there is a stillness that unnerves him.
It is so calm that the sound of the engine starting on the blue Lexus in Posner’s driveway shatters the air as if it were a thick and brittle object. He hasn’t even noticed that Posner is already in the car when he arrives. He’s lucky and knows it. Another few minutes and Posner might be off somewhere, and he would waste a full day’s surveillance.
Posner backs slowly down the driveway onto an empty street. “He’s a careful man. I’ll have to remember that,” Stern says to the empty passenger seat. He has begun to talk to himself aloud with some regularity in the past few months. Sometimes it’s to Heidi, but more often to an unknown audience, a shapeless companion who agrees never to disagree.
Stern watches as Posner turns onto the main street and moments later accelerates onto the highway going east. He’s easy to follow. There are few other cars in sight. But he must lay back more than a casual distance to avoid drawing even accidental attention. Posner stays at the limit of fifty-five although the road ahead is empty. A town police car comes from the other direction and Stern sees Posner’s brake lights flicker as the cars near each other.
“What’s he afraid of?” Stern asks aloud. “You’re going slowly enough. Feel guilty about something, do ya?”
He follows Posner into the village of Montauk past the mostly empty motels and food shops. Posner drives through the village without stopping and picks up speed as he reenters the highway still going east.
“How much farther can he go? He’s gonna be in the ocean pretty soon.”
At this point there’s no other traffic so Stern has to fall farther behind. He loses sight of Posner as the road bends and when it straightens out the blue Lexus is gone. Stern speeds up and goes for another mile before he realizes that Posner must have turned off. He makes a sharp U-turn and speeds back the other way. He barely looks at the road ahead as he scans both sides of the highway until he comes to a sign announcing the Montauk Overlook turnoff and wonders why he didn’t see it when he first passed. He slows and enters the parking lot and sees the blue Lexus on the far end where it’s hidden from the main road.
He pulls into a spot as far from where Posner parked as he can and still keep it in sight. There is no movement in the Lexus. Now he must decide whether to exit his car or wait till Posner returns. He squirms with indecision for a few minutes, then decides he just can’t wait and opts for leaving his car and moving with as little sound as possible along the fringe of the woods until he approaches Posner’s car. In less than a minute he’s close enough so that a subtle noise draws his attention down the slope. Posner is stooped over the ground and picking up an object. From a distance Stern can’t identify the item but he sees Posner put it into his windbreaker pocket and look around furtively. For an instant Stern thinks he’s been seen, but Posner’s subsequent stride up the slope without a second look convinces him otherwise. He races back to his car, considers taking off, but then decides he’d rather Posner be unnerved about being seen.
He lights a cigarette and watches as Posner exits the woods and looks in his general direction for a moment before he reenters the Lexus. Now he’s been seen. He’s sure of it. He watches Posner hesitate then put his car in motion. Stern slides down the seat and half turns the other way to avoid any possible detection.
As soon as the Lexus clears the parking lot, Stern pulls ahead to the area where Posner parked. He gets out and moves down the slope. He’s heading for the gnarled sand pine that he noticed moments before. He reaches the area in seconds, but there is nothing special to see. He scans the ground. Maybe there’s more of what Posner picked up, he thinks, but he sees nothing but pine needles and cones. He turns in an arc one last time. He’ll have to come back again. There is no need to remember the spot. The gnarled pine is a good landmark, but he remains puzzled as to why Posner would come all the way out here for just a few minutes. Back at the parking lot, he uses a felt-tipped pen to darken the base of the sand pine closest to the edge of the lot, so he’ll know where to park the next time.
He drives back westward through Montauk and passes the Lexus parked in front of a drive-in restaurant. “Surprised he’s not stopping at a bar for a real drink,” he says to his unspecified companion before he dissolves into a spasm of giggles.
That night the dream returns, but there’s a difference. He wakes moments before the end, just as the shadow carrying the body disappears from his view behind some trees. He doesn’t scream. Every sensation in his body tells him she’s dead and that the shadow carrying her body is Posner’s. The landscape in the dream is familiar. He’s been there. That very day he walked among the same sand pines in his dream. The thought drives him awake and all he can think of now is an image of Posner burying Heidi’s body. He has to prove it to himself. He doesn’t care anymore about the police. They’ve been useless. Even imagining him as somehow involved is idiotic. No. He’ll have to find some evidence and then confront Posner. He relishes the thought of seeing Posner sweat and plead for his life, knowing that it’s a plea he will not grant.
The next day he goes to the hardware store and buys a shovel and a flashlight.
“Looking for night crawlers, are ya?” asks the woman behind the counter.
“Something like that,” Stern answers as he wonders over the woman’s unintentional insight.
Then he drives to Posner’s house. He sees the car in the driveway, pulls up, and calls the number, but it’s busy.
“Too bad. I almost wanted to reintroduce myself,” he says and exhales a stream of mock laughter. Then he turns the car to the east and begins to drive out to the Montauk Overlook.
After a few minutes on the highway his voice returns to normal. “There must be something in that area near the gnarled sand pine that he wants to hide. He must have been the one carrying Heidi. What do you think?”
His companion’s silence affirms the assertion.
Everything about the drive to the overlook seems mechanical. He drives at maximum speed along the highway, slows through Montauk village and accelerates again until the overlook turnoff. The spot he’s marked on the base of a tree the previous day is still there, but he realizes he could have found it easily enough without the marking. One car is parked in the lot near where he pulls up. Actually, it is a small white pickup with the words “Marine Patrol” printed on the side and rear. He presumes it’s some official car and prepares himself to wait until the occupant moves. He turns on the radio and lights a cigarette. The wait isn’t long, as a uniformed officer of some kind appears from the far side of the lot. The man raises a small hand in greeting.
Stern nods and raises a hand in reply. He tries to act like he’s a local by remembering how the men he knew growing up in a small town in the Berkshire foothills would greet each other and strangers alike. Friendly, but not too much so. It seems to work. The man smiles back, enters his truck, and drives off.
Stern waits ten minutes to see if the man plans to return. A heavy cloud cover sits over the area and a chill seeps through his sweater. He feels he should have worn something warmer, but the first few steps down the slope convince him that he will soon have enough exercise to heat his limbs. In seconds he is back at the gnarled bent pine. He randomly starts to dig. The sandy soil is soft from recent rains and the ground carves with ease under the shovel’s blade. He digs a wide swath around the tree creating a perimeter encompassing the area he remembers where Posner walked. None of the trenches are more than a foot deep. He works for fifteen minutes, stops, and then begins a new search area at a spot some ten feet farther down toward the shore.
After nearly an hour all he can show for his effort is sweat. He begins to fill in the trenches, but doesn’t take the time to smooth out the soil, or brush pine needles back across the surface. In his haste he fails to notice a two- inch square of silver plastic torn from some bag that became mixed in with the soil.
CHAPTER 11
Peter Wisdom looks across the backyard lawn of his sister-in-law’s house, smiles, and raises a half-empty can of Bud in the direction of his wife, Karen. She smiles back. Karen stands out among the other women plucking bits of sliced vegetables or chips from the platters on the picnic table. She is short, but her smile is never ending.
He stands near his brother-in-law, Rollo, who tends to the steaks and burgers on two adjacent grills. It’s a family Sunday afternoon picnic. Rollo lets his staff set up the restaurant today, but he’ll go over later when it starts to get busy. Wisdom’s son, Kevin, kicks a soccer ball around with his two cousins and a neighbor. It is a sweet, early fall afternoon with far more sun than chill. He wonders if sweet is the right word, but decides it’ll do.
His family’s been in East Hampton long enough to be considered locals. It started with a summer vacation cottage his father bought in the area called the Springs when he got out of the army and began working as a New York City firefighter. That’s when they lived in Queens. Wisdom was the youngest of two boys and one girl. He
