A Man Overboard Read online

  He frowned. “Kind of odd that she would want to make the note seem more authentic than she had to.”

  Jack’s mouth was already open in response, but it ultimately fell shut without anything to say. Why the hell would she mention the cancer? The men wouldn’t have known about it so why make the note that much more convincing by revealing an unknown truth? And why would the men who had gone through the trouble of planning the thing even leave their cover story up to her imagination? None of it made sense. “Maybe she knew she was about to die, and this was her way of saying goodbye…” But it didn’t seem like something Stacey would do, though he’d never witnessed her in such a situation before.

  “You think these men came into your suite, took your wife out of the bedroom, and then came back for you?”

  The agent was right. There’s no way that Stacey would have sat there next to the bed he was sleeping in while constructing a carefully concocted suicide note for three intruders who were going to kill her anyway. She would have screamed. Would have fought. No, if they threw her overboard, it had to have been after they tossed him, not before.

  Johnson asked, “Do you have her cell phone? I’d like to see that text message she got.”

  “No. I don’t know where it is. I was just looking for it myself, hoping her mother left a message letting her know where she took Joseph.”

  “You don’t know where your son is?”

  Jack raised his arms, defenseless against the question. “We weren’t supposed to be back for another ten days. The neighbor saw them loading up her car with luggage the other day… I can’t get a hold of them on the phone. I guess I’ll drive over to her house after you leave. Maybe she just took him there.”

  Walking back to the mantle, Johnson touched the wedding photo Jack had been staring at. “How long have you been married?”

  “Five years.”

  “How long did you know each other beforehand?”

  “Not long at all, actually.”

  “What’s your mother-in-law’s name?” He left the picture.

  “Viktoriya Arsov.”

  “Russian.”

  “Yeah.”

  The agent looked out the window. “She been here long?”

  “In the northeast? As long as I’ve known her.”

  “Which hasn’t been that long.”

  Jack was confused by this sudden string of questions. “I don’t understand how that’s relevant.”

  “Like I said, at this point I have no idea what is and isn’t relevant. Do you mind if I pull your phone records, to see where that text came from?”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “Email?”

  The Jerry in him was starting to tingle. Glancing at his books, he tried smiling. “Don’t you think you’re monitoring them already?”

  “I doubt you made the cut,” he quipped. “Go check your mother-in-law’s house. In the meantime, I’ll see if I can get the security tapes from the ship before they erase them.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate your help. I didn’t know where else to go.”

  Johnson nodded his head toward the books, and Jack figured he’d had his eye on the one about the FBI setting up the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. But that was something that had been reported by the New York Times and Dan Rather and was a matter of public record now that the transcripts between Emad Salem and his FBI handlers were out of the bag. “Guess we’re not all that bad after all,” Johnson said.

  Jack forced a humble smile. “No, not all of you.” He walked him to the door.

  Before stepping outside, Johnson looked him in the eyes. “Listen,” he said. “I may be way out of line by saying this, but I think I’d want to hear it if I were in your shoes.”

  “What?”

  “From everything you just told me, there is no actual evidence to suggest that your wife is dead.”

  That stunned him. “They searched the whole ship…”

  “Security and the Nassau police? Doubt it.”

  Unbelief and a flare of hope flickered in Jack’s chest.

  Recognizing it, Johnson held up his hand. “Don’t go jumping for joy. I just don’t want to see you do anything stupid. Also, you should be careful what you tell your son. Give me some time before you write her off, okay?” He handed him his business card. “You don’t know anything yet.”

  All Jack could do was nod and accept the information.

  After the FBI pulled away from his house, Jack closed the door and leaned his back against it. Sliding to a sitting position, he hugged his knees to his chest. He wept there for fifteen minutes, the arctic terrain inside melting away and returning to an emotional jungle full of life and pain. When he finally wiped the last tear from his eye, he got up and headed out the door. He was pretty certain that he wouldn’t find Viktoriya or Joseph at her house, but he didn’t know where else to look.

  He made sure to lock the door behind him.

  12

  The sun was nowhere to be seen, and only the faint afterglow of twilight was left to illuminate the skies over Viktoriya’s home some twenty-five minutes away. Jack pulled the Sonata into her driveway, the headlights reaching out in front of the car and sweeping over the small house before settling on the white garage doors at the top of the asphalt stretch. He turned the ignition off and got out of the car, studying the property for a few seconds. Nothing seemed out of place, but as he walked to the front, he knew that the house was entirely too dark for anyone awake to be there. He rang the doorbell.

  No answer.

  He skirted around the house, careful to avoid short rows of bushes and flowers before coming to the green chain-link fence separating the front yard from the back. Flipping the latch, he quickly went to the patio and tried the back door. Figures she locks her own door. He didn’t know of any hidden key kept under a gnome or a doormat and looking around, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. The patio was clear, not a single thing on it capable of hiding a key. He wondered when she’d gotten rid of the outdoor furniture and the plastic flamingos. But peering through the window, not entirely unaware of how his behavior might appear to watching neighbors, he was confronted by yet another mystery.

  What in the…

  The living room was empty. And not empty as in no one was in it, but empty like…empty.

  Throwing aside all reservation, he kicked the glass window above the doorknob, cracking the pane into big diagonal pieces that shattered when they hit the patio. There was nothing more recognizable than the sound of breaking glass, whether a bottle, a window, or a windshield, and any neighbor that heard the noise would ID it for sure. But he was beyond caring. Though an encounter with the police and the time it would take to explain things wouldn’t help his mood any.

  Reaching through the broken glass, he unlocked the door from the other side. When he pulled the door open, more pieces of glass fell out of the window frame and exploded at his feet. A dog barked a few houses down.

  “Viktoriya? Joseph?” he called out, stepping into the kitchen. It was completely empty, the cabinets all open and displaying nothing but vacant shelves. The humming of the refrigerator was the only indication of…anything. The stove wasn’t plugged in, its digital clock blank. There were no other clocks, calendars, pictures, or measuring cups on the wall, no droplets of water trickling lazily from the faucet positioned beneath a now curtainless window. No trashcan, coffee pot, microwave, toaster, paper towels, napkins, hand or dish soap. He opened the freezer. No ice cube trays. She was gone for sure. When the ice cube trays were missing, no one was coming back. But the refrigerator was still running. Why unplug the stove and not the fridge? He knew that it was recommended the appliance be left plugged in up to three weeks even without use, so was she planning on returning? Or maybe unplugging the fridge just hadn’t occurred to her. Or whoever she got to clear the place. It was obvious she hadn’t moved herself out. After all, she was too old to even run.

  He went to the sink and ran his finger underneath the faucet, feeling for
any trace of water. It was dry. He turned both knobs on full and was rewarded with nothing. The water was shut off.

  Walking quickly through the rest of the house, worry finally began to set in. It was hard to avoid thinking that his mother-in-law’s abandoned house was somehow related to the masked men on the cruise ship, if only because both were unexplainable and had touched his life within a few days of each other. It didn’t feel like a coincidence, and his failure to make contact with the rest of his family became all the more unsettling.

  He left the house, completely unsure of what to do next, and walked to his car. This time, he skirted the other side of the property, following the garage around to the driveway. As he came to the corner of the garage, where the white stucco met the blacktop in front and grass on the side, he found a couple of signs leaning against the wall. There were only a few things they could be: a political endorsement (which Viktoriya would never allow), credit for some kind of service done on her property, or…

  He picked one up and turned it over, coming face to face with the big, bold letters.

  FOR SALE BY OWNER.

  Jack’s sense of the world continued to dive in an irrecoverable tailspin, and he wondered how long the dream would play out, what ludicrous scene the infamous Sandman could have lined up for him next. He double-checked the address on the mailbox just to make sure he had broken into the right house.

  An insatiable need to find Joseph exploded in his chest, filling him with a suffocating panic he had no way of repelling.

  13

  As twilight handed the sky over to night, Jack sat behind the wheel, two hands handling it so as to keep the car between the solid white lines—though barely conscious of the effort it took to do so. His mind was elsewhere, the nonsensical puzzle pieces of the last few days arguing on behalf of more eccentric theories that might, perhaps, better explain the recent changes in his life.

  One of them was the “dream theory.” Dream Theory insisted he was still asleep, either still on the cruise ship with Stacey naked beside him or even so far back as the night before they left for Miami, everything about the trip a dream. The problem with that theory, however, was that it disappeared into a sea of subjectivity so unsteady that there was no real way to tell how much of his past could be part of the dream. Maybe his whole marriage had been a concoction mixed by REM sleep. Maybe he was still in college, and this Stacey girl didn’t even exist outside of his imagination…a drug-induced coma after an accident he couldn’t remember, or a head injury from a falling air-conditioning unit sustained during his walk to work. Maybe his entire life was a dream, and like so many science-fiction stories, he was actually hooked up to machines that were filling his mind with a false reality while harvesting his natural energy for the psychic aliens now ruling earth. Or maybe Mr. Sandman had grown bored of bestowing pleasant dreams on children and had ventured into a new market of darkness that now exploited adults. For Hans Christian Anderson’s 1841 portrayal of the folk tale—Ole-Luk-Oie sprinkling magic dust on children’s eyes to either give them pleasant dreams for good behavior or no dreams for bad behavior—was a far cry from this torment. Though E.T.A. Hoffman’s darker, 1816 portrayal of the Sandman might be worth consideration.

  And yet it was Ole-Luk-Oie—who actually turned out to be Morpheus, the Greek dream god—that helped transition from the “dream theory” to another one, a piece of text stepping forth from one of memory’s forgotten cells.

  I will show you my brother. He is also called Ole-Luk-Oie but he never visits anyone but once, and when he does come, he takes him away on his horse, and tells him stories as they ride along. He knows only two stories.

  One of these is so wonderfully beautiful, that no one in the world can imagine anything at all like it; but the other is just as ugly and frightful, so that it would be impossible to describe it…

  There now, you can see my brother, the other Ole-Luk-Oie; he is also called Death.

  That Jack could reel any of the words out from the sediment lying at the bottom of whatever lost brain lake they’d settled in gave him pause. It didn’t seem plausible that that should have happened, and it made him pause at theory number two—the theory that Sandman’s brother was suggesting. The one lobbing his mind back and forth like it was a birdie fluttering over the net of truth. The one that proclaimed he had never been rescued from the ocean. That no hand ever did reach down into the dark waters to grasp his hand at the last possible second.

  That he was dead.

  But (as he surely couldn’t be in heaven) the concept of this being some kind of in-between, a testing ground for his soul or some sort of readiness exercise meant to prepare him for passage through the Pearly Gates, was also a theory with no practical use. If this was a supernal experience only, then the Joseph he was looking for didn’t exist and neither did the wife he was mourning. Nothing was real at all. And if this wasn’t real, if this wasn’t a physical reality taking place on an objective plane of existence with true ramifications to be applied across actual time and space…then forget it. He’d just kill himself and save the misery of failing whatever test some pantheistic non-being called “Everything” had somehow and for some reason conjured up to amuse its unconscious self.

  He needed a drink before his mind slipped down the hill of sanity and plunged headlong into this philosophic migraine. He’d gone there before and understood why some scientists reportedly killed themselves in the face of certain revelations, revelations concerning the very essence of existence, and he had no intention of returning to that padded room now. It was too much for the mind of the creature to grasp the methods and the world of the creator, reality itself a black hole full of infinite questions. Scientists learning of more and more dimensions, so-called “dark matter” comprising 97% of the universe, quantum physics, string theory…

  Jack shook his head and, with great effort, pushed all the madness out of his mind with one mental stroke.

  “Jesus Christ. Get a grip.”

  Jesus Christ. And suddenly, he knew why people like his wife chose to believe in nothing. It was easier to avoid the chaos, both philosophically and ethically. But such a belief system would lead him right back to the same irrational theories advising him that nothing was real, that it was all some scam, a random, meaningless mistake. There was no soul, no spirit, just the here and now and nothing forever. Love a chemical reaction in the brain, truth, beauty, and joy cruel fantasies produced by natural selection meant only to prolong the human species for…something. Shit. That was more depressing than the “why” and “how” questions.

  Stop!

  He smacked himself in the face, trying to stabilize the pillars of his own sanity. And in an instant, his world focused, the ivory towers of endless conjecture turning to sand and blowing away, the house that lay beyond the windshield—his house—the anchor keeping his mind from dissolving with them. He was back in his own driveway.

  A drink. Now. Before I lose my freakin’ marbles.

  He knew that getting smashed wouldn’t help find Joseph, but neither would winding up in a padded room, drooling all over himself for the rest of his life.

  He shut the engine off, and the headlights fell away. Taking the key from the ignition, he pushed the door open and stepped out. Standing there in the darkness, he studied his environment. Felt the cool night air glide through his hair. Smelled the freshly cut grass of nearby lawns. Listened to the strange cricket symphony. Watched fireflies blink yellow in the neighbor’s yard. And in all of it, the reception of the perceived authenticity never wavered. Never gave way to a watery static as alien dream-gods tried better adjusting antenna REM. There were no giant arthropods crawling up the sides of the chimney, no deep-sea fish from hell swimming through the yard—though he did double-check to make certain they were fireflies blinking around him and not the glowing photophores of demon anglers.

  Satisfied for now that he wasn’t actually an undead prisoner to the ocean’s floor, he continued to the house. But when he went to p
ut the key into the keyhole, the door pushed open. Again. Only this time, he knew that he’d locked it.

  He stepped back carefully. There was no car in the driveway, but he found a black, unmarked van with tinted windows parked in the street six doors away. His pulse quickened.

  A noise came from inside.

  Being the Jerry that he was, mentally prepared to survive anything from Martial Law to the super-virus that would wipe out mankind, he slipped his shoes off, leaving them on the porch as he eased the door open. Once inside, he silently shut it behind him.

  The smell of kerosene hit him at once.

  Kerosene? He thought of the kerosene heater he kept in the garage. But what would someone in a dark van parked halfway down the street want with his kerosene heater? If the person wanted to burn down his house, he’d be much better off using the gasoline in the garage rather than kerosene. But, though he knew that kerosene (which was used instead of gasoline as jet fuel because of its safer flash point) could never be hot enough to melt a hundred and ten stories of steel and concrete in fifty-six minutes, he no doubt believed that it could burn down his house. Just not as effectively and quickly as gasoline.

  As he tiptoed toward the stairs, he saw through the living room and noticed the interior door to the garage standing open in the kitchen. He raced up the stairs, silent in his socks, his heart thumping in his chest. Entering the bedroom, he ran to his closet and pulled a gun case from a shelf stacked with independent newspapers. Fumbling with the number lock, sweat began beading across his forehead. He finally got it open, grabbed the 9mm Smith & Wesson out of the foam padding, and rammed home the seventeen-round clip that he’d previously filled with hollow points. He moved the slide back and let go, the familiar sound of the first round being chambered startling him. This wasn’t the shooting range.