Chapter 19 The Big Island
The Big Island
Let’s talk it through.
There were only a handful of times when Owen had left New Zealand in the last five years. Six times, to be exact.
Each time that he left, he knew, was more dangerous than the time before it.
But that was the only choice. To fix this, he needed to move closer and closer to the problem.
The first time, he only had to mail a letter. He flew to Fiji to send a letter to Nicholas at The Sanctuary, Nicholas’s lake house in Texas Hill Country.
He couldn’t simply email Nicholas. He knew they would be checking Nicholas’s email. Forever now. Owen also didn’t doubt that Nicholas would be all too eager to turn Owen in, even if his email got past them.
That left him limited choices. And he couldn’t risk the postmark being from New Zealand. He didn’t even want the postmark to be from Australia. So he flew sixteen hundred miles just to mail that letter.
He put it on specific stationery—that first letter. He used the stationery from a hotel in Hawaii. Nicholas’s favorite hotel on the Big Island in Hawaii. Owen had downloaded the stationery from their website.
Owen chose to use that stationery so that Nicholas would know, beyond a doubt, that the letter was from him. Even though Owen didn’t sign it. Even though, of course, he couldn’t sign it.
If something happens to you, they’ll be in danger, he wrote. You know this is true. I’ll be in touch…
The second time Owen left New Zealand was six months later, the night before Bailey graduated from high school.
He didn’t intend to fly back to San Francisco, not at the start of this.
One could argue that there was no excuse for him flying so close to where Hannah and Bailey were unless (subconsciously, for just a moment) he needed to again be near where they were.
Unless, and he was conscious of this part, he couldn’t stand to miss Bailey’s graduation entirely.
What she had been working for, who she was becoming.
But he knew there was another reason as well.
He was starting to test the waters. For this plan to work, he needed to be in and out of America.
He wasn’t worried about himself. He was worried about Hannah and Bailey.
He needed to see what he could get away with while Nicholas was still around to help protect them.
Owen also knew there was no room for error. No room for the note to be intercepted or disregarded.
No. This needed to be a hand delivery. He flew to San Francisco and took a car service straight to the Hotel Drisco, where Nicholas was staying.
It wasn’t a surprise that Nicholas was staying there.
Bailey’s graduation was being held a few miles away at Kezar Stadium.
And Hannah always liked to have her out-of-town guests stay at the Hotel Drisco, a beautiful boutique hotel in Pacific Heights that housed Hannah’s wood-turned bowls and furnishings in nearly every suite.
On the car ride into San Francisco proper, Owen hacked into the hotel’s system and figured out which room Nicholas was staying in.
He took the elevator up to his floor and waited.
He waited until housekeeping came to clean—the ROOM BEING SERVICED sign hanging from the doorknob—the door slightly ajar.
He walked in and said he forgot something and left the manila envelope faceup in Nicholas’s suitcase—where he could be sure that Nicholas would find it.
He included a lot of things in that envelope—a lot of data points about the organization that Nicholas couldn’t ignore, about their leadership, about Frank himself.
Then Owen signed it with a simple invitation. As though anything between Nicholas and him got to be simple.
If you tell me where to meet you, I’ll be there.
After, Owen walked out of the airport and back into the waiting car.
The car, which drove him a few minutes out of the way to Kezar Stadium.
He couldn’t see anything from the road—certainly not his daughter.
But the parking lot was full, and he knew she was inside, beginning the next step in her life.
On the plane he let himself imagine it. Nicholas coming back to the hotel that night—proud and happy and a little bit weary—to find the note there. Would he throw it out? Would the emotion of the day propel him, despite himself, to put it back in the suitcase to consider for later?
Because he knew that at this point, Nicholas would have to respond. For this to work he would have to respond.
Then, six months later, Nicholas did respond. Six months and two weeks later, to be exact. Owen didn’t know what changed in those six months, but he knew something must have changed for Nicholas to decide it was time to engage.
On his weekly visit to a local library (this week into Picton), Owen saw that he engaged.
Nicholas was in Hawaii, staying at that hotel where he loved to take the family for the holidays.
The hotel on the Big Island where Nicholas used to take Kate and Charlie growing up every Christmas, and where Charlie’s kids spent Christmas too, until Nicholas went to prison.
Where, in the last few years, he had taken Hannah and Bailey too.
The hotel whose stationery Owen used to mail that first letter.
Bailey shared a photograph on her Instagram grid of the whole family celebrating Christmas Eve. Charlie and his ex-wife (who tried to spend holidays together for the kids) and the twins and Bailey (home for her first Christmas break from school) and Hannah. Of course, Hannah.
Caption reading: Another Day in Paradise
Here was the important part. In the photograph, the family was sitting around a beachside firepit. They were making s’mores and sharing frozen hot chocolate and laughing, all of them laughing together.
Charlie and Hannah and Bailey and the cousins. And flanked by the twins and by Bailey—flanked by all of his grandchildren, all in one place together, like a miracle—was Nicholas.
Owen knew that Nicholas didn’t let himself be photographed often, and never on social media. So Owen could imagine the rest of it: Nicholas telling Bailey that it was okay to post it. Bailey not knowing why of course.
That this was a message to Owen.
It was a message for him.
Owen walked out of the library and headed down to Queen Charlotte Sound and rented a room at a small bed-and-breakfast. He paid cash for a flowery corner room that cost him a week’s wages.
Then he got a fresh burner phone and scrambled the connection. He scrambled the connection and called that hotel in Kona.
It was after midnight in Kona when he called, but Owen had no time to waste. It was two days after Christmas—two days since Bailey posted the photograph.
He knew it was possible that Nicholas had already checked out and was on his way home to Austin. Calling Nicholas on a phone that the FBI and the organization would be tracing was a risk Owen couldn’t take.
When the receptionist answered, Owen thought his fear was confirmed—that Nicholas had already left. Because when he asked for Nicholas Bell’s room, the receptionist responded that there was no guest at the hotel with that name.
But then Owen remembered. Nicholas never checked into a hotel under his own name.
Shortly after he started working with the organization, he changed Kate and Charlie’s surname from Bell to Smith.
It was just a precaution then. But as Nicholas’s job got riskier, he took other measures to distance himself from his family—to separate out his work life from his home life.
To separate out any of the dangers of his work life, touching anyone he loved.
Owen knew this. He knew that Nicholas did what he could do to keep his family safe. It was, of course, not enough.
“Would you connect me with Meredith Smith’s room, please?” Owen said.
“I do see we have a Meredith Smith staying with us…” the receptionist said. “One moment, sir. I’ll transfer you.”
“Hello,” Nicholas said, picking up after the first ring.
He was awake and ready for the call. Because it had been a message for Owen. A message or a trap.
“Thank you,” Owen said. “For picking up.”
Nicholas didn’t respond, not at first. He stayed quiet.
If this was a trap, Nicholas could be slow timing this call.
Despite the scrambler, despite any precautions, Nicholas could be tracing him to this small bed-and-breakfast on Queen Charlotte Sound—twenty-four miles from the vineyard where Owen slept every night, twenty-four miles down that stunning and too-short winding road.
If Nicholas was tracing him, he would be tracking Owen’s location to a manageable field. He could send men—the organization could send men—to every house and farm and vineyard in the area. There weren’t many. They would find Owen.
Owen held the line anyway. He held the line and he waited.
Finally, Nicholas cleared his throat. And he spoke.
“Turns out I love her more than I hate you,” he said. “Both of them. Bailey and Hannah…”
That didn’t sound like Nicholas, at least the Nicholas that Owen had once known.
Except maybe it did now. Owen wouldn’t know, really, what Nicholas sounded like now.
Who he even chose to be now. But he had to imagine that it had softened Nicholas: getting to spend these last several years with Bailey, his granddaughter, who was so much like her mother.
Her face and her skin and her spirit. Nicholas getting to know Hannah too—Hannah who it was impossible (in Owen’s biased view) not to fall in love with.
The time Nicholas had been granted with both of them probably helped Nicholas make room for it—if not between Owen and Nicholas, certainly within Nicholas himself. A kind of thawing.
“I assume we need to do this in person?” Nicholas said.
“Yes,” Owen said. “And you’ll need to bring everything.”
“I don’t need you to tell me that.”
And then—like a promise, or a warning shot—Nicholas gave the instructions for what would happen next.
It would involve a trip back to the hotel in Hawaii in two months’ time. Nicholas provided a date in February for them to meet there. An instruction for Owen to rent room 1807. And only room 1807.
“Anything else?” Nicholas asked.
But, before Owen even answered, Nicholas had already hung up.
The road into the Big Island hotel was lined with royal poinciana trees. Coconut palm trees. The front drive framed by monkeypods.
There was no denying it was beautiful: the rolling hills and the small bungalows blending into the landscape, ocean as bright and blue here as he’d ever seen.
In all the years that he and Kate had been together, they’d never visited the island.
She was too busy studying for the LSATs. Running the law review.
Then, Kate was out of law school and starting her law career: starting it off fiercely as a clerk for a Texas Supreme Court judge—Kate giving every ounce of energy to that incredible job, to being a young mother.
She used to talk about the Big Island with an intense love though.
Kate loved reliving the memories of spending time on this island with her family growing up—the feel of that tropical air, days wading through that ocean together.
The sense of calm she felt walking through the hotel lobby for the first time (every time) and taking a first sip of their welcome drink: a secret blend of local rum and fresh mangos and guava juice.
(Minus the rum when she was a child.) Can’t wait for you to try it, she’d say.
It was one of many reasons why Owen turned down the drink now, his heart turning in on itself at the memory. Kate’s smile, Bailey’s smile.
He signed his paperwork and nodded politely when a staff member insisted on showing him the property (the koi pool and the firepits and the hammocks dotting the great lawn) before taking him to his room—finally taking him to his room—on the second floor of one of those small oceanfront bungalows.
When Owen was alone, he locked the dead bolt and waited until he was certain the staff member wasn’t coming back. Then he closed the shades and put the DO NOT DISTURB light on and walked over to the door that connected to Nicholas’s suite.
He unlocked his side of the door and he knocked. And he waited. He didn’t have to wait long.
He heard the click, the door unlocking from Nicholas’s side.
Nicholas, suddenly, standing before him, in khaki pants and a short-sleeve button-down linen shirt.
Nicholas, standing there holding a gun. He pointed it directly at Owen’s heart. The barrel touching his chest.
Fast and hard, that barrel digging into his chest.
For a second, Owen thought Nicholas was going to shoot him.
For a second, Nicholas almost did shoot him.
He cocked the trigger, his hand steady. Owen held his eyes.
The gun against his heart, but he held Nicholas’s eyes.
Because this would be okay too. Because if he were dead, Hannah and Bailey would be safe.
At least, they would be safer than they were now.
With Owen gone, they at least couldn’t one day be used as a bartering tool to get to him.
But they could still be used for revenge.
Nicholas seemed to realize this at the same moment Owen did. Or, more accurately, he seemed to remember this at the same moment that Owen came to the same conclusion. That’s the thing about what we don’t want to know. It catches up to you whether you pretend you can avoid it or not.
Nicholas put the gun down, Owen’s heart beating loudly. Beating where that gun just was.
“You look like shit,” Nicholas said.
“You don’t look so great yourself,” Owen said.
Nicholas glared at him. “I’ve got thirty years on you, what have you been doing that you look so bad?”
Before Owen could answer, Nicholas shook his head. “You know what? I don’t fucking care.”
He motioned toward the dining room table, a dozen boxes of files covering it. A dozen boxes of files (containing some twenty thousand documents and emails and correspondence). Two unopened laptop computers. Several legal pads.
“Let’s get to work,” he said.