“Yeah. He’s letting me handle the funeral and settle the estate. First I want that cause of death.”
“When you get hold of a bone you sure do gnaw on it.”
“A lot of time has gone by. I’m not an expert on morbidity, but it’s got to affect an accurate read. Make sure it’s the full deal. Blood analysis, tissue trauma, stuff under fingernails.”
“That’s not an autopsy. That’s forensics.”
Amanda was standing there watching me. Holding the phone to my ear with my left shoulder, I held up the gin bottle and pointed to the tonic. She nodded. I poured and continued to talk to Sullivan.
“Okay. Do whatever.”
While I talked I watched Amanda busy herself around the kitchen. When she refilled the ice trays she leaned into the sink, bearing her weight on her right leg with her left tucked behind like a dancer.
“I’ll take care of it,” said Sullivan. “You just worry about gettin’ her in the ground. Call me with the name of the funeral home and we’ll send her over there when we’re done.”
“Okay, chief. By the way, who cleaned up her house?”
“I don’t know. Not us. Unless it was the paramedics.”
“Is that usually what they do?”
“No, that’s the family’s business.”
Amanda leaned into me when she reached across the kitchen table for the tonic. She poured for both of us and handed me the drink. She mouthed the word lime and I jerked my head toward the refrigerator.
“So you didn’t turn off the power.”
“I don’t think so. I’ll call the County Health people. The power’s out?”
“I just turned it back on.”
“Don’t forget to pay LIPA. You got the authority.”
“The cop,” I told Amanda when I hung up.
“The cop?”
“Joe Sullivan. Not really the meatball I thought he was.”
“He’s doing what you want?”
“I got Jimmy Maddox, Regina’s nephew, to sign an autopsy request. Sullivan’s going to get the county coroner to do it for me, which probably took a little pull on his part.”
“That poor woman has to be buried.”
“She doesn’t care,” I started going down one road, then quickly switched to another. “I’m just curious. Got a little itch to scratch. Can’t hurt anything at this point.”
Amanda smiled instead of apologizing, which was a step in the right direction.
“I’m sure. Cheers.”
She took a healthy pull on the gin and tonic. We looked around the inside of my barren little house for a while without saying anything.
“I’d better go,” she said, finally.
“Probably should.”
“I feel better.”
“It’s the proximity of the Little Peconic. Has that effect.”
“Couldn’t be the company.”
Eddie and I watched her get back in the windbreaker. He got a pat on the head before she left. I got a complicated little smile.
The rain grew louder and insinuated itself back into the mood of the room. I put on a sweatshirt and went back out to the screened-in porch so I could sit quietly with Eddie, drink my drink and watch the lousy weather do its best to upset the resolute tranquility of the Little Peconic Bay. After a time the world collapsed into a space defined solely by what I could see through the screens, and for the next few hours a tired, threadbare kind of peace took the place of the flat black anguish somebody had bolted down over my heart.
A heavy gray blanket of fog was lying all over the area when I got up the next morning. The automatic coffee pot was prompt and at the ready. A shower, a shave, a worn pair of jeans and a freshly washed shirt from out of the dryer. Things that make me feel a little less like an animal.
For almost thirty years work would get me out of bed in the morning. It would wake me up before dawn, with all the imperatives of the coming day rioting in the corridors of my nervous system. Sometimes I’d actually bolt upright in bed with a scream choked off in my throat. Usually the transition was slower and more tortured. I’d open my eyes and check the clock. I’d never go back to sleep. I never noticed what the weather was like outside. There was no outside; it was irrelevant. Abby was a blanketed mound on the right side of the bed. I’d be on my second cup of coffee at my desk about the time her alarm went off.
She’d tried a lot of different jobs. They all made her unhappy. Raising our daughter was her defined purpose, and she did the job very well. Our daughter was exquisite. The world loved her. She hated her father, so I didn’t know her very well. I didn’t even know why she hated me, though I could’ve probably figured it out easily enough.
We lived in a large contemporary house in the woods north of Stamford, Connecticut. I drove to work at an engineering center in White Plains, New York. In the early days I was on my dictation machine before I started the car. Later it was the car phone jacked into voice mail. Except for an hour or two at a boxing gym I found in New Rochelle, I worked all day and into the evening without a break, even for meals. I ate frozen bagels and prepared foods heated in a microwave in my office. I drank coffee until I could hear my heart rate fluttering in my ears. All day long I’d count my responsibilities in my head like an obsessive compulsive counting his fingers or the days of the week. Agonies and ambitions streamed through my office, afloat on a river of selfishness and sacrifice. From phone to fax to face I’d hurtle in a vertiginous sprint, breathless and jagged. With the help of one or two other people, I held a slender tether on a twisting angry chaos. Like a bull runner of Pamplona, I knew the beast could turn and gore me at any moment. But I saw no other way.
The building we worked in had a square jaw and was charged with purpose. Our ostensible mission was to give worldwide R&D and engineering support to the company’s manufacturing operations. For some of the employees the goal was to provide a staging area from which to launch elaborate corporate intrigues and
I steered the Grand Prix cautiously through the fog on the way down to the Village. I felt like I was in a submarine. The mist was cold—a winter harbinger. I flicked on the heater for the first time of the season. It smelled like burnt mold. I was glad I was still in a pretty good mood.
The Village municipal offices were on Main Street behind a colonnaded facade that guarded the occupants from the citizenry. The interior smelled like the lobby of an old hotel. The walls were decorated with aerial photos and geographical surveys hung like family portraits over waiting areas and brochure stands. Cops with creaking leather holsters and contractors angling for zoning breaks greeted each other as they passed in the halls. One of them pointed out the stairs that took you down to the Records Department.
A chest-high counter anchored the front of the room. A woman sat at a desk on the other side, looking at a computer screen through the bottom half of her bifocals. Her iron-gray hair was chiseled into a helmet that perched on top of her head. Ceiling-high metal racks, filled with oversized leather binders, stood a few feet from her desk and ran to the back of the room, the end point disappearing into darkness. She ignored me. I waited her out.
“Can we help you with something?”
“I need everything you’ve got on this property in North Sea.”
I slid a slip of paper with Regina Broadhurst’s address written on it across the top of the counter.
She hoisted her wide bottom off the chair and used its mass to propel her up to the counter. She wore a cotton print dress and blocky high-heeled shoes. A bead chain was clipped to the temples of her glasses so they could double as a necklace. She looked at the address and handed it back to me.
“North Sea is in the Town. You’ll have to ask them.”
“They sent me here.”
She looked at me like I was the agent of a hostile power.
“It’s an estate matter. I’m the administrator.” I showed her my credentials. “All I need is the title, deeds,
