“So why don’t you talk to him some more about it?” Mitch said, his voice a good deal cooler than it was before she bit his head clean off.
“I can’t.”
“Why not? Who is he, the Dalai Lama?”
“I have to figure it out myself, that’s all. I just wish I knew how. I keep, I don’t know, thinking this bolt of inspiration will strike me or something.”
“Tex in the stamp stalls, sure.”
“Tex in the what?”
“In Charade, when James Coburn is walking through the stamp stalls in the Paris park and suddenly, kerchunk, the whole plot falls right into place.”
“Damn it, Mitch, this is not some fool movie!”
“I do know that,” he shot back. “And I know something else- that I’ve already had my bellyful of childish, self-absorbed, pain-in-the-asses today, thank you very much.”
Des drew her breath in, stunned. He’d never spoken to her this way before. Not ever. “You’re right, baby,” she said. “My miss. I’m sorry. Really, really sorry.”
But she was too late.
Mitch Berger, the kindest, sweetest love of her life, had already hung up on her.
CHAPTER 5
Mitch was not happy that Des wouldn’t come with him to the beach club.
In fact, he was so not happy that he decided he’d better get off the phone awfully damned now. His jaw ached. His mood was vile. And he didn’t want to say anything that he might really regret. He found it hard to believe she was so self-centered she couldn’t see that he was in the midst of a monstrous professional crisis and that he needed her by his side-not going on and on about her damned trees.
His situation could not have been more of a nightmare. The twenty-four-hour cable news channels were already broadcasting video highlights of The Fight by the time he got home to Big Sister Island. The digital photos of Tito with his hands wrapped tightly around Mitch’s throat were out all over the Internet. There was Tito astride him like a wild beast, teeth bared, ready for the kill. There was Mitch pinned helplessly underneath him, looking like some form of slow, terrified water mammal.
It was America Online’s top news story of the day. The headline on the service provider’s main screen read “Tito Lowers Boom on Highbrow Critic.”
The arts editor of Mitch’s paper, Lacy Mickerson, had e-mailed him twice and left an urgent message for him on his phone machine. Dozens of his fellow critics from around the country had sent e-mails as well, many humorous. He would respond to them at some point, but right now he was too busy fending off calls from one media outlet after another. Everyone wanted a comment, a quote, something, anything. The very same tabloid TV vans that had been following Tito and Esme all around Dorset were now pulled up on Peck’s Point at the gate to the Big Sister causeway, desperate to getout there and film him. Mitch was having none of it. He did not want to comment. He did not want to appear on camera.
He was not an entertainer. He was a critic.
Or at least he used to be.
He sat at his desk, an ice pack pressed against his jaw, and called Lacy back.
“Honestly, Mitch, I thought your review was gentle compared with a lot of the others I’ve seen,” she said after he’d given her his version of what happened. Among her many attributes Lacy was fiercely protective of her critics. “Hell, this film has been positively trashed by everyone. People are walking out in droves. Why did he pick on you?”
“Because I was there,” Mitch grunted, adjusting his ice pack. It didn’t help with the pain, but it gave him something to do. “He’s a genuinely talented actor. I feel sorry for him, actually.”
“Well, I don’t. I’ve seen these so-called bad boys come and go over the years.” Lacy was in her late fifties and claimed to have bedded Irwin Shaw and Mickey Mantle in her youth, not to mention Nelson Rockefeller. “They all have talent. It’s what they do with it that counts.”
“What do I do, Lacy? What’s my next move?”
“You shut it down,” she said firmly.
The two of them cobbled together a brief statement that would be posted immediately on the newspaper’s Web site-just as soon as Lacy ran it past someone with a larger office and, possibly, a law degree. It would also appear on the lead arts page in tomorrow’s paper. The statement would serve as Mitch’s one and only response to the attack:
This newspaper’s chief film critic, Mitchell Berger, and the actor Tito Molina engaged in a spirited creative disagreement yesterday afternoon in a popular eating establishment in Dorset, Connecticut. Mr. Berger feels the matter is fully resolved. He believes that Mr. Molina is a gifted artist with a wonderful career ahead ofhim and he looks forward to his future film work with as much excitement as ever.
After he and Lacy were done Mitch swallowed three Advils and spent the rest of the afternoon ducking phone calls. His phone machine got quite a workout that day.
He did pick up when Dodge called. And was pleased that Dodge wanted to broker a peace deal at the beach club. It seemed like a genuine solution. Dodge was smart and tactful. He’d make the perfect intermediary.
As for Des, well, Mitch hoped she’d figure out what she needed to figure out-and soon-because when she was stuck in the deep muck she had a way of dragging him down there with her, whether he felt like going or not. And that could be awfully damned hard to handle sometimes.
Not that love was ever supposed to be an easy thing.
When it came time to leave he dressed in a white oxford button-down shirt, khaki shorts, and Topsiders. He had a welt on his jaw and red finger marks around his throat, otherwise he looked fit, casual, and terrific. It was a warm, hazy evening with very little breeze. The sun hung low over the Sound, casting everything in a soft, rosy glow. He threw a pair of swim trunks and a towel into the front seat of his truck, then moseyed over to Bitsy Peck’s garden with a galvanized steel bucket to pilfer a dozen ears of corn.
It was Will who’d taught Mitch the best way to cook corn-plunge the fresh-picked ears directly into a bucket of water, soak them for at least a half hour, then throw them on the grill to steam in their husks.
Bitsy was busy digging up her pea patch with a fork, dressed in cutoff overalls and a big, floppy straw hat. She was a round, bubbly little blue blood in her fifties with a snub nose and freckles, and just a remarkably avid and tireless gardener. Hundreds of species of flowers, vegetables, and herbs grew in her vast, multileveled garden. Actually, Bitsy’s garden looked more like a commercial nursery than it did somebody’s yard. When Mitch first arrived on Big Sister shehad gleefully stepped into the role of his garden guru. The lady was a fountain of advice and seedlings and composted cow manure. Mitch liked her a lot.
Although lately she hadn’t been nearly as upbeat as usual. Not since her twenty-three-year-old daughter, Becca, a ballet dancer, had come home to mom and the massive three-story shingled Victorian summer cottage where she’d grown up. Becca had gotten herself addicted to heroin out in San Francisco, and had just finished a stint at the Silver Hill Rehab Clinic in New Canaan. Mostly, the two ladies kept to themselves. Hardly left the island at all, and seldom had guests. Bitsy went grocery shopping every couple of days. Otherwise, Mitch would find her toiling diligently in her garden refuge from dawn until dusk.
Becca was out there working with her right now, weeding a flower bed in a halter top and shorts, her own efforts rather distracted and halfhearted. Mitch had seen old photographs around the house of Becca in her full ballerina getup. She had been a slender and graceful young swan of a girl. Truly lovely. But that was before the needle did its damage. Now she was a gaunt, frail shell of a woman with haunted eyes that were sunk deep in their sockets and rimmed with dark circles. Her long brown hair was twisted into tight braids that looked like two lifeless hunks of rope.
Mitch smiled and said hello to her. Becca mouthed “Hello” in polite response, although scarcely a whisper came out. She was painfully quiet. This, too, was the needle, according to Bitsy, who said Becca had been the
most outgoing, popular girl in her high school class. Looking at her now, Mitch found it hard to believe.
“So sorry about all of those press vans at the gate today, Bitsy,” he said, toting his bucket over toward her corn patch.
“They didn’t bother us one bit,” Bitsy assured him.
“Well, they sure bothered me.”
Bitsy swiped at the perspiration on her upper lip, leaving a smear of mud behind. “My, my, aren’t you all fresh scrubbed and smell-goody,” she observed with motherly pride as he began stripping choice ears of corn off their stalks and plunging them into hisbucket. “And here we are like a pair of sweaty farm animals, aren’t we, Becca?”
“Yes, Mother,” Becca responded faintly.
“What’s the occasion, Mitch?” Bitsy asked, her good cheer a bit forced.
“I’ve been invited to the beach club. I’m kind of anxious to check the place out, actually. No one’s ever invited me before.”
“And who did, dare I ask?”
“Dodge Crockett.”
Becca immediately dropped her trowel, which clattered off a low stone retaining wall onto the ground. She stared down at it briefly, but didn’t pick it up. Just walked away instead-straight into the house, her stride still uncommonly graceful.
Bitsy watched her go, biting down fretfully on her lower lip. “She doesn’t like to talk about Dodge.”
“I noticed. How come?”
“I’m worried about that girl, Mitch. She spends too much time alone. It’s not good for her. She needs stimulation. I wish Esme would come see her.”
Mitch glanced at her curiously. “They know each other?”
“Oh my, yes. They were best friends when they were girls. The great Esme Crockett practically grew up out here. Slept over almost every night during the summer. There were slumber parties and pillow fights, and poor little Jeremy was so in love with her.” Becca’s younger brother, a senior at Duke, was away serving a summer internship in Washington. “He’d follow her around like a gawky little puppy. The house was full of kids and laughter then,” Bitsy recalled fondly. “Not like now.” She went back to her forking, throwing every fiber of her body into turning over the soil. “I didn’t realize you and Dodge had become buddies.”
“We walk together every morning. I like him a lot.”
“People do think very highly of Dodge,” she allowed, nodding. “There was even talk about the party running him for lieutenant governor some years back. I suppose it’s just as well they didn’t.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Yes, he’s a bright, enthusiastic fellow, all right. More than willing to do his part around town. So is Martine, who is so generous with her time, always ready to throw herself body and soul behind a good cause. And such a decorative creature, too.” Now Bitsy trailed off, glancing up at Mitch uncertainly. “Just promise me one thing. Promise me you won’t be too taken in by them. Will you do that for me, Mitch?”
“Okay, sure,” Mitch said, frowning at her. “But why?” “Because they’re cannibals,” she said quietly. “They eat people.”
The Dorset Beach Club was located at the end of a narrow and perilously bumpy little dirt road that snaked its way back through a half mile of marsh and wild brambles off of Old Shore Road. It was a private dirt road. No sign on Old Shore marked its presence. In fact, the roadside brush was so overgrown at the beach club turnoff that if you weren’t looking for it you would never know it was there.
Which, this being Dorset, was the whole idea.
In fact, Mitch wasn’t even sure he was bouncing his way down the right dirt road until he reached a grassy clearing filled with beat-up old Ford Country Squire station wagons, Mercedes diesels, and Subarus. Then he knew this had to be the beach club-in Dorset, the richer they were the junkier their ride. Only the working poor drove shiny new cars.
At the water’s edge sat a modest, weathered gray shingled cottage-style clubhouse that looked as if it had been built in the 1930s. Mitch got out, corn bucket in hand, and made his way around to the beach-side on a raised wooden walkway, passing through a portal directly into a different time and place. Here, on a wide wooden dining porch beneath a striped blue awning, Mitch found properly attired club members being served their proper lobster dinners by hushed, respectful waiters in white jackets. Proper attire for men was apparently defined as a madras sports jacket and Nantucket red pants. Proper attire for women was anything Katharine Hepburn might have worn to a summer concert under the stars in, say, 1957. A rathertinny sound system was playing soothing, vaguely Polynesian-sounding music. Not a single one of these members was under the age of seventy. Actually, not many appeared to be under the age of eighty. They seemed lifelike enough, although none of them actually spoke and all of them moved in slow motion, as if this were a dream. Standing there on the walkway with his bucket, Mitch had the astonishingly powerful feeling that this was a dream, that none of it was real, just his own Jewish schoolboy fantasy of what a private club like this might have been like in bygone days.
Mitch had experienced these paranormal phenomena several times before since he’d moved to this place. He’d taken to calling them Dorset Interludes.
Dodge had instructed him to continue past the dining porch to the long wooden veranda that faced the sand. Here there were showers and changing stalls, a cold drink stand and other amenities for beachgoers. Umbrella tables and built-in barbecue grills were provided for members who wanted to cook out and eat right there on the beach. It was all pretty unassuming considering just how exclusive the beach club was. Three letters of recommendation and a certified check for $10,000 were required-and that was the easy part. The hard part was that the membership roll capped out at a strict maximum of two hundred families, meaning that in order to get in you had to know people and then those people had to die. Not that it looked as if it would necessarily be a long wait, given the median age of the members who were politely gumming their lobster and corn back there on the dining porch.
Of course, the main attraction of the club was the beach itself- and a very nice, wide stretch of clean white beach it was, the sand so immaculate it looked as if it were raked hourly. No trash, no doggy poop, and above all, no beer-bellied pipe fitters from New Britain with their loudmouthed wives and squalling kids. Only the right sort of people were to be found on this beach. People who belonged here. Mitch didn’t and he never would and he knew this. But he plodded his way toward the barbecue grills anyway, footsteps thudding heavily on the wooden walkway. He was not here to fit in. He was here to bury the hatchet with Tito Molina.
The Crocketts had commandeered two umbrella tables at the far end of the veranda, where they were sharing a pitcher of iced margaritas with Will and Donna and Jeff. Tito and Esme hadn’t arrived yet. A big spread of cheeses and crackers was laid out on the table. No one seemed to be touching any of it. They were too busy drinking and talking, their eyes bright, voices animated.
“Hey, it’s macho man,” called out Donna, who was the first to spot him.
“Mitch, you look like you just went three rounds with Roy Jones Jr.,” observed Will.
“How does the jaw feel?” asked Jeff, who sat huddled under the umbrella with a beach towel over his exposed knees. Being a redhead, he burned easily.
“It’s really not so bad as long as I don’t smile, talk, or eat.”
“Where’s our resident trooper?” asked Dodge as he refilled everyone’s glasses. The pitcher was already half empty-they’d gotten a serious head start.
“I’m afraid she couldn’t make it.”
“That’s an awful shame,” clucked Martine, who was stretched out languorously on a lounge chair in the sun, looking tanned, terrific, and not a day over thirty-five in her snug-fitting black one-piece swimsuit. Martine’s hips were slim, her legs long, shapely, and smooth. She glanced fondly up at Dodge as he brought her a refill, stroking his arm with tender affection. Then she turned her inviting blue-eyed gaze on Mitch, drawing him effortlessly toward her.
“But I’m so glad you could join us.”
“Wouldn’t miss it,” said Mitch, his mind straying back to that word Bitsy Peck had just used to describe the Crocketts-cannibals. “Beautiful evening, isn’t it?”
“Beautiful,” she murmured, gazing at the soft glowing sky over the Sound.
“It will be raining by midnight,” Dodge predicted. “My left knee aches-old lacrosse injury.”
“Darling, I always thought it was your right knee,” Martine said teasingly.
“It’s always been the left,” he kidded back.
“Oh, goody, Berger brought corn,” observed Donna, her eyes gleaming at Mitch. She already seemed a bit tipsy. “Some men bring flowers and champagne, others bring hog feed. Speaking as one of the hogs, I say thank you.”
“Speaking as another one of the hogs, I say you’re welcome.” Mitch delivered the bucket to Will, who was building a fire in one of the grills out of seasoned hardwood chunks and mesquite. Dressed in a tank top, nylon shorts and leather flip-flops, Will could easily be mistaken for the club’s lifeguard. To Mitch he also seemed a bit less lighthearted than the others. Distracted, maybe. Was it being around Martine when both her husband and his wife were around? Mitch wondered.
“Seriously, Mitch, how is your jaw?” he asked with genuine concern.
“Seriously, it hurts like hell. I really don’t like getting hit.”
“But you’re okay to eat?”
“Oh, I’ll manage,” said Mitch, his stomach growling as he checked out their dinner-racks and racks of baby back ribs, potato salad, red cabbage slaw, fruit salad, brownies.
“For what it’s worth, I’ve known Esme since she was in pigtails,” Will said. “She’s always had good instincts about people. If she likes somebody, there’s some good in there.”
“I believe it.”
“Care to try a margarita, Mitch?” asked Dodge.
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