The Island of Dragons (Rockpools Book 4) Gregg Dunnett (desktop ebook reader .TXT) 📖

culprit. It showed the police could lie. But she didn’t bring it up. Why add to his pain? And why would they in this case. It didn’t make sense. But then none of it made sense, the whole thing was crazy. Madness. Billy would never make bombs.

Or would he?

She said nothing, but thoughts and memories about her friend chased each other around her mind. Billy was… impulsive, careless. He acted according to his own moral compass of what was right and wrong, which had little to do with the actual law. And certainly he was bitterly opposed to the expansion of the chemical plant – he’d pushed for much harder wording on those posters. But it was a giant leap from a poster campaign to a bomb. And why – what would be the point? There was no question that he could build a bomb. That he knew how to do it, and could find the resources. Of course he could. Billy was brilliant like that. He could do it as a lunchtime project.

She wanted to hang up. To somehow turn off this madness. But she knew that wouldn’t end anything. The pain, the questions, they would still be there.

“Billy would never blow up a security guard,” she said in the end, more firmly than she really believed.

Another pause, and Amber knew that Sam was chasing the same twisted thoughts around his mind as she was.

“I know that. Not deliberately.”

There had been no search and rescue operation. By the time it was thought Billy had gone into the water, too much time had passed. The water temperatures were too cold, and no one knew where he’d entered the water, meaning the potential search area would be far too large. Nevertheless, Billy’s father had put to sea, along with almost the entire fleet of fishermen from Holport, and tried to conduct their own search – both as that cold afternoon turned to black night, and from the freezing dawn the next day. But nothing was found, and everyone out looking knew by then it was only a body they were looking for.

In the days that followed, Amber was simply numb. Believing there must be some mistake and waiting for the confirmation. But when the FBI agent came to interview her – a woman, who claimed to have known Billy years before – she told Amber she had been at the ferry port herself. Had directed the search of the ship when it came in, and that there was no possible way he could have gotten off. And yet there was still something she was able to cling onto – one of the agent’s questions was whether Billy had made any attempt to contact her, since that day. It proved they too were not 100% sure, at least not at that point. And in the days that followed she sensed – rather than saw – the presence of other agents, waiting outside her apartment, following her to work. Keeping watch. If they were watching her, then they weren’t sure. They wanted to be certain he was dead.

But the days flowed rapidly past, and there was no contact with Billy. And either the FBI watchers got better at hiding, or they left her alone. And the slim chance that a mistake had been made seemed to contract further into nothingness. It was winter, cold and bitter. Billy wasn’t at home on the island. He wasn’t on his father’s boat. He wasn’t at his college apartment. He wasn’t anywhere. And though she checked her phone hundreds of times a day, near-panicking if it ever fell below thirty percent battery, for fear she might miss his attempt to contact her. He never did.

A week passed. Then two. Then three weeks. And still nothing. Except the call from Sam.

“You don’t have to, if you don’t want to.” Sam repeated. “Say something I mean – at the memorial service. But please come. I don’t know if many will.”

Chapter Fifty

In the end the little church was two thirds empty. Almost certainly it would have been fuller, had Billy Wheatley not been painted in the island media as a cold blooded murderer in the weeks before – after all a dead person cannot sue for libel. But perhaps it might not have been much fuller anyway, Billy was not a boy who went out of his way to make friends.

But it was an odd affair, with no casket on show, no body to bury or dispose of. And the subjects of how he died, and the still unresolved mystery of why he decided to bomb the chemical site were both off-limits, by unspoken resolve. Amber had initially rejected Sam’s call for her to speak, but as she traveled over on the ferry – the same boat that Billy had apparently jumped from – she changed her mind, and wrote something as she sat in the café, perhaps in the very same seat he had occupied as he discovered the police knew what he had done. She fingered the edge of the paper now, wishing she had had more time to consider what she wrote, had not penned it in such an emotional place, in such a dazed frame of mind. She barely listened to Sam as he spoke, nor to the priest who led the service. But when he said her name they cut through, and she found her legs working on their own, pushing her to her feet.

There was a microphone, a thin metal wire that stuck up from the wood of the pulpit. At first she leaned in, too close to it, and her first words warped and echoed around the little church. She shrank back, shocked, for the first time looked out at the audience. Most of the seats were empty, the ones that weren’t were mostly working people – fishermen from Holport, whom Billy had pestered, and grown to know, through asking what they were catching and where, so he could map