wouldn’t be using. Several weeks passed this way and I still hadn’t heard from Hope Bliss. She said it wasn’t going to be difficult to find Jack Reilly. He couldn’t be that hard to find.
I grieved for Max as if the loss were new. I don’t think I was grieving just for him, but for a past I might have spent better. Was my life going to end like this? The
And while I had made my retreat to the island, what had been happening up in Vermont? My source of information was Winnie, who unfortunately had no idea what really interested me.
Lindsay still wasn’t supposed to travel long distances, so she had moved in with the Franklins. Her prognosis was good, though according to Winnie, she seemed a bit odd.
“At least she remembers everyone now. We were really worried there for a while. But I don’t understand Max,” Winnie said on the phone. “I would have thought that he wouldn’t leave her side, but he only stayed until just after she woke up. Then he left on a book tour. I hope he’s not one of those guys who will get a girl’s hopes up only to drop her flat.”
“I don’t think he’s one of those guys,” I said, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Maybe he had gone back to the girl who had called him that night on his cell phone. Who knew what he was thinking? He was a different man from the one I had first fallen in love with.
But I, too, was surprised that Max had left so soon. He might have canceled a few dates of his tour. I had always thought that he was unlikely to leave the woman he loved in a precarious condition.
Charlie lifted up the extension. “Basil’s been asking about you,” he said.
Winnie said, “What are you talking about, Charlie? I didn’t hear Basil say a thing about Jane.”
“You weren’t there,” Charlie said.
“When wasn’t I there? I’m always there,” Winnie said.
“Well, you weren’t.”
Charlie hung up.
Winnie called every week. She complained of the sniffles during each call and the boys were always misbehaving.
“Anyway, Jane, you’re so lucky to be on the island by yourself. No responsibilities. You could have stayed with us for the winter, you know. We liked having you. Charlie and I fight even more when you’re not here.”
Considering how much they fought when I was there, this wasn’t a good sign.
One morning in mid-February I arrived at Isabelle’s, as usual, and she said she had a message for me. A Hope Bliss—what kind of name was that—had called her house looking for me. I remembered that I’d given Hope Isabelle’s number because at the time I didn’t have one.
I ate my cranberry muffin quickly and rushed back to the house to call Hope.
“Did you find him?” I asked as soon as she picked up the phone.
“Are you sure there is only a story involved here?” Hope asked.
“It’s a very good story,” I said.
“It was one of the strangest cases I’ve had lately,” she said. “Sorry it took me so long, but I had to do it the old-fashioned way. I trekked around all over the Boston area from one person to another to find anyone who had known him, or seen him. You want to know where I found him?”
“Of course I do.” What was she talking about—why would I have hired her if I didn’t want to know?
“He’s been under your nose the whole time.”
“Is he here on the Vineyard?”
“Yes.”
“Where does he live?”
“Oak Bluffs.”
“I’m in Oak Bluffs.”
“I know.”
“He’s in a gingerbread cottage four doors down from yours.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Isn’t it? You want to hear the craziest part?” I didn’t say anything so she continued. “He’s squatting.”
“What?”
“He found an empty house, got it open, and moved into it. He’s squatting.”
“That’s not too honest,” I said. I had seen Jack Reilly as an outlaw, even hoped he would be one, but the reality didn’t excite me as much as I thought it would. I was basically an honest person and expected other people to be honest. I’d imagined a bad boy, not a parasite.
“Damn straight. It’s stealing,” Hope said. “Anyway, that’s why he was so hard to find. He has a post office box in Lynn, but other than that it doesn’t look like he pays taxes, or has a bank account, or even has a telephone.”
When I told Isabelle about Jack Reilly, she said I should call the police, but I didn’t want to get the police involved. What if—and I was beginning to doubt it—Jack Reilly was all I’d dreamed him to be. What if when I opened the door, love hit me like a bucket of water from an upstairs window? Would I want the police shifting around at the bottom of the front walk waiting to drag him away?
It may have been ridiculous to put myself in jeopardy in pursuit of something I couldn’t even name, but I was determined to do it because if I didn’t, if I let the police go in and haul Jack Reilly away, I’d never know if, despite his antisocial behavior, he was the one.
Chapter 28
I wasn’t sure how to approach Jack Reilly. At first, all I did was watch his house, but I never saw anyone come out or go in. Since the house was on the same side as mine, it was harder to keep an eye on it than it would have been if he had lived across from me. I decided that if I didn’t see anyone go in or out in three days, I’d go and knock on the door.
The day my surveillance would have ended, I was going out for a walk, and as I locked my door, I turned and there was a man coming out of the house where Jack Reilly was squatting. This man was almost bald, with a scrawny chicken neck. He held a notebook in his hand and he was wearing a lumberjack jacket and the type of black-and-white-checked pants chefs wear.
Since I was only going for a walk and had no special destination, I didn’t see any harm in following him. He wasn’t the Jack Reilly I’d pictured, but maybe he was a friend of Jack’s. Maybe he, too, was squatting in the neighbor’s house. Perhaps I could find something out about Jack Reilly from him.
The man huddled against the wind and walked toward the center of town, where he went into a seaside restaurant and sat at the bar. I followed him in and took a booth. I wished I had brought something to read so I wouldn’t look conspicuous. I would have made a terrible detective, and every time I tried anything remotely related to detection, I appreciated Hope Bliss more.
I ordered a beer for stamina and worked up the nerve to send one over to the man at the bar who was now scribbling in his notebook with a cheap ballpoint pen.
The man took the beer, looked at the bartender, then turned toward me. The look he gave me was both wolfish and questioning, which may be the appropriate look to give a strange woman in a virtually empty restaurant who buys you a beer.
He got up and came over. He held his beer up in a toast and thanked me. I bowed my head and smiled shyly. I didn’t know if I was feeling shy or if I felt that this was the look I must produce, like some misguided Nancy Drew. I was proud of myself for tracking him to a public place so there’d be less chance for trouble. And I was still hoping that this man wasn’t Jack Reilly, that the whole thing was some mistake.
“Would you like to sit down?” I asked.
