I disappointed her by telling her the whole story, beginning with the visit from Ackerman straight through to my conversation with George Donovan. I filled in as many details as I could remember. I was starting to appreciate the concept of free and full disclosure. It was liberating. Rosaline Arnold was right. If you just open yourself up to people you care about, you get so much back in return.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. You’re out of your fucking mind.”
I tossed her the micro-recorder.
“Download it for me, will you? I’ll probably never need it, but you never know.”
“Sure, why not. Anything else I can do for you?”
“Yeah, a bunch of things, actually.”
Her shoulders dropped.
“Goddammit, Sam.”
“Come on, Jackie. What’s so bad about tracking down a missing management consultant? How hard can that be? I’m not asking you to do anything illegal.”
“Not yet.”
“I need her background information. Her parents’ names and where they lived. Her address in the City, which I don’t even have for Christ’s sake. The boyfriend, Robert Dobson. All those vital statistics. You just have to climb back over to your computer and look it up.”
“Or you could buy a computer.”
“Donovan said she was heading for a weekend in the Hamptons right before she disappeared.”
“We’ve heard that one before.”
“I need to know where she stayed. Who she stayed with.”
“Sure. I’ll just do a search—‘Iku Kinjo weekend Hamptons.’”
“You can do that?”
She sighed.
I remembered something Donovan had told me.
“Let’s look at her,” I said.
I coaxed her back to her desk and watched her call up Eisler, Johnson’s website, click on the annual report and scroll through the pages until we came to a photo of a half dozen bright-looking young professionals sitting around a conference table pretending to be engaged in earnest and penetrating deliberations. One of the women had an Asian cast to her features, and the caption confirmed it was Iku Kinjo, EJ associate and specialist in the energy and chemical-processing industries.
“Can you isolate her face, blow it up and print it out?” I asked.
“This is a basic office PC. It’s not Industrial Light & Magic.”
“What can you do?”
“I can put the whole group shot on a disk and give it to you, and you can take it to a guy I know in the Village who can isolate her face, blow it up and print it out.”
Ten minutes later she was still trying to figure out how to capture the image. It was all pure alchemy to me, so I wasn’t much help beyond offering cheerful words of encouragement. I could smell her starting to smolder.
“How urgent is all this?” she asked, glowering up at me. “Believe it or not I have people who pay me to do things for them. Quite a few at the moment.”
“It’s pretty urgent to George Donovan. Enough to risk a loaded gun at his head with my finger on the trigger.”
She frowned, but kept at it until she had what I needed transferred to a disk, which popped out of a little door on the front of the computer.
“He must really want her back,” she said, handing me the CD in a flat plastic case.
“Oh, yeah.”
“You know why? Beyond the obvious?”
“Mostly fear. Maybe love. Those are good enough ‘whys’ for starters.”
“Good enough for you?”
“Sure. I’ve seen what fear and love can do. You have any other theories?”
I could almost see the imperceptible tug as the hook caught. It was hard to know all the forces that drove Jackie’s busy, chaotic brain, but I knew one of them was curiosity. And its co-conspirator—the fear of boredom.
“Do you think Donovan will hold up his end of the deal with you? If you find Iku?” she asked.
“I’m wondering the same thing. I want you to take a look at my severance agreement and the settlement of the intellectual rights suit. Let’s see if Donovan’s as omnipotent as he thinks.”
“Could be a lot of money.”
“That’s what Donovan thinks.”
I spent another half hour making sure Jackie had what she needed to do whatever she did on the Internet. The potency of the Web was just starting to take hold about the time I evolved from divisional vice president to finish carpenter, and I’d seen my friend Rosaline Arnold pull off some astounding online research. I promised I’d learn how to do it myself someday. After I evolved a little more.
I left Amanda’s Audi Avant back in her driveway before sunset, which was just starting to heat up over on the western shore of the Little Peconic Bay. Clumps of luxuriant clouds were getting into formation, bathing in the first golden wash that radiated from the horizon. Eddie ran up to me just long enough for me to rub his head, then darted back toward Amanda’s. A true loyalist.
I peeled out of my clothes and put on a pair of swim trunks. The September air was only slightly cooler than late August, but the bay was still warm. I walked gingerly over the pebble beach and dove through the miniature waves, feeling the salty grey-green water scrub off a coating of City grit, startling disruptive revelations, and unexpected possibilities.
I’m not a great swimmer. My body’s too dense to float, though as a little kid I’d mastered a sort of hybrid dog paddle–Australian crawl that would keep me from drowning as long as my stamina held up.
I swam out as far as I dared and looked back at the tip of Oak Point. My cottage and Amanda’s stood side by side a few hundred yards apart, two Foursquare testaments to the power of hope, forbearance and weathered cedar. My father built mine during the Second World War. Amanda’s had also been raised by her father, though not with his own hands. He built about thirty other houses along with it, most of which she still owned, along with a big piece of abandoned industrial property at the base of the lagoon that bordered her lot. This alone would have made Amanda a very wealthy woman, even without the bulging portfolio of investments she’d inherited along with the real estate.
Besides the cottage, all I inherited was a debt from the nursing home that looked after my mother during the last years of her life. I was able to pay it off before taking my career, my marriage and my financial wherewithal off a cliff, leaving me with just enough to live on for a while before I had to reacquaint myself with finish hammers, nail sets and miter saws.
I wanted to think the financial discrepancy between us didn’t matter, but it always does. I didn’t feel I had to match her net worth to be worthy of the relationship, but having nothing versus having enough to underwrite a small country was a pretty big gap. Not a rich girl growing up, it had taken Amanda a little while to get used to fathomless resources, but she was getting there. She’d never be extravagant, but she had a right to have as full a life as her means would allow. It had never been an issue between us, but I wasn’t about to let it become one. I’d never let her let me hold her back.
So it wasn’t only concern for my daughter that caused me to drop for Donovan’s offer. Sitting there in his library—funded by the river of technology royalties that had flowed daily into his company, technology I’d had a major hand in developing—I felt an unfamiliar tug of self-interest. It wasn’t until I was out there trying to float around the Little Peconic Bay that I fully understood what it really meant.
I wanted some of my past back. A past I’d shed like a suit of flames. I didn’t want my job back, and surely not my ex-wife. I didn’t want the icy, faux-modernist house we had in the woods above Stamford, or the garden parties on the velvet lawns of Fairfield and Westchester Counties. I didn’t want the crushing responsibility or nerve-searing professional stress. I didn’t want to stand in front of the Board of Directors and sell them on the need to preserve one of the few assets they owned that actually contributed to the long-term health of the corporation —an asset they then threw away for eighteen months of stock lift. All I wanted was something I had truly lost all
