Randy White - Dead Silence

To the moneyed class, and their staffs, utility workers are an invisible essential, like plumbing.

An hour earlier, Tomlinson had dropped me in South Hampton where I’d rented a white pickup truck and bought a few things, coveralls included. Because there were tools and a ladder in the family’s machine shop, I didn’t need much else. On my way to the Myles estate, I had completed my costume by stealing two orange highway cones from a restaurant closed for the winter.

It was now 10:45 a.m. The truck was parked along the road, near a utility terminal. One cone was behind the truck, another next to a miniature green silo that was a connecting block for area telephones.

There couldn’t be many. Along this section of coastline, mansions had been built on dunes, far off the highway, with acres of space between. The Tomlinson estate was on the point of the peninsula, two miles down the road.

“Nelson was practically our neighbor,” Tomlinson had told me, explaining why it seemed commonplace when his brother and Myles were both tapped by Skull and Bones.

In an area this wealthy, maybe it was.

The Myles mansion lived up to the billing. It was a medieval-looking four-story that resembled “country houses” on England’s North Sea coast, because that’s where it had come from, shipped over in the nineteenth century, and reconstructed block by block. It was sandstone and slate, with turrets and roofed porticos that would have been hidden by hedges and a forest of hardwoods if it hadn’t been January.

Even now, it wasn’t easy to see. That’s why I had been on the ridge. A stone wall, head-high, surrounded the place, interrupted by iron gates at several entrances. The main gate and the service gate opened on electronic tracks. On the seaward side, wrought-iron gates exited onto the beach.

To each gate was affixed a brass placard that read SHELTER HOUSE.

Shelter House was a castle, not a fortress. Breaking into the place wouldn’t have been difficult after midnight, but it was before noon on a bright winter Saturday. At the staff entrance, two economy cars were parked near a Dumpster: resident caretakers. There was electronic security, including cameras at each gate, but the guard station at the main entrance was empty.

Getting into the house undetected should be easy. Spending ten or twenty minutes searching the place without interruption would be more difficult. Local police knew me now. If I didn’t play it right, I would add to Barbara’s embarrassment by calling her from jail.

I walked to the truck, pretended to put something on the front seat just so I could slam the door, then knelt by the terminal. I loosed the nut and slipped off the silo cover. Inside were dozens of brass connection strips, a maze of candy-colored wires and heavier rubber-coated wires. The candy-colored wires came from the main cable. The rubber-coated wires were for local use. Spend your life on the water, working with boats, either you learn basic wiring or you find a job inland.

Only four of the connector blocks were in use. An installer had used tape and a Sharpie to ID each of the four wires running underground to the mansion. I checked them, one by one. Two had phone numbers written on the tape. Two were DSL lines for Internet access.

I copied the numbers into a notebook, then put on gloves. Telephone systems use low voltage, but no one likes getting shocked. No normal person anyway.

Using a crescent wrench, I loosened a nut and removed a green wire. With a needle-nosed pliers, I stripped several inches of insulation, then bent the wire so it made loose contact with the positive side of the strip. All four rows were now partially grounded. Phones inside the mansion might still be usable, but there would be a lot of static.

Finally, I crossed the two DSL lines. No more Internet.

There.

I covered the terminal and crossed the road to the main gate. I pressed the intercom button and waited. Pressed it twice more before someone answered.

“Shelter House, can I help you?” A woman’s voice.

I said, “I think you’ve got trouble on the line, ma’am.”

“What line?”

Above me, a motor whirred, and I smiled up at a security camera. “Check your phone, ma’am. I’ll wait.”

When the woman returned, she said, “Could what’s wrong cause my computer to go screwy, too? A couple minutes ago, the screen went blank and the whole system froze. I was on the Internet.”

I had the notebook out, not looking at the camera, as I leafed through pages. “We’re not supposed to give computer advice. It’s some kind of liability deal. Let me make sure I’m at the right place before I say anything.” I read off the phone numbers I had just copied.

“That’s us. They’re both unlisted, so we hardly ever get calls. It could’ve been out for days.”

“Could’ve been,” I replied.

“The kitchen phone sort of works, but the important thing is my computer. I was right in the middle of a project, using the cable instead of using the Wi-Fi. Damn it! Please tell me it’s the phone. I just spent three hundred bucks for a new hard drive.”

“I don’t know…”

The woman said, “I’ve got a term paper due and I’m screwed if the Internet doesn’t work.”

Not a woman, a high school student, I decided, until she added, “I just made coffee. I can have it waiting.”

No, a college student. High school girls didn’t offer coffee.

I said, “There’s no reason for me to come inside if it’s your fuse box.”

“Just for a minute, as a favor?”

I said, “Well… if I’ve got your permission, I guess it’s okay,” picturing myself at the police station answering questions. One of life’s simple rules: Never, ever lie to a cop. Speak even a benign untruth and he will suspect you of murder.

“Thank you!”

I stepped back as the gate opened, adding, “It’s not that I don’t want to help,” wanting her to understand that phone men could be nice but we weren’t easy.

Through the window of Nelson Myles’s third-floor office, I could sit at his desk and look inland at the ridge where I’d hidden in the trees or stand by the elliptical machine and face the ocean. Bathroom, dressing room and spa all had views.

Wind gusted off the Atlantic, west to northwest. The beach was silver, deserted for miles, an unfriendly corridor where salt foam tumbled like tumbleweed and sand blew in veils heavy as snow.

There was a loft. I went up the steps and found a bed covered with a Yale comforter, a Yale throw rug on the floor, Yale pennants and a Yale varsity jacket hanging on a hat stand. Big yellow Y s everywhere but on the bay windows. I was standing near the window when I saw a police car slow as it passed my rental truck. I watched the vehicle stop, back up, then the officer on the passenger side opened his widow. He was checking the truck’s license plate. Smart cop.

I had been inspecting the jacket. Nelson Myles had lettered in golf-the man had to have been pretty good-but I let the sleeve swing free, concentrating on the squad car. Now the officer was getting out, hand on his sidearm but using it more as a support. A young guy who had hurt his back. A hockey player, I guessed… or maybe he’d moved furniture into a new apartment.

I was taking out my cell phone as the cop looked into the truck’s bed, then put a hand on the bumper to read the license. Watching the man’s reaction, I switched on my cell phone, thought for a moment, then dialed 911.

I needed more time.

Until the squad car, things had gone smoothly. I’d had only a minute or two to look around the rich man’s office, with its pecky walnut library, its marble floors and fireplace, walls checkered with mementos, photos of horses competing with Geronimo statuettes and Yale for space.