Mark Mills - Amagansett

‘Congratulations,’ said Mary.

The women drew each other close, the men shook hands before abandoning the formality for a hug.

‘Well done,’ said Hollis to Abel.

‘It’s all your fault.’

‘I’m pleased to hear it.’

Abel took the bag off him and peered inside. ‘Champagne?’

‘Call it a hunch.’

Hollis made a point of not drinking too much over dinner. They sat at the table out back and fought their way through the feast Abel had prepared for them. Lucy told the story of how a friend of hers had spotted Abel in Southampton earlier in the week. Puzzled by this, Lucy had casually asked Abel about his movements that day. When he failed to mention the trip to Southampton, she immediately assumed he was having an affair, and said as much to him. Abel had let her stew in her suspicions, only to propose to her that very afternoon, presenting her with a ring—the one he’d been picking up from the jeweler in Southampton earlier in the week.

They all cleared the table, and Hollis found himself alone with Abel in the kitchen, making coffee.

‘So,’ he said, ‘you’re finally going to take her up the aisle.’

‘What we get up to in the privacy of our bedroom is none of your damn business,’ retorted Abel.

They were still laughing when the phone rang.

‘I guess the word’s out,’ said Abel, heading for the hallway. He returned a few moments later.

‘Tom, it’s for you.’

‘For me?’

‘Conrad Labarde.’

Abel was at his shoulder when he picked up the receiver.

‘Hello.’

‘I’m sorry to interrupt your evening,’ said the Basque.

‘How the hell did you know I was here?’

‘I followed you. Do you have a pen?’

‘No,’ said Hollis, laying the indignation on thick.

‘Then listen carefully.’

He listened. At a certain point he interrupted the Basque. ‘Let me go get a pen,’ he said.

Abel provided the pen and the paper, and Hollis scribbled furiously for more than a minute. Only when he hung up did he realize Lucy and Mary had joined them in the hallway.

‘What is it, Tom?’ asked Lucy.

‘I have to go.’

‘Why? What’s up?’ asked Abel.

Hollis looked at Mary helplessly. ‘I have to.’

‘Go,’ she said. ‘Really. Go.’

‘I need a flashlight.’

‘I’ve got one in the car,’ said Abel.

Nearing the car, Abel said, ‘I lied.’ He opened the door and took his camera from the back seat. ‘I don’t have a flashlight, but I am coming with you.’

‘It’s too dangerous.’

‘Hey, 1943—where was my ass while yours was polishing a chair?’

It was Bob Hartwell’s weekend off. What if he was away? It wasn’t a risk Hollis could afford to take. He might need assistance.

‘You drive,’ said Hollis.

‘Where to?’

‘My place. I need my gun.’

Hollis spelled it out for Abel as best he could in the few minutes it took them to get to his house: Lizzie Jencks, Lillian Wallace, the Basque, the lack of hard evidence, and the meeting set to take place in just over an hour’s time.

‘Jesus, Tom, no wonder you’ve been acting so weird.’

‘Have I?’

The gun was in the bedroom. He checked the chamber, shoved a fistful of shells into his hip pocket, then he phoned Bob Hartwell.

‘Thank God,’ he said when Hartwell picked up.

Hollis told him to change into something dark and to have his gun and a flashlight ready; he’d pick him up in five minutes. He didn’t tell him why, and Hartwell didn’t ask.

‘Sure thing,’ he said in that low, impassive voice of his.

Thirty-Nine

Conrad capped the fountain pen and replaced it in the chipped mug on the desk. Wandering through to the bedroom, he tugged at the bedspread, straightening it.

Everything in order. Just one last act to perform.

He took the deer trails through the pitch pines north of the highway. He hadn’t walked on Napeague since her death, fearful that the memories would hunt him down. She was everywhere, it was true, but now he drew comfort from her presence: her narrow footprints pressed into the firm sand around him, the fallen branch she had once tripped over, the clearing with the lone tree in the middle, the one she felt so sorry for, shunned by its companions.

Maybe she had seen herself in that tree, standing apart from those around her. Strange that it hadn’t occurred to him before. And as he stared at the twisted little pine, it struck him just how alone she must have felt at the end, during those final moments of her life—the long walk back along the beach to her house, striding in anger beside the water’s edge, angry with him.

She had overreacted; if she had lived to see the new day she would have realized that, she would have understood his hesitancy at her proposal.

It had caught him unawares as they lay intertwined on the damp sheet.

‘Come away with me, Conrad.’

He had grunted, suspended in the sweet limbo between reality and dreams.

‘I mean it. Come away with me.’

‘Where?’

‘I don’t know. You decide. It doesn’t matter to me.’

‘You mean a vacation?’

‘I mean life.’

‘I have a life.’

‘A new life.’

He swiveled to face her. ‘Why?’

She didn’t reply at first. ‘Because I’m asking.’

‘Is this a test?’

If it was, the look in her eyes suggested he had failed it.

‘I can’t just move away like that.’

Ten minutes later she was gone, still sulking at his challenge to her flight of fancy. At least that’s how he’d read it then.

He saw it differently now.

They had killed her for a reason, they had killed her because they knew what he hadn’t known at the time: that she was about to blow the lid on Lizzie Jencks.

No, there’d been nothing infantile about her anger that day, she was just fraught and scared, poised as she was to risk everything on a matter of principle—family, friends, even him.

How close had she been to sharing the truth with him that last time he saw her alive? Very close, he suspected. And he wondered how things might have turned out if he’d only been more enthusiastic about her talk of a new life, if he’d only offered her the assurance she was looking for, that he would be there for her, come what may.

One thing was for sure—she would have stayed with him that night as they’d planned, and the killer lying in wait for her would have been denied his victim.

Conrad cut off the trail. It was a short walk over the low dunes to the tangle of bearberry bushes.

He dropped to all fours and clawed at the sand with his fingers. He came upon something hard and rounded and shifted his attentions a little to the left, scooping out a deep hole.

Taking up the whale vertebra he had carried with him from the house, he turned it once in his hands, caressing its familiar contours, then he returned it to its original resting place.

He filled in the hole and patted down the sand.

Forty

Hollis led the way, Hartwell behind him, Abel bringing up the rear. Stony Hill Wood was less forbidding at night than it had been during daylight hours when he’d cut through it with Mary. This was partly because he couldn’t see anything—barely the overgrown trail at his feet, even with the aid of Hartwell’s flashlight—but mainly because Abel was clearly far more frightened than himself.

‘Maybe he’s just a guy with a sick sense of humor.’

‘Who?’ asked Hollis.

‘Labarde,’ said Abel. ‘He’s probably sitting at home with his feet up having a good old laugh.’

Hartwell snorted, amused by the notion.

‘Hey, slow down,’ said Abel. ‘Wait for me.’