us.”
“Yes. We will. Soon,” he says. “We’ll talk and get everything straight.”
I imagine it with startling clarity, our favorite suite that reaches out into the water like a fingertip at the Fairmont hotel on Battery Wharf, directly next door to the coast guard ISC. I see the ruffled dark-green water of the harbor and hear it washing against pilings as if I’m there. I hear the creaking of docks, the clanking of rigging lines against masts, and the bass tones of the horns the big ships sound as if all of it is audible inside Fielding’s office.
“And we won’t answer our phones, and we’ll go for walks and get room service and watch the tall ships, the tugboats, the tankers from our window. I would love that. Wouldn’t you love it?” But I don’t sound nice as I say it. I sound pushy and angry.
“We’ll do it this weekend if you want. If we can,” he says as he reads something on his iPhone, scrolling down with his thumb.
I move my coffee away and the corner of the desk looks rounded, not squared. Too much caffeine and my heart is beating hard. I feel light-headed and edgy.
“I hate it when you look at your phone all the time,” I say before I can stop myself. “You know how much I hate it when we’re talking.”
“It can’t be avoided right now,” he says as he looks at it.
“Exit off Ninety-three, get on Commercial Street, and you’re right there,” I resume arguing. “A convenient way to get rid of a body. Drive it there and dump it in the harbor. Nude, so whatever trace evidence there might have been from the car trunk, for example, was probably washed away.” I shut a bottom drawer and sound peculiar to myself as I mutter distractedly, “Pain-relieving patches. None. And I didn’t see any in my desk drawers, either. Only chewing gum. I’ve never been a gum chewer. Well, when I was a little kid. Dubble Bubble at Halloween, with the colorful waxy yellow wrapper that’s twisted on the ends.”
I see it. I smell it. My mouth waters.
“Here’s a secret I’ve never told anyone. I’d recycle. Chew it and wrap it up again. For days until there was no flavor left.”
My mouth is watering, and I swallow several times.
“I stopped chewing gum when I stopped trick-or-treating. See, you’ve reminded me of trick-or-treating, something I haven’t thought of in so many years I can’t believe it’s just popped into my head. Sometimes I forget I was ever a child. Ever young and stupid and trusting.”
My hands are shaking.
“Better not to like something you can’t afford, so I didn’t make a habit of gum.”
I’m trembling.
“Better not to look like you grew up low-class, especially if you did grow up low-class. When have you ever seen me chew gum? I won’t. It’s low-class.”
“Nothing about you is low-class.” Benton watches me carefully, guardedly, and I see what is in his eyes. I’m scaring him.
But I can’t stop myself. “I’ve worked damn hard in life not to look low-class. You didn’t know me when I was getting started and had no idea what people are really like, people who have complete power over you, people you worship really, and what they’re capable of luring you into so that you never feel the same about yourself. And then you bury it like that beating heart under the floorboards in Edgar Allan Poe, but you always know it’s there. And you can’t tell anyone. Even when it keeps you awake at night. You can’t even tell the person you’re closest to that there’s this cold, dead heart under the floorboards and it’s your fault it’s under there.”
“Christ, Kay.”
“It’s odd that everything we love seems to be in close proximity to something hateful and dead,” enters my mind next. “Well, not everything.”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. Just stressed out, and who the hell wouldn’t be? Our house is across the street from Norton’s Woods, where someone was murdered yesterday, and he may have been at the Courtauld Gallery at the same time Lucy and I were the summer before Nine-Eleven, which she thinks was caused by us, by the way. Liam Saltz was there, too, at the Courtauld, one of the lecturers. I didn’t meet him then, but Lucy has him on CD. I can’t remember what he talked about.”
“I’m curious why you would bring him up.”
“A link on a website that Jack was looking at for some reason.”
Benton doesn’t say anything, and he doesn’t take his eyes off me.
“You and I go in The Biscuit when I’m home on weekends, maybe we’ve been in there at the same time Johnny Donahue and his MIT friend were,” I go on and can’t keep up with my thoughts. “We love Salem and the oils and candles in the shops there, the same shops that sell iron spikes, devil’s bone. Our favorite getaway in Boston is next to where Wally Jamison’s body was found the morning after Halloween. Is someone watching us? Does someone know everything we do? What was Jack doing in Salem on Halloween?”
“Wally’s body got where it was by boat, not the wharf,” Benton replies, and I don’t know where he got the information.
“All these things in common. You’d think we live in a small town.”
“You don’t look good.”
“You’re sure it was a boat. I feel like I’m having a hot flash.” I touch my cheek, press my hand against it. “Lord. That will be next. So much to look forward to.”
“More relevant is the fact that someone deliberately dumped his body where the hundred-foot cutters are homeported with guardsmen on board.” Benton watches my every move. “And starting around daybreak, support staff and other personnel show up for work and the wharf is a parking lot. All these people getting out of their cars and seeing a mutilated body floating in the water. That’s brazen. Killing a little kid in his own backyard while his parents are inside the house is brazen. Killing someone on Super Bowl Sunday in Norton’s Woods while a VIP wedding is going on is brazen. Doing all this in our own neighborhoods is brazen. Yes.”
“First you know it’s a boat. Next you know it was a VIP wedding, not just a wedding but a VIP wedding.” I don’t ask but state. He wouldn’t say it if he didn’t know it. “Why was Jack in Salem? Doing what there? You can’t even get a hotel room in Salem on Halloween. You can’t even drive, there are so many people.”
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Do you think it’s personal?” I ask as I obsess about what a small world it is. “I come home and this is my welcome. To have all this ugliness and death and deceit and betrayal practically in my lap.”
“To some extent, yes,” Benton says.
“Well, thank you for that.”
“I said ‘to some extent.’ Not everything.”
“You said you think it’s personal. I want to know exactly how it is personal.”
“Try to calm down. Breathe slowly.” He reaches for my hand, and I won’t let him touch me. “Slowly, slowly, Kay.”
I pull away from him, and he returns his hand to his lap, to the iPhone in it that flashes red every other second as messages land. I don’t want him to touch me. It’s as if I have no skin.
“Is there anything to eat in this place? I can send out for something,” Benton says. “Maybe it’s low blood sugar. When did you eat last?”
“No. I couldn’t right now. I’ll be fine. Why do you say ‘VIP’?” I hear myself ask.
He looks at his phone again, the tiny red light flashing its alert. “Anne,” he says to me as he reads what just landed. “She’s on her way, should be here in a few minutes.”
“What else? I can download the scan in here, take a look.”
“She didn’t send it. She tried to call you. Obviously, you’re not at your desk. There were undercover agents at the wedding. Protecting a VIP, but obviously he wasn’t the one who needed it,” Benton says. “Nobody was looking for the one who needed protecting. We didn’t know he was going to be there.”
I take another deep breath, and I try to diagnose a heart attack, if I might be having one.
“Did the agents see what happened?” Mount Auburn would be the closest hospital. I don’t want to go to the hospital.
“Ones stationed by the outside doors weren’t looking at him and didn’t see it. They saw people rushing
