After he’d put his phone away Nicholas said, “Or else? Or else what?”
“You know, I’ve always wondered about that myself,” Jesse said.
He took another look around the room, which had been tossed, and not in any kind of professional way. The desk on the other side of the room was not dissimilar to Charlie Farrell’s. The drawers were on the floor. Papers scattered everywhere.
“Charlie told me you handled his money,” Jesse said. “Were you still doing that when he died?”
“He took great pride in the fact that he hadn’t balanced a checkbook properly since my grandmother passed,” he said.
“Is there anything in the books that somebody could be worried about?”
“If there is,” Nicholas said, “it beats the shit out of me what it might be.”
Jesse put the sofa cushions back in place, and sat down.
“Odd that the guy broke in in the middle of the day,” he said.
“Maybe not so much. I was supposed to be at work. But I left some files here that it turned out I needed there. From the looks of the place, he must’ve been almost finished when I came through the door.”
“You didn’t drive?”
“Figured I’d get some exercise, over and back. Kill two birds with one stone. Except then I nearly got killed myself.”
“This had to have something to do with Charlie.”
“Nothing else makes sense, right?”
“Somehow this guy, whoever he is, thought you might know something your grandfather knew. Something that has somebody scared.”
“But what?” Nicholas said. “You think somebody killed Gramps and might have been willing to kill me over cryptocurrency?”
There was a ping then.
Incoming text, to Nicholas.
He took his phone out of his pocket, looked down at it.
His eyes got very big.
“What the fuck,” he said.
“Who’s it from?” Jesse asked.
“Gramps.”
Thirty
Nicholas wordlessly handed his phone over to Jesse.
There was a text, from what had been Charlie Farrell’s number. All the letters in lowercase. Some words running together. Jesse recognized his old friend’s distinctive style. Charlie had been a thumb user. Jesse had never gotten the hang of that. But the older he got, and as much dexterity as he had lost, he was happy he could still properly grip a baseball.
troubleinparadise.
maybe roosterin henhouse
about to cockblock them
think i know whoitis
talk later, gramps
Jesse copied the text, sent it as a message to himself, handed the phone back to Nicholas.
“Where’s this been?” Jesse said. “You get texts stacked up like planes waiting to land at Logan?”
“I actually think I might know,” Nicholas said. “A few months ago my girlfriend and I were in a group chat, a bunch of couples making a plan to go away for the weekend. And while that was going on, some texts just got lost to the ether. I did some research. It’s more common than you think, texts coming to you late, or just getting lost, even if they say ‘delivered.’ ”
“Gives you the creeps,” Jesse said. “Like Charlie talking to us from the other side.”
“Trying to tell us something,” Nicholas said. “Just after the fact.”
Jesse felt himself smiling.
“Not just a cop to the end,” he said. “After the end.”
“Is any of this making sense to you?” Nicholas said.
“Just this,” Jesse said. “We know the guy who killed Charlie took his phone. Maybe he got around to reading his text messages, and saw what he wrote to you, and decided you had to know something.”
“We just have no idea about what.”
Jesse said, “Maybe your grandfather figured out where the scam and spam calls were coming from, and who was behind them.”
“And that was worth killing him over?”
“What I’m going to find out,” Jesse said. “Something else you can take to the bank.”
Nicholas looked down at his phone again.
“Trouble in Paradise,” he said.
“Not the first,” Jesse said.
Thirty-One
There was one race about which Michael Crane had talked, what he called his white whale, the Clipper Round the World Yacht Race, starting up again after being paused for the past two years because of the pandemic.
He’d explained it to Molly by showing the course to her on the huge wall map in his study, how you ended up crossing six oceans over ten or eleven months, depending on how good your boat was, and the men crewing it. You could sign up for some of the legs or all of them. Michael always said he’d be in for all if he ever got his chance, a chance to participate in what he called the Olympics of yacht racing, because you were up against people from all walks of life and all corners of the world.
Now he had gotten his chance, because of Teddy Altman, the billionaire for whom he’d crewed before in big races, because Teddy’s new yacht had finally been finished during the Clipper’s two-year hiatus. Teddy asked Michael to captain the crew, offering him more money than Michael would normally make in five years. Michael accepted.
“I have to do this,” Michael told Molly.
“I know.”
But they both knew it wasn’t just about the Clipper Round the World Yacht Race, that this was a way for them to separate without legally or officially declaring that, or telling their children, for them to be separated by six oceans, for nearly a year.
It was because Michael now knew about Molly and Crow.
She had finally confessed to her husband about her one-night stand — did people even still call it that? — with an Apache whose real name was Wilson Cromartie, a career criminal at the time Molly slept with him, but now one who had, for all Molly and Jesse knew, gone straight. Or as straight as he could manage, being Crow. Molly would eventually be shot in their investigation of Neil O’Hara’s death. Crow would save Jesse’s life shooting a hired gun named Darnell Woodson. That was how Crow ended up back in Paradise.
And back, at least temporarily, in Molly’s life.
Just not all the way back, the way he wanted to be.
Molly didn’t know whether it was Catholic guilt that finally caught up with her, about something that she’d told only Jesse and her priest, just the one time, in real Confession. Whatever brought her to the moment, and realizing what the consequences might be and how it would hurt him, Molly told the man she had loved since high school about Crow.
She only left out the part about how fully aware she’d been last year that her attraction to Crow was as powerful as ever, like it was part of her goddamn DNA now.
Bless me, Father, for once again taking your name in vain.
Michael didn’t get angry. Did not ask for a lot of details.
“Just the one time?” is what he said.
“Yes.”
“But once was enough, wasn’t it?”
He said he would need to get a place of his own, and then they’d figure out how to tell their girls. But then Teddy Altman had called. Michael told Molly that it would be like a story from another time, and that he was going off to sea. He told her he would update her on his progress occasionally. He showed her an app that enabled her to track Teddy’s boat, which would eventually end up in London next year, hopefully ahead of everybody else.
“I love you,” Molly told him on the day he left for Teddy Altman’s private plane.
“I know,” he said, and then was gone.
That was a month ago. She still hadn’t heard from him, but Michael had told her that it might be a while before she did, and that might not be a bad thing.