Stephen Carter - Emperor of Ocean Park

Probably he hoped I would figure it out the first time I saw the note.

Or maybe Addison’s involvement was not limited to telling the Judge he wanted no involvement. After all, somebody had to put the Judge’s files on the disk. My father would not have known how to do it himself; but Addison loves computers. Maybe Addison gave him instructions, maybe Addison did it for him. Either way, my brother would have had at least a rough idea of what the Judge had hidden, and why, even if he did not know where. So, why did he refuse to help Mariah and me in our separate searches? Why, when I finally reached him, did he try to talk me out of going forward?

The same reason he arranged for Sally to remove the scrapbook. Because he was there in the kitchen at Shepard Street the night the Judge first tried to make his deal with the devil. Because he had buried that secret for more than twenty years. And because he was not ready to have it exhumed.

No wonder he never found time to come to the hearings.

I miss Addison. Not the way he is now, but the way he used to be. The way it was before, as the Judge would have said. I seem to miss the same thing in every corner of my life: the way it was before. I experience my family life as an unbroken chain of losses. My brother, my sister, my wife, my mother, my father, all of them gone but Mariah. Morris Young, like the Judge when he was at his best, preaches that we should always be looking forward, not back, and I try. Oh, how I try.

I have lost my wife. My father, for all his insanity, never lost his Claire, not until the day she died. In the last few years, I have been so obsessed with my father-first with living up to his standards, and, recently, with solving the terrifying mystery he thrust upon me-that I have scarcely given my mother a thought. It is time to correct the imbalance. It is time to get to know Claire Garland again, to study her life as painstakingly as I have studied Oliver’s. I have been trying to find a place for my father in the way I remember the past. I must do the same for my wife. And I must spend enough time remembering my mother that she, too, can finally take a proper place in the rooms of my memory. If memory is our contribution to history, then history is the sum of our memories. Like all families, mine has a history. I would like to remember it.

Bentley and Miguel are down in the basement now, whispering together, the way best friends do at that age. I check on the little fire I have going this cold afternoon, then climb the stairs to the second floor, go into my small bedroom, and close the door. I sit on my cheap mattress-and-box-spring bed and stare at the dresser, the only other piece of furniture in the room. From his perch atop the dresser, George Jackson seems to wink at me with dark plastic eyes. The disk, undisturbed, its information leaching away, remains inside him. The diabolical scrapbook is tucked away in a drawer, hidden beneath my underused exercise togs.

I close my eyes and remember Wainwright’s flailing hand. I open them and remember his despairing words, how he wanted to retire and Jack Ziegler and his partners refused to let him step down. Probably Wainwright was the unnamed buyer who tried to purchase the house on Shepard Street, so that he would be able to search it top to bottom. Eventually he would have offered to purchase Vinerd Howse, too. With contents, no doubt.

Contents like Abby’s bear.

A flash of lightning outside reflects in George Jackson’s plastic eyes, making him wink again. He is magical, this ancient toy shedding his stuffing. I am astonished that he survived the storm, but storms are funny that way: sometimes what the riptide draws out bobs to the surface and floats back in on the next crashing wave, other times it is sucked under and disappears. The jetties extending from the sands of the Inkwell probably made his return more likely, turning some of the waves back in; but, the truth is, I got lucky.

Or maybe not. Had George never returned to shore, had the police officer never found him, had I remained unconscious, had a dozen small things been different, I would not now be facing this dilemma. Had the waves carried the bear away, I would not have to worry about what to do. There would be nothing to do, because there would be no disk to do it with.

No arrangements.

Jack Ziegler and his friends or enemies or whoever they are decided after the cemetery that I probably had already found the information my father hid, and I implicitly promised Henderson that I would keep secret what I knew. Now the belief is a fact: the arrangements are mine at last, and I feel the surging stir of temptation that power always brings.

I pick up the bear, slide the disk free, and put George back where he was. Holding the disk by its edges, I walk back down to my living-dining room. Outside the windows, the storm has yet to abate. True, it cannot hold a candle to the one that roared across the Vineyard while I was there, but a storm is a storm, and, despite the fire, the condo is growing colder.

Or maybe I am.

I remember my father’s dream, to gain a measure of fame by creating the first Double Excelsior with the knight, the task that crazy old Karl called impossible. The Double Excelsior, but with black victorious in the end: two lonely pawns, one white and one black, pathetic in their powerlessness, beginning on their home squares and matching each other, move for move, until, on the fifth turn, each reaches the far end of the board and becomes a knight, the final move checkmating the white king. And the problem is not sound if there is any other option: a single line of play is all that is allowed. If the black king can be checkmated more quickly, or if either pawn can at any time make any other move and yet achieve the same result, the problem is cooked, which is to say, worthless.

My father left his Double Excelsior behind him, not on the board but in life, setting in motion his two pawns, one black, one white, matching moves, each stalking the other, one agonizing square at a time, until they reached the far side of their board on a storm-darkened beach in Oak Bluffs, where they faced each other for the final time.

One knight died. The other is left to give mate. Just as my vengeful father wanted. I hold in my hand the tool. I need only pick up the telephone and call Agent Nunzio or the Times or the Post, and the Judge’s Double Excelsior is complete.

Except that the problem is cooked, as the jargon has it, if there is any other possibility. And the difficulty with knights is that they often move… eccentrically.

Impossible, said Karl.

The boys are running around the house again. In a few minutes, I will have to give them a snack, warming one of the countless casseroles that Nina Felsenfeld and Julia Carlyle have delivered. Then the three of us will squeeze into the Camry for the short drive up to the Hadleys’ lovely home on Harbor Peak. I believe I have mentioned that Marc comes from money. Years ago, his Uncle Edmund was one of the founders of a little leveraged-buyout firm called Elm Harbor Partners. Kimmer had no conflict of interest, the Hadley money has long moved on, but I know from Dana, who should never have told me, that Marc once made a telephone call to the old family retainer who was then general counsel of EHP, urging him, as a favor, to ask for Kimberly Madison by name the moment she arrived in town. The request was part of the effort by Stuart Land, then the dean, to keep me from leaving, for I was as dreadfully unhappy during my first year in Elm Harbor as I had been during my final year in Washington. Had Marc not made the call, Kimmer might not have stayed; had she not stayed, she and I would never have married; which helps explain why I have never been able to dislike Marc as much as my wife does.