“If you help me,” I said, “I’ll try not to hurt him.”
She made a small laugh. “I would be better off if you killed him,” she said. “But there’s not much danger of that. The Costigans don’t get killed, or hurt. Though I’m afraid you very well might.”
“Where do you think he and Susan might be?” I said.
“Where have you looked?” she said.
“The Costigan house in Mill River. The lodge in Washington.”
Tyler Costigan widened her eyes. “Do the Costigans know?”
“Yes,” I said. “Jerry was in the house when we went in. We talked.”
“You forced your way in?” I nodded.
“You must have,” she said, as I nodded. “Well, you are an interesting man.”
“My friend helped me,” I said.
“Your friend? My God. I’d have said the Marine Corps couldn’t force their way into The Keep.” I drank some coffee.
“And the lodge?”
“We burned it down,” I said. “Susan wasn’t there.”
Tyler Costigan opened her mouth and closed it and opened it again and didn’t speak. The boat was almost to the left edge of the picture window, moving away at an angle.
Finally she said, “You must be as good as you look.”
“Better,” I said.
“Russell must love it,” she said. “He loves to see his father lose.”
I waited. The boat went out of sight.
“And, he must be having a wonderful time playing hide-and-seek with you.”
“There’s no allie-in-free,” I said.
“He doesn’t care. If it gets too bad his daddy will bail him out.”
“How bad is bad?”
“If he starts to lose,” she said. “Then he’ll call his fat little momma and she’ll speak to Jerry, and Jerry will send some people out to fix it. And”-she looked at me hard-“they will.”
“If they can,” I said.
“They always can,” she said.
“We’ll see,” I said. “Where do you think they might be now?”
“You really believe you can win this, don’t you?”
“Yes. I’m highly motivated.”
“You want her back.”
“Yes.”
“And you think if you can get her away from Russell, she’ll come back?”
“I’ll get her away from Russell because she doesn’t want to be with him. Once that’s done we’ll see about us.”
“But you’d have her back.”
“Yes.”
“Because you love her?”
“Yes.”
Tyler Costigan laughed. There was no pleasure in the sound and no humor. “I understand that perfectly,” she said. She turned again to stare out into the bright afternoon. “I got Russell,” she said without turning from the window. “She got you.”
“The ways of the Lord are often dark,” I said. “But never pleasant.”
CHAPTER 26
THE BOAT WAS GONE NOW, AND THE LIGHT HAD shifted so that it slanted in from the west edge of the picture window. I had drunk six cups of coffee and felt as if maybe my skin would jump off and dance along the baseboard.
“The rich really are very different,” Tyler Costigan was saying. “Especially if they are also unscrupulous.”
“One of the ways they got rich,” I said.
She nodded, but she wasn’t paying me much attention. “They have always gotten what they wished, and after a while they think they are supposed to. If they have a problem they hire someone to solve it. And they become ever more contemptuous of people who cannot. They even become contemptuous of people who have problems. And eventually they are contemptuous of everyone and care only about what they want.”
“Maybe that’s true only of the Costigans,” I said.
