“At least I dress appropriately. I don’t wear blue jeans to work”
“I have to go.”
“Fine. You’ll be hearing from my lawyer.”
David hung up the phone, climbed out of bed and went into the bathroom. The headache got worse when he stood up. His stomach was upset, too, but it wasn’t from the booze. He knew this feeling: anger as acid indigestion. Patty’s accusatory whine was in his blood like two cups of bad coffee. He drank a full glass of water at the sink. As he turned to lift the toilet seat, there was a knock on the door. He took a few steps and stuck his head out of the bathroom. The top half of the front door was glass.
There was a cop standing there, squinting, his hand to the dirty pane, trying to see inside.
A cop. Just as Lomax had predicted. No, no, not predicted. Arranged.
He stood up straight and took a breath. It didn’t matter. He had nothing to hide. He walked to the front door and opened it A gust of cold air cut through his robe and his pajamas. Accumulated snow that had been piled against the door fell in on his feet.
“Can I help you?”
“David Trezize?”
“Yes.”
“We’ve had some calls—can I come in?”
“Of course.”
The cop stepped inside and unbuttoned his coat. David had forgotten to turn the heat down last night.
“Mr. Trezize, I’m here this morning because we’ve had reports about physical abuse. Apparently, you struck one of your children and pushed the other one down during an altercation in the Stop & Shop parking lot two days ago. When the children started crying you told them forcibly to be quiet and continued to—”
“That’s absurd. I’m sorry, Officer, but I mean really—I would never do something like that.”
“The report goes on to say—”
“I don’t care what the report says. Who made this report? Who told you this shit?”
“I’m going to have to ask you to watch your language, sir. The report was anonymous.”
“One report?”
“That’s right sir. Now we have to make a full investigation of—”
“I beat up my kids in the most crowded parking lot on Nantucket and one person called in a report. Just one. Doesn’t that strike you as a little weird?”
“Not at all, Sir. We generally figure that for every call we get, there are ten people who choose not to get involved for whatever reason.”
“So now there are eleven ‘witnesses’ to something that didn’t happen because you automatically multiply any crank call by ten? I can’t believe this. Listen to me: I could never hit my kids. I don’t even yell at my kids. I’m a New Age pussy who doesn’t believe in discipline. Ask my ex-wife.”
“We fully intend to interview your ex-wife, Mr. Trezize. And your children. But from what I can see just talking to you, you clearly have some serious anger issues. And you’ve been drinking.”
“I had some vodka last night,” David said, slowing his voice down, speaking softly. “There’s nothing illegal about that. Come on. My children weren’t even with me.”
The cop seemed to physically ease off, leaning back a little. “All right, Mr. Trezize, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. After we talk with your family, if they confirm your story, we’ll let it go. But I still have to file a report, and if there’s even one more complaint against you, the DSS will have to open a full investigation. This is very serious. You could lose your kids and wind up in jail.”
“With no proof? What happened to ‘innocent until proven guilty’?”
“Well, that’s a luxury the state can’t afford, Sir. When the health and well being of the children are involved.”
David stared at him. “What if you’re wrong? What if you made a mistake?”
“The Department of Social Services would institute full restitution at that time. But it rarely happens. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, Mr. Trezize. That’s been my experience. You be careful now. Have a good day.”
He turned and walked back to his blue and white cruiser. It criminalized David’s yard, just sitting there. David watched the cop pull out and drive away. The day was still and bitterly cold. For some reason he didn’t move. He felt as if he could stop time by standing here. As long as he didn’t think about anything or feel anything he could maintain the stasis. He was a figure in a diorama, a member of some extinct tribe, posed stiffly, going about his ancient daily business, everything beyond his driveway artfully painted to give the illusion of three dimensions: “The Lost Middle Class of Nantucket” exhibit in the Natural History Museum.
David shut the front door and leaned against it. His feet were frozen and his head was on fire. He had to do something, some action was necessary now, but all he could think of was socks. He needed to put on some socks.
He climbed the narrow stairs and rummaged in the top drawer of his dresser for the thick pair of woolen socks Patty had given him for Christmas two years ago. He grabbed it and sat down carefully on the bed. He tried to put the right one on with his legs crossed, but in that position his foot was sideways and he couldn’t line up the heel properly. He tried twice. Finally he gave up and propped his foot on the edge of mattress. It slid off the sheet. He was going to have to lean all the way over. It wasn’t worth it. Everything was impossible.
Part of him wanted to find Lomax, grab him, scold him, shame him.
He sat up suddenly, rubbing his palms along flannel of his pajama pants. He could do it. Lomax was throwing the traditional Nantucket end-of-the-job celebration party for the tradesmen, where the worker bees got to dress up and mingle with the one percent. David hadn’t been invited, but so what? It would be the perfect place to confront the troll: under his own bridge, with all his cronies around him.
The idea spread inside David like spilled wine through a silk tablecloth. He had to do it. It would be a mistake, but he didn’t care anymore. Things couldn’t get any worse.
As usual, it was David’s optimism that was his undoing. Because things can always get worse, much worse; and you never know exactly where the bottom is, until you hit it.
Chapter Fourteen
Secrets
Cindy Henderson didn’t want to go to the Lomax party. She hated parties in general, with their pointless social requirements. You had to smile at people you disliked and make conversation with bores. Invariably you would run into someone whom you’d been successfully avoiding for weeks. And of course, after fifteen minutes of small talk, you’d wind up inviting them over for dinner, or planning a two-family vacation, backpacking in Zion National Park—anything to end the conversation. It would be funny, if it were happening to someone else.
Mike had suggested she stay near, to use him as a human shield. It sounded good, but then she would be exposed to the supernaturally tedious conversation of his tradesmen friends. Who bid what on which job, how many board feet of lumber someone got how much cheaper in Vermont, which builder was struggling with the HDC over the pitch of his roof; which plumbers cleaned up after themselves. It was better to just stay home.
For once, Mike didn’t seem to mind. “Don’t bother,” he’d said that morning at breakfast. “I’m not going to stay long. The last thing I want to do is spend more time in that mausoleum.”
“Are you sure?”
“Don’t worry about it. Take the night off.”
He was so accommodating and thoughtful, she became instantly suspicious. Did he not want her there for some reason? Was there someone he was afraid to have her meet? He had spoken so quickly, jumping right in after her comment, as if it was rehearsed. Over-rehearsed, actually: he needed to take a beat, relax and at least appear to consider what Cindy had said, before starting his prepared remarks.
“I think I will go after all.” She carried her coffee cup to the sink. “I got a new dress from the J. Jill catalogue and I’ve bee
n wanting to wear it someplace.”
“Are you sure? Because it’s really—”
“I’m positive, Mike. This will be fun.”
He shrugged. “Great. Just let me know when you want to leave and we’re out of there.”
She kissed him on his way out the door, and held him for an extra second or two, to show that everything was fine between them, precisely because it wasn’t. He sensed something off-kilter in the gesture.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Fine,” she said. “Go to work.”
She kissed him again and pushed him out the door. She was sure he had secrets; but she had her secrets, too. She wondered if there were any marriages without them, where everyone told the truth and had nothing to hide. Maybe that was what the storybooks meant by “happily ever after.” Or maybe happy was just an average, drawn between the rages and the joy, the sum of the constant struggle to stay close when everything inside and outside you seemed to be pulling you apart.
It was so much easier to lie.
It was comfortable to have a little private place for yourself, like a daybed where you could snuggle under a quilt for an afternoon nap. Like the fact of her pregnancy. Until she told Mike about it, or started to show, the baby was hers and hers alone. She could feel and do about it precisely what she wanted, without having to consult anyone, without taking anyone else’s feelings or advice or demands into account. It was none of anyone else’s business right now, not even Mike’s.
But there were other things she was happy to keep private. The principal one was named Mark Toland.
When they were seniors in high school, he had swept her up into a brief affair and then casually dumped her. Two years later, he had come to visit her at college, to apologize and win her back. But she had been seeing someone else. The other boy had walked in on them. He’d heard all her one-sided stories about Mark, and instantly recognized the gloating sexual predator she had described in her acid post-coital monologues. There had been a brief shoving match, but Mark was no fighter. His parting words were “Keep your alpha dog on the leash. Before he bites someone and they put him to sleep.”
She had written to Mark occasionally, after that. She felt bad about the way she had described him to the now-defunct boyfriend. She had left out a few essential items: his brilliance and talent, his wit, and energy. And his heavy-lidded, dark-haired good looks. He was tall, with the lean muscles of the Olympic swimmer he had almost become. Of course, the boyfriend had noticed that part. And Mark was rich. He came from six generations of family money; they had begun as cotton and lumber brokers for paper companies. Now they were the single largest manufacturer of notebooks and loose-leaf paper in the world. Mark’s older brother Alex was doing most of the grunt work running the business and Mark was free to take his huge trust fund and do whatever he pleased.
As it turned out, what pleased him was making movies. After putting in five years of work and hustle in Los Angeles, he was finally doing it. His family frowned on the business from a distance, but didn’t interfere. As they saw it, if he chose to do contemptible cheesy things like flattering scoundrels, compromising his integrity, and—worst of all—spending his capital pursuing an odious fantasy, it was all right with them. As long as he didn’t come back after he had burned through his inheritance, looking for handouts.
It was a workable truce.
And now he was going to have the satisfaction of rubbing their aristocratic noses in his implausible success. He had been gloating about that on the phone a few days ago. They had been chatting for several weeks, since he was back East scouting locations for his first feature film, and a mutual friend had given him Cindy’s number. He always called her at the store now, so the only interruptions were from customers—rich ladies with rich husbands, buying party dresses with corporate credit cards, comparing Mevlana handbags from the sale rack, laughing together. Maybe money did buy happiness. Maybe it really was that simple. You could certainly lease something pretty close to it. These women were certainly enjoying themselves. They didn’t need to flirt with old boyfriends on the telephone
Still, the only thing Cindy enjoyed now was a phone call from Mark Toland. The mornings when she didn’t hear from him seemed poisonously drab; grim stretches of time like Selectmen’s meetings or the eight-hour childhood ferry trips when the harbor was frozen.
“Listen, I’m in New York for two weeks,” he had said suddenly, the other day. “Come down here. We can see each other and neither of us will have to say a word.”
The boldness of the invitation shocked her. “I couldn’t.”
“Sure you could. It’s easy. You show your ID at the ticket counter and they look up the round-trip ticket I’m going to buy you. Then you get on the plane, eat peanuts, and read. Next thing you know, you’re here.”
“No, Mike would never…I mean, I don’t know what I could possibly tell him, that would—”
“You have family in the city. Say you’re visiting them. Hell—visit them. It won’t even be a lie.”
“I have to think about it.”
“Okay, but you can always think of fifty good reasons not to do anything if you think about it long enough.”
Then they had hung up and she hadn’t heard from him since.
The conversation seemed a little crazy to her now. She hadn’t actually seen Mark since the afternoon he had shown up at her dorm room, all those years ago. She had no business flirting with him over the telephone at this late date. Even daydreaming about meeting him in New York made her feel sleazy and cheap. She had really only let it start because she felt Mike was hiding something from her, which probably wasn’t even true in the first place.
She was married, she was six weeks pregnant, and she was going to a fabulous party with her handsome husband in a killer backless silk dress that would get everyone talking about her the way she wanted them to. She crumpled up the slip of paper with Mark Toland’s numbers, threw it away and started running herself a bath.
It was like her mother always said: “Life is good if you let it be.”
Chapter Fifteen
The Pen
The Lomax house, surrounded by miles of winter darkness and standing alone on its snow-smothered acres, light blazing from every one of its one hundred and twenty-six windows, looked like a luxury ocean liner icebound in the Bering Strait. I had a brief vision of it tilting up vertical and sinking without a trace—then we were pulling into the crumbled snow piled in the wake of the plow. There were cars parked on both sides of Eel Point Road.
We trudged to the house, me steadying Fiona by the elbow, climbed the frost-slick front stairs pushed inside. I was irritated, my feet were soaked through, I had skidded my car into two walls of banked filthy snow on the way to the house. As far as I was concerned, people who talked about a “winter wonderland of white” had to be doing it from a bungalow in the Florida Keys. They never discussed the sheer bulk of the stuff, or the malign stamina with which it kept coming, burying your car over and over again and shrinking the world. Everything bulged white, every tree branch and fencepost and mailbox; and the world crowded in on you. It was like living in a one of those gift shop paperweights, trapped in a little glass bubble, waiting for someone to shake up the next blizzard.
Fiona had little patience for my complaints. She loved the winter, especially a night like this one when the cold was so pure. No wind, no snow falling, no distractions; just the dense, intoxicating icy air, like Vodka straight out of the freezer.
The party was already busy and the music was loud. I immediately caught sight of my ex-wife Miranda, on the arm of a real estate broker, Joe Arbogast. I left Fiona admiring the Lomax silver collection and eased my way through the chattering crowd to Miranda.
We all said hello and Joe went off looking for another round of champagne.
“Henry, hi,” Miranda said. “We were just saying, if you come over Chr
istmas morning, you can take the kids for lunch. Joe wants to come over and—you know.”
I shrugged. “Sounds good. They’re looking forward to Tortola.”
“I got the beach house again. Everyone at school’s going to hate them. They’ll be brown as berries.”
We stood quietly, listening to snippets of other people’s conversations. Nathan Parrish’s wife saying “You can’t buy people,” and Nathan answering: “On the contrary, Darling. It’s easy to buy people. Selling them is the hard part. They depreciate faster than a Ford Explorer.”
I could hear Lomax from across the room: “People come here because they can’t make it anywhere else. It’s been that way for a thousand years. The Indians who came here couldn’t string their wampum straight. I went into one of these bookstores the other day, during Christmas Stroll. And I wanted to buy the big book of the season, the new Grisham. They told me it was in—they had it in the basement. But they hadn’t brought it upstairs yet. Our biggest retail day of the year, and they keep the new John Grisham novel in the basement because they’re too lazy to unpack it. Try getting away with that at Barnes & Noble. You’d be out on your ass in a heartbeat. But that’s Nantucket for you. That says it all.”
I turned back to Miranda. “So you’re still with Joe.”
“He wants to marry me.”
“That was quick.”
“Quick is good. Even in police work. You told me that. Most crimes are solved in the first week, or they don’t get solved at all.”
“I don’t know, Miranda. You’re in the first blush of a love affair and you’re already comparing it to a murder investigation.”
Fiona drifted over as Joe returned with two flutes of champagne.
Miranda took her glass and nodded. “Hello, Fiona.”
“I like your hair.”
“I just had it cut. For the benefit of my women friends. Men never notice anything.”
I put up my hands. “Not my job anymore.”
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