I told him, “Bermuda is small, mostly peaceful and orderly. The disappearance of a tourist, or any kind of violent crime, is unusual here. I don’t know how the paper got the story so quickly. The leak must have come out of the police station.”

“Local police won’t help us. Probably get in the way,” Sampson muttered as we walked over to the hotel registration desk. He signed in, then we trudged upstairs to show Nana and the kids that Uncle John was here.

Chapter 47

THE FOLLOWING MORNING, the two of us met for hours with the police in Hamilton. They were professionals, but a kidnapping was a rarity for them. They let us set up in their station house on Front Street. I still couldn’t concentrate or focus the way I needed to.

Bermuda is a twenty-one-square-mile island. While the British colony is small, we soon discovered that there are more than twelve hundred roads on the island. Sampson and I split up and covered as much ground as we possibly could. For the next two days we went from six in the morning until ten or eleven at night, without a break. I didn’t want to stop, not even to sleep.

We didn’t do any better than the locals, though. No one had seen anything. We’d reached a dead end. Christine had disappeared without a trace.

We were bone-tired. After we finished at the station house on the third night, Sampson and I went for a late swim at Elbow Beach, just down the road from the hotel.

We had learned to swim at the municipal pool in D.C. Nana had insisted that we learn. She was fifty-four at the time, and stubborn. She made up her mind to learn and took lessons with us from the Red Cross. The majority of people in Southeast didn’t know how to swim back then, and she felt it was symbolic of the limiting inner-city experience.

So one summer, Sampson and I tackled swimming with Nana at the municipal pool. We went for lessons three mornings a week and usually practiced for an extra hour after that. Nana herself was soon able to swim fifty or more laps. She had stamina, same as now. I rarely get into the water without flashing back to those fine summer days of my youth, when I became a reasonably good swimmer.

Now, Sampson and I floated on the calm surface, out about a hundred yards or so from shore. The sky above was the deepest shade of evening blue, sparkling with countless stars. I could see the curving white line of the beach as it stretched several miles in either direction. Palm and casuarina trees shimmied in the sea breeze.