The Vanishing Expert Read online

  She wished him luck and waved to him as the car pulled away. James stood solemnly on the side of the road, watching the old car carry her away. Suddenly, he didn’t want to drive to Bar Harbor. Christina’s parting words rang in his head like a bell.

  No secrets? he thought. His whole life was a secret!

  4

  A Romantic Notion

  After leaving Jean Berkhardt's house, he drove his Jeep to Seawall, and parked upon the rocky shelf facing the sea. He looked longingly out over the open ocean. Since it was a brisk November day on the coast, damp and cold, there wasn’t a soul out on the water. He thought back to a day in the spring— the last time he’d been out on the water— when the air was brisk and the sea was painted black beneath the thick and ominous clouds.

  The idea had come to him two years earlier. While cruising alone on Narragansett Bay, a late summer storm that was supposed to miss Rhode Island to the south swept in quickly. The sky turned from gray to black seemingly in an instant, and the wind and the ocean swells tossed his small boat so violently that he turned quickly around and headed homeward. There were moments as he headed back, the waves spilling over the sleek mahogany bow of his boat and the spray hitting him full in the face, stinging like needles, when he was uncertain if he’d make it ashore. And he wondered, just for a moment, what would become of Gloria if he never returned. Later, once he was safely ashore, he wondered something else: what if he were to simply disappear and emerge somewhere else to start his life again.

  It was a simple idea that seemed an almost romantic notion when it first occurred to him. He imagined that everyone at some point in their lives asked themselves the same question: If I could begin my life again, what would I do differently?

  For Edward Moody, what began as a simple question became his obsession. He found himself imagining a new life somewhere else, a simpler life with a new name. He'd find a job that he liked, a woman that he could love— a woman who would want to have a child with him— and he'd live a quiet, uncomplicated life somewhere near the sea.

  Before long, he began to think about the details until his notion began to take the shape of a plan. The more he thought about it, the more it pulled at him. He’d simply go out on his boat one day and never return. If he chose the time and the place carefully, it could take until the following day to locate the Chris Craft drifting empty and abandoned out at sea. When the search for Edward Moody ultimately yielded nothing, everyone would have to assume that he’d been cast over the side and drowned. It wouldn’t be the first time it happened, and while a body usually turned up eventually, it didn’t always.

  The settlement from his life insurance would be more than enough to satisfy his mounting debts, leaving Gloria with just enough to live on while she started over. She'd be able to keep the house if she was careful, but she'd have to work. That notion, as much as the tantalizing thought of his freedom, made him smile.

  During the last two years of their marriage, Edward had mentioned the idea of divorce more than once, but nothing ever came of it, in part because he felt a strange obligation to care for this woman who seemed unable— or, at least, unwilling— to care for herself. But he also knew that Gloria would never allow him to leave her without him paying a high price. She’d get everything, of course, but even worse, she’d find a way to make certain that any fresh start Edward might find would be hard won. He was convinced that the simple life he wanted would always be limited to what Gloria would allow him to have.

  Still, he’d raised the subject twice with Gloria, and both times he relented.

  The last time he’d mentioned divorce was nearly a year before his disappearance, shortly before that unexpected summer storm forced him back to shore with the seed of a thought in his troubled mind. By then, he knew Gloria was unhappy as well, and Edward held out some slim hope that she’d finally agree they could both be happier if they went their separate ways.

  This time, as he described the depth of his unhappiness— his even more desperate than the last time they’d had the same conversation— Gloria was quiet and despondent. She didn’t even argue with him, which surprised him. She just closed her eyes and listened to him describe in detail his reasons for wanting to go on with his life without her, as if she was the cause of all his unhappiness. Then, as she silently contemplated her uncertain future, she suggested something he hadn’t expected.

  “Maybe I should just go out and drive into a ditch,” she’d said flatly, her face drained of emotion and streaked with her tears.

  She didn’t mean it. She was just musing amid the rush of dark thoughts that flooded her mind at that moment, and she made the unfortunate mistake of uttering aloud a stray thought that rattled above the din of all the others.

  Edward decided not to respond to her remark, resisting his natural inclination to console her.

  But it found its mark. Where a moment earlier Edward had felt hopeful, suddenly he felt deflated, her words echoing in his mind, punctuated by the sound of a metal door slamming shut.

  Gloria had always been able to manipulate him, he knew, usually over insignificant things that didn’t matter enough to warrant an argument. Most of the time, he was less troubled by whatever it was she’d convinced him to do— or to do without— than he was by the idea that she might actually have drawn some sort of perverse pleasure from it, from pulling on his strings just to watch him dance. And then he would wonder if she was even aware that she was doing it.

  Most of the time, Gloria was perfectly reasonable. They disagreed as all couples did, and when they argued, she could sometimes persuade him she was right and he'd grudgingly concede the argument to her. And there were those occasions when she'd reason with him until they’d reach some sort of compromise, though the compromises rarely favored him. All of those things he could accept. It was the manipulation that infuriated him, and it was at those moments, when he felt the tug and pluck of the strings on his wrists and ankles and the unwelcome urge to dance for her, that his thoughts found their way back to that notion, romantic or not, of just disappearing and starting his life again.

  Just seven months earlier, in April— three weeks before his disappearance— Edward Moody sat with his sister, Kate, at Christie’s in Newport, one of their favorite drinking spots, enjoying an unseasonably warm day by the water. They’d driven in Kate’s car. It was still too cold and too rough out on the water to comfortably make the trip by boat, even on Kate’s boat, which was larger and heavier than his own. Edward had been brooding and silent for most of the ride, and hadn’t spoken a word since they crossed the Jamestown Bridge.

  Kate knew her brother was unhappy. She knew, also, that he wanted nothing from her except to indulge him whenever he was in one of his blue moods. Lately, she’d noticed his moods had gone from blue to black, particularly when the topic was his ever-worsening financial situation, or that Gloria was holding firm to her decision not to have children.

  “At this point, she’s probably right,” he told Kate. “I think we missed our chance.”

  He knew it wasn’t true. He was thirty-four years-old; the window hadn’t closed for him, and wouldn’t for many years. But he often found himself coming to Gloria’s defense. At first, it was out of a sense of duty— it was what spouses did for one another. Over time it had become more of a habit.

  When Edward first mentioned his plan to Kate in April, he did it cautiously, offering only fragments, and then watching her reaction over tugs on his beer bottle.

  If he had any choice at all in the matter, he wouldn’t have told Kate what he was considering. He felt he owed it to Kate to spare her the grief of his death. If the situation were reversed, he’d prefer to know the truth—that his sister was alive.

  But there was another reason he chose to tell her: he needed her help.

  At first, Kate thought his comments were harmless, just the odd ramblings of a man frustrated with his life, wishing he could start over. It wasn’t the type of thing a reasonabl
e person would ever consider for more than a moment. She assumed that, like his thoughts of leaving Gloria, he’d entertain the idea briefly, as a novelty, and then let it go. But as he told her more— as she began to see how completely he’d planned every detail, even down to the location where he would abandon his boat— Kate began to realize that her brother wasn’t just sharing an idle fantasy.

  “You can’t be serious!” Kate said to him. “You can’t just do something like that!”

  At first, Edward said nothing. He took another swallow from his beer, and looked around nervously to see if anyone had heard, and he gestured for Kate to lower her voice. “I know it sounds crazy,” Edward told her.

  “Crazy? No it doesn’t sound crazy,” Kate said sarcastically. “It sounds ridiculous!”

  He started to speak but she held up her hand to discourage him.

  “I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” she said firmly.

  “Actually, we need to talk about it a little more,” Edward suggested.

  “Why?”

  Edward leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Because I need you to help me pull it off.”

  “No way, Edward,” Kate said. “There’s no way you’re gonna make me a part of this.”

  “You’re already a part of it,” Edward told her.

  “How?”

  “Because you know,” Edward said. “Because, whether you help me or not, I’m going to do this, and you’re going to know.”

  Long before he disclosed his plan to Kate, he’d already put the process in motion.

  Setting up a new identity had been even easier than he imagined. In college, he’d taken a sociology class called ‘Crime and Punishment’ from a professor who’d once worked as a parole officer in New York. She was writing a thesis on the lives of professional shoplifters and forgers, and she explained to the class in great detail the process by which these criminals established multiple identities— some of them had dozens— complete with driver’s licenses, bank accounts and credit cards. The key to it all, she’d told the class, was in obtaining a social security number, and the key to that was in locating the name of a child who’d died prior to receiving one.

  In 1990, very few communities, particularly those in small New England towns, stored these records in computers. Most were paper documents in some filing cabinet deep in the bowels of the town hall. Others stored them on microfiche. But the chance of an underpaid town employee ever making the connection that the request for a birth certificate was at all out of the ordinary was, as they say in New England, slim to none.

  He rented a post office box in Portland, Maine. Using that as his return address, he wrote to the records department at the North Kingstown, Rhode Island town hall requesting a copy of a birth certificate for James Perkins. James had been a boyhood friend who’d been killed in a car accident when he was seven years old, along with his parents. In and of itself, requesting a copy of a birth certificate was perfectly legal, and when it appeared in the post office box a few weeks later, Edward grew more confident that his plan might actually work.

  He then took the next step, using the birth certificate of his dead friend to apply for a Social Security card. If any part of his plan had the potential to fail, this would be it. He was, after all, applying for a social security number for a boy who, had he lived, would have been thirty-three years old in 1989, and what thirty-three year old man didn’t already have a social security number? But Edward relied on the same philosophy that had proved true in obtaining the birth certificate— that a government employee would simply not care enough to do anything but fill the request and move on to the next in a stack of such requests.

  In January, he drove to Portland, and peered into his mailbox, finding a single envelope containing a Social Security card, along with a notice reminding him that he was required to register for selected service upon his eighteenth birthday. Reading that, Edward smiled, assured that his theory on government bureaucracy— and apathy— had worked to his favor once again.

  The rest was easy. He rented a one-room apartment in Waterville, and used that address and his new social security card to get a Maine driver’s license under the name James Perkins. He opened a savings account in a Waterville bank under his new identity, and he deposited nearly two thousand dollars he’d managed to hide from Gloria. Each month after that, he made deposits in the new account by diverting money that would otherwise have gone to the bank to pay his mortgage and other bills that were now piling up. By May, he had slightly more than four thousand dollars, a fraction of his current debt, but enough to get established if he was frugal.

  In May, on the afternoon before his disappearance, he visited his father in the nursing home one last time. At first he sat at his father’s bedside, watching him sleep. When Bud Moody finally woke, they talked for nearly an hour, his father asking him his name three times. Edward was convinced that his father would forget his visit an hour after he left. As he said his final goodbye, he leaned forward and kissed his father on the forehead for what he was certain would be the last time.

  On the following morning, the day of Edward Moody’s tragic disappearance, the sky was smeared gray and the winds, which came forebodingly off the ocean kept all but the heartiest sailors ashore. Gloria stopped him as he prepared to leave the house and urged him not to go, but Edward wouldn’t hear of it.

  “I’ve been looking forward to this all winter,” he told her. “I’m not going to let a little wind stop me.” He smiled and kissed Gloria on the cheek. “I’m just gonna get her wet,” he assured her. “I’ll be ashore long before that storm hits.”

  “Just be careful. I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

  “I’m always careful. And you’ve always got a bad feeling about it. So everything’s normal.” He waved to her as he pulled out of the driveway, and cruised slowly down the street, watching in his rearview mirror as his house grew smaller behind him. “Goodbye, Gloria,” he said softly. In his own muffled voice he could hear a sadness that had become all too familiar to him. It was one of the many things he was hoping to leave behind.

  Out on the water, the ocean dipped and swelled beneath his boat, the waves occasionally spewing over the long bow, much as they did on that stormy afternoon a year earlier when he’d first conceived of his plan. More than once, Edward feared that he might really lose the boat if the conditions grew much worse. Even so, he’d come too far to turn back, and the rough sea filled him with a combination of dread and excitement. It would surely add credibility to his deception, if it didn’t swallow him up for real.

  He carefully made his way out to the location he’d chosen months earlier— about a mile southwest of Newport Harbor— and he searched through the haze for any sign of Kate’s boat, expecting it to appear over each swell. He saw only the white crests of the waves and the occasional seagull.

  When he called Kate two days earlier to tell her he’d be going through with his plan on Saturday to take advantage of a spring storm that was headed their way, she’d tried once again to talk him out of it before finally accepting the futility of that. That she didn’t refuse to help him, Edward accepted as a good sign, and he moved ahead with his plans, assuming that Kate would be there for him when the time came.

  But as his boat was thrown about beneath him, he wondered if Kate might have reconsidered her intention to help him, or if perhaps the ocean was simply too rough for her to venture out upon it. She was a competent sailor, he knew, but she was a sensible one as well. Edward couldn’t discount that Kate might have simply decided to stay ashore. On any other day, Edward would have made exactly the same decision.

  He considered cruising around Beavertail Point to Narragansett— the route he’d planned to take with Kate once she arrived— but he was concerned about attempting it alone in his small boat in such rough seas, and his plan called for abandoning his boat in the deep water of Narragansett Bay.

  He needed Kate.

  When
he finally saw Kate’s boat bounding through the waves in his direction he felt a momentary sense of relief, but that relief turned quickly to worry when he saw the difficulty Kate was having upon the rough sea. Only then did he fully consider the risk he’d taken with his own boat, not to mention the risk Kate had accepted in helping him.

  As Kate pulled aside Edward’s boat, Edward threw a rubber dry bag in the stern of Kate’s boat and then leaped in after it, nearly slipping and falling into the frigid water.

  Kate regarded him as if he were crazy. “Jesus, Edward! Are you nuts?”

  Edward ignored the question. “I was starting to think you weren’t coming,” he said to her.

  Kate looked at him only long enough to confirm that he was safely aboard, and then she turned away. “I almost didn’t,” she said. “I hate that I’m doing this.”

  “I know,” Edward said. He started to thank her, but he saw Kate put up her hand as if to silence him.

  They cruised over rough seas toward Narragansett without speaking. As Kate navigated the boat, James opened the bag and removed a wetsuit, which he wiggled into as the boat rocked on the rough seas, tossing him first in one direction then another. He stuffed his clothing hastily into the dry bag as they reached the spot where Edward was to leave her. Kate pointed the bow into the stiff wind and allowed the engine to idle.

  “How am I going to find you?” she asked sadly.

  “You won’t,” he said. He saw the wounded expression on his sister’s face. “I’ll find you.”

  They studied each other for a moment, knowing this would be the last time they would see each other for some time. Edward would have to reestablish himself in a new town, under a new name. Kate would have to face the futile search for her missing brother, and his inevitable funeral, knowing it was all a lie.

  “It’ll take me a few months to get settled somewhere,” Edward finally said. “But when I do, I’ll let you know where I am.”