The shag carpet in the bedroom was another clue. He had heard Irena extol it as a luxury item! Blum supposed a lifetime of grimy bare floors had warped her judgment. Then there were the pillows on the bed—way too many pillows, branded pillows from Nantucket Looms and Erica Wilson, and a blue lace neckroll very much like the one he and Marjorie had given Irena for her birthday. She had complained about never being comfortable reading in bed.
That would have been enough, but Blum recognized the clothes in the closet, also. The short dresses that showed off Irena’s legs, the fur-collared coat she had brought with her from Lithuania.
Blum stepped back and sat down on the bed. He had been ninety-five percent sure of what was going on—hell, it was more like ninety-nine percent. But, oh, that last one percent! It meant more than the other ninety-nine put together.
It meant everything.
He stood up, thinking hard. He needed some token of his discovery. He opened the drawer of the nightstand and saw a litter of Avanti condoms—the newest thing—made by Durex, some English company. They weren’t even going to be commercially available for another year, but Coddington had connections with the importer. He had bragged about all of this over drinks at Boarding House one night. It was so typical of the man—he had to have the best and the newest of everything. And if it happened to be English, whatever it was, so much the better. Like the Taylors of Harrogate tea he had shipped from Great Britain every few months, which tasted no different from Lipton’s, as far as Blum could tell. Boasting about details that made you feel unique was a mistake—they set you apart, put the spotlight on you, made you vulnerable. This little condom was as incriminating as a fingerprint.
Blum took it, and one of the irises, and let himself out of the house.
***
He chose his moment carefully. Anna was shopping off-island the following Monday afternoon and Coddington would be upstairs in the refinished attic, fiddling with his Lionel trains. The hobby had always struck Blum as useless and reductive. The tracks wandered among a series of excruciatingly tended molding clay and papier-mâché landscapes—forests and mini-mountain ranges, cluttered little dollhouse towns. Blum could understand the plodding satisfaction of constructing this scale-model world; he could grasp the “collect them all!” pleasures of assembling the trains themselves, car by car. But once all of that was finished, once you owned the toys and laid all the tracks and constructed all the landscapes, there was nothing left do but watch the trains run in circles, signals chiming, draw-bridges opening and closing forever, without even the occasional derailment, station fire, or avalanche to break the monotony.
Still, Coddington loved his little railroad world.
Blum could hear the faint whine and clatter of the train from the foyer of the big house on India Street. He had come in through the open front door—Coddington never locked it—and paused a moment before starting to climb the stairs. He wasn’t sure what to say and he wound up saying nothing. Instead, he placed the flower and the condom on the tracks, between the filigree forest and tiny town.
Coddington stopped the train. “What the hell—?”
He strode around the giant plywood plank table that held his Lionel dream world and then stopped, staring at Blum’s offering.
“What the—how did you—? Oh, God.”
A perfect progression: bafflement, understanding, despair, one, two, three—in about as many seconds. Blum couldn’t have asked for more.
“You can’t tell Anna.”
“Actually, I can. Nothing would be easier. Some might even say it was my moral obligation. My responsibility, as her friend.”
“You’re not her friend! You’ve always hated her.”
Blum smiled. “Well, there’s that.”
“Please, Jack. I don’t know how you found out—”
“Spindrift LLC. You left the trail, and it was much better marked than the average road leading into a New England town. But then…they want people to get lost. Maybe you don’t. Maybe you wanted to get caught.”
“Jack, no, that’s crazy. You can’t do this. It would kill Anna.”
“You should have thought about that before you started fucking her sister.”
“I couldn’t—that was…it was beyond my…it—…we couldn’t help ourselves. We tried. I swear, we tried.”
“For a week?”
“I’d met her in Lithuania. Anna and I used to go back to Palanga every year. It’s a resort on the Baltic…kind of like here. A summer town.”
“Lots of chances to see the sister in a bathing suit.”
“Or…not. There is a naturist beach in Nemirseta that Irena loves.”
“Naturist? Nudist?”
“Ah—yes.”
“How did you manage to—you know…not give yourself away?”
“I kept my eyes on my wife.”
“Smart man. I always say—cellulite makes the best birth control.”
Coddington crumpled the flower, stuffed it with the condom into his pants pocket. Then he started the train again. It passed through the covered station and headed up through a tunnel the mountains, emerging a few seconds later to cross an exquisitely rippled blue-glass river.
“I can’t stop,” Coddington said, finally.
“I’m not asking you to.”
“Then…what? What do you want?”
“Sign the Winthrop deal.”
The train completed another circuit. “Then this goes away?”
“I don’t want to hurt you, Ted. I don’t care about your love life. Every marriage has a secret or two. I just want to grow my business.”
Coddington stopped the locomotive, cutting off the whining and the clickety-clack. The new silence felt like a gust of air from an open window. He set the control down. “But you’ll always know. That’s the thing. You can’t…un-know it.”
Blum shrugged.
“You’ll always hold my life in your hands. Your soft, spoiled, manicured little hands.”
“At least we’ll know who’s in charge from now on. That will simplify things.”
Coddington exhaled a long breath. The spirit seemed to go out of him with the stale carbon dioxide.
“They have a notary. We can sign the papers in their office tomorrow.”
But of course he never showed up for the meeting.
They all waited for an hour and finally agreed to reconvene the next day. Blum drove home to check his answering machine—and erase any messages, if necessary. God knows what Coddington might have said if he’d been drinking, and if Marjorie was home, standing near the little box when he triggered it from his cell phone, that would be one more problem to deal with. No, he had to do it himself, by hand, when he was certain he could listen in private.
Marjorie was out, she had left a note—something to do with volunteering at the NHA. That was a lucky break. There was no message on the answering machine, but Blum’s Ruger box sat open and empty in the middle of the desk. Coddington had taken his gun.
He recalled Coddington scoffing at someone’s suicide attempt, months before—how pills were for cowards and attention-seekers. “A cry for help? They should just try crying for help. They’d be astonished at how quickly people respond. It’s all pantomime, Jack. If they really wanted to kill themselves, they’d put a bullet in their skull. That’s a guarantee—Greg Norman, with a two-inch putt.”
So was Coddington planning to commit suicide? Could Blum’s threat have thrown Ted so completely? Well, he certainly wasn’t capable of murder, and as far as Blum knew, the man had no interest in target practice.
But suicide?
Things tilted out of control so easily. He remembered cooking in the old Cliff Road house, with baby Martin in a bassinet on the counter, rocking himself to sleep. Then somehow he had tipped himself off the ledge and crashed to the kitchen floor. In the endless silence b
efore the first outraged scream, Blum was sure the boy was dead, murdered by Blum’s negligence, by an instant’s criminal distraction—he had been separating eggs into a metal bowl. One irretrievable moment would poison his life forever, destroy his marriage, scatter his friends, render him a pariah, and rightfully so—and then Martin shrieked out his belated protest, and the world was set right.
But not this world. Not now.
Unless—if he could stop Ted somehow, intercept him before he committed the final act. Was that even possible? Coddington had at least ninety minutes’ head start. He might be hesitating, though. He might be paralyzed with indecision. The notion of suicide might be romantic, but the feel of that metal ring against your temple, the bullet behind it one finger-twitch away…that was something else entirely. That was reality, and Coddington had never excelled at reality. If he had snagged himself between the impulse and the act, there still might be time to stop him, to save him.
If Blum could find him.
Blum closed the gun case, put it away on the top shelf of the closet and hurried out of the house. He had a pretty good idea which spot Coddington would choose for his last stand.
The Coddington family had owned a parcel of land in Madaket, twenty acres around Long Pond, purchased for a few thousand dollars at the turn of the last century. Ted’s father had left the property to the Land Bank. The decision had outraged all four of Ted’s siblings, as well as his five cousins. They had been planning to sell off the land for yet another west-end subdivision, and expected a giant windfall—millions and millions of dollars to split up among themselves. None of them needed the money. They were all millionaires anyway. It was perverse, pathological, like all greed, like Blum’s greed, or so Coddington had carped, simply because Blum had wanted to expand their business. He had endured Ted’s lecture on this subject far more times than he cared to count.
The kids had contested the will, tried to get the old man declared incompetent, but Ted and quite a few others (including Pat Folger and Ed Delavane, Sr.) had testified in his favor. The will stood, and the land “went to waste,” as Ted’s cousin Marian had complained, bitterly and at great length, at the funeral and then at the graveyard, where Ted, furious and fed up, had finally slapped her face.
There was a stand of oak trees on that “wasted” land, where Ted’s father had wanted to be buried. But he had died in a scalloping accident, drowning in Madaket harbor when his waders filled with water and the swift tides took him out to sea. The body was never found, and the funeral plot was never used.
Until today.
So here he was, and there they were.
Ted buried by the elm trees, Blum leaning against his car, still trembling from the exertions of the burial. “It is what it is,” Ted had liked to say. “This is what I know”—his other pet phrase.
It is what it is.
Well, this is what I know, Ted: your life is over and my day is just beginning. I’ve got a grave to scatter with tobacco, a gun to put back in its case, and a suicide note to get rid of. I’ve got a lot to do and not much time to do it. You’ve got nothing to do and all the time in the world.
So who got the better deal?
Ted had already answered that one. He couldn’t go on, and Blum couldn’t quit. He couldn’t even rest. Every second counted now.
He was pushing himself upright when he heard the engine note of a truck.
He froze with panic. He was filthy, covered with dirt from the burial, his hair standing up in all directions, eyes wild, his face bright red from hard exercise. He must look insane. What could he say? What possible excuse could he—?
The black Ford Ranger came around a bend in the dirt road—old Ed Delavane’s boy, Billy. Of course it would have to be someone he knew. But people were oblivious, especially young people. Billy probably had girls and weed and surfing on his mind. Blum sucked in a solid bulge of air, pushed it out through his teeth.
Just act natural.
He lifted an arm to wave, and Billy slowed down. “Hey, Mr. Blum! Are you okay?”
“Fine, Billy—fine. Just took a bit of a tumble back there.”
“You need a lift to the hospital?”
He forced a smile, a deranged clown rictus. “I’m just going to drive myself there. I think I sprained my ankle. Nothing to worry about.”
“You sure?”
“I’m fine! Enjoy your day.”
“Will do. Take care of yourself now.”
He accelerated off, the fat tires dragging a cloud of dust behind the pick-up. When it was out of sight, Blum climbed into his own car. He sighed as he keyed the ignition. That moment could have turned out worse. Billy would probably forget the whole incident by New Year’s.
Onward. With the body buried, his first stop was Coddington’s house.
The place was overheated as usual, and impeccably neat, as if “staged” by real estate agents: not a book out of place, not a pillow unfluffed. The only sound was the low rumble of the furnace, and even that cut to silence when the house registered the thermostat’s preferred seventy-eight degrees.
Blum took the stairs two at a time, opened the master bedroom door and saw the note propped against the bed’s outcropping of lace-trimmed pillows. No envelope, just a single sheet of stiff vellum with Coddington’s flattened, almost illegible handwriting trailed across it.
Dearest Anna,
As you know I have been dreadfully unhappy for a long time, since before we met, in fact. Life has come to feel like an overwhelming burden with no purpose or meaning, just effort, endless effort without joy or reward. I’m tired. Every day I have to haul this weight onto my back and start walking again. I used to feel there was some destination, some end point. Now I just walk in circles. I’m lost. I cannot do it anymore. I’m sorry if this hurts you. I know you wanted to help me. The true tragedy of life is how little we can really do for one another. I hope my absence will help you, and ease your burden. After a while, I’m sure it will. Be strong, as I could not.
Ted
What a con artist! Of course, if he had been able to tell the truth about Irena, he wouldn’t have had to kill himself in the first place. You had to admire the guy. He did the deed to protect the people he loved and this note finished off the job perfectly. It played on the mystery of the suicidal personality. How could you argue with a scrupulously hidden despair? It only made you look lame and oblivious. Playing the emotional chess of suicide, this was a brilliant checkmate. All Anna could do was nod and pretend she understood him.
He folded the note carefully and slipped it into his coat pocket. If the body was ever found, if the bullet was ever matched to his gun, he had proof that Coddington had killed himself, written in the man’s own hand. It would be embarrassing, of course, old rumors would resurface, all the suspicions about why he did it, and why he used Blum’s weapon, and who buried him, and all the rest…but the letter would stand: his last ditch get-out-of-jail-free card. And he might need it at any time—now or a dozen years from now.
There was no statute of limitations on murder.
And make no mistake, that was what they’d be coming after him for. Cops loved a murder case. They wouldn’t care that it was a “cold case”—they liked things cold, the way a gourmand liked his potato and leek soup cold. Mmmmmm, vichyssoise. They’d slurp it up and lick the bowl clean when they were done. His bowl—his life. But not with the suicide note in his hands. That would stop them. Coddington’s last will and…. The thought pounced softly, a cat’s paw pressed to the string of his thoughts.
Coddington had always threatened he might change his will, leave his share of the business to Anna. “That would fix you!” he liked to gloat. “You’d be living in my world then! Fighting with her all day long! She’ll have a thousand reasons not to do anything you want to do! One long miserable argument, all the way to the bankruptcy court.” Of course, he had been joking, “kidd
ing on the square.” But—
Blum tore out of the bedroom, down the hall to Coddington’s home office.
The door was closed. Was it locked? He couldn’t get it open. Then it unstuck from the jamb and he stumbled inside. The new will dominated the empty desk, drawing the eye like the intricately garnished sliver of swordfish on a plate at some fancy restaurant.
Coddington’s last offering. Choke on this meal, partner.
Blum crossed the room in three steps and picked up the document—a one-page handwritten codicil, signed but not notarized. Of course it wasn’t notarized, the ink was barely dry. It must have been written at the same time as the suicide note. Blum skimmed it. Just as he feared—Coddington had decided at the last minute, one of the last minutes, to leave controlling interest in business to his dithering arbitrary bitter ignorant willful wife. The Widow Coddington.
Not anymore.
Sorry, Ted. This document dies with you.
He crumpled it into a ball and jammed it into his pants pocket. Then he left the office, shut the door behind him, and took the stairs two at a time. He paused at the front door, glancing quickly out the sidelights. The street was empty, for the moment. He let himself out, walked without haste to his car, climbed in, and drove away.
Mission accomplished. But there was much more to do.
***
He purchased the tobacco in four different locations, including the island’s new tobacconist, a business Blum knew was doomed, along with the video store, and perhaps even the basement music shop that was already shifting away from cassettes to CDs.
He took a long shower after he was done mixing the snuff into the Madaket soil, scrubbing his hands raw. No one saw him on this trip, though he had to crouch in the bushes briefly when a group of birders traipsed past, heading for Long Pond.
He wasn’t quite in the clear, though.
It turned out that some nosy neighbor had seen his car driving up to Irena’s little lovenest, and then studied the big SUV as he drove away. It must have been a memorable event—they didn’t find too many Range Rovers slumming at that end of the island, though it had only been a matter of time until Irena convinced Coddington to buy her one. Coddington himself had always driven that beater Volvo. Typical Old Money—he would no more have driven an expensive car than he would have flashed a Rolex watch or paraded his wife in a mink coat.
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