excerpt | review

THE RIPPLE EFFECT

BOOK I
The Swan Pond
March-April 2002

1

The “Swan Pond” at Anse Marcel on the northwest coast of St. Martin, a popular Caribbean tourist island between Anguilla and St. Barts, was a lousy place to disappear if you'd ever devoted body and soul to getting rich in New York. Hidden up a narrow, twisty creek and ringed by dense vegetation, the natural cove might have sheltered pirates or escaped slaves in a simpler time. But in the month of March, 2002, it was a marina for blue-water charter yachts. Tucked ashore among the bougainvillea, a five star health club resort?the ritzy type the French called a privilege spa—offered a clear view of million dollar hulls, flawless teak decks, lofty masts and polished chrome. Sooner or later a Wall Street guy would run into somebody he knew at the Swan Pond.

So Aiden Page kept his head down while he scrubbed diesel soot off the transom of a Swan 44 he had just delivered from Martinique. When he did look up, it was to whisper Hail Marys that on off days, between last week's clients flying home and the next en route, the only people to recognize him?the boats' deck hands and cooks, and the shore-based mechanics, riggers and varnishers—would know him as “Chuck,” a taciturn charter captain from some land-locked place like Kansas or Iowa where Chuck must have learned to sail on lakes.

He appeared, at first glance, similar to the other paid crew cleaning the boats this brilliant winter morning in the high season?a seafaring man in cutoffs and a faded polo shirt, face tanned, hair and beard bleached yellow by the sun. Squint lines radiating from his eyes suggested he had left his twenties far behind; his perpetually bowed head hinted at disappointments or remorse; but a restless vitality and a handsome face offered the possibility that the best years stretched promisingly before him, if only he could get out of this current mess.

He had a sailor's broad hands, and arms hard with muscle. But his legs betrayed the camouflage of the working seaman: unlike most professional crew, whose lower limbs were spindly from years confined to small decks, Aiden Page's were still muscled from daily workouts at the Downtown Athletic Club. If anyone noticed, he hoped they would take him for a pumped- up race boat gorilla from the “Heine,”the annual Heineken Regatta that the Island had just hosted. Though at an athletic five-ten and one-seventy, Aiden Page was built more like a bowman than a winch grinder and had the scars to prove it: an “O” branded on his left cheek by an errant jib's stainless steel clew ring; and a pale crescent on his chin, which never took the sun, courtesy of a foredeck face plant in a club race back on the Sound.

Thank God the fierce tropical light made everybody wear sunglasses. If there was one aspect of his appearance that would give him away to anyone who had ever met him, it was a distinctive feature shared by several of that arm of the Page family that emigrated from Kiltimagh in County Mayo—one eye bright blue, the other bottle green. Blue for dreaming, green for money, his father used to laugh. And look where that had got them.

When the transom was clean, he got busy Windexing the ports.

A pretty crew girl in a bikini bottom and loose shirt, who had already made several attempts to get friendly, leaned down from the high-sided Halberg-Rassey ketch moored beside the Swan. “Newsprint works better than paper towels,” she said. “The ink makes the glass shine.” She handed him a section of the New York Times, which was stained with coffee cup circles and crinkled like parchment by salt spray.

Aiden shut his mind to a generous flash of bra-less brown breasts. He couldn't risk hooking up with anyone who would ask questions. So getting laid would have to wait until he worked himself a lot further away than the Caribbean. He was dreading the arrival of Friday's charter clients; he didn't recognize their names on the manifest, but he couldn't breathe easy until he had scoped them out at binoculars distance to make sure they had never met.

The newsprint worked as advertised, until the paper got wet. He reached to wad a fresh sheet. It was sprinkled with head shot photos and the sight of his own face knocked the breath out of him, like the boom had whipped across the coach roof and smashed him square in the chest.

“Hey.” The pretty girl was back, peering down from her side deck, looking a little puzzled by the stricken expression of Aiden's face even as she said, “We're taking our van into town. Want to come for lunch?”

Aiden crumpled the paper and ran below.

The Swan's owner was seated at the nav station, reading bills from the charter company. He looked up at Aiden stumbling down the companionway. “Chuck, can you explain?”

Aiden hurried past the nav station, around the saloon table, and locked himself in the forward head. Heart pounding, breath storming through his lungs, he spread the sheet and tried to focus on the print.

Headlined “Portraits of Grief,” the page was laid out like a high school yearbook, with full face photos and six-inch biographies. Aiden, who had deliberately not looked at a newspaper in six months, surmised that the Times had committed to posting an obituary for every single person who died in the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Smiling up at him was a picture he remembered well. He'd kept a copy on his desk, right next to Morgan's. The publicist's photographer had shot him and Charlie at a company party, arms over each others shoulders. They were grinning happily at the camera, back in ?99 when you could do no wrong and the money would flow forever.

CHARLES PAGE and AIDEN PAGE

Brothers Inseparable in Life and Death

Charlie and Aiden. Aiden and Charlie. While in no way two peas in a pod, recalled friends and family, the “boys” as they were also known, were a team to be reckoned with. Charlie was older, steadier, and more worldly. Aiden flamboyant, the cut-up. When they raced sailing dinghies as kids, Charlie was always helmsman, while daredevil Aiden leaned so far in the hiking strap he occasionally fell overboard.

On a memorable Christmas several years ago, Charlie chartered a jet to take employees of HHH Investment Bank and their families to the remote Tonga Islands in the South Pacific. Aiden organized sailing canoe races across the Polynesian lagoon and acted as bookmaker for the high stakes betting. He and Charlie were the odds on favorites, but lost to a long shot dark horse: Aiden's teenage daughter Morgan. “It turned into a very expensive race,” one banker recalled, ruefully. “The mail room clerk who bet on the kid went home a lot richer.”

Charlie was HHH's CEO, Aiden his CFO. Aiden also served as HHH's fire warden, a job he appeared to take much more seriously than most things in life. When last seen the brothers were shooing traders, bankers, accountants, lawyers and secretaries into the stairwell that led out of the North Tower.

Aiden could not help but notice that Brothers Inseparable In Life and Death were bracketed by better people. A fireman, last seen going up the stairs, and a nurse who had stayed to tend to a burn victim in the lobby. Community volunteers. Church goers. Perfect parents.

He reached inside his polo shirt and touched trembling fingers to the simple gold crucifix that he had given his daughter for first communion. Perfect parents. Who would forever be missed by their children. Which was the part that really destroyed him. Even worse than leaving Charlie to die.

2

Morgan Page was afraid of the subway.

She had loved the trains before 9/11. They had been her magic carpet. It was the first thing she learned when they made her move to the city. You ran down the steps and in five minutes you were a million miles from your mother's apartment. Summon the courage to change to the IND or the BMT and you got another million.

But now she rode her bike. You'd have to be too dumb to live to let yourself get trapped underground when the next attack came. Fortunately, all winter long it hardly snowed so she could ride everywhere she had to go. She rode to school, which they moved temporarily to Brooklyn after the attack. After school she would ride all the way up to Central Park. Outdoors, away from crowds. Sometimes it was easier to skip school and ride straight to the park.

She could bike to Chelsea Piers to swim, but didn't do it often. It was scary when you thought about a bomb exploding in a truck in the parking garage under the pool and getting sucked down a funnel of water to the jagged wreckage. She could bike to her piano lessons in her teacher's snug little brownstone studio, which seemed pretty safe because it was so small; except even there you could feel through the walls the thumping of a helicopter as if they were attacking again. And she could bike to her shrink, who had an office in “Shrink Land,” a tree lined section of the West Village where a lot of her friends went before 9/11. Her turn, now. Twice a week.

This was Tuesday. It had been a long weekend. Even weirder than usual.

“Osama came to my room last night.”

She slumped in the chair, staring at the grease stains the bicycle chain left on her sneakers. The shrink, Dr. Melton, was even older than her grandfather. He had been headmaster of a private school?except it was a progressive school so they called him principal, like they did at her special public school, Stuyvesant. When he retired from school, he kept the kids for patients, and their parents for couples therapy trying to save their marriages. Which was how her mother knew him. Which made Morgan wonder why she was here: Dr. Melton hadn't done squat to save her parents so what was he going to do for her? He was small, with round cheeks and little glasses that reflected the light so you couldn't really see his eyes. Like what was he thinking? Forget it. You'd never know.

“He's even taller than people say,” said Morgan.

“Who is taller?”