The thought struck me—I felt it in my chest, as if I’d run over a rabbit in the road. I pulled over onto the dead grass between the bike path and the street.
Where was the porringer? Where was it?
It hadn’t been listed in the insurance inventory, but that made sense. That list had to have been compiled before the auction. But I didn’t recall it on the stolen property sheet for the robbery, either. Nothing had been reported stolen but some big pieces of furniture. I’d double check it but I was pretty sure. Was the porringer in the Sun Island locker? I hadn’t seen it, but I hadn’t been looking for it, either.
I did a U-turn and headed out to the storage facility.
A sparse, icy snow had started falling. I put on the windshield wipers. I took a quick right onto the boulevard and drove the back roads through the sprawling tree-screened subdivisions west of the airport. There was never much traffic on Lover’s Lane or Skyline Drive and for some reason I wanted to be seen by as few people as possible.
Sun Island Storage was off Nobadeer Farm Road, a bleak airport tributary far from Nobadeer beach, with no farm in sight anywhere. Instead there was a scattering of commerce: an automobile repair shop, a car parts store, retail warehouses, and contractor’s offices, a lot of new construction and raw shingles. Sun Island itself was a big building with loading bays and offices, standing above a fenced plot of the prefab storage spaces. I found the alley between rows three and four, parked and got out.
It was colder here and the lines of corrugated steel bunkers channeled the wind. Ed Delavane’s space was open, sealed with a strip of yellow police tape. I ducked under it into the musty jumble of old furniture. I found the light switch and fluorescents cut the gloom. The piles of antiques were daunting, like the improvised barricades that blocked the streets of Paris during the French Revolution. I spent two hours sorting through the chairs and desks and highboys and end tables, the chests of drawers and footstools and headboards. I found paintings and bookends and lightship baskets and sets of antique silver in brass-bound boxes. I found Tiffany lamps, ivory-topped canes, commemorative teacups, candlesticks, and wood-trimmed telescopes.
But no porringer.
I leaned against a dresser with a hinged mirror. It started to tip over. For a second I thought the whole teetering jagged mass was going to collapse in an avalanche of cherry wood and rusting casters. There were some ominous creaking noises, but after a few seconds it stabilized. The storage space smelled like old houses and the icy snow beyond the big bay door made it feel almost cozy. I stood quietly, thinking back, trying to remember if Lomax had actually bought the porringer. I had been angry that afternoon. The details of some stranger’s bidding transaction wouldn’t necessarily have registered on me. Someone else could have made the highest offer. That would be the simple answer, and simple answers were often the right ones. I needed to check Osona’s records. I glanced at my watch. It was a little before two in the afternoon, and Osona’s office was just down the street.
Five minutes later, I was upstairs in the auctioneer’s office, going through the receipts. It didn’t take long. I knew the date. And Osona remembered the sale; he rarely forgot one. A copy of the invoice was stapled to the sheet:
Item #224. hammered silver porringer, circa 1840. Some tarnishing, small dent in the handle. Makers mark on bottom. Sold to Preston Lomax, 89 Eel Point Road. Final sale price, $5,000, plus twenty percent tax, total of $6,000.
Osona was leaning over my shoulder. “Anything else I can do for you, Chief?”
I almost asked for a copy, but thought better of it. There would be time enough for that later, if it turned out to be necessary.
“No, I’m fine,” I said. “Thanks.”
“If you think of anything, just let me know. I’m always glad to help.”
“I appreciate that.”
We shook hands and I left. The office was overheated; it was good to get outside. I stood by my cruiser for a few seconds, feeling the icy speckle of snow on my face. I was thinking about the rearranged silver cupboard in the Lomax foyer. Someone with a good eye and a light touch had pulled off that piece of work. There was an obvious suspect. Fiona’s crew had been cleaning the day before the party, I recalled from the depositions.
She was home when I got there.
“Is everything all right, Henry?” she said when she saw my face.
“I’m not sure,” I said, walking past her. “Give me a second.”
She was cooking something good; the house smelled of braised meat and red wine. The porringer was still on the living room end-table, though no one was using it for an ash tray this afternoon. The handle was dented, just as the bill of sale specified. Fiona came up behind me. I felt her hand moving up and down my back. She did it to relax me, but I needed to stay tense now. I pulled in a tight breath.
“What is it, Henry?”
“Tell me what happened. I need to know the truth.”
“What happened?”
I turned. “Fiona. Don’t do this. You stole the porringer from Lomax. I need you to tell me exactly how and when you did that.”
“Are you going to arrest me?”
“No. I don’t know. Probably not. It depends. First, tell me what happened. What did you do? And when did you do it?”
“Not why?”
“I know why.” I picked up the porringer and turned it over. The tiny TD mark was sunk into the bottom of the bowl. I lifted it a little. “Thomas Donovan.”
She smiled. “Himself.”
“So?”
“So, I took it on the last day we were cleaning the house.”
“You didn’t think anyone would notice?”
“I was going to replace it with another one, nowhere nearly as valuable. And I didn’t think anyone would see the difference, no.”
“So why didn’t you do it?”
“It was foolish. I was procrastinating. I couldn’t decide which one to part with. I finally did decide, though. There was one Nathan Parrish gave me, a lathe-turned bowl from much later. I knew we were coming in on Monday to clean up after the weekend. And with everyone hung-over from the party, I assumed I was safe. I would have been, too. It was a quick switch and they’re a great lot of ignorant swine.”
I took a breath and set the porringer down on the table. “I’ll tell you what,” I said. “When are you supposed to be cleaning the Lomax house next?”
“Mrs. Lomax wants me in there before Christmas. I think they’re putting the house up for sale and the real estate people want it looking perfect.”
“All right. Put the porringer back when you’re there, and we’ll just forget about it.”
“Does it matter which porringer?”
“Yes, it matters.”
“And why would that be?”
“Because I’ll be checking on it. And I know what to look for.”
“You’re a bastard, aren’t you?”
“No, Fiona. I’m a cop.”
“And cops are all the same.”
“Only criminals think that.”
“In Ireland everyone’s a criminal then. Because everyone feels just the same way I do.”
“Right. The Ireland card. Most people hate cops here, too. But there’s nothing holy and virtuous about it. It’s not a religious war. They’re just cheaters and liars who don’t like to get caught.”
We stared at each other.
“Take care of this, Fiona. I have to go.”
The snow had tapered to the occasional flake, spinning on the wind, as I walked to the car. Growing up in California I had always assumed that snow came in big blizzard slabs of city-paralyzing white. Snow only made it into the L.A. Times when buses were slewed across New York City streets and people were using cross-country skis to get to work. This stuff annoyed me. It was indecisive weather. I was feeling stymied and defeated. A whiteout woul
d give me an excuse to stay home.
Maybe it was time to admit I was on the wrong track. Viewed from that angle, things were great. We had closed the case—Ed Delavane was going back to jail. My girlfriend had sticky fingers, but she seemed to have learned her lesson. Even Rick Folger was on the right track, and with Jesse Coleman gone, any hint of corruption in my cop shop was scrubbed clean.
I might as well face facts. This was a time to celebrate, not brood.
But I couldn’t help brooding. Miranda would say it was my natural state. Her biggest complaint about me had always been “You think too much.” She might have been right, but the fact remained—I was still missing something. It was right in front of me, like the arrow shaped by the space between letters in the FedEx logo.
I was just looking at it wrong. I decided to go home and read through the crime binder one more time, from page one. The kids were with their mother tonight, they were leaving for Tortola tomorrow morning early. I didn’t expect to hear from Fiona and all my really good friends lived three thousand miles away, so barring some police emergency, I could pretty much count on having a night to myself.
I finished out the day, picked up some drunken noodles with shrimp from Thai House, settled in at home with the food and a beer, watched the news on TV. I even found myself looking at a few minutes of insipid celebrity gossip in the purgatorial half-hour before primetime began. I hadn’t watched any of those programs since my divorce. Miranda had always loved them, though she called them her ‘dumb shows.’ I was startled to realize that I had absolutely no interest in the famous people on screen. Someone was pregnant, someone was in rehab, someone had gotten into a fight. It might as well have been the court report section of some Midwestern newspaper. I turned off the TV and silence settled on the house. The snow was coming down heavily outside, and it seemed to make things quieter. I brewed a pot of coffee, cleared the dining room table, set out the crime binder and all the photographs from Helen Sandler’s benefit party.
I had just started going through the reports on the crime scene and the interviews with neighbors when my landline phone rang. I let the machine pick it up. After the familiar sound of my own voice saying, “This is Henry. If I’m home, I’ll pick up. If I’m out, I’ll be back. If I’m late, I’m on my way. Leave me a message,” I heard a voice say:
“I know what you’re doing. Drop it, if you want your family to stay healthy.”
I pushed my chair back and leapt across the room, grabbed the receiver. There was nothing to hear but a dial tone.
Chapter Thirty-two
The Missing Piece
I was sitting in the snow between Miranda’s house and Polpis harbor, on a waterproof sheet with my back to a pine tree. The wind blew steady off the water. After countless Nantucket winters, the spindly trees in this little forest had permanently bent to the south. Clumsily through my heavy gloves, I pushed back the sleeve of my parka and pressed the button on my watch. The face glowed blue: twenty to four.
I exhaled and watched the breath steam away from my face in the moonlight. The coffee in my thermos had run out two hours ago. Miranda’s lights were out and nothing moved in the woods. They were catching an early flight to Boston. They’d be gone for the whole Christmas vacation which meant spending the holiday alone. We’d have another celebration when they got back. I’d gotten Billy Delevane to build Caroline a gorgeous dollhouse, complete with dormer window and strip oak floors. This might be the last Christmas when there was any chance of her still believing in Santa Claus and I wanted to keep the myth alive for as long as I could. The gorgeous inexplicable dollhouse would help. For Tim I had bought a new iPod, loaded with all the music my father had loved and passed on to me: The Beatles, early Dylan, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Jackson Browne. Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, and, Paul Simon. Laurie Anderson, Talking Heads and The Mountain Goats could wait for another season. I knew he’d have no problem believing the music came from the North Pole. Elves didn’t make electronic equipment, but everyone else outsourced their manufacturing jobs—why not Santa?
I checked my watch again. Another two or three hours and it would be over. I could make it. I was dressed warmly and it wouldn’t even be that cold if the wind let up. I felt the comforting weight of the Glock nine-millimeter in my coat pocket. There was something absurd about packing heat in this Christmas card town. But someone had conspired to commit murder here, and whoever it was had just threatened my family.
Lots of bad things had happened to me in Los Angeles: I’d been punched and sideswiped and shot at. But never anything like this. Big city cops were anonymous. I’d felt like a faceless cipher so often back then, just a threat behind a badge. I’d hated that, but it was starting to look pretty good around about now. You might take your work home with you sometimes; but it didn’t show up at the door uninvited. It didn’t stalk you.
I shrugged. Nostalgia was funny. I even missed my wife sometimes. I had thought about calling Miranda and warning her, but decided against it. She would have laughed it off and dismissed me, either as paranoid, “We’re not in L.A. anymore, Henry,” or as manipulative, an excuse to sneak back into her life.
The wind picked up, sending a whirling cloud of snow against my face. I tucked my head into the hood of my parka. I might have actually succeeded in scaring Miranda, but that would have been even worse. Caroline seemed to absorb through the pores of her skin any emotion her mother felt. The fumes of ordinary bitterness and anger were bad enough. I didn’t want a smog-alert of gratuitous panic to wreck their vacation. No, this was better: a quiet vigil that affected no one but me. I had left the crime binder open on my dining room table and I was longing to get back to it. But that was all right. A little extra distance might help me focus.
I glanced at the house again and turned away from the wind. There was no change. I could imagine them all: Miranda, lying at the very edge of the bed on her right side, with her neck-support pillow and the Lanz flannel nightgown she’d been wearing since high school. Tim would be thrashing and snoring and talking in his sleep (“Americanos!” he had said in a weird Mexican accent one night recently. “Always bring gifts! Shirts.”) Caroline would be surrounded by her stuffed animals, the Gund monkey and the Steiff lion were her long-standing favorites, probably wearing the Coldplay t-shirt I had paid thirty dollars for at the Fleet Center at Thanksgiving. And heavy wool socks. Her feet froze no matter how many quilts and comforters she had on the bed. Miranda kept the heat low. She said it was for political reasons, but I knew she was just cheap.
My mind wandered. It occurred to me suddenly, as if for the first time, that my father was dead. Despite my own best efforts at Kathleen Lomax’s denial technique, the treacherous thought kept slipping up behind me. It was always a chilly surprise. It gave me the same queasy sense of imbalance each time: one of the great cables attaching me to the Earth had been cut and I was swaying dangerously in the wind, like these trees.
I had no unresolved issues to torment me, I just missed my dad. One of his friends had said to me at the memorial service, “No one’s going to call me ‘dear boy’ anymore.” I could only nod. David Kennis had been a Hollywood screenwriter of the Old School, but he never took it very seriously and was delighted with his son’s choice of career. “Well, what do you know? Someone in this family is finally going to have a real job,” he had remarked on the day when I graduated from the academy.
Details of police procedure had intrigued him and he had enjoyed knowing the inside scoop on various high profile crimes. He had edited the crime novel that got me fired, trimming it into a lean if somewhat generic action piece. “You’re writing a thriller,” he had explained breezily when he handed back the much-thinner manuscript. “I took out everything that wasn’t thrilling. But don’t feel bad. I could cut a minute-thirty out of the Book of Genesis if I really had to.”
Dad had always wanted to go on a stakeout. I could never convince him of how boring they were. L
APD policy forbade ride-alongs in any case. But I set the policy at the Nantucket PD and it would have been good having Dad here with me tonight. The cold would have gotten to the old man, but his ghost didn’t care.
So I sat with that spirit and the spirits of all the Indians who had hunted here and all the other lives I could have chosen and didn’t, and I was just starting to doze off when I heard a sound from the bushes on the other side of the house.
I sat up, fully awake, listening.
I heard it again: a rustle of low branches. Whoever it was must have parked near Wauwinet Road and cut through people’s back yards, skirting the harbor, using the woods as cover.
I struggled to my feet, stiff and cramped. My heart was pounding, fear and anger and outrage clenching in my chest. They were really doing it. Some hired thugs from Boston or Fall River were closing in on my family, deciding whether to go in through a window or a door, maybe checking their picking tools. That would really mark them as off-islanders. Miranda had never locked her house and didn’t even own a key. One turn of the knob and these goons could be inside, cocking their weapons, choosing who to take out first.
I crouched low and sprinted through the trees. I couldn’t stuff my bulky gloves into my coat pocket. I pulled them off as I ran, my feet thudding softly in the untouched snow. I had the Glock in my hand when I reached the side of the house. I stood with my back to the shingles, my mouth held open, breathing quietly, giving the air the widest channel I could.
I listened, my whole body flexed in the effort. I heard the wind rasping against the snow, nudging the high branches. A solitary car passed on Polpis Road. But there was nothing from the other side of the house. I edged my way toward the corner, straining for a single unnatural sound.
Nothing.
They must have heard me. That meant they were waiting, too, guns out, leveled at the spot where they expected me to appear. I checked the safety on the Glock and brought it up to my chest, clutched in both hands. I was outnumbered. One or two of them were probably moving around the house right now, to take me from behind in a flank attack. Whatever tiny advantage I had, I was about to lose it.
Nantucket Sawbuck Page 27