By flashlight, they foraged for Indian artefacts in the soft sand just back from the beach on Gardiner’s Bay, unearthing shards of broken pottery and arrowheads discarded many centuries before. And though he never took her there, not wishing to tempt the fates, he told her about the whale skeleton buried beneath the straggle of bearberry bushes.
On windless nights they would take the cat-boat out and go firelighting for fluke. Sometimes they made love in the cockpit, rocking on the gentle swell. One time, the sounds of some event at the Devon Yacht Club had drifted across the water towards them—a Cole Porter number carried on the night breeze—and it struck Conrad that Lillian had chosen to be with him, lying in his arms, rather than consorting with her own kind. And though this puzzled him, he never questioned her motives, he never doubted her desires.
But that had all changed since her death.
He now saw himself as a figure in a bigger picture, the full and proper dimensions of which she’d chosen to keep from him. She had been party to a crime, a killing; and just as her move to East Hampton for the dead winter months could now be seen as part of an instinctual penance, some need to atone, so too could her relationship with him.
He was her link to the place, to Lizzie Jencks—a tool, perhaps, in the purging of her own guilt. Could he safely assume she would have struck up a relationship with him under normal circumstances? It was unlikely.
Worst of all, though—and it was this that had robbed him of all but the most fitful sleep for the past week—was the creeping realization that he might actually have been responsible for her death. She had changed, he had witnessed the change, just as she had watched him recover his footing in the world. But had he unwittingly given her the strength to act, to make a stand, to jeopardize the conspiracy of silence surrounding Lizzie Jencks’ death?
It was a question he would never know the answer to, never shrug off, and that realization gnawed at him, the corrosive acid of doubt.
His one satisfaction was that those responsible for her murder were now experiencing a torment of their own, inflicted by him. And though they might suspect they hadn’t seen the back of him, they had no idea just how far he was willing to go.
A few unforeseen developments aside, his plan was on course, moving ahead, narrowing down to the fine point. The policeman, Hollis, had taken the bait, and seemed intent on keeping it to himself. That was good, essential even. Whether he had judged Manfred Wallace correctly remained to be seen. He’d know soon enough.
He glanced at his watch, calculating the hours left to kill. He wasn’t tired, the prospect of the looming conflict sharpening his mind, blowing away the clouds of light-headed exhaustion.
He veered away from the water’s edge, up over the frontal dune into Beachampton, the grid of cheap new summer homes that lay beyond. The development was spreading at an alarming rate. Skeletal structures loomed around him, the building stock destined to flesh out their timber frames heaped up in piles. A bulldozer stood abandoned at the end of the narrow swathe it had punched through the dunes to the east—a new road yet to be named—reshaping in a few hours a landscape sculpted over centuries by the wind and the ocean.
Had the bulldozer completed its task, or were its instructions to keep right on going? If so, it should be showing up at his place somewhere towards the end of the week, huffing and puffing and coughing black smoke, its current course destined to take it right through the middle of the barn, ever onwards across Napeague, little shingle-clad homes mushrooming in its wake, all the way to Montauk Point.
If it was a vision of the future, then thankfully it was a future he wouldn’t live long enough to witness.
He kicked the Beachampton sand from his heels, heading west on Bluff Road past the big houses with their commanding views over the Glades towards the ocean. Nearing the Kemps’ house, he glanced up at the roof, fearful that Rollo might be watching from the ‘widow’s walk’—the little scuttlehole beside the chimney from which the women of the house once scanned the ocean for their husbands’ safe return. It could only be accessed via Rollo’s attic bedroom, and Rollo had always spent an inordinate amount of time peering down on the world from his crow’s nest, as he liked to think of it. Fortunately, he wasn’t there, and Conrad turned in to the leafy, tenebrous cool of Miankoma Lane.
The doctor from Manhattan and his family were in residence. The landing light was on and there was a car parked in back of the house near the barn. He noticed that they’d removed the old hitching-post that had always stood out front. The wooden go-kart lying abandoned near the front porch had been Conrad’s, hammered together from fish crates around the time of his tenth birthday; and while he felt a slight pang of possessiveness on seeing it there, he was pleased it was being used.
He trod lightly up the driveway, round to the back of the house. The barn was as good a place as any to hole up for the night. Maybe he was being too cautious, but he somehow doubted it. They would have to take action against him. And soon.
He noted, a little sadly, that the garden had changed almost beyond recognition. There was a carpet of lawn where the fruit and vegetable patches had once stood—their stepmother’s pride and joy, where she’d spent so many of her waking hours, growing pole beans and peas, carrots and cabbages, cucumbers, marrows and beets. She planted pumpkins around the small stand of corn so that the sticky vines would deter the raccoons, she built strawberry frames sheathed in condemned Promised Land bunker net, and her back grew strong from hauling up buckets of water from the well.
As young boys they’d never understood her obsession with cultivation. Only later, when they realized she was unable to bear children, did her endless planting and tending and reaping make any sense.
If she was upset by the barrenness she carried inside her, she never allowed it to interfere with her devotions to them. They, on the other hand, were less than fair in their dealings with her, certainly at the beginning, their young minds unable to grasp the idea—sprung on them one evening by their father—that their teacher was to become their mother. Miss Elliott, with her long wavy hair and her sticks of chalk and her constant talk of Regents exams and passing grades and the Palmer Method of handwriting? It just didn’t make any sense.
Miss Elliott was a ‘peach’, an upstater, who boarded with a local family during school terms. She wasn’t around a whole lot, and their father, it seemed to them, did nothing but fish from dawn till dark. How had they even met? The critical encounter, it soon emerged, had taken place at a dance held at Miankoma Hall by the Ladies’ Society of Busy Workers. They knew their father was good on his feet, they’d seen him dance in the barroom at Valentin Aguirre’s in New York, surprisingly nimble for such a big man, proudly presenting the steps of their region to the other Basques—the
