CHAPTER

seven

The bus was bad enough, the car only marginally better. A cobalt blue Ford Focus with barely enough trunk space for my duffel, a midget compared to your Explorer, waited in Hyannis at a rental dealership near the bus stop. I drove it quickly off the lot, pulled over at a level spot two blocks away to adjust the seat and the mirrors. The rain had slackened, so I paced the exterior to make sure they hadn’t tried to pawn off a vehicle with a dinged fender or a hissing tire. When I popped the hood, the engine looked clean, but I pulled the dipstick anyway, then opened the engine oil cap and peered inside through the oil-filler hole. Everything looked shiny, so I got back inside, flipped on the engine, and walked around back to examine the exhaust, which was fine, just white water steam. Consulting the rental company’s map, I reaffirmed the straight shot up Route 6. The map was small, but reassuringly detailed.

I felt powerful driving, even though I stuck to the right lane while faster cars passed at high speed. The Cape’s skeletal structure was simple. Route 6, the spine, charged up the middle of the narrow ridge of land, with Route 28, intermittently called Main Street, reliably to one side, and Route 6A, the old King’s Highway, on the other, till they converged near the Orleans Rotary and Route 6 rolled on alone all the way to Herring Cove and the Province Lands.

After a stretch of multilane highway, the road narrowed abruptly to a scant lane in each direction, the only improvement over the old “Suicide Alley,” a strip of yellow warning markers that barricaded the median. Signs said to turn on your headlights even in daytime. The Land Rover behind me crept up my tailpipe, and my hands clenched the wheel.

The character of the road changed again, multilane, but stop-and-go, with traffic lights, cross streets, and drivers no longer in such a hurry. Art galleries and ice-cream shops prevailed over infrequent chain stores. I passed seafood stands, a chiropractor’s office, a billboard advertising a women’s clinic, and swept around the Orleans Rotary into Eastham, where all the streets seemed to be called Seacrest or Seaview. Some of the small shops sported colorful flags to show they were open, but more seemed deserted. Ladders leaned against windows. Workmen painted and repaired wind-scoured façades. This far up the Cape, past the bent elbow of the peninsula and nearing its clenched fist, fewer and fewer guest accommodations were open. Signs read CLOSED FOR THE SEASON.

I passed a gas station coupled to a garage that advertised a mechanic on duty. Maybe it was the same garage that housed the twisted remains of your car. That’s what usually happened, wasn’t it? They towed the car to a local garage. I wondered whether Caroline had viewed the wreckage during her brief pilgrimage. Maybe she’d encountered the cops who’d attended your funeral there. Maybe that’s why they’d seemed familiar. I remembered Detective Snow’s telephoned request for a callback. I should have taken his number with me, but I hadn’t. I glued my eyes to the road.

Eastham was gone in a flash. Wellfleet followed; Truro beckoned. I crept along, searching for Goshen Street. There it was, just up the street from the Dairy Bee. I turned left at the traffic light, right at the third intersection, left again. Willis Road, a tiny gravel turnoff, opened on the right, and the house was exactly as you’d described: a shingle-sided, dormered cottage with a steeply slanted roof, a doll’s house, a summer place barely winterized.

The blue-trimmed brick house next door was larger by half. Two fierce women, you’d proclaimed, and one elderly shaggy dog. Guardians of the key. One chatty, one terse, one incontinent. I prayed for the terse one.

At first glimpse I thought she was a man. I kept my eyes down and requested the key. I could hear the dog snuffling behind the door.

“His wife already cleared out the place.” The woman was huge and bearlike in a chenille bathrobe. A cigarette dangled from one corner of her mouth.

“I’m his business partner,” I said. “We have the rental till the end of the month. I called and spoke to someone named Ruthie?”

Her voice was nothing like Ruthie’s. No one would have dared call this woman by any name that ended in a cute diminutive.

She took a drag on her cigarette, and the ash glowed briefly. “Just a minute.” The door closed and the dog barked. When the woman reopened the door, I caught a glimpse of a standard poodle’s graying muzzle.

“You know that guy in the blue van?” the nameless woman asked.

I denied it with a shake of my head.

“Keeps driving by the house. Stopped a couple times, looked in the window. You gonna be there alone, you be sure and lock up. Windows, too. Ran the van smack over the ice crocuses, didn’t bother to stop.”

Sturdy blue flowers lined her side of the narrow driveway. I assured her I’d be careful and thanked her for the key.

“He comes back, I’ll call the police.” She slammed the door. Fierce, indeed.

I tucked the key in a pocket, grabbed the duffel in one hand, my laptop and the Bloomingdale’s bag in the other. Oh, the relief of flipping the lock after carting my belongings inside.

The foyer was cramped, the kitchen an alarming shade of yellow, the bathroom tiny. Exhausted, too tired to eat, I shoved clothes onto hangers in the smaller of the bedrooms. It was narrow, but the view was lovely, a small pond, a stand of oak and maple. You’d have chosen it over the drab larger room. I was sure it was the room in which you’d slept.

My mind skittered to the penciled notes on the yellow pad. “2nd BST BD,” could be the second-best bedroom, in which case you’d have been talking to the owner of the house or the rental agency that handled the property. I envisioned the numbers and shook my head. You hadn’t paid any of those enormous sums for a one-month, out-of-season rental. You probably could have purchased every house on the street for money like that.

I went to bed early, but even with the grace of Ambien, couldn’t sleep. Such a long time since I’d left the nest and flown away, yet here I was, perched in a strange aerie. I tried breathing exercises. I tried counting. The plumbing gurgled, and a clock hissed and ticked. I missed the familiar noises of the apartment, the ping of the heating unit, the rain on the windowpane. It rained on the cottage roof at two in the morning, but there was no one to share the sound with, Teddy. I padded around the cottage twice, checking doors and windows, staring out the peephole.

I replayed your interview with Sylvie Duchaine in my head, recalling that old Hollywood credo about how films are made three times. Once by the writer, once by the director, and once by the editor. Our books were made three times, too, once by the subject who lived the life, once by you with your probing questions, and once by me in the written word. How would I ever manage it, handling your job as well as mine? Meeting, interviewing, a man as famous as Garrett Malcolm?

I heard the poodle bark around four thirty. It made me remember that girl, Barbara what’s-her-name, the French lit major with the dangly earrings who used to walk Pogo for you during your Tuesday office hours. I wondered whether you’d ever slept with her, an echo of my thoughts earlier in the day when I’d wondered whether Malcolm bedded Sylvie. Maybe you were right, Teddy, maybe I do brood too much about sex.