AMANDA AND ALEX’S wedding took place on the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend, during the first snowfall. As if that were just another element of the design scheme, a dreamy white passage to the Presbyterian church, Our Lady of Grace.
Olivia, Ruby and I had just returned to the island the day before, after spending a few days at my parents’ for Thanksgiving.
The wicked tongues of the island—almost all of them—said the bride and groom had to push the wedding earlier because she had gotten pregnant. That she was due at the beginning of spring. But of course, since they were the perfect couple, the crown prince and princess of Robin Island, a slur of that kind seemed like sheer blasphemy.
The first chords of the “Ode to Joy” sounded, and everyone stood up.
“If another horse rides up, I’m getting up and leaving,” murmured Miriam, who was sitting beside me with Chloe.
I had come, of course, with Ruby and Olivia, whom I’d had a drama with that very morning because when she looked out the window and saw a coating of snow everywhere, she started crying. “What’s under it?! We don’t know what’s there, Mommy. I don’t want to go outside. I don’t want to step in it . . .” I calmed her down, reminding her how much she’d always liked the snow and ice-skating. And after I had swathed her from head to toe in winter clothes, she dared to go out with me to make a snowman at the foot of Puchi Puchi’s grave. I had to leave Pony shut up in the house so she wouldn’t bother Olivia. We started to pile up balls of snow: the big bottom, a smaller one, and finally the head. Then we put a scarf on him, a cap, two buttons for eyes, a carrot for the nose and branches for arms. Olivia was rather disturbed by the result.
“What is it, Oli? You don’t like it?”
“It’s scary.”
“What do you mean? It’s like a nice, big doll made of snow. Do you want to give him a name?”
“No . . .” she said, taking two steps backward, her eyes remaining fixed on the snowman, as if she feared it would pounce on her.
“Well, if you don’t like it, no problem; we will get rid of it.”
But before I could do anything, she said: “No, don’t kill him!”
“Oli, stop with the nonsense; it’s snow. Snow isn’t alive.”
“Yes, it is alive, because it moves; it falls from the sky.” She didn’t give me time to dismantle her argument, because she added, “Maybe Daddy sent it. Maybe he’s inside it. Snow comes from heaven, and Daddy’s in heaven. Don’t kill it.”
And she ran off inside the house. What happens when the temperature goes up and the snow melts? I thought. To top it off, Pony had shit in Oli’s bedroom, causing more screaming and crying. Olivia didn’t want to leave the house or go to the wedding even though Oliver and her other friends would be there. So I ended up resorting to what you always resort to in these arguments: bribery.
“Let’s go to the wedding and I’ll give you a present.”
“Fine. I want a pony. A real pony.”
“A pony in the summer; it’s too cold outside now.”
“No, because it will sleep with me in the bedroom.”
“Oli, you can’t sleep with a pony. Ponies live in stables.”
“Well, send Shesnotapony to the stables.”
And so on for an entire hour. I let her use my iPad Mini with retina display, because you could see the cartoons better and especially because she could FaceTime with Oliver.
Mark was a few rows ahead of me, on the other side of the main aisle. Julia beside him, completely absent, her gaze lost up ahead, as if she were witnessing a funeral. Mark couldn’t avoid turning to glance at me from the corner of his eye.
Very close at hand, in my pocket, I had a Valium. I didn’t want what occurred at the picnic to happen to me again. To see all the island gathered together raised my level of anxiety considerably. The now-familiar tingling and burning in my head reappeared, together with my abiding fear of fainting, as was now customary in these stressful situations. When I found out my phobia had a name, asthenophobia, I calmed down because I felt less weird, part of a group. Just as finding out that same morning that there was also a name for fear of the cold, cheimaphobia, and of the snow, chionophobia, had diminished, if only a little, my level of worry about Olivia. Irrational fears we use to cover up, like a second skin, to protect us from aggressions, to isolate us and to make us lose a bad part and a good part, probably more of the second, of life. But I had never managed to control it, and after Chris’s death, it had exploded.
The first time I fainted was during a lacrosse game in elementary school, when I was nine. In a strange twist of luck, my protective mask fell off just as a teammate was passing me the ball. It hit me in the eye and I collapsed. When I woke up, the game was already over. We had lost 3–2 after being up 2–0. See? If you faint, you lose, I must have thought with my childhood logic. And now, however much I told myself, Alice, may your defeats catch you while you sleep. That’s better, right?, it did me little good. I suppose it had to do with my exaggerated need to maintain control. That’s why I had limited my world to a micro-circle, with the least possible number of variables. And there, right before my eyes, I now had more than three hundred variables. Infinite possibilities that just begged for a couple of Valium. But I was fine; I felt it wouldn’t overwhelm me. Flustered, yes, but the fact I knew almost half the attendees helped. When I say know, I mean their names, jobs and where they lived. Every night I spent at least an hour going over and studying the notes I’d gathered for my particular dissertation: “Anthropology of Robin Island: A Study of the Human Specimens and Their Possible Relationship to Chris Williams.” One or several of the people there had the answer to my first question: What was Chris doing on the island? In my three months there, I had realized it was impossible to pass unnoticed. Discreet, yes. Distant, yes. Reserved, yes. But invisible, no. Impossible.
If you could choose, Alice, who would you like to be the guilty party? Where would you like Chris’s map to lead you? What spot would you like the X to mark? Which one of them would you like to possess the treasure chest that the Master Key unlocks?
Reverend Henry, an affable, sensible man, was not much given to rambling, and the ceremony proceeded without too many corny asides. Two snowmobiles, decorated with the names of the bride and groom, substituted for the typical wedding limousine—as if they’d known all along it was going to snow.
“Please let them crash; please let them crash,” Miriam whispered as she saw the newlyweds exit hand in hand, leaving behind a trail of rose petals as if they were being escorted by a flock of robins.
Had they rehearsed that too?
The entire island attended the wedding. No one was going to miss the event, whether from duty or prior commitment. The wedding banquet was celebrated in climate-controlled tents at the home of Alex’s parents, Maggie and Rodney Burr, owners of Burr’s Marine.
While the event stretched on, everyone left their homes and, as could be predicted, left them unlocked. Amanda’s father, Doug, who ran the ferry, had also invited all his employees to the wedding, deciding that the ferry wouldn’t operate that day. So even access to the island was limited, as if it were a private party, safe from tourists, who were unlikely anyway, given the cold. That meant I’d have access to all the houses for a limited time. I had made a list of the most important places to plant my snitches. I came up with twelve where I had already studied the entries, windows, possible alarms, pets that might get hysterical . . . I had them laid out on a map and had timed how long it would take to go from one to the other in the golf cart. The total time, allowing three minutes to plant the snitches, was fifty minutes. Too long to go unnoticed? Maybe, but it would be months before I’d get an opportunity this good again. So it was up to me to make do. The best time to begin the mission: between the second course and the cutting of the cake—no one was going to go home without sampling the wedding cake. I would take off, telling Miriam I was going to feed Ruby somewhere discreet, and asking her to please keep her eye on Olivia, who would be eating at the kids’ table. Twenty minutes later, I would send her a message saying that Ruby had thrown up on my dress when I burped her and I was going to go home and change quickly. That would justify the time and my absence. I hadn’t counted on the complication of the snow. That was something that would undoubtedly slow me down and oblige me to modify things on the fly, setting my priorities by location to minimize the loss of time.
The image was picturesque and comic, to say the least. A golf cart with snow chains, crossing snow-covered streets, skidding all over the place. Me at the wheel in my deep-blue evening dress with the crisscross V-neck and a white three-quarter length down jacket, with Ruby attached to me in her carrier.
Besides setting out the snitches and making sure that Ruby stayed warm and asleep, I also carried the Master Key in my purse in case I came across any lock that it might fit.
My invasion route, in order:
Chief Margaret’s house. Basement. Not because I suspected anything, but she was the chief of police. She had a police radio in the basement, turned on twenty-four hours a day, rattling off all the fire and police notices in Barnstable, Dukes and Nantucket counties.
Jodie and Keevan O’Gorman’s. They own the liquor store and live on the second floor above the shop. I went in through the back door, again using Chris’s X-ray. I put a snitch in the living room, and before leaving I saw a bowl with various rings of keys. Could the keys to the store be there? They were, on a leprechaun-shaped key ring marked with the handwritten word store. Long live Saint Patrick. I put a bug under the counter.
Conrad the bank director’s home. Two snitches. Bedroom and living room. I wanted to see if Chris had opened an account or rented a deposit box.
Julia and Mark’s house. Two snitches. I tried to place a snitch in Julia’s office, but it was locked, and Chris’s X-ray did me no good there.
Jennifer’s house. Hard for me to enter in every sense of the word. Because I respected her a lot and because it was locked. But Summer had left her bedroom window open—to air it out and get rid of the unmistakable scent of marijuana. Unbelievable, the girl was smoking in the middle of her pregnancy. I got in by climbing up a ladder. After planting the snitch in Summer’s room, I went down to Stephen’s room, approached it slowly, trying not to make noise, as if I was afraid of waking him up from his coma. I slipped on some latex gloves and took out a cotton swab I had in a paper envelope. I put it in Stephen’s mouth and swabbed for twenty seconds, with medium pressure, on the inside of his cheek. Then, with the other side of the swab, I did the same with the other cheek. The idea was to pick up skin cells as well as saliva. I put the swab in the envelope—they insisted you couldn’t use plastic—and sealed it. I reveled—just a little—in my prowess as a detective. Before leaving, I begged Stephen’s pardon for the bother and kissed him on the forehead, thinking it would bring me good luck.
The DeRollers’. Two snitches, master bedroom and Gwen’s office, where she normally conducted her business as mayor.
Family Pet Land. One snitch. The day before, I had taken Pony for a checkup and opened the lock on one of the back windows. I wanted to keep an eye on Frank, especially after the episode that night when I surprised him—or he surprised me—coming out of the real estate agency.
Since time was pressing, I decided along the way to put off planting the snitches in Miriam’s office and home until another day. She had given me a key to her house not long before, because we were such good neighbors and even better friends, according to her. I hadn’t done the same, of course.
I passed by my house, changed into a long-sleeved dress with a pattern of poppy flowers. I touched up my makeup a bit and put on deodorant because I had sweated a lot, despite the cold. Before returning to the banquet, I visited my final stop: Karen’s Petite Maison. I went straight to the office, I cooed to Dingleberry, gave him a treat, just as I had to the multiple pets I’d come across at the various houses. I put the snitch in the desk, toward the base, in the hollow between the frame for the drawers and the strip of wood along the bottom. Easy. But there seemed to be a curse against me in that room, because when I got up, I tore my dress on a loose nail. Dingleberry looked at me in seeming satisfaction, as if it were an act of poetic justice. I had to go back home. That was another twelve-minute delay.
When I came back to the wedding banquet, they’d already cut the cake and passed it out. Fortunately, I had missed Amanda and her father dancing earlier to the tune of “Eternal Flame” by the Bangles.
As soon as I came in, completely numb in every sense, with Ruby in my arms, I scanned the room until I found Olivia. She was leaping around to “Gangnam Style” by Psy with a number of girls, trying to get Oliver’s attention, but from shyness or indifference he wouldn’t get on the floor. Watching my daughter dancing like that so relieved me that I wanted to go over and join her.
I saw Miriam arguing with Mike, who was standing in front of her—Chloe was sitting in her lap—hands on his hips, slightly bent over, threatening, drunk, spitting bits of saliva while upbraiding her for something I couldn’t manage to hear. I thought about not going over, to keep from getting in the middle, but his irritating attitude and the euphoria I felt obliged me to intervene.
“Is everything OK?”
Mike looked at me with disdain, biting his lower lip.
“Yes, everything’s fine,” Miriam said, not scared, at least not obviously. “Mike was just going. Right, Mike?”
Mike took his beer, finished it in one swig and walked off. As he passed by, he grazed my shoulder in a way that was as soft as it was calculated, so I could sense his contempt but couldn’t accuse him of aggression.
Had he always been so unpleasant? I couldn’t believe he and Miriam had ever been together. This was something I had already told her before, given our newfound trust. She had never tried to justify herself, but when she started to tell me all that had led her to her current situation, she’d get lost, drag her feet or turn elusive. Apparently, as time went on, the peevish postadolescent, full of potential, that she’d fallen in love with had become a frustrated pseudo-adult without much of a future who had wasted the better part of his life. He had started drinking again and messing around with drugs, hanging out with a gang of undesirables that made him feel less worthless and then “everything went to shit,” as Miriam said, and she left it there. But I didn’t. There had to be something else, definitely, and I was going to find out.
When Mike walked off toward the bar, Miriam started to tremble and turned very pale.
“That motherfucker made my blood sugar drop . . .” she said, or tried to say, rather, because all she managed to get out, dragging her words, was: “That mmm-fucker may mmy bloo . . .”
Hands quivering, she fumbled till she got the kit out of her bag. She had put in a quick dose of insulin, a bit bigger than normal, because of the copious meal along with sweets and wine. But she had miscalculated.
“Get sugar purse, please . . .” she told me while she measured her glucose levels. Forty-four. It had dropped through the floor.
I took a few packets of sugar out of her bag. She always kept some on hand. I opened them and she gulped them down.
“Don’t let him see me, please. I don’t want to give the asshole the satisfaction . . .”
I calmed her down, saying he was off laughing with his pals, far away, and no one could see what was going on. I gave her a little of the Coke that was on the table. We waited. Quiet, without talking. I had never seen her in such bad shape.
“It did take you a while to get back . . .” she said, coherent now, when she had her color back. “You did it on purpose. I’m sure of it. My hypoglycemia is on your conscience now.”
I laughed and answered, “So, how long does it take you to pick a dress that isn’t even the one you picked the first time? Forever, right?”
“Well, I like the one you chose.”
It was a red skater dress with a pleated skirt, Karen Millen.
My phone vibrated—I had it on silent. It was a message. From Mark.
Just so you know, when you left, I missed you, and I got jealous thinking you were with someone else.
I thought that was out of place and lacking in respect. Obviously, he’d had one too many, like almost everyone. I looked at him. He turned his back to me. He was four tables over to my right. Two minutes later, another came through.
Sorry for the previous message. It was totally inappropriate. I love your new dress. Did I ever tell you I like you?
That one almost bothered me more. Well, maybe bother isn’t the right word. It affected me more. The first one was clumsy flirting; the second was edging into romantic territory. Still innocent. The beginning. It scared me more than a little. He still wouldn’t look at me. Julia was beside him, still inert, with a glass of champagne in her hand. Was he writing all that with her right next to him? I didn’t like that either, too audacious. A third message arrived.
I’m a little drunk, don’t pay too much attention to me.
OK, great, Mark, don’t write me again. It’s fine, let it go. Everything’s OK. But no, he wrote me again:
Meet at my office later?
I didn’t go. I was exhausted after the day’s intensity. That day and the two hundred that preceded it. I wanted to put the girls to bed and activate the snitches. Try them out and make sure they worked correctly. I realized that I hadn’t been able to put one in Mark’s boat. It would have been a good opportunity to round off my plan. But that proposition wasn’t an innocent invitation. I knew what I’d be going for if I ever went.