influence.
If the Gardiners—with their island out in the bay, a manor held by royal grant since the earliest days of settlement—represented the aristocracy, then the men sitting around Conrad’s table were the gentry of Amagansett. Other families had come and gone over the centuries, some even challenging their ascendancy, but they had ridden out the years ahead of the herd.
There was nothing overt about the hold they exercised over the village. Like the wind that turned the blades of the artesian wells and twisted the weathervanes, you couldn’t actually see it, but you knew it was there. It percolated the village, touching councils, committees, the schoolboard, even the Ladies’ Society of Busy Workers.
And like the wind, if it turned on you, if it really turned on you, there was nowhere it couldn’t reach.
‘You have any idea why we’re here?’ asked Ned.
‘Sure he does.’
Conrad looked Frank Paine hard in the eye. He was known for chewing cloves to hide the smell of alcohol on his breath. He was doing it now.
‘The girl who drowned,’ said Ned. ‘Rollo’s got it stuck in his head it don’t add up.’
‘Yeah?’
‘That’s what he says. Says she couldn’t have drowned where they say she did and ended up off the beach here. Says the set was too strong, she’d have been carried a ways down.’
‘The ocean can do strange things,’ said Conrad. ‘Remember Elsie Bangs.’
Elsie Bangs was a neighbor of Sam Ockham’s down at Lazy Point who’d gone clamming at the mouth of Napeague Harbor one evening a few years before the war. Her family went hungry that night. It was assumed that she’d lost her footing near the edge of the deep channel and gone under. She certainly drowned. Two weeks later her badly decomposed body was washed ashore at Dead Man’s Hole on the back side. She was identified by a stocking garter stitched for her in school by her daughter.
Once people had overcome their surprise at the idea of Elsie wearing stockings to go clamming, they began remarking on the extraordinary journey her body had taken. Against the prevailing currents she had traveled east, past the Montauk fishing village at Fort Pond Bay, rounding Montauk Point and bearing west along the ocean shore, hugging the bluffs, before being cast up at Dead Man’s Hole, a distance of some fifteen nautical miles from where she’d disappeared.
‘It ain’t often the ocean plays tricks like that,’ said Edwin Songhurst, old but not yet stooped, still husky and raw-boned.
‘Take your brother,’ added Ned. ‘He showed up right where we said he would.’
Not exactly true. One small part of Antton—an arm, one shoulder and his head, all still attached to each other, but barely—had been washed ashore a little to the east of the area they’d been searching in.
‘Why’d you go at Charlie Walsh over them earrings off the girl?’ asked Frank Paine.
Conrad turned to him. ‘What would you have done? Pocket them yourself?’
‘Let’s keep this civil,’ said Ned. ‘We know you knew her, Conrad. Rollo saw you two together.’
Conrad tried to think straight, but failed, his thoughts collapsing in on themselves.
‘When?’ he asked.
‘It don’t matter when.’
‘He’s no cause to lie.’
‘And nor do you.’
It can’t have been rehearsed, but it worked—a gentle yet firm assault on all fronts, each chipping in their bit, having their say.
‘Yeah, I knew her.’
It explained a lot, Rollo knowing. It explained his reaction when they’d pulled Lillian from the ocean—silent, shrinking, living Conrad’s horror. It explained his blind fury when he came to Conrad’s aid in the parking lot at Oyster Hall, and his attentiveness in the following days. It explained a lot he should have picked up on before, but hadn’t, and he wondered what else he’d missed.
The current, for one. If Conrad knew her body should have been carried further eastward by the longshore drift, then Rollo certainly did. He could read the waters off the back side better than anyone.
‘Where’s Rollo?’ he asked.
‘He’s okay,’ said Ned. ‘A little upset is all.’
‘How’s that?’
‘I had to work it out of him. He’s been acting odd for a bit now; was worse than ever Saturday after you two went tuna fishing.’
‘Yeah?’
‘He thinks you’ve got a problem with the girl’s brother.’
‘Her name’s Lillian.’
‘Do you?’ demanded Cap’n Jake.
Conrad felt a sudden urge to unburden himself, but as he looked into their eyes he saw what he already knew: that they hadn’t come here for him, they’d come here for themselves.
