“How do you feel, Dad?”
“Completely at peace. Blessed to be here with you, your wives, and your kids.”
I haven’t told them about the one-page note Eben Cain, the man who watched over this house in the lonely winters, handed me yesterday. Slow-speaking and deliberate, Eben said it had been months since he looked into the old mail slot in the waiting room at the island’s dock, where for years his family’s mail was left. In his one concession to the modern world, Eben had a shiny new mailbox in the post office in Boothbay Harbor. He went there once every two weeks.
“Sometimes,” Eben told me, “I take a gander in the old slot. This was in it.”
Eben handed me an envelope on which Christina’s writing appeared. “For Eben Cain, To Be Given to Mr. Johnson.” I opened the envelope. In it was a single sheet of paper. “Carlos, if you wish to follow the money, there’s an account in Banco Popular de Venezuela in Bogota. Anyone who has the numbers I’ve written here can get full access to the money in that account.” At the bottom of the page was a line of fourteen numbers and below that were the words: “All my love, Brighteyes.”
Tonight we’ll have a bonfire on the beach. We’ve already assembled the stones and the wood and the seaweed for the fire. I’ll show my grandchildren how to bake lobster in the seaweed and stones as my own grandfather taught me.
And I’ll let Christina’s note float momentarily over the fire and then dissolve as the ashes disperse into the night air.
Now I hear the screen door open. At different times in my life, I’ve seen my grandfather, my mother, my father, my wife, my boys when they were children, and Christina Rosario walk through that door. And now, in this place and time, I see Helen.
“Helen,” I say. “Come here. Let me hold you.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
EDUCATED AT BOWDOIN AND Cornell, Paul Batista is one of the leading criminal defense trial lawyers in America. He is also one of the country’s most familiar and widely known television personalities, with hundreds of appearances on Court TV, MSNBC, and CNN over the last fifteen years. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. He is the author of several legal textbooks, including Civil RICO, the leading treatise on the federal racketeering law, now in its third edition. His poetry has appeared in such leading literary magazines as Poetry International, Pegasus, Press, and Parnassus. He served in the United States Army in the early 1970s. An avid marathon runner, he lives in New York City and Sag Harbor, New York. Death’s Witness was his first novel.
