That had left him with the young girl who had drowned out by the stone jetty. When he put “Windward Resort” and “drowning” into a search engine, all that came up was the story of a teenager named Duane Wozniak who had drowned while swimming off the jetty in 2000. He read what he could about that incident, but it was clear it had been an accident, and he couldn’t find any connection between Duane Wozniak’s family and any of the people on the list. For whatever reason he was much more interested in the story that Frank’s sister had told him. Cynthia had said that she thought she was fourteen or fifteen years old when the girl had drowned, and since she’d also said she’d been eighteen in 1961, that meant the drowning most likely occurred in either 1957 or 1958. It made sense to Sam that he hadn’t been able to find any mention of a drowning at the Windward Resort in those years using online searches. A young girl’s accidental drowning at a beach in Maine would not necessarily have made it into a national publication, one that had been archived online. But the story would certainly have been mentioned in local papers. So for the past three days Sam had sat bleary-eyed at the Kennewick public library going through microfilm from both the Kennewick Star and the Southern Maine Forecaster, two local papers that were active in the mid-1950s. He had been close to giving up when he decided to expand the time frame, look for articles in 1956 and 1959, as well. He’d hit the jackpot just three hours earlier, finding a story in the Star about the tragic drowning of Faye Grant in July of 1956. She’d been ten years old, staying at the Windward for the summer with her mother and brother. A police detective by the name of William Cable was quoted as saying that the drowning was accidental, that Faye Grant had probably climbed into the crevice at the foot of the jetty, then been unable to get out when the tide came in.
In one of the articles, the names of Faye’s immediate family were mentioned. The father was John Grant, an insurance executive from Hartford, Connecticut. Faye’s older brother had probably been named after his father, since the newspaper referred to him as “little Jack Grant,” and the mother was Lily Grant, née Lily Radebaugh, originally from Baltimore.
When Sam had read those words, an electric shiver had passed over the skin of his arms and the back of his neck. “Little Jack Grant” could be going under the name of Jack Radebaugh. If Faye had been his sister, then the List of Nine would have something to do with her death. Probably revenge. Frank Hopkins, who would have been at the Windward Resort when Faye had died, had been drowned by the jetty. The other names on the list, all people too young to have been present for Faye’s death … well, Sam had no idea why they had been targeted. His best guess was that they were somehow related to someone that Jack believed to be guilty. Maybe one of their parents. The dates would work.
After sending an email to both Detective Mary Parkinson of the state police and to Agent Ruth Jackson of the FBI with JPEGs of all the relevant articles, Sam was now studying the notes he’d taken on the victim’s families. And it was all starting to fall into place—there were more similarities between the parents of the victims than the victims themselves. They were all white, all middle-or upper-middle class, all clustered around New England. And there was something else, something Sam had noticed a week earlier. On the list of nine names there were six men and three women. He’d wondered about that. If Jack Radebaugh, or someone else （it was possible）， was murdering the children of people he considered complicit in the death of his sister, then not only would he try to make their deaths painless, but maybe he’d also pick sons to murder and not daughters. Jessica Winslow was targeted, of course, but she was an only child. And Caroline Geddes, while not an only child, had one brother who lived outside of the country. Mind racing, Sam went and got another beer from the fridge, not even bothering to look at the football game on television.
When he returned to his study he thought about Alison Horne, who had never been found. Was she dead already? Probably not, he thought, because if she’d died there would have been a police report, a death notice, something to alert the FBI. Maybe she was dead, and her body hadn’t been discovered yet. But someone surely would have reported her missing. No, Sam assumed she was still alive, and he wondered where she was, and if she knew how much danger she was in.
2
MONDAY, OCTOBER 31, 3:03 P.M.
Jonathan Grant was going to text Alison from the airport to let her know he was back in Bermuda and would be at the house in thirty minutes, but decided not to. He thought he’d surprise her, despite the fact that he knew her well enough to know she was not big on surprises.