Chapter 30 - The Ghost on the Lake
The rain had begun to fall over Lake Lucerne, turning the water into a sheet of hammered pewter beneath the towering, mist-shrouded peaks of Mount Pilatus.
The private launch Wilhelm Strauss had provided cut through the chop with a low, muffled rumble. David stood at the bow, gripping the brass railing, his coat soaked through with mist, staring through the drizzle as if he could will the fog to part.
I sat under the launch’s canvas canopy, holding three-week-old Leo close against my chest, wrapped securely inside my wool shawl. My fingers were locked around the small silver key inside my pocket, its metallic edges digging into my palm.
"Mom," David called back, his voice cracked with an emotion so raw it sounded like a wound reopening. "Look."
Ahead, protruding into the gray water from the foot of a sheer, pine-covered cliff, was a private wooden landing dock belonging to an isolated stone villa perched high among the trees.
Standing on that dock, solitary beneath a large black umbrella, was the figure of a man.
He wore an old, faded mackinaw jacket—the same heavy, red-and-black wool coat Frank had worn every winter to shovel the driveway on Crestview Ridge. He stood with his weight favored slightly to the left side, the old sciatica hitch that no actor could ever imitate.
The launch bumped gently against the heavy rubber bumpers of the dock. The deckhand looped the mooring line around the brass cleat with a wet, heavy slap.
The man with the umbrella didn't move.
David stepped onto the wet timber first, his boots slipping slightly on the slick boards. He stopped six feet away, his chest heaving, unable to speak, his whole body trembling like a child in the dark.
I stepped off the boat, holding our grandson tight against my heart.
The man lowered the black umbrella.
The hair was entirely white now, thinned at the temples, and the deep lines around his mouth and eyes were carved deeper by four years of Alpine wind and solitary exile. But the eyes—those calm, slate-blue eyes that had looked across the kitchen table at me for four decades—were unchanged.
"Hello, Evie," Frank Hayes said, his voice as rough and steady as gravel tumbling in a stream.
I stood there on that wet, foreign dock, three thousand miles from the house we had shared, holding the child who had almost cost us everything. The fury, the grief, the four years of sleeping alone in an empty bed, the tears I had shed over an empty casket in an Ohio cemetery—all of it rose up in my throat like bile.
I didn't kiss him. I didn't fall into his arms.
I walked up to him, looked him dead in the eyes, and raised my right hand, slapping him across the face with every ounce of strength remaining in my sixty-eight-year-old body.
The crack echoed across the water like a rifle shot.
Frank took the blow without flinching. His head turned slightly with the impact, but his slate-blue eyes swung back to mine, steady, sorrowful, and completely unrepentant.
"I deserved that," he said quietly.
"You deserved to have me turn this boat around and leave you to rot on this mountain, Frank Hayes," I said, my voice shaking with a rage so pure it burned the cold air between us. "You let me mourn you. You let David destroy himself."
"If I had stayed, Evie," Frank said, looking down at his son, whose tears were washing through the rain on his cheeks, "Arthur Vance would have killed you both in nineteen-twenty-one. You had to be the grieving widow. You had to be the helpless pensioner. It was the only armor that could hold until the trust matured."
He looked down at the bundle in my arms. A soft, cracked smile touched the corners of his mouth.
"Is that him?" he whispered, his rough, weathered hands trembling as he reached out toward the blanket. "Is that Leo?"
Before I could answer, before Frank’s fingers could touch the wool of his grandson’s blanket, the sharp, unnatural whistle of incoming ordnance tore through the mist above the lake.
From the tree line three hundred yards up the cliffside, a brilliant streak of white phosphorus flared into the gray afternoon sky, followed by the deafening crack of a high-caliber sniper rifle echoing across the water.
The deckhand behind us on the launch collapsed instantly onto the teak deck, blood blooming across his chest.
Frank’s face hardened in a split-second transition from grandfather to soldier. He lunged forward, throwing his heavy wool coat over me and the baby, slamming us both down onto the wet timber of the dock as a second round splintered the heavy oak piling an inch above David’s head.
"The consortium didn't track Arthur!" Frank roared, pulling a heavy service automatic from beneath his mackinaw, his eyes scanning the ridgeline through the driving rain. "They tracked the baptism registry in Florida! Chloe sold the coordinates!"
He grabbed David by the collar of his coat, hauling him down into the shelter of the stone retaining wall.
May you like
"David! Get your mother and your son into the boathouse! Now!"
Across the lake, slicing through the gray rain and mist, three high-speed black tactical interceptor boats with running lights extinguished were closing in on the dock at fifty knots, their mounted machine guns swinging directly toward the landing.
