“Short game,” Julie said softly, looking away from us, out at the ocean. “He says you have a good short game.”
Between my worries about Belov and Julie’s recollections of her husband, I was afraid we were in for an awkward afternoon. I was wrong. By the time we reached the hotel lobby, Betsy had both of us laughing, and the more serious concerns were forgotten for a while. There were several miniature golf establishments within walking distance, but apparently Betsy had seen one with giant plastic alligators on a drive earlier in the week, and that was where she wanted to play.
Julie hadn’t rented a car, so I had to drive. They’d taken a cab from the airport when they arrived in town, and Hartwick had driven them a few times. Other than those trips, they’d stayed in walking distance.
“It’s too small for you,” Betsy said of the Contour as she settled into the backseat. I closed the door of the little rental car and looked at her in the rearview mirror.
“I agree,” I said. “It’s way too small for me.”
“It fits me, though,” she said.
“Want to drive?” I asked, straight-faced.
“I’m not old enough to drive,” she answered just as seriously.
“Oh. I guess I’ll handle it, then.”
We drove to the miniature golf course with the giant plastic alligators. It turned out to be just a few miles south, and the bizarre décor didn’t stop with the alligators. They were there, all right, but so were a large plastic pirate ship, an octopus, and several pirate mannequins complete with eye patches and hooks. The course wrapped around a flowing creek and-like everything else in town-was lined with palm trees.
We played for nearly two hours. Betsy played first, and I tried to match whatever she had done on the hole to keep us close and make it more fun for her. It appeared to work, because on the last hole she was focused. She set the ball down on the plastic mat and backed away from it, then dropped into a crouch, balancing the putter against the ground, as if she were checking the break of the green.
“She’s watched her dad,” Julie said, but this time the memory brought a smile.
Betsy put the ball in the hole on her fourth putt, and I missed my fourth, making her squeal with a victor’s delight.
“You owe me an ice cream,” she taunted.
“It’s not fair,” I said, pointing my club at the plastic alligator that was watching over the hole. “He kept staring at me. It made me nervous.”
She laughed some more at that, and then we returned our clubs and left. It was early, but Betsy said she was hungry. Neither Julie nor I wanted dinner yet, so I took us on a drive to kill some time and build our appetites. I drove south on Business 17 out of Myrtle Beach. There were signs for a place called Murrells Inlet, and Julie recognized it from the brochures.
“They have charter fishing boats there,” she said. “Want to go to the docks and look at the boats, honey? Then we can go eat.”
Betsy shrugged. “We can watch boats. I’ll still be hungry, though.” Agreeable to the idea but not impressed with it.
I drove to Murrells Inlet, and we walked the docks. I’d done a fair amount of sailing on Lake Erie, but I’d never taken a boat out on the ocean. Most of the boats at these docks were powerboats, and all of them were large. I thought back to the small sailboat I’d seen just off the beach the day before, and I wondered what it felt like to have something so tiny on an ocean so large.
“I love the water,” Julie said, holding onto the railing of the dock and leaning backward, her eyes on the horizon line. “The ocean’s so big. It’s amazing. We could get on one of these boats, and if the weather was fine and there was enough gas, we could go all the way across it. Just go until we hit land again.” She said it as if she wished we really could. I looked down at her but remained silent. She sighed. “Can’t do that, though, can we? We have to stay here and face life. I didn’t mind that before. But then it got all screwed up. Now I don’t know what to do. Do we run, do we hide, do we go back?”
“It’ll be okay, Julie.” I said. “I’m going to help you get through this.”
She smiled at me, but her sunglasses shielded her eyes, and I couldn’t guess what she was thinking. She reached over and gave my hand a quick squeeze. “I know you’re going to,” she said. “And I hope you have some idea how much that means to me.”
We ate dinner at a seafood restaurant in Murrells Inlet. It was the same type of food I’d eaten the night before, but it had been good then, and I saw no reason to seek variety. I ordered crab legs, and Betsy watched with interest while I cracked them and extracted the meat.
“They look scary,” she said.
“Just from the outside,” I said. “The good stuff is inside the shell.”
“Can I try?” she asked. I was impressed. Most little kids tended to shy away from unfamiliar foods, certainly from anything that looked like crab legs. I looked at Julie, and she shrugged. I removed a small piece of meat and put it on Betsy’s plate. She speared it with her fork and put it in her mouth without hesitation.
“It’s good! ” she exclaimed a moment later. “Let’s get more crab’s legs!”
So we got more crab legs. And that girl could eat. I guess she hadn’t been kidding about her appetite on the drive to the docks. We polished off two orders between us. Julie helped only slightly, content to stick with her shrimp for the most part.
“I think she ate her weight in crab,” I said when we were done, and Julie laughed.
“She eats like a teenage boy, but somehow she stays tiny.”
“Take her into a lab and ask them to find a way to distribute her metabolism in a pill or something,” I suggested. “You could make a fortune.”
We drove back to the hotel as the sun set behind us. The beach was nearly empty now, save for a few walkers and one group of kids playing with a Frisbee. The night air was still warm, though. We went up to the room, and Julie and Betsy played board games while I read the newspaper and tried calling Joe. I made several calls without receiving an answer. It was frustrating to know he had a cell phone and just didn’t bother to take it with him or keep the battery charged. You can take an old cop to higher technology, but you can’t make him remember it.
Around nine, Betsy went to bed. I was sitting out on the balcony then, and I’d taken my gun out and tucked it against the wall behind me. Betsy stepped out, surprising me, and I moved my foot quickly, trying to hide the weapon from view. She held out her arms.
“Goodnight hug,” she said. She hugged me, and I patted her little back, feeling very strange. I wasn’t the type of guy who gave many goodnight hugs, but if she sensed that, she didn’t care. I had to admit I was somewhat pleased she’d wanted one.
“Don’t forget my ice cream,” she said as she went inside. “I beat you.”
“I won’t forget,” I said.
Twenty minutes later, Julie joined me. She noticed the gun, but she didn’t comment on it.
“We need to talk,” she said.
I nodded. “That would probably be a good idea.”
She dropped into the plastic chair beside me. “What do you think I should do, Lincoln? I’m so scared, and so confused. But I know we can’t keep this up. We need to take some sort of action instead of just delaying.”
I told her about my conversations with Joe and Amy and about Yuri Belov.
“Amy thinks you should let her write the story,” I said. “She thinks if everything was made public, it would eliminate the threat you pose to some people.”
She leaned forward, interested. “What do you think of that?”
I shrugged. “I don’t think it’s a cure-all. To the Russians, it will probably just be added motivation. As far as Jeremiah Hubbard is concerned, it might be pretty powerful, though. He’s a well-known public figure, and he cares about image.” I drummed my fingers on the arm of the chair and sighed. None of the solutions looked too promising.