“Definitely. He didn’t fall. He was trying to disappear.”
The deputy looked confused. “Yeah, that’s the part I’m not getting.”
The name tag on the front pocket of his shirt said Martinez. From the top of the same pocket peeked a cigar with a blue It’s A Boy! ribbon around it. I’d seen Sheriff Hartwell gleefully handing them out, as well as showing off photos of his newborn son, when he wasn’t busy coordinating the search on the ground for Garrett, “in case his body washed up on shore.”
Overhearing this phrase had sent a chill down my spine. The sheriff and his fellow officers seemed pretty certain that Garrett had either fallen by mistake or purposefully jumped to harm himself. Why else would anyone go into the ocean fully clothed at night in January?
“Disappear?” the deputy repeated. “Why would he want to do that? Was he running away from something?”
“No. It was a magic trick. Garrett is a writer.” Was a writer? No, is. Definitely is. “He writes about magic, and he does disappearing acts to entertain the kids. The thing is,” I said to the deputy, “Garrett is the last person I know who’d ever want to hurt himself.”
I couldn’t think of a more delicate way of saying that Garrett Newcombe was a complete narcissist who thought he was God’s gift to women. Case in point, he wouldn’t even stop singing to them on the author bus when they asked him to, repeatedly.
“Oh, yeah?” Deputy Martinez looked up from his notepad. “How long have you known him?”
“Um. Well, not that long.” Had it really only been yesterday that I’d met Garrett on the plane? “But I’m still pretty sure he isn’t the type who would ever do anything to hurt himself.” Others, yes—particularly attractive females. Himself, never. “He just really wanted to put on a good show to promote his books.”
“Yeah, his books.” Deputy Martinez nodded. “I understand they’re about kids who go to wizard school? Wasn’t that what those Harry Potter books were about?”
“Yes,” I said. “But Garrett’s are different. The kids in his books go to evil wizard school.”
“Okay. Got it.”
I saw Deputy Martinez write Evil Wizard School in his notepad.
Oh, God. When he put it that way, the entire thing seemed sillier than ever. This man’s job was to save people. Mine was to write stories about talking cats. What was I even doing with my life? I needed to make some changes, and fast.
“See, that’s why Garrett was pretending to disappear,” I said, trying desperately to make the officer understand. “Because he was acting like one of the wizard professors from his books.”
“Right.” Deputy Martinez snapped his notepad shut as if the case were closed. “Except that he wasn’t pretending, was he? He really did disappear. And I have to be honest with you, Ms. Wright. When people around here go missing in the water at night, we generally don’t find them until daybreak. It’s simply too dark out there to see them … especially when, if what you’re saying is true, they disappeared on purpose, and don’t want to be found. Here.” He handed me a business card. “If you can think of anything else, please let us know.”
“But …” I stared in disbelief as he rose from his chair. “That’s it? You’re calling off the search?”
“Have to, ma’am.” The deputy tipped his hat. “We only have the one helicopter, and we’ve got to share it with the hospital. There’s a resident who just had a heart attack and needs to be medivacked up to Miami for an emergency bypass. We don’t have a cardiac surgeon on staff at the local hospital. We need to concentrate on saving the people who want to be saved. Have a good night.”
Then he was gone, leaving me feeling dismayed—unlike the rest of the festivalgoers. Most of them were delighted by the turn the evening had taken, especially the children, who could not have been more excited by the magical disappearance of one of the authors and the subsequent appearance of both a helicopter and multiple boats in the water with flashing lights on them. If anything, these had only made Garrett’s trick more spectacular. Dylan, the young boy whose book he had spent so much time signing earlier in the day, seemed to be in ecstasy.
“It’s no good looking for Mister Newcombe, you know,” he kept telling anyone who’d listen, even as his exhausted-looking parents attempted to convince him to return with them to their hotel. “He’s in the spirit plane. He’ll rematerialize when he feels like it … probably when we all least expect it!”
“I hope that kid’s right,” I said to Bernadette.
She raised an eyebrow. “You mean about Garrett being in the spirit plane?”
“No. About him showing up when we least expect it.”
“Oh, right. Except that when he does, I think he’s going to regret it.”
She wasn’t kidding. The sheriff’s deputy wasn’t the only one who didn’t appear to appreciate Garrett’s prank. Will was stomping around with a furious expression on his face, and Frannie kept glancing at her watch, muttering, “If I miss the game because of this, I’m going to kill that little weasel when he finally rematerializes.”
“True, but you gotta hand it to the guy,” Saul said. “He certainly knows how to work a crowd. I’m thinking maybe my next book should be about a guy like him. You know, a novelist who strikes a bargain with the devil in order to become a bestseller.”
Kellyjean shivered. “That’d fall into the horror genre, all right.”
“If you do write it,” Jerome said, a beer in one hand and one of the sheriff’s It’s A Boy! cigars in the other, “be sure to make him survive his publicity stunt so that the fellow hosting the event he’s crashed can murder him.” He nodded toward Will, who was on his cell phone a few yards away, glaring into the darkness beyond the deck railing. He truly did look murderously angry.
“Oh, sure.” Saul was sipping on a Baileys he’d snagged from the restaurant’s bar. “Everybody’d want to kill him. That’d be part of it. Only they can’t, see, because he’s got the devil on his side. And—”
I tuned their voices out and focused instead on Will. I couldn’t tell who he was talking to on his cell, but he looked about as angry as a human being could possibly look and not actually be pounding his fists against something. I didn’t want to interfere—it wasn’t my place, and he definitely had enough to worry about—but I felt I should let him know what the sheriff’s deputy had said.
So I drifted toward him, idly listening to the chatter of the teenaged girls still sitting at the table we’d shared. Chloe and her friends had long since left for Sharmaine’s sleepover, but Jasmine and Cassidy were sticking around, apparently to see how the drama about Garrett played out.
“Look,” Jasmine said, her pretty face glowing in the light from her phone screen. “It’s number nine now.”
“Really?” Cassidy peered down at her phone, then looked disappointed. “Oh, but only in the U.S.”
“Right, but that’s because there was that earthquake. We can get it to trend higher if we post that shot of you with the helicopter.”