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.