Amanda, standing abruptly and striding off toward her house. We watched her in silence, all the way to her front door.
“Nice set of legs on that one,” he said.
“Don’t tell her that. Only go to her head.”
“Better to keep ’em in the dark.”
“Same goes for you. And Marve Judson,” I said.
“So there is a real story,” said Ackerman. “You know it, but you’ll never give it up.”
“Maybe you could beat it out of me.”
“They didn’t tell me you were an ex-fighter. I’da been more careful.”
“So now who’s in the dark?”
“The little guy, Acquillo. Always the little guy.”
I turned my attention back to the Little Peconic Bay. The sky by now had gone a garish crimson and gold, drawn in a swirl pattern atop the western horizon. It felt like fall had already taken hold in this second week of September, the air cool and dry, the fading sunlight having shed the soft summer glow. Every season in the Hamptons had its claim on the heart, but I prized autumn most of all.
Eddie smelled the cheese a hundred yards away and ran over to guide Amanda back to the Adirondacks. As a reward, he got the first wad of the soft cheese, slathered on a slice of pate. The rest of us got ours in due course. I didn’t want to give any more information to Ackerman, and luckily he didn’t press it. Instead he set himself to finishing off the six-pack of Burton’s expensive beer and Amanda’s hors d’oeuvres. Then he padded back to his hulking SUV and disappeared into the night.
“I’m not sure what that was all about,” said Amanda when he was securely out of earshot.
“Complexity theory,” I said.
“Of course.”
“The rapid compounding of variables that causes an orderly system to be suddenly and irrepressibly propelled into chaos.”
“In other words, you need to find that girl in a hurry.”
“You bet,” I said.
“So what’re you going to do?”
“Have another half a tumbler of vodka. Which means only half a tumbler tomorrow, unless I want to skip it entirely the day after.”
“Or simply adjust the budget parameters,” she said.
“Spoken like a banker.”
“Not a banker by choice. I aspired to greater things.”
“I forgot. You were a science major.”
“Biology. I would have thought that was obvious.”
“Mostly the flair for anatomy.”
“Let’s see if you can hold that thought through the next round,” she said, scooping up my tumbler and her empty wine bottle to take back to my cottage for reprovisioning.
Not a problem, I thought as I craned my neck to watch her move across the lawn again. That’s when an association that should have been obvious leaped to my mind. From behind, Amanda looked a lot like Iku Kinjo. Tall and slender. Moved with the kind of feminine roll of the hips that could distract a stadium full of heterosexuals. Iku’s skin tone was darker and redder than most Japanese, though her features were emphatically Asian. Including the coal black eyes that signaled a readiness to either accept your abject submission or rend your flesh into bloody ribbons.
This is where my mind was wandering. She didn’t fit with George Donovan. Unless you invoke the canard that opposites attract. Lord knows my skills in the mysteries of love and attraction were pathetically inept, but it just didn’t feel right. Iku was a shooting star. Brilliant and incandescent. Lit up the sky wherever she went. Young and self-assured, she didn’t need Donovan. If anything, he needed her. As a sign of his progressive business acumen, his drive to introduce modern strategies to a mature industrial company like Consolidated Global Energies.
When Amanda showed up again I asked her opinion.
“Why would a beautiful and accomplished young superstar like Iku Kinjo want to roll around naked in bed with a shallow, albeit wily, old stuffed shirt like George Donovan?”
“Girls do dumb things sometimes,” she said without hesitation, settling herself back into her Adirondack, passing me my tumbler on the way down.
“Okay.”
“Or she didn’t do it. He just says she did.”
She raised her wine glass so I could clink it with my tumbler. She didn’t look nearly as self-satisfied as she deserved to look.
“From now on you approve every assumption I make about precocious young women. You’re obviously knowledgeable on the subject.”
“I was never precocious and I’m no longer young. But all women are capable of sexual conduct that can surprise them as much as anyone else. By the same token, all women are prey to false accusation prompted by male fantasy.”
“You learn that in biology?”
“At the disco. New York City. Circa 1987.”
“Both possibilities provide a motive for her to go to ground,” I said. “Which gets me no closer to finding her.”
“Don’t be so sure about that.”
She studied the inside of her glass, swirling the wine around until it was perilously close to cresting over the lip.
“The bad thing that caused her to run could have been something entirely different,” she said, finally.
“You’re right. I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Do you think Donovan was surprised by her disappearance?”
“Definitely. He was completely caught off-guard. That partly explains the reckless way he’s been handling things. Taking big risks. Panic mode.”
“Alerting Marve Judson,” she said.
“Yeah. You can’t work around a reptile like that. He can sense perfidy through the soles of his feet.”
“What do you think Judson will do?” she asked.
“Get ready to meet him. He’ll be here within a week.”
“You think so?”
“I know him. It’s a sure thing.”
“I’ll pick out an outfit.”
“Think Kevlar.”
She went back to examining her wine glass. I focused on the Little Peconic. There were two or three sails still visible in the fading light, stark white against the distant shore of the North Fork, heeled over against the westerly funneling through the channels above and below Robins Island. I’d been watching sailboats crisscross the little bay outside my front door my whole life, and only now was I beginning to think about being on one of them. I’d sailed since the birth of memory, on Sunfish and homemade dories and then bigger sloops belonging to friends around town, and ultimately crewed on stately racing yachts for the vapid sops Abby cultivated up in Marblehead. But it wasn’t competition I had in mind. Quite the contrary. I imagined ghosting into the outer waters on a lazy southwesterly and anchoring within the embrace of a sheltered harbor, to watch the show in the sky and listen to the splash and flutter of water birds and the ring of hasps against a metal mast.
It wasn’t exactly the male fantasy Amanda referred to, but it served to transport my mind through the balance of the evening, allowing me to postpone another confrontation with uncontrollable forces set loose on the world by the usual concoction of ardor, cupidity, ego and fear.
SIX
I WAS HOLDING A PIECE of crown molding over my head when my cell phone rang. I had three finish nails
