The clear, icy waters lap at my sneakers as I sit on the sand, my arms encircling my knees, gazing out across the mists of Menemsha Bight to Vineyard Sound. The afternoon sun, hanging low in the sky, sparks bright golden triangles in the swells before me. Off to my left is a long jetty built of huge stones, a favorite spot for summer people who like to fish. On the right, the headland presses far out into the water, and a handful of homes, from this distance stolid, secluded, and spacious, dot the point. Their shingles are weathered to that wonderful New England gray-brown. A clutch of fishing boats bobs along the horizon, sailing in with the day’s catch, their labor finally done. And somewhere out there is the spot where Colin Scott, whom I knew as Agent McDermott, went overboard.
The question is who pushed him, for I no longer believe that he fell.
If I ever did.
After John and I chased Foreman through the woods, I made my decision. I waited for the Browns to depart and then, on the first workday of the new year, I picked up the telephone and fought my way through Cassie Meadows and various secretaries until I finally reached Mallory Corcoran. I told him about the chess book being taken and returned. I told him about the pawn being delivered to the soup kitchen. And I asked him point-blank if he knew anything about these matters.
He asked a perfect lawyer’s question: Why do you say “these matters”? Are you telling me you think they’re related somehow? Not an answer, just a question.
And I knew I couldn’t trust him any more. Bizarre. I trust an unidentified voice on the phone at two-fifty-one in the morning that assures me there is no more danger, but not my father’s law partner, who sat behind him in the hearing room for two days when things began to go sour, then gave him a job and a healthy stipend after he left the bench.
So, why am I back here? Goodness knows, my trips are stretching our budget. Worrying about money again, I did not, after all, say no to the man from my father’s speakers’ bureau when, persistent as ever, he called back much sooner than he had promised. I did not say yes, either, but I allowed him to fill my head once more with the beguiling vision of earning close to a hundred thousand dollars for three days’ work. Plus first-class air travel, he added.
I told him I would think about it.
I creak to my feet and shuffle down to the water, yearning for the delicious shock of cold spray on my face. I have been on this pebbly beach for a little over an hour, walking, sitting, praying, thinking, skipping stones, but mostly worrying the facts around in my mind. I have spotted a couple of beachcombers, year-round people, but have stayed clear of them. I need to think-and to work up my courage.
The truth is, I am not quite sure what I am doing back on the Vineyard. I only know that I woke very early on Thursday quite clear in the conviction that I had to return, even if only for one day. Kimmer, already up, was sitting at the kitchen table in a long tee shirt and nothing else, working on a brief. Standing in the arched doorway, I watched her strong body move under the loose white cotton. I allowed myself ten or twenty seconds of fantasy, then crept up behind her and kissed her on the back of the head. Kimmer pushed her glasses up on her nose and smiled but did not offer her lips. I sat down next to her and took her hand and told her I had to go. She did not seem sad. She did not throw a tantrum. She did not even argue. She just nodded solemnly and asked when.
Today, I told her. This afternoon.
“You’ll miss the Citywide Lamentation,” Kimmer deadpanned-this being our shared slang for an interfaith service held on the first Sunday in January, where the leaders of the Elm Harbor community come together and pray to be reconciled across the divisions of race and sex and class and religion and sexual orientation and nationality and language-spoken-at-home and disability and educational level and marital status and neighborhood-of-residence and whatever else is popular this week. Recently the organizers have tossed in “institutional affiliation”-evidently a reference to the widespread belief in the community that university types look down their (our) noses at everybody else. Kimmer goes because everybody who is anybody in town goes, including a good chunk of the faculty, and several of her partners at Newhall she goes, in short, for the networking. I go because Kimmer does.
“Well, that’s true-”
Kimmer shushed me. She stood up and spread her arms, at first, I thought happily, for a hug. But then she closed her eyes and turned her palms toward me, splaying her fingers wide, and leaned her head back and intoned solemnly: “May Whoever or Whatever might have been involved in our creation…”-an eerily precise imitation of last year’s inclusive yet surely blasphemous invocation by the new university chaplain, who came to us from a West Coast college where her studied caution on the question of God’s actual existence apparently went over somewhat better than it does here.
Then my wife’s somber look vanished and she broke into giggles. I laughed too, and, for a silly moment, it was old times. Kimmer stepped into my arms and actually hugged me, quite hard, and kissed the corner of my mouth and told me she understood what was driving me, and if I had to go, I had to go. Usually when my wife kisses me with softly open lips, I get a little goofy, but this time I bristled, for Kimmer was sweetly affirming, the way we are with the mentally ill. She believes only in my compulsion, not in my version of the facts.
I went upstairs to pack, leaving a still-twittering Kimmer down in the kitchen.
Bentley nodded gravely when I told him Daddy was going away for a day or two, and he offered only one piece of parting advice just before I went out the door: “Dare you,” he whispered.
I’m trying, son.
Eventually, it is time to move. I walk along the single sandy street leading from the beach to the quiet village of Menemsha, peeking behind every shuttered restaurant and fish store until I stumble across Manny’s Menemsha Marine, which turns out to be no more than a battered wooden shack, once painted white, a few dozen paces from the nearest dock. The two small windows are sealed. The sagging roof is made of tin. The building looks just about big enough to turn around in. No wires for telephone or electricity run anywhere near it. But Manny’s is the place, according to the Gazette, where Colin Scott and his two friends rented their boat. I wonder why they chose it. It is quite indistinguishable from any number of other boat-rental operations scattered around the harbor; and every one of them, including Manny’s, seems to feature a painfully hand-lettered black-and-white sign, prominently displayed across the door, reading CLOSED FOR THE SEASON.
Perhaps their choice was random, except that I do not envision Colin Scott doing anything at random.
I knock. The whole edifice shakes. I tug the ancient padlock, then walk completely around the shack twice, first clockwise, then counterclockwise, straining my eyes to peer into the single grimy window. I step back and put my gloved hands on my hips and try to figure out whether I actually have a plan. What did I think, that Manny himself would be here to welcome me with a broad smile of relief? Yes, I’ve been waiting for somebody to ask me about that birthmark! Well, he isn’t-but if the rental service is closed for the season, how did Scott/McDermott and his friends get a boat? I turn awkwardly in a circle, trying to think what to do, and that is when I notice a skinny white man in his twenties, much in need of a shave, wearing old khakis and a heavy sweater against the January cold, watching me from the hard dirt path between the shack and the road. He carries a small backpack. I have no idea how long he has been standing there, and I experience, briefly, the secret fear of false arrest that every black male in America nurtures somewhere deep within, especially those who have nearly been falsely arrested: did he see me yanking on the lock?
“They’re not there,” the man says helpfully, and grins to show me his very bad teeth. It actually sounds a little more like Theyah not theah. As though he is as much Maine as Cape.
“Where’s Manny?” I ask.
“Gone.”
“When will he be back?”
“Oh, April. May.” He starts to walk away.
“Wait!” I call, hurrying after him. “Wait a second, please.”
He turns slowly back to look at me. He eyes my clothes. No smile this time. His dark green turtleneck sweater looks like a hand-me-down. His sneakers are bursting. I am wearing a fleece-lined jacket with the little Polo logo on it and designer jeans. I feel suddenly, weirdly out of place, and out of time, a black capitalist come to
