3
ZEE TOOK THE TUNNEL to the North Shore instead of the bridge. The old Volvo she’d gotten in grad school barely passed inspection every year, and though she seldom drove in town, she couldn’t seem to give it up. The alignment was so bad that she had to keep both hands firmly on the wheel to stay in her lane as she drove.
Zee hated tunnels-the darkness, the damp, the dripping from overhead, where she imagined the weight of water already pushing through the cracks, finding any weak spot and working its way through. She wasn’t alone. Since the Big Dig tunnel ceiling collapse a couple of years back, most Bostonians were skittish about tunnels.
“Water always seeks its own level,” Zee said aloud, though she was alone in the car and the sound of her own voice seemed wrong. The thought was wrong, too. It only made her more tense. Think of something else, she told herself. She wished she had taken the bridge. At the same time, she wondered if she would ever be able to take the bridge again.
Both Mattei and Michael had told Zee not to go to Lilly’s funeral.
“Why would you do that?” Mattei asked.
“Because she was my patient,” Zee said. “Because I’m a human being.”
“I hope you don’t have any delusions that the family will welcome you,” Mattei said.
“I’m going,” Zee said.
ZEE HAD PLANNED TO STOP to see her father before the funeral, but she was running late. These days she didn’t drive enough to know how bad the traffic would be this time of day. The Big Dig might officially be over, but traffic was still a mess. She had planned to go directly to Salem and surprise Finch with a visit. She was worried about him. Lately she had only seen him in Boston when he came in for his doctor’s appointments. He seemed frail and weak. And she couldn’t help but feel that he was hiding something from her. So today she planned to drop in unannounced to see for herself. But it was too late to go to Salem now. She’d have to see Finch after Lilly’s funeral.
She altered her route, electing to take the coast road directly to Marblehead, winding along the golden crescent of beach that stretches from Lynn through Swampscott to the town line. At the last minute, she decided to take a shorter route through downtown Lynn, not counting on road construction. It was summer. Road crews were everywhere, the required extra-shift cops sleepily directing traffic.
Zee hadn’t been on this road for a long time. Mostly the streets were as she remembered them. Roast-beef and pizza places lined every block. Popping up next to them were bodegas, nail salons, and the occasional package store. The businesses were essentially the same. But the ethnicity had changed. Small groceries sat next to each other, their signs in Spanish, Korean, Arabic, Russian. Lynn had always had a diverse population. These days there were more than forty languages spoken in the Lynn schools. Zee forgot who had told her that. Probably it had been her Uncle Mickey.
Her mother’s people, including Uncle Mickey, were from Lynn, though they were originally Derry Irish. They had come over from Ireland to become factory workers at a company on Eastern Avenue that made shoe boxes.
They were all IRA, or at least the two brothers had been, Uncle Mickey and his brother Liam, who died in an explosion in Ireland. Zee remembered her mother telling her that their emigration had been sudden. Maureen’s reluctance to say more about it left Zee wondering about the details. It was out of character for Maureen to hold back any details when she was telling a story. Whatever it was that had happened, the family had no longer been safe in Ireland. They’d had to leave the country overnight, taking only what they could carry.
Maureen had told her all this in such a matter-of-fact tone that Zee had never quite believed the story.
“Make no mistake,” her mother had said many times. “We are, every one of us, capable of murder. Given the right circumstances, it is within each of us to take a life.”
Zee never knew whether by “every one of us” her mother had meant all of humanity or simply all of the Doherty clan. She had often thought about asking that question, but she never did. In the end she decided she really didn’t want to know.
Their house had been on Eastern Avenue, near the factory but farther down the street, closer to the beach. Zee doubted if she could find the place now. It was so long ago that her grandmother had died. Her mother died only a few years later, just after Zee turned thirteen. Besides Zee, Mickey was the only Doherty left.
The factory where they’d once worked had long since closed. A sign on the front of the building read KING’S BEACH APARTMENTS. It was directly across from Monte’s Restaurant, where she used to go for pizza with her father and Uncle Mickey in their pirate days.
When her grandmother died, Uncle Mickey had moved to Salem. He wanted to be closer to his sister, he said. Mickey could pilot a boat with the best of skippers, but he had never learned to drive a car. Though it was only a town away, Lynn was too far from what was left of his family, he said. And he didn’t like riding the bus. Though Maureen had killed herself just a few years after he made the move to Salem, Mickey stayed on. He had grown to love the Witch City. He was both a born entrepreneur and a natural salesman. He had a bit of the old cliched blarney in him as well. When Salem reinvented itself, Mickey was right there to take advantage of the opportunity. He now ran a witch shop on Pickering Wharf, several haunted houses, and a pirate museum. He had done well. People in Salem fondly referred to Mickey Doherty as “The Pirate King.”
Lynn, Lynn, City of Sin. Zee recited the old poem in her head. A sign on a Salvation Army building read CITY OF HIM. People were always trying to find a new image for Lynn. Zee liked it the way it was. It seemed to her a real place where real people led real lives.
She could smell Lynn Beach from here, fetid and heavy. At the Swampscott town line, she noticed a little shop with a woman in the window seated at a sewing machine. Outside the store hung a sign, hand-lettered, with penmanship that slanted downward as it progressed: MALE/FEMALE ALTERATIONS.
City of Sin. There was a reason she felt so right here, Zee thought. As sins go, Zee had committed her share. She felt guilty about a lot of things, not the least of which was the question that Lilly had asked shortly before her death. Lilly’s question reminded Zee so much of Maureen that she hadn’t shared it with Mattei. It was the thing that in retrospect should have tipped her off about Lilly, but instead it hit her in a much more personal way, as if someone had punched her in the stomach.
The last time she’d seen Lilly Braedon, Zee had been trying so hard to rationalize the risky behavior Lilly had been engaging in that she found herself unprepared for the question. Just as the session was ending and Lilly was walking out the door, she turned back to Zee and asked, “Don’t you believe at all in true love?”
4
WHEN LILLY’S HUSBAND HAD first brought her to Mattei, Lilly had been heavily dosed on Klonopin. Her anxiety had become so debilitating that the internist her husband had been taking her to had first prescribed Xanax and then, when that failed, increasing doses of the branded clonazepam. Lilly could barely speak. She couldn’t drive. The pupils of her eyes looked like tiny pinpoints. But she was no longer anxious. She was zombie calm.
It turned out that Lilly hadn’t driven for the better part of a year, which had been inconvenient at best with a husband and two young children to care for. Instead of taking the kids to the yacht club to swim, Lilly had started walking them down to Gashouse Beach, which she said she preferred. But the kids missed their friends and the swimming lessons they had signed up for, and Lilly had such a bad feeling about the ocean-a terror that it would take her children, that the surf would send a rogue wave or that some remnants of red tide would seep through their skin to infect them-that she didn’t even let them wade in the water at the beach. Instead they were allowed only to sit on the rocky shore, playing in what little sand they could find, building castles, and slathered with so much 45 SPF that the blowing sand began to coat their pale bodies, making them look like sugar cookies.
By August, Lilly’s husband had taken pity on her and hired a nanny. That was when the real trouble started.
Lilly willingly surrendered her SUV to the nanny, happy to be free of it, preferring to walk around town. She had Peapod deliver groceries. And then she paced.
