Page 59 of Nine Lives

Two

1

Sunday, October 30, 4:39 p.m.

The Saints game had just started, and Sam Hamilton cracked open a beer, even though he had no intention of sitting down in front of the television. He was in his study, the volume of the TV turned up loud enough so that he could hear if anything momentous happened. Sam had filled an entire wall with photographs and newspaper clippings and his own handwritten notes, all pertaining to the Frank Hopkins case, or rather, as he thought of it, the List-of-Nine case. Since his trip to visit Frank Hopkins’s sister, Cynthia, down in Florida, Sam had become consumed, not just in getting periodic updates from Mary Parkinson of the state police, but in researching the two incidents that had taken place at the Windward Resort that Cynthia had told him about. And now he’d finally found something that seemed like it might be the key to everything that was happening.

At first, he had focused on the murder/suicide that had occurred in 1961. A man named Bart Knapp from Portland, Maine, had committed suicide in one of the Windward’s rooms after murdering his mistress, a woman named Betsy Sturnevan. Both were married, and both worked at the same accounting office in Portland, Maine. Details about this particular story were not too hard to find, since the case had made national news. Because there had appeared to be no significant struggle in the room, and because both of the deceased had been found with sedatives and alcohol in their bloodstreams, the official verdict had been a double suicide, the assumption being that Betsy had slit her own wrists while she was in the bed, then Bart had gone to the tub and used the razor on himself. Betsy Sturnevan’s family had rejected that verdict, claiming that not only had Bart murdered Betsy Sturnevan, he had taken her to the Windward Resort against her will, keeping her drugged with sedatives.

It was a sensational story, and Sam had dug up a number of articles to read, most from a local paper at the time, the Kennewick Star. None of the police officers involved in the case were still alive. But both Bart Knapp and Betsy Sturnevan had had young children at the time of their deaths, and Sam had considered seeing if he could find them now. They’d be in their early or middle sixties. He might have done it except for the fact that he wasn’t able to find any connection whatsoever between either of the lovers and anyone on the list. Ultimately, he decided that it was a dead end.

That had left him with the young girl who had drowned out by the stone jetty. When he put “Windward Resort” and “drowning” into a search engine, all that came up was the story of a teenager named Duane Wozniak who had drowned while swimming off the jetty in 2000. He read what he could about that incident, but it was clear it had been an accident, and he couldn’t find any connection between Duane Wozniak’s family and any of the people on the list. For whatever reason he was much more interested in the story that Frank’s sister had told him. Cynthia had said that she thought she was fourteen or fifteen years old when the girl had drowned, and since she’d also said she’d been eighteen in 1961, that meant the drowning most likely occurred in either 1957 or 1958. It made sense to Sam that he hadn’t been able to find any mention of a drowning at the Windward Resort in those years using online searches. A young girl’s accidental drowning at a beach in Maine would not necessarily have made it into a national publication, one that had been archived online. But the story would certainly have been mentioned in local papers. So for the past three days Sam had sat bleary-eyed at the Kennewick public library going through microfilm from both the Kennewick Star and the Southern Maine Forecaster, two local papers that were active in the mid-1950s. He had been close to giving up when he decided to expand the time frame, look for articles in 1956 and 1959, as well. He’d hit the jackpot just three hours earlier, finding a story in the Star about the tragic drowning of Faye Grant in July of 1956. She’d been ten years old, staying at the Windward for the summer with her mother and brother. A police detective by the name of William Cable was quoted as saying that the drowning was accidental, that Faye Grant had probably climbed into the crevice at the foot of the jetty, then been unable to get out when the tide came in.

In one of the articles, the names of Faye’s immediate family were mentioned. The father was John Grant, an insurance executive from Hartford, Connecticut. Faye’s older brother had probably been named after his father, since the newspaper referred to him as “little Jack Grant,” and the mother was Lily Grant, née Lily Radebaugh, originally from Baltimore.

When Sam had read those words, an electric shiver had passed over the skin of his arms and the back of his neck. “Little Jack Grant” could be going under the name of Jack Radebaugh. If Faye had been his sister, then the List of Nine would have something to do with her death. Probably revenge. Frank Hopkins, who would have been at the Windward Resort when Faye had died, had been drowned by the jetty. The other names on the list, all people too young to have been present for Faye’s death . . . well, Sam had no idea why they had been targeted. His best guess was that they were somehow related to someone that Jack believed to be guilty. Maybe one of their parents. The dates would work.

After sending an email to both Detective Mary Parkinson of the state police and to Agent Ruth Jackson of the FBI with JPEGs of all the relevant articles, Sam was now studying the notes he’d taken on the victim’s families. And it was all starting to fall into place—there were more similarities between the parents of the victims than the victims themselves. They were all white, all middle- or upper-middle class, all clustered around New England. And there was something else, something Sam had noticed a week earlier. On the list of nine names there were six men and three women. He’d wondered about that. If Jack Radebaugh, or someone else (it was possible), was murdering the children of people he considered complicit in the death of his sister, then not only would he try to make their deaths painless, but maybe he’d also pick sons to murder and not daughters. Jessica Winslow was targeted, of course, but she was an only child. And Caroline Geddes, while not an only child, had one brother who lived outside of the country. Mind racing, Sam went and got another beer from the fridge, not even bothering to look at the football game on television.

When he returned to his study he thought about Alison Horne, who had never been found. Was she dead already? Probably not, he thought, because if she’d died there would have been a police report, a death notice, something to alert the FBI. Maybe she was dead, and her body hadn’t been discovered yet. But someone surely would have reported her missing. No, Sam assumed she was still alive, and he wondered where she was, and if she knew how much danger she was in.

2

Monday, October 31, 3:03 p.m.

Jonathan Grant was going to text Alison from the airport to let her know he was back in Bermuda and would be at the house in thirty minutes, but decided not to. He thought he’d surprise her, despite the fact that he knew her well enough to know she was not big on surprises.

He let himself into the house on Church Folly Lane and shouted a “hello” as he wiped his shoes on the inside mat. The house was quiet, and he wondered if Alison was down at Tobacco Bay or out for a walk. But then she appeared on the stairwell in a long white nightgown, and for a strange moment, Jonathan felt like he was looking at a ghost.

“I’m back,” he said.

She came down the stairs and embraced him, saying, “I’m glad,” followed immediately with, “You could’ve called first.”

“I thought I’d surprise you. You seem thin.”

“Oh,” she said, and looked down at herself in the sheer nightgown. “Living on yogurt and fruit, I guess. I really am glad you’re back.”

“Let me unpack and shower and then we can go out for a big meal.”

They went to the Swizzle Inn, Jonathan complaining, as he did every time they’d gone there, that it was now a tourist trap that sold T-shirts and specialty glasses. But still, he had a favorite table that they had managed to get, and he ordered the chowder as an appetizer and then the liver and onions. Alison ordered a salad.

“Tell me about your trip,” she said.

“I’m done with all that, now.”

“What do you mean?”

“Commitments. Money. All that. Tell me about Bermuda. What’s it like without me here?”

Alison took a sip of her rosé, and said, “I thought I’d like it, but I’m not sure I do. Did I ever tell you how I have ESP?”

He lowered his brows. “No, I don’t think so.”

“It’s no big deal but ever since I was girl, I’ve gotten feelings, almost like a cold chill goes through me, whenever bad things are going to happen. Or sometimes when they have happened.”

“Tell me more. I’m interested.”

She told him about how she knew her grandmother was going to die before it happened, and about the time in high school when she’d passed Missy Talbot in the hall on a Friday afternoon and she’d felt as though all the warmth had been sucked from her. Missy died that Saturday night, thrown from a car when her boyfriend careened off Pope Road coming home from Brian Sherzinger’s party. She didn’t tell him that she’d had the same feeling of coldness on the night that Jonathan had asked her if she wanted to get a glass of wine with him after her shift. But she did tell him that after he left Bermuda, and she was alone in his house, she’d been swamped with bad feelings, cold feelings.

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