Henderson is on his feet, wide shoulders flexing, catlike, under the loose jacket. I wonder how many seconds it would take him to kill me with his bare hands should the need arise. “Thank you for your hospitality, Professor.”
“Thank you for stopping by.”
Before folding up his electronic baffler, Henderson adds a final point: “Your friend also wants you to know that if you should, in the future, discover contents that are… less disappointing… he will expect to hear from you. In the meanwhile, he assures you that you will not be troubled further over this matter.”
I think this one over, too. Some threats are bluffs. He is implying a little bit more than he is saying. “And my family and I.. .”
“Will be perfectly safe. Naturally.” But no smile. “You have your friend’s promise.”
As long as I keep my end of the bargain, he means. Before, Uncle Jack’s ability to protect me was driven by his assurance to involved parties that I would track down the arrangements. Now that things have changed, his ability to protect me rests on his assurance that I will not. They cannot know whether I have found the real contents someplace else; whether, like my father, I have hidden them away, and made arrangements of my own, to be launched in the event of my unexpected demise. The involved parties and I shall live henceforth in a balance of terror.
“All right,” I say.
We do not shake hands.
Every night I watch the weather channel. Near the end of the third week of the month, while Bentley is with me for a few days, I turn on the television and note with approval a terrible hurricane on its way up the coast. If it keeps on its present course, it will hit the Vineyard four days from now. Perfect.
The next morning, Saturday, I take Bentley back to his mother. My son and I stand together out on the front lawn, and Don Felsenfeld, tending his flowers, raises a trowel in greeting. I decide not to wonder whether Don, who notices everything, knew about Lionel before I did.
“When Bemley see you ’gain?”
“Next weekend, sweetheart.”
“Promise?”
“God willing, Bentley. God willing.”
His keen eyes search my face. “Dare Daddy?” he inquires, lapsing into the secret language we hardly ever hear any more.
“Yes, sweetheart. Dare Daddy. Absolutely.”
I lead my son up the crooked brick path to Number 41 Hobby Road. Crooked because Kimmer and I, shortly after moving in, laid the bricks ourselves. A two-day job that took us, busy, love-struck rookies that we were, about a month.
My hand trembles on the cane.
The house is empty. The thought comes to me unbidden but with all the moral force of absolute truth. It is an empty house… no, an empty home. Kimmer is certainly inside somewhere, waiting for her son. Her BMW is parked in the turnaround, as usual, in defiance of my counsel. And if my wife has been careless and broken her solemn word-nothing new there!-Lionel Eldridge might be lurking around the place, his powder-blue Porsche safely hidden away in the garage. Yet the Victorian sits empty, for a home that once housed a family and now holds only its shards is like a beach whose sand has eroded to rock-retaining only the name, and none of the reason for the name.
At the door, I tell Kimmer I am returning to the Vineyard for a few days. She nods indifferently, then stops and peers at me. The resolution in my voice frightens her.
“What are you going to do, Misha?”
“I’m going to finish it, Kimmer. I have to.”
“No, you don’t. There’s nothing to finish. It’s over, it’s all over.” Hugging our son to her thigh now, wishing the truth away.
“Take care of him, Kimmer. I mean, if anything happens to me.”
“Don’t say that! Don’t ever say that!”
“I have to go.” I peel her hand from my sleeve. Then I spot the real panic in her face and I realize she has it all wrong. She thinks I’m going off to Oak Bluffs to kill myself. Over her! I love her, yes, I am in pain, sure, but suicide! So I smile and take her hand and lead her down the steps onto the lawn. She is savvy enough to shoo Bentley into the house.
“Please don’t talk that way,” Kimmer mumbles, shuddering. She does not object when I put my arm around her.
“Kimmer, listen to me. Listen, please. I’m not going to do anything foolish. There’s a piece of the mystery that hasn’t been solved yet. Everybody’s forgotten about it. But I haven’t. And I have to go and see.”
“Go and see what?”
I think about the shadows I have sensed, ponder how to put it. I think about the still-unexplained attack on me in the middle of the campus. I think about my bullet holes. I think about my chat with Mr. Henderson. From my memory I draw the Judge’s line: “The way it was before, darling. I have to see the way it was before.”
She licks her lips. She is wearing jeans and a polo shirt and is as fetching as ever. Her hair is awry, and I wonder, with distress, if she was too busy in bed last night to braid it. She shoves her glasses up on her forehead and asks only one question: “Is it going to be dangerous, Misha? For you, I mean.”
“Yes.”
CHAPTER 61
The hurricane hits on my second day in Oak Bluffs, and it is a triumph of a storm, one of the greats, a storm to be talked about for years to come, just as I hoped it would be. All morning the police go up and down the roads with megaphones, warning everyone living near the water to take shelter. The radio stations, both on the Island and from the Cape, predict horrific property damage. I stay in the house or on the porch, watching the storm arrive. By early afternoon, the wind has knocked down tree branches and power lines all over the Island, and my electricity is gone. I hear creaking up in the attic, as though the chimney is deciding whether to jump. A couple of decades ago, in a storm less severe than this one, the chimney fell over flat on the roof of the house. I open the front door. Rain forms a wet, shimmery shield just beyond the steps, as though to walk through the curtain would be to enter a magical world where leaves fly and lawn furniture tumbles aimlessly through the streets and trees crack sharply in two.
Still I wait.
No more cars on Ocean Avenue or Seaview, nobody playing in the park. As always, a few foolish souls are out walking along the seawall, perhaps waiting to see whether the storm surge will be high enough to wash them away. But they are no more foolish than Talcott Garland, Misha to his friends, sitting in the unboarded front window of his house in defiance of official orders to evacuate. Of course I cannot leave. I have planned for, searched for, hoped for this moment since the day I left the hospital and saw Kimmer standing militantly in the front hall of Number 41 Hobby Road and solved the mystery. I dared not let on, not to anybody, and only Dana even guessed that I might know. I cannot evacuate. I am waiting, waiting for the worst of the storm, waiting for the only instant since encountering Jack Ziegler in the cemetery when I can know, absolutely know, that I am alone. Nobody, I am betting, can maintain surveillance through a hurricane like this one.
At three-twenty, the storm surge strikes. Water careens over the seawall, carrying sand and seaweed and
