twenty-four

Unlike Cold Spring Harbor, the neighboring town of Huntington was actually a township representing five unincorporated areas and housing a population of close to a million residents. Cold Spring Harbor, with only five thousand residents, had a gourmet food store but no supermarkets. Our hamlet had no gas stations or mini-marts or anything that might imply convenience. You could, however, sample Long Island wines at one of three Cold Spring Harbor liquor stores while you waited for your speed boat to be winterized at the docks. The more mundane purchases, like aspirin, occurred somewhere among the suburban sprawl of Huntington. The border of
the two towns was a real estate hot potato. The homes appeared equally as grand on both sides of the town line, but the housing prices dropped a few hundred thousand on the Huntington side. As you inched farther into Huntington, the town took on a more diverse reality. That means everyone didn’t look alike—in a good way.

The Carmen House Apartments, a cluster of three-story brick buildings, were located on the east side of Huntington, as far as you could possibly get from Cold Spring Harbor. It was Huntington’s first attempt, in the 1960s, to stratify housing needs. Set in a leafy, suburban area with single-family neighborhoods on either side, the Carmen apartments seemed revolutionary at the time. Fifty years later, natural wear and tear, as well as a revolving door of residents, showed the cracks. The buildings were, in fact, crumbling. The grassy green, now a dirt courtyard, seemed beyond landscape repair. And of course there were signs that meant nothing when taken individually, but told a story of poverty in cumulative display: a lone child’s sandal, a broken tricycle, an overflowing Dumpster even I wouldn’t approach on an empty stomach.

“Is this where scavengers live?” I asked, opening my sketchbook.

“Not quite,” Frank said, as he parked the Gremlin under a shady oak tree. “This is where Lizzy James lives.”

“Frank!” I yelled. “How could you not tell me where we were going?”

“How could you not tell me about this woman?” Frank’s hands gripped the steering wheel, probably to prevent himself from hitting me. “You’ve done nothing but beg me to help you, yet you went off to play detective with Dr. Grovit instead of me. You realize I’m a detective, right? Did you think I wouldn’t find out?”

“How did you find out?”

“It wasn’t rocket science,” he said. “Grovit called Harbor House and I picked up.”

If someone were watching us, they would have seen two very angry people in a heated argument. My arms flailed and my mouth jabbered. The only problem was the accompanying audio. I hadn’t actually said anything of merit, because I had zero comeback to Frank’s accusations. He was dead-on. In my misguided zeal, I had gone on my wild goose chase without him.

Frank grabbed my circling hands and slapped them together in a prayer position. “Why are we doing this to each other?” he said, and then released me. “From day one, we’ve been challenging each other.”

I started to speak, but again, I had nothing worthy to say.

“If this is going to work, we need to be honest,” Frank said. “We’ve probably got some unresolved issues holding us back. I know I do.”

I raised my eyebrows. I hadn’t considered Frank’s take on our relationship, as I had only seen him reacting to my histrionics. “Oh,” I said softly. “I guess I haven’t been listening too well, have I? Is something bugging you?”

Without much coaxing on my part, Frank admitted what was really on his mind. “Is something still going on between you and Charlie?”

Holy cow. Is that what he’d been thinking this whole time? Me and Charlie? Ridiculous, I thought, and then I looked at Frank. It wasn’t ridiculous to him.

“No, but if I’m being honest, I could see why it would bother you,” I replied. “My friendship with Charlie has crossed the line in the past, but it hasn’t recently, and it won’t going forward.”

“Good,” he nodded. “Your turn.”

Hmm. Why did I challenge Frank all the time? Could it be I was frustrated that our physical relationship had stalled? It seemed like a shallow reason for all this angst, but I couldn’t come up with anything better. I distracted myself by watching people come and go across Carmen House’s courtyard, and I realized that any one of these people could be Lizzy James. Suspicion crept up my spine as I eyed a group of chatty women and immediately branded them guilty of something. The feeling of culpability was all too familiar. Of course, I thought. I’d felt it the day I met Detective Frank DeRosa, nearly a year ago.

“The night you first came to Harbor House,” I said as I tilted my side-view mirror at an angle that allowed me to catch Frank’s reaction. “Did you think I was involved in Teddy’s death?” It had always bothered me that Frank might have been suspicious of me in the beginning of the investigation.

“Yes,” Frank replied, his face remaining placid.

I was blatantly offended. “Why?”

“Because everyone I spoke to prior to meeting you described you as, well …” Frank slowed down as he tried to sanitize his recollections.

“Forget it,” I murmured.

“No, that’s the point. We need to clear the air,” Frank replied and then continued. “You were described as the black sheep, the trouble-maker, a disappointment, and well, a bit eccentric. And then there was your attic. The piles of sketches, face after face after face. The whole setting was bizarre. And Harbor House, with the junky furniture and the broken down car …”

“Okay, okay,” I interrupted, “I get it. I come across as a modern-day Miss Havisham.”

“A younger, cuter version,” Frank amended as he opened the car window. “And there it goes, right out the window.”

“What?”

Frank pretended to brush something imaginary through the car window. “The tension. It’s gone.”

I smiled. Frank wasn’t naturally funny, but when necessary, he could see the humor in a situation. He also had a habit of being right most of the time. We did have unresolved issues, but at his insistence, we had just remedied two. Charlie and I hadn’t slept together recently, which I’m sure brightened Frank’s day. I wasn’t thrilled that Frank had initially considered me a suspect in Teddy’s death due to an unfavorable first impression. I guessed, however, that by this point, we’d moved successfully past our preconceptions.

I smiled and asked, “What’s Lizzy’s apartment number?”