“No, not Mikhail -just Misha. That’s what the Russians call Tal. You’re a kid, so let’s call you Misha.” He laughed, an ugly, liquid sound, accompanied by a gurgling deep in his chest, because he was already ill, although he would linger, in declining health, for another few years. He shuffled to the edge of the porch, coughing helplessly, the timbre thick and wet and physically disgusting to my child’s ear, for it takes many years on God’s earth to learn that what is truly human is never truly ugly.
I would have let the name go, but Addison, who hated chess, liked the sound of it and began to call me Misha, especially once he discovered how much it annoyed me; so did his many friends. I learned to love the nickname in self-defense. By the time I got to college, I rarely identified myself as anything else.
“But most people still call you Tal,” says the roller woman when I am done. “You reserve the name Misha for… mmmm, your very close friends.”
“What do you have, a file on me?”
“Something like that.”
“You being the good guys? Just not the great guys?”
She nods, and this time I laugh with her, and quite easily, not because anything either of us has said is amusing, but because the situation itself is absurd.
The waiter is back. Dessert orders occupy us: Peches Ninon for the lady, plain vanilla ice cream for the gentleman. He nods at Maxine’s order, frowns at mine. Maxine grins conspiratorially, as if to say, I know a nerd when I see one, but I like you just the way you are. Maybe her grin does not signify all that, but I still blush.
We talk on. Maxine’s previously raucous face grows somberly sympathetic.
She has led me, somehow, to the night Abby died, and I am reliving the wretched moment when my elegant mother, her hand shaking, answered the telephone in the kitchen, let out that horrible moan, and collapsed against the wall. I tell her how I stood alone in the hall, peering in the kitchen door, watching my mother wail and beat the phone against the counter, far too terrified to comfort her, because Claire Garland, like her husband, encouraged a certain emotional distance. In my adult lifetime, I have shared the story only with Kimmer and, in less detail, with Dana and Eddie, years ago, when the two of them were still married, and Kimmer and I were still happy. I have scarcely told it to myself. I am surprised, and a little annoyed, to find a catch in my voice and moisture on my cheeks.
We are walking now, the two of us, a pleasant stroll in the brisk air of an autumn evening on the Vineyard. We are sauntering along the deserted Oak Bluffs waterfront, for all the world a happy couple, passing the empty slips across from the Wesley Hotel, a gracefully sprawling Victorian behemoth built on the site of an earlier hotel of the same name, which perished by fire. The flat January water laps comfortably at the seawall. A few pedestrians pass us, headed toward town, but the harbor, like the rest of the Island in the off-season, has the texture of an uncompleted painting.
“I can’t tell you everything, Misha,” says Maxine, her handbag, gun and all, swinging gaily from her shoulder. Her arm is linked in mine. I am pretty sure she would let me hold her hand if I tried.
“Tell me what you can.”
“It might be easier if you tell me what you think. Maybe I can tell you if you’re hot or cold. And what I can’t tell you, you might be able to figure out for yourself.”
I think this over as we walk. After dinner, we stood a little too close to each other in the parking lot, sharing that odd reluctance to part that characterizes new lovers, as well as people who follow other people for a living. It was Maxine who suggested we drive to Oak Bluffs, although she refuses to tell me where she is staying. And so we did, the Suburban following me once more, along the Vineyard Haven Harbor, over the hill separating the two towns, and down again to the center of town. We both parked on the waterfront, across the street from the Wesley. I have no doubt that Maxine knows exactly where I live, but I do not want her anywhere near Vinerd Howse.
Call it an excess of marital caution.
“Well, handsome?” she prompts. “Are we gonna play or not?”
“Okay.” I take a breath. With darkness, the air has turned icy. “The first thing is, I think my father was involved in… something he shouldn’t have been.” I risk a glance at Maxine, but she is looking at the water. “I think that, somehow, he arranged for me to get some information about it after he died. Or somebody thinks he did.”
“I agree,” she says softly, and, for the first time in this mad search, I own an actual fact.
“I think that Colin Scott was looking for that information. I think he followed me because he hoped I would find my father’s… arrangements.”
“I agree.”
We walk on, headed toward East Chop, a wide outcropping dotted with shingled homes, more Cape Cod style than Victorian, many of them on high bluffs overlooking the water, most of them considerably more expensive than the houses closer to town. Kimmer and I briefly fell in love with a gorgeous house up there, three large bedrooms and a back yard opening onto the beach, but we did not have two million dollars to buy it. Probably it is just as well, given what has happened to us in the years since.
“Other people are also interested in the arrangements,” I suggest.
“I agree,” Maxine murmurs, but when I press her, she declines to be more specific.
I stare at East Chop Drive, which leads up to the old lighthouse and what used to be called the Highlands. At the foot of the bluffs is a private beach club. In the middle of the Chop is a private tennis club. East Chop, for all its crisp New England beauty, has a whiter feel than the rest of Oak Bluffs. Not many of the summer residents seem aware that East Chop was once the heart of the Island’s black colony.
“Colin Scott knew my father.”
“I agree.”
“He worked for my father. My father… paid him to do something.”
Silence.
I am disappointed, for I was trying, one last time, to discover that Colin Scott and Jonathan Villard were the same person, which would explain what Scott was doing in the foyer at Shepard Street, arguing with my father. But evidently not.
I hesitate, then try another tack. “Do you know what my father left for me?”
“No.”
“But you’re familiar somehow with the… clues.”
“Yes. But we aren’t sure what they mean.”
I try to think of another intelligent question to ask. We are in a little park full of brown grass, East Chop rising before us, downtown Oak Bluffs off to our right. The occasional car passes on East Chop Drive, which separates the park from the harbor.
“This island is lovely,” Maxine says unexpectedly, gripping my arm lightly with both her hands, her gaze on the distant shimmering water.
“I think so.”
“You’ve been coming here for how long? Thirty years? I can’t imagine-I mean, we didn’t have that kind of money.”
“We’ve always really been just summer people,” I explain, wondering whether Maxine appreciates the distinction. “And it wasn’t so expensive in the old days.”
“Your family had money, though.”
“We were just middle-class. But you were, too. A couple of professors.”
“They never got paid very much. And, besides, my father used to be what you’d call a high-stakes gambler. Only he wasn’t very good at it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. He loved us. We lived in a big old house on the campus with about five dogs and ten cats. Sometimes we had birds. Our folks loved animals. And, like I said, they loved us.”
“Us?”
She wrinkles her nose. “Four brothers, one sister, nosey. I’m the youngest and the tallest.”
