“So, from now on you’ll be sleeping with the lights on. Welcome to the club,” he says. “How is Emma? That’s the most important thing.”
“Emma is strong.”
In fact, she has insisted on preparing a lumberjack’s breakfast—an omelette, flapjacks, sausages, grapefruit and toast. I hang up the phone in time to dart out of her path as she twirls through the kitchen wearing nothing but my Jaguars jersey and mint-green toenail polish.
Bravely she relates the details of her abduction. Jerry and Loreal were staking out my place the night I returned from Los Angeles, then tailed Emma home from the pancake house the next morning. She thinks they got in through the front door, which she’d left unlocked after letting in the cat. The men waited as she dressed for work, then tossed the burlap hood over her head as she came out of the bedroom. She was dosed with sleeping pills, bundled in the trunk of a car and driven to an unknown location—based on a whiff of bathroom cleanser, Emma believes it was a cheap motel. There she was kept for thirty hours until they doped her again, took her to the lake and placed her aboard the airboat. She never saw the faces of her captors, and never once heard them mention Cleo Rio by name.
So, as anticipated, it will be impossible to pin the kidnapping on Jimmy’s widow. After what happened last night, the crime is destined to remain unreported anyway. Mrs. Stomarti will get away with everything, except her dead husband’s song.
I can live with that. We got Emma back.
While the omelette is frying, she ambushes me with a boisterous hug. “You are hereby forbidden from touching a loaded firearm ever again,” she teases.
“I told you how much I hated those damn things.”
“From what I remember, you were very gallant last night.”
“Lucky I didn’t shoot off my own fingers.”
“You still saved our lives. Think about it, Jack.”
I haven’t told Emma what happened to Jerry and Loreal. She was in dreamland when Juan and I went to find them.
“The men who kidnapped you died in the airboat crash.”
After a troubled pause, Emma asks: “You’re sure?”
“You’ve heard of blunt trauma? This was the opposite.”
“Should we call the police?”
“And tell them what—the dead guys tried to kill us to cover up the theft of a pop song? The cops would roll us both in bubble wrap and ship us to the psycho wing at Charity.”
Breakfast turns into a quiet affair. Emma isn’t angry; she’s engrossed. It’s no small weight to bear, the experience of a soul-rattling event that may never be acknowledged.
Yet that’s how it must be. There was no abduction. No meeting on the lake. No lethal chase.
Emma says, “But what if somebody figures out—”
“Never. It was an accident. The weather was lousy, the sky was dark.”
“I understand, Jack.”
The Union-Register sits in a lawn wrapper on the counter; I haven’t got the appetite to peek at the front page. Emma opens it and spies the headline. “What! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I was waiting until the drugs wore off.”
Excitedly she slips on her reading glasses and spreads the paper over the table, across the breakfast platters. “That figures—Old Man Polk finally dies and I’m not there to edit the story.”
“Read it aloud,” I say.
She gives me a peckish look. “Well, aren’t you something.”
“Please?”
So she reads to me:
The man who shaped and guided the Union-Register for nearly four decades passed away Friday after a long illness. Mac Arthur Polk was 88.
A community icon and fervid philanthropist, Polk died at his Silver Beach home with his wife Ellen at his side. Friends said the couple was playing Chinese checkers when he collapsed.
Though he had been in failing health for some time, Polk remained engaged and outspoken, never losing his passion for the newspaper he inherited from his father.
In an interview last week at Charity Hospital, he said, “There’s no greater privilege than publishing a daily newspaper, and no greater responsibility than delivering the truth, even when it ain’t so pretty.”