“I’m sorry, really I am,” she said. “It’s just that I—I can’t do it.” But since the bargain hunters were too busy venting to one another to listen, she slipped back inside and bolted the door behind her. Then she took her coffee and her malasada and went out onto the back stoop to be alone with her bay. She’d been avoiding fatty indulgences since she first learned she was pregnant, but this was an exception. The malasada might score poorly nutrition-wise, but it was desperately needed food for her soul. Just like the chilly breeze that rose from the water, and the sight of the boats spackled with salt and barnacles bobbing near the wharf.
A half-hour later she tentatively went inside and peered out the front window. The porch, the yard, and the street were empty, and for a minute Hallie missed the horde of intruders she had sent away. Without them, she was left alone with the decision that would enrage many people she hardly knew, and hugely disappoint the most important person in her life.
Sam had been calling all morning. But instead of answering her cell, she had switched it off. Before she could explain what she’d done, she needed to understand it herself.
When she got home from the lawyer’s office, she paused briefly at the foot of the stairs, before marching up to the room she’d been avoiding since she first came home. Nick’s bed was casually made and lumpy, as if some secret vestige of himself might still be hiding under the covers. Beside the bed a mountain of books teetered with a photo of Liz Cooper set on top. Nick’s personal summit.
Lying down on the bed, Hallie spread her arms like wings and realized she had never felt more safe anywhere else. This was where she’d come when she’d woken from a nightmare; and there had never been a dark vision Nick couldn’t quell. It’s not real, he would say decisively. Then he’d let her lie in the crook of his arm. “This,” he’d say. This is real, Pie. Now tell me—is there anything to fear? Hallie always believed that the fearlessness that was both her greatest strength and her most dangerous weakness had begun here. She turned on her side and found shelter in her father’s room one more time. Within minutes, she was asleep.
Her rest was disrupted several times by pounding at the door, and by still louder voices at the open window. She didn’t answer any of them. Not even when she heard Felicia’s throaty voice: “Hallie, honey? Come on, I know you’re in there.”
Or when Aunt Del beat her cane distinctively on the window, and growled, “Hallie Costa! What’ve you gone and done now, girl?” But despite her words, there was no mistaking the triumph in her voice. Aunt Del had been trying to dissuade her from selling the house ever since she first heard that Cindy Roderick had put up a sign outside her office. Hallie knew she owed both Felicia and Aunt Del an explanation—not to mention her husband. But not sure what it was, she pressed her eyes closed and willed herself back to oblivion.
When she woke up, she was disappointed to find herself still trapped in the light of the same day. But even before she headed downstairs to choose between the uneaten half of her malasada and last night’s cold pizza, she thought about her phone. Though she’d turned it off, she could practically feel it pulsing beside her. She wondered how many times Sam had called—and how long she could possibly avoid telling him about her impulsive decision.
A minute later the intense desire for an eggplant grinder with fresh mozzarella overcame nearly everything else. She waited till just before closing time when the streets were likely to be quiet before she slipped out. By then, she was sure the news had spread through town: Hallie Costa had canceled the sale of Thorne House.
She covered her hair with a hood and took a circuitous route to the market on Bradford Street. After she’d finished her perfect eggplant sandwich, she made her way up to the roof clutching her phone and what was left of her apple juice. By then it was nearly eleven and Sam was probably ready to call the Provincetown Police Department and request a safety check. She flipped the phone open, intending to call home, but instead found herself dialing Neil’s cell. It was the same number he’d had for years, in spite of several moves.
He greeted her with the same upbeat, expectant hello he’d had as a teenager, but he couldn’t maintain the optimistic tone for long. Hallie wasn’t sure whether it was the trial or his stagnant acting career that had changed him, but something was clearly missing. She recalled the deterioration Lunes had described: failing to show up for rehearsals, losing parts, drinking excessively.
“You’re in Provincetown?” he said after she had told him her location. “Hal, that roof was a hazard twenty years ago. Do you really think you should be up there?”
“It’s safe,” Hallie said, remembering the feeling she’d had in her father’s room. That, not mugs or telescopes, or even this house, was her real legacy. Hers and Lizzie’s.
Despite her ambivalence, there was so much she wanted to tell Neil. About the grinder she’d had at Georgie’s, and the golden light she woke up to that morning, and why she couldn’t sell the house. She wanted to tell her story in narrowing loops, the way she and Gus and Neil had as teenagers until they eventually converged on the truth.
“It’s not just the physical dangers I’m thinking about. That was your special place, yours and Gus’s, wasn’t it? You’re probably up there reliving everything.”
The whole town was our special place, but I have a new life now, Hallie wanted to say, but something in Neil’s voice stopped her. There was a loneliness there, a longing that he only revealed when he’d had a drink or two. It filled her with sorrow and made her eager to get off the phone. She tried not to think about why none of his relationships ever worked out.
“Anyway, I shouldn’t be bothering you. It’s just being here . . . well, I guess I was feeling nostalgic,” Hallie said. “I probably should let you go, and I need to call Sam.”
“I get that feeling all the time, and I’m not even in Ptown,” Neil said, ignoring the mention of Sam.
The wind had turned cold as Hallie stood there clutching her little phone, and she was shivering as she said goodbye. By the time she hung up, she regretted calling. Neil tried to keep in touch, but they’d only spoken once since the trial—when he called to say he was moving to Chicago. She was about to dial Sam when she heard the front door open and close.
She went to the hatchway and yelled in the direction of the stairs. “Hello?” There was no response. Clinging to both cell phone and flashlight, she descended the ladder to the attic cautiously—unsure if she should make the intruder aware of her presence or not.
But the tread hardly sounded like that of a burglar, or anyone who meant her harm. Instead, it recalled a tired man coming in from work. Hallie heard the refrigerator door opening and closing, followed by the sound of someone rattling through the junk drawer as if they were searching for something. The noises were so familiar that, for one crazy minute, she thought it might be Nick.
The footsteps echoed up the stairs toward the second floor.
“Hello?” Hallie repeated, resting her hand protectively against her abdomen. “Who the hell is in my house?”
Chapter 24
The only answer was a slow but determined creak of the stairs. Hallie was looking around the attic, searching for hiding places when she spotted the life-size painting propped in the corner. Wolf, who’d always considered it a failure, had faced it toward the wall. The intruder paused on the second-floor landing. Hallie held herself taut, thinking that he—and she was sure it was a he by the weight of his footsteps—must have been lured to the house by the paintings, which had been advertised in the paper.
She scanned the room, wishing her father or Wolf had kept a gun. She imagined herself bursting forth to defend Wolf’s work, the impassioned swirls and furious dashes of color that would be all her daughter would ever know of her paternal grandfather. But there was no gun, and if there had been, Hallie wouldn’t have known how to use it.
She was startled when the narrow door to the attic staircase opened and the visitor continued to climb to the top floor. The only exit was by the roof, and
even the rusted iron ladder that Gus had ascended the first time they kissed was long gone. Heart banging against her ribs, she slipped behind the painting and made herself as still and small as possible.
The intruder strode to the middle of the room and then pulled a string, casting the chaotic space into sharp relief with a hundred-watt bulb. Hallie waited for his next move, but there was none. No movement. No words. Not even the clearing of a throat. The only sound Hallie heard was the low whisper of her unwanted visitor’s breathing. What kind of burglar broke into a house and made his way up three flights of stairs, only to stop dead in the middle of the attic?
Hallie’s first thought was that it might be the annoying Lunes Oliveira, come back to torment her one more time. Or maybe it was one of the thwarted early birds, returning to take revenge on a seller who had denied them the pleasure of sifting through her father’s things. Both possibilities infuriated her so much that they banished her fear.
She poked her head cautiously out from behind the painting and found herself staring directly into a familiar pair of gray eyes darkened by indignation.
“Sam? What the hell?” she said, clutching her chest as she stepped forward. “You just about scared me to death. Why didn’t you answer?” She attempted a relieved laugh but was cut short by her husband’s implacable stillness.
“You should be scared,” he said, indicating the door he had entered with the flat of his hand. “Jesus, Hallie. Anyone could have walked in and cornered you up here. I can’t believe you didn’t even lock the door.”
“What are you doing on the Cape?” Hallie shot back guiltily. “Don’t you have an eight-o’clock class in the morning?”
Sam continued to glare at her. “You know exactly what I’m doing here. I called you at least fifty times today—and that was before you turned off the phone.”
“So you drove all the way . . . Oh, God, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. There’s no excuse, but coming home was a lot harder than I expected,” Hallie said. “I just . . . I needed some time to process—”
“And you couldn’t have picked up the phone? Am I such an insensitive prick that you couldn’t talk to me about it?”
“Of course not, but—”
“But shit. If you didn’t want to talk to me directly, you could have at least left a message. Let me know you were safe.”
“I thought of that, but it felt like the coward’s way out,” Hallie said weakly.
“And not responding to my calls at all—that’s your idea of courage?”
Hallie sunk down onto one of her mother’s old boxes. “I was trying to figure out how I was going to explain what I’d done. I canceled the estate sale this morning, Sam.”
“That’s the least of what you did.”
“You know about the house! But how—?”
“I called the attorney this afternoon.”
“And he told you? Isn’t there such a thing as client confidentiality anymore?”
“I’m your husband, Hallie. Or did you forget that once you crossed the town line? Williams assumed I knew.”
“I know we agreed to sell the house, Sam. But when I saw that crowd swoop in to pick Nick’s bones this morning, I just couldn’t go through with it. I know it’s crazy, but this place, his outdated medical books, the mug he drank his coffee from—they’re all I have left of him.”
Sam turned off the light, allowing the moon to outline them as he pulled up a box beside her. “Not true,” he said more gently. He placed his broad flat palm over her chest and kept it there. “Not true.”
Hallie covered his hand with her own. “I’m sorry,” she repeated.
“I know you are.” Sam smiled for the first time since he’d arrived. “And I’m sorry, too. I didn’t realize how much I scared you when I came in till I saw your face. I was just so pissed, so goddamn frantic . . .”
Hallie nodded. “I love you.” She leaned forward to hug him, and as she did, she saw a rectangle of dusky sky. Apparently she’d left the door leading to the roof unlatched and it had swung open.
“The wind must have blown that door open,” she said. “Maybe before you leave, you can nail it shut.”
Hallie met the only man who’d interested her in years in the most unlikely of circumstances: at the reading of a will. Wolf’s will, to be exact. It was two months after Nick had taken the grim hike out to the painter’s shack and discovered his body that Nick and Hallie were summoned to the office of an attorney named Warren Kennett.
When she received the letter informing her that she had been named a beneficiary, Hallie was a first-year medical resident living in Boston’s Mission Hill. She traced Wolf’s real name with her fingers as she recited it out loud several times to her roommate, Abby.
“John Samson Maddox. I thought I knew him so well. I even used to tell people he was my uncle, and I never even knew his name,” Hallie said, thinking of the hours she’d spent watching him work, thrilled as the vibrant splashes of color that at first seemed arbitrary and unrelated gradually recreated what she and Gus called the beach at the end of the world.
The attorney’s office was a room of mahogany and glass, with Persian rugs and traditional paintings on the walls. Hallie’s first thought was how much Wolf would have hated it.
Warren Kennett shook Nick’s hand, and nodded toward Hallie in a way she thought condescending. Though she only had two hours off from the hospital, she was wearing a short black skirt and an oversized sweater borrowed from the more fashionable Abby, with her own favorite plum-colored boots. She’d even taken the trouble to blow her hair straight. Now she wished she had shown up in her scrubs.
It was only then that she noticed the man who was already there. He rose politely.
“Sam Maddox,” he said, extending his hand before Kennett had a chance to introduce him. “Your friend Wolf’s son.”
“Wolf’s son?” Hallie and Nick blurted out simultaneously.
“But Wolf didn’t . . . I mean he couldn’t have—” Hallie stammered. “He didn’t even believe in involvements.” But as she spoke, she thought of the vague rumors she and Nick had never believed.
“Hallie!” her father muttered under his breath. She wasn’t sure if he was correcting her for her bluntness or the inappropriate length of her stare.
Hallie blushed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . . it’s just—well, all these years—”
“No need to apologize,” the son said graciously. “I’m well aware of my father’s aversion to human relationships. I hadn’t seen him since I was five.”
If that troubled him, he gave no sign of it. Hallie immediately decided that the man couldn’t possibly be related to Wolf. He was as self-contained and formal as Wolf was gruff and awkward. Even physically they were opposites. Wolf was tall and gaunt, while his son met her gaze levelly. Everything about him suggested solidity, from his body type to the equanimity of his expression.
Hallie couldn’t help but notice, however, that he had his father’s eyes. The same shade of gray, the same laser-like focus. She wondered if he was trying to escape her stare when he positioned his seat slightly behind them—where he could observe their reactions, but they were not privy to his.
“I don’t mean to rush things,” he said. “But I have some business to take care of while I’m in the city. Do you think we could get started?”
Hallie cast a furtive glance backward, trying to figure out if his voice was calm or just cold.
The will was simple and straightforward. All of Wolf’s financial assets, which included a boring complexity of accounts and stocks, annuities and trusts, went to his son.
“To my friend, Dr. Nicolao Costa of Provincetown, I bequeath the grandfathered lease to dune shack number 11 at Race Point, as well as all of my paintings and sketches, currently located in his home and at the shack.
Nick lowered his head, and Hallie could see that he was moved—not by the gift of the paintings, or even the coveted lease to the shack, but by the fact that Wolf referred to him as h
is friend. The doctor had only been hoping for access to the dune shack. But for years, he had been telling everyone in Provincetown that someday the paintings that hung throughout his house would be famous. Now he could help make that happen.
Hallie and Nick had almost forgotten the man sitting behind them when Sam cleared his throat and rose. He checked the time on his cell phone, apparently unimpressed by what was to Hallie a mind-boggling inheritance. “Excuse me, but if I’m done here, Warren, I’m going to take off.”
“Dr. Costa. Hallie. Nice to meet Wolf’s friends,” Sam added. And then with a polite nod of his head, he was gone.
Nick was obviously ready to leave, too, but Kennett returned to his desk and to the will. “I know you need to get back to the office, Dr. Costa, but there’s one more item to be discussed.” He looked pointedly at Hallie for the first time. “John’s bequest to you, Hallie.”
“But my father got the paintings and the shack,” she said. “What else did Wolf have?”
The lawyer chuckled softly to himself. “If you were listening a moment ago, you’d know that John Maddox had a great deal more than the lease on a barely livable shack and a few paintings of unknown value.”
Hallie waited, expecting Kennett to say that Wolf had willed her his old paint brushes or the marble tablets that she’d watched with fascination as he mixed his colors. But instead, the lawyer returned to the formal language of the document. “To Hallett Costa of Provincetown, Massachusetts, I bequeath the painting entitled Hallie at Race Point, which is currently being stored in the back of Georgie’s store.”
For the third time in an hour, they were shocked into silence. It was Nick who spoke first. “That’s not possible. Wolf never painted anything but seascapes,” he said firmly. “And he certainly never painted my daughter.”
“And why would he hide it in the back of Georgie’s?” Hallie added. “Why not show it to us?”
Again, Kennett smiled. “It seems our friend Wolf kept secrets from all of us, doesn’t it?”
The Orphans of Race Point: A Novel Page 25