He couldn’t afford to assume anything now. He had to know for sure. Even as the thought formed in his mind he was swinging his legs off the bed, setting tender feet on the cold oak plank floor, crossing the room as the sounds went on, spiking and subsiding.
Marjorie rolled over “Jackson—?”
But he was already out the door.
Ten steps down the dark hallway, and the sounds from Martin’s room suddenly stopped. He was at the door and through it before he could control the impulse. He was moving too fast, with a swarm of emotions held primed but still inert vibrating in his throat, explosives set to detonate at a signal waiting for the lethal transmission: fear, rage, despair, embarrassment, relief.
But at the moment the door flew open he felt nothing. For the moment his capacity to react was overwhelmed, a power surge that blew all the breakers. His brain went black.
All he could do was stare.
He clutched the doorknob as if it were the only thing that could keep him from hurtling through the ceiling. On the bed, Martin and Connor lay naked, entwined in a position of mutual pleasure generally named with a number, a date, the year of Woodstock and Manson and the moon landing. They were in fact at the moment of perfectly timed release as Blum stepped into the room, thinking, this is Hell. Literally, Hell. If the floor had opened up and showed him the malignant playground of devils and satyrs from his childhood nightmares, with Satan himself grinning bloody-toothed, beckoning him down down down into an eternity of agony and despair, it couldn’t have been worse
He had laughed at those grotesque images. Even as a kid. He didn’t believe in any afterlife. But he didn’t need the afterlife, now. Hell didn’t need to wait. Hell was right in front of him.
Finally the boys sensed his presence. Martin twisted around to see him. His son seemed eerily calm. Perhaps he hadn’t fully grasped the horrific moment either. All he said was, “Don’t you ever knock?”
“What—what are you…? What is going on in here?”
“Are you serious?”
“It—you—”
“This is me—coming out.”
Connor sat up in bed, pulling the covers over them both. “Martin, don’t—”
“I’m gay, Dad. Now you know.”
“You—the two of you—”
“We’re in love.”
Connor said “Please, sir, if you could just—”
Martin’s voice was cold. “Stay out of this.”
“But—”
“Just—shhhhh.” He turned back to his father. “I can’t believe you never figured it out for yourself, Dad. I posted a rainbow bagel on Instagram. Hello—I do a perfect Streisand impression! I know every Sondheim tune by heart. So I won’t be getting married, today or any other day. Even though it’s legal now. For us. Your example is too fucking scary.”
“Watch your mouth!”
“So bad words are the problem?”
“Put some clothes on. And get this…boy out of here.”
“He’s a man. And he’s staying.”
“Don’t make me laugh. I want him gone, he’s gone. This is my house.”
This seemed to knock Martin off balance for the first time. “You…it—where is he supposed to go?”
“He has a home. There are five boats a day off the island right now. And a dozen plane flights.”
Connor touched Martin’s shoulder. “He’s right. I’ll just…”
He stood, covering himself with a pillow, grabbed his clothes off the floor and picked his way to the bathroom, closing the door behind him. The sound of the latch clicking reset the moment.
Martin took a deep breath in the ventilating silence. “Jesus, Dad.”
“You make me sick.”
“What? How can you—?”
“Physically sick! I feel like I’m going puke right here, right now, standing here.”
“Dad—”
“Fouling those sheets. Seven-hundred-dollar Porthault sheets, tainted, ruined. I’ll have to burn them now.”
“This is absurd. Look—”
“How could you choose this?”
“What the fuck? I didn’t choose anything! Did you choose to be right-handed?”
“They chose for me! You never knew that, did you? I was born left-handed and they made me change at school.”
“No wonder you’re so fucked up. They say it gives you headaches too. Because they should never have tried to rewire your brain that way. It’s child abuse.”
“So, I was abused? Is that it? And I suppose you were, too.”
“No, you didn’t care enough to abuse your kids. You save that for your employees.”
“Enough!”
“No, I—”
“Shut up, you little shit. You know nothing about my business! And this has nothing to do with me. Get up and put some clothes on. I want you out of here, too.”
“What—so you’re kicking me out of my own house?”
“It’s not your house! It’s my family’s house. You’re not my family anymore. You’re…something else. You’re a stranger. You’re trespassing.”
“Come on, that’s just totally—”
“You’ve fouled your own nest!”
“That’s crazy. I didn’t—”
“You commit sodomy under my roof but I’m the crazy one!”
“Look—”
“Go! Just—go.”
“Jackson.”
Marjorie was standing in the doorway behind him, her dressing gown tied hastily, her hair tangled, her face indented from the pillow. The sound of her voice was like something breaking, something precious he had knocked off a table, flailing his arms around. “Please, Jackson…”
This was too much, too many people, too many opinions, too much confusion. “Go back to bed. Or make coffee. Do something useful. I’ll handle this.”
She didn’t move. “Martin is my son, too, Jackson.”
Martin had taken the brief lull to stand and start pulling on his clothes.
“Mom…”
“No, I can’t stand this.”
“You didn’t see what I saw!” Blum’s voice squealed out raw, high-pitched, crazy. He sounded like an hysterical child, even to himself. He had to slow down, take charge, master this moment, master himself.
“I didn’t need to see anything. I’ve known for years, Jackson. Since he was ten. Maybe before that. It was obvious to anyone who cared to look.”
“And you never saw fit—”
“I knew how you’d react. Or at least…I was afraid of how you might react. Now I see I was right.”
“So you’ve been in this with him all along.”
“Yes. That’s right! I’m ‘in it’ with him. I’m in everything with him. I’m his mother.”
“Fine. You handle this, then. But make sure he’s gone, him and his…boy toy in there. I don’t want to see either one of them ever again.”
He pushed past her and stalked out of the room. Martin and his mother stared at each other like two survivors of an earthquake, bereft but unscathed, standing in the rubble.
“Martin, I’m so sorry.”
He stepped closer, reached out to take her hand. “Don’t be, it’s okay. It’s just him. He can’t help himself.”
“But I married him.”
Martin allowed himself a crooked little smile. “And had kids with him, Mom. I can’t totally regret that.”
She took his hand in both of hers and squeezed hard. “That’s the one thing I don’t regret either, Martin. But sometimes I wonder if you—I mean, it seems like you’re not really happy to be here, like…you feel…”
“I was happy to be home. I was happy to be here—this morning. I was. Until five minutes ago.”
“I can handle your father. I can fix this.”
“Mom—�
�
“We want you to be happy.”
“You do. He wants me to be him. And I’d rather die.”
Blum charged back into the room. Marjorie stepped sideways, releasing Martin’s hands, shielding him. The gesture was unthinking, instinctive, but it stoked Blum’s rage. “How dare you say that, you ungrateful little freak—?”
Martin stepped backward, but his tone was fearlessly cruel. “You were eavesdropping? Are you kidding me?”
“I—”
“You’re pathetic. You’re the freak, you big fat fucking—”
The bomb went off, an engulfing bloom of hate. Blum heard the slap before he felt it on his palm, before he understood that his arm had moved. The impact jolted him to his shoulder, and Martin stumbled backward, shocked to silence. Blum advanced on him, but the boy made no effort to retaliate or even lift his arms to defend himself. They stood panting and furious, staring at each other.
Blum spoke first. “You’d rather die than be like me? Well, I hope you do. I hope you get AIDS and die. I could kill you myself right now.”
His wife’s beseeching irrelevant voice, from somewhere far away. “Jackson, don’t do this…”
“No,” Martin said. He seemed to be answering both of them “Do it. Then you’ll have to live with it for the rest of your miserable shitty life. I could die happy knowing that. Plus you’d go to jail. You might make your own gay friends there. You’re old and ugly but there’s someone for everyone.”
Stricken, Blum raised his arm for another blow but his strength or his resolve or his certainty, his understanding of the world and his place in it…everything fell away from him at once. He was weak, swooning with disgust for everything in the world, everything in his world, including himself. All he could finally say was: “You’re not worth it.”
“Coward.”
“Get out. Never come back. I never want to see your face again.”
He walked out of the room for the last time, leaving the door open. Martin and his mother looked at each other, mute. There was nothing left to say. She couldn’t help, she couldn’t change anything. Even if she put her marriage on the line and he knew she didn’t have the force of will for that ultimatum. It would have been a bluff and they both knew it.
She was wondering how she could possibly explain Martin’s departure to his brother, what desperate positive spin she could put on it. But there was no point in thinking that way. The boys talked to each other. They actually communicated, which was some kind of twisted miracle in the Blum family. Max would know everything soon enough. She mustn’t make everything worse by lying. At least the boy hadn’t had to witness this horrible scene. He would learn about the grotesque banishment of his brother secondhand. That was a blessing, if a small one.
But it wasn’t the case. Max had been crouched behind the door of the upstairs hall bathroom the whole time, listening to every word, to the smack of flesh on flesh, to his father’s retreating footsteps fading down the hall. When he slipped back to his room ten minutes later, he knew exactly how he was going to spend his share of the Red Ticket Raffle money, and it was a much finer commodity than Vicodin or oxycodone. Maybe revenge was a drug, too—he craved it like a drug.
But he would only need one hit.
Chapter Twenty
Fracking
It seemed like a slow three weeks, that annual lull between Christmas Stroll and Christmas morning, but pressure was building gradually, like the slabs of the Earth’s crust grinding against each other, silent and secret and still, until force overcomes friction and the rock lurches and the earth quakes.
Maybe I was drawn to plate tectonics metaphors because of my years in Los Angeles. Though our human temblor was a modest one, it held the same sense of a moment unpredictable but inevitable, a shock that failed to surprise. But like the hydraulic fracturing that was partly responsible for the new earthquakes in Oklahoma, there was a vital element of human meddling here, too—mine. I wanted to force water into the buried fissures and release the trapped gases, the hidden truth. If the placid lives around me felt a seismic shudder afterward, fine.
Put it this way: I liked shaking things up. It was my hobby. Unfortunately for Jackson Blum, it was also my job. I knew the story of his crime. All I needed was the proof.
Karen Gifford had confirmed Chief McGrady’s story about the confrontation between Blum and Coddington at 21 Federal. She had found a mention of it in the Inquirer and Mirror’s “Here and There” column:
As the year-round population grows, public decorum declines proportionately, even among community leaders who should know, and act, better. Rather than setting an example of civil discourse, two prominent members of the Chamber of Commerce involved themselves in a violent argument this week at 21 Federal restaurant, complete with raised voices and unseemly epithets…
Whatever the subject of that quarrel—love or money or both—I knew where it had ended up—with a gunshot and a hasty burial, the grave protected from curious animals by a layer of tobacco.
I tracked down three of the vendors, one of them still on-island, living at Our Island Home, another retired to North Carolina, the third one settled in a guest cottage on his daughter’s Truro property. One of them remembered no special purchases, another one never even sold chaw. The third had a dim recollection of getting cleaned out of Copenhagen, Skoal, and Red Man one afternoon. But he didn’t recognize the customer.
That itself might prove useful. “So he wasn’t a regular?”
“No, that’s right. Guess he wanted to start with a bang. Like the stuff was going out of style.” The old man chuckled. “Which it was. By the way. Hardly no one takes snuff these days.”
I hit pay dirt with Hugh Tabor, the one store-owner McGrady had mentioned by name. He was indeed living in Key West, selling real estate and renting out a few properties of his own along Front Street in Old Town.
“This takes me back,” he said in a wheezing Boston drawl, after I had introduced myself and explained why I was calling.
“So you remember the sale?”
“I remember that whole crazy year. Everything got cleaned out. The cops confiscated all the marijuana plants on the island, you couldn’t find Lagavulin scotch anywhere—the Japanese had discovered the stuff and bought every bottle on the market! It was a terrible year for scallops, and some crazy old rich broad tore out her whole garden, the landscaper had put in too many pink flowers. I’m talking something like two, three acres now. They cleared out Bartlett’s and every other nursery just to replace the plants. Tough year, 1997. And then the man who spent the better part of a decade at Town Meeting trying to get smoking banned, even outside, even on the moors, even on the deck of the steamship in a gale…this guy comes into the store and cleans me out of chewing tobacco. Every can! I guess he figured it was okay if you didn’t smoke it. Or maybe he was trying to keep the stuff away from everybody else. But he ran a store. I expect he knew that we restock items, time to time.”
I thought of our own little anti-drug cartel scooping up the opioids and destroying them. The idea was Quixotic and futile but it was also civic-minded. But Prescott and Folger, however misguided, were mounting a crusade. My suspect was no crusader. “This was Jackson Blum?”
“That’s right. And I wasn’t the only store he hit that day. God help you if you wanted some weed, a hydrangea bush, or some good single malt and a plate of scallops that winter! Or chaw. I didn’t restock until April.”
“Thanks, Hugh.”
“Does this help?”
“Absolutely. One more little jigsaw puzzle piece.”
“Like one that’s partly treetops and partly sky, and it fits right in the middle?”
“Exactly. Sounds like you love puzzles.”
“Sure. I always have one going.”
“Me too.”
I thanked him again, hung up the phone, stood and stretche
d. Then I walked over to the door and grabbed my coat off the hook. I needed to talk to Jackson Blum, but I had one more person to interview first.
I met Anna Coddington at Brotherhood of Thieves for lunch. She drank a Navy Grog and ate a basket of bay scallops and spiral fries, the restaurant’s signature dish.
But she wasn’t happy about it. “This place isn’t the same anymore, since the fire,” she complained, lifting the frosty copper mug and starting in on her second drink.
“The fire?”
“May of 1999. Very sad. Fire spoiled the Nobby Shop, too. The town smells smoke and instantly everything has to be brought up to code, with lots of renovation money for all the local vultures. Oh, my dear, those sacred, inviolable building codes! Which I decrypt as—remove all charm and history from any targeted structure! The Nobby Shop used to look like a Vermont country store—all those floor-to-ceiling shelves. Now you might as well be in the Cape Cod Mall. Very sad. Of course…people take advantage. The Brotherhood used the renovation to put in this awful bar. That’s where the money is. And they added the television, of course. We can’t have any public space without a television! I don’t even call it the Brotherhood anymore. I refer to it as the ‘Otherhood.’” She chuckled at her little joke and took another swig. I was drinking iced tea.
“But you still come here,” I pointed out.
“They kept the old Navy Grog recipe. And I do like the fire on a winter afternoon.”
I took a spoonful of lobster bisque—my favorite menu item, and said, “So your late husband and Jackson Blum were feuding at the time of Mr. Coddington’s death?”
“I wouldn’t call it a feud.”
“A long-running argument?”
“They had different visions about the future of the business. Ted was happy with the way things were. Jackson wanted to take over Main Street.” She offered a cold little smile. “And, possibly, the world.”
“Well, that didn’t work out very well.”
“Thank goodness. At least he never decided to run for President.”
“Was he capable of murder?”
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