She left a note on his nightstand: Just remember that if you lose Miss Pinkie, she’ll always be with you, right in your heart where you left her. Miss you already. Love, Heddy.
In Anna’s room, she brushed the curls off the child’s sweaty forehead, kissing her. Anna, You are as strong and powerful as your brother—don’t whine for what you want. Demand it. Remember everything. Love, Heddy.
She went down to Ted’s office, turning the study’s doorknob only to find it locked. It was never locked. She’d have to climb through the window. The night air was warm and the tire swing still as she descended the porch steps, disappearing behind the hydrangea bushes lining the house. With an initial push, she realized the screen was jammed, but the window wide-open. She jimmied the screen with a stick, worrying about how noisy she was being. Finally, she got it open enough to hoist herself into the room.
The headlights of a car shone through the bushes, and she froze, ducking down inside, fearing they were coming up the driveway. But the car turned. Was it Ash?
Her flashlight scanned the contents of the dark study. His desk had a neat stack of folders, a framed photograph of him and Jean-Rose, a navy sweater tied at his neck. She opened his desk drawers, flipping through the files, pulling out a manila envelope but finding nothing but photocopies of tax returns. She flipped through the hanging folders on the other side: lighthouse donations, house title, bank accounts, correspondence. The latter one was thick, dozens of papers stuffed inside. She thumbed through, thankful when she spotted the envelope with the postmark from Worcester.
There was the creep of headlights up the driveway. They were faraway still, perhaps down by State Road, but they illuminated the towering oaks down the hill. The Williamses never returned before eleven, and she held her breath. She had to get out of there. Heddy made sure everything was in its place, then unlocked the door, stepped into the hallway off the living room, locked the knob from the inside and closed the door.
She ran upstairs, stuffing the envelope under her mattress, startling Ruth. “What the hell is wrong with you?” Ruth whispered, looking up from Pride and Prejudice.
Heddy listened for the slam of a car door, but when it didn’t come, she exhaled, slowly crawling into bed. She dropped onto her pillow, facing Ruth, knowing this would be the last time they’d have a late-night talk for a long time. “Ash wants me to leave with him tomorrow.”
Ruth sat up. “And you’re not going?” Ruth’s mother was to be cremated and a memorial service planned, and after promising to be there, Heddy felt like she needed her friend’s permission to leave early.
Heddy shrugged. “We have to scatter your mother’s ashes.”
Ruth put the book she had been reading on the nightstand. “So you’re saying that you’re not going?”
“I think so.” She was testing Ruth, pleased by her response; she’d been worried Ruth would be against it, that she’d beg her to stay. She needed Ruth to be okay with this, even if she didn’t know the details of the $5,000.
Ruth flounced backward, the springs of the bed squeaking. “Do you think he’ll notice if I show up in your place? I could use a little whisking away.”
Heddy forced a smile. “He’d be lucky to have you.”
Ruth wiped a tear from Heddy’s eye. “No, there’s something to serendipity. There’s a reason I met you this summer. Maybe there’s a reason all of this happened.”
Heddy looked out the window at Ash’s cottage in the moonlight; she could make out the chimney, the angle of the roof. “Maybe.”
“You know,” Ruth started, her voice wavering. “I have an aunt in New York. Maybe I could stay with her…”
Heddy stood on the mattress, and Ruth did, too, sensing the gravity of what she was suggesting.
“I’m not close with her. I think she hates my father.” Ruth rolled her eyes. “Who doesn’t?”
Heddy was grinning. If Heddy used the money from Ash, she could go back to school. She could give Ruth money for cosmetology school; they could live in Boston, but she wouldn’t tell her that yet. She reached for Ruth’s hands. “That means you can come with me. When I leave. We can share an apartment.”
They started jumping on the squeaking bed. “I want to, but…”
“But what?”
Ruth frowned, her freckles dark and red. “What if it’s a disaster?”
“What if it’s the best decision you ever made?”
They considered that a moment, the hum of the oscillating fan traveling from one side of the room to the other.
Ruth saw Heddy’s suitcase open on the desk, all her belongings folded inside, even Gigi’s red dress.
Heddy bit her nails. “What would you do?”
“I’d do anything to get the hell off this island, so you know what I’d do.”
“But if you were me?” Earlier, she’d mailed Beryl a postcard with one line: I’m coming back after all!
Ruth shrugged. “Who cares about you?”
It’s why she loved Ruth. She could always make her laugh.
“I promise I’ll send for you,” Heddy said.
Ruth giggled. “You act like you’re my guardian angel.” They squeezed each other.
Heddy excused herself to the bathroom, hoping Ruth didn’t notice that she’d tucked the manila envelope under her arm. Once she was on the toilet, she pulled out the contents. She had to know what was inside: she flipped through each picture.
The naked form of a man’s chest, intertwined with another body, a line of dark hair running down the center of a bare stomach. But it was a detail in the next picture that caught her eye: One man’s face was turned away, while the other, shirtless and in jeans, held a Yankees cap. She studied the image, trying to make out his blurry face.
She spotted a familiar pair of dimples. A pair of tortoiseshell glasses square on the man’s nose.
Heddy dropped the pictures, stunned. She gathered them up onto her lap, leaning into the photograph once more. It was definitely him.
TWENTY-NINE
The floorboards of Ash’s deck groaned when Heddy dragged her suitcase onto it, and from inside, she could hear two men’s voices through the open windows. She slid open the screen door, hiding the envelope and stepping beside a large navy duffel, partially unzipped, collared shirts stuffed inside.
“Well, this complicates things,” Sullivan said. He dimpled, but there was something else in his smile, too: satisfaction. He held her gaze while transferring bundles of twenties from two black camera bags into a large, open suitcase on the coffee table, as nonplussed as a cashier packing a bag of groceries. “We had bets on whether you’d come.”
She looked at Sullivan, then back at Ash. Ash came toward her, kissing her forehead.
“I should have known,” she said, her voice distant and hazy, lost in a daydream. “The car pulling out of your driveway that morning when I was swimming. It was Sullivan’s. And I saw Barkley yesterday, but I…”
That pointed look Sullivan was giving her. He was enjoying this, she thought, he wanted her to see him this way, with this hard edge. Was Sullivan thinking: I told you to stay away from him or This is what you get for not choosing me. But he… she didn’t understand.
She looked from Ash to Sullivan and back again. She wondered aloud: “But how?”
“I know, we have some explaining to do. But first, did you find the envelope?” Ash held her shoulders to steady her, and she stared at the three creases in his forehead, how deep they were. There was the possibility that the photos inside could ruin Ted Williams, but what did they mean to Sullivan, now that she knew he was involved, too? Had he disrobed to tempt Ted, to catch him—or did Sullivan, well, was he a homosexual?
Heddy dangled the envelope in front of Ash’s fresh shave, and he snatched it. There wasn’t any going back. She’d broken into Ted’s office. If they were caught, she would be implicated. She couldn’t run now, or Ash and Sullivan would follow. This had been her choice.
“He thought he had me, didn’t he?
” Sullivan wore the smirk of a bragging child, and Ash took her hand, giving Heddy a twirl.
She planted her feet—she didn’t want to spin; her head was spinning enough. She was trying to understand what she was seeing.
“Sullivan is your associate?” Heddy said. She tracked Ash as he walked into the kitchen, slipping the manila envelope into the refrigerator. An odd spot, she noted. She also noted the pistol on the kitchen table, shiny and silver, lying on its side. The same pistol she’d seen in the bathroom closet. She blinked, then blinked again, until she realized she wasn’t blinking, her eye was twitching.
Ash sat her down on the sofa—she wanted to yell: Stop touching me. What is happening?—but she let herself be moved, uncertain what it meant that these two men were standing in the same room. That they were in on this together.
She tried to stop looking at the gun, but like a magnet, her eye kept finding it.
Her summer could have gone differently. If she’d taken the job as a camp counselor in the Catskills, she might have fallen in love with the mountains rather than a man. She would have spent her mornings swimming in the lake or hiking the surrounding forests. The people would have compared the height of the trees, bragged that they saw bear prints and praised the fresh air the way people on this island spoke of money and the sea. But if she hadn’t come here, if she hadn’t met these two men and been drawn into this crime, she wouldn’t be returning to school. She wouldn’t be in love.
“We wanted to tell you,” Ash said. He intuited that she was uneasy, and he crouched down on his knees to face her, his eyes pleading, like he needed forgiveness. “This will all be over soon, and it will be me and you, kitty kit.”
“He wanted to tell you.” Sullivan retorted, zipping the hard-shell suitcase closed. He took off his Yankees hat, smoothed his hair. “It was a coincidence that I met you at the park, that Jean-Rose set us up. That wasn’t planned.”
“But Peg?” Ash retrieved her purse from the console, handing it to her, and Heddy could feel its weight in her lap. She’d need to count it. “Sullivan, what are you doing here?”
The handle of the gun was silver, smaller than she thought pistols were. Heddy wondered if she could hold it. If she needed to get to it, she could hop over the back of the velour couch. It was the most direct way.
Sullivan fell back into the couch beside her, sighing, leaning forward on his elbows and dropping his head into his hands. “Peg thinks it’s on, but she’ll figure out it’s not.”
“Oh, Sullivan.” Heddy felt sorry for him. She supposed she always had. Perhaps that’s why she couldn’t love him, or perhaps it was something else, some distance she hadn’t been able to pinpoint. Maybe it made sense now that he was in those pictures. She took his hand, clammy and wet, and he squeezed hers in return. He was pretending to be brave.
“Do you swing toward, you know,” she whispered, tilting her head to Ash. “Men?”
“God no.” He laughed almost too hard, intuiting her anxiety that he’d faked his interest in her. “But we needed to get on the inside and get photos of them, so I joined in. Why not, right? I’ll try anything once, although I’m not sure I’d do it again.” He paused, then blurted: “You know, I really did like you.”
Ash, burning Coconut Coast brochures in the fireplace, shot them a look. “Remember who she’s leaving with,” he snapped. This made Sullivan inch away, his leg bouncing up and down, earthquakes on the inside rumbling on the outside.
“How do you even know each other?” Heddy asked.
The day she saw Sullivan’s car at Ash’s house. Had they been concocting their plans at Ash’s breakfast table? If she’d arrived only moments earlier, would she have seen them together? The awkwardness that must have ensued once she was juggling dates with the two of them, and then later, once she’d chosen Ash. She felt guilty in her duplicitousness now that she faced them; they’d known what she was up to all along.
“We met at a bar in Florida,” Sullivan said, with the amusement of someone starting a good story. “Ash was going on about some guy Ted Williams who screwed his family. I told him, ‘Boy, do I know Ted Williams.’ ”
“I gave you a black eye,” Ash said. She opened the clasp of her purse and peeked inside to see the cash. Ten bundles of twenties. Now she knew she’d done the right thing.
“Sullivan, you don’t need this.” She closed her purse, fastening it shut. “You could leave now. You could go back to your life. You have everything.”
But Sullivan ignored her. “Don’t you see? Mother can’t tell me what to do anymore.” He patted the front of the Samsonite suitcase, a tiny silver lock dangling from the zipper. “This is all I need, Heddy. I’m taking Ash’s ticket to Brazil. It’ll be me, a mojito, playing Latin jazz whenever I want.”
She wondered if the gun was loaded. She rubbed her temples. “You were always telling me to stay away from Ash. But it was you, too.”
Ash’s voice, direct, at Sullivan: “We’re square?”
“Fifty-fifty, minus her share,” Sullivan nodded. She imagined him in São Paulo playing his sax, how solitary that life seemed already. He turned back to Heddy: “You could come with me.”
Ash lunged at him: “You little shit.” A slam of a body on the floor, two men rolling like children, each one trying to free a fist to slam into the other. She ran to the kitchen table, positioning herself so her back was to the gun. She didn’t want one of them to grab it.
“You can’t blame me for trying,” Sullivan coughed out. “I like her, too, man.”
Heddy whistled sharply, like she’d do to the kids. “Stop it. You’re like damned children.”
They stood, holding their hands up, backing away from her, like they were stunned. “It’s bad enough what you did, but to fight like this is appalling,” she said.
There was a subtle tilt in Ash’s head, a gentle nod, like he was trying to tell her something. She looked at Sullivan to see if he was up to something, but they were both looking behind her, like someone was standing there.
Heddy’s heart struck with fear thinking of the children. Had one of them followed her to the cottage without her realizing it?
Something clicked at her side, and curious, Heddy turned around, her breath slipping when she saw him. Ted, gripping the gun, Ash’s gun, pointing it at all three of them. She backed up, instinctively raising her hands, banging into a kitchen chair.
“I told you not to go in my office,” Ted barked. Heddy stared into the eye of the pistol, willing whatever was inside to stay there. “Doing their dirty work, eh? Jeannie was right about you, you little slut.”
The words shot through her ears. Because even if she was frightened, even if she let herself get caught up in this mess, she’d spent a summer longing for Ted to treat her as a daughter. Now he was pointing a gun at her. Heddy lowered herself into the kitchen chair, thankful to feel the cushion under her, but she couldn’t stop looking at the gun, which Ted roved back and forth between the three of them. If she could have run, she would have, but Ted, in his striped golf shirt and pressed khakis, blocked the front door.
“And you two, this ridiculous scheme.” Ted’s finger was on the trigger, but the gun was pointed at Sullivan. “Give me the photos, and give me my goddamned money. The entire fifty thousand you squeezed out of me.”
“Heddy knows where the photos are, don’t you?” Sullivan coaxed.
Ted pointed the eye of the gun at him, and Sullivan nodded her along; she could see sweat glistening on his forehead, his cheeks flush with adrenaline. “Why you’re in on this, Sullivan Rhodes, I’ll never know,” Ted seethed.
“Go ahead, kitty kit,” Ash said, motioning to the kitchen. “Get the envelope you brought us. It’s right where you left it.” She tried to understand what he was saying, why he was saying it, what he wanted her to do. Was he telling her to give him the manila envelope or did he want her to distract Ted so that he and Sullivan could overtake him?
“You heard them. Get up, you penniless piece of shit
,” Ted said, pushing her off the checkered pattern of the cushion and smacking the side of her head with the gun. She yelped, knowing now what Jean-Rose must feel when he hit her, a combination of adrenaline, hatred, and gratitude. Gratitude because if he’d just go far enough, it would all be over. He pressed the barrel of the gun into her back, nudging the metal harder against her spine, before pointing the gun back at Ash and Sullivan, who were still standing, hands up, behind the couch. She cast her eyes to the linoleum floor, knowing Ted’s temper, hearing her shallow breath, sensing this was on her. She pictured Jean-Rose, how she could distract Ted when he got angry, confuse him by talking circles around him.
“It’s just that…,” she started.
A vein in Ted’s neck bulged, and he whacked her cheek with the gun. “Get me the damn photos.”
Pain whiplashed through her face, and she put her hand there, feeling blood. She glanced at Ash while walking to the kitchen, and at the avocado green stove, she began to cry. As she reached for the handle of the kitchen drawer, her hand trembling as it wrapped the metal, she didn’t know what he’d do next, when he saw that there was nothing but forks, spoons, and butter knives inside.
“It’s not here.” She cleared her throat, ready to flinch.
“I’m not an idiot,” Ted said. He jabbed her in the back again, harder, and she felt a burning ring where the gun pulsed. She thought of the violence she heard at night, how Jean-Rose muffled her cries. What was he capable of? She reasoned that Ted wouldn’t kill them, not here. It was too big of a mess, there would be too many questions, and he still wouldn’t have what he wanted. She’d stick with her plan to stall, give the boys a moment to figure something out.
“Ash put it in here. I saw him. He said he wanted it by the knives so if anyone tried to steal it, there was protection. Now I’m not going to take out one of these knives and do anything funny, but I can tell you, as someone who worked in your home and tucked your kids in at night, that envelope is not where he left it.” She tried to read Ash’s expression, but he was watching her. Did he expect her to pull a knife out of the drawer and hold it to Ted’s throat? She wouldn’t; not ever. She mouthed: “Do something,” but Ash darted his eyes away.
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