by Joshua Corin
Where in the house would Grover sleep? Had the argument really reduced so fast to nitpicking? “He’ll sleep on the sofa,” she answered, and as the words tumbled out of her mouth, she realized why Rafe had posed the question. It wasn’t a nitpick, really. If Grover slept on the couch, she and Rafe, no matter how much enmity currently flowed between them, would have to share the bed. There would be no middle-of-the-night retreat for either of them.
Esme made a vow to, the next time she was in Manhattan, locate Karl Ziegler’s place of residence and leave a flaming pile of dog shit at his front door. Not that this was all his doing. He couldn’t have been aware of their marital problems. He had inflicted Grover Kirk on her, not on them. And the plan was sound. No, no. Next time in Manhattan: place of residence, flaming pile of dog shit. Done deal.
The next exit off the Long Island Expressway was theirs. Soon they would be home. Esme massaged the bridge of her nose. If only home were home.
“Rafe,” she said, “what’s done is done. As much as I’d appreciate your support, this is happening whether you give or not.”
“I still don’t understand why he has to stay here, why the FBI can’t just put him up in a motel room.”
“Because he needs supervision and if the bad guys have him under surveillance and notice he’s spending all his time indoors accompanied by two men carrying government-issue firearms, he’s going to get a little suspicious.”
“‘The bad guys.’ I hate it when you condescend to me like that.”
“Yeah, Rafe? Well, I hate it when you’re an asshole.”
She hung up.
Not that it mattered much. In twenty minutes they’d be pulling into the driveway, and then she and Rafe could recommence their jolly squabble. Esme leaned back in her leather seat, closed her eyes and longed to live in a Calgon commercial rather than an Albee play. While she was at it, she also wished for world peace, an end to starvation and a pair of comfortable heels.
Rafe was standing outside when they arrived, a mug of hot coffee his only companion. The steam swirled up and smoke-screened his mouth and eyes. Esme frowned—where had she seen that image before? She and Tom, both sleepy-eyed, got out of the car. Grover sidled into the front seat. For the sake of verisimilitude, he had to pick up his own vehicle from the Days Inn and bring it here. He and the young FBI agent drove off to do just that.
“Rafe,” said Tom.
“Tom,” said Rafe.
Rafe went back inside. At least he had the courtesy not to slam the door behind him and in their faces.
“Your husband’s as congenial as ever,” murmured Tom.
Rafe was in the kitchen, washing out his mug. Esme expected to find her father-in-law splayed out on the sofa but the old man was nowhere to be found. Even the door to his room was wide-open. Just as well. She told Tom she would be right back, and headed up to her daughter’s bedroom. Sophie would probably be asleep, but it felt like forever since she’d seen her beautiful face and Esme just wanted to hold her and squeeze her and—
Sophie wasn’t in her room.
Esme frowned, checked the master bedroom. Maybe Sophie was in there, curled up under their sheets? No.
Panicking now, Esme checked the bathroom, then bolted back downstairs.
“Where’s Sophie?” she asked Rafe. No, not asked—demanded.
He clinked his mug into the dishwasher. “With my dad.”
At this time of night? Past her bedtime? What the hell was Rafe—
And then she knew. She turned to Tom, who looked away. He must have figured it out even before she had.
“She wasn’t too happy about spending the night in a hotel room,” Rafe added, “but then again, you didn’t really give me much time to get her prepared. She was really looking forward to seeing her mother.”
On one hand, Esme wanted to knuckle-punch him in the spleen for what he’d done, and without telling her. On the other hand, though, he’d been absolutely right to do it. And she hated herself a little for not thinking of it.
Of course Sophie wouldn’t be sleeping here tonight. She wouldn’t be spending any time at home, not while Grover Kirk breathed its oxygen and occupied its furniture. It was in her best interest to keep the two of them as far apart as possible, even if it meant uprooting the little girl out of her own bed.
Esme took a calming breath and asked, “Where are they staying?”
“The Worths’.”
Esme nodded. Their friends—well, his friends, really—Nolan and Halley Worth owned a towering lighthouse on the North Shore that they had ingeniously converted to a bed-and-breakfast. The Worths also had a grandson named Billy who was a year younger than Sophie, and whenever he came to visit, they always teased that one day everyone would be attending Billy and Sophie’s wedding (a conversation topic that always inspired the two children to fake-retch).
“I’m going to make myself scarce,” said Rafe. “I make it a rule not to be in the same room as the guy who accosted my daughter. At least, not when there’s law enforcement present.”
He shuffled to his office and made sure to slam the door shut behind him.
Twenty minutes later, Grover’s Studebaker was parked in the driveway, and the other sedan idled by the front curb, waiting to carry Tom back to New York City. Before he left, though, he spent a few private minutes in the garage with his motorcycle. He left looking solemn and with dust on his fingertips.
Esme hugged him goodbye and stood outside until the car had disappeared from view and the sound of its motor had faded into the silence of the cool November night.
“I like your neighborhood,” said Grover.
Esme did her best not to be startled by his sudden appearance behind her. “Thanks,” she replied, then quickly passed him back into the house. He closed the door behind them.
“The last time I was here, Lester didn’t really give me a tour. Where is he, by the way? I still have some of that wine he enjoyed.”
“He’s not here.” She surveyed the two bulky vinyl suitcases he’d hefted in with him from his car. They were currently leaving dents on the sofa cushions. His only other piece of luggage, apparently, was the cloth valise which hung off his shoulder strap. “May I please have your car keys and computer?”
“In a minute.”
He strolled around the living room slowly, as if he were marking his territory.
“I have somewhere to be,” said Esme. “May I have your car keys and your computer, please?”
“Relax, relax.” He made his way to the bottom of the stairs and gazed upward. “Nice house. Roomy. Too big for just one child, though. Does Sophie get lonely?”
Grover’s face belied innocence, but Esme didn’t care. She curled her left hand into a fist, casually approached the dickhead standing in her home and popped him in the jaw. He staggered back and fell onto the bottom three steps. She reached toward him again and he reflexively raised his arms in defense, which allowed her to easily slip the valise off his shoulder with one hand and the car keys from his pocket with the other.
“Thank you,” she said.
“You’re the psycho, not me!” He rubbed at his jaw. “Not me.”
“There’s ice in the fridge.” She slid the laptop out of its case, set it on the kitchen counter and booted it up. “Help yourself.”
He didn’t move.
Esme followed the instructions that Mineola had given her, and with a few keystrokes, she had locked Grover out of his own laptop. The only time it would be used was when she was present and supervising.
She shut the computer down and padded to Rafe’s office. The door remained shut. She considered opening it, poking her head in, perhaps offering an olive branch, but decided now was not the time. Also, her knuckles were throbbing from the jab.
“I’ll be at the Worths’,” she called through the door.
Waited for a response.
Nothing.
So be it.
Back in the living room, Grover still hadn’t moved from the botto
m of the stairs. Let him sleep there for all she cared. She passed him by without even a glance, entered the garage, climbed inside the driver’s seat of her Prius, plugged her iPod into the car stereo and started its engine. She needed to clean today’s shit off her soul.
The Eurythmics would do the job quite nicely. By the time Esme was on the main road, she was singing along with Annie Lennox about sweet dreams and the seven seas. Sing it, Annie, sing it.
As she neared the lighthouse, the black expanse of the sea, always an unseen neighbor in Oyster Bay, came into view. Although the town had begun as a fishing village so many years ago, with most homes located close to the water, the only people who lived seaside now were the very rich. And so the shoreline became foreign. It belonged to other people. Esme and Rafe were upper middle class and that entitled them to frequent the public beaches, but the actual parcel of water adjoining Oyster Bay went untouched by them, aside from the occasional sojourn down to Barney’s for the world’s finest (and smallest portion of) grilled flounder. This was the playground of the tourists and the millionaires, and as she pulled into the gravel lot beside the Worths’ B and B, Esme felt like a tourist, here to visit her daughter in a tower.
When the Worths had purchased the original lighthouse from the town, their first goal had been reconstructive renovation. After all, the structure was more than two hundred years old. They spent countless fortunes making it a place where people could live, and then countless more making it a place where people would want to live. The renovations had been successful, and it was now unimaginable that the lighthouse had served any other purpose but to host and cater to discerning guests.
“B and B USA” gave it five out of five stars.
The tall front door opened to the ground floor, which was a museum dedicated to Oyster Bay itself. Like all the floors, this was circular, and if one followed the wall in a clockwise rotation, one could trace the town history in vivid chronology, through a series of murals and back-lit displays. But Esme had been here before, and so she continued up the winding stairwell that wound the core of the structure to the first floor, the main floor, where Halley Worth sat behind a shipwright’s large desk, reading a library copy of Typee.
“What a pleasure,” she lied, and placed her book face-down on the desk surface. She stood to give Esme an aristocratic hug (the kind which lasted half a second and served no purpose other than for the two huggers to see how close they could come, arms around each other, without their bodies actually touching, actual human contact being gauche).
The Worths were Rafe’s friends. Most of the intelligentsia and glitterati of the town were Rafe’s friends. He was, after all, a young and ambitious professor at the college. Esme’s line of work was somewhat less respectable, if only because so much of what she did made for inappropriate dinner conversation. Even before she’d rejoined the FBI as a consultant, she’d always felt like an outsider in this world. She had grown up impoverished, and no matter how expensive a dress she wore, no matter how many galas she and Rafe attended or how many charities they supported, she always felt as if she were ostracized. Perhaps it was all in her head. Many of Oyster Bay’s socialites were lovely people.
Though not Halley Worth.
Halley Worth, age sixty-two, was a genuine old-school snob-bitch. Her husband, Nolan, had made a killing in the stock market while she’d played house, and now it was her turn to run the show while he spent his days playing poker with his right-wing buddies. The Worths suffered fools gladly, if those fools shared the correct politics, and so Esme’s father-in-law got along very well with them. In fact, as Esme and Halley broke their almost-embrace, a toilet flushed, and moments later Lester stepped out to join them.
“She’s on the fourth floor,” he said.
No hello. No sorry about your situation. Ah, Lester.
Esme bid farewell to the lovely pair and ascended the winding stairwell up, up, up to the fourth floor. There were two doors here, one of which led to the restroom and one of which led to the bedroom. Esme knocked on one, opened it, waved to the WC, closed the door, knocked on the other, opened it and beheld her beautiful daughter, asleep in bed, dreaming.
Sophie was safe here. What better setting than a lighthouse to protect her from the darkness of the world? And there was so much darkness in the world. Esme faced it daily. It was inevitable that some of that darkness would creep across the threshold of her own home, and so if this was the temporary solution they had, so be it, right? The child’s welfare needed to be prioritized over lesser concerns like a mother’s love….
Esme thought about P. J. Hammond, and what he’d done for his flesh and blood, and what he’d ultimately done to him. So much darkness in the world to keep at bay, and if that darkness came from within, the responsibilities of the parent did not change. Protect the child. P.J. had protected Timothy for so long. Esme would protect Sophie, even if it would drive her daughter to despise her for her absence. Why couldn’t she have a normal mother like everyone else?
She probably still resented Esme for not being there today at the museum, and rightfully so. If Esme had been there, Grover wouldn’t have. If Esme had been there, there would be no nightmares for Sophie’s fragile imagination to conjure. Because as she lay there on the fourth floor of the tower by the sea, it was obvious to Esme that Sophie was experiencing a nightmare. Her fists were curled up around her blanket, and her lips were twitching toward a frown. Loose strands of hair were beginning to stick to her wet forehead.
Not even the lighthouse could shield her from the darkness of her own making.
Esme crossed the threshold of her daughter’s room, knelt down beside her borrowed bed and gently rocked her exposed shoulder until those perfect eyes of hers flickered open, already shiny with tears.
“Mommy…?”
“I’m right here, baby.”
The girl’s small arms rose up and wrapped themselves around her mother, tightly, tightly, because if they were tight enough, if she were strong enough, maybe she could keep her mother from ever, ever leaving.
16
The FBI put Tom up in a two-star hotel not far from the Federal Building. It was a prewar building, and the hotel’s four elevators were still operating at their original speed. Tom waited ten minutes for one to open and lift him up to the twelfth floor. An assortment of giggling teenagers crowded in with him, and one of them, a spiky-haired girl with braces, felt the impulse to push all of the buttons on the brass panel. Tom felt the impulse to knock her unconscious with a carefully placed uppercut to the back of her right ear. Unlike the teen, he practiced self-control. But it was difficult.
Tom ached. He ached in his temples. He ached in his shoulder blades. He ached in his biceps and his triceps and his forearms and thighs and calves and especially, especially, the soles of his feet. He had managed to keep the ailments of age at arm’s length for so long, but his convalescence over the past six months seemed to invite it all, every joint inflammation in the medical dictionary. They all ended in -itis and they all hurt like hell and he wasn’t even sixty years old. So what if he’d pushed his body for decades, as if it belonged to one of these obnoxious teenagers rather than that of an aging man who’d survived not one but two motorcycle accidents, not to mention a long history of work-related injuries (stab wounds, bullet wounds, punctures from a staple gun, multiple gashes from multiple box cutters, just to name a few). But it was Galileo who had finally beaten him. Penelope Sue, bless her heart, had done her best to build him back together, but not all the pieces fit, not anymore. He was becoming a relic, just like that motorcycle in Esme’s garage.
And he was kind of okay with that.
He slipped his electronic card key into the door, pushed his way into his room and willed himself to stay awake and mobile long enough to undress and step into the hot propulsive shower. God bless the water pressure in New York City. It didn’t quite melt away the soreness in his muscles, but it did liquefy them a little, and returned some much-missed flexibility to his n
eck. By the time he’d toweled himself off, he was warmed, massaged and oh-so-ready for sleep.
His head had barely tapped the fluffed hotel pillow when his cell phone buzzed. He considered ignoring it, but his abject curiosity curtailed that option.
“Hello?” he murmured.
“Oh, shit, did I wake you?”
Tom smiled. “Not at all, Penelope Sue.”
“You’re such a liar.”
“Then you’re in love with a liar,” he replied.
“So I am.”
Tom spotted the digital clock. It was 12:32 a.m.
“Why aren’t you asleep?” he asked her.
“Why aren’t you?”
“Because you called me, you adorable lunatic.”
“We haven’t talked all day,” she said. “I’ve missed you.”
“We talked a couple hours ago.”
“That was Monday. Today is Tuesday.”
Tom checked the clock again: 12:33 a.m. Dear Lord, he was in love with a dork. In spite of himself, his smile widened. “Mmm-hmm.”
“So are you in bed, Tom?”
“It’s almost one o’clock in the morning, woman.”
“Well, I’m not in bed.”
“That’s because you’re a weirdo.”
“No, it’s because I’m walking in a hallway.”
“Why are you walking in a hallway?”
“Because it’s the only way to get from where I’m going to where I need to be, silly.”
“And where is it you need to be at almost one o’clock in the morning?”
“I’m almost there, actually.”
“The refrigerator?”
“Tom Piper, are you calling me fat?”
“No, love. I’m calling you insane.”
“Insane for you, maybe.”
Tom audibly groaned. “Mmm-hmm.”
“Oh, I forgot to tell you about this wonderful client I had today. Well, yesterday. He was about your age and—”
There was a knock at his door.
“Excuse me a minute,” he told Penelope Sue, and he wiped a hand over his face to clear away any nap-goo that may have accumulated, whipped the covers off his long body and ambled to the door, not even bothering to put on a T-shirt. The Big Apple bellhops had probably seen a lot worse than the late-night topless body of an over-the-hill gunslinger from Kentucky. The real question was, why would a bellhop be buzzing him at 12:34 in the morning?