The Dreaming Tree

by Matthew Mather

  They reached the front desk, and she said to the shift officer, “Detective Devlin from Suffolk County. Deputy Chief Alonzo told me to come see XO Harris.”

  Where else but the East Hampton PD would they have an executive officer? Captain Harris was a pain, but one her deputy chief had made her promise not to aggravate.

  The shift officer didn’t bother to look up from his paperwork. “Take a load off,” he said. “I’ll tell him you’re here.”

  Del thanked the officer and sat in a soft leather chair to one side of the reception desk.

  “I’ll bite,” her partner said, joining her. “What do you mean, you can see stuff?”

  On the side table between them was a pod-fed coffee machine, with instructions saying to ask for decaf if needed, and stacks of Sailing and Hamptons Living magazines. Not linoleum floors like every other police station she’d ever been inside, but marble with a logo engraved in the floor, as if this were the FBI headquarters. It even smelled like—what was that, patchouli?

  “I’m a tetrachromat.”

  “A whatcha-chromat?”

  “A tetra …,” Del enunciated slowly, “chro … mat.”

  “Still no idea.”

  “It means I can see more colors than you.”

  “Like how many?”

  “Like, you can see a million, and I can see ninety-nine million more.”

  “Bull.”

  “Are you color-blind?”

  Coleman had to think for a second. “Nope.”

  “If you were, you’d be a dichromat. ‘Di-’ means ‘two’ in Greek. Dichromats can see only about ten thousand colors, and that’s most animals, like dogs. Their eyes have only two different types of these things called cones that see colors. Trichromats—three kinds of cones—are regular people.”

  “So you’re a tetrachromat; you have four cones.”

  “Ladies and gents, we have a winner.” Del gave him her you’re-not-so-stupid-after-all grin.

  “I still don’t get it. You see more colors than me? Like what colors?”

  “A color-blind person can’t see the difference between red and green. To you and me, the difference is night and day, obvious as a slap in the face, but they just see the same red-green shade of gray.”

  “They just see gray?”

  Del crinkled her brow. “I don’t know what they see, to be honest. Color is subjective. We call red ‘red’ just because everyone else calls it that. I can never really know what you see. So I can’t explain the colors I see that you can’t.”

  Coleman still had the same blank expression.

  “Look, color-blind people see red and green as the same color. So me, with my extra cone, I see a color I call ishma. I’ve called it that ever since I was a kid. A word I made up. You see it as the same color as red or green, but to me it’s as clearly different as night and day. It’s slightly higher up the frequency scale toward ultraviolet, and I can perceive my reds a little deeper.”

  “Are you bullshittin’ me?”

  Del’s easy smile faded. She whispered, “When we go to crime scenes, I sometimes see blood spatters on walls that have been cleaned—stuff nobody else can. I can detect things in the dark. That’s why they call me ‘the ghost.’”

  “So you’re telling me you’re the only person who can see like this?”

  “A small percentage of females—only females—are tetrachromats, but they only discovered it a few years ago. I mean, we were all here before that, but it was discovered as a thing only about ten years ago. I knew I was different when I was a kid—could see stuff. But reading an article a few years back, I found out what I actually was—at least, the name for it. It’s a mutation.”

  “So you’re a mutant.”

  “In the flesh.” Del let her smile return.

  “Mutants have been living among us all along?” Coleman grinned back at her.

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  “In the land of the three-coned men, the four-coned woman is king.”

  “That’s pretty good, Coleman.”

  “What else can you see?”

  “That guy Royce Lowell we saw the other day? You remember?”

  “The head-chopped-off guy?”

  “To me, the skin of his face was totally different from the color of his arms. And his wife—I could see that she’d just been lying about something. Remember?”

  “You see that just by looking at them?”

  “A lot of people, a lot of the time. It’s not just the colors, but body language, too. More of a feeling than anything else.”

  It was a skill she’d worked on over time. Maybe she should have been a professional poker player. An easier way to make money, but then, girls wanted their daddies to be proud, and her father wouldn’t have been happy to see her become a gambler. Then again, police work was gambling of another sort.

  “Maybe the wife wasn’t exactly lying,” Del added, qualifying her statement, “but she wasn’t happy with something when she opened that door. It’s all in the blood vessels near the—”

  “Devlin.” The shift officer was on his feet, pointing to the door at the back of the station. “Detective Devlin, he’ll see you now.”

  * * *

  “So that’s it? Nothing else?” Captain Harris leaned back in his reclining leather chair. Behind him, floor-to-ceiling windows framed a bucolic scene of woods and a stream. Between the mahogany bookcases and the credenza to his right, plaques and awards decorated the walls. He glanced at his computer screen.

  “We don’t know who called it in,” Del said, admiring his office. “Probably a crank. Kids being a pain in the ass. Didn’t find anything unusual.”

  A week ago, someone had called in to Suffolk County a report of the missing person—missing over a year now. Said they saw her, unequivocally her, on a road near Ocean Drive in East Hampton. The sheer detail of the call forced them to come and check it out, door-to-door, but nothing. The deputy chief of Suffolk didn’t want to find out that some rich nutball was hiding a girl in the backyard, so he told them to come check it out for themselves, but quietly.

  “Good. Don’t like bothering my people with stuff like this.”

  My people—it was an odd turn of phrase to describe the citizens of East Hampton. “Gotta do it, much as I hate it, Captain.”

  Captain Seamus Harris. His red crew cut was as Irish as his name. Half of her found him comfortably familiar, while the other half felt on edge. Del inspected Harris’s face: the color smooth, the capillaries as pink and relaxed as the forest behind the glass.

  He’d already lost interest and was looking at his emails again.

  “One thing that was noteworthy, though,” she added.

  He looked up from the computer screen. “What’s that?”

  “We met Royce Lowell-Vandeweghe.” After Coleman told her about him, she’d looked Royce up, read the stuff in the papers. “The guy who underwent that head surgery.”

  She didn’t need to be more detailed. The relaxed pink shade turned darker. “That is an amazing story.”

  “You’re the one that pulled him from his car? After the accident?”

  The effect was immediate. A mottled explosion of orange-ishma bloomed on Harris’s face. Del was taken aback. She hadn’t expected that. Hadn’t expected anything, really. Was just curious. The captain maintained an even smile, though. A regular person wouldn’t have noticed anything.

  “Thank God I could help,” he said after a pause.

  “But you happened to be out there, way out in Montauk. That’s gotta be a—”

  The smile slid away. “Listen, Detective Devlin. I don’t want you causing trouble where there isn’t any. That family has gone through enough. I want to make it clear that you leave the Lowell-Vandeweghes alone.”

  She didn’t reply.

  �
��Is that clear?” he repeated.

  “Sure.”

  He looked at his screen.

  In Del’s vision, his face was crisscrossed with patches of orange-pink. It wasn’t just that he was upset. Harris looked as though he was lying about something.

  “Anyway, you got other fish to fry. They just found your hiker.” He swiveled his monitor around to an email he had opened, and clicked the image files. A weathered sack filled with gray-brown lumps. “Or at least, parts of her.”

  10

  “Two more.”

  The trainer, a burly Asian man with a shaved head, straddled Roy’s body on the bench in his new home gym. The man got his meaty hands under the barbell to spot the weight. “Grip as hard as you can and push. Come on, push!”

  Roy strained. Inch by inch, the massive weights rose.

  The dreams were getting even more vivid. He could still see the little girl’s eyes from his dream again last night, as blue and pale as the woman who was always with her. Their hair flaming red. Or images of his mother, screaming at his father. One second, Roy was here, sitting on the couch watching TV, and in the next, he’d be off in a dream world.

  Sometimes, he would dream about the accident.

  He still couldn’t remember it all.

  His mind slid back as he lifted the barbell.

  He remembered that they’d driven in from Manhattan, waited for the traffic to ease off first. He had asked the concierge to bring around his baby-blue 356 Speedster. Penny hated it, couldn’t stand the way it blew her hair around when he took the top down. She had tried to insist that they get the driver to bring them in the Escalade, or take the helicopter shuttle from West Thirtieth, but he had told her it was too expensive, that they weren’t that rich. And anyway, he said, it was his birthday. New Year, every year—a cursed day for a birth if ever there was one.

  Images of the drive on the Long Island Expressway flashed in his mind: the smell of the leather seats, the bite of the frigid air, Penny’s hair flying in the wind. Then scraggly chokeberry and bayberry bushes half-lit in the headlamps, the washed gray cedar shingles of the Chegwiddens’ rambling New England–style home rising up out of the gnarled, wind-blown pines. White-framed windows cast warm yellow light over patches of sea grass atop sand dunes. A distant crash of waves, the full moon reflecting off the Atlantic. Strains of a cello, soft clink of plates and glasses, black-liveried kitchen staff serving hors d’oeuvres on silver platters, hushed conversation and peals of laughter, a flash of a diamond necklace, and then …

  Screaming, but not in the accident. Someone screaming before it happened.

  He was yelling at someone.

  Or was someone yelling at him? Was it Penny? Or his mother?

  “One more,” the trainer encouraged. “Come on, you can do it.”

  The barbell descended to bounce off Roy’s barrel chest. He gritted his teeth. The bar started to move back up again.

  “That’s ten. Can you do one more?”

  Roy held the bar aloft, his breathing fast and shallow. He nodded. The weight training was about the only thing that kept his mind centered. Someone whistled. Roy strained again and pushed the weight all the way up, banging it onto the rack. Sam ambled toward them, limping with his cane.

  “You can bench four hundred pounds? That’s insane! Thought I’d drop by to say hello, see how my boy is doing.”

  “We good for today?” Roy asked the trainer.

  The trainer nodded and offered a hand to haul him to his feet. “Why don’t you go get hydrated?”

  “My thoughts exactly,” said Sam.

  * * *

  “Maybe you should talk to your mother?” Sam said. “I think it would be good for you. Get things out in the open.”

  “You’re right,” Roy said.

  Two months had passed since he got home, and the blackouts were getting worse. Sometimes, he couldn’t remember what he’d been doing for an entire evening. It wasn’t alcohol—that didn’t seem to make much difference. The events seemed random. Danesti said it was normal, that his body and mind were repairing themselves. He said the medical team was keeping track of him remotely. He said that nothing about Roy’s recovery from such an extreme surgery was abnormal. He just needed to stay calm and things would improve.

  Sam asked, “You got a beer in there?”

  “Sure.” Roy opened the refrigerator and pushed back a bunch of kale, frowned, and looked down another shelf. “Actually, no. Looks like Penny took it all.”

  His friend opened the cupboard over the dishwasher and clucked. “Cleaned out all the booze, too.”

  “You want a bottle of water?”

  “Try not to touch the stuff.”

  A loud ringing interrupted them. It was the house phone, set on the counter under the microwave. No one called the house phone these days except telemarketers.

  Roy picked it up anyway. “Hello?”

  “Mr. Lowell-Vandeweghe?”

  Roy remained silent.

  “This is Susan Collins,” the caller continued, “from the New York Tribune. We met at the press conference at Eden.”

  “We met?”

  “I asked you how you felt. Do you remember?” After another pause and no response, she added, “The blond one. You looked right at me.”

  “Oh, right. Listen, I’m not doing any more interviews.”

  “This isn’t really concerning you.”

  “Who is that?” Penny called out from the upstairs hallway.

  “Just a telemarketer,” Roy yelled back with his hand over the receiver. Then, in a lower voice, he said to the reporter, “I can’t really talk now, but—”

  “I’ve been researching Eden Corporation’s finances,” she said.

  Ka-click, ka-click, ka-click … Penny’s high heels announced her descent of the stairs.

  “I really can’t talk right now. Maybe later.”

  “Roy, I would really—”

  He hung up just as Penny appeared.

  “Why do you talk to them?” she said straightaway.

  “Maybe because I’m lonely?” He let the half joke hang in the air a split second before adding, “I feel bad for them.” Roy fidgeted with his water bottle for a few seconds. “I’m going out.”

  “You’re not supposed to go out. Remember what the doctor said about infections?”

  “I’m just going to my mother’s.”

  “Why would you want to go see her?”

  “I need to speak with her.”

  “You want a lift?” Sam offered.

  “I’m just going out for an hour,” Roy said.

  * * *

  “Would you like a drink?” Roy’s mother asked.

  “Ah, I don’t think so.”

  She checked her watch. “It’s six o’clock. You going to make your mother drink alone?”

  “Scotch, then, a few ice cubes.” He never needed much arm-twisting.

  “I’ve still got some of your father’s. Give me a second.” His mother sauntered into the kitchen, her heels clicking against the Italian ceramic tiles. She had on black slacks and a matching top covered by a tailored dinner jacket with sheer lapels.

  “Going out?” Roy asked.

  “It’s the sick-kids fund-raiser tonight,” she said from the kitchen, out of sight.

  Roy inspected the array of pictures in silver frames, on display on a high table in the entryway. There were black-and-white pictures of his mother with Bob Feldman, the civil rights activist arrested at Columbia. Another with blood on her face, being dragged away by the New York Police Department after the raid on Hamilton Hall. Over a hundred students injured in the occupation, one of the most famous in the civil rights struggle of the sixties—at least, as his mother liked to describe it. She always claimed she was the seventh of the “IDA Six,” a group of students who were e
xpelled for uncovering the Institute of Defense Analysis, which hooked Columbia to the Vietnam War.

  Truth be told, she wasn’t even really a student at Columbia at the time, but it cemented her street cred with the Hampton crowd. Virginia always denied being anything important, just before regaling them with a steamy tale of her short-lived affair with Feldman. There were pictures of her at Woodstock, with flowers in her hair. That generation always liked to think of themselves as unique, as having fought “the man,” pushed for the good of humanity. But from Roy’s perspective, they were just a bunch of selfish kids, doing whatever they wanted, and they’d grown into a generation of selfish adults, and now selfish retirees who controlled the country.

  There were pictures of Virginia standing with Diana Ross in Studio 54 and of her posing with a range of other celebrities. Right at the edge of the table were some wedding photos of her and Roy’s father, Richard. Just one shot without her—the only one with a celebrity: Richard standing with his arm around tech entrepreneur Steve Robinson.

  This was their family home—a big step up from the one at Mott’s Point, and at least twice the size of Roy’s house. His dad had bought the place in 1994, just after he started his private equity company, right at the start of the original dot-com boom. Located in Sagaponack—although his mother would always say it was Bridgehampton—it was a fifteen-minute drive from Roy’s house in East Hampton, but a totally different feel, with a riding stable across the street, and a still-operating farm behind that.

  “Here you go.” Virginia handed him a crystal tumbler with an inch of Scotch. “Why don’t we sit? I do need to be going soon.”

  They went to the living room, to an ornate glass table between two overstuffed couches. Roy dropped onto one. “Just wanted to stop by and say hello.”

  “Well, then, hello.” She took a sip from her drink, a vodka soda with a lime twist.

  “I have a few things that have been bothering me.”

  She took another drink. “I’m sure you do. I know this is very difficult. I’m doing my best to help—”

  “The night of the accident, did you see us leave?”