ROUTE 6A FROM SANDWICH TO BREWSTER HAS TO BE ONE OF the most beautiful roads in America. It runs along the north side of the peninsula, past cranberry bogs and blueberry patches and small farms, and in early fall the small farms still have honor racks filled with corn and squash and tomatoes. It passes antiques shops, country stores, esoteric museums, cemeteries with flat, vertical gravestones that might date back to the 1600s, and tiny town centers with parks and gazebos. And all along the way are large eighteenth-century homes with huge lawns and stone walls and great, leafy trees. Some of those homes have been made into inns and restaurants. Like The Captain Yarnell House.
Sandwich, Barnstable, Yarmouth, Dennis, Brewster—each town has a slightly different look, a slightly different personality, far more obvious to the locals than the occasional or first-time visitor. Get to Brewster and the woods grow thicker and the spacing between homes and businesses becomes greater. Brewster, being at the end of the road, has a slight air of being pleased with itself simply because it is where not everyone can or will go. Pass Nickerson State Park, turn north on a small country lane and head toward the bay, where the water can recede a mile or more during low tide and people can go clamming with buckets and rakes or let their vizslas or Labs scamper across the flats in pursuit of seagulls. The Captain Yarnell House is set back behind a sickle-moon driveway filled with pebbles that splatter against the underside of your car if you drive in a little too fast. Which you might do if you’re in a hurry, or nervous, or anxious because you have come a long way to get here and you know you are getting close to your goal.
At 3:00 on a post–Labor Day afternoon, I did not need to be in a hurry. Many restaurants on the Cape close for the season in September. The higher-end ones may stay open until November or even December, but you never know. The folks at Captain Yarnell could have packed it in and moved on to Florida or New Hampshire or Vermont, so I was glad to see a pair of vehicles in the parking lot: a small black BMW and a rather beat-up Ford pickup truck. I parked next to them and made my way around the back of the building to the entrance to the kitchen.
It was warm, somewhere between seventy and seventy-five degrees, and the screen door was still in place. By putting my two hands around my eyes I could lean my face against the screen and look inside. Two men were working. A short Latino was in a T-shirt and full apron, peeling vegetables. A tall, dark-skinned man wearing a white double-breasted chef’s jacket was working over a gargantuan stove that must have had twenty burners. He was furiously stirring something in a heavy metal pot, and I thought it best not to disturb him until the fury subsided.
Minutes passed before the Latino noticed me. “Hey!” he said, and his eyes grew wide.
The chef looked over. He did not stop stirring. He returned his eyes to his task. “Help you?” he called out.
“Chris Warburton?”
“That’s me.”
“I’m George Becket from the D.A.’s office. I need to talk to you.”
The job title works better some places than others. The smaller man stopped peeling and stood very, very still. Chris Warburton slowed his stirring, peered at his creation, lowered the flame beneath the pot and mumbled something to his assistant, who used a sidestep to take his boss’s place at the stove without removing his eyes from me. Then Chris came toward me, wiping his palms against each other in quick, noisy slaps.
He was a handsome man with a confident smile. He gave me that smile because he, Chris Warburton, chef of The Captain Yarnell House, had nothing to fear from the district attorney’s office, except perhaps the immigration status of his assistant.
I moved aside as he opened the screen door and came out of the kitchen. He looked up at the blue sky with its bright gray and white clouds rising from the horizon and said, “Nice day.”
From the kitchen came a series of muffled noises. The assistant no doubt scooting off. I wondered if he would try to make it to the pickup truck or just hide in the main part of the restaurant. The cellar or the attic, perhaps. Maybe dash away on foot, head for the marshlands.
“I need to ask you about a job you used to have, Chris.”
“Sure.” Ask away. Look at my smile. Don’t pay attention to what’s going on behind me.
“With the Gregorys.”
“The Gregorys?” Chris Warburton’s smile got even bigger. “I was a kid then.”
It was nine years ago. The man was not yet thirty.
“You used to, what, be a gatekeeper for them?”
“Yeah, pretty much. I mean, mostly I sat in a Jeep Wrangler and checked who came in, kept the gate closed to those who weren’t supposed to be there. A lot of tourists would show up, try to peer through the bars.” He showed me, holding his hands to the sides of his face, making his job seem both glamorous and boring at the same time. I had the feeling he could do that about anything, tell you how mundane his life was and make you wish you were doing it with him.
“When you were there, were there other people working at the compound? People who weren’t just friends or family?”
“Oh, sure. Lots of ’em. Housekeepers, yard guys; they had care-givers for old Mrs. Gregory, the Senator’s mom. And then she died, of course, so they weren’t around after that. It was a group of Irish la—”
“You remember,” I said, cutting him off, “an au pair that Ned Gregory and his wife used for their kids?”
The smile stayed. The eyes roamed. I wondered if I had gone too far. Chris may have been a beneficiary of the Gregorys’ largesse, but he had gone out and made it on his own. Barbara had told me that. I was counting on that. Chris Warburton, chef, beholden to no one. Except, looking at him, it didn’t seem like such a sure thing anymore. The Gregorys, Barbara said, had sent him to culinary school, got him his first jobs, put him on the path to success. How can you not be beholden to someone like that?
He was stroking his chin, thinking about how he could best answer. Au pairs? he could say. There were so many of them. They would come and go. Ned would give them a poke or two and they’d be on their way.
“This one came from a wealthy family,” I said. “Her father owned movie theaters.”
I heard an engine starting. It was a rough sound, not the kind a BMW would make.
“Lexi,” Chris said, rather more loudly than he needed.
From the other side of the building I could hear pebbles being splattered.
“Lexi what?”
“Lexi Sommers,” he almost shouted.
There were very tiny beads of sweat on Chris’s broad forehead. I deliberately turned my own head in the direction of the engine and the flying pebbles.
“I heard she got married.”
“That’s right.”
“You know what her name is now?”
The pebble sound was over now. The engine sound was fading. Chris moved just enough to intercept my long-distance gaze. “Why, Lexi done something wrong?”
“Just give me her name and tell me where she is,” I said softly, “and I’ll be on my way.”
Chris heard the change in my voice. But with each passing second his task became less difficult. Stall, stall, say nothing.
“You were both about the same age, both working for the family. With them but not part of them. You must have at least gotten to know her, Chris.”
“I did.”
“So I’m expecting you stayed in touch.”
The engine sound had completely disappeared. The fleeing Latino helper could be on 6A now. I looked at my watch. It was just a show. I didn’t even note the time.
And Chris, for his part, simply let the time go by.
“Letters, pictures of the kids. Things like that.” I was thinking about what Barbara had done at Jason Stockover’s prep school.
When he still did not respond, I got out my cell phone. “You get invited to the wedding?” I asked.
He snorted. “We weren’t that kind of friends.”
He could have been saying any number of things. I didn’t bother to work them out. I hit a button and put the phone to my ear.
“What are you doing?”
“Seeing if I need to stop that pickup truck, Chris.”
“He’s a good guy, just trying to support his family.”
“Helpless guy, too, I imagine. Not like Lexi. She’ll have all kinds of support. I talk with her, she’ll probably have a lawyer sitting right there with her. Not that she did anything wrong or that she’s going to be in trouble, but just to protect her against the things that all the rest of us have to deal with.”
“Like you.”
“Like me. That’s right, Chris.”
He shook his head. The drops I had seen at his hairline flew off. “I can’t do anything to hurt the Gregorys.”
“And I’m not asking you to do anything other than give me a name and address.”
Chris Warburton cranked his neck back and looked up at the sky, which probably did not look as bright as it had when he came out of the kitchen.
“Hello, Sergeant?” I said into the phone. “It’s Assistant D.A. Becket—”
“I might know where there’s a Christmas card you could look at,” the chef said, putting his hand out. And when I didn’t lower the phone, he added, “Might still have the envelope.”
“I’ll get back to you,” I said to the phone.