Bound for the Outer Banks Read online

  Ella smiled and immediately heard La Campanella being played by the live pianist in the main dining area. The host led the family to the private terrace room. When Ella entered the room everyone yelled, “Surprise!” She had assumed the evening was just going to be an intimate dinner with her parents but suddenly she was thrust into the center of a large group of people, some of whom she would only refer to as slight acquaintances. Later BeBe confessed that she wasn’t sure who she should invite and she’d hoped she’d done a good job.

  Ella had no grandparents and very few relatives. Joseph Barrantine’s parents had died when Ella was small. Joseph had been a late in life child as Ella had been for Joseph. Unfortunately this was a lethal combination for having grandparents around for any length of time. Ella saw her second cousin Camille whom she had only met a hand full of times in her life. Camille had recently turned sixteen also but Ella had not been invited to her party. Ella assumed Camille’s mother had not been as desperate to put together a guest list as BeBe had been.

  She spied a table of guests all from the National Honor Society community services project team. Sandy, Jacob, Ben, and Valerie were four of the nerdiest people Ella had ever met but they were truly nice. They had an antiquated Dungeons and Dragons board game that Jacob’s dad had from college that the group played religiously. After their Honor Society meetings they would plead with Ella to play but she always thought it was a little creepy and constantly came up with fairly believable excuses as to why she had to be home immediately following the meeting.

  Ella had realized after sixteen years that she was too nerdy for the cool kids and too cool for the nerdy kids. She wasn’t into Goth, and although she was fit, she wasn’t terribly athletic and would never be considered a jock. It seemed that none of the niches really suited her. She considered herself to be fashion conscious, but she wasn’t fashion forward enough to be a member of the “scenes.” As for the “goodies”, Ella couldn’t make the cut. Ella considered herself a religious person, especially since she had attended both Synagogue and a Methodist church growing up. BeBe said Ella could figure out what she wanted spiritually later. Ella was apparently not quite good enough when she became close to Rachel a high ranking member of the “goodies.” While the two girls were sitting on the bleachers, Ella let the “F” bomb fly when a wasp stung her while they were listening to the coach lecture on the competition regulations of Badminton. Rachel quickly dismissed Ella from the group. Ella finally decided she was a “jack of all trades master of none” personality type. Surprisingly she found herself completely at ease with this little token of self-discovery.

  As Ella continued to scan the room filled with distant relatives, all from her Dad’s side of the family since BeBe had severed all ties with hers, she was startled to see a table full of 1CB’s. 1CB was short for First Class Bitch. These were the popular girls that everyone hated but secretly wanted to be, at least everyone but Ella. She held no secret envy for these girls and avoided them at all costs. She wondered how in the world BeBe had thought to invite them. Later when Ella inquired about the composition of the guest list, BeBe told Ella that she called her homeroom teacher to get a list of kids she might like at her party. That explained a lot.

  Mrs. Ritchey was a 1CB wannabe from the word go. She was forty three years old, and wore Abercrombie and Fitch T-shirts paired with colored skinny jeans. The unfortunate thing, besides the aforementioned ensemble, was that her belly button showed through the T-shirt fabric when pushed against it by her large muffin top.

  Ella faintly smiled at Angelica Bundy, Brandy Berkowitz, and Emily Gacy, the girls that made up the 1CB contingent. They gave her halfhearted smiles in return surely wondering why they had been invited but attending nonetheless because after all, a free Saturday night at the River Café with your two besties was a coup.

  The dinner began with an amuse-bouche of butternut squash cream and pumpkin seeds next to a venison jerky resting on top of mixed nuts. The appetizer was a wild rock lobster with hearts of palm. The chef at the River Café was considered one of the top ten chefs in all of New York City and that was apparent to Ella by each course placed in front of her. The entrée was a choice of Scottish Salmon with a port wine and shallot reduction or a Prime New York Strip Steak with a blue cheese fondue. A vegetarian alternative was offered but there were no takers. Ella was sure if Mrs. Ritchey had been an Emo type there would have been plenty of takers at her party.

  After an array of desserts including an apple almond tart, a goat cheese cheesecake, and a sorbet plate, it was time to open gifts. One of the last gifts Ella opened was BeBe’s vintage Finnegan’s leather suitcase. Ella knew what the case meant to BeBe and tears began to well up in her eyes. Anjelica Bundy looked at the old piece of luggage with disgust and loudly whispered to Ella that her gift would “make up for that old thing.” Ella looked up and glared at Anjelica as if she were shooting laser beams from her eyes, hopefully magnified and intensified by the reservoir of tears. Ella ran her hand over the embossed oval Finnegan’s Limited brand and smiled. She was so very thankful she’d been able to share her sweet sixteen with her parents before they were prematurely taken from her.

  Chapter 4

  Ella had heard the static and click from the agent’s radio. The voice on the other end said in a staccato, enunciated rhythm, “Ro-a-noke Isl-and, North Car-o-lin-a, city of Man-te-o.”

  “Got it,” answered the driver as he pressed the voice button on the dash.

  Ella’s heart sank. Manteo? Roanoke Island? North Carolina? BeBe’s hometown? How could this be? During her myriad of interviews with the FBI’s and CIA’s joint task force she had never discussed BeBe’s home town. She had assured them that she had never been to her mother’s home state of North Carolina and that she had never met any of her mother’s relatives. The focus immediately changed to Brooklyn and her father’s few remaining relatives.

  At this moment Ella racked her brain to ensure she had correctly stated to the authorities that she had never divulged any information about her mother’s family to Dante Vitali. She didn’t even know most of their names! BeBe was tight lipped about her childhood with the exception of where Harmony Beauchamp was concerned. “No,” she quietly said to herself, “I never told Dante any details about my mother except that she was Southern.”

  Dante had always assumed that BeBe must be from Biloxi since that was where he’d met Ella. Ella was staying in “her mother’s bungalow” that she’d inherited. She still referred to it as BeBe’s bungalow especially since that’s what the little sign with the brightly painted mermaid said which hung above the front door’s transom.

  Ella had only revealed to Dante that her mother was from the South and that she had no living relatives. This just seemed easier than telling him the entire torrid story of why her mother left North Carolina never to return. And besides that, whenever Ella spoke of her mother she became a blubbering hot mess. She had suffered in silence since the accident and she continued to do so.

  Ella was certain she had never told Dante anything about Manteo. As far as he knew Biloxi, Mississippi was her only tie to the South besides her college in Savannah and Saint Stanislaus, the Catholic all girls’ boarding school she had attended in Bay St. Louis. BeBe had been thrilled to find the school. She informed Ella that it would give her another possible spiritual path to follow since it was Catholic and she didn’t “know squat” about Catholicism yet. And it was only forty minutes to Biloxi so BeBe could come down to the bungalow and they could spend time together some weekends. “And,” exclaimed BeBe, “we can still head over to the Big Easy for the day!”

  BeBe had insisted that Ella live some of her formative years in the South because BeBe would declare, “I do not want you talking like a Yankee!” She would pinch her nostrils together and start yelling, “Waaahhhnnda! Waaahhhnnda! Come heeyah Wanda and look at this!” She would say this in a grating nasal voice that Ella had indeed heard more than a few times while shopping with her mom in Queens.

  “Honey you’re going to have a sweet, Southern accent whether you want it or not. Trust me. It will benefit you in the future.” BeBe had told Ella of all her many travels before meeting Joseph Barrantine and how men’s eyes would glaze over when she began to speak. She even had men offer to pay her good money just to sit and talk to them.

  It would drive Blythe Barrantine close to crazy whenever someone tried to imitate a Southern accent and they began speaking in double negatives or failing to make their subjects and verbs agree.

  “’I ain’t got no paper!’ ‘He weren’t in the garden this morning.’ What the hell are they talking about? That’s not an accent. That’s just stupid.” Blythe would continue to rant. “Don’t they teach the difference between ACCENT and SYNTAX in these fancy acting schools?”

  BeBe would always turn to Ella and say, “Elle, just because we’re Southern doesn’t mean we’re ignorant. I can assure you stupidity doesn’t stop just south of the Mason Dixon Line!”

  So it was decided that Ella would attend Saint Stanislaus at the beginning of her eleventh grade year. The girls at Saint Stanislaus were predominantly from wealthy southern families. Ella began to see exactly what her mother had been speaking of regarding the soft, rounded accent of the southern girls as opposed to the harsh, grating, nasal accents of the “Yankee girls” as BeBe would refer to them.

  Ella already spoke with somewhat of a southern drawl because of the large amount of time spent with her mother. BeBe’s accent was not terribly heavy but when she got upset or especially excited about something, which between the two accounted for approximately ninety percent of the time, her accent became much more pronounced. By the end of Ella’s junior year, she was speaking a drawl which sounded like “honey coated heroin.” At least that was
what one of the senior boys at neighboring St. Patrick’s School in Biloxi described it as. Ella had met Jack Murphy while lying on the beach with some friends from Saint Stanislaus when his Frisbee landed on her beach towel.

  When she was told a date for the Sadie Hawkins Dance was mandatory Ella was appalled.

  “This is ridiculous,” she thought. “I feel like this is a weird form of forced dance prostitution,” she told her roommate Shelby.

  “For God’s sake Ella, Saint Stanislaus wants to graduate women who can become heads of corporations, in order to do that you have to learn to manage men. If you don’t have enough gumption to ask a man to a stupid Sadie Hawkins Dance how do you expect to control one in the board room one day?” Shelby crossed her arms waiting for Ella’s response.

  Ella said nothing. She wanted to scream, “I’m not here to be a CEO one day. I’m here to make sure I don’t lose my accent!”

  She immediately realized the absurdity of the statement, but the truth was she had no desire for some power position in a company. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to spend the rest of her life doing, but the one thing she knew was she didn’t want to work in an office for a big corporation. She got claustrophobic just thinking about it.

  Ella knew she was more than likely the only girl complaining about the Sadie Hawkins Dance. The other students, feeling stifled by attending an all girls’ school, were thrilled to be attending a function where the girl was given the go ahead to be so forward as to ask a guy out. This was simply not done in the South, at least not the circles in which Saint Stanislaus girls traveled.

  Ella had finally gotten up the nerve to allow Shelby to act as the go between and send the invitation to Jack Murphy by word of mouth through Shelby’s date who also attended St. Patrick’s. Ella was consumed with relief when Jack responded through the gamut of messengers that he'd love to go.

  The car lurched forward snapping Ella out of her daydream. Jack Murphy and Saint Stanislaus seemed liked eons ago. So much water had passed under the bridge since then, not clear, calm water either, but a lot of black water, dark and murky that might contain disease causing fecal matter. Yeah, that about summed it up because wading through a lot of crap would pretty much describe Ella’s past decade in a nutshell.

  As the Charger pulled out of the Atlanta airport and onto Interstate 85 North, Ella once more decided the arrangement to send her to Roanoke Island was a complete coincidence. Besides, she had always been curious about where her mother’s folks were from. After a few miles, the driver took the ramp onto Interstate 20 East. A few exits later Ella saw the sign for Zoo Atlanta. She wished she was headed for a carefree day at the zoo instead of running from Dante Vitali’s United Sacred Crown crime organization. The agency would only fly Ella to and from major airports deciding a pretty, single girl exiting a plane at a small airport would bring unwanted attention and questions. Also, instate agents were not allowed to take her to her destination. The proximity was too close and should they get curious it would be too convenient for them to seek her out.

  Every town Ella had been hidden in had been pedestrian friendly. She was always given a bicycle on which to get around because contrary to popular belief, the agencies did not have unlimited budgets to support an individual, waiting for sometimes years, to testify in a high profile case.

  After balling up her lime green Lilly Pulitzer cardigan, which Ella kept with her at all times to combat frigid airplanes and airports, she placed it on top of Old Finnegan. She laid down her head and tried to rest because it would be a nine hour drive to The Outer Banks of North Carolina.

  Chapter 5

  The nine hour trip to Roanoke Island demanded at least two stops according to Special Agent Jefferson. He did not ask Ella for any input on where they would stop. Three hours into the trip he pulled off Interstate 20 at a Columbia, South Carolina exit and pulled into a Waffle House parking lot. Ella was always embarrassed when she had to exit out of the back seat of The Bureau cars that transported her to her next home but she did it without protest.

  When Ella had just returned to the states on a grueling eleven hour flight, after a stop at the embassy to rat out Dante, she asked why the agent was making her ride in the back since she wasn’t a criminal. “It’s just the rule, ma’am,” he said with an especially pronounced Southern accent. Ella had wondered if somehow her late mother had intervened from the afterlife and sent a Southern gentleman to retrieve her from the airport after one of the most emotionally trying times of her life. Ella smiled at the round faced agent and dutifully hopped into the backseat and she’d never questioned it since.

  Once she arrived she was given a stipend of cash each month that she picked up at the local post office under the assumed name Belle Butler. What a ridiculous name, she’d think to herself. Of course she figured the spirit of Blythe Barrantine had been working overtime on that little nugget.

  “Belle Butler! Dear God Sugar! There isn’t a more Southern lady like type of name! Didn’t you fall into the luck bucket of made up monikers!”

  No one had uttered Ella’s real name since the interrogation by the legal attaché at the embassy in Berlin. The paperwork from the FBI had been faxed over the embassy’s encrypted line. Within the paperwork was Ella’s new alias, “Belle Butler.” It was clearly dreamed up by a room full of men at headquarters since Ella thought it sounded like the name of a porn star. “BELLE BUTLER,” her mind wandered as she dissected her new name.

  She had been pleasantly surprised, as she introduced herself in the grocery stores, libraries, theaters, etc. in each new town, to have people swoon over her new name. “What a beautiful name!” “You must be from the South! You’ve got the name and the accent to go with it!” BeBe would have gushed and said, “See honey, I told you so.”

  A Waffle House waitress in the standard yellow ascot and sun visor with the Waffle House logo approached the table. Her nametag read, “Phoenix.”

  “Interesting name,” Ella thought. Maybe Phoenix was an assumed identity made up by the room full of men at The Bureau who sat around coming up with assumed names, probably from the latest centerfold they’d seen, pondered Ella. Once you found yourself in the witness protection program you had wild suspicions about all kinds of people you met. Were they also being hidden? Was the town a kind of two for one place for witnesses where the government received special rental rates or discounts?

  As Ella contemplated these things, Agent Jefferson brought her back to reality. “Belle?” asked Agent Jefferson, “Your drink order?”

  Phoenix stood poised with her pen and pad, “Oh,” said Ella, “I’d like an orange juice, please.” Ella had been trying to kick the Diet Coke addiction for the past few months. After reading the book “Skinny Bitch” she’d sworn off any type of diet soda and hadn’t had one in over three years until she realized she’d been lied to, kidnapped, and basically held captive by a man she was desperately in love with. She essentially fell off the wagon, crumpling under the stress, and headed straight for a vending machine. “Screw it,” she said under her breath. Rachel her previous middle school friend from the “Goodies” clique, would have been so disappointed. Ella popped open the Diet Coke and downed it in a single breath like a frat boy funneling a beer in Panama City Beach at Spring Break. This was followed by the mother of all burps which she assumed would also have disappointed “Goodie” Rachel.