He went through the stone pillars, then immediately cut into the thick stand of mature trees and shrubs lining the private road. Before leaving, he’d studied the area on Google maps, saw how the road curved around on itself like a giant question mark with a turning circle at the end. By cutting through the trees he would arrive at the back of the house at the end of the road—the Bloodwell residence.
He made his way through the trees, stopped at the edge of the lawn leading up to the mansion. Immediately on his left there was a stone summer house bigger than his apartment. From there a flight of steps ran up to the terrace at the back of the main wing of the house. He ignored them, cut across the lawn instead, keeping to the deeper darkness in the shadow of the trees even though no light spilled out from any of the windows.
At the end of the lawn there was a large ornamental pond surrounded on three sides by the house. Beyond that there were a pair of patio doors leading into the only lighted room at the back of the whole building. He crept around the pond, stood off to the side of the doors, back to the wall. Waited. Listened. The sound of a radio or TV turned down low came to him through the glass. He risked a fast glance inside.
A man was seated at a table watching a movie on a laptop, a cup of coffee and an ashtray beside it. Evan recognized him. There had been four men involved in the original attack on Bella in the Jerusalem Tavern. The two who started the fight as a diversion, the man with the knife, and the fake Detective O’Brien who claimed he’d been watching from further along the bar. The man in the room was the one who’d started the fight.
A number of things went through his mind. It proved beyond doubt that Bloodwell was behind the attack. That was a relief of sorts. It retrospectively justified his presence creeping around in the dark behind the man’s house, his agreeing to do as Blair had asked. He was thankful that it wasn’t the fake detective or the man with the knife, both of whom he’d already attacked once before in the diner. And it suited his purposes down to the ground that the house was so big that the man on guard duty didn’t need to use headphones for fear of disturbing his slumbering employer.
He pressed his back to the wall again, looked around, saw what he wanted. Then he waited another ten minutes. Long enough for a second man patroling the house or taking a leak to get back. No second man appeared.
Satisfied, he retrieved a long-handled pond net from where it stood propped up in the corner. He laid it on the ground in front of the patio doors. At each corner of the pond there was a stone statue of a water nymph balanced on the low wall surrounding the pond. Not to his taste at all. Far too ostentatious. But useful, just the same. The nearest one was only a few yards away. He stood behind it, put both hands on its back, pushed gently. The base rocked, lifted an inch. It was heavy enough that it hadn’t been permanently fixed to the wall.
He gave it a hard shove. It toppled into the water with a loud splash. He let out a surprised yelp as it hit the water, loud enough to be heard in the nearest room but no further, already moving back towards the patio doors. He grabbed the net handle as the doors flew open, brought it up sharply into the guy’s legs as he ran out. His arms windmilled, trying to keep his balance. Then Evan was on him like a real-life mythical creature, two hundred pounds of malevolent goblin come to life, landing on the guy’s back as he staggered forwards.
He kicked his legs out from under him, pushed him down. The guy hit the low wall with his gut, Evan on top of him. The air punched out of his lungs and mouth, a grunt squeezed out with it. He tried to suck it back in. Too late, his head was already underwater. Evan leaned all his weight on the guy as he bucked and thrashed, fingers in his hair, shoving his head deeper into the water. Pulled his head out for a split second. Then back under again. Held him for longer this time, the struggles growing weaker. Yanked him out a second time. Hit him with fake O’Brien’s sap as he coughed and spewed and sucked air, knocked him senseless. Laid him face down on the ground, pushed hard on his back with the heels of both hands. A lungful of pond water squirted out. Good enough. And more than the guy would’ve done for him.
He climbed off him. Cocked his ear. Nothing. No sounds from inside the house. No lights flicking on upstairs. He dragged the guy’s limp body back into the room, bumped his face up the sill as he went, made something bleed, didn’t care what. Left him lying in the middle of the floor, blood smeared across the tiles. He pulled out his phone, took a picture to add to his collection. Except this one wasn’t his idea. Blair had insisted.
Then he got the hell out.
Message delivered.
13
Blair was nowhere in sight the next morning when he wandered downstairs, just a message to say that she’d catch up with him later. He ate breakfast in the kitchen with Leon and afterwards Leon drove him to the hospital in the Bentley.
‘Successful night?’ Leon asked.
‘Yeah. At least I think so. I did what Blair wanted me to do. It was very satisfying, hearing the guy going glug, glug, glug as I held him under.’
‘I’ll bet. But she didn’t want you going into the house to find Bloodwell? Get a bit more satisfaction?’
He shook his head.
‘Nope. Something tells me she wants to keep that for herself. Any idea where she is this morning?’
‘Uh-uh. I heard her talking on the phone to Merritt. I’ve got no idea where she went after that. They don’t always keep me in the loop.’
He felt something coming together in the background. She was talking to Merritt a lot. She’d asked for a copy of the photo he’d taken of the fake O’Brien. She’d insisted he take a picture of the guy last night, send it to her immediately. He figured she was planning on trying to scare Bloodwell off. From what he’d heard about the guy, it wasn’t going to work.
She wasn’t at the hospital either.
He went up to Bella’s room. He was a little disappointed to see a different cop sitting in the chair outside her door. He’d been looking forward to asking the other guy what snacks they had in the machine. He stuck his head around the edge of the door. She was sitting up in bed, looking a hundred times better. Not so different physically, but a different person mentally and emotionally than the day before. Time and drugs had worked their magic. Although it would take a lot more time before the pain over her friend Liz’s death lost its sharp edge.
She saw him peering around the door like a small boy too scared to go in and say hello to scary old granny on her death bed.
‘Don’t be afraid to come in.’
‘How are you feeling?’
‘Much better. And sorry how I reacted over Liz. It was such a shock even though I’d been expecting it.’
He waved it off. Told her his skin was thicker than that.
‘What did you get up to last night?’ she said.
That surprised him. He wasn’t the only one Blair hadn’t shared her plans with.
‘Blair cooked me dinner.’
Her eyebrows went up, made her wince as it pulled on the stitches in her scalp.
‘She must like you.’
Yeah, he thought, enough to tell me half the truth about what the hell’s going on.
It was as good a way into the conversation he wanted to have with her as any. Nor did he feel guilty bringing it up since Blair had gotten the okay from her before she told him. Or so he thought.
‘She was telling me some of the family history.’
Her face froze momentarily as if a spike of pain had gone through her, then she worked a smile onto it.
‘Really?’
He sat on the edge of the bed. She tried to make a joke out of it.
‘Uh-oh. As bad as that, eh?’
‘She told me about you attacking Gerald Bloodwell. How you set the newspapers onto him and how he couldn’t go to the wedding because of what you did to his face.’
He grinned at her, atta girl. He’d have expected her to grin back. Or at least a smile of bitter satisfaction at the memory. He didn’t see either.
‘What
else did she tell you?’
There was a nervousness in her voice he hadn’t heard before. The sickly hue from the previous day was back on her face.
‘She told me all the things he said about you. How he accused you of being a—’
‘Oh, that.’ She swiped the air with her hand as if knocking a stupid idea out of the way. ‘Yeah, well, maybe I overreacted. But the bastard had it coming.’
She’d dismissed it even before he’d come out with it all. Like it was so old hat, it didn’t warrant mentioning.
Except it didn’t feel like that to him. It felt as if she’d steered him off the subject before she even knew what exactly he was talking about. Which meant that Blair had lied to him, made up some specious story. It wasn’t the time or the place to get into it with Bella in her improved but still vulnerable state. He made a joke of it.
‘Yeah. And you were the one who said I don’t mess around just because of what I did to the guy posing as a detective.’
They both laughed at that, even if it did hurt her busted ribs.
Then he went to find Blair.
14
His phone was in his hand, ready to call her, when she came out of the elevator. She saw the look on his face, her step faltering momentarily. He got right to it.
‘We need to talk.’
He wasn’t even in the mood to reflect on the way that the roles were reversed. The way the world normally worked, it was the women who said, we need to talk, the men who swallowed nervously, loosened their collars.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you all about it when we get there. Come on.’
There wasn’t any point asking her, where to? She wouldn’t tell him. And he’d find out soon enough.
They went downstairs and caught a taxi to the nearest car rental office. She told him what she wanted him to do, then waited on the sidewalk while he went inside and rented a silver Chevy Suburban with tinted rear windows. Then he drove them to the house where she collected an armful of plaid blankets, threw them in the back. He eyed them suspiciously, the lyrics to Billie Jo Spears’ Blanket On The Ground running through his head. She caught him looking, smiled at him.
‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to attack you. I’m old enough to be your mother.’
She’d used the word attack in a man-eating cougar sort of way, but it had a prescient ring behind it.
She directed him across town to pick up I-495. He followed her directions, didn’t ask anything until they were on the Interstate heading south.
‘You want to tell me what this is really about now?’
‘Not yet. I want to show you.’
He gave up, got settled in for the eighty-odd miles drive to Woods Hole. It took them two and a half hours, most of it in silence apart from the music on the radio. About halfway there she received a phone call. He guessed she’d been expecting it from the way she’d been holding the phone in her hand the whole time. He glanced at the screen before she answered it. Merritt.
Again.
Something was going on.
Merritt did most of the talking. She contributed a couple of uh-huh’s, then ended the call. The nervous tension he’d felt building in her since they set off ratcheted up a notch. She cracked the window open a couple inches, angled her face towards the cool breeze.
‘Everything okay?’ he said.
‘Fine.’
‘How’s Merritt?’
That got a reaction. Her head snapped sideways at him, lips parted.
‘I saw his name on your screen,’ he said.
She nodded, didn’t volunteer anything.
‘You tell him what you told me about Bella beating up his grandfather?’
‘Yes.’
‘You tell him the real reason?’
He didn’t say that, of course. But he sure as hell thought it. He pushed harder on the gas, a subconscious act. The quicker they got there, the sooner she’d show him the truth—whatever that meant.
A couple miles before they reached the ferry terminal that would take them to Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard, she told him to pull into a gas station. She got out, climbed in the back, burrowed her way under the blankets. He set off again as a muffled okay came from behind him.
She stayed hidden under the blankets for the whole of the forty-five-minute ferry crossing, didn’t join him in the front again until they were on Seaview Avenue heading south towards Edgartown.
‘So this is what it’s like having kids, is it?’ he said. ‘You want to play I spy now? I spy with my little eye, something beginning with . . . S’
Looking out of the window, you’d have thought it was an easy one with the Atlantic Ocean stretching away to the horizon on their left. Except it wasn’t sea in his mind so much as suspicious or subterfuge.
They repeated the whole procedure fifteen minutes later when they got to Edgartown and waited for the Chappy Ferry to take them to Chappaquiddick. He couldn’t say why, but he’d had a premonition for a while now that the infamous island was their destination. On the other side, they followed Chappaquiddick Road and then a rough dirt road across the island to Dike Bridge where Senator Ted Kennedy’s car went off the bridge and into Poucha Pond in 1969.
He parked fifty yards from the bridge and they walked the rest of the way, stopping in the middle of the bridge to admire the view. Except he knew by now that it was something very different she saw in her mind beyond the sand and sea and perfect blue of the sky. She slapped the guard rail with her hand.
‘This wasn’t here when Kennedy’s car went off the road.’
They carried on, went past a bicycle rack and then a wooden hut with a flag blowing in the wind, off the end of the bridge and into the sand dunes of East Beach. She turned left and they walked another hundred yards through the sand, no words passing between them. He knew they’d arrived when she stopped and sat on a dune. She drew her knees up to her chest, arms wrapped around them. A protective gesture. But not to shelter her from the wind coming off the flat expanse of the Atlantic in front of them. To ward off memories of the past.
He could’ve told her she was doing it wrong with her arms wrapped around her. They were inside her already. And they were coming out no matter how hard she squeezed her knees. He let the wind blow through him as he waited for her to start. Tasted the salt on his tongue, the smell of the sea filling his nose, the evocative cry of the gulls overhead. It was fresh and clean and invigorating and made him glad to be alive, made him thankful it didn’t carry with it the horrors that it clearly did for her.
She took a deep breath, started talking. He didn’t know if her eyes were open or closed because he wasn’t looking at her. But he knew it was going to be bad from the way it started.
‘I’ve only ever been here once before. My family used to have a big house on the main island. We came out here every summer. That picture in Bella’s wallet that you found of the two of us standing in the water was taken here.’
He pointed downwards at the sand.
‘Not here?’
‘Not this actual spot, no.’
No, he thought to himself, something very different happened where we’re sitting now.
‘It was on South Shore Beach, not far from where we had the house.’ She smiled sadly, a gesture that he guessed marked the end of the good memories. ‘Anyway, until thirty years ago, I’d never been to Dike Bridge. I was born in 1970, the year after the Kennedy incident. You’re not interested in boring political scandals when you’re a kid and then when you get a bit older, you’re more interested in boys. So I’d never actually come to see it until I was twenty. Then somebody said, come on, I’ll take you, show you the exact spot where it happened.’
He didn’t interrupt even though he had a very good idea of who that somebody was. And what had happened. A life ruined. A tragedy equal in every way to the more famous events of 1969 apart from its political ramifications.
She pushed herself to her feet, slapped at the sand sticking to her butt. Then walked down to
the water’s edge. He followed her, stood beside her looking out over the ocean as she bared her soul to him.
‘It was a week before I got married that my future father-in-law, Gerald Bloodwell, brought me here. He showed me the bridge, where the car went into the water. Then we carried on walking like today. We stopped at this exact same spot where we were sitting a minute ago . . .’
He didn’t want to hear any more. He wanted to run into the sea, stick his head under the water, pay a dog walker to hold it under, anything so that he didn’t have to listen to the next words she said.
‘That’s where he raped me.’
It took his breath away even though he’d seen it coming from a long way off, felt the crushing weight bearing down on him as the shameful words slipped from her bloodless lips, fouling the freshness of the sea air itself.
He knew why they’d come here today. She’d come to prepare herself for what would follow, forced herself back to the scene of the crime for the first time since it had happened in order to fortify her resolve. He could forgive her for the lies and half-truths, the stories she’d fabricated on her journey to this point of no return.
He was happy to help in any way possible.
And if what she’d already told him wasn’t bad enough, she told him the rest of it.
15
Hiding under the blanket didn’t seem so silly on the return trip back to Edgartown. From there, instead of heading north back the way they’d come to Oak Bluffs, they went due west across the island towards West Tisbury, took a left heading south again on Oyster Pond Road. After three-quarters of a mile she told him to pull off the road into the trees lining it.
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