Page 28 of Return to Whitmore
“What scheme, exactly?”
Jack looked grim. “He was having us sell drugs around the island. At the high school and to tourists.”
Charlotte gasped. Tio Angelo had always been charming and manipulative and difficult to pin down, but she’d never guessed that he’d been involved in something so sinister.
“My question is,” Jack continued, “is whether Tio Angelo maintains operations here. After this got dodgy, did he manage to set something up from afar?”
“You want to track down Tio Angelo,” Charlotte guessed.
Jack nodded, his expression jagged and mean. “I need to see him.”
“What do you want to say to him?”
But Jack didn’t want to say.
Charlotte tried another tack. “How are you going to figure this out?”
“There was another guy involved,” Jack said. “A guy without the means to leave the island, I think. If he’s still here, maybe he’s still working for Tio Angelo.”
Charlotte’s mind shot in a thousand directions. “Who?”
“You remember Amos?” Jack asked. “He was my age. Their family didn’t have money. He was easy for Tio Angelo to lure in. He could finally help his mother pay the bills.”
Charlotte’s heart spasmed. It sounded so evil. She thought of her Italian grandmother and grandfather, how they remainedin Italy, nursing broken hearts after the supposed death of their son, Angelo. All the while, it was probable that he’d faked his own death to avoid the cops.
And now that Jack brought it up, Charlotte recalled that cops had been sniffing around during the final months at the White Oak Lodge. There had been one strange and exhilarating time, when they’d come and Tio Angelo had cooked them a stupendous Italian meal. They’d left terribly pleased and unwilling to follow up with whatever they’d come to the Lodge to look for.
“Where were the drugs?” Charlotte whispered.
“In the basement, of course,” Jack said.
Charlotte closed her eyes, remembering the endless tunnels beneath the White Oak Lodge, the warnings from her father and her uncle and everyone else to stay away. People had gotten lost down there, lost and never found.
“Was that where the rumor of the Whitmore treasure came from?” Charlotte asked, remembering how people used to whisper about the buckets and buckets of gold under the White Oak Lodge.
Jack snorted. “That rumor was around long before Tio Angelo brought his drugs in.”
Charlotte’s thoughts raced. They were nearing the island, the place that had housed and hidden their Whitmore family secrets for decades. Here they floated on the Nantucket Sound, where, the year before her birth, Uncle Ronald Whitmore had drowned and cast her father into the throes of depression.
“I want to film this,” Charlotte said to Jack, remembering her dream of documenting the story of her mother and father, the story of her life.
Jack shrugged. It was clear he didn’t want her to, but since he’d dragged her here, he couldn’t refuse.
It didn’t take long for Charlotte and Jack to find Amos, the ex-drug dealer who now, it seemed, worked as a sort of handyman and odd-jobs man around the island. From a distance, Charlotte and Jack ate ice cream cones and watched as Amos fixed up a wealthy man’s sailboat, his naked shoulders glistening with sweat and his radio on full blast.
“He’s handsome,” Charlotte said vaguely. “More so than I remember.”
Jack couldn’t agree or disagree. He was too jumpy, searching everywhere for some sign or connection to Tio Angelo. They’d come all this way to find a path back to Tio, to connect the dots. But all day long, the only person who approached Amos was a delivery guy on a bike who brought Amos a burger, which he ate in the sun with his feet in the water. Jack said they had to stay on the island longer. They had to keep watching. There was a glow in his eyes that meant he wanted to keep going.
But the next day and the one after that found Charlotte and Jack in similar situations, watching Amos and finding no details. Jack was angular and exhausted, not sleeping well at the hotel they’d rented far off the beaten path. They were both terrified of being recognized and upped the ante on their disguises more and more as the days passed. Soon, they would have to return to Manhattan, to their lives. Maybe Jack was tired of being Seth Green. Perhaps he wanted all of this to resolve.
Charlotte didn’t know and was too frightened to ask.
Finally, on day five, Jack concocted a plan. He wanted Charlotte to approach Amos and befriend him. “Flirt with him a little bit! Distract him! And then, when push comes to shove, ask him about Tio Angelo,” Jack said, speaking rapidly. “You’ll catch him so off guard that he’ll answer you.”
Charlotte wasn’t sure if she wanted to put herself at risk like that. Then again, she wasn’t hiding behind a fake identity likeJack was. All she knew about their situation was what Jack had told her.
“If I do this,” she said meekly, “can we go back home?”
