I floundered on. “We’ve been quite happy, but I sometimes think I’m more than he bargained for.”
Hal had been lying on his back but now turned on his side and propped himself on one elbow to look at me. “You seem perfect to me.”
“Hardly. Hasn’t Connie told you? I’ve recently had cancer. And a mastectomy. Under these clothes and this ridiculous wig, I look like an anorexic Yul Brynner.”
His face turned serious. He turned on his back and rested the beer bottle, half full, on his chest. “My mother died of breast cancer, Hannah, when I was seven. But that was a long time ago. Medical science has come a long way since then.”
“That’s what I’ve been told, but I’ve read that the ancient Egyptians treated breast cancer about the same as we do today—slash and burn—although I will give medical science points for Taxol, tamoxifen, and Herceptin.”
“You crack me up, Hannah!” He adjusted the bill of his cap to shade his eyes better and was silent for a moment. “You ever worry about dying?”
“Every day. That’s why I find myself wanting to spend time with my family and friends, doing things I love. I want to make memories, Hal. Not only for me but for them. Maybe that’s what immortality is all about.”
“No one could forget you, Hannah. You could be anywhere in the world right now. Instead you’ve chosen to be here in Podunk, U.S.A.”
I decided not to mention that my choice to come to this forgotten little corner of the world was triggered by the possibility that my husband had been unfaithful.
“I know I should be back home in Annapolis right now, but I can’t get Katie Dunbar out of my mind.”
“She was a likable kid.” Hal turned his head and stared off toward the horizon, where the water met the sky in a seamless wash of blue and gray.
“Did you know Katie well, Hal?”
When he didn’t answer right away, I figured he hadn’t heard me over the wind. Or maybe he’d nodded off. “Hal?” I poked him with my finger.
“Huh?”
“I was wondering if you knew Katie Dunbar?”
“Not really. Saw her around, is all.”
“But you just said she was likable.”
“Everybody liked Katie. Most popular girl in the high school.”
“It’s hard to imagine anybody wanting to murder a sweet girl like that.” I recalled her sudden academic problems and fickle behavior. “Maybe she had a dark side that nobody knew about.”
Hal struggled to his feet and poured his remaining beer, now warm, overboard. “I wouldn’t know anything about that.”
I stood up, too, suddenly thirsty for a Coke. “I wonder if Dennis has made any progress on the case?”
Hal grinned at me. “I’m here to report that the good lieutenant has finished off the Heineken and has started on the Bud Light. When last seen, he was rubbing sunblock number eight into your attractive sister-in-law’s shoulders. I’d say there’s no time like the present to ask.”
Hal followed me along the leeward side of the boat, holding on to the lifelines that circled the deck like a double clothesline, then stepped into the cockpit. “Hi, you guys.”
Connie raised a lazy arm. “Hi, yourselves. Have some chips.” She had removed her shorts and top. Dressed in her bathing suit, she was sprawled on her stomach on one of the seat cushions. Dennis, looking a little looped, stood behind the wheel, piloting the boat. I wondered if it was such a good idea. All we’d need was for the coast guard to pick up a cop on a drunken boating charge.
Hal and I arranged ourselves on the cushion opposite Connie and munched on chips we took from an opened bag that had been rolled down and secured with a clothespin. Connie’s work, no doubt.
No one was saying anything at the moment, so I leaped right in. “Dennis, when I talked with Chip at the funeral this morning, he seemed the farthest thing from a murderer than anyone I could imagine. I know you interviewed him. I figured if he were guilty, you would probably have arrested him by now.”
For a moment I thought he wasn’t going to say anything, but to my thanks, the beer had wrought magic on its journey from stomach to brain to tongue.
Dennis eyed the compass and adjusted his course slightly. “We brought him in yesterday for a couple of hours, and at first he recited, almost word for word, the same story he did in ’90. I still think he might be hiding something, but I couldn’t trip him up. He never denied leaving with Katie after the dance or tried to cover up the fact that witnesses had seen them in the car arguing. So I asked him what the argument was about, and he said it wasn’t important. I told him I’d keep him there, in a cell if I had to, until he told me what they fought about. After about fifteen minutes he gave up. ‘Over sex,’ he says.”
“So what else is new?” Hal chuckled and opened another Bud Light for each of them.
“My first thought,” Dennis continued, one hand on the wheel, the other holding the fresh beer. “Then he claims that they drove to the parking lot behind Hamilton’s Restaurant and that Katie put the moves on him. He goes with the flow for five minutes or so until it gets so hot and heavy that they’re steaming up the windows and he pushes her off. Buttons up his shirt and tells her to put her dress back on, he’s taking her home. She cries and wails that he must not really love her and he explains that au contraire, he loves her too much to violate her chastity. That if he slept with her, she wouldn’t be the kind of girl he would want to marry.”
Connie squinted at her watch and sat up. “That sounds so wacko it almost has to be true.” She pulled on her shirt and took the wheel back from Dennis. “Time to head home, crew. Ready about!”
“Sounds like born-again logic to me!” I shouted above squealing winches and the noise of the sails swinging and flapping to the other side of the boat.
Once Sea Song was heading confidently back in a homeward direction, Dennis chose to sit next to Connie behind the wheel, where he calmly reeled in each fishing line. “I’m beginning to believe his story myself. Besides, we’ve turned up absolutely no physical evidence linking Chip Lambert to the crime. It’s been a frustrating week.” He handed the rods to Hal, who disappeared below with them. “Can’t catch a damn fish, either.” He leaned back and breathed in deeply. “But what a fabulous day! Someone gave me a mug that says, ‘A bad day fishing is better than a good day at work,’ and ain’t it the truth!”
Just off Holly Point, with the wind blowing down the Truxton directly on Sea Song’s nose, we lowered the main, furled the jib, and cranked up the engine. Dennis talked a little more about his plans to reinterview Angie and the rest of the Wildcats before we sighted the marina and everyone became busy with predocking tasks.
Hal stood on the bow with a boat hook, ready to snag a dock line and hand it to me. Dennis stood aft, waiting to grab a line from a piling to act as a brake. Later I tried to reconstruct it all, to figure out how something so stupid could have happened. One minute I was standing there minding my own business, waiting for Hal to hand me a dock line, and the next I was tripping over an anchor line or a coiled-up dock line, something soft anyway, and flipping overboard, feet over ass. In retrospect, I suppose it would have been best to simply get wet, but natural instincts being what they are, I grabbed for the lifelines, connected, and nearly ripped my arm out of its socket. A pain that can only be described as searing, like a hot knife, spread across my chest as the muscles on my “good” side felt as if they were separating from my chest wall. I remember seeing Hal’s hand shoot out a fraction of a second too late, and I recall hanging from the lifelines, screaming.
Four knots per hour might not seem all that fast until you’re trying to scrabble up the side of a polished hull with the water licking greedily at the bottom of your shoes every time the boat slices into a wave. While I flailed ineffectually with my feet, Hal caught my hand and held on tight. I heard Connie shouting something to Dennis about the boat hook. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Dennis drop the line he was holding and stagger forward. He snatched the metal pole
that Hal had dropped and thrust it in my direction. After a few unsuccessful attempts I was able to grab on. Shouting contradictory instructions and swearing loudly at each other, the two men gradually pulled me aboard. I lay on the deck in pain, gasping like a beached fish.
I have no memory of the docking of the boat, but somehow she got into the slip, Connie’s checklist was completed, and I ended up resting against Hal with a plastic bag of ice wrapped in a towel clamped under my left arm. I refused to cry but kept moaning and apologizing, “How can I have been so clumsy?” I looked up into the face of this man who had the knack of being around when I was at my very worst and felt a strong tug of affection that frightened the bejeezus out of me.
Yet I didn’t push him away. Hal accompanied me on the ride home, sitting with me in the backseat of Connie’s car, insisting all the while that I let them take me to the emergency room at Chesapeake County Hospital. I was equally adamant that they did not. I had no desire to call more attention to myself. Dennis, shocked sober by adrenaline, followed in his car. When I was comfortably settled on the couch in Connie’s living room and they had extracted a promise from me that I would call the doctor if I didn’t feel better in the morning, they left, but not before I heard them muttering together just out of earshot.
Around eight-thirty I wandered out to the kitchen to eat the cream of mushroom soup and peanut butter sandwich Connie made me for supper. Later, back on the couch with a heating pad under my arm and Connie comfortably nearby, reading the latest P. D. James in an overstuffed chair near the window, I dozed. I awakened just in time to catch the end of a dreadful made-for-television movie I had seen before and the beginning of the eleven o’clock news. I was about to flip over to the weather channel when the screen filled with a perfectly coiffed reporter standing in front of the honey yellow brick wall outside Gate Three at the Naval Academy. “Connie! Come here, quick!”
By the time she reached my side, the camera had shifted to the Administration Building. I was so involved in watching Paul leave the building with Murray Simon, his lawyer, that I didn’t hear what the reporter was saying. As they walked down the sidewalk, the camera followed along, with Paul looking straight ahead, ignoring it and the idiot reporters. He wore his best blue suit and the yellow tie that Emily had given him for Christmas. It was the tie that almost broke my heart. How could he do this to us? Someone asked a question, and Paul waved them away, smiling stiffly. The camera then panned up the flagpole to the U.S. flag, flapping and snapping in the breeze. It reminded me of the sails. While Paul was going through this ordeal, I was lying on the deck of a sailboat with another man, joking and trading life histories. I felt so overwhelmed by sadness and guilt that the tears I had fought to suppress since the afternoon finally came.
Connie, bless her heart, must have been listening to the voice-over. “It’s okay, Hannah. The academy isn’t saying anything. The midshipman hasn’t been identified. Channel Two must be hard up for news today, that’s all.”
I blew my nose. “I should have been there for Paul today, Connie. Guilty or innocent, I should have been there.”
chapter
9
I raided Connie’s medicine cabinet that night—slim pickings, I can tell you—rooting through leftover vials of prescription medication that had been lying around since the Nixon administration. My hopes were raised when I discovered a brown plastic container labeled “Percocet” hidden behind a blue jar that might once have held Noxzema, but with the exception of some telltale dust at the bottom, the Percocet container was empty. I fought the urge to dip into it with a wet finger. I had to settle for a nearly empty bottle of aspirin that had expired in 1995. Praying that vintage aspirin wouldn’t kill me, I swallowed three tablets with a swig of bottled water and two hours later took three more, which turned down the fire in my chest until 4:00 A.M., when the tablets ran out. This allowed me to lie uncomfortably awake, watching the numerals on the digital clock flip over one by one while I rehearsed what I was going to say when I telephoned Paul in the morning.
How is it, I wondered later, that a plan with such good intentions could go so terribly wrong? In the hour or so before dawn, I had carefully worked out my she-said-he-said scenario, but once on the telephone with my husband, the conversation galloped off in directions I hadn’t anticipated.
—I said I was coming home.
—He said I wasn’t.
—I said I was, too.
—He said he didn’t want me there.
—I said I didn’t care whether he wanted me there or not. As his wife I would be standing with him the next time the press showed up.
—He said there wouldn’t be a next time. He was going away.
—I said well, thanks very much for telling me and why couldn’t he come away to the farm?
—He said it was too close to Annapolis. They’d find him.
—I said well, where then?
—He said he didn’t know where just yet, but away.
Things rapidly deteriorated after that. We didn’t stoop to hurling insults at one another like “So’s your old man!” or “Your mother swims after troopships!” but it was close. I hung up, deeply regretting that I had called and so pissed off that I forgot to tell him about falling overboard.
Connie, who had overheard the last part of this heated discussion, silently handed me a glass of orange juice.
I sipped it gratefully. “Now he’s mad at me. He said he doesn’t want me to come home.”
“So I gathered.”
“I feel so useless, Connie. I want to help, but I don’t know how. Everything I suggest, he shoots down.”
“Paul knows how stubborn you can be, Hannah, and he wants to protect you. I’m sure he’s doing what he thinks is best—for him as well as for you. I think you’re just going to have to trust him on this.”
I watched Connie crack three eggs into a bowl, using one hand, and tried to imagine what it would be like living under the constant scrutiny of the press. I would be looking for a job soon. I had classifieds to read. Letters to write. Phone calls to make. I decided that appearing on the nightly news wouldn’t look good on my résumé. When Connie started beating the eggs furiously with a fork, I said, “I have to confess that it’s a relief in a way that Paul doesn’t think I’m needed at home. I don’t picture myself as the type of woman who gazes adoringly at her man while he’s being grilled on 60 Minutes about his sex life. I guess I just wanted to be given the opportunity to try.”
Connie poured the eggs into a cast-iron skillet that had been heating on the stove. “You sound like you don’t believe him!”
“You want the truth? At this point I’m so tired and sore that I don’t know what to believe.”
Connie checked her spatula in mid-stir and turned her cool green eyes on me. “I’ve known Paul far longer than you have, Hannah, and if there’s one thing I would stake my life on, it’s his fidelity. He would never cheat on you. Never!”
During this conversation I had been sitting at the kitchen table, busily folding and refolding my napkin. Connie’s attempt to pull rank on me stung. While she stirred the eggs, I sulked, trying to think of a good excuse to get out of the house. I didn’t want to think about Paul today; the wound was too fresh. I wanted to go into town and talk with Angie about her argument with Chip. But Connie was in one of her bossy, mother hen moods, and she’d probably insist that I stay home and take it easy.
When I had coaxed the napkin into a shape like a duck, I propped it up against my plate. I decided to ignore my bad mood and try the direct approach. “Honestly, Connie, your medicine cabinet is pathetic! You have dried-up Dippity-Do dating back to the Flood, but no decent drugs. After breakfast I’m driving into town to pick up something a little stronger than aspirin. And Ellie will give me a cold beer to take it with and won’t even mention that it’s not yet lunchtime.”
Connie popped some bread into the toaster. “I hate to burst your bubble, Hannah, my love, but Ellie doesn’t sell beer.”
“She almost always is. I doubt the poor creature has any place else to go,” Connie said pleasantly. I couldn’t believe she wasn’t giving me grief about my plan. Maybe I was getting on her nerves, too.
After a plate of Connie’s excellent scrambled eggs—not too wet, not too dry—I cranked up the car, told a droop-tailed, disappointed Colonel that he couldn’t go with me, and headed into town.
Ellie’s Country Store had just opened. Through the screen door I could see Bill Taylor moving a broom around, sweeping dust between the cracks of the old hardwood floor. A bell attached to the top of the door jangled when I entered. Bill looked up.
“Hi, Bill. What do you have in the way of painkillers? I pulled a muscle in my, uh, arm yesterday.” I didn’t feel much like discussing my medical history with him.
“Gee, Mrs. Ives. Sorry to hear that. How’d it happen?”
“Carelessness, I guess. I fell overboard.”
He pointed to a shelf marked “Sundries.” “Take a look over there. Heard you’d gone sailing after the funeral.”
“Pretty dumb idea, huh?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I would have preferred it to cleaning up after the reception.” He pushed the broom forward another six inches or so. “Story of my life.” He sighed and continued sweeping. “After the University of Maryland I worked for Hal a bit, back when he and his dad still built boats. Old Mr. Calvert taught me everything I know about woodworking.” He paused and propped the broom against a nearby shelf. “But nobody builds boats like that anymore. It’s all molded fiberglass now.”
It seemed to me that a sizable teak tree had been sacrificed to construct the handsome cabin and provide the exterior trim on Sea Song, but I didn’t mention it. “And after that?”
Bill straightened the canned soup display. “After that I worked as a computer programmer for the army down at Fort Belvoir in Virginia, but I quit about a year ago, so I could write full-time.”
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