She yawned, stretched, still staring, and said, “My brother. I just had me a witchin’ dream, and you was in it. Now I open my eyes, and here you are in front of me lookin’ so pale, like you just seen a ghost.”
I told her, “In a way, I just did.”
I’ve spent a lifetime maintaining my own counsel, and keeping secrets. Even if I believed in the value of psychoanalysis, emotional purging-name a popular term-I swore an oath to a covenant long ago that bars me from any such therapy. So, after living such a long and solitary internal existence, I discovered something new in Ransom. She’s become a friend and confidante who, because she actually does treat me with the unconditional love of a sister, has earned my unconditional trust.
So I told her. Told her about Pilar’s e-mails, and that I might not be Lake’s father. Without getting into my clandestine activities-information I can never divulge-I told her all that I could about Thackery, and then added, “The only other possibility is Tomlinson.”
I’d felt sick. But the expression of outrage on her face rallied me. “You serious. That ol’ hippie-stork needs someone to tie his cock in a knot. Or throw a potion on him that makes his Willie Johnson limp as boiled yarn. Maybe tha’s just exactly what I’ll do. Came close to doin’ it back the time we dated those few times and I found out he was already diddlin’ other womens.”
I nearly smiled.
I said, “The thing is, the timing with Tomlinson and Pilar doesn’t work out quite right. He was in Masagua with me before Lake was born, but it was only five or six months before he was born.”
Sounding cynical, Ransom asked, “Were you there when that baby born?”
“No.”
“Know anybody who was?”
“I didn’t even know she was pregnant.”
“Uh-huh. Sometimes a woman lie about when a baby come out when she not sure who the daddy be. Who the one that told you about the child?”
I had to think back. The answer surprised me. “It was… Tomlinson?… Yeah, it was. He brought me a newspaper that had a photo of Pilar and Lake. It was taken not too long after she gave birth. He had blond hair back then, so I just naturally assumed…”
Ransom was nodding, still saying, “Uh-huh, uh-huh…” Then she asked, “When did the woman tell you that you was the daddy?”
I had to think about that, too. “Because of where they lived, Masagua, I couldn’t go back to that country for a long time. There were… reasons. On my end, not hers. So I guess it would have been in phone conversations. I remember waiting for her to mention it; figuring that she would. And she finally did. When Lake was maybe three or so, she said something like, ‘He’s at an age where he’s asking about his father. So we need to have a talk.’ She put it like that. She said she thought I’d be a good father when the time came for us to be together.”
Ransom said, “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” in the same knowing tone. “Why you think the timing’s so far off with that ugly Stork Man, Tomlinson?”
I said, “It might not be. There’s a chance Pilar met Tomlinson before she met me.”
To explain, I had to tell her things about the man that I’d never shared with anyone.
As far as I know, even Tomlinson isn’t aware how far our relationship goes back.
There’s a good reason for that. But because of things that I’m obligated to keep confidential, I couldn’t lay it all out for Ransom. I had to blur the edges. I tried to say little but imply a lot.
Ransom has a first-rate intellect and great intuition. She seemed to understand that I was constrained by something, and she reacted to those limitations with only the occasional, careful question.
Stroking the black cat’s ears, she listened intently as I told her that not so long ago, in this same room, nearly in tears, Tomlinson had confessed to me that, many years before, he’d participated in a crime that had killed a friend of mine.
I told Ransom, “I already knew. I pretended like I didn’t. But I’d found out long ago that Tomlinson was involved. Even before I came back to Sanibel and started leasing this place.”
I could see that she wanted to ask, How? Instead, she just nodded.
Tomlinson, I told her, had been a member of a political extremist group responsible for sending a bomb to a San Diego naval installation. The bomb had killed three people and injured another.
One of the sailors killed was a naval Special Warfare officer. The officer had been a good friend. He’d had a wife and a child. I took it personally.
I couldn’t tell Ransom that I was a member of an organization that also took the murders very personally. A secret organization so small and select that we took orders from three or fewer people at the very top of the political ladder, and conducted operations that were never officially documented or acknowledged. Not that we knew where our orders originated.
I found that out much later.
Our group had exceptional resources, and few legal or political boundaries.
Tomlinson hadn’t sent the bomb. He hadn’t participated in the making of it, nor had he been aware of the plan. But he hadn’t tried to stop them or have them stopped, either. He’d been a member of the group. As far as we were concerned, there was blood on his hands.
We didn’t know it at the time, but he felt the same. It was more guilty blood for the heir to a fortune soaked in the blood of others.
It was then he began to study Buddhism, and that he secretly created a scholarship fund for the children of the murdered sailor.
It was also then that Tomlinson fell apart. He went insane. He was institutionalized by his family for many months, and given shock treatments, and kept heavily drugged.
I told Ransom, “Being locked away like that saved his life. But not in the way you might think. It saved him because it got him off the street. The group responsible for the bombing had thirteen members. Within two years after the explosion, six of the thirteen had been either killed in freak accidents or badly injured. Two others- poof -vanished. No trace ever found.”
The woman understood my meaning. I could read it in her expression-a look of growing, uneasy dismay-as she said, “Like this here cat when it be after a bird. Someone was huntin’ them folks down and murderin’ them.”
I corrected her. “I don’t think you can call it murder. Not if it’s sanctioned.”
Now her expression had saddened, seemed to say, Oh Lord, I don’t want to believe you said that.
IT seemed wiser to continue talking than to risk a pause that might invite her questions. So I said, “When I came back to Sanibel and found out this stilt house could be leased, I had no idea that Tomlinson sometimes used Dinkin’s Bay as an anchorage. Quite a coincidence, huh? I didn’t think so at the time.
“When he showed up and I realized who he was, I was suspicious as hell. I figured he had to be suspicious of me, too, though he never showed it. In fact, he came on like the same sweet, brilliant flake he seems to be today. Like maybe the shock therapy had changed his wiring or something. That’s what I thought could’ve happened.
“But I was still on my guard. The group that sent the bomb wasn’t the only radical organization Tomlinson had been involved with. I.. . knew about him… for reasons I might tell you down the road. So I thought maybe someone had sent him after me. Or maybe some government agency had leveraged him and was using him against me.”
Ransom asked carefully, “There’s a reason some government might do that to you, my brother?”
I barely nodded twice- Yes -before I continued, “I got my chance to test Tomlinson’s motives when a pal of mine got into some trouble and I had to go back to Central America. I invited him along. You get a man in the jungle, all the little tricks and gimmicks fall apart after a few days. Once I got him in the jungle, I knew I’d find out the truth.”