“This is important.” Sky was in deadly earnest. “She’s going to want to know why Rusty was here.”
“And I can’t tell her,” Peter said evenly. “I may never find out, now.”
“If the extent of your—falling-out—were known, it could place you in an awkward position. You realize that, of course.”
“Yes,” Peter said impatiently. “But right now it’s not the main thing on my mind. I know I didn’t kill him, and I don’t give a fuck if the Nantucket police don’t believe me. That’ll sort itself out. Right now, I’ve got to figure out why Rusty was killed. Because there’s a strong chance someone thought he was me.”
Sky gazed at the fire, which was catching slowly, the wood too green. His long, thin fingers were loosely clasped in his lap. “No one has the slightest reason to kill you, Peter.”
“I like to think not,” he agreed “But the whole thing is so insane. It feels too random. If Rusty wasn’t killed by mistake—why was he here last night? Did his murderer follow him to my door? Was Rusty on the run? I can’t answer those questions because I know nothing about my brother’s life, after all this time. “
“Was there anything on him that might tell us something? A cell phone? Any—papers or letters?”
“The cops wouldn’t let me check his pockets and the detective didn’t tell me what she’d found. I’ll have to wait until they decide to share their information. She mentioned an autopsy.”
Sky shifted in his chair. “If you’re worried about the abilities of the Nantucket police, we could call in a private investigator. The firm uses a number of them.”
“Rusty wasn’t a cheating spouse, Sky.”
“So far as we know.” The lawyer’s tone was sharp. “But the truth is, Rusty could have been anything in the past ten years. We need more information. Contacts in Brazil—”
Peter stared broodingly into the fire. “Rusty came back here to die. He was in trouble, and for whatever reason, he needed to see me. He didn’t get in touch with you. Nothing but desperation would have brought him to me or this island.”
“Unless your premise is wrong,” Sky said.
Peter looked up. “Meaning?”
“Maybe he’d made a fortune and wanted to brag. Or maybe he wanted to settle old scores. Hell, maybe he just wanted to see his brother again. And just happened to stray into the path of a killer . . . who thought he was you.”
“So you haven’t ruled that out,” Peter said.
Sky gave him the ghost of a smile. “I’m a lawyer. I can make a case for every contingency. So who might want you dead?”
“I’m not that interesting.”
“No rival cranberry farmer who’d kill for your market share?”
“Right.” Peter pulled a face. “You know the only other bog is a collective on preservation land. You drew up our agreement for sharing the water rights to Gibbs Pond. Nobody connected to it has any reason to want me out of the way. Dollar for dollar, I spend more maintaining the sluice gates than they can afford to.”
“Scorned any women with bad tempers and big cars?”
“I’d have to look at them first, and you know I haven’t done that in years.”
“Other than the detective,” Sky said, then added swiftly, “If I remember correctly, Georgiana’s children are the main beneficiaries under your will.”
“I left some stock to Princeton and the cost of a college education to Will Starbuck.”
Sky studied him a moment. “I’d put that at about three hundred thousand dollars by the time he’s ready to go,” he said. “Does his mother know you did that?”
“Come on, Sky, Tess isn’t the type to hang around my gate at midnight hoping I’ll just happen to walk in front of her pickup,” Peter said.
“Did she know her son would benefit by your death?” Sky persisted.
“I may have mentioned I’d like to help him with school at one time or another,” Peter said grudgingly, “but she dismissed it. She’s got a lot of pride. She knows nothing about my will.”
Sky sighed. “That would be incentive to keep you alive, then. We can rule out material gain as a motive. Barring a psychopath, we’ve come up with nothing.”
“Which brings us back to Rusty. And all that you know that I don’t.”
Something in the line of Sky’s shoulders stiffened, and the set expression he adopted for particularly difficult clients came over his features. “If you mean the background to Rusty’s business ventures, Peter, I probably know very little more than you do,” he said.
“Rusty’s dead, Sky. You don’t have to protect him any longer. Tell me what you know.”
“Nothing more than you do. You’re still the little brother, aren’t you? Wanting to share Rusty’s secrets? They’re probably not pretty. I’d rather live in ignorance.”
“He must have told you something about his break with my father.”
“He showed up in Cambridge, in a snowstorm, the night it happened,” Sky said. “But he didn’t give me details. All he wanted was help to get out of the country.”
“My dad and Rusty never got along that well,” Peter said. “Both of them knew Rusty was intended to take over the business; Max needed him, and Rusty had the kind of instincts my father valued. Acumen and guts. Ruthless judgment and a will to power. But they were always looking at each other out of the corners of their eyes, like two guys circling a boxing ring. I don’t think Dad fundamentally trusted Rusty. He knew there was something missing.”
“Integrity,” Sky suggested.
“Integrity.” Peter studied him. “Is that why Max cut him off? What could Rusty have done to warrant that? Something criminal?”
“I suggest you ask your mother.”
“I did. She doesn’t know. Neither does George.”
“And you were the one person Rusty would never tell,” Sky said. “How ironic it is. What’s the time, Peter?”
Peter glanced at his watch. “Ten of three.”
Sky cocked an ear toward the Atlantic, his entire body listening. The faint bellow of horns drifted into the stillness of the room, and a log in the grate hissed. “The fog persists,” he said. “They’ll have closed the airport anyway—I’m not going to get out tonight. Where do I start?”
“How about that night in the snowstorm?” Peter stretched out his long legs. His calves ached from that morning’s run; amid the confusion and police, he’d forgotten to stretch.
Sky gave him a sidelong glance. “After Alison. Okay. Rusty had been working for three years at Salomon. He’d made an enormous amount of money for someone twenty-five years old.” Sky stood up and poured himself two fingers of bourbon, his favorite drink when fog engulfed the island. The liquor’s gleaming depths glowed in the firelight as he lifted the glass to his lips. “But I think he sensed the downturn was coming and decided to bail. He was applying to business schools for the following September.”
“I remember. I was filling out law school applications around the same time.”
“Fortunately, you didn’t mail them,” Sky said, and for an instant the expressionless mask shifted and he smiled at Peter. “The world would be much diminished without Mason Farms.”
“Thank you. I would be, too.”
“I think he intended to sit out the economy for a couple of years, earn a degree, and then join your father at Mason Enterprises.” He paused, swirling the bourbon, then looked searchingly at Peter. “But maybe that began to seem too safe. I don’t really know what he was feeling or thinking at the time, I only know what he did. Can you understand that?”
“Perfectly. I always felt that way about Rusty. He was impossible to read.”
“He kept himself under tight rein. When he was in the grip of some passion, he was extremely volatile. I’d seen it for years, under different circumstances: before a really big game, or when he was a
bout to pull off a major deal, he’d have an air of genius—and of danger, of instability. During those times I felt like he’d gone beyond me, and that I didn’t really know him at all. But to be around him then was the most exciting living I’ve ever done. Rusty could enslave anyone in that mood.”
Peter shifted uneasily in his chair. He’d been pretty enslaved himself, once.
“How much did you know about the family business?” Sky walked over to his desk, fishing in a cubbyhole for tobacco and a cherrywood pipe. His restless progress through the room struck Peter as a way of warding off anxiety.
“Not much,” he said, “and I wasn’t in particularly good shape that Christmas. I’d spent most of the fall holed up here in the Cliff Road house, licking my wounds.”
“That’s right, you did. Rusty lived dangerously most of that year, didn’t he?” Sky turned back to the fire, looking, Peter thought, curiously relieved. He sat down. “But Alison was nothing next to power.”
“What do you mean?”
Sky struck a match and cupped it closely over the bowl of the pipe. Peter waited.
“This is all guesswork,” Sky said, “but I think he tried to profit from a merger Max was planning, and screwed up.”
“Rusty didn’t work for Max.”
“Exactly,” Sky said. “From what he said before the whole thing blew apart, he got wind of a deal Max was putting together and tried to buy a chunk of stock.”
“Insider trading?”
“Basically.”
Peter glanced at Sky impatiently. “I figured out that much on my own. It had to be insider trading, given the business Rusty was in and the fact that a lot of traders got in over their heads around that time. Even though the federal grand jury came down with a sealed indictment, it was pretty clear that securities fraud was the issue.” He paused. “But that’s not enough. Max would have fought something like that with the best lawyers he could buy. He’d have loved the challenge, even if it was Mason Enterprises stock Rusty’d played with. Instead he cut his son’s legs out from under him and went home to die. Can you see what that means?”
Sky drew on his pipe and said nothing.
“It must have happened before Christmas,” Peter said. “I remember. I’d gone back to Greenwich for the holidays and when Max showed up that night, Rusty wasn’t with him—I flattered myself that he was avoiding me. But I’d never seen Max look like he did that entire holiday. He was in the grip of a cold, white-knuckled fury. On Christmas Eve he stood up and raised a toast to Masons dead and gone, and he added Rusty’s name to the list. That was it. A flat announcement that he’d cut my brother off. My mother went nuts. But he never told her anything.”
Sky’s face was impassive.
“Max wouldn’t even hire a lawyer for Rusty. By January, my father was dead,” Peter said. “A massive heart attack. Rusty had skipped town. No one knew how to reach him with the news.”
“It’s a year we’ve all tried to put behind us.”
Peter chose his next words carefully, studying Sky’s face. “We got almost no information out of the grand jury that investigated Rusty. We weren’t even allowed in the room. But you were deposed by the prosecuting attorneys, Sky. What did you tell them?”
He pulled his pipe out of his mouth, then slapped the tobacco into the grate. “Nothing but what I’ve told you, Peter. Rusty didn’t share much. Probably didn’t want to incriminate me.”
“I’ve thought for years that it must have involved a personal betrayal so monstrous, that Max could never bear the sight of Rusty again. It seemed the only thing that could explain the rage—the profound bitterness—that marked his last months.”
“They’re both dead,” Sky said. “But what happened ten years ago has nothing to do with last night.”
“Wait. Let’s think for a minute as Rusty would have, before he was prosecuted. Max has a deal going down—no surprise, he lived and breathed them, but this one is special. Something risky, something Max was betting the store on.” He stopped, his brows knit in concentration. “Let’s call it a hostile takeover. Rusty’s at Salomon—Max’s major underwriter. Somehow Rusty knows when Max is going to move, he knows the target, he knows the status of negotiations with the banks; he stands to make big money on commissions.”
“I think we’ve already established that,” Sky said.
“If you had that sort of information, and you were Rusty, what would you do?”
“Neither of us has ever been Rusty,” Sky said flatly. “This doesn’t get us anywhere. Go home, Peter. I’ll be in touch when I’ve talked to the police.”
Sky was warning him off. The late-summer day was ending prematurely, the sun lost in the fog, and the old house felt drafty. Peter got to his feet.
“You’re right, of course. What happened ten years ago only matters to me, doesn’t it?
“You know that’s not true,” Sky said. “Take the back way home, and expect reporters at your gate. You’re the closest thing to the Kennedys Nantucket’s got, and people love a murder.”
Peter took Sky’s advice and made for the Polpis Road, the frame of his bike bucking stiffly over the occasional stone and his progress swift in the windless air. He pedaled unconscious of the effort involved, past Sesachacha Pond, his mind wrestling with the dark tangle of his brother’s past. He was certain Sky knew more than he would say. He dismissed the reasons for his silence—loyalty to Rusty, a lawyer’s innate discretion, fear of some kind—they could wait. More important was the thread he had picked out of the past, the fragile link between all that had gone before and the blood on his doorstep.
Rusty had used what he knew about a pending hostile takeover before it happened. He’d made a lot of money in his few short years on the Street. Money was always nice; but power was better. Rusty wanted what his father had: influence over markets, entire economies, and lesser men. And he wasn’t willing to wait for it.
Suddenly, as Peter neared the Polpis Harbor Road, it seemed obvious. This particular deal must have given Rusty power over Max. He’d tried to take down his own father. Nothing else would have made Peter’s dad so unforgiving or so bitter.
How did Rusty find out about the deal? Not from Max; the control of information was one form of protection, and Max never shared his plans. Peter considered Salomon briefly, and ruled it out. When ME went to its underwriter, it counted on Salomon’s practice of encoding clients’ names—to limit the spread of information among insiders and shield it from speculators.
“There must have been a source,” Peter muttered to himself, the wind generated by his passage tearing the words from his lips and throwing them over his shoulder. Someone close to Max, someone vital, who had betrayed him for a reason and lived to regret it. Once Rusty had the knowledge he needed, the source’s credit with Max would be worthless. Had he tried to salvage what he could by telling Max what he’d done? Had that been Rusty’s undoing? And had the source then lost everything—his job, Max’s trust, maybe even his freedom?
A motive for murder, once Rusty returned to American shores.
Peter slowed the bike to take the left-hand turn-off past Almanack Pond and down toward the farm. He knew now what he had to do. There was one man who might be able to help him—Malcolm Scott, Max’s former chief financial officer, who was spinning out his remaining years patiently at home in Westchester County. He would pay Malcolm Scott a call.
He dove for his driveway neatly, slowing the bike as it hit the unpaved surface. The wheels steadied and he glanced up, then came slowly to a halt, his right leg dropping to the ground. The dim bulk of parked cars loomed through the fog. Sky was right. He had company.
Chapter 9
The slam of the kitchen door woke Merry abruptly from a dream that she was underwater. She had been pushing her way through brackish weeds in a swimmer’s crawl, her eyes clouded by mud, searching for somethin
g. The bog, she thought hazily, and opened her eyes.
Her Swedish grandmother used to say it was bad luck to dream of water. From the shifting patterns of leaves thrown on the wall by the beech tree beyond her window, she judged it to be five o’clock. She lay back on the pillow, eyes closed, and listened to Ralph Waldo humming among his vegetables in the yard below. Her father’s face rose in her mind, and with it, the residue of anger filling her head like bad gin. She opened one eye, groped for her watch on the bedside table, and discovered it was past six. She was fuddled with daytime sleep.
By now, the bog would be drained and the crime scene unit would be crawling among the sandy vines searching for anything man-made that might have belonged to Rusty Mason. Bailey would be with them. A wave of anger and remorse washed over her. Her father would never forgive her for the scene she’d made today. She’d have to resign. But where to go? Back to New Bedford? It was too much to think about.
The Folger house sat on Tattle Court, one of the warren of lanes that sprang from Fair Street. It was a Federal-style cottage of six rooms, with a slate-blue door placed asymmetrically in the clapboard facade—a “three-quarter” house in Nantucket parlance. The shingles that sheltered it from salt air and the island’s winter winds had mellowed to a soft charcoal over the years, and on the shady north side, sea-green moss grew thick on some of them. The white trim was peeling and the windowpanes were clouded with age. The house sat close to the street behind a picket fence whose gate opened onto the driveway running along one side. The gate was weighted with an iron ball and chain, staked in a bed of dahlias. In the backyard, hydrangeas and herbs were ranged in riotous disorder around a mirrored lightning ball. Ralph was a desultory weeder.
Inside, the house was a mass of clutter. Boxes of junk mail, never opened, but hoarded over decades, sat on the dining-room table. The living-room curtains—removed for cleaning before her grandmother’s death three years earlier—lay folded over a wing chair whose silk upholstery fell in tattered streamers around its legs. Wrought-iron blacksmithing tools, owned by some nineteenth-century Folger, stood in the corner of the stairway. An easel sporting a half-finished canvas straddled the hallway next to a large Boston fern.
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