Page 15 of Return to Whitmore (The Whitmore #2)
Chapter Twelve
A little more than a month after the documentary film festival, Charlotte brought Jack to Kathy’s for a Christmas celebration. There were nine of them, all of whom either didn’t speak to their parents or couldn’t afford to go home. They called themselves New York City orphans.
Sometimes she thought of Vincent and had to tell herself not to cry.
At Christmas, Jack charmed the socks off everyone.
He told stories of his marvelous travels, of the people he’d met, of the things he’d seen.
His stories suggested that he’d been everywhere from California to Nigeria, and Charlotte wasn’t sure what to believe.
Surely, he didn’t have a passport that said “Seth Green” and therefore couldn’t travel overseas. But who, exactly, was he hiding from?
“Seth is so funny,” Kathy said as Charlotte helped her wash the dishes later that evening. “Was he the guy at the documentary screening? The one asking the questions?”
Charlotte nodded. “Yeah.”
“Crazy way to meet someone.”
Charlotte laughed. “You don’t even know,” she said.
Kathy pressed her for details, demanding more. “You and Seth are living at that hotel together?”
“Separate rooms,” Charlotte said.
Kathy reminded her that she knew of a few apartments around Greenwich Village going for cheap. Charlotte was terrified that the minute she signed a lease, Jack would run out of her life again. Maybe it was a chance she had to take.
Two weeks later, when Charlotte first brought Jack to the apartment a few blocks away from Kathy’s, she stood in the corner with her arms crossed and watched as he walked the halls and surveyed the rooms. She felt as though he were a cat, as though he needed to sniff every area of the space to connect with it.
She didn’t want to interrupt him and chase him off.
Was she constantly in fear that he was going to leave her? Again?
“Would you consider living here? With me?” she asked, her voice wavering.
Jack’s smile was enormous. “You kidding me, sis?”
Charlotte’s and Jack’s laughter rocketed from wall to wall. Although it was just two bedrooms and a kitchen and a thousand times smaller than their White Oak Lodge roots, it felt like paradise. It was where they’d start over, where they’d rebuild. Charlotte couldn’t believe she’d ever doubted him.
The bills, of course, were not easy to tackle.
With Jack’s fake ID, he was able to secure various gigs as a bouncer, a mover, a fitness instructor (this was their favorite to make fun of), a bartender, and a part-time librarian (his favorite).
Charlotte worked freelance as a video editor and shot several local commercials.
Together, they stitched together a life that made sense to them.
It made sense only to a point, of course. Jack was still mum about the night of the fire. Sometimes late at night, Jack’s nightmares woke him up, and he screamed. But when Charlotte demanded answers, he pretended not to remember what he’d dreamed about.
Charlotte knew there was so much more where that came from.
But as they went into 2002, they felt more stable than ever, which was saying something. Charlotte agreed to be Ralph’s girlfriend, and Jack began to date a model who barely spoke enough English and couldn’t pronounce “Seth” correctly.
They were happier than they’d been in years, happier than they’d been as teenagers at the White Oak Lodge.
Still, the White Oak Lodge haunted them. How could it not?
It was the summer of 2002 when Jack woke Charlotte up at the crack of dawn and said he’d borrowed a car. “Pack a bag. I want to get out of the city.”
Jack had planned it correctly, taking several different schedules into consideration before he staged his plan.
Charlotte didn’t have another gig lined up for over a week, and Ralph was out of town visiting friends in Florida.
Jack’s model girlfriend was considering breaking up with him, which was probably part of the reason he wanted to go.
But as they drove out of Manhattan and into the buttercream light of the morning, they could do nothing but sing songs on the radio and laugh.
“I can’t remember the last time I got out of the city,” Charlotte said with a startled laugh.
“Isn’t it wild to breathe that clean air?” Jack asked, opening the windows.
Charlotte filled her lungs and closed her eyes. Once upon a time, in Nantucket, they’d breathed salty and healthy air constantly. They hadn’t thought to notice.
That was when it struck her that they were heading north.
He wouldn’t dare drive them back there. Would he?
“Jack, where are we going?” she asked, grateful to call him by his real name when they weren’t around other people.
Jack hammered the steering wheel and smiled.
“Jack! But why?” Charlotte’s anxiety spiked. “Things are going so well…”
Was he going out of his mind because of the breakup?
“I’m just curious about some stuff,” he said finally. “Can’t I be curious?”
“You can be curious. But you have to clue me in.” For once.
Jack laughed. “You sound like Allegra.”
“Be nice,” Charlotte said. “You haven’t told me, like, anything. And we’ve been living together for seven months!”
Jack sighed in a way that suggested the trauma of their past was not something he carried easily. Charlotte bit her lower lip and considered telling him to pull over and let her out. It felt like ghosts awaited them back in Nantucket—the living and the dead.
Plus, Vincent was back there, probably. She was sure he was still with Jamie, kissing and laughing on the boardwalk, doing all the things that she and Vincent had once done.
What if she saw them? What if Vincent accused her of stalking him, of being unable to get over him?
(Which was true in a way, wasn’t it?) What if news of Jack being back on the island got back to their mother—and Francesca flew from Italy to chase them?
“Jack,” Charlotte said, electrified. “People think you’re dead.”
“Don’t worry,” Jack said. “I have a disguise.”
Charlotte’s heart felt heavy. She reached over to touch his shoulder. “But why, Jack? Why must people think you’re dead?”
“It all got too messy.” Jack’s face was shadowed.
“What the hell were you doing?” Charlotte demanded.
“That’s part of the reason we’re going back,” Jack stammered. “I want to understand more about it myself.”
That shut Charlotte up for now.
When they parked near the ferry that would take them to Nantucket, Jack retrieved his disguise from the trunk: a blond wig, a baseball hat, and a Hawaiian shirt.
“That won’t work,” Charlotte began to say as he changed.
But when he finished, he brought his hands out beside him and shook them and said, “Ta-da!”
Charlotte had to admit that Jack looked remarkably different. Gone was his black Italian hair. With sunglasses on, he might have been any other Northern European tourist.
“What about me?” Charlotte asked. “I look almost the same.”
Jack squinted at her, then went to rummage through his trunk to find a large bucket hat and a pair of sunglasses. “This should do it.”
Charlotte put them on and looked like herself, but with a bucket hat and sunglasses. It would have to do for now.
Jack drove the rental onto the ferry and led Charlotte to the top deck so they could watch their home come closer over the murky blue horizon.
Charlotte felt tears in her eyes. Under her breath, under the sounds of the ferry engines and the whipping winds, she asked, “What are we looking for, Seth?”
Jack’s face went pale. Finally, it seemed he was ready to tell her something. “Tio Angelo was up to something back then. He roped me and a few others into it. I think it went deeper than even I understood.”
Charlotte could hardly breathe. “You think Tio Angelo is still on the island?”
“No. I mean, he’d be stupid to stay,” Jack said. “Although this was the center of his scheme.”
“What scheme, exactly?”
Jack looked grim. “He was having us sell drugs around the island. At the high school and to tourists.”
Charlotte gasped. Tio Angelo had always been charming and manipulative and difficult to pin down, but she’d never guessed that he’d been involved in something so sinister.
“My question is,” Jack continued, “is whether Tio Angelo maintains operations here. After this got dodgy, did he manage to set something up from afar?”
“You want to track down Tio Angelo,” Charlotte guessed.
Jack nodded, his expression jagged and mean. “I need to see him.”
“What do you want to say to him?”
But Jack didn’t want to say.
Charlotte tried another tack. “How are you going to figure this out?”
“There was another guy involved,” Jack said. “A guy without the means to leave the island, I think. If he’s still here, maybe he’s still working for Tio Angelo.”
Charlotte’s mind shot in a thousand directions. “Who?”
“You remember Amos?” Jack asked. “He was my age. Their family didn’t have money. He was easy for Tio Angelo to lure in. He could finally help his mother pay the bills.”
Charlotte’s heart spasmed. It sounded so evil. She thought of her Italian grandmother and grandfather, how they remained in Italy, nursing broken hearts after the supposed death of their son, Angelo. All the while, it was probable that he’d faked his own death to avoid the cops.
And now that Jack brought it up, Charlotte recalled that cops had been sniffing around during the final months at the White Oak Lodge.
There had been one strange and exhilarating time, when they’d come and Tio Angelo had cooked them a stupendous Italian meal.
They’d left terribly pleased and unwilling to follow up with whatever they’d come to the Lodge to look for.
“Where were the drugs?” Charlotte whispered.
“In the basement, of course,” Jack said.
Charlotte closed her eyes, remembering the endless tunnels beneath the White Oak Lodge, the warnings from her father and her uncle and everyone else to stay away. People had gotten lost down there, lost and never found.