Eden in Winter

by Richard North Patterson

  Adam steeled himself. With merciless precision, he told her what Ben had done to Jenny, omitting nothing.

  Carla listened in silence, impassive, though her face became more pale. Only when he had finished did her eyes shut. ‘My God, Adam …’

  The anguish in her voice incited him, a decade of hatred spilling out. ‘Maybe that’s why the son of a bitch despised Teddy so much. One drunken night with my mother, he shared some special memories of a fellow soldier. But he was too “manly” to face up to it, or to treat Teddy with the compassion he damned well owed him. Instead he turned his sexual enthusiasms on my girlfriend – and, of course, my mother.’

  Carla’s eyes snapped open. ‘That must have been a lovely mother–son conversation,’ she said in a harsher tone. ‘Obviously, I haven’t given your family enough credit for selective candour. So, if you’re asking me if we had anal sex, the answer is no. There are only so many mental images I want you to suffer.’ She turned from him, her voice muted and despairing. ‘I finally understand the depth of Ben’s shame – and your hatred. I don’t see how we can ever get past that.’

  Carla’s misery was so palpable that Adam felt his anger soften. ‘Do you even want to try?’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m not sure it’s safe – not after this. It might be better for us both if you turned to Rachel, or anyone who isn’t me. But I wanted us to tell the truth, so I might as well give you mine.’ Composing herself, she faced him. ‘I don’t know whether you’d ever betray me. But, given what I’ve been through, you can stake your life on the fact that I’d never betray you.’

  Reaching across the bed, Adam touched her arm. ‘You don’t need …’

  ‘I’m not done. The only hope for us is honesty – in or out of bed. I’ve never known a man who didn’t want to be better at sex than the guy before, and with you it’s outright toxic. So let me tell you what that was like with Ben …’

  ‘You don’t have to do this.’

  ‘Come off it,’ Carla snapped. ‘You and your father – the one you had when it mattered – competed over everything: sailing, writing, and even women. If we don’t confront that, your competition with a dead man will blow up in our faces.’ As though to compel his attention, Carla gripped Adam’s wrist. ‘When we became lovers, Ben was sixty-five years old. It wasn’t hard to grasp why he wanted me, or what that meant to a man who felt time tapping him on the shoulder. I was an elixir that staved off his own mortality.

  ‘For me it was different. Ben was terrified of death; I was afraid of committing to any man. My sponsor in A.A. put it pretty well: “Maybe you don’t believe you deserve a partner who will really be there. If so, Benjamin Blaine is the walking definition of a self-fulfilling prophecy.”’

  Carla’s tone softened with self-recognition. ‘I knew she’d nailed the truth. But I needed to work through my own confusions about men, and I started with him. Ben was intent on helping me stay sober, so he was right for that moment. Maybe for the first time, I mattered to someone for more than my celebrity or my looks.’

  Adam tried to imagine her as she was, fighting against addiction and the damage of her own beginnings, strangely like Ben’s own.

  ‘Still,’ she continued in a rush, ‘I knew that I should break it off. But no sooner had I decided to than I found out I was pregnant. When I told Ben, tears ran down his face, and I felt how much this meant to him – and to me, the woman who could never have children. Then Ben found out he was dying, and would never know his son.’

  Adam spoke without inflection or intonation. ‘So you stayed with him out of pity, and concern for your unborn child.’

  ‘No,’ Carla said firmly. ‘There was some of that, it’s true. But I’d come to love him, as much as I was capable then. It felt good to be strong enough to care for a man who was dying and afraid, no matter how it looked to the tabloids or the vicious gossips on this island. And if Ben still wanted to make love with me, I wanted him to.’ A new tone entered her voice, steely and determined to finish. ‘Don’t misunderstand me – I’m not an angel of mercy, dispensing sex to the needy. Even at sixty-five and with brain cancer, Benjamin Blaine had more going for him than the handful of Hollywood guys I’d slept with. So it’s hard for me to think he was as sexually equivocal as your mother suggests.’

  Though he fought against this, Adam found her rawness painful. ‘You’re right,’ he said tonelessly. ‘I needed to hear the truth …’

  ‘Then you might as well hear all of it. For so many reasons, you are so much more to me than Ben-in-a-younger-body. When you’re not tangled up in the past, I can talk to you in ways I could never talk to him – or wanted to. No doubt it’s completely twisted, but Ben got me to a place where I could be with you. That’s what breaks my heart – knowing that you can be strong and sensitive and kind, a partner I might actually believe in. But, because of him, you may never get there – at least not with me.

  ‘And yet here we are in bed. And there’s just no way that Ben or anyone else has filled me with the craving I feel for you, at once completely satisfied and yet wanting the next time so much that it’s a part of me.’ Her voice turned husky, and sudden tears welled in her eyes. ‘I can imagine going through life needing you, in every way. There’s been no one like that before you, and I’m scared to death there never will be. But God knows what else you’re hiding, or whether you’re capable of getting over Ben. I don’t know if you should even try.’

  From the front room came a brief cry; Liam stunned to find himself awake. ‘A timely reminder,’ Carla said. ‘At least for me. I won’t let old resentments poison my son’s childhood. All too often a child sees his parents’ misery and blames himself. With you, I’m not sure that Ben’s son could ever escape it. Any more than Jack’s son did.’

  Adam felt his chest constrict. ‘That’s a lot to absorb, Carla.’

  Carla’s eyes welled again. ‘Then go now. And if you honestly find you can’t live with the past, please don’t come back. I’d never blame you for it. But I’m through with this subject, and I can’t go on living with you and Ben. It’s hard enough right now.’

  Turning away, she went to Liam. When Adam left, Carla was in the rocking chair, the baby at her breast as she spoke in the quiet voice of a mother.

  SIX

  That night, Adam could not sleep, grappling with the questions Carla had posed with such lacerating clarity. When at last morning came, sunny and temperate, he went to his front stoop and found a Manila envelope beside his newspaper.

  Inside was the latest issue of the National Enquirer. Apprehensive, he riffled it, stopping on page three. Atop the fold was a photograph of Carla gazing at him across the table at State Road, and another of Adam leaving her guesthouse the next morning. Beneath this was an article by Amanda Ferris.

  Swiftly, Adam read a distorted mirror of the truth. He and Carla were ‘entangled in a shocking affair’, even while the district attorney investigated him for impeding the enquiry into the death of his father, Benjamin Blaine – himself the father of Carla’s infant son. ‘In exchange for his father’s place in her bed,’ Ferris wrote, ‘Carla Pacelli seduced him to settle the will contest brought by Ben’s aggrieved widow, Clarice. In this Greek tragedy of familial perversity, Adam betrayed his mother to satisfy Carla’s greed, while striving to conceal the terrible possibility that his brother Teddy killed their father.’ Sickened, Adam reached the last lethal sentences. ‘For Adam Blaine, sex and money are truly thicker than blood. Especially when the prize is his father’s mistress and his father’s fortune.’

  Staring at the words, Adam heard his telephone ringing. Even before answering, he guessed who was calling.

  ‘Read the article?’ Ferris asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  His terse, emotionless response caused her to hesitate. ‘I’m working on the next revelation,’ she told him, ‘that the D.A. believes you broke into the courthouse, stole evidence, fed it to Teddy’s lawyer, then used it to enlist your uncle in a cover up.’

/>   Adam knew better than to react. Evenly, he said, ‘I wonder if you want to do that.’

  Ferris laughed at this. ‘I know what you’re thinking – that I helped you by bribing Bobby Towle. But you’ll never turn that around on me, will you? You’d be nailing your high school buddy and yourself.’ She paused for effect. ‘Suppose I write that Bobby leaked police evidence. The police can’t trace the cash I gave him, and under Massachusetts law they can’t force me to reveal my sources. But they’ll find the money running from his bank account to pay for his wife’s stretch in rehab. And the unravelling of your clever scheme will have ruined two more lives.’

  This was the one thing that Adam had not considered. With studied calm, he said, ‘In this fever dream of yours, Amanda, you and I are Siamese twins. A smarter woman would have a care.’

  But she was smart enough, Adam knew, to understand that he could take her down for destroying Bobby Towle; once he and Bobby had nothing to lose, they could both become witnesses against her.

  ‘Only if you and Bobby confess guilt,’ she countered. ‘In the meanwhile, I wonder if Carla Pacelli would enjoy reading you tried to set her up as a suspect in Ben’s death. She might hesitate to let you back in bed.

  ‘No doubt people will wonder how any man can be so twisted. But word has it you were wounded in Afghanistan – not the kind of thing that happens to guys who work for U.S.A.I.D. Which explains the talents you brought to covering up for your brother, and the cold-blooded way you use everyone around you. That’s the glue for my story – the truth about who you really are.’ Voice swollen with portent, she finished, ‘Your life is catching up with you. If you really care about Teddy, you’ll make a deal with the district attorney – your confession in return for leaving your brother and uncle alone. Hanley might even take it, and I can move on to other things. After one last article, of course.’

  That was what she wanted, Adam understood – his cooperation in his own ruin, providing her with the career breakthrough he had thwarted the summer before. Though she was not quite there yet, she had already done great harm. He could not, after all, outrun the past.

  Without responding, he hung up the phone and called Carla.

  *

  Eyes smudged with sleeplessness, Carla answered the door clutching a copy of the Enquirer. ‘Ferris already called,’ she told him in a brittle voice. ‘She invited me to “clarify” our relationship.’

  Mute, Adam nodded.

  ‘You should come in,’ she added wearily. ‘Before someone takes our picture.’

  Entering, Adam was struck by the thought that, hours before, they had spent the afternoon as lovers. Now all that was in ruins, with Ferris hounding them still. For a moment he watched Liam struggle to turn in his bassinet, then sat with Carla at the kitchen table.

  ‘What will you do?’ he asked.

  ‘I won’t talk to her, no matter what she does to me. But she’s already done more than enough to us.’ Glancing over at Liam, she finished, ‘We know what she wrote about us isn’t true. But what happens when Liam’s old enough to discover all this? What do I tell him then? That it doesn’t matter to me how or why his father died, or who might have killed him? Or, as bad, who might have concealed the truth?’

  The devastating litany left Adam without words. ‘All I can ask,’ he said at length, ‘is that you trust me, and believe that any choice I’ve made was for a reason.’

  Miserably, Carla shook her head. ‘How can I? I don’t even understand what the choices are, or why you’ve made them. However hard, I was honest with you last night. It’s way past time I get that much from you.’

  But she could not have it, Adam knew. Whatever the cost to him, the price of honesty would be to betray his father – and, by doing so, to ruin his mother. ‘If you know who I am,’ he said quietly, ‘that should be enough. Anyhow, it has to be.’

  But the truth, and his secrets, would follow them. Searching his face, Carla said nothing more. Then she turned to the window, a dismissal.

  Adam stood. ‘My family is waiting,’ he told her, though it no longer made any difference.

  *

  He sat at the dining room table with his mother, Jack, and Teddy, the article spread across it. Eyes clouded with doubt, Clarice asked her youngest son, ‘What is this woman implying about you?’

  Unlike with Carla, Adam had no compunction about lying, and every need to do so. ‘That I know more than I do, I suppose. Which is no more than you do.’

  He did not look at his brother, who must suspect that he was dissembling, or at Jack, the reason for it. ‘Then why,’ his mother persisted, ‘is this reporter still poking around us? These vermin are too afraid of being sued to simply make things up.’

  ‘I don’t read the minds of vermin, Mother. All I know is not to feed them. We’ve all said our piece, and it’s time to let this story die.’

  ‘But it won’t die, will it? Not when your affair with Carla Pacelli is keeping the story alive in the most distasteful of ways.’

  Wherever he turned, Adam thought, Ferris had secreted her poison. ‘Sorry,’ he said tonelessly. ‘Selfish of me to think I could live my own life.’

  ‘Ben’s life,’ his mother snapped. ‘Ms Pacelli has a gift for seducing the nearest Blaine—’

  ‘Even me,’ Teddy cut in, facing his mother. ‘I visit her now and then, and, as the only gay Blaine, I’m uniquely positioned to be objective. And she’s a far better woman than you imagine.’ Unfazed by his mother’s annoyance, Teddy went on. ‘What part of the article don’t you believe, by the way? That Adam saved your inheritance so he could sleep with Carla? Or that he’s covering up my murder of dear old Dad. Because you don’t get to pick and choose between one accusation and another.’

  At the corner of his vision, Adam saw Jack glance at him in uncomfortable complicity. Tartly, Clarice asked the others, ‘Is there really a question that this woman slept with my husband and son? Or have I gone insane?’

  ‘You haven’t,’ Adam said. ‘And neither have I. Best to leave it there. Amanda Ferris and George Hanley are the enemy, not me. So if we’re done here, I’m going for a sail.’

  It was a lesson from Ben – at the worst moments of his life, he sought out solace on the water, alone. But when Adam stood to leave, Teddy followed him out the door.

  ‘Thanks for the intervention,’ Adam said over his shoulder. ‘For a brief, unfilial moment, I considered strangling her instead of Ferris. One dead parent is enough.’

  ‘At least it was the right one.’ Teddy placed a hand on Adam’s arm, to stop him. ‘I don’t understand what’s happening, bro. But something is closing in on you.’

  ‘Don’t sweat it, Ted. I know what I’m doing, pretty much all the time.’

  ‘Not when you’re watching out for all the rest of us.’ Teddy’s face furrowed with concern. ‘How is Carla handling this?’

  ‘Let’s just say it isn’t helpful.’

  ‘How can it be?’ Teddy responded. ‘The portrait this viper paints of Carla is pretty wounding – the kind of thing people remember and she’d never want Liam to read. And she can’t help but wonder if you’re covering for your homicidal brother. All she’s got left is to protect her boy.’

  Hands in his pockets, Adam gazed out at the water, voice filled with sorrow and regret. ‘Last summer I thought it would end there, with the four of us making peace as best we could. But now I can see the damage I’ve done by reaching out for Carla and Liam. That’s my legacy, it seems.’

  *

  When Adam arrived home, George Hanley and two state troopers were waiting on the porch. Coolly, Adam said, ‘Afternoon, George. Can I get you guys a beer?’

  The bulky district attorney regarded him with the bleak appraisal of a recording angel pondering a dead man’s fate. ‘I don’t suppose you’d mind if we search the place?’

  ‘I don’t suppose, ‘Adam responded mildly, ‘that you have a search warrant?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘I didn’t think so – n
o sane court would find probable cause for one. So you’re counting on my good nature.’

  ‘That,’ Hanley said in an astringent tone, ‘and your pristine conscience.’

  Adam made a swift calculation. ‘Search away, George – as long as you tell me what you’re looking for. I always like to know what I’ve been up to.’

  Hanley shrugged. ‘Might want to confiscate your cell phone and computer.’

  This was what Adam expected – he had used a cell phone to photograph documents in the courthouse, a computer to print them out. Both had been issued by the agency, and were therefore untraceable; both now resided at the bottom of the Vineyard Sound. ‘I do mind that. What on earth do you need them for?’

  Regarding Adam with amiable suspicion, Hanley rejoined, ‘I’m sure you know. Activity on a cell phone will pretty much tell you where the owner was – it’s linked with the nearest cell tower. But there’s a particular twelve-hour time span last summer where your cell phone records show no activity at all.’

  Adam smiled. ‘Don’t keep me in suspense. Those twelve hours must coincide with the break-in, so you’re wondering if I have a second phone. Fortunately, I’ve figured out my whereabouts that night. Would it spoil things to tell you I was fishing off of Dogfish Bar? Striped bass don’t respond to phone calls.’

  ‘Nope. It wouldn’t spoil things at all.’

  Adam gave a sigh of resignation. ‘Go ahead – take any cell phone or laptop you can find. Just let me visit them in a couple of days, so I can transfer my files to a new computer. Unless you decide to give them back.’

  Adam saw the defeat surface in Hanley’s eyes – and, with it, the understanding of what Adam had surely done. That much was foreordained. What unsettled Adam much more was that Hanley still persisted, spurred by Amanda Ferris. The medical examiner’s inquest showed no sign of ending, and it had already damned any future with Carla.