Leaving to look at rental properties, Adam encountered Jack repairing a rotted corner of the front porch.
“Termites,” Jack muttered, then drove another nail into a new plank.
With nothing to say, Adam headed for the car before hearing Jack softly call his name.
He turned to face his father. Still kneeling, Jack looked up at him, squinting slightly in a thin winter sun. “I hear you’re moving out.”
Adam nodded. “Better that way.”
Jack’s deep brown eyes were questioning and somber. “Is it? Your mother doesn’t think so.”
Afraid of being overheard, Adam moved closer, speaking under his breath. “She might if she knew what happened between you and Ben that night. But I would think she knows enough. You and mom should have whatever you both need—God knows you waited long enough. But the three of us can’t go back and rewrite history, playing mom and dad and son.” He glanced toward the guest house. “Besides, there’s Teddy to consider. For everyone’s good, the less Ted knows about our family history the better, including that he’s only my half brother. Which also makes us cousins, I suppose—sometimes I lose track.”
Jack winced, deepening the lines of age in his weathered face. “I wonder if you can ever accept me. Or who I am to you.”
Caught between sadness and fatigue, Adam sat beside his father. “What can you be? I make no judgment about what happened between my mother and you. And I’ll never forget what a good uncle you were to us both. But you weren’t a father to me when it mattered.”
“So it doesn’t matter now.”
“I wish it did, Jack. But nothing can change the past, or what we’re dealing with in the present. I contrived this cover-up so that neither you nor Teddy spends a life in prison for my quasi-father’s death—sealing my mother’s sadness in the bargain. But as long as I stay in this house, I’m living that every moment. It’s suffocating.”
Jack ran a hand through his dark silvering hair. In a low voice he said, “God knows I’d like to go back to when you were a boy, tell you ‘I’m your father, and I love you.’ I always felt I was watching you through a window—completely miserable, unable to make myself known. But I had to live by your mother’s rules.”
“And Ben’s. So here we all are, living out the choices I had no part in making.” Feeling compassion war with candor, Adam placed a hand on Jack’s shoulder. “I don’t hate you, Jack—far from it. I don’t want Mom or you or Teddy to keep paying the price for who Ben was. But I can’t pretend to feel things I don’t, or to forget what can never be forgotten.”
Jack looked down. “At least that’s honest. Far more than we could ever be with you.”
There was nothing more to say, Adam knew. He let his hand rest on his father’s shoulder for another moment, then went to find a place to live, still suspended between his past and future.
Driving to meet the rental agent, Adam reviewed yet again what George Hanley knew or believed—that Adam had broken into the courthouse, stolen files, and sent them to Teddy’s lawyer. The one piece Hanley did not have was Adam’s manipulation of Bobby Towle, once his teammate and friend. Adam’s deepest shame.
Shortly after Ben’s funeral, Adam had met Bobby at the bar of the Kelly House.
In ten years, it was little changed—dim lights, wooden tables, and a bar jammed with tourists and islanders, the din of laughter and conversation bouncing off walls covered with old photographs or Vineyard memorabilia. His friend sat at a small table in the corner, looking bulky and awkward in blue jeans and a polo shirt big enough to double as a beach towel. In the instant before Bobby saw him, Adam had the affectionate thought that he looked like Baby Huey all grown up—a little bulkier, a lot sadder.
With a smile, Adam sat down. “So pal, how’ve you been the last decade or so?”
Bobby mustered a smile of his own. “You know how this island is. Days pass, then years, nothing changes much. Pretty soon that’s your life.”
But something had changed, Adam sensed. For a guy like Bobby, being a cop, and married to the prettiest girl in their high school class, should have felt better than it appeared. Bobby ordered two beers, then asked, “And you? Seems like you just disappeared.”
Adam nodded. “One day I woke up, and decided to see the world. For me everything changes, every day. I don’t know which is better.”
The puzzlement lingered in Bobby’s eyes. “Everyone thought you’d be a lawyer. Maybe marry Jenny Leigh.”
Adam felt the familiar ache, the memory of a life torn asunder. “So did I,” he answered. “I found out that wasn’t me.”
A young waitress brought two beer mugs full to the brim. Hoisting his, Adam said, “To victory over Nantucket.”
Clicking mugs, Bobby replied nostalgically, “That was a game, wasn’t it?”
“Yup. I’ll remember the last play on my death bed. They’re two yards from the goal line, five seconds to go, a quarterback sweep away from beating us. He almost gets to the goal line. Then you knock the sonofabitch into tomorrow, and the ball loose from his hands—”
“And you fall on it,” Bobby finished. “Happiest moment of my life.”
“Happier than marrying Barbara?” Adam asked lightly. “Football games are sixty minutes; marriage is supposed to last a lifetime. Or so they tell me.”
Bobby’s face changed, his bewildered expression followed by a slow shake of the head. “That’s what I always believed.” He stopped himself. “I don’t much like to talk about it, Adam. With what happened to your dad, we maybe shouldn’t even be having this beer.”
It was another sign, if Adam had needed one, that George Hanley and the state police thought someone had killed Benjamin Blaine, and had focused on a member of his family. Shrugging, he said casually, “This is the Vineyard, not Manhattan, and we’re old friends. That doesn’t entitle me to anything you don’t want to tell me. But if it helps, I’d like to hear more about you and Barbara.”
For a long moment, Bobby looked down, then shook his head again, less in resistance than sorrow. “It’s all just so fucked up.”
Adam gave his friend a look of quiet commiseration. After a time he said, “I guess we’re talking about your marriage.”
Bobby puffed his cheeks. Expelling a breath, he murmured, “Barb got mixed up with a guy where she worked. At the bank.”
This required no elaboration. “Sorry,” Adam proffered. “That’s tough to take, I know.”
Bobby looked past him, seemingly at nothing. “You start to imagine them together, you know? Still, the unfaithful part I could have gotten past. But this douchebag was into crystal meth.” His voice became almost hopeful. “I think that was what Barb was into, more than him.”
Keep telling yourself that, Adam thought, if it helps. Signaling for a second beer, he asked, “Did you guys break up?”
Bobby stared at the table, as though examining the wreckage of his own life. “She begged me to take her back. But by that time, it had gone on way too long, and she was way too deep into meth. I had to put her in a treatment center.”
It was the kind of thing Bobby would do, Adam thought—even in high school, he had been a responsible kid, stepping up when a lesser person would not. “When did all this happen?”
“She went away six months ago, to a treatment center on the Cape. She’s still there.” He frowned. “It sort of reminds me of the actress your dad got mixed up with. Except she had the money to get straight.”
“Oh, it worked out fine for Carla,” Adam said. “For her, this island became a profit center. But I guess helping Barbara gets expensive.”
“Like lighting hundred dollar bills on fire,” Bobby answered resignedly.
When the waitress brought their second beers, he barely noticed her. Adam thanked her, then asked his friend, “How are you affording that?”
“I’m not. Had to take a second mortgage on the place we fixed up together. Only reason I could buy it is my granddad left me a little.” A look of bleakness seeped through Bobby’s stoic mask. “You haven’t been here for a while. I love this place, for sure. But us ordinary folks are getting squeezed out of the real estate market by summer people with money. Not to mention we’re losing work to these Brazilians and day laborers from the mainland, and property taxes keep going up. Families who’ve been here since time began are barely hanging on.” He looked at Adam, as though recalling the difference in their circumstances. “Your dad always had plenty of money. Still, you’re well out of all this. Except for what happened to him, I guess.”
“More to my mother. I guess you heard about the will.”
“Oh, yeah.” The words were weighted with significance. “We’ve heard.”
“I guess everyone has,” Adam said resignedly. “How has it been working with the state police?”
“About what you’d expect. They send over this sergeant named Mallory—thinks he’s a hotshot, and that cops on this island are all buffoons. Not that he says that. It’s more the way he’s so patient and polite. Like when I was talking to Grandma after she got Alzheimer’s.”
Adam had to laugh. “From now on, Bobby, I’ll speak very slowly and distinctly.”
Bobby’s grin was rueful. “It really is like that, you know.”
“So how long do you have to put up with these guys?”
“As long as they keep digging.”
Adam shook his head. “I can’t believe that anyone killed him. I don’t know why they’d think so.”
“Well, they do.” Bobby looked away, then into Adam’s face. “Is anyone in your family getting legal advice?”
Adam feigned surprise. “They’ve got no reason to lawyer up. What with the will, they can’t afford to anyhow.”
Bobby stared at his beer. “Maybe they should try,” he said in a flatter tone. “I know where they can get a second mortgage.”
“Not on a house that belongs to Carla Pacelli. I’m the only one with money, and not much at that.” Adam paused, then asked quietly, “How much should I worry about them, Bob?”
Bobby considered his answer. “All I can tell you,” he said in a lower voice, “is there’s a problem with the autopsy report.”
“What kind of problem?”
For what seemed to Adam a painfully long time, Bobby concealed his thoughts behind half-closed eyelids. “How close are you to your brother, Adam?”
With difficulty, Adam summoned a look of composure, maintaining the same puzzled tone. “Teddy? We used to be very close.”
Bobby seemed to inhale. “If you still are, you might ask him the last time he was at the promontory. Depending on how you like the answer, tell him to get a lawyer—”
“Bobby,” Adam interrupted. “I know my brother. He hated that place.”
“So he says. Problem is, he also hated your father.”
“No more than I did.”
Bobby shook his head. “Maybe so. But Teddy stuck around.” Pausing, he glanced at the nearest table, then continued speaking under the din. “Might as well tell you what Teddy already knows. Your brother used to have a boyfriend on the island, and Mallory and George Hanley went to see him. Seems like Teddy used to fantasize about giving your dad a shove, then watching him hit the rocks head first. Pillow talk, I guess.”
Adam’s skin went cold, and then a memory pierced his consciousness. The brothers had set up an old army tent to camp in the back yard. Teddy was twelve, Adam ten—the evening before, Teddy had refused to join the family picnic at the promontory, and Ben had mocked his fear of heights. “I guess you’re made for sea level,” their father had concluded. “A metaphor of sorts.” Lying in the tent, Teddy repeated this, then said, “Loves those sunsets, doesn’t he?”
“Yeah.”
“Ever think about giving him a shove?”
Teddy’s tone of inquiry had unsettled Adam badly. All at once, he had felt the difference between them, the line of demarcation that was their father. “Not really, no.”
“Because I do, all the time. Sometimes it feels like the bastard is choking me to death—”
Facing Bobby, Adam shook his head, as if to clear it. “That sounds like something a kid would say. Even at that, it doesn’t sound like Teddy.”
“People grow up,” Bobby rejoined, “get serious about life. Maybe there’s a lot he hasn’t told you. Like that he called his ex-boyfriend the night your father died, leaving a message that he needed to talk.”
“About what?”
“The message didn’t say. But your brother sounded desperate, almost out of his mind. Not like I remember him from high school, this kind of gentle guy.” Bobby stopped to stare at him. “You don’t know anything about this, do you?”
“No,” Adam conceded. “Nothing.”
“That’s pretty interesting, don’t you think? Anyhow, I’ve made my point, and said way too much to do it. But ask yourself which neighbor of yours likes to walk that trail after dinner.”
Adam searched his memory. “Nathan Wright used to.”
“Tell Teddy to see a lawyer,” Bobby repeated. “That’s all I have to say. If you want to talk about old times, I’m happy to stick around. Or you can tell me about what you’ve been up to.”
Bobby’s misgivings were palpable, and in his last words, Adam heard a plea—help me make this a night with an old friend. “Then let’s switch to whisky, Bob, and do it right.”
For the next few moments, waiting for two glasses of Maker’s Mark on ice, Adam spun stories about Afghanistan—in his telling a strange and exotic place in which Adam was a seriocomic bit player. Over one whisky, then another, they began reprising the Nantucket game, recalling key moments in a night that made them champions of their league. “You know,” Bobby said in a thicker voice, “my dad always said that, next to Ben Blaine, you were the best quarterback we ever had.”
Adam laughed briefly. “Funny, Bob. My dad said that, too.”
At length they got up, leaving crumpled bills on the table. Outside it had rained; the night air had cooled, and shallow pockets of water glistened on the asphalt. The two men embraced, and then drew back, looking into each other’s faces.
“Good luck with Barbara,” Adam said. “I hope it all works out.”
Bobby’s shoulders slumped. “Me, too,” he murmured. “I always wanted kids, you know.”
“So did I,” Adam replied, and realized that this was true. “A family of my own, where I made things turn out better.”
Bobby looked up again. “Ask Teddy about the insurance policy,” he said, and had walked unsteadily toward his car.
You might ask Teddy, Bobby Towle had told him, the last time he was at the promontory.
It had only taken a week for Adam to betray his friend.
In the dead of night, Adam had taken the ladder down the promontory.
Reaching the bottom, had had turned from the site of his father’s death, walking toward the water. Here the tide was a continual low rumble, punctuated by the deep echoing surge of six foot waves striking land. Thick clouds blocked the moon. His surroundings were monochrome—starless sky, dark water, darkened beach.
Walking toward him along the shoreline was the lone figure of a woman. He waited, shivering in the chill wind.
Spotting him, she briefly stopped, then closed the remaining distance. Only when she stood before him could Adam see her features.
Amanda Ferris looked into his face. “Why are we meeting like this?” she said. “At midnight, in the loneliest place on earth. I keep wondering if you’re a serial killer.”
The reporter’s voice was slightly louder than required to carry over the pounding surf. Perhaps it was nerves, Adam thought; this was their first meeting. But perhaps it was something more. Calmly he said, “First take out your tape recorder. I’d guess it’s in the pocket of your blouse.”
Her face and eyes became immobile. “What do you mean?”
Now Adam was quite certain. “Do it,” he snapped. “Or go back to the swamp you came from.”
Ferris’s shoulders turned in, as though she were hunched against the cold. Then she reached into her pocket and held out a digital tape recorder in the palm of her hand. “Erase my voice,” Adam ordered. “Then throw it at the water.”
Ferris stiffened. “Take it, if you like. Then give it back when we’re though.”
“With my fingerprints on it?” Adam said coldly. “Quit playing with me. You’re not qualified.”
Ferris stared at him. Then she erased the tape and flung it into the surf with an angry underhand motion. “Who are you?” she demanded.
“You’ve already researched me on the internet,” Adam replied. “Not to mention calling the consulting firm I work for. As to why I’m doing this, you’ll understand by the time we’re through. But ‘off the record’ doesn’t cover this encounter. Except for the benefit to your career, the next half hour never happened.”
Watching her eyes, Adam took stock of her once again—bright, determined and aggressive, with a good measure of cupidity and amoral curiosity. Her job was not about anything save the public desire to pick the bones of celebrities like Carla Pacelli and his father—or, perhaps, become one. At times Adam was glad that he no longer lived in America.
“All right,” Ferris said sharply. “Let’s talk about what both of us want.”
“I already know what you want,” Adam replied. “You think someone killed my father—that’s why you’re still here. But you’re getting nowhere with the state police.” Adam glanced up at the promontory. “Like you, I’m curious about how my father fell from there to here. Unlike you, I can’t pay people to find out. But I do know who might take your money.”
Shifting her weight, Ferris studied him with narrowed eyes. “Explain to me what you get from this.”
“First let’s talk about what you need. To start, you want the complete autopsy report, focusing on the marks on my father’s body or evidence on his clothes—rips, mud, hairs or saliva that weren’t his. The report is under wraps, so that’s a bit of a trick—”
“In other words,” she interjected, “someone will have to sell it—”
“Next you’ll want the evidence they found on the promontory, including footprints and any signs of a struggle. Beyond that, you’ll need the witness statements—especially from my family, Carla Pacelli, and Jenny Leigh.”
“That’s a lot to get.”
“You’re a clever woman, and money will make you smarter. As for me, I want copies of everything—starting with the autopsy report. And I expect to hear what you know before you print it.” Pausing, Adam spoke slowly and deliberately. “Don’t even dream of holding out on me, Amanda. If you do, I’ve already figured out how to get you indicted for obstruction of justice—”
“You’re joking.”
“Hardly. You’ve got three choices—failure, a career making story, or a potential stretch in prison. The risks you should be taking aren’t with me. From what I’ve learned, your career is on the bubble. So how badly do you need this story?”
Almost imperceptibly, Ferris seemed to recoil. In an undertone, she said, “You’re a very strange and scary person. It’s pretty much common knowledge that you couldn’t stand your father.”
“I’m rethinking our relationship. So how much nerve do you have? I can always go to TMZ.”
Ferris clamped her lips, then nodded.
“Good,” Adam said. “While you’re at it, check out Carla Pacelli. From the rumors I’ve picked up, she claims to have known nothing about the will before he died. Prove that false, and her entire story unravels. That would interest me.”
“And the Inquirer,” Ferris agreed. “So tell me where I start.”
Feeling the tug of conscience, Adam hesitated. His deepest loyalty, he told himself, must be to his mother and brother. When he spoke, his mouth felt dry. “There’s a policeman in Chilmark,” he answered in a monotone. “As best you can, I want you to protect him. But he’s in desperate need of money.”
After she had gone, Adam had remained on the beach, his soul leaden. His mind framed useless apologies to Bobby Towle.
How did I get here? he had thought. How did all of us get here? Now the link that bound the three of them—Ferris, Bobby and Adam—was all Hanley needed to convict him. And all that protected him was that this connection was equally damning to the others.