The Summer House

by Jean Stone

  The “people” turned out to be three men, a woman, a child, and a dog, all standing on the porch of a building marked “Cuttyhunk Historical Society.” They were looking off toward the Vineyard, discussing, perhaps, whether or not Carol would choose to land there instead of … there.

  One of the men waved at Reggie, who waved back, pulled up to the white picket fence, and shouted, “Evening, friends. Nice day.”

  “Reggie Watson? That you?”

  “It’s us,” Reggie replied. “Me and my sweet sister, LeeAnn, and our passenger, who wishes to remain nameless. Do you have any food in that joint or do you prefer to starve your tourists?”

  Along with the laughter that rolled down from the porch came the friendly, small-town warmth that Danny had not felt in ages, not since his life had become hospitals and hotel rooms, wheelchairs and airplanes, not since his days were spent being shuttled between patient and poster boy, poor, helpless Danny and the politician’s brave son.

  Cuttyhunk was simple, and that was how Danny liked it. He smiled and wondered if he could stay there at least part of forever.

  Until they rounded the corner and pulled into the driveway back at the house, Liz had not given up hope that the van would be in the driveway. But it was not there.

  The dull ache in her head crawled down to her shoulders. She bent her neck to relieve the pain; it did not work.

  She said mechanical thanks to Tuna and was vaguely aware of walking toward the house and of BeBe behind her. Inside, Keith was building a fire in the fireplace.

  “Any luck?” he asked.

  BeBe shook her head. Liz went into the kitchen to make tea.

  “Me either. It’s a mess at the harbor. Everyone’s trying to get off-island before the storm shuts everything down. But not Danny. At least, if he went, he didn’t take the van. He could have bought a passenger ticket—they wouldn’t have a record of that. But the vehicle … no dice.”

  “I suppose you checked the parking lot …” BeBe asked, while, from the other room, Liz tried not to listen. All she wanted to do now was burrow under the big puff on her bed; she wanted to burrow from the world and pretend that Father was not dead, that Josh had not learned about Danny, and that Danny was here, safe in his room. She wanted to turn back the clock to last night—or was it the night before—before she had once again found warmth in Josh Miller’s arms. She wanted to pretend it had not happened, and yet she could not.

  Setting the kettle on the stove, Liz fired the heat beneath it, and tried desperately not to think about what would happen if Josh Miller came forward and claimed Danny as his own.

  Outside, the rain whipped a tree branch against the window. Liz wondered if Danny was warm and safe and if he’d be all right.

  The teapot whistled. She poured the water into her mug and stood mutely watching, while the teabag steeped.

  “Lizzie?” Her name was called so quietly, Liz barely heard it. She turned and saw BeBe standing in the doorway. Her sister’s face was white.

  Liz gripped the counter, afraid to hear what BeBe was going to tell her.

  BeBe came into the kitchen and put her arm around Liz. “Keith saw Danny leave the house earlier.”

  “When?”

  BeBe removed her arm and wove her fingers together, one by one, the way an ex-smoker or ex-drinker sometimes does when trying to substitute one action for another.

  “Earlier,” she replied, “before the rain started. He didn’t think there was reason for concern at the time.”

  “BeBe, what’s going on?”

  BeBe shook her head. “I don’t know. But I’m afraid, Liz. I’m afraid this is all my fault.”

  “What’s all your fault?”

  “Keith followed Danny outside. He saw him going down to the path.”

  “To the water?”

  BeBe averted her eyes from Liz. “Yes. But he thinks Danny turned off at the cove.”

  “How? The wheelchair couldn’t make it down the path.”

  BeBe struggled with her words. “When Keith was driving to the ferry, he remembered that he’d seen Danny. As soon as he returned from Vineyard Haven, he checked it out. That’s when he saw the ruts of the wheelchair. They’re now filled with rainwater.”

  “What are you saying? Is Danny still down there? Did he fall into the water …”

  BeBe shook her head. “No. The tracks don’t go all the way to the cove. But I’m afraid they went far enough.”

  “Far enough for what, BeBe?”

  Silence.

  “BeBe?” Liz asked again, wanting to shout, but afraid it might hurt too much, afraid that she was going to need all the energy she had to handle what was coming. “Far enough for what?”

  BeBe sucked in her lower lip. “Josh …” was all that she could say.

  Liz steadied her eyes on her sister and asked her in a voice that was surprisingly even, “Danny overheard what you said to Josh?”

  BeBe could not seem to answer. She mashed her teeth into her lip. Her eyes brimmed with fat, wet tears. Her body trembled.

  Liz’s hand went to her throat. The blood in her veins seemed to bubble, coming to a rolling boil like the candy Liz used to help Mother make so often for Father and Daniel and Roger and BeBe in the safety of the house on Beacon Hill. Bring to a rolling boil, the cookbook read. If she hadn’t known exactly what that meant before, Liz knew now. One by one, her body parts began to move. Her feet, her hands, her legs, her arms. Her head swiveled from side to side and up and down. Her facial nerves twitched and jerked. Then she pulled back one arm as hard as she could, thrust it forward with a might she hadn’t known that she possessed and slugged her sister smack in the jaw.

  Just as BeBe thudded to the floor without a cry, without a whimper or a scream, Joe appeared at the kitchen door. Beside him stood a man in a uniform. “Mrs. Barton?” Joe asked. “This is Sheriff Talbot.”

  The sheriff stepped forward and looked down at BeBe. “I’ve come for your sister, Mrs. Barton. She’s wanted for questioning in the murder of Ruiz Arroyo.”

  Chapter 28

  She wondered if this was where Ted Kennedy had sat back in the Mary Jo Kopechne days that hardly anyone remembered anymore, except maybe the girl’s parents and the islanders who lived near where it happened. She wondered if there was some irony in the fact that she was the sister-in-law of a presidential candidate and he had been the brother of two. No, she guessed that was stretching things. She wondered if she would be thinking more clearly if her jaw didn’t feel as if it had been broken in half.

  BeBe sat forward on the narrow cot, rested her aching face in her hands, and tried to figure out why the hell she was here.

  The murder of Ruiz Arroyo?

  It was what Hugh Talbot had said. That Ruiz had been found this afternoon down in Palm Beach, and that he had been driving a Mercedes registered in her name.

  Well, of course, she had given him the Mercedes. He had not been a bad lover, up until that last night. He had not been a bad lover, had not been a bad employee, and taking the car back had seemed so … juvenile, that BeBe had decided to just let him have it. Besides, the car enabled him to have fast transportation back to his wife and four kids and out of her life.

  But now he was dead and they thought she had done it.

  “I wasn’t even in Palm Beach!” she shrieked in the cruiser all the way to the county lock-up in Edgartown. “I left there this morning!”

  “They said it was an execution-type murder. Something about you hiring someone to do it.”

  “Who the hell would I hire? And why?” Her insides were trembling as much as her voice. She felt a sickening combination of disgust and despair at the idea of Ruiz with a bullet in his brain.

  “I don’t know the details, BeBe,” Hugh had replied. “I only know we have to hold you here until we can extradite you to Florida after the hurricane.”

  She stared at the concrete floor now, then the concrete ceiling, then the concrete walls. She stared at the small window and the tall iro
n bars that went from top to bottom, as if this were a real cell, in a real jail, like she’d seen at the movies hundreds of times.

  It is a real jail, you moron, she told herself.

  What had been as bad as being hauled in for “questioning,” was that Liz had stood by and watched it all happen, without ever coming to her sister’s defense.

  She’d tried to tell Hugh Talbot that they had to look for the Cubans—the people behind the boatloads of illegals that were Ruiz’s “other” business, the black market big business that he’d disguised as a charity. She’d tried to tell Hugh, but Hugh didn’t care. His job was simply to put her away for the duration.

  She looked back to the iron bars on the window and wondered if the jail would be protected from the storm clearly brewing outside, or if anybody would care if BeBe Adams got washed away in a gale.

  Ruiz might have cared back when she was his meal ticket.

  But now even he was dead.

  Closing her eyes, she knew she should cry for him, and yet she could not.

  “Your sister is where?” Michael shouted as he stood in the living room of the house on the Vineyard, disheveled from the wind and rain. Liz had been neither disturbed nor elated when she’d seen Michael at the door not long after BeBe had been whisked off by Hugh. She’d been sitting in the living room, waiting for something, though she didn’t know what, perhaps death.

  Death had not come; instead, Michael had. He told Liz they had left Florida for New Jersey when he’d telephoned Hugh to see if there was news. Hugh’s wife said he was out making ready for the storm, but that as far as she knew Danny had not surfaced. So Michael diverted the charter to Logan, then caught a Lear down to the island and prayed they could still land.

  They could; they did; and his shadowing agents even managed to secure a vehicle, a canvas-topped Jeep.

  “BeBe’s been taken in for questioning in a murder,” Liz repeated flatly. “The way she lives—the way she’s always lived—sooner or later something like this was bound to happen.” She listened to her words as if they were being spoken by someone else. She wondered why Michael was putting his arm around her, and then she remembered that he did not yet know about her and Josh.

  “They have to know she has nothing to do with it,” Michael was saying.

  Liz shrugged. “Who knows.”

  Michael sighed. “Well, I know your sister better than that. As soon as this storm is over I’ll get Buzz Rangely on it.”

  Nodding mechanically, it took Liz a moment to remember that Buzz Rangely was a lawyer. Oh, great, she thought. Once the lawyers were involved, everything would be known. Every dirty little piece of their dirty little lives.

  “Right now, the priority is to find Danny,” Michael, in-charge Michael, continued. “Where is he, Liz? Why is he still gone?”

  The flames in the fireplace licked one another as if trying to soothe each other’s pain.

  Before Liz could respond, footsteps sounded on the stairs. It was Evelyn and Roger. “If you’ve come to the Vineyard for a little sun, I’m afraid your timing is off,” Liz said. She turned back to the fireplace and asked, “Where are Mags and Greg?” Please, God, she prayed, don’t let them be here, too.

  “We left them in Boston,” Michael said. “They’ve gone to the house. I didn’t think …”

  “Thought I’d help board up the place,” Roger said. “This could be a doozie. They almost wouldn’t let us land.”

  A doozie. Yes, Liz thought, Roger would call a hurricane a “doozie.” Perhaps he had inherited that word through DNA from Mother. Is that how DNA worked? Did Danny now say things that Josh always said? Did he react more like Josh than the rest of the family? Would he fit in better with Josh and his family? Would he want to be Jewish?

  “Liz,” Michael said after Roger and Evelyn left the room. “Where is Danny?” he repeated. “What happened?”

  She studied the burning logs. “I want to go home,” she said. “I want to go back to Boston.”

  Michael hugged her. “We can’t go home, honey. We have to find Danny.”

  Tears drizzled down her cheeks. She wanted to break down into sobs, despite the fact that Michael would hold her and calm her and tell her everything would be all right when he didn’t have a clue how wrong things were. She wanted to do it all, but suddenly she was so tired, so very, very tired.

  “Hugh is combing the island for Danny,” Michael said. “If he’s still here, he’ll find him.” He nudged her. “Come on, honey, I’m going to take you into the bedroom. You’re going to lie down and rest. I should give Roger a hand.”

  The thought of a presidential candidate nailing plywood across windows seemed somehow out of sync. She wondered if Josh was outside, boarding up his place, too. She wondered if … Oh God, Liz thought. Could Danny have gone to Josh’s? Could he be there now? And if he was, what was he doing? The media was there. The media was everywhere.

  She jumped up from the sofa. “I’ve got to go out.”

  “What?” Michael stood, steadying her with his arm.

  “I’ve got to go out. Keith has the car keys …” She headed for the kitchen.

  Michael grabbed her arm and stopped her. “Liz, what are you doing?”

  “I think I know where Danny is.” She wrenched her arm from his hand. “I’ve got to go.” She marched into the kitchen, where Keith was on the phone, talking to God only knew who.

  “Give me the car keys,” she demanded. “Now.”

  Michael was right behind her. “It’s okay, Liz. We rented a Jeep at the airport. I’ll drive you.”

  She shook her head. “No. This is something I have to do alone.”

  Evelyn peered out the window as Liz backed down the driveway and wondered what the hell was going on. She hated not knowing things. She hated being shut out like she didn’t matter, just because she wasn’t an Adams by birth, just because she had ended up with Roger when she should have had Daniel. She hated being shut out because she’d not had any children, no heirs to the throne, unlike Liz.

  She hated anyone knowing when she had made a mistake. Especially BeBe.

  On the other hand, she thought with a small smile, sometimes things really did work out for the best.

  She turned from the window and wondered what would happen when the media learned what was really going on behind the Barton/Adams closed doors.

  Liz studied the trees that blew and bent before her, and the rain that pelted in the headlights. And then she saw it: the long, unmarked driveway where a signpost with an arrow reading “Miller” once stood, back before the name meant anything, back when it had been safe to have your name on a signpost because no one cared who you were.

  She turned down the driveway and slowed the vehicle to traverse the ruts and the potholes and the other deterrents that provided a natural “No Trespassers” caution.

  Liz had never seen the house from this side, only from the ocean side when she had walked along the beach so many times, spying, pretending to just happen to be strolling by, to just happen to be digging for clams right there in his front yard. As she rounded a final curve, the house stood before her, looked back at her, reflected in the headlights. It was big and gray and not unlike her family’s house.

  Only this house was all boarded up, without a sign of life.

  Chapter 29

  “Sit down, Michael,” Liz said after she had returned to the house. It was after ten, and there had as yet been no word from Danny. But on the ride back to the house, Liz had finally slipped back into her mind, into her body, and into what was left of her spirit. She had slipped back into herself because she had decided what must have happened to Danny, and she felt that at least he was safe.

  Josh would take care of Danny. She felt as certain of that as she did that Danny had gone to Josh’s house, that they had left the Vineyard together. She had not figured out what had happened to the van: that would come later, once the pieces had all been revealed.

  And revealed, she knew they would be. Which w
as why she also knew that the time had finally come to make things right. Because despite everything else that she had done wrong, there was one thing that Liz could do right: she could tell Michael the truth before he learned it somewhere else, some other way, like on the evening news.

  She’d brought him into their room—her room, actually, the room where she’d slept each summer, where she’d stared out at the stars and dreamed so many dreams, where she’d learned to go against her father’s wishes by sneaking out to Josh. The room with the window where sand pebbles had grazed so many times, sands of time, grains of her heart.

  Michael sat on the edge of the bed. It was a queen-size bed, with a headboard made of white birch logs, put there after they were married, replacing the twin wrought-iron bed that Liz had during her childhood. The rocking chair that had once been in there was also gone—the tiny space with the window dormer left no room for both the big bed and the chair, so Liz now was compelled to sit beside her husband, when she would rather have been further away. Los Angeles, perhaps. Or London.

  She reached down to the chenille bedspread and pulled at the threads, the way she’d done when she was a kid, the way her kids had done. “I think I know where Danny is,” she said, quietly, so no one but she and Michael and maybe God could hear.

  “You came back alone from your secretive mission,” Michael said with an edge to his voice that Liz did not recognize. “So he must not have been where you thought.”

  Liz sighed and closed her eyes. “It wasn’t as much ‘where’ as ‘with whom.’ ” She opened her eyes, looked at her husband, and spoke as clearly as possible. “I think I know who Danny is with.”

  Michael’s eyebrows elevated as if to say, So? Get on with it! But he sat patiently beside her, in a politician’s neutral pose, awaiting her next words.

  “I think he’s with Josh Miller,” she said, more abruptly than she had planned.

  His expression turned to a frown. “Miller? Why?”

  Liz could not even force a half smile, not even for Michael, her husband, her mate—if not of soul, then at least her husband of years of loyalty, the builder of their family, with Liz so visibly by his side. Michael, her husband, the father of two of her three wonderful children. But she could not even force a half smile for him now, despite the fact that he was about to feel so much pain, pain that he did not deserve. She cleared her throat.