prosecution.”
“It was that dreadful scene at the restaurant,” she said.
“Didn’t help. Jackie’s going to want you to back me up on that one.”
“So ridiculous,” she said.
“That’s what I kept saying until they were sticking my fingers on pads of ink and asking me if I had a passport.”
She wrapped her arms around me and held on for about a minute.
“What a nightmare,” she said into my shirt.
“So you never wondered about it,” I said.
She looked up at me like she didn’t understand what I meant.
“About what?”
“The fire. Robbie.”
She looked at me carefully for a second, then shook her head.
“At first, of course,” she said. “But I’ve known Robbie Milhouser my entire life. He was all show. You saw that. Even if he was capable of the thought, he didn’t have, you know …”
“The courage?”
“That’s right. All bluster, no balls,” she said.
“He took a swing at me. Imprecise, but enthusiastic.”
“He didn’t know you. Misinterpreted the gray hair.”
Even under the grime, I could see that Amanda’s olive skin was approaching its palest state—which on her showed more as a spectrum shift from the deep reddish brown of summer to a slightly yellow cast that a few bright days in May would quickly dissolve.
“How long had he wanted to team up with you?” I asked.
She shook her head and shrugged.
“I don’t remember exactly. He came by the job here and tried to get me into a conversation. It took a while for him to come out and say he wanted to form a partnership. I tried to be polite, but all I could think was, how ludicrous. Then he left and I forgot all about it. Until he spotted me in the restaurant.”
Holding her, I thought she felt thinner than I’d remembered, more fragile.
“And what do you mean by damning evidence?” she asked.
“He was killed with my hammer stapler. I bought it last year to install the insulation in my addition.”
The worry on her face that had been competing with other emotions took over. Worry and disbelief.
“That’s just nuts,” she said. “How can they be sure?”
“Fingerprints. And it still had the bar code from the store. It’s mine.”
I explained what else they had on me. Including my footprints all over the scene.
“Of course your footprints were there. We went there together so you could show me all the wrong things they were doing. A lesson in crappy carpentry, I think is what you said.”
“You’ll need to say that, too,” I said. “About being there. You can hold on the construction critique.”
“Burton won’t let this get too far,” she said. “I’m sure of that.”
“Jackie’s my lawyer. Burt’s consulting.”
“You can’t ask for more than that,” she said, her voice pitched for ambiguity.
Jackie had defended Amanda’s husband after he’d tried to defraud her. There wasn’t much Jackie could do to save him from the foregone conclusion, but she mounted a spirited defense. Everything she did was spirited. But you couldn’t blame Amanda for having a few mixed feelings.
I cast about for a change of subject.
“Any more trouble with the houses?” I asked.
“Can’t do much more with this one. So I had a security company concentrate on the other site,” she said. “All quiet so far. The only thing worth reporting was a guy in an old Pontiac who drove by every day, slowing down when he passed the house. I told them if he made a move to shoot first and ask questions later.”
“Better safe than sorry.”
“Is that your philosophy?” she asked. “Always play it safe?”
“Yes. In principle. More honored in the breach.”
“I think it’s safe enough to take a walk, what do you say?”
She took my hand and led me toward the street, then north toward the bay.
Eddie took the lead and we followed him through the neighborhood of plain but cared-for single-story houses that Amanda owned along the lagoon to the east. For years they’d been occupied by long-term, year-round renters, but most of those people had died, or retired to Florida, or wised up in time to buy a place of their own before real- estate prices in the Hamptons wiped out its own middle class. Now they were mostly seasonal rentals, though at least one had emerged as a full-time group home for an illegally large number of immigrant laborers.
I asked her about it.
“I can’t have the place teeming with people, but I’m not going to throw them out,” she said. “Everybody wants them to cut the lawns and clean the toilets, then just disappear at night like vampires in reverse.”
“You got bigger issues than that,” I said. “Like the DEC?”
She looked up at me.
“You heard? That was quick.”
“Jackie caught word of something down at Town Hall. I just guessed it was environmental.”
Several houses down from the group rental, right before a swath of wetlands that fronted the Little Peconic, was the house Amanda had grown up in. It was the freshest-looking place in the neighborhood. She’d had the exterior completely refurbished and the grounds professionally landscaped. Nobody lived there, but housecleaners and gardeners came and went to maintain the property in its pristine, revitalized condition.
She squeezed my arm as we walked by, but whatever associations the sight of the house had stirred were left unspoken.
Eddie caught the smell of the wetlands and hurtled ahead, ears up and tail fully raised. The breeze picked up as we moved closer to the water, a sturdy northwesterly bearing the aroma of the saline, mildly putrescent tidal marsh tucked in behind the narrow pebble beach. Various species of seabird took flight in a burst of fluttery panic, flushed out of the tall grass by Eddie’s unwelcome arrival.
The road ran over a narrow causeway across the wetlands and stopped at the beach, which you entered by squeezing through a white-painted barrier intended to prevent SUVs from trampling the wildlife preserve. Amanda led the way to a dry strip just shy of the tidal line, where she dropped to the ground and lay flat on her back, arms out and feet crossed. I joined her, noticing the deepening blue sky for the first time, etched as always by the leisurely flight paths of gliding gulls and hulking terns.
“I’m screwed,” she said, after a few minutes.
“Put that in layman’s terms.”
“I’m thoroughly screwed.”
“Oh,” I said.
“The DEC has shut me down pending a further investigation into why they should or shouldn’t ruin my life.”
“I thought you had all that stuff worked out.”
“I had a full phase-one environmental study completed and approved.”
“I remember. I was there for the celebration. Party of two, as I recall.”
“I recall being issued building permits for a half dozen houses. One of which I’d be installing carpets in right now if it hadn’t been for the pyrotechnics.”
“The DEC trumps the local boys. Even I know that,” I said.
“The DEC were the ones who passed on phase one in the first place. I had a whole testing crew on the WB site for a week. I took them into every nook and cranny and fed them coffee and expensive pastries—even offered to launder their gaudy orange jumpsuits.”
“Must have changed their minds.”
She was quiet again for a minute.
“I guess. I don’t know. Who knows?” she said, finally.
“Are you allowed to clean up the burn site?”
