“I hate guns!” The girl was gasping in her panic. “I hate guns!”

“It’s all right,” I said with an urgency equal to her terror, “it’s OK!”

“I hate them!” Her fear seemed out of proportion to its cause. She had twisted away so violently from the sight of the gun that she had dropped her huge, sacklike handbag, which had consequently spilled its contents across the path. “Have you put the gun away?” she asked in a stricken voice. She was still shaking like a sail loosed to a gale.

“It’s gone,” I said.

She dropped to her knees to retrieve the slew of notebooks, pens, tape cassettes, lipstick, chewing gum, and small change that had cascaded from her enormous bag. “Are you Tim Blackburn?” She turned her anxious face up to me.

“Yes”—I stooped to help her collect her scattered belongings—“and I’m sorry I frightened you.”

“You didn’t frighten me, the gun frightened me. I’ve never had a gun pointed at me before. I’ve been waiting for you.”

“Why didn’t you ring the doorbell and wait inside?”

“I telephoned,” she explained as she grabbed coins out of Charles’s flower beds, “and someone said you were out, but would be coming back later, so I came straight round here, but there were no lights on downstairs. I thought everyone must be in bed already and I didn’t want to disturb anyone. So I waited.”

“A long time?”

She nodded. “Long enough.”

“I thought journalists didn’t care about waking people up?”

She blinked at me in gratifying astonishment. “How did you know I was a journalist?”

“I noticed you at the conference,” I confessed, “and saw you had a press badge.”

“Wow!” Her amazement seemed to stem from the fact that anyone might have noticed her. She retrieved a last pencil and straightened up. “My name’s Jackie Potten. Actually my name is Jacqueline-Lee Potten, but I don’t use the Lee because it was my father’s name, and he left my mom when I was kind of little, and Molly Tetterman says she’s sorry she wasn’t at home when you phoned, but she was away in Maine because her son is in college there and she was visiting him all week, and she only got home today, and I phoned her tonight and she told me about your messages on her answering machine, and she asked me to talk to you, which is why I wanted to see you, and I’m sorry it’s so late, but I’m leaving tomorrow…”

“Whoa!” I held up my hands to check the impetuous flow, found my key, and opened the guest-house door. “Come and have a drink,” I told Jackie. I did not yet know her connection with the Genesis Parents’ Support Group or exactly why she wanted to see me, but there was something in her disorganized volubility that I liked. Her presence was also good for me because her vulnerability forced me to control the panic that raced had my own heart and filled me with an inchoate fright.

“I don’t drink alcohol or coffee,” Jackie informed me in an anxious voice, as though I might be about to force those poisons down her throat.

“Come in anyway,” I said.

“Tim!” Charles, hearing his front door open, shouted from the private parlor upstairs. He was waiting up for me, as I had assumed he would, so I gave him the news he really wanted to hear, which was that his precious Austin-Healey was unscratched.

“I didn’t expect you back so soon.” Charles, who was splendidly dressed in a Chinese silk bathrobe, appeared at the top of the stairs. “What happened?”

“He was early,” I said, then placed the gun on the hall table. “I didn’t need it, but thank you anyway.”

“And who on earth are you?” Charles imperiously demanded of Jackie Potten who, faced with the ethereal creature on the stairway, shrank back into the doorway.

“My name’s Potten,” she said, “Jackie Potten.”

“I assume,” Charles said haughtily, “that you are the person who telephoned earlier. You may wait for Mr. Blackburn in the guest parlor, and he will help me make a pot of coffee.” Charles walked slowly downstairs. “Come, Tim.”

As soon as we were in the kitchen Charles dropped his absurdly pretentious manner. “So what happened? Tell me!”

“Not a lot. He was early, we spoke, he took the letter, and then vanished. I didn’t learn a thing.”

“Is that all?” Charles was disappointed.

“That’s all.” I sat on a stool and shook my head. “I don’t know, Charles. For a time there I actually liked the bastard, then at the end I thought he was laughing at me.” I had also thought that von Rellsteb had wanted me dead, so that Nicole could inherit, but there had been no ambush, so even that theory was wilting.

“You don’t need coffee”—Charles saw the weariness in my face—“you want something stronger. Your usual Irish?”

“Please.”

Charles pulled open a cupboard and sorted through the bottles. “What do you know about that creature?” He waved in the vague direction of the parlor where Jackie Potten waited.

“She’s a journalist,” I explained, “and I suspect she must be interested in the Genesis community because she said Molly Tetterman told her about me. You don’t mind her being here, do you?”

He offered me a dramatic shudder. “Of course I mind. She’s such a drab little thing.”

“Drab?” I sounded offended. “I don’t think she’s drab at all.”

“You don’t? That hair? And that awful blouse? And the skirt? That skirt wasn’t tailored, Tim, it was a remnant from a chain-saw massacre! Here!” He tossed me a bottle of Jamesons.

“I think she’s rather appealing,” I said stubbornly.

Charles raised his eyes to heaven, then poured himself a large vodka. “Would you like to find out what this ravishing creature of your dreams wants to drink?”

“She told me no coffee or alcohol.”

“A club soda and ice, then,” Charles decided. “I’m certainly not wasting designer water and a twist on such a creature.”

I carried the soda water back to the parlor, where Jackie was staring very solemnly at an alabaster reproduction of Michelangelo’s David. Charles followed me. “So tell us what happened,” he instructed me, as though we had not already spoken in the kitchen.

I told, leaving out only the details of my panicked flight from Sun Kiss Key, lest Charles should think I had been anything less than careful with his precious car. Not that there was much to tell, for my meeting with von Rellsteb had been remarkably unproductive. “I should have come with you,” Charles said.

“What good would that have done?” I asked.

“I would have pointed the gun at him, and then told him he had five seconds to tell me where the Genesis community lived. What is it?” This last, rather brusque, question was addressed to Jackie.

“The ice cubes.” She gestured at her club soda. “Are they made with tap water?”

“Of course.”

She blushed. “Do you mind?” She began fishing out the ice, which she dropped into an ashtray. Charles was amused, but pretended to be exasperated. Jackie Potten, once the offending ice was safely out of her drink, took a tentative sip, then searched through her capacious handbag for a notebook and pencil. “How did von Rellsteb travel tonight?”

“I don’t know.”

“I mean by boat? Car?”

“I don’t know. He sort of appeared, then vanished.”

“By broomstick,” Charles said happily.

“Gee.” Jackie frowned at me. “I mean they had a boat the other night, so I guess they must have come to Florida by sea. I hired a motorboat to look for them, and I searched most places from here to Marathon Key, but I didn’t see them.”

“What were you looking for?” I asked her. “Erebus?”

“Erebus?” She frowned. “Oh, the catamaran! They renamed her Genesis One. They’ve got two other boats we know of, Genesis Two and Genesis Three.”

“How do you know?”

“Molly asked the State Department, and they gave us copies of complaints that Japanese fishing boats had made. It was nothing to do with the State Department really, because none of the Genesis boats are American, but the Japanese complained to them anyway. And sent some photographs.”

“And you looked for one of the boats here?”

She nodded. “But I didn’t see any of them. I wondered if von Rellsteb and the others flew here. Maybe I should try and find their records in the airline computers?”

She seemed to be asking my advice, but I knew nothing of such matters and had nothing useful to say, so I merely shrugged. I wished I could have been more helpful because I was finding her oddly attractive. I did not understand why, she was an unremarkable girl, but I was acutely aware of her presence. I decided her eyes were her best feature. They were large and a curious silvery green, though perhaps that was just the reflection of the sea-green lampshades Charles favored in the guest parlor. Otherwise Jackie’s face was very narrow in the chin and broad in the forehead. Her skin was chalky pale and she seemed, under the billowy clothes that had so offended Charles, to be painfully thin. Her fair hair was in disarray despite the pins and clips she had used to tame it. I put her age at mid- to late-twenties, but her innocence made her seem more like a fourteen-year-old waif; the orphan of some heartless storm.

“Would you mind telling me,” Charles asked in his silkiest voice, “just who you are, Miss Potten?”

“Oh, gee.” She was instantly flustered. “I’m here for the Genesis Parents’ Support Group.” She paused, as if expecting us to respond, and when neither of us spoke, she added a nervous explanation. “I’m Molly’s investigator,” she added in further reassurance.

“Investigator?” I sounded incredulous.

“I investigate Genesis,” Jackie said defensively.

“So you’re not a real journalist?” Charles made the question sound like a sneer.

“Oh, yes! I work for a paper in Kalamazoo”—she paused because Charles had sniggered, but then she decided not to make anything of his scorn—“and the editor isn’t really sure that the Genesis community is a proper story for our paper. I mean our only connection with Genesis is through Molly Tetterman, but the editor doesn’t like Molly very much. Not because she isn’t a good person, because she is, but because she can be very insistent, and she keeps on pestering Norman, he’s the editor, about the Genesis Parents’ Support Group.”

“Jackie,” I interrupted her very politely, but I was becoming aware that this orphan of the storm could talk the back legs off a herd of donkeys unless she was checked. “What were you doing at the conference?”

“Oh!” She was momentarily confused, as if trying to remember just what conference I was talking about. “I went there because I hoped to get an interview with Caspar von Rellsteb. Which I didn’t, of course.” She looked at me rather pathetically. “It’s been a wasted trip, really.”

“And mine,” I said as though it might make her feel better.

“Did you ask von Rellsteb where Genesis lived?” Jackie asked me.

I nodded. “But he wouldn’t tell me. He just fed me a whole lot of mystical nonsense about how Genesis needed its privacy.”

“I think it’s Alaska,” Jackie said suddenly.

“Alaska?” I asked.

“The Genesis group has always been based in the Pacific,” Jackie explained, “and when they left British Columbia they probably wanted to stay somewhere on that same coast, and von Rellsteb has always been intrigued by Alaska. No one would know if they were there, because parts of that coast are really inaccessible, so they wouldn’t need to bother with green cards or anything like that.”

“But why Alaska?” I insisted.

“Because I found the man he shared a prison cell with in Texas, and he said von Rellsteb was always talking about Alaska, and how it was the new frontier and a place where a man could…”

“Prison!” I interrupted.

Jackie nodded, but, for once, had nothing more to say.

“Why was he in prison?” I asked.

“It was attempted robbery,” Jackie said, “but I only found out about it last month, so I haven’t had time to write it up in Molly’s newsletter. It all happened ten years ago. He served two years of an eight-year sentence, and when he was released they sent him back to Canada because he should never have been living in Texas anyway. He tried to hold up an armored truck. You know, the kind that collects money from stores and banks? But it all went wrong and he didn’t steal a penny in the end. The whole thing was really kind of stupid, except he was carrying a gun, which didn’t help his defense in court. His lawyer tried to claim that von Rellsteb was alienated, and that he was only protesting against society.”

“Did he fire the gun?” Charles asked.

Jackie shook her head. “The police say it jammed, but for some reason the technical evidence about the gun was inadmissible.”

“But if the evidence had been admissible,” I said slowly, “von Rellsteb might have been arraigned on a charge of attempted murder?”

Jackie nodded slowly, as though she had not thought of that possibility before. “I guess so, yes.”

“Bloody hell,” I said.

Charles, plainly bored with the night’s lack of interesting news, yawned, and Jackie hurriedly said she had to be leaving. She was driving back north the next day and we agreed that she would give me a lift as far as Miami Airport. The hundred-and-fifty-mile journey would give us each a chance to pick the other’s brain for more news of Genesis. “Though of what use such a dull creature can possibly be is beyond me,” Charles said grandly after Jackie had left for her motel.

She returned at ten o’clock the next morning in a tiny imported Japanese car that was spattered with bumper stickers; so many stickers that they had spread off the fender onto the fading paint of the trunk. “Vegetarians Do It on a Bed of Lettuce,” one sticker proclaimed, while another warned “I Brake for the Physically Challenged,” which seemed to imply that the rest of us plowed indiscriminately into wheelchairs with merriment aforethought. “You car?” I asked Jackie.

“Sure. I worked out that it would be cheaper to drive than fly, so long as I stayed in really economical motels.” Jackie explained that her editor in Kalamazoo was not interested in Genesis, so she had attended the conference on her own time and on her own and Molly Tetterman’s money.

I put my seabag onto the car’s backseat, said farewell to Charles, then climbed into the cramped front passenger seat of Jackie’s car, where one dashboard sticker thanked me for not smoking and another enjoined me to buckle up.

We took four wrong turns in our mutual attempts to navigate out of town, but eventually Jackie steered the car safely onto the Overseas Highway where she gingerly accelerated to forty-five miles an hour. “Are you really going to drive all the way to Kalamazoo?” I asked in astonishment.

She evidently thought I was being critical of the car rather than of her nervous driving. “It sort of shakes if you go too fast.” She began to describe various other symptoms of the car and, while she spoke, I surreptitiously examined her and wondered just what it was that attracted me to her. She did not, after all, have the impact of beauty, and I did not know her nearly well enough to determine her character, yet still I felt an odd excitement in her company. It was, I finally decided, her very touching look of earnest innocence which made her seem so very fragile and which made me feel so very fatherly toward her. She was, after all, just about young enough to be my daughter.

When she had exhausted the problems of car ownership I asked what had first made her interested in Genesis.

“Berenice,” Jackie said, as if that would explain everything, then, realizing that it explained nothing, she rushed into more detail. “She’s Molly’s eldest daughter, you see, and she went off with von Rellsteb about five years ago, and Molly thinks that Berenice was brainwashed by him, because she’s never even written her mother a letter, and they were really close! Berenice was my best friend, I mean, we told each other everything! Everything! Which is why I’ve been trying to find her. I know she wouldn’t just have just cut me dead, I mean, people don’t do that, do they?”

“Perhaps she wanted some peace and quiet?” I suggested wickedly.

She looked immediately contrite. “I talk too much,” she said miserably. “I know I do. My mother always says I do, and so does Molly, and so did Professor Falk, he was my Ethics of Journalism professor.”

“There are ethics in journalism?” I asked.

“Of course there are!” She offered me a reproving look, which, taking her gaze off the highway, made us wander dangerously across the center yellow line.

I leaned over and steered the car back toward safety. “So Berenice just ran away?”

“She went to a school in Virginia, where she met this guy, and in her senior year he took her to British Columbia for spring break, which I thought was kind of weird because she’d always gone to Florida before. That’s where she met the Genesis people. They weren’t called Genesis then, that came later. They were some kind of weird commune, know what I mean? And they just swallowed Berenice alive! No letters, no calls, nothing!”

“And you’ve been trying to reach her ever since?”

Jackie nodded. “I even visited British Columbia, but they threatened to call the police and have me arrested for trespassing! I couldn’t believe their nerve!” She frowned. “But at least they didn’t point guns at me.”

I thought she was reproving me for my behavior of the previous night, and I offered yet another apology.

“I don’t mean that,” she said hurriedly, “but Genesis is heavily into survivalism. Didn’t you know that?”

“I don’t even know what survivalism is.”

She bit her lower lip as she framed her definition. “It’s a kind of apocalyptic horror thing, know what I mean?”

“No.”

“Survivalists say that the nuclear holocaust is inevitable, but they’re determined to survive it, right? So they live in really remote places, and they have guns, so that if any other survivor tries to take their women or food stocks they can fight them off.”

“Charming,” I said.

“It’s kind of freaky,” Jackie agreed, then stopped talking as an eighteen-wheel truck, like the one that had nearly killed me the previous night, overtook us in a thunder of vibration and noise. Jackie was plainly terrified by the truck’s looming proximity and I wondered how she was ever going to endure the hundreds of miles between here and Kalamazoo.

“Why did they leave British Columbia?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t know. Unless they just wanted to be somewhere more remote? Their island was pretty terrible, sort of cold-water standpipes and mud everywhere and real primitive, but a sympathizer let them use it for free, and it had a sheltered harbor for their boats. I guess boats are important to von Rellsteb. Do you know anything about boats?”

“A bit,” I said, then changed the subject back. “Who was the sympathizer who gave them an island?”

“She’s a rich widow who’s into New Age. You know, channellers and crystals and all that really weird stuff? I think she was charmed by von Rellsteb. I mean she was really cut up when he just left her without saying anything. He didn’t even tell her where they were going.” Jackie paused. “She must have given him money, and I guess he was screwing her.” She touchingly glanced at me to make certain I was not embarrassed by her allegation. “She thought that maybe he’d moved Genesis to Europe, because they disappeared soon after he came back from his European trip. But I don’t think she’s right. I think they’re still in the North Pacific.”

“With my daughter,” I said grimly, and Jackie then wanted to know about Nicole, and so I spent a half hour telling my family’s story before we stopped for lunch at a waterfront cafe where Jackie ordered a salad of celery, lettuce, and a ghastly concoction called tofu, which she told me was made from soybeans, but looked to me like the foam insulation that my boatyard sometimes pumps into the space between a steel hull and the cabin paneling. “I assume you’re a vegetarian?” I asked her.

“I haven’t eaten flesh since I was six,” she said enthusiastically. “Mom tried to make me eat chicken or turkey, and some fish as well, because she said I needed the protein to grow properly, but I couldn’t bear to think of all the suffering, and even at Thanksgiving I used to make my own fake turkey with vegetables and bread. I used to mix them and…”

“Jackie…!” I said warningly.

“I know.” She was instantly contrite. “I’m talking too much.” She suppressed a shudder at the size of the steak on my plate, then reverted to the safer subject of the Genesis community. She told me how difficult it was to get even the smallest scraps of information. “We can’t even talk to people who used to belong because, so far as we know, not one member of Genesis has ever left the community since they moved out of British Columbia! Not one. A handful left before that, but none of them know where von Rellsteb might have gone.”

It took me a few seconds to understand the implication of Jackie’s news. “You think he kills them if they try to escape?”

Jackie was unwilling to endorse the implication of murder, but she thought it more than probable that some members of Genesis were being held against their will. “I never got beyond the pier when I visited British Columbia,” she said, “but I got this really bad feeling. I mean like von Rellsteb was into control? Like heavy discipline? I spoke to this professor at Berkeley, and he told me that a lot of Utopian groups finish up by substituting control systems for consensus because their leaders aren’t really into agreement and compromise, but have this blueprint which they insist will only work if it’s followed exactly, and they somehow manage to impose it on the group, then enforce it with rewards and punishments. Do you know what I mean?”

I was nodding eagerly, because Jackie was reinforcing my own theory that von Rellsteb had some kind of sinister mastery over his followers, and Jackie’s revelation offered an explanation of my daughter’s silence. Nicole had ignored me because she had no choice. Nicole was not a convert, but a convict, and I told Jackie about the unsettling image of the three girls wearing von Rellsteb’s strange green uniform on the day Nicole had sailed away.

“It’s not just uniforms,” Jackie said. “This guy at Berkeley says these groups make really weird hierarchies for themselves. Some groups degrade into slaves and owners, and in others the underlings have to work their way up the hierarchy by pleasing the guys at the top.”

“It makes sense!” I spoke enthusiastically, for how else could my Nicole’s vivid spirit have been broken except by some brutal methodology? Nicole, I suddenly knew, was a prisoner, and my suspicion that von Rellsteb used his disciples to make himself wealthy seemed overwhelmingly confirmed by Jackie’s description of how Utopian ideals deteriorated into fascist regimes.

Jackie suddenly looked very troubled. “Aren’t you going to eat your salad?”

“Of course not. I’m not a rabbit.”

“It’s good for you.” She waited to see if that encouragement would make me relent, then took the salad for herself when it was obvious I was not going to eat it.

I watched as she picked at the lettuce. “Why doesn’t your editor want you to write about Genesis?” I asked her.

“Because he doesn’t really believe Genesis is as bad as I say, and the paper can’t afford to send me all over the world to find out if I’m right, and I haven’t got enough proof or experience to persuade a bigger newspaper to let me do it. If I took the story to a Chicago paper they’d just put one of their own staffers on it, which means I’d be passing up my best chance of a Pulitzer, so I’m chasing the story in my own time. And with Molly’s help, of course.”

“So you can get a Pulitzer?”

“Sure, why not?” She responded as though that achievement was well within her grasp, and I decided there was more to Ms. Jackie Potten than her unprepossessing exterior promised. “It depends on the story, of course,” she explained. “I mean if von Rellsteb really is holding people against their will, then it will be a Pulitzer story, but if he’s running just another survivalist commune, then it’s page thirty-two beneath the fold.”

“It’s no story at all,” I said, “if you can’t find him.”

“What I’d like to do is track down where he gets his money. Of course I’d like to find where they’re all living, but I guess that would be difficult because the coast of Alaska is really huge! And it’s got lots of inlets and islands. They could be anywhere, and maybe they’re not even in Alaska!” She sounded rather despairing at the difficulty of the task she had set herself, then she cheered up. “But there might be another way of finding them. The paper trail.”

“Paper trail?” I asked in bemusement.

“People can’t just disappear,” Jackie said with renewed enthusiasm. “There are always records! How does the Genesis community get their money? They must use a bank somewhere, and if they use a bank, then the Internal Revenue Service has to know about them, so maybe I should go that route.”

“I know where they get their money,” I said with some satisfaction.

“Where?” She was immediately interested.

So I told Jackie about my suspicions that von Rellsteb was raising funds by forcing inheritances onto his cowed followers who, in turn, would pass the money to von Rellsteb. After all, if Joanna and I had both died in the English channel then Nicole would have inherited our expensive house that overlooked the sea, our investments, and our boatyard with its healthy cashflow, and if Nicole was indeed a brainwashed prisoner of the Genesis community, as I now believed her to be, then von Rellsteb would have become the effective owner of that plump legacy. And I had no doubt that von Rellsteb was still interested in that legacy. Why else, I asked, would he have raised the matter of Nicole’s inheritance?

“He did what?”

I told Jackie about von Rellsteb’s odd concern that perhaps Nicole might have been disinherited. “Isn’t it obvious why he raised the subject?” I asked her.

“I don’t know.” Jackie was clearly unconvinced by my theory. “I haven’t heard of any other Genesis parents just disappearing, and why would von Rellsteb go all the way to Europe to find a victim? A lot of his followers come from Canada or the States, so why not pick on them?”

“Because,” I suggested, “a murder in Europe is far less likely to be traced back to a commune in Alaska.”

Jackie was still unconvinced. “It would be a messy way of making money. Think of all the other family members he’d have to deal with, let alone the lawyers. Mind you”—she was clearly worried that I might be upset by her abrupt dismissal of my theory, so she tried to soften it—“we know so little about what makes von Rellsteb tick. I still haven’t discovered why he went to Europe four years ago, and it was clearly important, because it was after that trip that the whole commune disappeared.”

Jackie was referring to the journey during which he had met Nicole, and I suggested that perhaps von Rellsteb had been on a recruiting trip.

“Maybe,” Jackie said, but without enthusiam.

“Perhaps he was going back to Germany,” I said. “He must have relatives there.”

Jackie stared at me, then, very slowly, laid down her fork. “I bet that’s why he went to Europe!” she said in the tone of voice that betrayed the dawning of an idea.

“Why?”

“Oh, boy! Why didn’t I think of that?”

“What?”

“Jeez!” She was mad at herself. “Wow! I’ve been dumb! You know that? Really dumb! His father!”

“Father?”

“Only his mother emigrated to Canada. There’s no record of a father, but I’ll bet that’s it!” Then, being Jackie, she told me the story from its very beginning, from the time that Caspar von Rellsteb had been born in Hamburg in the very last months of the Second World War, which, I realized with a pang, made him almost my exact contemporary. Jackie confessed that she had discovered nothing about von Rellsteb’s real father, but had instead concentrated her research on his mother who had been a German national called Eva Fellnagel. In 1949 Eva Fellnagel had married a Canadian army sergeant called Skinner, and afterward had gone to live with him in Vancouver. Caspar, Eva’s son, had traveled with the couple, and, though the marriage to Sergeant Skinner had not lasted long, it had been sufficient to secure both Eva and her son Canadian citizenship. Jackie said she had always assumed Caspar’s aristocratic surname had been an affectation wished on him by his mother. “But perhaps there really was a von Rellsteb!” Jackie said excitedly, “and maybe that’s why Caspar went to Europe! To find his real father!”

“And if we could find him, too?” I suggested.

“Sure!” Jackie was excited, certain that by retracing von Rellsteb’s European footsteps she could track him all the way down to the present. Then her face fell. “There’s just one problem,” she said ruefully, “I’d have to go to Germany.”

“Which you can’t afford to do?” I took a guess at the reason for her dubiety.

“I haven’t got any money,” she confessed, “and Molly’s spent almost all her savings.”

“I’ve got money,” I said very simply, because suddenly life had become extremely simple. Nicole was being held prisoner by a man who was trying to forge his own insane Utopia. I would find that man’s hiding place and I would free my daughter. It would take money, but I had money, and I would do anything to get my daughter back.

I was going hunting.

 

“You’ve done what?” David asked me when I told him the results of my American visit.

“I’ve hired an investigator.”

“Oh, good God! You’ve hired someone! To do what?”

“To find Nicole, of course.”

“Good God!” At first I thought David was upset because of my profligacy, but then I realized he was frightened of my obsession with Nicole, expecting it to end in crippling disappointment. “Tell me, for God’s sake!”

I told him about Jackie Potten, and the telling took all the way from Heathrow Airport to the coast where, before taking me home, David stopped for lunch at the Stave and Anchor. We sat at our usual table by the fire, where I took pleasure in a pint of decent-tasting beer and David took an equal pleasure in mocking me. “So! Let us celebrate your achievements, Tim. You have permitted some American girl to fleece you of sixteen hundred pounds. I do applaud you, Tim, I really do.”

It was lunchtime, but a depression that had brought a gale of wind and rain up the channel had also fetched a mass of clouds that made the pub windows as dark as evening. The lights were on in the bar where a group of idle fisherman amused themselves by listening to our conversation. I tried to defend myself against David’s scorn. “Jackie Potten is a very enterprising reporter,” I insisted with as much dignity as my tiredness would allow. “That’s what I like about the Americans. They’re so full of enthusiasm! They’re not like us.”

“You mean they don’t roam the world giving away their wealth to passing females?” David inquired robustly. “Good God, Tim, the trollop must have thought Christmas had arrived early! She must think you are the greatest fool in Christendom! You never did have any sense of financial responsibility.”

“I am merely subsidizing Jackie’s investigations,” I insisted.

“Oh, dear Lord,” my brother said in despair. He scratched a match on the stone of the hearth, then laboriously lit his pipe as he prepared his next broadside. “You remind me of Tuppy Hargreaves. Do you remember Tuppy? He had that very rich parish in Dorset, and a rather grand wife, but he abandoned them both to run away with a girl young enough to be his granddaughter, and in no time at all the poor sod was wearing a wig and gobbling down vitamins and monkey-gland extract. He died of a heart attack in Bognor Regis, as I recall, and the floozie drove off with an Italian hairdresser in Tuppy’s Wolseley. I took the cremation service in some ghastly place near Southampton. They only paid me two pounds, I remember. Two measly pounds! No doubt a similar fate awaits you, Tim, with this Jackie creature.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said.

“It is not me being ridiculous,” David said very grandly, then gave me a most suspicious glance. “Was this child beautiful? Did she bat false eyelashes at you, is that it?”

“I am merely paying for Jackie to continue her investigation of Genesis.”

“Her investigation of gullibility!” David pounced gleefully. “Good God, Tim, how gullible can a grown man be? This Miss Potten presents you with a few tattered assumptions about the Genesis community and you reward her with the balance of monies in your pocket, barely leaving yourself enough to buy a pint of ale! Do you really believe she’ll travel to Germany on your behalf?” David, despite his calling, had little faith in humankind. “Not that we can do much about the girl now,” he went on, “you’re home, the damage is done, so now you can do some proper work.”

“What does that mean?” I asked suspiciously.

“It means that your boatyard, now that you’ve had your fling, could profit from a firm managerial touch.” David usually kept an eye on the yard while I was away. “Not that Billy doesn’t do his best,” he added hastily, “because he does, but he hasn’t got the swiftest brain I’ve ever encountered in a parishioner, and he’s a hopeless salesman. And that’s what you need, Tim, a salesman! You must sell some of the yard’s inventory before you entirely run out of space! You won’t believe this, but Tort-au-Citron is back on the market. God knows what that lawyer thought he was playing at when he bought her, but you’ve got her back, and doubtless you’ll have to haul her out of the water and let her clutter up the yard again.”

“Stormchild is for sale again?” I asked in mild astonishment.

“Stormchild, yes, or Tort-au-Citron,” David confirmed. “It seems young Miller rather overplayed his hand in buying the boat, and his partners are now understandably keen to get the brute off their books. I warned them that in today’s market it won’t sell quickly, but if you can find a buyer, Tim, I think they’ll be willing to drop their price pretty savagely. In fact I think they’ll take a loss just to put the whole embarrassing exercise behind them.”

“Maybe they’ll go as low as ninety-five?” I wondered.

“Good Lord, no!” David seemed offended. “You’ll have to ask a higher price than that! At least a hundred and ten thousand! Remember, Tim, you’re on a broker’s percentage, and they’re lawyers! In the words of the good Lord himself, screw the wretches till they squeal.”

“Ninety-five,” I said again, “because I’ve already got a buyer lined up.”

David stared at me with a gratifying amazement. “You do?”

“Yes,” I said, “me.”

That stopped David cold. He gazed at me for a few seconds over the rim of his glass, took a long swallow of ale, then momentarily closed his eyes. “I could have sworn you said you intended to purchase Tort-au-Citron for yourself. Please inform me that I misheard.”

Instead of answering I took our glasses to the bar and had them refilled. When I carried the pints back to the table I confirmed David’s worst suspicions. “I’ve decided to sell the house,” I said, “put a sales manager into the yard, and buy Stormchild.” I was damned if I would go to sea in a boat named after some legal jest. She would have her old name back. “With any luck I’ll be away before Christmas. Cheers.” I raised my glass to David.

“Go and see Doc Stilgoe and have him prescribe you a nerve tonic,” my brother advised.

I smiled. “Truly, David, I’ve had time to think about my life, and I don’t want it to trickle on like it is. Besides, I was never any damned good at running the business; Joanna was always the one who did the books, and I’m a much better sailor than I am a salesman, so I’ll buy Stormchild, then go looking for Nicole.”

“You can’t just disappear!” David exploded at me.

“Why ever not? Nicole did.”

“She was young! She was a fool! She was irresponsible!”

“And I’m alone,” I said, “and what responsibilities do I have?”

“You have responsibilities to Nicole, for a start,” David said trenchantly. “If the silly girl ever does decide to come home, then it’s going to be mighty difficult for her if home is halfway round the globe and still moving!”

“Nickel’s not coming home, David. None of the Genesis community has ever left von Rellsteb, at least not since he went into hiding. Maybe some of his followers have tried to escape, but he’s made damn sure that none get away to tell any tales.”

“So what the hell are you going to do? Just wander away on a boat and grow a beard?”

“I’m going to find Nicole, of course,” I said, then held up a hand to stop David from interrupting me. “I believe she’s being held against her will. I can’t prove that, of course, unless I find her, so that’s what I’ll do.”

David snorted derision. “You are mad.” He was scornful, yet I also heard doubt in my brother’s voice, as though he knew I was right and was simply reluctant to admit it.

“No,” I said very seriously, “I’m doing what you and I have often dreamed of doing. I’m going on an adventure, an old-fashioned quest across far seas, and, perhaps, at the end of it, I shall find Nicole.”

“My dear Tim, what terrible things the Florida sun has done to your sanity,” David said, though I heard a distinct tone of jealousy in his voice. David often complained that the world had become dull and offered no chances for adventure.

“Why don’t you come with me?” I asked him.

He laughed. “My dear Tim, I’m busy.”

“God will give you a sabbatical, won’t he?”

“I’m overdue for one,” he said wistfully, and I could see he was tempted, but he was also frightened of the temptation. In some ways the relationship between David and myself was like the one that had existed between Nicole and her brother. Nicole, like me, was the daring one, the instigator of mischief, while David, like Dickie, was more cautious. My brother, tough as he was, did not like embarking on uncertain endeavors. That, I often thought, was why he preferred dinghy sailing to deep-water cruising. However fast and exciting a racing dinghy might seem, it is almost always sailed within sight of land, in sheltered waters, and in daylight. Blue-water cruisers, on the other hand, go out into the great waters where tempests, darkness, and dangers wait. “Damn it, Tim, I’d love to come,” David now said, “but duty forbids.”

Outside the pub the gray wind beat bleak rain across the town’s roofs and brought the far sound of the wild seas breaking on the river’s bar. To me the noise was music, for it was the sound that would take me back to sea, and to the world’s far ends and, if God willed it, back to Nicole.

In a boat called Stormchild.

 

I craned Tort-au-Citron out of the water, scrubbed her hull clean of a season’s weed and barnacles, then gave her a triple coating of antifouling paint. First, though, I took the ridiculous name off her transom and painted her original name in its place. She was Stormchild again, and I was sentimental enough to think that the lovely boat was grateful for the change.

I paid ninety-six thousand for her. She was worth nearly double that price, but I had persuaded Miller’s legal partners that she had deteriorated badly. The lawyers should have insisted on a survey, but they took my word on the boat’s condition, confirming David’s suspicions that Miller’s partners were simply glad to be rid of the yacht. Which suited me, for I now possessed a boat superbly suited to my purpose. Stormchild was tough, but she was also fast, safe, and comfortable. My plan was to provision her, then, leaving David to tie up the loose ends of my affairs, I would head south across Biscay. I could expect a lively time of that crossing, for it was already very late in the year, but I would be heading into the regions of perpetual summer, and, when the trade wind belt moved north, I would go west toward America.

“You’ve heard nothing from that wretched child, I suppose?” David never called Jackie by her name. That was not from unkindness, but rather out of David’s fear of the unknown, and I, who knew my brother’s foibles only too well, knew I would never shake his preconception that Jackie, being young and foreign, was a threat to me.

“I’ve heard nothing,” I confirmed.

“A fool and his money are easily parted,” David said with sanctimonious relish. It was five weeks after my return from Florida and, on a bitterly cold day, he was helping me rig Stormchild. We had craned her into the water the day before and now she floated, lone and glorious, at the winter pontoons.

“She might contact me yet,” I said defensively, though in truth I had rather abandoned hope of Jackie Potten. I did not for one moment credit David’s belief that she had cheated me, but I did fear that her investigatory skills had not proved equal to discovering why von Rellsteb had made his journey to Europe. I had not heard from Jackie, nor from Nicole. I had harbored a secret hope that the carefully written letter I had given to von Rellsteb on Sun Kiss Key would spur Nicole into a reply, but I had to assume that the letter had never been delivered.

“If that wretched girl doesn’t come through with the goods,” David said acidly, “then you’re sailing into the unknown are you not?”

“Not really. I think Alaska or British Columbia are the places to search.” I had bought the Admiralty charts for those far, inhospitable, and secretive coasts, and the more I studied the charts, the more I became convinced that von Rellsteb might indeed have taken refuge in one of the tortuous inlets of the North Pacific. In that expectation I now prepared Stormchild for desolate and icy waters. I had put a diesel-powered heater into her saloon and new layers of insulation inside her cold, steel hull. I had built extra water and fuel tanks into her belly and crammed spare parts and tools into every locker. I had treated myself to the best foul-weather gear that money could buy, and I was stocking Stormchild’s galley with the kind of food that fought off winter’s gloom: cartons of thick soups, cans of steak and kidney pies, stewed beef, and plum duff. Thus, day by cold day, my boat settled lower in the water.

Some of the equipment I needed was not available from my own chandlery, or from any yachtsman’s discount catalog. I had been alarmed by Jackie Potten’s description of the Genesis community as survivalists and impressed by her contention that Utopian communes often became degraded by the imposition of a controlling discipline, and I did not want to face such a belligerent group unarmed, so I quietly put the word about that I was in the market for a good rifle. Billy, my foreman, solved the problem by revealing that his father had hoarded two British Army rifles as souvenirs of his war service. “Silly old bugger shouldn’t have them at all,” Billy said, “not at his age. Bloody things ain’t licensed, and all the old fool will ever do is shoot hisself in the foot one day. You’d be doing me a right favor to take them out of the house.”

He wanted me to buy both rifles. They were .303 Lee-Enfields, the No. 4 Mark I version, which was a robust, bolt-action weapon, tough and forgiving, with a ten-shot magazine and a maximum range of twelve hundred yards, though only an optimist would bother to take aim if the target was much above three hundred paces. The Lee-Enfield had once been the standard rifle of the British forces, and was still used by armies that appreciated the merits of its rugged construction. Both guns still had their army-issue, brass-tipped, webbing slings, while their stocks and barrel sleevings had been lovingly polished with linseed oil.

David helped me hide the two guns deep inside Stormchild; one we placed in a specially disguised compartment under the generator in the bow, while the other we hid behind the timber paneling of the after companionway. “It’s sensible to take two,” David said with a most unchristian relish, “because if one goes wrong, then you can always shoot von Rellsteb with the second one.”

“Don’t be daft,” I said, “I’m not going to shoot him. I’m only taking the guns as a precaution.”

“Don’t let him shoot first,” David warned me. To my brother Stormchild’s voyage had transformed itself from an exercise in futility to an enviable demonstration of moral absolutes that would end with good triumphing over evil. David’s initial opposition to my expedition had changed when I told him how idealistic communes like the Genesis community often became fouled by the politics of domination. To David, therefore, Nicole had become a pristine maiden victimized by a Prussian villain, and that dislike intensified when I told David of my conversation with von Rellsteb, and how he had expressed a desire to live at one with the planet. That was just the kind of heretical mysticism that brought out the Christian soldier in my straightforward brother, and so, enthused by righteous indignation, he encouraged me to slay the enemy and release Nicole. But that enemy was well armed, and I was sailing alone, which was one of the reasons I wanted David, who was my closest friend as well as my brother, to accompany me. I made my strongest effort to change his mind on the day when, at long last, we took Stormchild for a long shakedown sail off the southern English coast. “Nothing would please me more than to accompany you,” David said, “but it’s impossible.”

“Betty wouldn’t mind, would she?”

“She’s all for it! She says it would do me good.” David was standing at Stormchild’s wheel, which, in the manner of many brilliant dinghy helmsmen who find themselves sailing a larger yacht, he twitched far too frequently. We had left the river long before dawn and flown up-channel in the grip of a bitter east wind that had now gentled and backed into an evening whisper. Stormchild had taken the day’s white-topped waves beautifully, while now, serene and beautiful, she ghosted the evening’s flood tide homeward. “She sails very sweetly,” David said as he glanced up at her towering, sunset-touched main.

“She does,” I agreed, “but I still wouldn’t mind a second pair of hands aboard.”

“Doubtless, doubtless.” David crouched out of the small wind to light his pipe, then chucked the dead match overboard. “Even the bishop said a sabbatical might do me good,” he added wistfully.

“Then come!” I said, exasperated by his refusal.

“It would be sheer irresponsibility,” he said with a touch of irascibility. “Besides, I’m older than you. I don’t think I could cope with the discomforts of long-distance cruising.”

“Balls.”

He shrugged. “If I could find someone to look after the parishes, I would, maybe.” He sounded very uncertain.

“I wish you would come. Think of all the bird life in Alaska!”

“There is that,” he said wistfully. David and Betty were both ardent ornithologists, and their house was filled with bird books and pictures.

“So come!” I urged him.

He shook his head. “You’ve been itching to make a long voyage for years, Tim. It’s been too long since you sailed round the world. But I’m not itching for the same thing. I’ve become a creature of habit. People think I’m a curmudgeonly old clergyman, and that’s exactly what I want to be. You go, and I’ll stay at home and pray for you. And I’ll keep a pastoral eye on the boatyard, too.”

“If you change your mind,” I said, “you can always fly out and join me.”

“That’s true, that’s true.”

Our wake was now just a shimmer of evening light, proof how sea-kindly was Stormchild’s sleek hull. We were hurrying home in an autumn dusk, sliding past a dark shore where the first lights hazed the misted hills yellow. There was a chill in the air, a foretaste of winter, an invitation to follow the migrating birds and turn our boat’s bows south. In front of us the sea was dark, studded by the winking lights of the buoys, while astern of Stormchild the empty sea was touched with the dying sun’s gold so that it looked like a shining path which would lead to the earth’s farthest ends and to where all our secret hopes and wildest dreams might one day come true.

 

I had Stormchild’s compasses swung professionally, then had a technician give her radar a final service. I had learned that the Alaskan coast was prey to ship-killing fogs, so the radar was more than a frill, it was a necessity. The aerial was mounted at the mast’s upper spreaders and fed its signal to two screens; a main one above the navigation station at the foot of the companionway, and a repeater screen that was mounted in the yacht’s center cockpit.

A new spray hood arrived. It was made from stout blue canvas with clear plastic windows that would shelter the forward section of Stormchild’s cockpit against the bitter northern seas and shrieking winds. Stormchild had a small auxiliary wheel mounted in that forward section of the cockpit, while the main wheel was further aft. Astern of the large main wheel was the teak-planked coach roof over the after cabin. That cabin was the most comfortable aboard, but not in a rough sea when the motion amidships was always easier, so I was using the after cabin as a storeroom. I planned to live, sleep, navigate, and cook in the main living quarters amidships. On the starboard side of those midships quarters was the navigation station, which was equipped with a generous table, good chart stowage, and plenty of space for the radios and instrumentation. Aft of the navigation table was a shower and lavatory, while opposite, on the port side of the companionway, was a large galley. Forward of the galley was the saloon with its two wide sofas, table, and wall of shelves that held books and cassette tapes. The diesel-powered heater looked something like a small and complex woodstove, and gave the saloon a decidedly cozy air, a feeling heightened by the framed pictures and glass-shaded oil lamps.

Forward of the main cabin were two smaller sleeping cabins that shared a common bathroom. I had turned one of the cabins into a engineering workroom, while the other was crammed with stores. Last were two chain lockers, a sail locker, and a watertight compartment that held Stormchild’s small diesel generator, under which one of the two rifles was hidden.

On deck I had a life raft in a container, a dinghy that was lashed to the after-coach roof, and a stout rack filled with boat hooks, whisker poles, and oars. At the stern, on a short staff, I flew the bomb-scarred red ensign which had flown from Slip-Slider and which the navy had rescued from the channel. I would take that ragged flag to my own journey’s end as a symbol of Joanna.

Stormchild had been rerigged, repainted, and replenished. The work had taken me eight weeks exactly, and now she was ready. The sale of my house was progressing smoothly, the boatyard had a new manager and all I needed now was the right weather to slip down channel and round Ushant. That weather arrived in early November, and I topped up Stormchild’s water and fuel tanks, checked her inventory one more time, then went ashore for my last night in England. I stayed with David and Betty, and used their telephone to make a final effort to reach Jackie Potten. There was no answer from Jackie’s telephone, and only the answering machine responded when I called Molly Tetterman’s house. So much for the ladies of Kalamazoo, I thought, and put the phone down without leaving any message.

The next morning, in a cold rain and gusting wind, I carried the last of my luggage down to the boatyard where the heavily laden Stormchild waited at the pontoon. Friends had come to bid me farewell and cheered when David’s wife, Betty, broke a bottle of champagne on Stormchild’s stemhead. David said a prayer of blessing over the boat, then we all trooped below to drink more champagne. David and Betty gave me two parting gifts: a book about Alaskan birds and the Book of Common Prayer. “Not the modern rubbish,” David assured me, “but the 1662 version.” It was a beautiful and ancient book with a morocco leather binding and gilt-edged pages.

“Too good for the boat,” I protested.

“Nonsense. It isn’t for decoration anyway, but for use. Take it.”

Billy, on behalf of the boatyard staff, then presented me with a ship’s bell that he ceremoniously hung above the main companionway. “It’s proper brass, boss,” he told me, “so it’ll tarnish like buggery, but that’ll make you think of us every time you have to clean the sod.”

We opened still more champagne, though I, who would be taking Stormchild down channel when the tide ebbed, only drank two glasses. It was a sad, bittersweet day; a parting, but also a beginning. I went to find my daughter, but I also went to fulfill a dream that had given such joy to Joanna—the dream of living aboard a cruising boat, of following the warm winds and long waves. I was going away, leaving no address and no promise of a return.

At midday, as the tide became fair, my guests climbed back onto the pontoon. Friends shouted farewells as the rain slicked Stormchild’s teak deck dark. I started the big engine. Billy disconnected the shoreside electricity, then slipped my springs, leaving the big yacht tethered only by her bow and stern lines. David was the last to leave the boat. He gripped my hand. “Good luck,” he said, “and God bless.”

“Are you sure you won’t come?”

“Good luck,” he said again, then climbed ashore. I looked ahead, past Stormchild’s bows, at the rain-beaten river, down which Joanna had sailed to her death, and from where Nicole had sailed into oblivion. Now it was my turn to leave, and I glanced up at the hill where my wife and son were buried, and I said my own small prayer of farewell.

People were shouting their goodbyes. Most were laughing, and a few were crying. Someone threw a paper streamer. Billy had already let go the bow line and David was standing by the aft. “Ready, Tim?” he shouted.

“Let go!” I called.

“You’re free, Tim!” David tossed the bitter end of the aft line onto Stormchild’s deck. “Good luck! God bless! Bon voyage!”

I put the engine into gear. Water seethed at Stormchild’s stern as she drew heavily and slowly away from her berth. Next stop, the Canaries!

“Goodbye!” a score of voices shouted. “Good luck, Tim!” More paper streamers arced across Stormchild’s guardrails and sagged into the widening strip of gray-white water. “Bon voyage!”

I waved, and there were tears in my eyes as the streamers stretched taut, snapped, and fell away. One of the boatyard staff was sounding a raucous farewell on an air-powered foghorn. “Goodbye!” I shouted one last time.

“Mr. Blackburn!” A small and determined voice screamed above the racket, and I glanced back across the strip of propeller-churned water, and there, crammed among my friends and dressed in a baggy sweater and shapeless trousers with her bulging handbag gripped in a thin pale hand, was the lady from Kalamazoo. Jackie Potten had surfaced at last. She had not let me down after all. “Mr. Blackburn!” she shouted again.

I banged Stormchild’s gearbox into reverse. White water foamed and boiled as the propeller struggled to check the deadweight of over twenty tons of boat and supplies. I slung a line ashore, David and Billy hauled, and ignominiously, just thirty seconds after leaving, I and my boat came home again.