Always Love a Villain on San Juan Island Read online

  So their talks had been about business, with no space for the personal. All further exchanges about her plans or hopes or intentions had stayed out of the conversations. But soon, together, it was bound to come up. The thing itself was simple enough, not so much as skin off the back of his hand. Since she’d developed a morbid fear of growing too old too quickly, she’d decided the time had come. She wanted his sperm. Not given to her as a lover, but donated nonetheless. Was she still as determined to have a child? She’d promised she’d consider other options. But she said she deeply doubted anyone could match her first choice—him.

  So many things wrong with it. First the pragmatic—if Kyra had a child, what would it do to Islands Investigations International? They had an excellent working relationship and a darn good success record. Why take a chance on ruining that with a baby always around? And even before a baby came, she’d be carrying it—a great extra burden on, for example, a stakeout, and a seven-month pregnant woman stalking any situation would be anything but invisible.

  But that wasn’t the worst. Supposing a baby did appear as the result of this crazy idea, then what? Kyra as a stay-at-home mom? Noel couldn’t see it. A live-in nanny? Too expensive. Join some single-mothers cooperative? Drive her crazy, bunch of little kids around her ankles. And Noel would not be taking any part in raising a kid; that was crystalline in its clarity.

  Which would make it even worse, knowing that somewhere he had a son or daughter carrying his genes. He couldn’t handle this as a notion, let alone as a physical being. Leave the genetics to his brother and sister-in-law. Two good kids. Oh, Noel got along with kids. Other people’s kids. The ones you could walk away from when the tears came, when the sleep didn’t, when their innards rebelled. No, he was not about to become a father, not in any way. The very suggestion prickled his forehead with sweat. He swiped it away. Move on quickly. Fall asleep . . . but sleep was far away.

  Think of something else. The plagiarism case, a good diversion. Tomorrow he’d get on the Internet and learn what he could about plagiarism. When working with the Sun, he’d been asked to track down pilfered sources a colleague was suspected of using: a nasty business. That was a lifetime ago. Well, ten years. Brendan was still alive. No, don’t go there either.

  Peter seemed like a good guy. Their dinner together was easy. Admit it, Noel, you were attracted to him. And what’s wrong with that? Interesting, his thinking he was gay. Or had he gone beyond thinking? Probably not here on San Juan. Bellingham, maybe—a small gay scene, but visible. Likely Seattle, where he could remain anonymous. Was that what made the marriage fail? Or did it fail for some other reason and now Peter just didn’t want to deal with women anymore? Which came first, the sexuality or the sexuality? Yeah, right.

  He turned the radio on, set it to go off in an hour, and let a droning NPR voice take his brain far away. Something about the off switch didn’t work and the voices kept coming at him all night, giving him a Kyra-and-baby-free head but leaving his sleep haunted by battlefields far away, psychobabble too close, experimental music, all interspersed with the latest news, the same words in hourly refrain.

  When the phone rang just after 7:35, he welcomed the ringing—an intrusion most other mornings, but right then a relief. “Hello.”

  “Noel. Hi.” Familiar voice . . . “It’s Peter.”

  “Oh. Hello.”

  “Hope I didn’t wake you but I wanted you to know I just talked to Jordan.”

  Noel wanted to say, Who? but could only manage, “Oh.” Then he remembered. “Your student.” He leaned over and unplugged the radio.

  “Yep. He’ll be happy to meet with you, but he’s busy at mealtimes waiting tables. He can see you for half an hour, around ten.”

  “This morning?”

  “Yes of course. Come to my office. I’ll introduce you and leave you to get to know each other.”

  “We’re talking about fiction versus journalism, that was okay with him?”

  “Excited you’re willing to give him the time.”

  “Excellent.” No giving of time here; Langley was paying for as much time as Noel needed. And considering what else he needed, he asked Peter, “You have any way of finding out who his friends are? People who might have a good sense of him?”

  A moment of silence, then Peter said, “I’ll try. Might have something by ten.”

  “See you then.” Noel set the phone down and lay back for a final moment, doing nothing. Felt good. A rough night.

  Up, ablutions, clothes on. A quick breakfast? He’d noticed a coffeemaker in the kitchen, maybe coffee too? Yes, in the refrigerator, actual fresh beans, and beside the coffee machine an electric grinder. Provide you well, these Morsely people. Grounds, a filter, and in six minutes he sipped hot coffee from a handmade mug, his computer open. Eggs and bacon would wait till after his conversation with Jordan Beck.

  First he googled Peter Langley. Several dozen hits: Peter’s course descriptions, handouts to his students, advice on essay writing. All natural if the whole of this university was available online. Digging some, Noel found five papers Peter had published, and a reference to his doctoral dissertation, “Transient Sexuality in the Novels of Virginia Woolf.” Hmm. No rabid feminists at Langley’s thesis defense? Five citations later, Noel discovered that the University of Washington Press was publishing a book, Virginia Woolf: Sexual Ambiguist, almost certainly a revision of the thesis. Helpful in the thrust for tenure, Noel assumed. A solid scholar. And from what Noel had seen, a sensitive teacher.

  He next sought out Jordan Beck. He found three: a diagnostic radiologist in Cleveland; the ex-mayor of a small town in the south of England, recently deceased; and the twelve-year-old winner of a civic oratory contest in Marysville, Tennessee. Morsely’s Beck had yet to make his mark, at least on Google.

  On to plagiarism. Hundreds of hits, maybe thousands. Remarkable. A high proportion of the early ones were for downloadable software, which would help a student discover if the paper he or she were submitting had been plagiarized, either because the student hadn’t realized she was stealing the intellectual property of others by copying too much while doing research—hard to believe, but Noel had seen a couple of young reporters do just that—or because the student had bought a paper and needed to know if it was stolen from elsewhere rather than the invention of the so-called author who’d sold it to him. Several of the sites allowed Noel to paste in the text he might be wondering about, click search, and within seconds the site would seek out word phrases in the published material it had on file, both original electronic texts and print matter that had been copied electronically. One site claimed it had seven billion items in its memories. Noel googled plagiarism again, found two dozen sites that would allow him to download, chose what looked like a large organization—Viper, which claimed their search engine had been used by the Miami New Times to check out Gerald Posner’s prose when they suspected him of plagiarism; good enough for Noel. He found the working page he needed and typed in the two opening sentences of Beck’s novella. Please wait, the screen told him.

  How speedy would Viper be? He waited, watching a small line pulse across the screen, for about twenty seconds. A message appeared:

  Strong matches 0.

  Weak matches 3.

  Click here.

  He clicked. Three paragraphs appeared, some words matching the words in Beck’s story but in different strings, bearing no relation to “Piper Blues.” He tried another site, aplagueonplagiarism.com. Same phrases, similar results. Helpful only in proving that if plagiarism was involved, neither Viper nor Plague had found it. Or, to be honest, that Noel hadn’t figured out how to use either search engine properly. He’d try again later.

  He locked the house and drove to Friday Harbor, where he’d spotted a bakery. He bought two croissants, they’d keep him till bacon-and-eggs time, and returned to the Morsely campus. Up the perfectly tended drive, now parking as Peter had suggested in back of the Mansion. Up the handsome staircase to Peter’s office with
forty-five minutes to spare before Beck showed up.

  Today Peter wore a tweed sport jacket over a dress shirt, a blue-and-red-striped tie, and likely the same jeans. He noted Noel checking him out. “Staff meeting at noon.”

  “Ah.” Professor Langley was quick.

  He offered coffee, which Noel refused. “Here’s the novella,” Peter said, handing him the sheaf. He got up from his desk and with a grand gesture, said, “And here is my brain. Internet Explorer is what I use; just click it and you’re on your way.” He started for the door.

  “I don’t want to kick you out—” Noel began.

  “Need to have a brief conference with a colleague, no problem.”

  “Where does Beck work?”

  “Oh. Yeah, the Wild Pacific. Mostly seafood. Semi-upscale.”

  “And did you get me names of his friends?”

  “One Tom Fergusson and another, Spider Jester.” He laughed when he saw Noel’s face. “Yeah, I know, but that’s apparently his real name.”

  “What some parents do to their children.”

  “I’ll try to run down their addresses when I get back.”

  “No rush.” Noel figured he’d be able to find where they lived more quickly and less visibly than Peter. “Oh, Beck’s restaurant. Worth eating at?”

  “Yeah, it’s good.”

  “My partner Kyra Rachel is coming in this afternoon.”

  “Oh. You’ll both be working on the case?”

  “We usually do.”

  A hint of discomfort on Peter’s face. Then he nodded, turned and was gone.

  Worried about the cost of the investigation? Guess Kyra hadn’t mentioned they billed by the hours the case took, not the number of investigators.

  Two weeks and one day. That long since she’d first awakened here. She knew this from her watch, which they hadn’t taken, and from a calendar that hung from a nail on the wall beside the door.

  No windows was what she’d first noted. She’d awakened to dim light from a lamp in the corner. If it burned out, would she be in complete darkness? She’d been scared: where was she, why had they taken her? The fear had gone away, replaced by anger, replaced by boredom: they were literally wasting her time. She’d needed these last two weeks to prepare for her classes. He’d promised he would release her before the term began. Maybe naïve, but she believed this. She had to.

  That first day she’d gotten up from the bed, head still aching from whatever had knocked her out, and pulled a few more of her wits together. Her legs felt unsteady. To take stock, she needed to measure the room: eight short stumbling paces by twelve, the latter estimated because the bed to the right and the chest to the left made it hard to stride from one wall to the other. One inner door: a bathroom. Private. How nice.

  Her head. She still wondered what the stuff was that had knocked her out. It took days to recover. He’d given her painkillers, but they hadn’t dulled the ache much.

  The first time he’d knocked on the door, unlocked and opened it, she’d cowered on the corner of the bed. He wore a black balaclava ski mask that completely covered his head, except for his eyes. Breakfast on a tray. She wasn’t hungry. The second time she’d stood behind the door with a tattered copy of Bleak House in her hand, the heaviest object she could find. He called through the door, “Get on the bed!” She did.

  He opened the door, set the tray on the cracked arborite table: soup, an orange, a banana. She’d sat on the matching metal chair with its torn upholstered seat and eaten while they watched each other warily. When she’d finished, he removed the tray, unlocked the deadbolt, and locked the bolt from the outside. No words.

  Meals became a ritual. There’d be a knock on the door, which told her she had to scurry to the bed and sit on it. He knew she’d done so because he could see her through the peephole in the door. Looking in, not out like in hotel rooms. Then he’d present her with her meal. When she’d finished, it was back to the bed, where she had to stay till he left and locked behind himself. Despite his jailer capacity, he did all this with a kind of grace. Under other circumstances, perhaps a courteous man.

  Susanna had lain down and listened to her head ache. The sheets were clean, as far as she could tell. She stared at the cover of Bleak House. She’d read it in June for her fall course on Nineteenth-Century Novels. She wondered who in this house read Dickens.

  Later she’d gotten up and perused the other titles in the small, flimsy bookcase—just very old detective books. No works by George Eliot, the last author she’d had to read for that course. No Henry James either, not that she expected them. She replaced Bleak House. Lot of good it would’ve done as a weapon.

  Once she’d stopped listening to her head ache, she tried to hear the noises of the house: footsteps on the apparently carpeted steps, louder steps on a hard surface overhead, water gurgling, clattering dishes. Was she under the kitchen? Then silence. No voices, not even music or TV. Headphones? Had her captor gone out? Was she alone?

  She had to escape. She tested every part of the outer walls, institutional green concrete, must be the house’s foundation. Except for outside the bathroom, a wooden panel. She’d removed it. Behind, access to the bathtub drain. Space between the walls, four inches or so. She was slim but no way of squeezing her body in, up and out. The ceiling of the room and bathroom too were solid, holey white acoustic tile over what looked like thick plywood. She’d rapped every inch of it. Unyielding. Same for the floor, solid plywood. Three-quarter inch, she’d guessed. At two points along the baseboard, no obvious heat control, a covered grille each about a foot long, vents for air conditioning or heating or maybe just air. They weren’t planning on suffocating her, anyway.

  An inside wall, hideous faux wood paneling, separated the bathroom from her living area, normally what, office, rec room, guest bedroom? With a light, hollow-core door. She could have smashed through that easily.

  The bathroom had ugly mauve fixtures but at least contained an overhead shower with curtain so she could keep her body clean. A florescent-tube light over the mirror. Two unmatched towels and a washcloth. On the counter, soap, shampoo, comb, new toothbrush, paste, tumbler, sanitary napkins and tampons. Any women in the gang? Was it a gang? Someone had left, but was someone else lurking? Sleeping?

  “Hello?” she called, tentatively. And louder: “Hello!”

  She had tried the door handle, just in case. It turned, but the bolt held. She took a run at the door and bashed it with her shoulder, yow! She rubbed it. Solid. Wood or steel? Maybe if she—

  “Cut that out!”

  He’d been right there, outside the door. She’d missed his steps on the stairs.

  “Get on the bed!”

  “Why?”

  “Get on the bed.”

  Nothing to gain standing here. She sat on the bed, pulled her feet up, edged to the designated corner.

  The door opened and he came in. The balaclava seemed skewed, as if he’d put it on in a hurry. He stood by the door. “Do that again, I’ll have to tie you up.”

  “Who are you? What do you want?” Did she really want to know?

  “All in good time. But believe me, you can’t get out.”

  A few seconds. She slowed her breathing.

  “Did you hear me?” His voice was calmer.

  She waited.

  “Did you hear me?!”

  Awfuckit. “Yes.”

  “Good.” He left and relocked.

  Susanna shuffled off the bed and stood, still rubbing her shoulder. All in good time struck her as an uncommon construction, erudite or old-fashioned. Awfuckit, she repeated. Then, what did all in good time mean, anyway? What would happen all in good time? Had he been standing out there all the time, watching her through the peephole? A voyeur?

  The books and the television, her distractions. She turned the TV on quietly. Did she expect the door to burst open? Was she waiting for him to yell at her again? She’d studiously been following the local news. No one had reported her kidnapping. Had she missed it?
Or was it too soon? Did no one care she was missing? Her father would surely have spoken to the Sheriff. Maybe the kidnappers had told her father not to tell anyone they’d grabbed her. That’s what she’d believe. For now.

  She saw only Balaclava, and that at mealtimes. The first meal after she’d slammed into the door, the tray held a frozen gel pack. She didn’t say thank you, but put it on her shoulder the minute he left.

  The next morning the breakfast tray had contained another gel pack, a wrapped sandwich, and the usual cereal, fruit and toast. Balaclava leaned against the wall and watched her. She ate. She placed the limp gel pack on the tray. She moved the sandwich to the table. All now in silence. She finished her breakfast. He left.

  She continued to sit. She stared at the sandwich. Would he not be around at lunch? Might she be alone in the house? She listened to kitchen sounds, footsteps, water running, more footsteps, then a door closing and, shortly, faintly, a car engine and tires on gravel.

  She grabbed her blanket, brown and white checked, and a book, and returned to her chair. She wrapped the blanket around her shoulders. The book, a mystery she’d been reading, couldn’t distract her. Her attention was on sounds from the rest of the house. Eventually the fridge gurgled on. Then off. Nothing else. As cavernous as an empty house can sound.

  She figured she was alone. How, how to escape. She needed a weapon. A strong weapon. The only possible weapon, the chair. Susanna picked it up and rammed the door with the front two legs. The tubular aluminum cracked off as the force reverberated up her arms, into her tender shoulder. She did it again. Another leg clattered down. The broken ends were sharp. She attacked the deadbolt. Produced only scratches on the bolt and across the door. Both were solid metal. The last chair leg, bent over.

  There was no way out. No way out! She started to shake. The smashed chair dropped to the floor. She started to cry, sobbed, howled, her whole body shaking. She was so cold, the shakes had shivers in them—she made it to the toilet before vomiting.

  No one heard her, no one came. The person who’d left might never return. I’m alone, completely alone, no one knows where I am, I could die here—The green walls wavered and slowly closed in, the corners first like a giant maw about to swallow her—