Elin Hilderbrand - The Castaways

He listed his duties in a notebook.

• Give away or dispose of (sell?) furnishings (china, silver, etc., to Chloe)

• Give away or dispose of personal effects

• Clean house (call Nicole at Swept Away)

• Sell cars (call Don Allen Ford)

• Put house on market/sell house

• Pay debts (credit card, mortgage, etc.)

• Set up college/trust funds

Figuring out exactly what had happened out on the water was not on this list. Naming Greg MacAvoy as Tess’s murderer was not on this list.

Addison had a hard time getting past Tess’s iPhone. He looked through the calls: all those calls from him, in addition to calls from Andrea, Delilah, Phoebe, Lisa Shumacher. And the text messages troubled him. The night before the sail, a Sunday night, a night when Addison knew Tess had been with the kids because Greg was singing at the Begonia, Phoebe had sent Tess a text message that said, I’ll be over in five minutes.

Addison did not remember Phoebe going over to Tess’s house or leaving home at all for any other reason. But Addison was having a hard time remembering that Sunday night in any detail. What had happened? Where had he been? Then he recalled the deal, the big deal, $9.2 million on Polpis Harbor, and he realized that he and Phoebe had eaten takeout Greek salads and then Addison had gone back into town to his office to write up the purchase-and-sale agreement. Furthermore, he remembered seeing both Greg’s car and Delilah’s car outside the Begonia, and he considered stopping in for a presigning, anticipatory celebratory drink, but he’d decided against it because he didn’t want to jinx himself. So Phoebe must have gone to Tess’s house while Addison was at the office.

He couldn’t keep himself from asking Phoebe about it. But he had to be casual. He did not want to raise any red flags. (Though really, he thought, it was impossible to raise any red flags with Phoebe. It was impossible to make her curious or suspicious. She simply did not care.)

He said, “Did you see Tess the night before she died?”

Phoebe was lying by the pool with a wet washcloth over her eyes. She kept half a dozen washcloths in a bucket of ice water by the side of her chaise.

She said, “I did.”

“Did you go to her house?”

“I did.”

He did not think she was being coy. She simply could not, in her drug-muddled state, bring herself to wonder why he was asking.

“What for?”

She sighed. “I needed to drop something off.”

“Oh, really?” Addison said. “What?”

“An anniversary present.” She removed the washcloth and squinted at him. “Do you think we should get a dog?”

“A dog?”

Washcloth discarded. There was a pile of warm, soggy wash-cloths by the side of the pool, which unsettled Addison in the way that used tissues or soiled sanitary napkins would. Phoebe wrung out a new icy cold washcloth and secured it over her eyes, just so.

“I wouldn’t be able to take care of it,” she said. “Maybe I’ll buy a dog for Domino. Do you think Ellen Paige would throw a fit?”

Addison was dying to revisit the anniversary present. Anniversary present? That didn’t sound right. Between the eight of them there was a rule about no gifts; they all strictly adhered to it.

“What was the present?” Addison asked.

Phoebe said, “She probably would. A dog is so much work. Maybe next year.”

Also in Tess’s text messages was the message she had sent him at 8:45 A.M. I’m afraid.

Addison only checked Tess’s outbox as a lark. Because what moldered in one’s outbox? Texts that were unfinished or unable to be sent. But Addison checked anyway, to be thorough-and there was a text that Tess had tried to send Addison three times. Eleven-oh-five, eleven forty-three, twelve-ten. During the sail. Before they capsized.

The text said, I’m afraid you won’t get it.

She was afraid he wouldn’t get what? She was afraid he wouldn’t get something, as in an object she had left behind for him? Or she was afraid he wouldn’t understand. Get what? Why she was going on this sail in the first place? (He in fact didn’t get it, though he pretended he did.) Or why she couldn’t tell Greg that she was in love with Addison? Or something else entirely? Wondering about this would drive him mad. He put the phone in his pocket with the two pieces of his felt heart.

The job of executor was overwhelming. Addison had to dismantle two lives, four lives, really, a family’s life, a home. He had the keys to the house; he could go over there anytime. But he made excuses. He wasn’t ready.

The Chief stopped into Addison’s office. This wasn’t exactly a big deal, because Wheeler Realty and the police station were only a block and a half away from each other.

The Chief said, “How’s it coming with the house?”

Addison fell back in his swivel chair. “It isn’t coming. I’ve been so busy.”

The Chief said, “That may be. But you have to think of the kids. They need closure.”

The Saturday after the Fourth of July, Phoebe announced she was going on a day sail with Swede and Jennifer on Hank’s boat. She had seen them at Caroline Masters’s party and they had invited her, as predicted. She accepted, she wanted to go, she knew Addison felt differently, she knew Addison didn’t want to sail again as long as he lived. So she was going alone.

He looked at her. She was in a swimsuit and a matching coverup, she had a bag packed, she was eating a bagel with cream cheese. A bagel with cream cheese? Was that actually a wheel of carbohydrate slathered with fat going into her body, or was it an illusion? Who was this woman? Was it Phoebe Jurgen, the twenty-six-year-old hotshot whom Addison had seen for the first time sunning herself in Bryant Park? It was -he could see her, his wife, the woman he had been waiting so long for. But honestly, he could barely bring himself to care. This would be one of those tragic/ironic love stories where they missed each other coming and going.

“Okay,” he said. “Have fun.”

He went over to the MacAvoy house with his list. Where to begin?

I’m afraid you won’t get it.

Are you going to tell him? Are you going to tell him you love me?

You have to think of the kids. They need closure.

He had brought a bottle of Jack Daniels.

He would write the book. How to Be the Executor of a Will, Even When One of the Deceased Was Your Lover.

It was ten-fifteen in the morning. He poured himself a drink and got to work.

He was a real estate agent. Houses and the things in them were his area of expertise. Greg and Tess’s house was small, but it was cute, in a garage-sale-find sort of way. He did not mean to sound condescending. He would gladly have lived in this house with Tess; he would have lived with Tess in a shack with papier-mâché walls and a corrugated tin roof.

He finished his first drink by ten-thirty, then vowed to slow down.

The fireplace was the house’s best feature; it was made of stacked fieldstone. The furniture in the living room, Addison knew, was a combination of purchases from Pottery Barn (Addison loathed Pottery Barn and the resulting homogenization of American interiors) and pieces Tess had salvaged from the take-it-or-leave-it pile at the dump: a tall cabinet that held her candles and her table linens, a pine bar that she had painstakingly stripped and refinished. Tess had a touch of Charlie-Brown-Christmas-tree syndrome. If she saw something pathetic or abandoned, she brought it home. Stray animals, friends of Chloe’s and Finn’s from dysfunctional families, pieces of crap furniture from the dump-and Addison.

He would save nothing from the living room, he decided, except for the pine bar.