He plunged straight down into the sea.
Pandemonium. All the passengers jumped up and began yelling to Antonio to turn the boat around, turn the boat around .
But sailboats are not so easy to turn around when under wind power. So first Antonio—without help—had to lower the sail and start the engine. Only then, a quarter mile away from Janklow, could they turn back and effect a rescue.
Janklow could be seen. He was in the water, waving his hands wildly, but more as if he was a little kid splashing in the tub.
As the boat drew up alongside, the state senator had the presence of mind to throw a life vest to Janklow, while his wife berated him for being so careless.
But Janklow just laughed; a wild, manic sound that sent chills up his wife’s spine. And then, pushing himself along the side of the boat and refusing all proffered hands, Janklow went to the stern, dove down, and came up with his face shoved straight into the churning propeller.
It would be listed as an accidental death, not a suicide.
“I’m looking at the spreadsheet right now,” Lystra Reid said. She had a phone propped on her ear and a pad open before her. Tiburon police officers and California Highway Patrol detectives were milling around the marina of the Tiburon Yacht Club. They had taken statements from everyone on the Janklow boat. Lystra had little enough to say, and none of it useful, and the detectives had let her go.
But rather than take off immediately Lystra savored a bourbon rocks and split her attention between the mild chaos of the investigation and the neat order of her spreadsheets.
“Yes, I am very much aware of some of my off-book expenses, and no, I won’t enlighten you further, Tom. One of the reasons I don’t take the company public, yeah, yeah, is because I like to spend my money without being second-guessed. It is, after all, mine.”
At the age of nine, Lystra had been sent away. Her father had finally decided that he could not raise her properly. His own business was falling on hard times; the carnival business was fading fast. Her father’s act—he was a trick shooter and put on an impressive if threadbare show with guns, knives and hatchets—no longer drew enough of a paying crowd for the carny life to make much sense.
He’d sat her down and explained it all to her. She would be going to a good, decent family that would raise her properly, with school, and friends, and all of that.
“You won’t be my dad anymore?” She hadn’t cried. She’d felt sick with betrayal, but she hadn’t cried.
Her father, his lined face half-hidden in the gloom of the Louisiana dusk, had said, “I won’t be with you. I won’t be seeing you, I . . . I have to find some way to make a living. But listen to me, Lystra. Listen to me. You’re a very smart kid. And better than smart, you’re determined. You’ll do fine. And if you ever need me, really need me, life-and-death need, I’ll be there.”
“What about Mom? Is she dead?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
She knew he was lying. She couldn’t recall the exact moment when it dawned on her that her father had killed her mother. But once the idea had dawned, certainty soon followed.
Her mother had been a bit of a party girl. That was the nicest way to put it. Lystra’s mother liked a good time, and she had not found it in the life her husband gave her. She’d looked for comfort elsewhere. In booze, in drugs, in sex.
“I know,” Lystra had said. Nothing else. Just those two words.
Her father had said nothing. The two of them just sat there on the broken-down lawn chairs. Then her father had poured two fingers of bourbon into a paper cup and handed it to her.
God, it had burned her throat, but she had swallowed it and not made a sound.
“Bad things happen in this life,” he had said at last.
Lystra had held out her paper cup and said, “More.”
He shook his head. “That taste was enough. You’re still a kid.”
“You killed my mother. Now you’re dumping me. Okay. That’s all done. Yeah. Maybe I’ll never see you again.”
“Maybe.”
“But if I do, you’ll do whatever I ask you to do.”
“Will I?” He’d seemed almost amused, but seeing the look in her eyes he had flinched, looked down, and finally poured her a second drink. “I will,” he had said, and there was a sacredness to that vow.
Lystra went to live with a very nice, childless family by the name of Reid, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She got straight As in school while barely bothering to crack a book. She wasn’t just a smart kid; she was brilliant. A cold, emotionally distant, friendless but never-bullied kid.
But at age fourteen things began to change. Not her grades, those stayed top-notch. But at about that time Lystra began to talk to her long-distant father again. He would speak to her when she was walking through the corridors at school. He would speak to her as she sat in the Baptist church and listened to the sermon. Her lip would curl when she heard him. Her eyes would focus with inhuman intensity on the back of a man’s neck until by sheer force of will she could make him turn around, uncomfortable, only to become confused when the danger he sensed turned out to be just a young girl.
Her father’s voice spoke to her. And other voices as well. Angels, sometimes, though not the better sort of angel. And the voice of a girl with the odd name of Scowler.
She never told anyone about the voices, they had universally warned her not to. Yeah, don’t tell anyone we’re here, they’ll lock you up. Yeah.
Then both her adoptive parents had died in a car accident. The particulars of the accident raised eyebrows but elicited sympathy. Lystra had been sixteen at that point, just learning to drive. And despite the fact that Lystra had played various online driving games for years, she panicked while driving the real thing. She had not realized the car was in reverse. She did not notice that her parents were standing behind her, down at the bottom of the long driveway.
The police questioned her for a long time. The detectives could not quite square her story of intending to pull the car forward slowly into the open garage with the fact that the car had been in reverse and had shot at surprisingly high speed the sixty-seven feet between the rear bumper and the two Reids.
“When I realized it was in reverse, it was too late, yeah. I saw what was about to happen, and I knew what to do, but instead of hitting the brake I accidentally hit the gas pedal.”
“And then?”
“I felt the impact and my only thought was that I should pull the car forward. Yeah. Undo my mistake.”
“Right. And in the process you ran over both of your parents again. That’s your story. You’re sticking to that?”
“How can I do otherwise? It’s the truth.”
No, they had not believed her. No one believed her. People who knew Lystra Ellen Alice Reid scoffed at the notion that she had panicked. Panic? Lystra, panic?
But in the end the cops couldn’t prove a thing.
There wasn’t a lot in the way of a social services department in Tulsa, but a shrink was tasked with testing her.
“She’s a very difficult subject,” he had reported. “Hard to test. Her IQ is very high—very smart, very quick—so she knows how to answer, how to avoid setting off alarm bells. But my instinct tells me she’s concealing something. At times I got the impression she might be hearing voices. Phantom voices. She may just be traumatized. Or she may be schizophrenic but with enough control to hide it.”
Lystra was the sole heir to a million-dollar life insurance policy that was doubled due to the fact that the death had been an