Mark Mills - Amagansett

‘I wouldn’t do that.’

‘What then? You were so absorbed you forgot all about our date?’

Hollis hesitated. ‘That’s pretty much the size of it, I’m afraid.’

Mary glanced back at the files. ‘First Lillian Wallace, now Lizzie Jencks?’

He could see what was coming and he wished it wasn’t.

‘I said there might come a time when I’d ask what you’re up to. Now’s that time, Tom.’

He hesitated. ‘I can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I don’t know for sure, not yet.’

‘Enough to sneak a bunch of papers home.’

‘I didn’t sneak them home.’

‘Come on,’ said Mary. ‘Why are you doing this?’

‘Doing what?’

‘This cloak-and-dagger stuff. I thought the whole idea was to leave this kind of thing behind you. Isn’t that what you said? A quieter life?’

‘It’s probably nothing.’

‘A drowning and a hit-and-run?’ She paused. ‘Are they connected?’

‘Mary,’ sighed Hollis.

Now she was hurt, stung by his refusal to trust her. And he realized then that he’d seen that look before, in Lydia’s eyes, the first time he’d shut her out, laying the foundations of the wall.

‘Okay,’ said Mary.

She headed for the door.

‘Mary…’

‘No, Tom,’ she said as the door swung shut behind her.

For a moment he thought he might run after her and tell her all, but a sterner voice in his head questioned the wisdom of doing so. With the investigation so precariously poised, what good could possibly come from confiding in a person he cared for, but who, when it came to it, he hardly knew?

Besides, there was a lot to be done, much to be thought through, not least of all: how best to obtain samples of paintwork from all the vehicles at the Wallace residence.

Twenty-Nine

Conrad checked his watch. Ten o’clock. Time to make himself scarce.

He allowed his eyes to adjust to the darkness outside, then headed for the beach. He walked west along the shore, the sky dirty with stars. He searched for distraction, but it was hard to find. The night, after all, had been theirs, the only time when they could roam freely, without fear of being seen together.

They had never discussed the need for discretion, it was a given from the first, the way things had to be. The world wasn’t ready for them yet. The secrecy wasn’t without its satisfactions, though. It added a spice to their encounters, an edge of illicitness.

At Lillian’s suggestion they had sometimes met openly in public, as customers in a general store or as moviegoers obliged to sit next to each other. On these occasions they rarely spoke, except to apologize as they brushed past each other, or to exchange pleasantries about the weather under the unsuspecting gaze of a counter clerk. One time, Lillian had ‘dropped’ her purse while paying for some goods, obliging Conrad to crouch at her feet and gather up the scattered coins. And she had made no attempt to deny him the lingering view up her linen skirt of her nakedness beneath.

The anticipation that went with these encounters was maddening, too maddening on one occasion, and they’d been unable to wait till later, Conrad’s hand delving beneath Lillian’s jacket, strategically folded on her lap, during a night sequence in The Imperfect Lady, the auditorium of Edwards Theater cast into welcome gloom. And with the giant faces of Ray Milland and Teresa Wright looking down on them from the screen, he had brought her to a rippling climax—bearing out her claim that she could reach her peak in total silence, a skill acquired in the dormitories of New England boarding schools, she maintained, where the slightest gasp in the drowsy darkness would attract howls of ridicule.

There was another side to the clandestine nature of their affair that they both welcomed. There was never a wasted moment, no time-consuming introductions to each other’s friends, no social gatherings where both were present yet not together. It seemed that they had somehow managed to distill a year, more, into a few brief months. They were never lost for things to talk about, arguing for argument’s sake about books and ideas, trading stories about their lives. She told him about her dream of becoming a theater actress, and how it had slipped away from her with the onset of war and the death of her mother, her ally. She said she had moved up to East Hampton for the winter to recover from the split with her fiancé—one part of the truth, he now suspected; her claim that Penrose had left her for another woman probably a lie.

They felt no compulsion to remain indoors once darkness had descended. Sometimes they would swim in her pool, then make their way across the sandhills to the beach, where they’d cook up whatever fish he’d brought with him that evening over a driftwood fire. Other times, when she visited him, they would strike out on foot, heading north over Montauk Highway, crossing the railroad, disturbing the snakes warming themselves on the tracks in the cool night air. Napeague was his world, and he shared it with her as they wandered. He pointed out the spot where he and Billy used to gather coal from beside the tracks during the early years of the Depression, big bituminous lumps tossed from the tender by sympathetic railroad men. He drew her attention to the best cranberry bogs and to the osprey nests, platforms of sticks and bone and rope and other debris, perched precariously atop the telegraph poles. They strolled the skirts of the salt meadows, and they pulled blue-claw crabs from the channels with scoop nets.

By flashlight, they foraged for Indian artefacts in the soft sand just back from the beach on Gardiner’s Bay, unearthing shards of broken pottery and arrowheads discarded many centuries before. And though he never took her there, not wishing to tempt the fates, he told her about the whale skeleton buried beneath the straggle of bearberry bushes.

On windless nights they would take the cat-boat out and go firelighting for fluke. Sometimes they made love in the cockpit, rocking on the gentle swell. One time, the sounds of some event at the Devon Yacht Club had drifted across the water towards them—a Cole Porter number carried on the night breeze—and it struck Conrad that Lillian had chosen to be with him, lying in his arms, rather than consorting with her own kind. And though this puzzled him, he never questioned her motives, he never doubted her desires.

But that had all changed since her death.

He now saw himself as a figure in a bigger picture, the full and proper dimensions of which she’d chosen to keep from him. She had been party to a crime, a killing; and just as her move to East Hampton for the dead winter months could now be seen as part of an instinctual penance, some need to atone, so too could her relationship with him.

He was her link to the place, to Lizzie Jencks—a tool, perhaps, in the purging of her own guilt. Could he safely assume she would have struck up a relationship with him under normal circumstances? It was unlikely.

Worst of all, though—and it was this that had robbed him of all but the most fitful sleep for the past week—was the creeping realization that he might actually have been responsible for her death. She had changed, he had witnessed the change, just as she had watched him recover his footing in the world. But had he unwittingly given her the strength to act, to make a stand, to jeopardize the conspiracy of silence surrounding Lizzie Jencks’ death?

It was a question he would never know the answer to, never shrug off, and that realization gnawed at him, the corrosive acid of doubt.

His one satisfaction was that those responsible for her murder were now experiencing a torment of their own, inflicted by him. And though they might suspect they hadn’t seen the back of him, they had no idea just how far he was willing to go.