A giant, bright yellow, antique car crawled along a two-lane road on the top of a granite cliff that dropped down to the ocean. Patches of grass, brush, and trees were interspersed among the exposed rock. The road was about ten miles north of Port City, Maine. The unusual vehicle was a convertible with the top down. Three people sat in the car, all three fitting in the generously sized front bench seat. This left the equally large rear seat vacant. A blond man in wire-frame aviator glasses drove. In the middle of the front seat was a woman with long, brown hair. The third person was a man with jet-black hair and naturally dark skin.

The expensive houses along the cliff were much prized for their spectacular ocean view, but these houses were necessarily on the opposite side of the road. There was not enough land on the ocean side of the road to put a house because the road hugged so close to the precipice.

A woman in a white-and-blue U.S. Postal Service truck was putting mail in boxes along the safe side of the road. Seeing the yellow antique car coming up the road in the other direction at a pace no faster than a man could walk, she moved to the other side of her truck and leaned out the window.

She yelled out, "Hey, mister. Having car trouble?"

James Stalwart pushed the brake and stopped.

"My car's running fine, ma'am."

She said, "Your car? You look like you're only in your mid-twenties, but that looks like a Forties car."

"Thirties. Nineteen-thirty-four, to be exact. I inherited it from Great-Grandfather after he died," James said.

The woman said, "It’s a hot day. I wish the top would come off this thing."

Shoving hair out of her face because having the roof being down let the ocean breezes toss her hair around, Kelly put in, "James didn't just inherit it. He restored it for his great-grandfather. This was just a pile of rusty parts before James did that."

The mail carrier asked, "If your car is running okay, why are you crawling along?"

James said, "I'm looking for a certain spot."

"I know this area well. Whose place are you trying to find?"

James thought that a mail carrier would indeed know the area well.

He replied, "It's not a house I'm looking for. It's been so long that I don't remember what houses were around the area. I should...but I don't."

She said, "Excuse me?"

Rather than answering, James took off his glasses and put his hand to his eyes, as if lost in thought.

Hector spoke up, "Ma'am, we're looking for a site of a fatal car accident."

"I haven’t heard of any accidents on this road."

Kelly lifted up her hands, which contained a bouquet of flowers, and then she said, "A friend of ours died there. It's the sixth year anniversary of her death."

"Oh, I thought you meant a recent accident," the mail carrier said.

Putting his glasses back on and seeming back in control, James said, "Her name was Andrea Ditto. She was driving her mother's green station wagon along this road. Almost as much her car as her mother's, though. Andrea used to drive it to high school fairly often rather than taking the bus."

The woman said, "I'm sorry. I didn't have this route that long ago. Others have told me of the accident, though. It is told as a warning to be careful driving on this road. She was a high school girl, wasn’t she?"

Kelly said, "Not exactly. We were all in the same year in high school. It was just a couple months after graduating. So, she was not a college girl either. She would have been in college if she'd lived another month."

James thought about how the tragedies of Andrea as well as his own parents had delayed his and Hector's own college plans for so long. Kelly had gone on to college that autumn, getting just a two-year degree. Now, the three of them were all enrolled in college full time. They all felt old compared to most of the students in their classes, but they had all done fantastically well in the completed spring semester.

The mail carrier said, "I can't help you. Sorry."

James said, "Thanks, anyway."

He put the car in gear and began crawling along again. The woman in her mail truck continued on her route, stopping at each mailbox. Although both vehicles moved slowly, they eventually disappeared from sight of each other.

James stopped the car and pointed, "I recognize that tree from when we checked out this site for clues after Andrea's death."

Hector said, "We can't park here."

Kelly suggested, "There's a place up ahead where we can park safely off the road."

James drove up to where Kelly had indicated. He parked. The three came walking back down the road.

Hector said, "I'm not sure this is the right place."

Kelly countered, "I also remember that tree. It had that distinctive giant knot in it that looks almost like an old man's face."

Hector said, "It does look like an old man's face. It reminds me of the way your great-grandfather looked, James."

James looked at the knot, and then gave a large tremble the other two could see. His face paled.

He claimed, "All I see is a large knot in a tree, not a face."

James turned from the tree. He stepped over the guardrail, pointed, and declared, "There are gouges carved into those rocks."

Hector put up his hand to shade his eyes from the sun, then squinted before saying, "Now I see them. Just like a crashing car would make. This is the spot, all right. Man, your vision is sharp to pick those out. I guess you really did need those glasses."

"Hate 'em," James said, "but I can't see the board without them."

Kelly asked, "Is that why you're doing so well in college when you did only mediocre in high school?"

James said, "Afraid I don’t have such an easy excuse. My vision was fine then. I just didn't study much back then. It was my own fault."

Hector remarked, "You could get laser surgery so you wouldn't need glasses anymore. Like Joel Robust did."

"I'm just far-sighted and don't need glasses to read. I think if my vision gets bad enough to need glassed for reading as well, I might do it. Not until then. Hey, look, there's something shiny."

As James started making his way slowly down the cliff, Kelly called out, "Watch out for poison ivy! It's common around here."

James hesitated and looked around. Her warning was timely. He'd been so fixated on what he saw that he wasn't watching for that and almost stepped in some. He slowly made his way around the patch of three-leaved plants. He continued his descent down to near the ocean. Kelly and Hector waited at the top.

James pulled weeds away, none with the distinctive shape of poison ivy, and then announced, "It's a bumper. It's still got a very faded parking sticker for Port City High School."

Kelly had planned to just toss the flowers over the cliff, but she didn't feel like tossing them so they'd be falling down onto James. Instead, Hector took the flowers from her, then she and he made their way down to see the bumper for themselves.

When down at the bottom, Kelly noted, "The license plate is still on it."

James looked at that. After six years, he did not remember the plate number of his girlfriend's mother's car, but he was sure this was it anyway. The registration sticker in the lower right corner of the plate was over five years out of date.

Despite looking some more, the only other evidence they found of that terrible wreck was broken car glass, but that was plentiful. The glass had not broken the way window glass would break. Rather, it was in tiny fragments, each about a quarter inch by quarter inch. The car itself had been down in the ocean itself, but had been retrieved with a special salvage barge.

Kelly commented on this, "Why did the glass turn into such small pieces?"

James had once run an auto repair garage in Washington D.C., so had seen this effect many, many times. The business had failed, partly because of his being away so often solving cases, being an absentee owner, and partly because the Slayers had found it and attacked, killing the three people James had had working for him.

He replied, "Safety glass is designed to do that. Most side windows in cars have it. The glass does less harm to passengers in an accident when it shatters like this. I originally put safety glass in the windows of the antique car, even though it was not a historically accurate thing to do."

Hector chuckled and said, "The bulletproof polycarbonate windows you have in there now are a whole lot less historically accurate!"

James countered with humor in his voice, "Back in the Thirties, Dillinger had a car that was supposed to be bulletproof."

"Come on," Hector said. "He might have had armor plate steel for the sides, but polycarbonate windows didn't exist back then."

James remarked, "I don't know what he did for windows in his armored car back then."

Kelly suggested, "Maybe just really, really thick glass?"

"Even a bulletproof car wouldn't have helped in an accident like the one that killed Andrea," James said.

Hector declared, "I don't like calling it an accident. I feel we should call it what it was. A murder."

Kelly remarked, "At least it's a solved murder."

James said, "Not only did we catch the man who did it, we even destroyed the organization that ordered him to do it."

"I still find it hard to accept that as really being so," Hector admitted. "Fighting the Slayers occupied most of our attention for the past half-dozen years."

James thumped his own chest and swung around his right arm high, then said, "I feel so unencumbered and free now."

Hector and Kelly both understood these physical motions. Until recently, James would have had on a bulletproof vest and carried a handgun in a shoulder holster. Hector and Kelly also found it a strange feeling themselves not needing to wear vests anymore. That the antique car was armored with polycarbonate windows, Kevlar batting behind the sheet metal, and run-flat tires was a holdover of their years as federal agents in an organization known as the Institute. James and Hector had been officially employed that way for most of the past six years. Kelly had joined them a few years later.

Kelly said, "In a strange way, Andrea isn't really dead. She was cloned."

Hector replied, "I have trouble thinking of her clone as anything really to do with her. Just a baby that happens to have identical DNA."

James said, "The clone would be two years and a half years old now. I wish I knew who adopted her. I don't even know what name her new family gave the baby. I've tried to get Dr. Silver to tell me, but he won't say a word."

Kelly remarked, "I wasn't there when you two found her clone. I understand that the Slayers wouldn't be stopped by moral concerns of cloning. They were into terrorism and assassination, after all. I could understand them making a clone if it would be a full-grown duplicate. This was just a baby. Wouldn't fool anybody as being the same person."

Hector said, "Andrea was not their first clone. They had tried many times to clone Richard Mighty."

Kelly shuddered, then said, "Unsuccessfully, I hope!"

James replied, "No. They had hundreds of failed attempts, but then they had three clones of him who survived. Andrea was cloned after they had success with Richard."

Kelly gasped.

Hector said, "These were just babies, like Andrea's clone. Dr. Silver believes that raised by normal adoptive families, it's unlikely any of the Richard clones will grow up to be like the late Richard Mighty whom we knew."

Kelly said, "We don't know that they won't turn out bad, either. Who really knows how much role nature vs. nurture plays?"

James said, "I didn't think we had a lot of choice since the four babies already existed: the three clones of Richard and the one of Andrea. What were we supposed to do? Kill babies? That'd make us worse than the villains we were trying to stop."

"No, of course not," Kelly said. "Making the clones is just so sick!"

"No argument from me on that," James said.

Hector said, "You did try to adopt Andrea's clone, James."

"Dr. Silver put a stop to that and talked some sense into me," James remarked.

Kelly bent down and wiped dirt off the parking sticker on the bumper. High school seemed such a long time ago.

She stated, "Richard Mighty was such an immoral egotist that I can see why he'd have himself cloned. Why do it to Andrea, since a real clone is only a baby? What was the point? Plus, she was provably dead. Her body had been recovered from the ocean by then."

James said, "The records we obtained when we shut down the Slayers indicated blackmailing me was the point. I admit I cared...still care...about Andrea's clone. Even though she shouldn't exist, I still care. I'm weak enough that the blackmailing would have worked."

Hector remarked, "Except I found out too soon about the plan. Then, you and I acted too fast in retrieving her clone and shutting down the entire cloning operation."

James said, "Thanks for doing that, Hector. I don't know what terrible things I might have done if I had been blackmailed that way. I'm still puzzled about the expense of doing it that way for them. According to the records, it cost over seven million dollars for them to make Andrea's clone. Yes, it would have worked for blackmailing me, but why was I so important?"

Kelly remarked, "You really did play a key role in shutting down the Slayers, so it's not like you weren't unimportant enough for them to spend that kind of money on."

"Yes, but I can't imagine they knew I'd ever manage that," James protested.

Hector cleared his throat, then declared, "You really don't know, do you? Dr. Silver was grooming you to be his successor. It would have been worth a fortune to the Slayers to have something with which to blackmail the future head of the Institute. Even if they had to wait twenty years. By then, Andrea's clone would look like the Andrea you remember, even though you'd be much older."

James jaw hung open, then he regained control, "You'd be a better choice to run the Institute, Hector. So would you, Kelly. Your associate degree is in business. That'd help in running an organization."

"Maybe I would have been a better match. I outscored you in every class we took through the Institute," Hector said, more stating a fact than bragging. "I'll admit I resented it when I figured out Dr. Silver favored you so much. However, you're the one who is the great-grandson of the founder of the Institute. Not me. Not Kelly. I guess Dr. Silver wanted to put it back in the family."

Kelly remarked, "All that concern about having a successor was for naught. The Institute is as dead as the Slayers."

James stated, "Leading the Institute was never my ambition. Despite who my great-grandfather was, I never even would have gotten into any of this if I hadn't been forced into it by the murder of my parents, followed two months later by the murder of my girlfriend."

Kelly put one of her hands on James's arm. The sun caught the diamond on her ring finger as she did this. It was just an engagement ring with no wedding band to go with it yet.

"None of us would have wished for this," she said. "In high school, I figured I'd have Andrea as my bridesmaid and Hector would have you as best man at our wedding. I thought it might then get flipped around for you and Andrea. I know high school romances often fail after high school is over, but it hasn't for Hector and me. I don't think it would have for you two either."

Hector remarked, "Andrea was a better amateur detective then we were. We learned later she'd already solved the mystery of who had killed your parents. If she could only have not been killed for that."

James now had to take off his glasses as he was crying. He sat down on the chrome bumper and sobbed.

Unable to think of what to do or say, Hector turned away looked at the ocean waves lapping the shore, just a short distance down from where they were by the bumper. Kelly, though, came up to Hector. She took from him the flowers that he still held. He had lost awareness he still held those until she did that.

James blinked, noticing the flowers. He got up off the bumper and walked over to the other two. Kelly tried to hand him the entire bouquet, but he'd only take some of them. James smelled the flowers he had taken, then tossed them one by one into the ocean. He then shut his eyes again. Not with tears actively flowing anymore, but in deep thought.

He finally opened his eyes and said, "I hope what the three of us accomplished during the past six years gives Andrea some peace."

Hector said, "We've gotten our revenge against her killers...and the killers of your parents."

Kelly frowned at that comment, but did not contradict it.

James responded, "I suppose we did, but it does not feel satisfying the way I thought revenge would."

Kelly asked, "How do you feel?"

James shoulders drooped and he answered, "Like I've finally done something that is significant enough to release me so I can get on with an ordinary life."

Hector said, "Whatever we do from now on, I doubt our lives will ever be ordinary."

Kelly said, "Even being undergrads in college when in our mid-twenties prevents us from being ordinary compared to most of the rest of the students. Those we went to high school with have mostly graduated college and moved on already."

James nodded. He thought of another girl, Vicky Dent, a year younger then himself, who he had met a little over a year after Andrea's death. He felt that he had loved her, even though never with the fierce, intense love he had had for Andrea. Vicky had dumped him a few weeks before she had graduated from college. That was a year and a half a year ago, as she graduated in December. She had a bachelor's degree in Computer Science. She had gotten a high-paying job at a computer company out on the West Coast. He had not heard from her since. It was not like he couldn’t contact her, even though she had not supplied her number. He had looked and her California address and number were in the Port City University alumni guide. He had never called it.

James said, "Vicky claimed that my continuing obsession with Andrea, despite her being dead, ruined me. Vicky said that it was terrible that at my age and with my abilities, I had never been to college."

Hector said, "We're in college now and have some hard classes already under our belt. Who cares if it is years later than our high school friends?"

Kelly starred out to sea, then commented, "The three of us have solved murders already committed and stopped other murders that would have happened. We've prevented major acts of terrorism that could have killed hundreds or even thousands. Many people are alive now because of what we...not just you, James...were motivated to do as a result of the deaths of Andrea and of your parents."

James said, "I don't think of it that way, but it helps when you say it in those terms."

With absolute conviction, even though she had no idea where such certainty came from, Kelly declared, "Vicky was wrong and hurting herself when she said that about you wasting your life. You didn't waste it. Andrea, wherever she is now, would be very proud of what you've done."

James firmly stated, "With what we have all done. I think that my parents would also be proud. Thanks for being in it with me for all these years. I caused both of you to be put in danger so many times."

Hector said, "I wouldn't have had it any other way. I think in the same terms as Kelly put it. Many people are alive who would be dead if we had not stopped so many criminals. Even for some who did die, I think we brought in some closure by catching their killers."

Kelly then said, "Hector and I can't really know what it is like for you. My parents and his parents are still alive. We liked Andrea, but not loved her in the way you did. While I don't really know your pain, I am glad we contributed to shutting down the Slayers."

James simply said, "Thank you."

Kelly handed half the flowers she still held to Hector. He and she took turns tossing the rest of the flowers into the ocean as James had done.

The three of them then turned and climbed back up to the road. After they climbed back over the guardrail, they walked to where the unusual car waited. They did not talk of the dead, but of wedding plans.

As they then got into his car, James thought about the death of his parents a little over six years ago, the death of his first love exactly six years ago at this spot, and the death of his great-grandfather almost two years ago. All his other close relatives had been dead well before that. He had harbored thoughts of giving up the life of danger. He had imagined a picket fence, two and a half kids, and a normal life with Vicky. It couldn't happen until the Slayers were gone because he had to finish things for Andrea and for his parents first. The Slayers now were gone, his mission accomplished, but so was Vicky.

Back in her position in the middle of the front seat, Kelly broke through his dreary thoughts as she jokingly threatened James not to let Hector get in any trouble at the upcoming bachelor party.

James looked at his two friends. Despite all his losses, by having friends like these, he did not feel lonely, but blessed.

Not revealing any plans, he grinned diabolically at Kelly as though what was unrevealed was wicked. He started the car. They continued along the road on the top of the cliff. It was a beautiful summer day for a drive in an antique convertible.

THE END