Chapter 11
Scarlett called Agent Kerr at six in the morning and told her about the phone.
Kerr didn’t say anything. Scarlett could hear her breathing, and a coffee maker, and a dog barking somewhere in the background.
“Say that again,” Kerr said. “Slowly.”
Scarlett said it again. She had been holding the phone up at the stern when she went over.
Alexis’s statement said Alexis left her there, alive, and went back upstairs.
Alexis’s lawyer said Alexis found the phone on the back deck the next morning, when the crew had already searched that deck at dawn.
So how did Alexis end up with the phone?
“Huh,” Kerr said.
That was all. Huh. But Scarlett had spent enough time around Kerr now to know what that huh meant. It meant a door had just opened somewhere.
“Don’t do anything,” Kerr said. “Don’t call anyone. I’ll call you back.”
* * *
Ryan was in the kitchen when she came down.
She had heard his car come in very late. She had heard him walk past the stairs and go into the study and not come out. Now he was standing at the counter in yesterday’s white shirt, making coffee, and he looked like he hadn’t slept.
He looked up when she came in. He didn’t say anything.
“I watched it,” Scarlett said. “At the gate.”
“I know,” Ryan said. “I saw you. In the window.”
They stood there with the whole kitchen between them.
“Kerr told you not to make any statements,” Scarlett said.
“She called me last night to tell me I was an idiot.” A tiny, tired twist at the corner of his mouth. “Then she said it was a good speech. Then she told me I was an idiot again.”
Scarlett almost smiled. She didn’t. She took the coffee he held out to her, and she went back upstairs, and she didn’t lock her door behind her. She didn’t know why she noticed that. She noticed it.
* * *
She called Troy Maddox at eight.
She hadn’t planned to. But Kerr had said don’t call anyone, and Kerr meant don’t call Alexis, and Scarlett had been thinking all night about the one other person who had been on that boat, awake, at the wheel, watching everything, the way he always did.
Troy picked up on the second ring. When she said her name, he didn’t say anything at all for a while. Then he cleared his throat, hard.
“Mrs. Walsh.”
“Scarlett, Troy. You’ve known me for eight years.”
“Scarlett.” His voice was rough. “I’m glad. I don’t have the words for how glad.”
“Can I come see you? At the boat?”
A pause. “You sure you want to be on the boat?”
“No,” she said. “But I think I have to be.”
* * *
The Halcyon was tied up at the marina on the bay, twenty minutes from the house, at the far end of the long dock where the biggest boats lived. Jess drove her. Jess wanted to come aboard. Scarlett said no.
She walked down the dock alone.
It was a bright, hot morning. Seagulls. The smell of diesel and salt. The Halcyon rose up white and enormous at the end of the dock, and Scarlett’s legs went slower and slower the closer she got, until she was barely moving.
Troy was waiting at the top of the gangway in his white shirt. He came down to meet her. He didn’t try to hug her. He just stood in front of her and looked at her face, at the scar and the short hair.
“Learned every name on my crew,” he said. “First trip. Nobody ever did that.”
“I remember.”
“The crew’s been asking about you every day. Every one of them.”
He walked her aboard. He walked beside her, close, like a man walking beside someone on a narrow ledge.
She made herself go all the way to the stern.
* * *
It looked so ordinary in the daylight.
The low back deck. The teak boards, freshly oiled. The rail. The little gate in the rail, closed now, with a new latch on it, shiny and steel. The swim platform folded up flat against the back of the boat.
Scarlett stood at the rail where she had stood that night. She put her hand on it. She waited for the black water to come.
It didn’t. Not all the way. Her heart pounded and her mouth went dry and her hands shook, but she stayed standing. It was just a boat. It was just a rail. The sun was on the water.
“Troy,” she said, without turning around. “That night. After I left the dinner table. What did you see?”
Troy didn’t answer right away. When she turned, he was looking at the deck.
“I was on the bridge,” he said. “Running south. There’s a camera that shows the aft deck, but it’s for docking, it’s a bad angle, it mostly shows the platform.
But I can see down a little from the bridge wing if I step out.
And I step out. It’s a habit. Every half hour, I step out and look at my boat. ”
Scarlett waited.
“I saw you go down the stairs to the aft deck. I thought, she’s sick, she wants air. That’s normal. People get sick.” His jaw worked. “I saw Dr. Burke go down after you. I thought, good, she’s a doctor. I went back in. I had a buoy to watch for on the radar.”
“And then?”
“Maybe ten minutes later, I stepped out again.” He looked up at her.
“And Dr. Burke was coming up the stairs from the aft deck. By herself. She stopped at the top and fixed her sleeve. Like this.” He tugged at his own shirt cuff.
“And she was holding a phone. Not hers. Hers is black. I’ve seen it a hundred times, she was always on it. This one was green. A green case.”
The world went very quiet.
“I didn’t think anything of it,” Troy said.
“I thought you’d gone to your cabin and she was bringing your phone to you, or bringing it to Mr. Walsh.
And then she went up to the sky deck. And I went back to the radar.
” He stopped. His voice went thick. “And at dawn the steward came up to the bridge and said the cabin was empty, and I—”
He turned away and put both hands on the rail.
* * *
“Did you tell the police?” Scarlett asked quietly.
“Yes, ma’am.” He wiped his face with the back of his hand. “The Bahamian police came aboard at Nassau. I told them. I told them everything. The stairs. The sleeve. The green phone. I told them I thought it was yours. The officer wrote it all down.”
“Then why—”
“Because the next day, Mr. Luke came to the boat.” Troy’s face went hard.
“He took me into the salon and shut the door. He said the company had lawyers looking at everything. He said my statement was confusing and emotional and it could hurt the family. He said Dr. Burke was a guest and a friend of the family and there was no reason to drag a doctor into a tragedy. He said a phone was nothing. People carry each other’s phones.
He said the company doesn’t need the CEO’s doctor in the story.
” Troy’s hands tightened on the rail. “He had a second statement typed up. Shorter. Same as the first, but no phone. No sleeve. Just I saw Mrs. Walsh go to the aft deck and did not see her again. He asked me to sign it for the FBI when they came.”
“Did you?”
“I’ve worked for that family nineteen years,” Troy said. “I’ve got a daughter in college. He didn’t say he’d fire me. He didn’t have to.”
He looked at her.
“I signed it,” he said. “God forgive me. I signed it. And I’ve been sick about it every day since.”
* * *
Scarlett stood at the rail and looked at the closed gate and thought about Luke.
Luke in his pale blue suit, on the phone on this same deck. That’s where this ends. The board needs it to end. Luke bending over Ryan’s shoulder at the folding table on the dock. Luke in the front hall yesterday. Do it for her.
She should have been angrier. Maybe she would be later. Right now she just felt cold and clear.
“Troy,” she said. “I need you to tell Agent Kerr what you just told me. All of it. The first statement and the second one and why.”
“I’ll lose my job.”
“No, you won’t.” She said it with a certainty she hadn’t earned yet, and she saw him hear it. “You won’t. I promise you that. And even if you did, I’d hire you.”
“To do what? You don’t have a boat.”
“I’ll buy one,” Scarlett said.
Troy made a sound that was half a laugh and half a sob.
Then he told her the rest, because she asked.
He told her what Ryan had done when the steward came up that morning.
How Ryan had come up the stairs to the bridge in his socks, gray-faced, and had not shouted, not once, and had grabbed the radio himself.
How Ryan had made Troy turn the Halcyon around and run the whole route back in the daylight, standing on the bow with binoculars for six hours.
How Ryan had gone into the water off the swim platform twice, before the crew physically dragged him out.
“He kept your sandals,” Troy said. “The ones you left by the cabin door. He kept them in the bridge. On the chart table. For two weeks. Wouldn’t let anybody touch them.”
* * *
Agent Kerr called while Jess was driving her home.
“Your captain just called me,” Kerr said. “Voluntarily. He’s coming in at noon. He’s bringing a copy of his first statement, which, it turns out, the Bahamian officer gave him. He also mentioned that your brother-in-law told him to change it.” A dry pause. “I had a very busy morning, Scarlett.”
“Tell me.”
“Tell you what I can tell you.” Kerr’s voice changed.
It got quieter and flatter. The way people’s voices get when they are about to say something important.
“The test from that island clinic picked up one particular family of sedatives. We got a subpoena for the drug records at Dr. Burke’s practice last week, based on your statement.
Concierge doctors keep a small supply of certain medications in the office, for patients.
They have to log every single dose.” A pause.
“Two doses of a sedative from that exact family went out of her office supply log the Thursday before the cruise. Signed out to a patient. The patient’s name on the log is Scarlett Walsh. ”
Scarlett closed her eyes.
“You were never her patient,” Kerr said. “Were you.”
“I met her four times. At parties.”