sail.
He'd been a fan of pirate yarns, stories of naval battles, and tales of adventure on the bounty. He'd read many of them aloud to Mitch, who had sat enthralled for hours.
Daniel and Kathy suffered motion sickness in a rowboat on a pond. Their aversion to the sea had been the first thing to inspire Anson's interest in the nautical life.
In the cozy, fragrant kitchen, he pointed to a pot steaming on the stove. 'Zuppa massaia.'
'What kind of soup is massaia?'
'Classic housewife's soup. Lacking a wife, I have to get in touch with my feminine side when I want to make it.'
Sometimes Mitch found it hard to believe that a pair as leaden as their parents could have produced a son as buoyant as Anson.
The kitchen clock read 7:24. A traffic backup from an accident had delayed him.
On the table stood a bottle of Chianti Classico and a half-full glass. Anson opened a cabinet, plucked another glass from a shelf.
Mitch almost declined the wine. But one round would not dull his wits and might restore some elasticity to his brittle nerves.
As Anson poured the Chianti, he did a fair imitation of their father's voice. 'Yes, I'm pleased to see you, Mitch, though I didn't notice your name on the visiting-progeny schedule, and I had planned to spend this evening tormenting guinea pigs in an electrified maze.'
Accepting the Chianti, Mitch said, 'I just came from there.'
'That explains your subdued manner and your gray complexion.' Anson raised his glass in a toast. 'La dolce vita.'
'To your new deal with China,' Mitch said.
'Was I used as a needle again?'
'Always. But he can't push hard enough to puncture me anymore. Sounds like a big opportunity.'
'The China thing? He must've hyped what I told him. They aren't dissolving the Communist Party and giving me the emperor's throne.'
Anson's consulting work was so arcane that Mitch had never been able to understand it. He had earned a doctorate in linguistics, the science of language, but he also had a deep background in computer languages and in digitalization theory, whatever that might be.
'Every time I leave their place,' Mitch said, 'I feel the need to dig in the dirt, work with my hands, something.'
'They make you want to flee to something real.'
'That's it exactly. This wine's good.'
'After the soup, we're having lombo dimaiale con castagne.'
'I can't digest what I can't pronounce.'
'Roast loin of pork with chestnuts,' Anson said.
'Sounds good, but I don't want dinner.'
'There's plenty. The recipe serves six. I don't know how to cut it down, so I always make it for six.'
Mitch glanced at the windows. Good — the blinds were shut.
From the counter near the kitchen phone, he picked up a pen and a notepad. 'Have you gotten any sailing in lately?'
Anson dreamed of one day owning a sailing yacht. It should be large enough not to seem claustrophobic on a long coastal run or perhaps even on a voyage to Hawaii, but small enough to be managed with one mate and an array of sail motors.
He used the word mate to mean his fellow sailor but also his companion in bed. Regardless of his bearish appearance and sometimes acerbic sense of humor, Anson was a romantic not just about the sea but also about the opposite sex.
The attraction women felt for him could not be called merely magnetic. He drew them as the gravity of the moon pulls the tides.
Yet he was no Don Juan. With great charm, he turned away most of his pursuers. And each one that he hoped might be his ideal woman always seemed to break his heart, though he would not have put it that melodramatically.
The small boat — an eighteen-foot American Sail — that he currently moored at a buoy in the harbor was by no measure a yacht. But given his luck at love, he might one day own the vessel of his dreams long before he found someone with whom to sail it.
In answer to Mitch's question, he said, 'I haven't had time to do more than bob the harbor like a duck, tacking the channels.'
Sitting at the kitchen table, printing in block letters on the notepad, Mitch said, 'I should have a hobby. If you've got sailing, and the old man has dinosaur crap.'
He tore off the top sheet of the pad and pushed it across the table so that Anson, still standing, could read it: YOUR HOUSE IS PROBABLY BUGGED.
His brother's look of astonishment had a quality of wonder that Mitch recognized as similar to the expression that had overtaken him when he had read aloud the pirate yarns and the tales of heroic naval battles that thrilled him as a boy. His initial reaction seemed to be that some strange adventure had begun, and he appeared not to grasp the implied danger.
To cover Anson's stunned silence, Mitch said, 'He just bought a new specimen. He says it's a ceratosaurus dropping. From Colorado, the Upper Jurassic.'
He presented another sheet of paper on which he had printed THEY'RE SERIOUS. I SAW THEM KILL A MAN.
While Anson read, Mitch withdrew his cell phone from an inside coat pocket and placed it on the table. 'Given our family history, it'll be so appropriate — inheriting a collection of polished shit.'
As Anson pulled out a chair and sat at the table, his boyish expression of expectation clouded with worry. He assisted in the pretense of an ordinary conversation: 'How many does he have now?'
'He told me. I don't remember. You could say the den's become a sewer.'
'Some of the spheres are pretty things.'
'Very pretty,' Mitch agreed as he printed THEY'LL CALL AT 7:30.
Mystified, Anson mouthed the questions Who? What?
Mitch shook his head. He indicated the wall clock—7:27.
They conducted a self-conscious and inane conversation until the phone rang promptly on the half-hour. The ring came not from Mitch's cell but from the kitchen phone.
Anson looked to him for guidance.
In the event, which seemed likely, that the timing of this call was coincidental and that the expected contact would come on the cell phone, Mitch indicated that his brother should answer it.
Anson caught it on the third ring and brightened when he heard the caller's voice. 'Holly!'
Mitch closed his eyes, bent his head, covered his face with his hands, and from Anson's reaction, knew when Holly screamed.
Chapter 20
Mitch expected to be brought into the call, but the kidnapper spoke only to Anson, and for longer than three minutes.
The substance of the first part of the conversation was obvious, and could be deduced from hearing his brother's half of it. The last couple of minutes proved not easy to follow, in part because Anson's responses grew shorter even as his tone of voice became more grim.
When Anson hung up, Mitch said, 'What do they want us to do?'
Instead of answering, Anson came to the table and picked up the bottle of Chianti. He topped off his
