried off and change. Ah, Nancy? Excuse us, please? See you tomorrow, probably.” He grabbed my elbow and steered me in the direction of Connie's house at an unnecessarily hasty pace. Joel trotted along with us.

I waited until we were out of the range of Nancy's hearing and said, “That was unkind, Tom.”

He groaned while Joel laughed. “You don't know the background, Aunt Gillian,” the latter said. “Nancy's had the hots for Tom for the last year—”

“Joel,” Tom said in a tone of reprimand.

“Well, she has! She sighs and goes all dewey-eyed every time he walks into a room.” Tom rolled his eyes. “It's been like that for a long time. Everybody thinks it's a riot.”

I wondered how funny Annette had found it.

“Nancy just doesn't take hints,” Tom explained. “She's a nice girl, but she lives in a restricted world. I don't think she sees many people other than Deckers.”

“Fate worse than death,” Joel agreed cheerfully.

Maybe so, but still … “I don't like being used, Tom.”

Tom groaned again. “Not my day, is it? I wasn't using you, Gillian. I was going to suggest we go out for a bite anyway. Nancy's talk about the restaurant just provided an opening.”

I shrugged and changed the subject. “Joel, your folks told me you had a bodyguard for a while. What happened to him?”

“Them. Three of them, worked eight-hour shifts. It was just impossible, Aunt Gillian. They stuck to me like glue, even followed me to the John at school! Everybody was avoiding me … you'd think I had the plague or something. It was lousy, really lousy, all the time they were there. Mom and Dad finally let them go.”

“When were they let go?”

“When? I dunno, I don't remember.”

“Before Raymond was killed or after?”

“I said I don't remember.” Impatient tone. “Tom, do you remember?”