Carolyn G. Hart_Henrie O_01 Read Free Page B

belong to?” I looked back at the array of expensive vehicles.
    “The others.”
    “What others?” He might not want to talk, but that didn’t discourage me in the slightest. I’ve been asking questions for most of my lifetime.
    “The people going over to the island. You’re the last.”
    I felt a flicker of irritation. I’d asked Chase, of course, why he needed help, and he’d said only that I would find out. He said he wanted me because I had an instinct for truth. What kind of truth was he seeking? And why here, so far from the sophisticated world where he moved with so much power? I knew something about his life, of course. It would have been hard not to: twice chosen
Time
Man of the Year,the subject of countless admiring articles in
Fortune
and the
Wall Street Journal
. I knew he owned a number of homes: an old one—a monument to rapacious aggrandizement—in Newport, a cottage in Carmel, an estate in Atlanta, a brownstone in New York, a flat in London. I’d never read about an island home. But, for all I knew, this was some kind of exclusive resort. That would be very much like Chase.
    I looked across the sound. I thought perhaps I saw a green smudge of land against the horizon, low and lumpy.
    I shaded my eyes. “How far is it?”
    “’Bout six miles.”
    “You can only get there by boat?”
    “Yeah.”
    I looked at Frank Hudson’s back. His shoulders were hunched. There was no sense of holiday pleasure here. I wished I could see his face. Why was he angry?
    The boat picked up speed, spanked across the whitecaps. I raised my voice to be heard over the engine. “So there are no cars on the island?”
    Hudson eased up on the throttle and looked briefly, contemptuously, back at me. “No cars. No phones. No TV. Nothing.”
    “Is everything brought in by boat? People, supplies, newspapers?”
    “Or it don’t come.” He pulled down on the bill of his cap, shading his hostile eyes.
    “Who lives there?” I shifted a little in my seat. The Naugahyde upholstery was patched and a little lumpy. But the boat was well cared for, clean and tidy.
    “Nobody. Not now.” The deep voice sounded angrier. “I don’t call comin’ a few weeks at a time livin’ there. ’Course he can do what he wants, can’t he? He owns the island, every inch of it. That’s what he said when he bought it and started to build. Said he could do what he wanted, where he wanted.”
    I knew there were many small, privately owned islands off the coast, most of them serving as hunting preserves. I looked across the water with growing interest. A private island. With only Chase and his chosen guests.
    Hudson shoved the throttle forward; the engine rose to a roar.
    The sun slid behind a heavy bank of clouds. It was still hot, August, Low Country hot, but now the day had turned gray and ominous, the clouds edged by crimson. In the heavy, moisture-laden air the throb of the motorboat sounded like the buzz of an angry wasp.
    Then I saw the island, dark and vividly green, low against the murky horizon. An isolated patch of land with no link to the mainland and therefore no connection with the sprawling, powerful empire of Chase Prescott, media magnate.
    This was a Chase Prescott I didn’t know. What had happened to make the information mogul of America leave behind all the trappings of power? Chase seeking respite? That was at odds with everything I remembered. No matter how much he enjoyed drama, Chase surely wasn’t recalling the reclusive, nerve-ridden decline of Joseph Pulitzer, who had spent his final years in a tower with foot-thick wallswhere he still suffered acute pain from the smallest of noises.
    As we grew nearer, the boat bouncing on the short, choppy waves, I could see the ripple of spartina grass. The tide was coming in. Dense and impenetrable undergrowth choked the towering pines. There was no sight of a house or a dock. The island must have appeared just the same—fecund, wild, forbidding—to a party of