it, but I don’t think that will ever be. I believe she’s seeing someone else at Otwahl, a scientist she’s working with there.”
“Do you know his name?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t recall it if I ever knew. I think he’s originally from Berkeley as well, and then ended up here because of MIT and Otwahl. A South African. I’ve heard Johnny rather rudely refer to the Afrikaans nerd Dawn dates, and some other names I won’t repeat. And before that it was a dumb jock, according to my son, who’s a bit jealous….”
“A dumb jock?” I ask.
“A terribly rude thing to say about someone who died so tragically. But Johnny lacks tact. That’s part of his unusualness.”
“Do you know the name of the man who died?”
“I don’t remember. That football player they found in the harbor.”
“Did Johnny talk about that case with you?”
“You’re not going to imply that my son had something to do with—”
I calmly reassure her I’m not implying anything of the sort, and I end the call as the SUV crunches through the frozen snow blanketing our Cambridge driveway. At the end of it, under the bare branches of a huge oak tree, is the carriage house, our remodeled garage, its double wooden doors illuminated in our headlights.
“You heard that for yourself,” I say to Benton.
“It doesn’t mean Jack didn’t do it. It doesn’t mean he didn’t kill Wally Jamison or Mark Donahue or Eli Goldman,” he says. “We need to be careful.”
“Of course we need to be careful. We’re always careful. None of this you already knew?”
“I can’t tell you what a patient told me. But let’s put it this way, what Mrs. Donahue just said is interesting, and I didn’t say I’m convinced about Fielding. I’m saying we just need to be careful because we don’t know certain things for a fact right now. But we will. I can promise you that. Everyone’s looking for Dawn Kincaid. I’ll pass this latest information along,” Benton says, and what he’s really saying is there’s nothing we can do about it or nothing we should do about it, and he’s right. We can’t go out like a two-party posse and track down Dawn Kincaid, who probably is a thousand miles from here by now.
Benton stops the SUV and points a remote at the garage. A wooden door rolls up, and a light goes on inside, illuminating his black Porsche convertible and three other empty spaces.
He tucks the SUV next to his sports car, and I slip the lead over Sock’s long, slender neck and help him out of my lap, then out of the backseat and into the garage, which is very cold because of the missing window in back. I walk Sock across the rubberized flooring and look through the gaping black square and at our snowy backyard beyond it. It is very dark, but I can make out disturbed snow, a lot of footprints, the neighborhood children again using our property as a shortcut, and that’s going to stop. We have a dog, and I will get the backyard walled or fenced in. I will be the mean, crabby neighbor who doesn’t allow trespassing.
“What a joke,” I comment to Benton as we walk out of the detached garage and onto the slick snowy driveway, the night sharply cold and white and very still. “You decide to get an alarm system for the garage. So we have one that doesn’t work and anybody could climb right in. When are we getting a new window?”
We head to the back door, walking carefully over crusty snow, which Sock clearly doesn’t like, snatching his paws up as if he’s walking over hot coals, and shivering. Dark trees rock in the wind, the night sky scattered with stars, the moon small and bone-white high above the roofs and treetops of Cambridge.
“It sucks,” he says, shifting the bag of groceries to his other arm as he finds the door key. “I’ll make sure to get them out here tomorrow. It’s just I haven’t been around and someone has to be home.”
“How big a deal to get fencing in back for Sock? So we can let him out and not be afraid he’ll run off.”
“You told me he doesn’t like to run.” Benton unlocks the door of the glassed-in porch.
Beyond it are the dark shapes of trees in Norton’s Woods. The timber building with its three-tiered metal roof hulks darkly against the night, no lights on inside. I feel sad as I look at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences headquarters and think of Liam Saltz and his slain stepson. I wonder if the maimed flybot is still out there somewhere, buried and frozen, no longer alive, as Lucy put it, because the sun can’t find it. I have a funny feeling someone has it. Maybe the FBI, I decide. Maybe people from DARPA, from the Pentagon. Maybe Dawn Kincaid.
“I think we need boots for him,” I say. “They make little booties for dogs, and he needs something like that so he doesn’t cut his paws on the ice and frozen snow.”
“Well, he won’t go very far in this cold.” Benton opens the door and the alarm begins to beep. “Trust me. You’ll have a hard time making him go out in this weather. I hope he’s housebroken.”
“He needs a couple of coats. I’m surprised Eli or Dawn or whoever didn’t have coats for him. Greyhounds need them up here. This really isn’t the right part of the world for greyhounds, but it is what it is, Sock. You’re going to be warm and well fed and fine.”
Benton enters the code on the keypad and resets the alarm the instant he’s shut the door behind us, and Sock leans against my legs.
“You build a fire, and I’m making drinks,” I tell Benton. “Then I’ll cook chicken and rice or maybe switch to cod and quinoa but not right now. He’s been eating chicken and rice all day, and I don’t want him sick. What would you like? Or maybe I should ask what’s in the house.”
“Some of your pizza’s still in the freezer.”
I turn on lights, and the stained-glass windows in the stairwell are dark but will be gorgeous from the outside, backlit by lights inside the house. I imagine the French wildlife scenes brilliantly lit up when I take Sock out at night and how cheerful that will be. I imagine playing with him in the backyard in the spring and summer, when it’s warm, and seeing the vibrant windows lit up at night and of how peaceful and civilized that will be. Living on the edge of Harvard and coming home from the office to my old dog, and I’ll plant a rose garden in back, and I think how good that sounds.
“Nothing to eat for me right now,” Benton says, taking off his coat. “First things first. A very strong drink, please.”
He goes into the living room, and Sock’s nails click against hardwood, then are silent on rugs as we pass from room to room and into the kitchen, where I feel him leaning against my legs as I open dark cherry cabinets above stainless-steel appliances. Wherever I move, he moves and presses against me, pushing against the back of my legs as I get out tumblers, then ice from the freezer, and then a bottle of our very best Scotch, a Glenmorangie single-malt aged twenty-five years that was a Christmas gift from Jaime Berger. My heart aches as I pour drinks and think of Lucy and Jaime breaking up and of people who are dead, and of what Fielding did to his life, and now he’s dead. He’d been killing himself all along, and then someone finished it for him, stuck a Glock in his left ear and pulled the trigger, most likely when he was standing near the cryogenic freezer, where he stored ill-gotten semen before shipping it to wives, mothers, and lovers of men who died young.
Who would Fielding trust so much as to allow the person into his cellar, to share his illegal venture capitalism with, to let borrow his sea captain’s house and probably everything he owned? I remember what his former boss told me, the chief in Chicago. He commented he was glad Jack was moving to Massachusetts to be near family, only he wasn’t referring to Lucy, Marino, and me, not to any of us, not even to his current wife and their two kids. I have a feeling the chief meant someone I never knew existed before now, and if I weren’t so selfish and egotistical, maybe the thought would have occurred to me sooner.
How typical of me to assume such importance in Fielding’s life, and he wasn’t thinking of me at all when he told his former chief what he did about family. Fielding probably meant the daughter from his first love, probably the first woman he ever had sex with, the therapist at the ranch near Atlanta who bore his daughter, and then gave her up just as Fielding was given up. A girl with genetic loading, as Benton put it, that would land her in prison if she didn’t end up dead. And she moved here last year from Berkeley, and then Fielding moved back here from Chicago.
“Nineteen seventy-eight,” I say as I walk into the dark, cozy living room of built-in bookcases and exposed old beams. The lights are out, and a fire crackles and glows on the brick hearth, and sparks swarm as Benton moves a log with the poker. “She would be about Lucy’s age, about thirty-one.” I hand him a tumbler of Scotch, a generous pour with only a few cubes of ice. The whisky looks coppery in the firelight. “Do you think it’s her? That Dawn Kincaid is his biological daughter? Because I do. I hope you didn’t already know about her.”
“I promise I didn’t. If it’s true.”
