They must think this is Nantucket,” Walter said. “Is that a Range Rover?”
“Oh, don’t start,” Ruth said in her scolding voice. “The wife is lovely. I think it’s wonderful they want to have us over. Give them a chance.”
“Give me a drink, I say. Though they’re probably the white-wine spritzer types. Hoity-toity.”
“For heaven’s sake, please, stop.”
Walter grumbled something inaudible as he parked the truck and turned off the engine and, heaving a long sigh, got out. Something crunched under his boots, and the air smelled fishy. They’d recently put down crushed oyster shells over the dirt driveway. All the rich summer folks seemed to do that. They probably thought it made their places look more authentic, more Cape Cod, somehow. Like hydrangeas and split-rail fences and wind chimes and fairy roses. They had no idea what a pain in the butt crushed shells were, how you had to lay more down every year because of the erosion, how the shells got caught in your lawn mower, how the weeds always sprouted up through the bare spots and then you had to spray Roundup, which could kill your dog. They never thought about how it hurt your knees if you had to crouch down to work on your car. Then again, people like that probably didn’t know how to fix their own cars. They probably didn’t even wash their own windshields.
Walter cast a shrewd eye on the sweet old house, probably one of the oldest on the Cape. An eighteenth-century Colonial with a steep gable roof and doghouse dormers and small-paned windows with shutters that actually worked. A big fat central chimney, painted white. The clapboard siding had been gussied up with a fresh coat of white paint, the shutters with black semigloss. The cedar roof shingles were weathered silver gray. Looked like the roof needed replacing, though.
“Will you wait for me?” Ruth said. Walter scowled but stopped and waited for his wife to catch up. She needed a hip replacement sooner rather than later. “Can you hold this, please?” She handed him the festively wrapped jam jar and clutched his right wrist for support.
“Welcome,” a woman called. “Welcome!”
As soon as the screen door opened, a dog came hurtling out like a guided missile, heading right for Ruth, yapping, jumping up on her. A toy dog: a Jack Russell terrier with a small snow-white body, a tan face, and perky ears. Ruth gasped but then laughed with delight. “Why, look at you, poochie!”
The dog kept yapping shrilly. “Anís!” the young woman shouted. “Down! Down!” She ran across the lawn toward them and grabbed the dog by the collar, a band of Madras plaid. “Bad girl! Bad! Anís, no! Stop it! I am so sorry!”
“Nothing like a hearty welcome,” Ruth said.
“I’m Morgan. It’s so nice of you to come over.” She was tall and blond and wore pink Capri pants, a lime-green alligator shirt, a pearl choker necklace. They all shook hands and exchanged the usual pleasantries.
“Hutch is out back tending the grill,” Morgan said. “He won’t set foot in the kitchen, but put the fire outside and all of a sudden he’s Mario Batali or something.”
“Anís is an unusual name for a dog,” Ruth said.
“That licorice-flavored liqueur? We drank it constantly in Marbella, on our honeymoon. It’s in that Hemingway novel, which one was it? The Sun Also Rises, I think. Anís del Toro—anisette of the bull? Hutch was an English major at Yale and never lets you forget it.”
They entered the house, leaving the dog outside, and Walter handed Morgan the jam jar. She exclaimed over it as if she’d just won Mega Millions.
“Oh, it’s nothing,” Ruth said. “Wild blueberry preserves. Those wild blueberries grow like weeds on our property.”
“I adore wild blueberries!” Morgan exclaimed.
Walter noticed they’d replaced the aluminum screen door with one made from mahogany. Bogus, he thought. Pretentious. At least they were taking care of the flooring. He’d always loved the old wide-board floor, creaky and uneven after years of settling, scarred by centuries of boots and shoes, the pumpkin pine having mellowed to an amber that polyurethane stain could never imitate.
“So you let your dog run loose outside, huh?” he said. “I guess you got one of them invisible fences put in.”
“Oh, where you put that funny collar on them and it shocks them if they cross a certain line on the property or something like that? No, we’d never do that. But she’s not going to run away. We feed her too well! She loves being off-leash, though. If only I could stop her from digging!”
“Oh, dear,” Ruth said.
“We think she buries her bones and then digs them up later.”
“What a shame,” Ruth said. “Your lawn is so beautiful.”
“Oh, but it’s not. It looks good, but the grass is just awful. It’s this terrible, coarse-bladed, wiry stuff that hurts when you walk barefoot on it. Like you’re walking on a Brillo pad! Hutch wants to have it all dug up and replaced with, I don’t know, whatever they use in golf courses. You know men and their lawns!”
“It’s zoysia grass,” Walter said coldly. “Drought-resistant. I put it in for the Murdochs ages ago because they didn’t want to waste money on an irrigation system.”
Morgan looked stricken. Her hand fluttered over her open mouth. “Oh my God, that’s not what I meant at all. I mean, it’s exactly what you want if you’re not going to have an irrigation system. It’s so much hardier. The thing is, we’re going to have a swimming pool put in back there, and you know how all those trucks and tractors and things are going to chew up the lawn, so the whole yard’s going to have to be reseeded anyway.”
Walter gave her a quick, hard look; then his face seemed to relax. “Just don’t use hydroseed. You’ll be yanking out weeds for years. The soil’s nice and rich, and I should know. I tilled in truckloads of Canadian sphagnum peat moss.”
“Walter, remember how the Murdoch boy used to dig holes all over their lawn and you’d have to come back and reseed?”
He shrugged.
“Sure you do. It looked like they had a family of moles. He used to bury things, just like your dog. He called it his pirate treasure. Once he buried the Murdochs’ television remote and he could never remember where he’d put it. And remember that box of cigars Tom bought you one Christmas and how it just disappeared one day and it turned out that poor Paulie had buried it in the yard, only he didn’t remember where?”
Walter shrugged again. “Wouldn’t have been any good if I found ’em anyway. The damp would have ruined ’em.”
Ruth lowered her voice to a confiding whisper. “He was what we used to call feebleminded. Not quite right in the head. He looked like a strapping teenager but he had the mind of a five-year-old. Such a handsome young man… He always wore this funny red-and-black hat—you know those plaid hunter’s caps? I call it an Elmer Fudd cap?”
Morgan nodded and smiled.
“Night and day, he was never without that hat. Winter and summer, no matter how hot it got. And of course he always had the earflaps down.” A troubled expression crossed her face. “Walter was like a father to that boy. And then…” She fell silent and looked sad.
Walter said, “I’d be careful letting a dog that little run around outside at night.”
Morgan looked at him quizzically.
“You know about the coyotes, don’t you?”
She gasped. “Coyotes?”
He nodded. “Sure. At night you’ll hear them howl and laugh. They roam around here in packs like wolves.”
“They do no such thing,” Ruth said. “Coyotes are loners.”
“I guess you forgot what happened to the Costas’ poodle,” Walter said. “And he was even on one of them retractable leashes.”
“Oh, that was such a terrible thing,” Ruth said.
“Coyote came and grabbed it and ate it for dinner,” Walter said.
Morgan turned abruptly and opened the mahogany screen door. “Anís! Anís, come! You get in here right this minute!”
The dog came scampering in.
“Now, I haven’t seen the Pamet Puma, as they call it, but I’ve heard tell there’s a big cat roaming around and feasting on small game and domestic animals. It ain’t no legend, I hear. There’ve been sightings. When they can’t find game, they get awful hungry…”
Morgan put a hand on Walter’s shoulder. “Thank you so much for the warning. No one told us anything about that.”
“Well, that’s what neighbors are for,” Walter said.
“What can I get you to drink? We have red wine and white wine—a wonderful Sancerre—and Hutch can make you martinis or just about any mixed drink you like.”
“Just a glass of ice water for me,” Ruth said.
“You probably don’t have bourbon,” Walter said. “I do like my Jim Beam.”
“Are you kidding? Booker’s is all Hutch drinks! Hutch! Come on inside and meet the Colemans.”
A tall, gangly young man with tortoiseshell glasses entered from the other side of the low-ceilinged living room, the screen door clattering shut behind him. He was wearing a long black apron that said STAND BACK! I’M GRILLIN’ on the front and he smelled of woodsmoke. He gave Walter an unnecessarily firm handshake. Hutch Whitworth, his name was. Hutch and Morgan, Walter thought. What kind of names were those?
“A Booker’s for Mr. Coleman and a glass of water for Mrs. Coleman.”
“Ruth, please.”
“Ruth, do you prefer still or sparkling?” Morgan said.
“Oh, just tap water for me.”
Walter took hold of his wife’s elbow and muttered, “You don’t want it from the tap.”
“Of course!” Morgan said. “We have Evian or Fiji or… what’s that neat bottle?”
“Voss?” said her husband. With a wry grin he added: “From the frigid aquifers of Norway.” Under his apron he was wearing a light-blue gingham button-down shirt and shorts that actually looked pink.
“Tap is fine,” Ruth said. “Really.”
“Honey,” Walter said. “You know about the well.”
“The well?” Hutch said.
“Any kind of bottled water would be fine for her,” Walter said. “Let’s just leave it at that.”
“Is something wrong with our well?” asked Hutch.
“They didn’t tell you when you bought the house?”
“Tell us what?” Morgan said. “Is something wrong with the well water? Hutch, I thought we had it tested.”
“We did. They said it was a little hard, maybe, but otherwise pure and clean as the driven snow.”
“Charlie sold you the house, right?”
Hutch nodded. “Right…?”
“Charlie,” Walter said with a low chuckle. “I love him like a brother, but you know, when you shake hands with him you count your fingers afterward.”
“You mean he’s… dishonest?” Morgan said, eyes wide.
“Charlie’s the salt of the earth,” Walter said. “Great guy. Great guy. But, well, you know… Like they say, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.” He shrugged. “Who tested your well water? Kenny Fisher?”
“I think that was his name,” Hutch said slowly.
“Sure,” Walter said, nodding. “The only game in town. Kenny and Charlie are old pals. Kenny’s never gonna screw up one of Charlie’s sales. Anyways, all that hooey about herbicides and pesticides and weed killers and stuff? There’s no scientific proof it causes birth defects or bladder cancer or leukemia or what have you. That’s all just scare talk. No proof.”
“Walter,” Ruth said, “I never heard anything about their well water. Where are you getting all this?”
“Sweetie, if you ever joined us for poker night you’d know a lot more about what’s going on in this town than who’s hitting the bottle too much.” He winked at the young couple. “There’s a reason they call us a quaint drinking town with a fishing problem.”
Morgan’s mouth was gaping open, and her husband’s face was flushed.
“I always wondered,” Walter said, “why the Murdoch kid was born, you know, feebleminded. They insisted it didn’t run in the family, so you had to think, well, what if it was the water?”
“I think Estelle had a sister with developmental problems,” said Ruth.
“Who can ever know with these things?” Walter said.
“You know, I’d love a tour,” Ruth said hastily. “Can you believe we’ve lived next door for forty-three years and this is the first time we’ve ever been inside this house? Walter spent plenty of time over here, but not me.”
“Sure,” Morgan said, sounding subdued. “Let’s get some drinks first. Hutch, I’ll have a bourbon, too, come to think of it.”
“Bourbon and water, coming up,” Hutch said.
“Use the Evian,” said his wife.
While Morgan showed Ruth around, the men stood next to the grill, highball glasses in their hands. It was one of those immense stainless steel numbers the size of a Volkswagen. The dog whined and pawed at the screen door from inside. “So the traffic noise don’t bother you?” Walter said casually, watching Hutch flip bell peppers, orange and yellow and red. They had nice black stripes on them from the grill.
“You know, I don’t even notice it anymore,” Hutch said.
“No, you wouldn’t. Not consciously.” Walter took a long sip. In the lull, the whoosh of car tires on Route 6 seemed particularly loud. Then, as if on cue, came the blat of a motorcycle. “You probably saw that thing in the Sunday paper a few weeks back about how noise pollution can raise your blood pressure and give you anxiety and disrupt your sleep and what have you. Damages the fetus worst of all. Developmentally and all that. Scary stuff. But you folks probably aren’t planning to have kids anytime soon, so it’s no big whoop.”
Walter could hear the young man swallow hard.
“We’ve been talking about hiring one of those acoustic consultants to design a noise barrier fence on the highway side,” Hutch said.
“Why not,” Walter said, nodding. “Worst that happens, you’re out twenty, thirty thousand bucks. Call it an experiment, right? Though I always wondered if maybe they’re selling you a bill of goods. It never works like they tell you.”
“Actually, they’re supposed to cut down noise as much as ten decibels.”
“Build it high enough, maybe. Twelve-foot fence gonna look like the Berlin Wall, though.”
Hutch shrugged. “We could sort of mask it with trees. Leyland cypresses, maybe.”
“Huh,” Walter said, unconvinced. “Sure. You might get lucky.”
“How’s that?”
“Your Leyland cypresses don’t much like our winters.”
“Ah.” Hutch tried to turn a piece of zucchini, but it slipped through the cooking grate and landed in the coals with a hiss. The fire flared and crackled.
“Not helping you much, am I?”
Hutch chuckled. “You’re supervising,” he said. “Male bonding. Whatever.”
Hutch’s hair was thinning on top, Walter saw. The guy would probably be bald in a couple of years easy.
After a long pause, Walter said: “Well, I’m glad the house finally sold.”
“This house?”
“You musta got a real nice deal on it.”
“I—I thought it was on the market for only a couple of weeks.”
“Going on six years, more like.”
Hutch looked surprised. “That can’t be true.”
“Oh, Charlie. Man, I love him to death, but he musta relisted this house a dozen times over the years. Like they say, the last key in the bunch opens the lock. Guy could sell snow to an Eskimo.”
“Wh—what was…? Well, they must have way overpriced it, then. We put in an offer half an hour after we saw this place.” Hutch gestured widely with his hand, indicating not just the house but the sweep of open land. “You don’t come across eighteenth-century Cape houses in this condition every day, you know, with this much land.”
“Oh, it wasn’t the price,” Walter said.
“What—what do you mean, it wasn’t the price?”
Walter noticed something and pointed. “What’s that over there, a garden?” The sun was setting and the vast expanse of lawn was bathed in an ochre glow. The shadows had grown long. Walter’s vision wasn’t as sharp as it used to be, but he could make out a large rectangular plot fenced in by chicken wire and timber posts. It was situated right on the edge of the woods. That narrow strip of forest separated this house from Walter’s farm.
Hutch looked and said, “My tomato garden. What about the house?”
“Just tomatoes in there, huh?”
“Heirloom. Twenty-seven different varieties.”
“Any reason you put it way the heck over there? Seems like you’d get a hell of a lot more full sun if you moved it away from the trees.”
“Well, you know, it’s interesting: I noticed the grass over there was darker and greener and way taller than the grass next to it, even though it had just been mowed a few days before. I figured that for whatever reason the soil there was better. Just naturally richer.”
Walter stared at the tomato garden for a long time. Suddenly his sun-creased old face had grown taut. He seemed to be deep in thought, and not happy thought.
“What is it?” said Hutch.
After a few seconds, Walter shook his head. “Huh? Nothing.”
“Well, as I was saying, maybe it’s the leaves from the trees—you know, they decay over the years and form a rich loam or compost or humus, I’m not even sure what you call it. But whatever it is, the dirt there is incredibly rich. I’ve never seen anything like it—the plants are immense and healthy and they’re bearing loads of fruit, and they’re huge. And the best I’ve ever tasted. You’ll see what I mean—Morgan is making her tomato salad for dinner. We’ll give you some to take home—we have way more than we can possibly eat.”
The old man looked shaken. He cleared his throat. “Who dug your garden for you?”
“You really must think Morgan and I are just a couple of spoiled yuppies from the city,” Hutch said, emboldened by the alcohol. “I did it myself, put the plants in myself, staked them myself. I like gardening. I actually find it relaxing.”
“You come across anything?”
“Excuse me?”
“When you dug the garden, I mean.”
“A lot of roots and some rocks is all.” Hutch gave him a puzzled glance. “I suppose now you’re going to tell me that’s where the old cesspool was, huh?” He grinned wickedly as if to show he was onto the old man’s tricks.
“Oh, no,” Walter said softly. “Oh, no. Nothing like that. Nothing like that at all.”
“Then what?”
Walter looked pensive. Like he couldn’t decide how to answer. Finally he said, “I don’t suppose you have any more of that fancy bourbon?”
Dinner was punctuated by long, uneasy silences. The clinking of silverware, the sounds of chewing and smacking and swallowing seemed unusually loud. Ruth exclaimed over the cold cucumber soup and asked if that interesting flavor was fresh cilantro. The steaks were perfect, charred on the outside, tender and juicy on the inside, and Ruth asked Hutch how he grilled steaks as good as what you’d get at one of those expensive steakhouses in New York City. When Hutch revealed his secret—you coat the steaks in an emulsion of clarified butter and oil and kosher salt before putting them on a very hot fire, and turn them only once—he didn’t sound very enthusiastic. He barely talked at all.
Ruth did her best to lighten the mood by telling funny stories about some of the more colorful characters who lived here year-round: the bossy postmistress who had a habit of “misplacing” your mail under a sorting table if she took a dislike to you; the elderly gentleman who had a llama farm and rode a motorcycle; the once-famous B-movie star who never left his house. Morgan smiled and laughed politely and made sure everyone’s wineglass was replenished with the Pinot Noir from Oregon that had become their house red.
“Will you look at these tomatoes?” Ruth said after one particularly long stretch of silence. A wicker basket of cheerfully colored but strangely misshapen tomatoes sat in the middle of the antique French country farm table, an unusual centerpiece. “How extraordinary.”
“This one’s my favorite,” Morgan said, selecting a bulbous deep-red one. “Don’t you think it’s obscene?”
“Oh!” Ruth said, giggling. The tomato’s deep cleft looked almost lewd, like a buxom woman’s cleavage. “What sort of tomato is that?”
“That’s called a Mortgage Lifter,” said Hutch in a brittle, almost annoyed tone. “Heirloom tomatoes have all sorts of funny names.”
“Well, I think it looks just like the buttocks of a young boy,” Walter said.
After several seconds of awkward silence, Ruth coughed.
Morgan got up to go to the kitchen, but on the way she turned around. “Oh, Hutch, you should ask Walter about the chipmunks.”
“Chipmunks?” Ruth said.
“Yeah,” Hutch said, perking up a bit. “I think the chipmunks are eating my tomatoes. It’s like they wait for the tomatoes to get absolutely, perfectly ripe and then they take a bite—one single bite per tomato—like they’re sampling each one. Then of course you have to throw them away, unless you want to catch rabies. It drives me nuts.”
“Oh, sure,” Walter said. “It’s a cycle around here. They extend the hunting season so’s people can shoot more coyotes because they’re eating too many house pets. And of course coyotes eat chipmunks, so fewer coyotes, more chipmunks.”
“Oh, but they’re so cute!” Morgan said.
“They’re cute until they eat your blueberries and raspberries and tomatoes, and then they’re not so cute.”
“So what do you do?” Morgan asked.
“Snap traps.”
“Like—like rattraps?”
“Nah, mousetraps’ll do you just fine. Put a little dab of peanut butter on there and you’ll catch ’em easy.”
“Well, I don’t think I could do that,” Hutch said. “I couldn’t kill a chipmunk.”
“Do those Havahart traps work on chipmunks?” asked Morgan, still standing at the kitchen door. “Catch and release them somewhere?”
“Oh, no,” Walter said with a deep, rumbling laugh. “You gotta kill the little buggers. Snap their little necks.” He saw their horrified expressions. “Hey, a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.”
“Oh!” Morgan said. “I almost forgot!” She excused herself and then returned from the kitchen with a platter. “Hutch’s tomatoes,” she announced.
“Come on, it’s your great recipe,” Hutch said modestly.
“Olive oil and a touch of balsamic vinegar and a sprinkle of sea salt is hardly a recipe, honey,” Morgan said, dishing tomato salad onto salad plates. “Walter?”
“Looks tempting,” Walter said. “But I’ll pass.”
Hutch glared at him. “Something wrong with the tomatoes?”
“Hutch!” Morgan said.
“Oh, these tomatoes are wonderful!” Ruth exclaimed, fork poised in midair. “I don’t know what you did to them, but they’re just divine! Walter, you have to try Morgan’s tomato salad.”
Walter smiled but shook his head.
“Walter started telling me something about the tomato garden earlier,” Hutch said. “Right, Walter?”
The old man compressed his lips and appeared lost in thought.
“Did there used to be a toxic waste dump there, Walter?” Hutch smiled, but his voice was harsh and a bit too loud.
“Hutch,” Morgan said again.
“I’m sorry,” Walter said. “I really should have kept my mouth shut. There’s no reason you need to know the history. What’s past is past.”
“Walter, what are you doing?” Ruth said.
“History?” Morgan said.
“Please. Forget I ever mentioned it.”
“Walter, please,” Ruth said, placing her hand on top of his. “Stop it right now.”
Morgan and Hutch exchanged a quick glance, and then Hutch said, “No, I’d like to hear whatever it is that Walter doesn’t think we need to know.”
“Honey,” Morgan said.
Ruth shook her head and exhaled noisily. “Oh, dear.”
“I just don’t think it’s right that no one told them about the house,” Walter said to her.
“Walter,” Ruth said, “it’s past my bedtime.”
Morgan smiled and said lightly, “Well, now you have to tell us.”
Walter looked at her, then at her husband, his face grim. “All right.”
Ruth scowled.
“The Murdochs lived in this house for years,” Walter said. “Tom and Estelle and their son, Paulie. Nice folks.”
“You certainly spent a lot of time over here,” Ruth said crisply, “when Tom wasn’t around.”
Walter rolled his eyes. “Ruth, we’re not having this conversation again.”
Ruth shifted in her chair, sat up straighter, her lips pursed.
“Now, how long ago did it happen, Ruth?”
Ruth shook her head almost imperceptibly. She seemed to be pouting over some old hurt, a wound that still hadn’t healed.
“Eight years ago, I think it was,” Walter said. “Hard to believe it’s been that long.”
The young couple watched him intently.
“Tom and Estelle had gone to Boston for the weekend, and they left Paulie at home alone. He must have been sixteen, seventeen, and even if he wasn’t quite right in the head, he did fine on his own. When they came home, the house was empty. Nobody home. No Paulie.”
Ruth was studying her half-eaten tomato salad.
When a few seconds had passed, Hutch said, “And?”
“It was like he just up and vanished. Not a trace. They called everyone they knew in town and they drove around, and—nothing. He was gone. It was the damnedest thing.”
“What happened to him?” Morgan asked, sounding as if she didn’t want to know the answer.
“They put up signs everywhere. There were search parties. The police didn’t have any luck. Days went by, and then weeks and months.”
“Was he kidnapped or something?” Morgan asked.
“I bet he ran away,” Hutch said. “You wouldn’t believe how many teenagers leave home and just, I don’t know, live on the streets.”
“They sold the house, must have been a year later. They said they couldn’t live here. Too many memories of the kid. They moved down to Boca, but that didn’t last long. Estelle had a heart attack and died maybe a month or two after they moved.”
He went quiet, and Hutch mistakenly assumed the old man had finished his story. “I’m not really getting what this has to do with my tomatoes,” he said.
Walter fixed him with a beady stare. “The family that bought the house—I don’t even remember their names, they owned it so short a time—well, you know, the old cesspool wasn’t up to code, so the town made them put in a septic tank. New state law. They hired Jimmy Rice to do the excavation, isn’t that right?”
Ruth, still staring at her plate, nodded once.
“Jimmy was sitting in his backhoe loader digging the pit for the drain field, right about where the tomato garden is now, and when he emptied the bucket something caught his eye. Something bright red, like a piece of clothing, maybe.”
“No,” Morgan said, her voice tight.
“The damnedest thing. He got out of the cab and picked up this red plaid Elmer Fudd cap out of the dirt pile, and stuck to it was this white fragment of bone… I mean, Jimmy’s son went to grade school with Paulie, so of course he recognized the hat right away.”
“He dug up the… body?” Hutch whispered.
“Just that cap and a small piece of skull.”
“What about the rest of the body?” Hutch asked. His wife looked pale and queasy, her hand over her mouth.
“Like I told you, I tilled in a lot of peat moss in that soil to make the grass grow better, and that stuff’s real acid. Turns out acid soil really speeds up the decomposition of human remains. They didn’t find the skeleton. They didn’t find any bones except for a few slivers. The peat moss actually dissolves the bones after enough time goes by. And the thing is, the human body makes excellent fertilizer.”
The color had drained from Morgan’s face. She blinked hard. “Pardon me,” she said. She rose unsteadily from the table, her elbow knocking a salad plate clattering to the floor, where it shattered. But she kept walking toward the kitchen.
Hutch’s mouth hung open. He took off his tortoiseshell glasses and put a hand over his eyes. Ruth had folded her hands in her lap, eyes downcast, as if she were praying. Everything went terribly still, except for the faint whoosh of car tires from the highway and a distant retching noise that seemed to emanate from the kitchen or the bathroom.
“The family hired some fancy real estate lawyer in Hyannis who got them out of the sales contract. Some little loophole in the law about ‘deceptive trade practices’ or some such. And of course everyone started calling the Murdoch house the Murder House. Tom was arrested down in Boca a little while later. I guess the Cape and Islands district attorney’s office found some witnesses that remembered him complaining about Paulie, back in the day. What an ordeal it was taking care of him. How he was at his wits’ end. How it was straining their marriage and he didn’t know what was gonna happen to that kid after they were gone and how he really hoped the kid died before they did.”
Ruth said very softly, “You were one of the witnesses at the trial, Walter. Aren’t you going to tell them about that?”
“I got subpoenaed, honey. I didn’t exactly have a choice.”
“But you were the one who first told the police about Tom. If you hadn’t come forward, Tom wouldn’t be in prison.”
“He killed his own son, Ruth. He belongs in prison.”
“I loved that boy, too. I wasn’t as close to him as you were, certainly, but I did love him. But I never understood why you never said anything before then. Why’d you wait till Jimmy Rice found that poor boy’s hat? What took you so long?”
“Until they found the hat and the piece of skull, everyone thought the boy ran away, Ruth. We all did.”
“Still,” Ruth said. “Who knows if Tom did it or not? Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. Maybe it was someone else. It just always bothered me how they could put a man in prison for saying nothing more than he was worried about what would happen to his son. They didn’t have a single piece of evidence tying him to the murder, but the jury convicted him and the judge sentenced him to life without parole. That’s not beyond a reasonable doubt, seems to me.”
“Ruth,” Walter said. “You were always sweet on Tom and you know it.”
“And you—”
But she stopped short. Then she pushed back her chair and got up from the dinner table. “Please give your wife my thanks and also my deepest apologies,” she said as she started limping toward the front door. “We’re going home, Walter.”
Even though the Colemans were next-door neighbors, the drive took a good three minutes, what with turning left on Route 6 and then making the complicated figure eight off the town center exit to circle back around to Hatch Road.
Ruth sat in silence almost until they pulled into their driveway. Then she spoke in a small, fierce voice. “Well, I hope you’re proud of yourself.”
“Ruth.”
“I don’t think we’ll be invited over there again.”
“They would have found out sooner or later, Ruth. People talk.”
“They barely just moved in! And you didn’t have to ruin that nice dinner. They worked so hard.”
“They made me tell them.”
“And you kept dropping hints so they’d ask. Why don’t you admit it?”
He shook his head and tried very hard not to smile.
“Walter Coleman, this is all because they outbid you on the house, isn’t it? I don’t even know why you put in an offer anyway.”
“It’s not the house, it’s the property. We could double the size of our farm.”
“All these years the estate’s been trying to unload the Murder House, and they finally find a buyer.”
“They’ve had my offer on the table the whole time.”
“Not a serious offer, Walter. Not a serious offer. You were bidding a fraction of what just the land’s worth, not including the house.”
“That’s all we can afford.”
“Well, you lost and they won. So just deal with it and stop torturing that nice young couple.”
As they got out of the truck, Walter wasn’t able to keep that wicked smile from spreading across his face.
Ten days later, a 1995 Caterpillar 416 backhoe lumbered up the long dirt road to the old Murdoch place and over the crushed-oyster section. It drove right across the lawn to the tomato garden around the back, leaving deep ruts in the zoysia grass, and then came to a stop, the engine running.
Behind the wheel, Walter was trying to recall some of the places where Paulie liked to bury his treasures.
His standing lowball offer had been accepted a few minutes after Hutch and Morgan had moved out. They’d engaged the services of a real estate attorney in Cambridge who got the sales contract voided on the basis of deceptive practices. The lawyer didn’t have to try all that hard, either. Now, at a price less than half what the preppy couple had paid, the Murdoch property was finally Walter’s.
He’d start at the tomato garden; why not.
Paulie Murdoch used to bury his little treasures all over the yard, seemingly without pattern. So the box could be anywhere, really.
It hadn’t been a problem when Paulie ran off with Walter’s box of cigars and buried them in the yard somewhere. How the boy loved his pirate treasure maps! But when he sneaked off with Walter’s antique oak tool chest, the one that had belonged to his grandfather, the one where he kept the special photographs, something had to be done at once.
Not because the chest was an heirloom, though it was. No, it was those very special and very private photographs he kept inside, the pictures of forbidden things. Including the ones that documented the very special and very private games that Walter had convinced the teenage boy to play.
Yet the more insistently Walter had demanded the return of the box, the more gleefully the feebleminded boy had laughed. All he’d say was that he’d hidden them somewhere so he could show Mommy and Daddy, who loved to look at pictures of their only son.
This was no threat. It was part of the game whose rules he’d made up and from which he could not be dissuaded.
What happened next—well, it was self-preservation, nothing more. A man had to do what a man had to do.
He pushed the left joystick forward to lower the front loader bucket to the ground; then he pulled the right joystick to curl it back. The sharp-toothed bucket chomped through the flimsy chicken-wire fence, buckling and crumpling it, furring strips snapping like matchsticks, and it scooped out the first load of dirt.
He’d find the damn box, no matter how long it took. He was a patient man. Now he had all the time in the world.
Then, suddenly, a strange impulse overcame him. He was not unacquainted with strange impulses. He engaged the parking brake, got out, and stepped through the hole he’d just torn in the garden fence, his boots sinking into the soft, rich soil. Then he knelt before one of the gangly staked plants and plucked a single perfect tomato.
It was blood-red and ripe and full, with a deep cleft. He held it to his nose and inhaled deeply of its musk. Then he sank his teeth into it. The juice squirted and dripped onto his jowls and spurted into his eye, but it was good.
God, was it good.