The phone had rung in the middle of the night. Nobody, and especially not the parent of a teenager with his own car, wanted to be woken up by that sound. But Jordan was the publisher of the island’s newspaper, the Nantucket Standard, and so the phone rang in the middle of the night in the Randolph household more often than it did in other households. People called with news, or what they thought was news.
Zoe had been known to call in the middle of the night as well, but that was always Jordan’s cell phone, and he’d taken to shutting it off when he went to bed to avoid unnecessary drama. Anything Zoe wanted to say to him at two in the morning would sound better at eight o’clock, once he was safely in the car and driving to the paper.
It was a Saturday night, or technically Sunday morning. It was eighteen minutes past one. Jordan had a pretty good handle on what was happening around the island at any hour of any day. At one o’clock in the morning on a Sunday in mid-June, the crowd would be spilling from the Chicken Box onto Dave Street. There would be a string of taxicabs waiting there, and a police cruiser. Downtown, there would be clusters of people on the sidewalk outside the Boarding House and the Pearl; there would be the inevitable woman who attempted to cross the cobblestone street in four-inch stilettos. An older, more sedate clientele would roll out of the Club Car once the piano player finished “Sweet Caroline.”
Jordan had been at the Club Car with Zoe a few years earlier, on the night they experienced what they now referred to as “the moment.” The moment when they both knew. They knew then, but they did not act. They didn’t act until more than a year later, on Martha’s Vineyard.
The phone, the phone. Jordan was awake. His mind was instantly alert, but it took him a few seconds to get his body to move.
He swung his legs to the floor. Ava was sleeping in Ernie’s nursery with her earplugs in and the white-noise machine going, and the door locked and the shades pulled. And the magic elixir of her nightly Ambien silencing her demons. She would be completely dependent on him to rescue her in the event of a fire.
Fire? he thought.
And then he remembered: graduation.
He raced to the phone. The caller ID read Town of Nantucket. Which meant the police, or the hospital, or the school.
“Hello?” Jordan said. He tried to sound alive, awake, in control.
“Dad?”
That was the only word Jake was able to say. What followed was blubbering, but Jordan was buffered by the knowledge that Jake was alive, he could talk, he had remembered the phone number for the house.
A policeman came on the line. Jordan knew many of the officers but not all of them, and especially not the summer hires.
“Mr. Randolph?” the officer, his voice unfamiliar, said. “Sir?”