Elin Hilderbrand - The Castaways

Should he call Phoebe?

What was the point? Phoebe knew.

Florabel was trying to get his attention. “Dealer!” she said. She was in front of her desk, snapping her fingers in his face. “God, what is wrong with you today? Your wife is on the phone.”

Phoebe? Now Addison was scared. “Take a message,” he told Florabel. “I’m busy.”

“Busy?” Florabel said. “Jesus, Dealer, if you were my employee, I’d fire you.” She got back on the phone and hung up seconds later. “She wants help out on the savannah. She said there are hundreds of cocktail napkins scattered across the grass.”

“Okay,” Addison said absently.

Phoebe knew about Tess. She found out at some point in the spring when she went looking for Addison, but she found Florabel instead, and Florabel directed Phoebe to the Quaise cottage. Phoebe saw Addison’s car and Tess’s car. She either figured it out from just that, or she peeked in the window (which was too awful to imagine, so scratch that part). She didn’t tell anyone. She didn’t tell Delilah, she didn’t confront Tess or Addison. She had spent the spring under a blanket of heavy medication; possibly the reality hadn’t registered.

Or she didn’t care.

Or she saw things for what they were. She, Phoebe, had become a pharmaceutical wasteland. She had been incapable of any real emotional connection with Addison for eight years. After Reed died on 9/11, she had disappeared. And for those eight years Addison had stood by her. He supported her and worried about her; he flushed pills and went with her to see Dr. Field. He kept her comfortable; he relieved her of all responsibility. He paid the house cleaners double, he learned to like takeout food, he took her on vacations where they stayed at the finest hotels, he kept their social life alive, he made excuses for her when she passed out in her soup or when she blanked out in the middle of a conversation. He kept her safe; he carried her up mountains and across rivers. He gave a hundred thousand dollars to Reed’s scholarship fund and put another hundred thousand into trust for Domino. He went to hours and hours of grief counseling, where Phoebe either cried uncontrollably or sat in a stupor. He gave up all dreams of having a baby. The miscarriage, which also occurred on 9/11, was an accident, caused by extreme stress. Phoebe could get pregnant again, with ease. But no, she wouldn’t, she didn’t want to. She wouldn’t let Addison touch her.

And he had lived with that, for years and years.

And then Tess came to him, or he went to Tess, it was a mutual discovery, they were in love.

Maybe Phoebe understood this. Maybe-God, was it possible?-she approved.

Addison remembered back to when he met Phoebe. She was lying on a towel in Bryant Park. She had been wearing a short, flowered sundress, eating salad out of a plastic container. Addison felt like he had found a diamond bracelet lying in the grass. He remembered his astonishment. You mean something this beautiful doesn’t belong to anyone?

He’d snapped her up. All these years later, he’d held on.

Oh, Phoebe .

He unlocked his top desk drawer, where he had stashed Tess’s iPhone. It was time to stop hiding things; he would give the phone to the Chief. And there, in his top drawer, was an envelope with his name on it. In Tess’s handwriting. Holy hell! Tess’s handwriting? It sure looked like it. Addison looked around. Florabel was on the phone again, whispering with one of her girlfriends.

Addison opened the envelope, and there was a note inside. It said: I am going back to Greg and my kids. I will explain my reasons when I get home. Please know you will always have a piece of my heart. Tess.

He folded the note back up, slid it into the envelope, and put it in the drawer.

He sat in a bubble for… well, he wasn’t sure how long.

Florabel was snapping at him again. “Dealer! What about helping Phoebe pick up the cocktail napkins? Are you going?”

He looked at Florabel, who was the only person with a key to his desk drawer. He opened the drawer and pulled out the envelope. “Did you put this here?”

She sighed in a way that seemed almost sympathetic. “I did.”

“Where did you get it?”

“I found it weeks ago,” Florabel said. Now her voice contained an uncharacteristic element: guilt. “I found it in the Quaise cottage, back when you first gave me the listing. And then, swear to God, Addison, I completely forgot about it. I just found it again last night when I was cleaning my desk. Is it important?”

Addison shrugged. The phone rang, and Florabel seemed eager to answer it. Well, either she was lying, which she never did, or she was telling the truth and had “forgotten” it, which she would never do, and had “found” it when she was “cleaning her desk,” which she never did because her desk was always immaculate. Florabel had been holding on to the letter until she sensed Addison could handle it. She must have guessed who it was from and what it said. Possibly she’d even opened it and sealed it back up without a sign of tampering. Possibly Florabel had been not only a cheerleader but a CIA operative.

I’m afraid you won’t get it. The note. She had left it there for him to find on Sunday, when he normally went to the Quaise cottage to change the sheets and straighten up. But he hadn’t gone on that Sunday because the $9.2 million Polpis Harbor deal had come through, and then the next day Tess died. So Florabel had found the note instead.

Was it important? Please know you will always have a piece of my heart . He pulled out the three pieces of frayed red felt and laid them on his desk blotter. Which piece?

He gathered the pieces up, stuffed them deep in his pocket, and headed out to the savannah to help his wife.

As he stood on the wharf waiting for the ferry to dock, he could have had any number of thoughts, but for whatever reason, he found himself remembering the afternoon he had been shot.

It had been seventeen years earlier, in the frantic but emotionally dry period of his life after Andrea left him but before he met Delilah. He was a one-man show at the farm at that point; he did everything himself.

In the late fall he was turning over the land where he had harvested pumpkins. The furrows were scattered with busted-open pumpkins like split skulls, spilling out seeds and pulp. The pumpkin patch was in the southwestern corner of the farm, bordering the thick pines along Hummock Pond Road. Jeffrey was on the plow, watching as the pumpkin remains were turned over, back into the soil to nurture it. He heard a noise and thought the plow had encountered a rock-and the next thing he knew, he was falling off the plow into the dirt. He groaned. There was an incredible searing pain in his side; he felt as though his shirt had caught fire. What the hell? He felt like his mind was being sucked through a tunnel at warp speed. He touched his side where the pain was and lifted his hand. Blood. His shirt was soaked with it. What the hell? He had no idea. He blacked out.

A passerby called 911 and Jeffrey woke up to a couple of female EMTs lifting him onto a stretcher and sliding him, like a loaf of bread into an oven, into the back of an ambulance.

“You’ve been shot,” one of the EMTs said. She had cut away his flannel work shirt and was inspecting his wound. “Someone was after a deer.”

He tried to lift his head but found he could not.

He stayed at the hospital for three days. Three days that he couldn’t afford to lose, but what could he do? He’d been shot, as surely as if he’d served in the Gulf War or been caught in the crossfire in Morningside Heights.

The day after he’d been shot, a policeman walked into his hospital room. This seemed unremarkable at first; someone had mentioned that the police wanted to talk to him. What ended up being remarkable was that the policeman was Edward Kapenash, the new chief. They were short-staffed at the station, so the Chief was handling this himself.