Stephen Carter - Emperor of Ocean Park

Protect the family, Jack Ziegler instructed me. Well, I’m doing my best. Only there is more left to do.

On Bentley’s last day with me, we picnic boldly at Menemsha Beach, watching the sun drop beneath the most beautiful horizon on the East Coast. The same beach where Mr. Scott drowned another poor soul so we would think he was dead. I dare any of the ghosts of the past nine months to show themselves. Sitting on the blanket, I hold my boy so close that he begins to squirm. I cannot seem to let go. My eyes fill. I recall the night he was born, how both he and Kimmer almost died. My terror after the doctors forced me from the delivery room. The joy we felt when it was over, both of us, mother and father, on our knees praying for our son, making all the promises to God that people hardly ever keep after they get what they want. I catch myself wondering how it all slipped away, and that is when I know it is time to go home.

The next morning, I pack up the car, and Bentley and I sit in the short standby line for the early ferry. It is time to return Bentley to his mother; to his home. And time, finally, for me to confront my demons.

Mallory Corcoran’s summer place is a wrecked farm sprawling over two hundred acres near Middlebury, Vermont: a restored eighteenth-century clapboard house, half a dozen outbuildings, plenty of meadows rented to locals to graze cattle, and tangled woods where Uncle Mal likes to hunt. The farm is not difficult to find-it almost jumps at you, spreading across the road, as you head down Route 30 toward Cornwall. I have not been here since I was a second-year law student, when he invited me for Memorial Day weekend, while also entertaining the Secretary of State and a couple of Senators. I suppose he was trying to recruit me- Someday this all could be yours! -and it might even have worked, except that his friendship with my father already scared me, even if I did not, yet, know all its dimensions.

We sit on aging bentwood rockers on the front porch, lawyer and client, sipping lemonade, while Edie plays with a couple of grandchildren and a horde of dogs and cats out in what real New Englanders call the dooryard. Uncle Mal is wearing dirty jeans, work boots, and a checked shirt: very much the gentleman farmer, or what a Washington lawyer trying to be one looks like. I am in my usual summer attire of khakis and windbreaker. My cane lies on the floor next to me, guarded by another of the many huge dogs they keep, but I want Mallory Corcoran keenly aware of its existence.

“How much have you figured out?” he asks when we have exhausted the small talk.

“I know you left the note at Vinerd Howse.”

“Not me. Meadows.” He smiles without apology.

“That’s why you had her sit in that first time. She was already involved.”

“She was already involved,” he agrees. “But we had to do it the way we did it. We were carrying out the last wishes of our client. Your father. He left us one of those, ‘In-case-anything-happens-to-me-open-this’ letters.”

I remember the morning I left Aspen. “And he gave you the code to turn off the alarm at Vinerd Howse. So nobody would be the wiser.” Uncle Mal nods. But I am confused. “So why didn’t he just have you tell me what he wanted me to know? Why all this crazy rigamarole?”

Mallory Corcoran sips his lemonade, strokes another large dog between the ears as it rumbles at his side. He is not intimidated by me. He was not reluctant to see me. By his own lights, he acted honorably and has nothing to hide. “I think your father wanted you to know some things, but I am not sure he wanted to put them into ordinary language. I think he was… he was afraid that somebody else would come across it. So he made his arrangements and then hid them where only you could find them.”

“A year ago,” I murmur.

“I would say, almost two years.”

I nod. “It’ll be two years this October since he gave you the letter.”

Uncle Mal is too savvy a lawyer to ask me immediately how I figured this out. But he does not know the story I heard from Miles Madison, my father-in-law.

“That sounds right,” says Mallory Corcoran, still playing with the dog.

I nod. Earlier this summer, I consulted with my colleague Arnie Rosen, an expert in professional responsibility, who explained over lunch that an attorney’s obligation survives the death of a client. The lawyer may no longer act in the name of the client, of course, but should generally carry out any deathbed instructions, as long as they propose nothing illegal or outside the scope of the lawyer’s duties, and as long as the client is in his right mind. If what is asked seems wrong, the lawyer might try to dissuade the client or might even refuse to do it; but, if the lawyer accepts the task, the obligation exists. In other words, what Mallory Corcoran did in delivering the Judge’s letter to Oak Bluffs was within his ethical responsibility to my father-whatever its twisted morality.

Why was it necessary to trash the first floor of Vinerd Howse? I ask. Or to break the glass?

He shrugs. “To make sure that you would be the only one to venture upstairs and find the note. Your father’s idea.”

“Meadows did that, too?”

“I didn’t ask for the details.”

“What if I had just waited for the police before going upstairs?”

“I don’t know. I suppose they would have found the note and given it to you. The same if the caretaker-can’t remember his name-had been the first one to find it. I must confess, however, I’m not sure your father considered the possibility that Kimberly might see it before you did. I suppose it all could have gone wrong. Or maybe he just figured you were too much a gentleman to send your wife to check upstairs after a break-in.”

I cannot tell whether I am being complimented or mocked, so I drop the subject and, instead, ask the first of the two questions that brought me to Mallory Corcoran’s dooryard. “Did you know what my father was doing? Why he left you the note?”

“Let me anticipate. You are asking me whether I know what his arrangements were, or exactly why he wanted you to know whatever he wanted you to know. The answer, Talcott, is no. I’m afraid I didn’t know. I still don’t.”

“Do you know why he chose me and not Addison?”

This time the answer is longer in coming. “It was my impression that your brother was… oh, out of favor.”

“Out of favor?”

“Your father seemed to think your brother had betrayed him.”

This one puzzles me. But one look at Mallory Corcoran’s super-lawyer face tells me I will get no more. So I ask the second question: “Did you know what was really going on? Between my father and Jack Ziegler?”

He has his answer ready. He has probably had it ready since the day the housekeeper called the firm to say the Judge was dead: “Your father was my partner and my friend, Talcott, but he was also a client. You know it is impossible for me to divulge what he told me in confidence.”

“I take that as a yes.”

“You should not construe it either way. You should not assume anything.”

“Well, I’m your client, too. That means you have to keep my secrets.”

“True.”

“All right. Let me speculate for a moment.” Uncle Mal is a statue. “I don’t know exactly what my father and Uncle Jack were up to, but I know they were up to something. I don’t know how much of it you guessed, but I don’t think he would have told you very much, because. .. well, because he craved your respect.” And didn’t quite trust you, I think but do not say, for I am pouring on the butter here. The Judge didn’t fully trust you, which is the real reason he gave you only that one cryptic note and hid his arrangements someplace else. “But I’d like to tell you what I think happened.”