James Patterson: The Beach House

In fifteen minutes I put the darkened windows of Montauk's three-block downtown behind me and climbed the long, steep hill out of town. The night was full of stars, and the crickets were noisier than the traffic. I wondered what had happened to Dana.

I walked by the stone ruin of the historical society and the stark-white sixties architecture of the town library, where I'd often stopped on my way home from school.

Peter and I had covered this stretch at least a thousand times, and every single crack in the pavement looked familiar. We'd walked it, run it, skateboarded it, and biked it in every extreme of Long Island weather, sometimes with Peter propped precariously on my handlebars. And although we weren't allowed to, we'd often hitchhiked. On account of all the carless Irish kids who come over every summer to pump gas, change sheets, and bus tables, Montauk is one of the last places left in the country where drivers still routinely pull over for strangers.

I walked off 27 onto Ditch Plains Road and made the sweeping turn by the beach parking lot. My father's pickup was in the driveway. I guess Mack wasn't done fleecing the pigeons in his weekly poker game.

If I was up when he got back, he'd dump his winnings on the kitchen table and I'd join him in a Rice Krispies nightcap.

All the lights were out, so I lifted the sticky garage door as quietly as possible and entered through the kitchen. I grabbed a beer and sat in the cool, pleasant dark. I called Dana, but all I got was the answering machine. What was that all about?

I sat in the darkened kitchen and thought of the last time Peter and I were together. Two weeks before he died, we had dinner at a trendy restaurant on East Second Street. We polished off two bottles of red wine and had ourselves a gas. Christ, he was such a happy kid. A little crazy, but good-natured. It didn't even bother me when the waitress wrote her phone number on the back of Peter's neck.

For some reason, I found myself thinking about my pro bono case at the office, the Mudman – his life on death row in Texas. What Peter and Mudman had in common was the minuscule regard that the powers that be had for their lives. The government valued Mudman's so lightly, they wouldn't bother to make sure they were executing the right man. And Peter's murder was so trifling, it didn't require solving.

My thoughts were suddenly shattered by a loud crash directly overhead. What the hell? Someone must have broken in through Peter's window and toppled over his dresser.

I grabbed the skillet off the top of the stove and sprinted up the stairs.

THE DOOR TO PETER'S ROOM was shut, but the sound of moaning came from inside. I pushed against the door, met some resistance, then crashed through, stumbling over the outstretched legs of the body on the floor.

Even in the dark, I could see that it was my father.

I switched on the lights. He was in trouble. He was sick. Obviously, he'd collapsed and fallen, which had made the loud racket. He twisted violently on his back as if he were fighting someone only he could see. I hooked one arm under his neck and lifted his head off the floor, but like a child having a night terror, he couldn't see me. His eyes were aimed inward at the explosion in his chest.

"Dad, you're having a heart attack. I'm calling an ambulance." I ran for the phone. By the time I got back to him, his eyes were even more dilated and the pressure on his chest seemed worse. He couldn't take a breath.

"Hang on," I whispered. "The ambulance is on the way."

The color drained from his face, and he turned a sick, ghostly gray. Then he stopped breathing, and my father's eyes rolled up into his head. I held open his mouth and breathed into it.

Nothing.

One, two, three.

Nothing.

One, two, three.

Nothing.

Tires screeched in the driveway and there were loud footsteps on the stairs, then Hank was kneeling beside me.

"How long has he been like this?"

"Three, four minutes."

"Okay. There's a chance."

Hank had the portable deflbrillator lifepack with him. It was in a white plastic box about the size of a car battery. He hooked up my father, then threw the toggle that sent electrical current into his chest.

Now I was the one who couldn't breathe. I stood over my father, numb and disbelieving. This couldn't be happening. He must have come up to Peter's room to reminisce.

Each time Hank threw the switch, my father went into spasm.

But the line on the electrocardiogram showed no response.

After the third jolt of electricity, Hank looked at me in shock.

"Jack – he's gone."

MY FATHER'S FUNERAL was held forty-eight hours later at St. Cecilia's. Close to a thousand year-rounders squeezed into the squat stone chapel or stood just outside it for the Monday service. No one was more surprised by the size and intensity of the outpouring than I. My father was reserved and modest, the opposite of a hail-fellow-well-met. Because of that, I always assumed he'd been unappreciated. That wasn't the case.

Monsignor Scanlon recounted how, at sixteen years of age, John Samuel Sanders Mullen left Ireland and traveled alone to New York City, where he found a spot with relatives in an already crowded Hell's Kitchen tenement. Macklin and my grandmother couldn't make it across for another three years, and by then my father had dropped out of school and apprenticed himself to a carpenter. Even after his parents arrived, he was the family's only means of support for several years – "a sixteen-year-old boy working eighty-hour weeks. Can you imagine?" asked the monsignor.

Five summers later Sam and his new wife, Katherine Patricia Dempsey, were looking for a Sunday's respite from the asphalt furnace. So they rode the Long Island Rail Road as far as it would take them. Stepping off, they found a little fishing village that reminded my father of the one he'd left behind in County Claire. "Two weeks later," said the monsignor, "Sam, full of a young man's love and ambition, pulled up roots for the second time in eight years and moved out to Montauk for good."

I often wondered why my father showed so little zeal for the Hamptons gold rush. Now I saw that by the time he arrived at the end of Long Island, he was far more concerned with appreciating what he had than lusting for more.

"Since the Mullens arrived in this town," continued Thomas Scanlon, "I've had many happy occasions to visit them in the house on Ditch Plains Road that Sam built. Sam Mullen had all a man could ask for – a lovely home, an even lovelier wife, an honest business, and in young Jack and Peter a pair of handsome sons who were already two of the brightest lights in our village. Peter was the town's most gifted athlete, and Jack was showing the academic promise that would eventually take him to Columbia Law.

"But then," the monsignor said, "catastrophe blindsided the Mullens. First came the much too early death of Katherine Patricia from cancer. Last week the still unsatisfactorily explained death of Peter Mullen, a blow that unquestionably contributed to Sam's death Friday night.

"To see the hand of God in any of this is obviously beyond our limited knowledge. I only offer what I know to be true. That this life, however short, and it's almost always too short, is precious beyond measure."

Mack, Dana, and I sat in the front row. Behind the three of us, the room shared a cathartic sob – but Mack and I were dry-eyed that morning at least. To us, this wasn't divine mystery, it was murder. Whoever had killed Peter was also partly responsible for my father's heart attack, or at least his broken heart.

As the monsignor continued over his parishioners' tears, I felt the grip of my grandfather's hand on my knee. I looked into his ravaged face and bottomless Irish eyes.