Compulsion

by Keith Ablow

  He looked at me, a little put out to be interrupted. "Yes?" he said, with a synthetic amiability.

  "Is it true that the little girl's windpipe had been blocked off?" I said.

  "What?"

  I noticed that his friends were still talking about the markets. "It's what I heard, but I wasn't sure. I'm not from the island. I'm a friend of Julia's from way back. I heard her baby was-essentially-strangled."

  "I guess that's right," he said tightly.

  "I was just thinking how terrible that would be," I went on, "not being able to breathe. Suffocating."

  "Then don't think about it." He let that linger a beat, then turned away.

  I listened to hear whether my little intervention would resonate for a while, keeping Mr. Bow Tie quiet, if nothing else. But he was right back in the fray, arguing that the SEC rules were vague and unevenly applied. He got pretty heated about it.

  Dozens of limousines were lined up closer to the church steps. Whispers had it that they had transported some of the most powerful guests, including Senator Drew Anscombe and famed financier Christopher Burch of Links Securities. Assistant Secretary of State William Rust and Russian ambassador Nikolai Tartokovsky had supposedly been fast-tracked to the family's side aboard Darwin Bishop's Gulfstream jet.

  The atmosphere inside the teak doors of the weathered gray church was far more solemn. A marble statue of Mary, hands down, palms open, stood near the entrance. A stained-glass window of gold, ruby, emerald, and sapphire panes, depicting her in the same posture, glowed behind the altar. Between the two lay a tiny casket covered by a white pall, emblazoned with a deep red cross.

  A tiny casket is a non sequitur, a wrenching failure of all God's magnificent intentions.

  Julia will bury her baby come morning, I thought to myself. She will put her baby in the ground and leave her there. My throat tightened as I pictured Julia walking away from the burial plot, pictured Brooke curled into a ball, shivering. I shook that image out of my head, but it lodged like a fistful of earth in my throat.

  All the pews were full. I stood to one side of the hall. Looking around the room, I saw not only Anscombe and Burch but a host of luminaries, from newscasters to rock stars.

  The priest, a surprisingly young man with wavy black hair and tanned skin, offered the opening prayer:

  "To You, O Lord, we humbly entrust this child, so precious in your sight. Take Brooke into your arms and welcome her into Paradise, where there will be no sorrow, no weeping nor pain, but the fullness of peace and joy with your son and the Holy Spirit for ever and ever."

  My eyes looked up at Mary, another mother who lost her child to murder. I wondered whether that connection, or anything that could be said inside these four walls, or anything that could be said anywhere, ever, would provide real solace to Julia.

  Darwin Bishop was the next to offer a prayer. My jaw tightened as I watched him climb the stairs to the altar. He gripped each side of the lectern and slowly took stock of the room, much as he might at a corporate gathering. His eyes were dry. "Wisdom 3:1-7," he said. In an unwavering voice, he read:

  "But the souls of the just are in the hands of God and no torment shall touch them.

  "They seemed in the view of the foolish to be dead and their passing away was thought an affliction and their going forth from us utter destruction.

  "But they are in peace."

  Brooke had died, horribly. It was Bishop who seemed at peace. I felt my blood pressure rising as he went on:

  "Chastised a little they shall be greatly blessed because God tried them and found them worthy of himself.

  "As gold in the furnace, he proved them, he took them to himself.

  "In time of their visitation they shall shine and shall dart about as sparks."

  I turned and walked quietly out to the lobby, not wanting to watch Bishop or listen to him or risk seeing Julia kiss him when he took his seat.

  I did want to offer Julia my condolences. I waited until the end of the mass, when the family formed its receiving line.

  The Bishops stood to one side of the altar, accepting a seemingly endless stream of sympathies. Julia, in a simple black fitted dress that I am embarrassed to say made my heart race even in the presence of tragedy, stood next to the priest. Darwin stood on his other side.

  I shook Garret's hand first. His grip was firm and, as I looked at him, his gray-blue eyes met mine with composure, if not chilliness. I stepped in front of Julia's mother next. She was an elegant and slim woman, about sixty-five, battling tears. I took her hand. "I'm sorry about your granddaughter," I said, recognizing how inadequate the words inevitably sounded.

  "Thank you," she said, leaving her hand in mine. "You are?"

  "Frank Clevenger," I said, not expecting the name to register with her.

  "I thought you might be," she said, glancing toward Julia, a few feet away.

  I moved on toward Julia. I couldn't help feeling that it was appropriate for me to have met her mother, that there was some small chance I might become important in both of their lives, even after the investigation was over. It was a warm feeling, but I fought it. I wanted to maintain my balance until Brooke's murder had been solved. But in the instant I took Julia's hand, my plans for equanimity evaporated. Darwin Bishop had moved off several feet, obviously not wanting to greet me, and I found myself locked in a private moment with his wife, at their daughter's funeral, staring into her eyes as she stared into mine. "I'm so…" I stumbled, wanting to avoid the cliché.

  She took my hand, moving her thumb along the inside of my wrist. "I appreciate your being here. I know it was asking a lot of you."

  "You could ask for more," I whispered, drunk with her presence. Her black hair and green eyes, together with skin as smooth and radiant as I ever expect to see or touch, made me feel further than ever from the tenement house I grew up in. Add the chaser of feeling just a little outclassed by Julia's wealth, a little lucky to be smiled upon by a woman with so many options, and my balance was truly put to the test.

  "Are you staying on the island?" she said.

  "Yes," I said.

  "Where?"

  I could feel myself falling. "The Breakers," I said. Letting go of her hand was an act of will, but I sensed that if we lingered any longer, it would raise eyebrows. I instinctively glanced at Garret and saw that he had already registered the emotional exchange between his mother and me. He shot me a look full of confusion and anger. "I hope I see you soon," I told Julia, and walked away, headed toward the back of the church.

  I wasn't quite to the door when someone behind me grabbed my arm. I whirled around and found myself face-to-face with Darwin Bishop. His face had a look of fragile indulgence on it. "There's a part of me that likes your audacity," he said, still holding my arm.

  Half of me wanted to share my condolences with him. The other half wanted to break his hand. "I don't think this is a good place to talk," I said.

  "It's not the place I would have chosen, especially for you to romance my wife," Bishop said.

  "That's not…" I started.

  He let go of my arm. "You're in over your head," he said, in a tone that was almost fatherly. "Your instincts aren't serving you."

  "Thanks for the advice," I said, and left it at that. I turned to go, but he grabbed hold of my arm again. I turned back to him.

  "You know how you told me you have one skill?" Bishop said. "You're a burrower. Nothing more, nothing less."

  "That's what I told you."

  "I thought about that. And I realized I've really only got one skill myself."

  "Which is?" I said.

  "I pick winners from losers. In anything. It doesn't matter whether it's stocks, people, businesses, ideas. It's like a sixth sense with me."

  I thought back to Bishop's bet on Acribat Software, down forty-five percent in a year. But that fact was a petty distraction; his billion-dollar fortune obviously meant he could see things other people would miss-in the markets, and perhaps elsewhere. "That's a v
aluable skill," I said.

  "I rely on it," he said. "And my sixth sense tells me you're about to lose everything." He smiled. "I can smell it coming." He turned and walked away.

  I watched him take his place again in the receiving line. My pulse was racing, and the muscles in my right arm were tense from holding back with the right cross I would have liked to deliver to his chin. But thinking about it now, what probably bothered me most was that I knew he was right, at least about one thing: I would have told anyone else in my place to stand back from the boundaries I was starting to cross.

  11

  I got back to my room at The Breakers at 9:40 p.m. I had grabbed takeout shrimp and arugula gourmet pizza for dinner-nothing being regular anything on Nantucket -and eaten it on my way back to the hotel. The night had turned windy and rainy, and that, together with the late hour, gave me a good excuse to bow out of spending the night at North Anderson 's. I called him at home and got the customary urgings toward safety that I would expect from a friend. Double-lock the door, no unexpected midnight repairs to the plumbing, and so forth. I sidestepped them, told him I'd be fine, that I was leaving the island in the morning and not returning for at least a day. I had business to attend to back in Boston, including another visit to Lilly at Mass General.

  The management had left my bottle of wine back inside my room, on my nightstand. I smiled at its persistence, grabbed it, and was about to bring it far down the hall, where it couldn't find its way back to me, when the phone rang. I picked up. "Clevenger," I said.

  "It's Julia."

  "Where are you?" I asked.

  "Downstairs."

  I didn't know exactly how to respond. "In the lobby…" I said, for filler. Thinking of her just three floors away- alone-made me start to think what it would be like to hold her, without worrying that we might be seen.

  "I need to be close to someone I trust," she said. "Just for a few minutes. I…" A moment of silence. "I want to tell you what it was like for me at the church tonight, what I really felt."

  I knew the smart thing to do would be to join her in the lobby or meet her for coffee at the Brant Point Grill. But knowing what to do and actually doing it are different things. "I'm in room 307," I said.

  When I heard a knock at my door, I resolved not to let things get too far, to keep some therapeutic distance between the two of us. I opened the door. Julia stood there in her black dress, her hair damp from the rain. She had been crying, but her eyes still glowed. I offered her my hand. She took it and walked into my arms. I pushed the door closed and let her cry as I held her. The feel of her delicate shoulder blade against my palm, the rising and falling of her chest against mine, a tear that ran off her cheek and down my neck were all intoxicating to me. No less so was the music playing in the background of our lives: her cruel husband, my cruel father, her need to escape a bad marriage, my boyhood fantasies of rescuing my mother.

  Julia raised her head off my chest, turning her face up toward mine, with her eyes closed. And I did what might be forgiven, but not excused. I moved my hand to her cheek and kissed her, gently at first, then more passionately, sensing not the crossing of boundaries but the melting of them, their obliteration. Our mouths became one. And it seemed to me-and I believe to her-that our futures had also, mystically and immeasurably, been joined. My unconscious seemed to be saying that if these were the worst of circumstances in which to have found one another, they were, unavoidably and irretrievably, our circumstances. The rules of decorum that governed the great mass of relationships would have to yield. We were inevitable.

  I have kissed many women in my life, but none of them made me feel the way Julia did. She ran her fingers up the back of my neck, then pulled me toward her, inside her, receiving all my passion, then pulling back, barely brushing her soft, full lips over mine, catching my lip between her teeth, gently pulling, making me feel she was hungry for me. Then her lips traveled up my cheek, and I heard her excited breathing louder than my own, felt her warm tongue slip inside my ear, move deeper, speaking about all the warm ways our bodies and souls could join into one.

  Only after we had kissed a long time did I gather a fragile resolve to ease her away from me. "You wanted… to talk," I said.

  She took a deep breath, let it out. She slowly opened her eyes and nodded. I took her by the hand and guided her to a couch that looked onto the harbor. The aluminum masts and gilded stems of a hundred or more sailboats caught the moonlight and swayed like a glittering crop of silver and gold on a field of blue. "Tell me," I said quietly, still holding her hand. "What was it like for you at St. Mary's tonight?"

  She looked at our hands laced together, then placed her other hand on top of them. She looked back at me. "Like burying a piece of myself," she said. "I kept wishing it could have been me who died. Since the day she was born, I've had a feeling about Brooke-that she was someone extraordinary." Tears began streaming down her face. "It's horrible to say, but I felt much closer to her than I do to the boys. Even closer than I do to Tess."

  Julia's recollection of her earliest reaction to Brooke was light-years from the estrangement Claire Buckley had described. Part of me wanted to resolve the discrepancy with a few questions, but it didn't seem like the time to ask them, partly because I didn't want to hear answers that would replace any part of my affection for Julia with new doubts about her. I wiped the tears off her cheek. "What other feelings did you have today?" I asked simply.

  "Anger. Wanting someone to pay." She cleared her throat. "Most of all, guilt," she said.

  "How so?"

  She hesitated.

  "You don't have to tell me anything, you know," I told her. "It's up to you."

  She squeezed my hand. "I should never have exposed the girls to Billy. They didn't sign up for that risk."

  Julia's suspicions clearly hadn't shifted substantially from Billy to her husband. "I understand," I said. "What do you think you should have done?"

  "I should never have allowed the adoption. We weren't prepared to handle a boy with Billy's problems. And Darwin wasn't interested in being a father to him, anyhow."

  " Darwin insisted," I said.

  "Then I should have left," she said. "For that reason, and the others."

  I felt like I had another chance to press my case for Tess's safety. "Aren't those other reasons still valid?" I asked gently. "Billy isn't at home, but the rest of the stresses still affect Tess-and Garret."

  "You mean Darwin 's temper," she said. "The control issue. His violence."

  "Yes."

  "I've talked with my mother," she said. "I may go back to the Vineyard with her and the children."

  "Good," I said.

  "There's just no telling how Darwin will respond."

  "I think Captain Anderson would provide police protection," I said. "At least for a while."

  "Right." She didn't seem satisfied with that safety net.

  "And I would be around," I said, "if you needed me."

  She squeezed my hand more tightly. Then she raised my hand to her lips, kissed it. "How can I feel this close to you this fast?" she asked.

  "I've asked myself the same question about you," I said.

  "Any answers?"

  "Blind luck," I said.

  She closed her eyes and slowly moved my hand inside the "V" of her dress, so that my fingers slid naturally under the lace of her camisole and onto her breast. When they reached her nipple, it rose up for me and she made a sound of exquisite pleasure, like she had just awakened and was stretching in a warm feather bed.

  Every man dreams of finding a woman who will not only yield to him, but one who will embrace and confirm him, matching every iota of his masculinity with an equal or greater measure of femininity. Julia was this rare woman.

  Touching her made me want to touch her everywhere. I moved one hand to her knee, just above her hem, and the other to the back of her neck. I drew her toward me, so that I could unzip her dress. She rested her head on my shoulder, waiting and willing. But I
couldn't allow myself to undress her. I ran my fingers down the edges of her spine, over the cloth. Then I kissed her cheek and sat back on the couch. "This isn't the right time," I said. "With you coming here from the church, feeling everything you're feeling, we couldn't be sure what it meant."

  She nodded, almost shyly. "It's late, anyhow. I should be getting home."

  We stood up. There was an awkward moment, readjusted to the fact that we wouldn't be making love.

  "You're here for the night, or longer?" Julia asked.

  "I'm leaving in the morning, but only for a day. Then I'll be back."

  "We could meet somewhere Friday night," she said.

  That felt like throwing caution to the wind. "The fact that I'm being followed won't scare you away?" I said.

  "It didn't tonight," she said. "I'm more frightened by the thought of not seeing you."

  "Paranoia," I said. "A fear with no basis in reality." I smiled. "I treat it all the time."

  Thursday, June 27, 2002

  I woke just after 5:00 a.m. with my heart racing. I flicked on the bedside light and searched for something amiss, but nothing had disturbed the elegant furnishings of my room or the peaceful harbor outside. I got up and walked to a set of sliding glass doors that gave onto a small deck. The sailboats still swayed in an easy breeze. I walked out and breathed deeply of the ocean air. The day was already warm. It was calm enough to make me nervous, and I wondered whether the quiet was the thing weighing on me. Maybe I was missing the throaty drone of tugs and barges working Chelsea 's Mystic River, the smell of overheated petroleum, the firefly headlights of the occasional early morning commuter crossing the Tobin Bridge. But something made me reject that easy answer. I walked back inside and, still thinking of Chelsea, instinctively dialed my home phone for messages. One had been left just forty-one minutes earlier. It was from Billy. My heart raced faster.