Authors: Carol Plum-Ucci
He held the thing up again. Couldn't seem to help himself. "
Evidence.
"
He sat back down on the couch and opened the black book as I crawled warily up and plopped down beside him. My heart turned hot and started banging, though he was being vague enough that I couldn't have said why at the moment.
"I don't think Opa told you the story about the Riley boat to make pleasant chatter. I think he was laying a big hint on me, telling me it's time I opened the floodgates of debate. He's right."
He turned the first page, and a hefty legal document stared back at me. I looked where his finger pointed and saw the name of my parents' boat, the
Goliath.
Then my eyes bounced up to big bold letters at die top:
SEARCH
WARRANT.
"Oh, shit," I breathed, over and over, following his finger down this page, seeing these all-too-real names and facts: "Name of Vessel: GOLIATH. Location of Port: THE BASIN, ATLANTIC CITY. Owner/Operator: WADE BARRETT, MARY ELLEN STARN. Date: NOVEMBER 10," and the year, signed by a judge, and by two men who had the word "Agent" after their signatures and "DRUG ENFORCEMENT ADMINISTRATION" beneath. The blue ink where the DEA agents had signed was now fading, but I ran my finger over it, hoping it might just disappear.
I didn't know what exactly this had to do with my parents' death, but some sort of black energy was rushing off Emmett, making me feel electrocuted. This had to do with the man who rocked me in his lap and told great stories about our ancestors. And it involved a woman, a flight paramedic, who came home with tales of saving lives while reciting her version of the captain's prayer: "Lord, give me a stiff upper lip."
"None of this will make any sense to you if I don't start from the beginning. The night they disappeared was not the beginning. It started two years before, I would estimate."
He turned a page and pointed to a cassette tape in an envelope that fit into a three-ring binder. Emmett's way of keeping things organized for research had always gotten on my nerves. This was beyond reckoning—a three-ring-binder plastic job for a cassette. The cassette was dated about six months after Mom and Dad died, and marked "Talk with Mrs. Riley" in Emmett's scratchy handwriting. I guess that meant he'd been to see her and taped the conversation.
His voice went on. "About two years before Mom and Dad's boat disappeared, the Riley boat disappeared. About two weeks before the Riley boat disappeared, Mom and Dad had dinner at the home of Claude Lowenberg. He was Dad's first mate. Remember him?"
I nodded. "I just remember he was a very quiet guy."
"Still waters run deep. He had a lot of friends. A lot of people trusted him. He'd heard some things that he shared with Mom and Dad. In essence, Captain Riley was in a lot of trouble, shall we say."
He turned the page again, and there was a search warrant that looked pretty similar to Mom and Dad's, only it was a Xerox in black and white, and was more grainy looking. And the names were different. This one read, "Owner/Operator: CONNOR RILEY." And I snapped my eyes up to the darkened picture window, not really wanting to read any further.
Emmett kept on. "Captain Riley had come on tough times. A lot of the container ships had. Federal Express had come onto the scene, driving prices down at UPS. The freighters were losing a lot of business. Sometimes the owners would get tempted to bolster their incomes illegally. They would drop off a small load of furniture in Jamaica that didn't really even cover the cost of the trip. They'd also pick up something to make the trip worthwhile—"
"Oh, my God," I breathed. I let him talk on about Captain Riley running drugs, feeling it was about to hit closer to home, and the gray hatch was slamming in the wind.
"Captain Riley had delivered a huge amount of Colombian gold up to Canada and had gotten paid for it." He pointed to a newspaper clipping that followed the Riley search warrant. It covered the disappearance, mentioning Connor Riley had come under suspicion of drug trafficking.
"The DEA didn't find the shipment or the money, but they took a lot of his files, things lying about on his desk, and among them were some scrap sheets he'd scribbled out, with phone numbers, delivery names, estimates of his profit. He realized they would eventually put it all together and arrest him. They'd get him on circumstantial evidence, unless they came up with a witness, I don't know..."
I looked at him funny when he said "I don't know." It was the first sign that he didn't know every last detail about this story. It made me want to listen for flaws in his arguments, in spite of how this black book intimidated the hell out of me.
"Captain Riley decided to take Claude Lowenberg into his confidence. Riley said he was going somewhere safe from the law, and was going to fake a disappearance. On top of that, he was looking to pass around his cartel contact in the Caribbean, if any ships wanted to make a few deliveries themselves. And if they got into trouble and wanted to meet up with Riley later; the contact would help them with that."
"Dad told you this?"
"Yes. Almost as soon as they got home from dinner at the Lowenbergs'. Dad appeared to be in shock when he told me. They were friends with the Rileys, and were sorry if they really had been mixed up in the whole illegal business. Mom and Dad wanted no part of it. That's what Dad told me."
"But, you don't believe him?"
"I did. I think at that point, Dad was sincere. I think Mom was, too. Dad encouraged Claude to call the authorities. But Mom was awfully quiet that night. She let Dad do all the talking. She just kind of sat at the edge of the fireplace and looked at her fingers."
"So you're saying Mom and Dad never used Captain Riley's contact in Jamaica, and never did anything wrong."
"Not at that point. The Riley vessel disappeared not even two weeks later, The Coast Guard took a Mayday that sounded very similar to that ... that legend you used to call The She. Like Opa said tonight, a couple of drug-running captains had tried to fake disappearances after they realized they were about to be arrested. One gave false coordinates over the radio and added sound effects and hysterical comments like, 'We're being sucked, we're being sucked. What's that off the starboard bow?' Both of them were found and prosecuted. But Captain Riley's boat was not ever found."
"So ... you think he faked it really well and got away with it?"
Emmett laughed politely. "If I haven't given you enough evidence yet, get this. By the time the DEA got an arrest warrant, Captain Riley was already lost at sea. They leaned on Mrs. Riley. She had found out about the previous load of Colombian Gold and confessed. Then she swore up and down that her husband had said he was sorry, swore to never do it again, and went to sea to deliver a regular load of goods on schedule. She's kept to that story ever since, even though the Coast Guard found a female name on the crew list. As it turned out, the woman didn't even have a seaman's license but was a waitress over at the Seaview Country Club. The Rileys were members there. Even still, Mrs. Riley rather enjoys calling herself the widow Riley."
"You're saying this waitress was Captain Riley's girlfriend? And it's impossible that Mrs. Riley is a widow?"
"The wife is always the last to know about an affair. Dad used to laugh in disgust and Mom sometimes threatened to tell Mrs. Riley. After the girl's name showed up on the Basin dock log as crew, Mrs. Riley had her chance to reckon with the truth. But Mrs. Riley believes what Mrs. Riley
needs
to believe. A person is entitled to her sanity, especially when she's an innócent party. I'm saying her actual widowhood is so improbable that when I call her by that name, I have to smile into my fingers."
"What does this have to do with Mom and Dad?" I could feel myself taking an educated guess by this point, though I didn't think I could ever believe it.
"Here comes one of the lies I've always told you, which I want to clear up. Two more years pass. I never heard another word about Mr. Riley from Mom and Dad. No matter what he did, they were just not the types to get off on gossiping about it. But remember how I've said now and again that I was on the boat with Mom and Dad the day before they disappeared? That Dad pulled me out of school to help him work on a faulty hatch?"
"Yeah...," I breathed. Emmett had mentioned it a number of times over the years.
"Well, there wasn't any faulty hatch, okay? That's not why I was there. Dad came and got me at school, didn't say anything except that there was trouble on the
Goliath
and they needed me to help. We got to the dock. Nobody was around except Mom by that point. They took me on board. The hold was full of steel girders that needed to be delivered to Jamaica quickly, but the place was a wreck. In the galley, plates and food and cleaning supplies were all over the tables. In the captain's quarters, every last paper was out of the files. Everything left was in these huge, makeshift piles. In the crew bunks, all the mattresses had been slashed and the foam was coming out. A hundred other things were out of order though all they had in the hold was steel. Thank God the cargo wasn't somebody moving their corporation with all papers in boxes. That would have been a mess.
"At any rate, Mom looked really glum, and all she said was, 'Start cleaning up.' So I did. Dad cleaned up the office, I cleaned the galley, Mom cleaned the barracks. Because they'd never mentioned Captain Riley's stupid proposal after he made it to Lowenberg, I didn't really get what was going on. I thought it was some sort of robbery ... until I found the search warrant. One of them had laid it on the counter in the galley."
I interrupted him at that point. "So what did they say? Did they
say
they had been running drugs?"
"Of course not. I was their son. You don't share things like that with your son. But I think what had happened to Captain Riley's income had started happening to them. They were short on funds, and maybe they couldn't make their payment to Opa that month."
For that he had a page of line graphs from a Quick-Books program. They showed Dad's income had dipped sixty thousand dollars a year for two years, leaving the final income at only thirty thousand dollars.
"Mom was so stinking proud, you know. She insisted on buying that boat from Opa at the same price anybody else paid. If she didn't, she said, her crew wouldn't respect her. Not that it really helped all that much. I think they finally caved in, ran an illegal load or two ... It probably happened anywhere between once to occasionally. There's no actual way of knowing now."
My head was shaking slowly back and forth, back and forth. I shut my eyes again, to keep from seeing Emmett's neat and orderly little research. But I didn't want to see that wave—
An avalanche of white bearing down on the little cabin in the dark, only it wasn't snow. It was water.
For a year now, that vision had given me so much peace.
I wanted it to stay. But it was fading.... Even with my eyes shut, this black book was overtaking it, making me feel like an imbecile. Then the book dissolved, too.
I heard voices instead, first far-off, then my room came clear, from back in West Hook. I was kneeling on one side of the bed; Mom was kneeling on the other. We were talking like that. We must have been praying first—doing the Hail Mary before bed—but now we were just talking. Mom was smiling.
Her hair's falling out of her ponytail on one side. Her hands are red and cracked because she hates to wear gloves in winter. They're folded in the middle of the mattress so our knuckles are touching.
"
Mommy, what's
rape?"
I'm asking her because Dad always says things like, "You're six years old. Go play baseball for about five years." But Mom never glazes on me. And I can see her smile growing bigger, more ornery, before her eyes wander
over to mine, way slow. I know I'm saying a bad word, and I know this word has to do with something evil, but she's laughing, like evil has no power over her.
"
It's where a man gets his way and a woman doesn't, because his muscles are bigger.
"
"
Emmett told Daddy you got a rape once. Emmett said you told him that.
"
She's laughing more. I watch her send her body in a circle above her knees when she laughs, and it looks very full of confidence, and I decide I want to laugh like that from now on.
"
Daddy knew, or I wouldn't have told Emmett.
"
"
So a bad man was strong over you. It's true?
"
"
You ever known me to lie?" She drums her fingers on top of my hands.
I'm looking her over. I'm thinking she's the prettiest lady I've ever seen, though she doesn't look like my friends' moms. She's got muscles in her neck that go down under her blouse, come out her fingers, and go everywhere in the room.
"
He must have had a lot of muscles.
"
"
Yeah, well. He was a very small person." She laughs again, like she just made some kind of joke that I don't get. She's laughing into the mattress now.
"
Mommy, did you put the man in jail?
"
"
Yeah. For a while.
"
"
Is he out of jail now?
"
"
He works on the docks, in fact." She watches me for only a second before my thought grabs hold of her, and
she wraps her hands around mine. "But don't you worry about him, baby. He would have no interest in you. He'll never do anything to hurt you. You believe met
"
There's no way not to believe my mom. "Do you run away when you see him ?
"
Her smile dims down for a minute, more like she's confused than like she's afraid. "No ... No! In fact, I make sure, every time I'm down there, to say something. I march right up and look him in the eye. Maybe I say, 'Couldn't you move that mop a little faster?' Or, 'Not going out today, Fitz?' He's grounded for life. He'll never see the other side of the horizon again. That's about the lowest thing that can happen to a person of the sea. That's all I do, remind him of that, when I'm looking him in the eye.
"