The She by Carol Plum-Ucci Page B

parents' death, but some sort of black energy was rushing off Emmett, making me feel electrocuted. This had to do with the man who rocked me in his lap and told great stories about our ancestors. And it involved a woman, a flight paramedic, who came home with tales of saving lives while reciting her version of the captain's prayer: "Lord, give me a stiff upper lip."
    "None of this will make any sense to you if I don't start from the beginning. The night they disappeared was not the beginning. It started two years before, I would estimate."
    He turned a page and pointed to a cassette tape in an envelope that fit into a three-ring binder. Emmett's way of keeping things organized for research had always gotten on my nerves. This was beyond reckoning—a three-ring-binder plastic job for a cassette. The cassette was dated about six months after Mom and Dad died, and marked "Talk with Mrs. Riley" in Emmett's scratchy handwriting. I guess that meant he'd been to see her and taped the conversation.
    His voice went on. "About two years before Mom and Dad's boat disappeared, the Riley boat disappeared. About two weeks before the Riley boat disappeared, Mom and Dad had dinner at the home of Claude Lowenberg. He was Dad's first mate. Remember him?"
    I nodded. "I just remember he was a very quiet guy."
    "Still waters run deep. He had a lot of friends. A lot of people trusted him. He'd heard some things that he shared with Mom and Dad. In essence, Captain Riley was in a lot of trouble, shall we say."
    He turned the page again, and there was a search warrant that looked pretty similar to Mom and Dad's, only it was a Xerox in black and white, and was more grainy looking. And the names were different. This one read, "Owner/Operator: CONNOR RILEY." And I snapped my eyes up to the darkened picture window, not really wanting to read any further.
    Emmett kept on. "Captain Riley had come on tough times. A lot of the container ships had. Federal Express had come onto the scene, driving prices down at UPS. The freighters were losing a lot of business. Sometimes the owners would get tempted to bolster their incomes illegally. They would drop off a small load of furniture in Jamaica that didn't really even cover the cost of the trip. They'd also pick up something to make the trip worthwhile—"
    "Oh, my God," I breathed. I let him talk on about Captain Riley running drugs, feeling it was about to hit closer to home, and the gray hatch was slamming in the wind.
    "Captain Riley had delivered a huge amount of Colombian gold up to Canada and had gotten paid for it." He pointed to a newspaper clipping that followed the Riley search warrant. It covered the disappearance, mentioning Connor Riley had come under suspicion of drug trafficking.
    "The DEA didn't find the shipment or the money, but they took a lot of his files, things lying about on his desk, and among them were some scrap sheets he'd scribbled out, with phone numbers, delivery names, estimates of his profit. He realized they would eventually put it all together and arrest him. They'd get him on circumstantial evidence, unless they came up with a witness, I don't know..."
    I looked at him funny when he said "I don't know." It was the first sign that he didn't know every last detail about this story. It made me want to listen for flaws in his arguments, in spite of how this black book intimidated the hell out of me.
    "Captain Riley decided to take Claude Lowenberg into his confidence. Riley said he was going somewhere safe from the law, and was going to fake a disappearance. On top of that, he was looking to pass around his cartel contact in the Caribbean, if any ships wanted to make a few deliveries themselves. And if they got into trouble and wanted to meet up with Riley later; the contact would help them with that."
    "Dad told you this?"
    "Yes. Almost as soon as they got home from dinner at the Lowenbergs'. Dad appeared to be in shock when he told me. They were friends with the Rileys, and were