CONSIDERING MIRIAM SUSPECT number one was almost a way of exonerating her right off the bat. It was impossible I’d hit the nail on the head right away. I liked her; I needed her on my side on the island. That wouldn’t keep me from rooting around in her life, of course. The one had nothing to do with the other. I mean, she was a suspect, but there wasn’t some big question mark floating over her head like a helium balloon. She had something like diplomatic immunity. Besides, to get to know about her life, I wasn’t going to have to make any great effort; almost right away she made me into her escape valve during her nasty separation. What began as a strategy to get information out of her ended up, little by little, becoming the closest thing to a friendship I could allow myself to have at the moment.
“Hurricane Sandy ruined a fair amount of property on the island. Mike and I saw a ready opportunity to do business here. We found interested investors, we bought a dozen places at bargain basement prices, and we set up the agency. Mike rehabbed them, and I sold them for three or four times the original price.”
“So you hit it big, in other words.”
“Don’t doubt it for a second,” she said. I laughed.
“And calling your dog Sandy . . .”
Now it was her turn to laugh.
“No, silly. Sandy showed up on the island after the hurricane. No one had seen her before. I found her frightened and starving, and I brought her here. She didn’t have a chip or any kind of identification.”
“And you sold all the houses you bought?” Translation: Did you sell one of the houses to Chris?
“No, no way. There’s still a few left. In this particular case, time is a factor that works in your favor. Demand almost always outstrips supply. You have to know how to play your cards right. Plus, since I started the agency, I’ve been managing lots of properties for people who don’t live on the island. Mainly land or places purchased as an investment. In general, there’s not much movement, though. This is a small place.”
As I listened to her in the office of McCarthy Realty, I didn’t stop scribbling notes in my mind: I have to get into their files . . . Documents, notes, purchases, sales, rentals . . . She keeps everything in two filing cabinets . . . Miriam must have known Chris . . .
Miriam took out a little box with a diabetic kit inside.
“Do you mind if I inject my insulin now?’
“No, not at all,” I answered, despite my phobia of needles. “How long have you been diabetic?”
“They originally diagnosed me with gestational diabetes; you can’t imagine what a treat that was. Goodbye to anything you crave. It was awful for me because on top of the pregnancy, I was watching my marriage go to shit. But I held out like a champ for my baby’s health.” While she injected her stomach, I looked away. “But it turns out that after I gave birth—supposedly that’s it, it only lasts the time of the pregnancy—it won’t go away. And in the meantime, all this shit with Mike, and my glucose levels go through the roof, and the pills I’m taking don’t work anymore, and more shit, more stress. Thirst, nausea, having to pee all day, losing weight. More shit. Hyperglycemia. Blurred vision, tingling, fatigue. To the hospital, and it’s type 2 diabetes.”
“To me, it sounds more like type ex diabetes,” I said, and we laughed.
McCarthy Realty was housed in a small reddish stone building with big windows full of photos of properties for sale or rent. I had already been inside on various occasions and had glanced at the two locked filing cabinets. The back door led to an alley where Miriam always parked her car. The lock was standard, and she never used the deadbolt. I trusted I could get it open with X-ray film. That would be my first big mission.
Dark athletic wear. So they don’t see me. What is your excuse? I’m out running, the girls are asleep, and this is my brief time to clear my head. A mile there and a mile back. Brief, well, not exactly brief. But you have to go running; there’s no other option; that’s the only way not to raise suspicions. Black tights, black shirt. Nothing that will attract attention. We’re on an incognito mission. A flashlight? The one on the phone will do. Make sure it’s charged. Yep, all in order. The lock picks? Got them. Girls asleep? Sound asleep. Baby monitor? Yes, with a two-mile range, best one on the market. Sounds iffy. Should have tried it first. Abort mission? No, it’s getting done tonight. Chris’s X-ray, the one of his head, the one that shows the injury from the accident. How macabre that you held on to it. Tonight Chris is coming with me to break into the real estate agency. So what about Pony? You can’t take her; she’s too unpredictable, too jumpy. But if you leave her alone at home with the girls, she’ll definitely cry and wake them up, and then you’re screwed. Give her a tranquilizer? No, how cruel, drugging a dog. Leave her outside? Worse, she’ll start barking, wake up the whole neighborhood. What do I do with Pony? I’m taking her. You think she’s going to run a mile there and a mile back? No way. Don’t look at me like that, Pony. Wait, I can’t leave the girls alone. How crazy. Especially Ruby. She’s an extension of me. Granted, she’s good and she never cries and she almost always sleeps seven hours straight after her last feeding. But maybe she sleeps that deeply because she feels me close by. Maybe if I go, she’ll wake up and cry and wake up Olivia. No, if I go, I have to take her with me. Abort mission? No, the golf cart. We’ll go in the golf cart. If they catch me, I’ll saythat it relaxes the baby, that she won’t stop crying and that I’ve taken her out for a spin. And Olivia, are you going to leave Olivia alone? Forty minutes max. Two miles. A baby monitor. It’s absolutely impossible for anything to happen. If they catch you, they’ll take away custody. Oh shit, now don’t say that. Are we going or not?
I, who had been so careful not to wear anything that would attract attention, ended up in a golf cart with headlights, driving around a baby and a dog. Luckily, I didn’t cross paths with anyone. Beginner’s luck. First I passed by the agency. When I got to the end of the street, I turned around and then went into the alley.
It was surprisingly easy to get the back door open—I had tried the same maneuver at home for hours. I slipped the X-ray between the frame and the door, then slid it downward. One, two, three times, and clack, the door opened.
The light from the streetlamp—the only one still lit on Grand Avenue—filtered softly into the agency. I made a rapid attempt to locate the keys to the filing cabinets. It was likely that, with the trusting atmosphere on the island, Miriam kept them in some container along with rubber bands, pens, pencils and clips, or in one of her desk drawers, but I couldn’t find them. I tried the Master Key, just because. Obviously, that didn’t work either. Whatever, I was prepared. I took out my phone and opened the YouTube app, where I had a video set up and ready to play: “How to Open a Filing Cabinet without Keys.” It lasted one minute and fifteen seconds. It was a preteen boy, eleven or twelve years old, with a reedy, singsongy voice, giving an in-depth explanation of all the steps that had to be followed:
“This type of filing cabinet is the easiest. So easy, even a kid could do it. Ha, ha. Here we go: take the pick, in it slides, and you’ll notice there is a little play inside. Turn the pick in the direction you would to open the cabinet with a key, and when it stops, hold it and leave it in that position. Then you put in a second, thinner pick or a wire or a paperclip, and you start to move it, like you’re picking your teeth with a toothpick, even though my mom says it’s bad manners to do that in public. And so on until you find the exact spot, and then the lock opens. Clack. See? Easy as pie.”
The fifth time I played the video while trying to open the lock, I started to get really irritated and to curse that little pissant nerd and his bullshit. And since service is bad on the island, the video stopped and started jerkily: “Taaaaaake the pick, in slides, you no t ha a lit play insiiiiiiide.” To top it off, midnight fell and the streetlamp went out. And almost at the same time, I realized that the baby monitor’s signal didn’t reach this far. Something could happen to Olivia, and I wouldn’t know. I mentally reprimanded myself, got up and aborted the mission. The dense hatred I felt for that eleven- or twelve-year-old kid who made it look so easy made me kick the filing cabinet. I dented it a bit; Pony barked nervously; Ruby woke up scared and started crying. I locked myself in the bathroom of the agency to calm her down, so no one would hear us. Then she stopped crying and smiled, and I left. You aren’t going to last long on this island, girl . . .
The DeRollers, Gwen and Dan Sr., a pleasant African American couple, were the mayor of Robin Island and the owner of Dan’s True Value Hardware Store, respectively.
“It’s enough to make you mad. My wife is the one who wears the pants in the house and out. And I’m here in the meantime selling screws and live bait. On this island, the ones that really run the show are the women: my Gwen, the mayor; Margaret, the chief of police; Gail, the chief of the volunteer fire department; and Julia, the famous writer who put the island on the map. Lots of people come visit because they know she lives here. Weirdos. You see that, Alice? All women, all mothers. There’s a reason they’ve been calling it Mom’s Island since the old days. You know the story?”
“No, Dan, I don’t.”
“They’ll tell you soon enough. Don’t think you’ll hear it from me, though, because every time someone does, the legend gets bigger, the curse falls harder on the men of Robin Island,” he said jokingly.
Dan had a model of filing cabinet identical to the ones from Miriam’s agency. She must have bought them there.
“I need a sprinkler, a hook for hanging a picture, a folding ladder, two or three steps, some pruning scissors, a regular plunger, and . . . and . . . let me think, I might be forgetting something . . . Oh, and a filing cabinet, that one right there will work.”
I didn’t need any of those things. I just said them as I saw them on the shelves. It was all part of my tactic to throw people off and my recently discovered paranoid streak.
“Well, I can give you everything but the filing cabinet. Miriam reserved it. Hers is messed up. It won’t open.” Gulp.
Three days went by until they delivered the filing cabinet that I ordered from Dan Sr., and in the meantime I had my first encounter/run-in with Julia.
“Did they take all of them?” I asked Gail when I saw that the advertisements for my painting classes had disappeared from the pharmacy.
“It was Dan DeRoller Jr.,” she answered me. “He wants to be your only student in the class and says he’s going to be Picasso.”
Dan and Gwen’s son, Dan Jr., was sixteen and had Down Syndrome. When he was born, they gave him only four days to live. His parents homeschooled him. He was my first student and had called me himself, without asking for permission. He was adorable.
“Wow, and I was getting my hopes up . . . I’ll leave more, OK?”
Gail assented softly while putting several bottles of gummy vitamins on a shelf. Before I left, I went to the book section. On a rotating shelf I saw the two novels Julia had published, The Funeral Dress in paperback and If You Came Back Home in hard and softcover. I took a hardcover copy, opened it, and read her brief biography on the jacket:
In 2009, Julia Ponsky was introduced to the general public with her celebrated first novel, The Funeral Dress, which became an instant contemporary classic and a sales phenomenon, remaining on the New York Times bestseller list for several weeks. Translated into more than twenty-five languages, it was selected by the American Library Association as one of the most important books of the year, and named Book of the Year by the New Yorker. Hailed by Granta as one of the best novelists under forty, Ponsky is a frequent contributor to Vanity Fair and Harper’s. After graduating from Princeton she received an MFA from Columbia, where she became a professor in the Creative Writing Department. She currently lives with her husband and son in Robin Island, Massachusetts.
If You Came Back Home is her second novel.
I looked at the author photo: pretty, beaming, confident. She had the air of a Hollywood star, the kind who wins Oscars, like Jennifer Connelly. I lowered the book, and there Julia was, standing right in front of me. A pulse of heat radiated up to my cheeks.
“Oh, um, hi . . .”
“Hello.”
“I’m Alice.”
“I’m Julia.”
“Right . . .”
She shook my hand.
“How embarrassing,” I had to confess, because it was evident that any attempt to cover up my feelings would make me look even more idiotic.
“I’d be embarrassed if you read it.”
She snatched the book away from me so smoothly that it took me a moment to realize I didn’t have it in my hands anymore, like a magic trick.
“I didn’t want to publish it. My editors made me, because of my contract. Gail is dedicated to putting it out there. Right, Gail?”
Gail looked over the top of her glasses.
“It’s the one that sells best,” she said, going back to her business.
“Because I come here every week to buy them.”
“I’d be delighted if you’d sign it,” I said, looking at the copy she had taken from me, as if it were mine since I’d seen it first.
“If I sign it for you, we’ll never become friends. Not that I want to be your friend, not yet. But maybe in the future. And you can’t be friends with an admirer who collects autographs. Every time I sign a book, instead of feeling closer to the reader, it puts up a fence.” And without waiting or looking for a reaction to her words, she added: “I’m a little weird; don’t pay any attention.”
Julia grabbed the four remaining copies of If You Came Back Home from the shelf.
“Put these on my tab, Gail,” she said as she walked out.
Why did that woman intimidate me so much? Well, her biography is pretty impressive. She’s done important things, unlike you.
That same night, in bed, I started reading Julia’s book—I bought the e-book on Amazon. I didn’t make it past page twenty-five. Not only was I tired, but the book seemed like a drag.
You and I are going to be best friends. Pony looked at me disconcertedly, maybe jealously, because I was talking to a rectangular metallic structure with two drawers, each with its own handle. Finally, the filing cabinet had arrived. Once it was set up in the attic, I took the picks and turned off the light to work completely in the dark. Pony whined. Weren’t dogs supposed to be able to see in the dark?
In two and a half hours, I managed to get the filing cabinet open with the two picks, without looking, in even less time than the eleven- or twelve-year-old kid in the video. Suck on that. I wanted to make my own video and post it because I was actually pleased with my progress. Title: “How to Open a Filing Cabinet in the Dark without Keys, and Even Quicker Than the Repulsive Eleven- or Twelve-Year-Old Kid with the Singsong Voice.”
In the effusion of the moment, I thought: Why don’t I do it now? It’s midnight. It’s Tuesday. There’s a new moon. It’s starting to get cold—which frightened Olivia; we were in for a hell of a time. There won’t be anyone there. Indulge your impulse. You’re on a roll. You’re starting to get a handle on the situation. Come on, take off for the agency. And so I did.
I opened the filing cabinet on the first try. The purchase and rental contracts were arranged by date. I looked through all of them back to 2012, the year when Miriam started the agency. There weren’t really very many. Could that be all of them? Mine was there; it was the first, or the last, depending on how you looked at it. Yeah, that must be all of them. There wasn’t so much to buy or rent on the island. Miriam had already told me that. I did an initial sweep, searching like a madwoman for the name Chris or the last name Williams. Nothing. I tried again, looking for the name of Chris’s business, WTT. Still nothing. And since I knew myself, knew that later that night, already back home, or the next day, I would be absolutely certain that I had gotten nervous and overlooked some detail and wouldn’t want to break into the agency again because that would be tempting fate, I decided to take photos of all the files. Of the cover of each folder and the first page of the contracts. I took them with me to the bathroom in the back part of the office. I was afraid someone outside would notice the light from the flash. Good thinking, Alice. See, you’re learning quick. You’ve really got a knack for this. Even Ruby and Pony behaved impeccably, as if they’d learned from past experience.
I left the agency, and when I reached the main street and was in my golf cart again, I had to slam on the breaks not to run over Frank, the vet and owner of Family Pet Land. He was in the middle of the road, looking at me with wide-open eyes, like a frightened animal, blinded by the headlights.
“Frank, you scared me!”
“Why?” he asked, without understanding anything. Then I realized he was in his pajamas. He had been driving his electric car. It was up on the sidewalk, badly parked. The first thing I thought was that he was drunk. Then, that he was maybe a sleepwalker.
“Rose, it’s time to go home.”
Rose? Who is Rose?
“Frank, I’m not . . .”
“Not you, not you . . . But it is you, it’s always you . . . And that’s just great that you give yourself to all the little animals on the island. And that you work ungodly hours. But, honey, it’s time to go home . . .”
Then I remembered Rose was his wife, the one he had lost many years ago. Frank wasn’t drunk or sleepwalking. It was something much worse, something irreversible.
“Of course, Frank, let’s go home,” I said, playing the role of Rose.
“Come on, get in the car.”
“No, honey, I’m going in the golf cart. We’ll see each other at home, OK?”
He didn’t answer me. I could see he was confused. Lost, looking for something, not really knowing what.
He got in his car and, with full command of his motor skills, took the road back to his house.
I wanted to follow him, to be sure he made it safely to Horse Rush Farm and to tell his daughter, Barbara, what had happened to her father so she could take charge of the matter. But I couldn’t risk exposing myself. The worst thing is I hoped that Frank was experiencing an episode of senile dementia so that the next day he wouldn’t make any comment to his daughter that would give me away.
To confirm that he didn’t remember, I went to Family Pet Land the next day to buy food for Pony. When he saw us come in, he greeted us effusively:
“My favorite girls, Alice, Ruby and little Pony. Come here, Pony, pretty girl, take a treat from Uncle Frank . . .”
Alice? Ruby? Pony? Perfect control of the situation. Was he lying last night? Was he faking an episode of Alzheimer’s? Had Frank caught me red-handed?
I left the store disconcerted and worried. Miriam saw me from the sidewalk in front of her agency and ran over to meet me. Oh God, they’ve caught me. Frank told Miriam.
“Hey, Alice,” she said to me, worried. “What’s going on? Have you seen yourself? We’re friends, right? So why don’t you tell me things? Why are you trying to hide something so obvious?”
Miriam looked at me very sternly while I held back the urge to cry, but above all, to confess.
“You look really rough,” she continued. “You obviously didn’t sleep a wink. And don’t tell me it’s Ruby’s fault, because she sleeps like an angel. And, hey, if you don’t want to talk about what you never talk about, I understand. I’m not going to pressure you. But at least let me pamper you a bit and take you to lunch. Because even if you don’t think so, you deserve a prize for coping with everything so well.”
Whereupon I started crying, though Miriam never found out the real reason.