Son of Destruction
Author: Kit Reed
Date: 2012-10-26 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Paranormal; Mystery
Description: A spellbinding American Southern Gothic thriller with a supernatural twist - a past secret has the power to destroy the future . . . - When Lucy Cartaret dies, her journalist son Dan returns to her hometown, Fort Jude, Florida, in search of his real father, claiming he's here to investigate the mysterious deaths of three elderly women. Spontaneous human combustion, experts say. But why? Surely it's more than coincidence - and what links these deaths to Dan's mother? It soon becomes clear that something terrible happened during his mother's last year in town, thirty years before. But the social
Publisher: Severn House Digital

Table of Contents

A Selection of Recent Titles by Kit Reed

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

A Selection of Recent Titles by
Kit Reed

THINNER THAN THOU

BRONZE

THE BABY MERCHANT

THE NIGHT CHILDREN

ENCLAVE

WHAT WOLVES KNOW

SON OF DESTRUCTION

Kit Reed

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

First published in Great Britain 2012 by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

9 –15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

First published in the USA 2013 by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS of

110 East 59th Street, New York, N.Y. 10022
eBook edition first published in 2013 by Severn House Digital
an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

Copyright © 2012 by Kit Reed.

The right of Kit Reed to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

Reed, Kit.

Son of destruction.

1. Journalists–California–Los Angeles–Fiction.

2. Combustion, Spontaneous human–Fiction. 3. Florida–

Fiction. 4. Suspense fiction.

I. Title

813.5'4-dc23

ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-356-3 (epub)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8232-5 (cased)

ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-462-2 (trade paper)

Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

This eBook produced by

Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

For Carl Brandt – the best of the best
with love

It won’t matter how hard he runs for the car, gulping air; he will always hear her. It won’t matter how fast he drives through the Florida night, how far he goes or how hard he tries, he can’t outrace the horror in the house behind him, the sudden flash of orange light that stained her bedroom window.

He’ll spend the rest of his life running ahead of that night: police photos of the smoking remains, coals burned to glowing cinders in her belly.

The guilt.

It’s nothing I did. It’s nothing I did!

Doubt overturns him.

Then what was it?

He doesn’t know. Nobody does.

It’s all over the news by morning. Bulletins start coming in on his car radio before he hits the Interstate. Stopping for gas at dawn in Jacksonville, he sees footage on CNN and the fiery death is bannered on newsstands by the time he reaches Savannah. In the years since, he’s read magazines, books about her death and others like them – written by people compelled to explain the inexplicable because mysteries don’t die until somebody comes up with the answers.

Does he only imagine that as he turned to leave, the air in the old woman’s bedroom changed – or that she did?

He doesn’t know. Guilt sinks its teeth into him. Is it something I did?

I can’t be that, he thinks, without knowing what that is, or why it is so urgent.

I can’t do that.

I won’t.

He carries these things in his heart: a son that he’s never seen, and a secret that he doesn’t understand, but must keep at all costs. The responsibility is tremendous. Worry boils up in him. I can’t let him . . .

Can’t let him – what? He doesn’t know. How do you help a son you’ve never met when you don’t know anything but that he’s yours, and you’re afraid for him?

1

Dan Carteret

Burt was never his real dad. The truth is stamped in Dan’s face. He was built on a different template. By the time he was tall enough to look into a mirror, he knew. He grew up knowing, but when his mother finally let go of her secret she broke it gently, like bad news.

Like, she thought he didn’t know?

Even you could see it, going by at a dead run. With that bullet head and the used-car salesman’s smile, Burt Mixon is nothing like him. Where Dan is tall and easy with you, Burt is mean-spirited and short. He tried to be nice to Dan, but they didn’t like each other very much.

He ran that house like boot camp: spit, polish, morning runs and excruciating clap pushups, the quintessential ex-Marine. The ex part rankled. Something went wrong on Parris Island back in the day, but that was before he married Lucy, and she’ll never tell. After he was separated from the service, Burt set himself up in New London, but he made a bad civilian. After a lifetime of pushing boots, training hick kids to shape up and snap to, he was moving used cars off the lot in a military town, and it rankled. Danny was his last recruit.

‘Did you do that?’ The sequence was pre-set. Burt used to stand over him, waiting for him to cry. When he was really little, it used to work. ‘Well, did you?’

Whatever. That shrug. Dan is tougher now.

‘Goddammit, I’m trying to make a man out of you!’

‘I don’t care!’

He shook off the beatings but not the guilty, conflicted look on his mother’s face. She loved him, probably too much, but Burt was her only husband, and in charge. ‘Don’t.’ He felt the edge of her hand between his shoulder blades – the gentle pressure that told him, It’s all right, love. I’m here. ‘He’s your father.’

Burt was nothing to him.

His mother only ever hit him once, on a strange, sad day before he was old enough to read, and it was so awful that they both cried. He found certain things in her jewel box before she swooped down on him and snatched everything away. Underneath all her beads and bracelets, he found a snapshot of five guys in a Jeep on some beach, laughing so hard that he thought they were laughing at him, and at the very bottom there was an envelope – was that his name? There was a newspaper inside. It was awful: pictures of somebody or some thing laid out in a ruined chair like a burnt-out log in a fireplace. One bedroom slipper with a foot in it, and a naked ankle bone, like it just broke off. Lucy ripped it away from him and smacked him hard. She disappeared it but he remembers. He still can’t make sense of the conflation: four laughing guys and the charred figure in the scorched chair.

Kids like Dan, even kids who grow up happy, travel on the myth: these can’t be my real parents. I’m only stuck here until they come for me. It kept him going through the loneliness and hard times with Burt, and the snapshot fueled the myth. Until he comes for me.

He was fifteen before she told him the truth.

In fact, it wasn’t the main business of the meeting. It came out accidentally. Even though it was late afternoon in late winter in New London, she pulled him out on the back porch and shut the door, Lucy Mixon with her sweet face tight, setting her jaw in that brave little tough-mom way. She was all hung up on it: bent on telling him, not knowing how to say it.

He wasn’t about to start. They stood there shivering.

Finally she said in a tight voice, ‘Honey, you know we both love you very much but I have some kind of hard news.’

He did not act surprised or upset when she explained that it wasn’t going to happen right away, but she and Burt were splitting up. It was over, she had to do it. When he didn’t respond she said, ‘You’re the only person I’ve told.’

He looked past her, watching it get dark.

‘Danny? Dan?’

She wanted him to react, she wanted him to say, ‘It’s OK,’ she wanted him to for God’s sake say something but he just stood there, waiting her out.

After a long time she said, ‘I’m sorry.’

An icicle dropped.

There was only the sound of her waiting.

She said what mothers do in this situation, ‘Don’t worry, he’s not leaving you, OK? No matter what we do, he’s still your father.’

It was so quiet that he could hear the ice cracking on the Thames.

Lucy tried, ‘You don’t seem very upset.’

Like he would feel bad that this abusive, sanctimonious jarhead bastard was being kicked out of their lives. He and Burt hated each other, even though they weren’t allowed to admit it.

‘Danny?’ Even in the dark, Lucy could see he was glad. ‘Dan?’

‘OK.’

The hand she put on his arm was shaking. ‘I’m telling you first, so you won’t feel hurt. We both still love you.’

He must have been one cold little bastard, standing there with his eyebrows clenched and his jaw carved in stone, nothing, not even an eyelid, twitching. Looking back, he feels bad about it. At the time he said, ‘It’s no big deal.’

‘We’ve been a family for so long. I just.’ She didn’t finish. After a while she said, ‘It’s over and I’m sorry, OK?’

It was quiet for way too long. Oh God she was waiting for him to say something, what . . . appropriate.

All these years later he’s sorry he couldn’t have been nicer with her. Softer. He should have hugged her and said he loved her and let her sob into the front of his fleece. He did what he could: he shrugged, signaling no problem, but she was too upset to read signals. ‘Dan?’

Finally he said, ‘OK.’

‘I just don’t want you to be upset.’

Oh Mom, don’t cry. ‘Why would I?’

A light went on in the kitchen. Burt, looking for his dinner. For his wife, the assigned provider. ‘Lucy!’ He yelled loud enough for them to hear through sealed storm windows, ‘Where is everybody? What’s going on? Luce?’

While Danny and his mother stood out there on the back porch with icicles dropping and everything in flux.

She said, ‘We’ve been with him since before you were born, Danny. He’s just like your . . . well, he’s nothing like him, but . . .’

‘What?’

She covered her mouth. ‘Oh honey, please don’t be upset.’

He isn’t? He isn’t! Danny’s heart did a joyful flip. Oh God, I was right. ‘Why, Mom?’

‘You mean why am I telling you or why do I think you’re upset?’

Her face went to pieces. Danny’s face stayed where it was.

‘He tried so hard, and I know he loves me.’ She was desperate to make him like the man she’d picked out to take care of them, she hoped for it even there, at the end of the arrangement. ‘I just don’t want you to miss him too much. Burt, I mean. When he goes.’

‘Like I would give a . . .’

‘Don’t, Danny. Don’t say flying fuck. Listen. I know you feel bad . . .’

‘I feel fine!’

‘But this might make you feel better. It. Uh. Oh Danny, I . . .’

‘Dan.’

‘Dan. Dan, it.’

It was cold. Spit was freezing on his teeth but they had to stay out here on the rickety back porch until she finished. ‘It’s OK, Mom. You don’t have to tell me . . .’

‘Please, I’m trying to tell you something important.’

He finished, ‘You just did.’

But she didn’t hear. ‘I should have told you before.’

She was a mess. God he hated Burt. ‘He’s going. We’re cool.’

‘That isn’t all.’

‘Mom?’ That little gulp of hesitation scared him. There was always the possibility that she was getting married again.

Inside, pots crashed: Burt fending for himself. Never mind what had just passed between them, or that he understood long before she tried to tell him. Lucy needed to spell it out. She took the requisite deep breath: well. ‘About Burt.’ Sigh. ‘I didn’t want you to go on thinking he was your father.’

An icicle dropped off the porch roof and knifed into the melting snow.

‘He was just a nice guy who came along at the right time.’

Oh, is that all. Danny made her wait so she would understand what he was about to tell her. He dropped spaces between the words like bricks, to make sure she would remember. ‘Like you think I didn’t know?’

‘How?’

Oh, Mom. Don’t look so betrayed. ‘How could I not?’ He made a smile for her, but it was too late, or too fake. ‘Mom, what’s the matter?’

Water sheeted her eyes and hung, not spilling. It was a miracle of surface tension. Lucy was beaming, like, Thank God that’s over. This is how she surprised him: ‘I’m just so glad!’

‘Mom!’

She rushed on. ‘I’m taking my name back. It’s Carteret.’

He was trying to hang tough but as soon as she said it, the surface broke. I always knew.

‘If you want to, you can too.’

Dan Carteret.

‘Yes!’ He covered his face fast, so Burt wouldn’t come running out to see what blazed out here in the dark just now, and shone so bright. He was that glad.

One day my real father will come for me, he told himself. Prisoner of war, he thought, superhero, Marine deserter; the myth kept him going and it crystallized that night: it had to be one of the guys in that snapshot. Why else would she keep it for so long? It didn’t matter which one of the five it turned out to be, he was Not-Burt. Different. Unknown.

‘So you’re OK?’

Gulp hard, man. Breathe. Exhale carefully, so you don’t spook her by shouting. ‘I’m good.’

‘Good,’ she said. ‘Now let’s go back inside.’

‘Not yet.’ Dan put himself between Lucy and the door, trying to lead her where they had to go. ‘So. Carteret. That’s my father’s name?’

‘No. Now, move.’

He swept her hand off the knob. ‘So. What’s Carteret. Something you made up?’

‘It’s my name, Dan, that I was born with. It’s who we are. Now, please. I’m getting cold.’

‘I said, not yet.’

She tugged the door open in spite of him. ‘We’re never going to see him, you know.’

He pushed it shut. ‘Why not, Mom? What is he, dead?’

‘Danny, don’t.’

‘Married?’

‘I don’t know, I don’t know.’ She scrubbed her hands down her face. ‘It doesn’t matter!’

‘In jail?’ They were having a little battle over the door.

‘No. If he was in jail we could . . . We can’t.’

‘Why?’

Her face went through so many changes that it scared him. ‘We just can’t.’

‘Come on!’

Picture of Lucy, thinking. It took her a minute to come up with, ‘There are people I have to protect.’

‘Like who? Him?’

The look she gave him was uncompromising. Fierce. ‘Starting with you.’

‘Fine,’ he said bitterly. ‘So I don’t know who I am.’

‘You’re my son!’

‘I don’t know and you won’t tell me.’

‘You don’t have to be Dan Mixon any more, and that should be enough.’ Lucy’s hands were shaking. Her breath was shaking too. ‘Trust me, Danny, that’s all you need to know.’

‘Come on, Mom!’ Like a cop, he slammed the heel of his hand into his mother’s shoulder; they both heard the thud. ‘What’s his name?’

‘I can’t tell you.’

‘Who is he? Who is he really?’

There was a pause during which he actually believed she was going to tell him. Her head came up, but her eyes were looking past him at something else. Then her voice lifted and floated clean away. ‘Just a boy I thought I loved.’

Inside, a bowl broke on the kitchen tiles and Burt squawked. ‘Lucy!’ Had he guessed she was dumping him? Did he hear them out here on the porch? Dan didn’t think so. Burt didn’t care about Lucy, he was just pissed about the no dinner. ‘Lucy?’

‘What happened?’

She put her fingers over Dan’s mouth, shushing him. Through the back window, they saw Burt slam the oven door and stalk out into the front room. She whispered, ‘Nothing. I can’t tell you.’

God he was so angry. ‘That’s all? That’s all you’re going to say?’

‘That’s all you need to know.’ She turned, as if they were done.

He pulled her back. ‘No it isn’t, Mom.’

‘OK,’ she said finally. ‘It was a boy from home.’

‘Where’s home?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ Lucy sighed. It was so sad. ‘He wouldn’t want you to know.’

‘That’s a lie.’ His head came up so fast that his neck snapped. ‘He wrote to me.’

‘Not exactly.’ Her expression told him he was right.

‘You tore it up.’

Stabbed in the heart. ‘I’m sorry! I had to protect you.’

‘What else did you tear up?’ He knotted his fists to keep from shaking her. ‘Marriage license?’

‘There wasn’t one.’

‘Funeral notice? Passport?’ If only he’d known what to look for that awful day when he was four, he’d know! I know ways of hunting for things that leave no trace. The treasures she kept hidden made no sense to him at the time: a newspaper he couldn’t read with photos she would not explain, gold football, old jewelry, empty plastic shell – diaphragm case, he understood at fifteen, but not back then – night school BA from Connecticut College – he and Burt wore suits to the graduation – and, what else? ‘My birth certificate?’

‘I would never do that.’

‘Why not,’ he said bitterly. ‘You trashed everything else.’

‘Not that.’ For a minute out there on the back porch they were like two kids squaring off. You flinched. No, you flinched. Then her face crumpled. ‘Oh, honey, that would make you a stateless person. I wouldn’t do that to you.’

‘Prove it.’

‘Of course.’ She sighed. ‘It’s on file in Town Hall, you can get a copy any time you want. You might as well know. I had to tell them something at the hospital, so . . .’ Oh, didn’t she take a long breath then, and wasn’t the voice she finally managed so thin when it came out that she sounded like someone else. Long breath. ‘I told them it was Burt.’

‘Son of a bitch!’

‘I did what I had to.’ Lucy had a strong, sweet face – too pale, but with those beautiful eyes. They loved each other, that was understood. She’d brought him up doing what she thought was best for him, that too was understood. She wasn’t being cruel. She was doing the best she could.

‘If I have a father he has a name, so, what? What’s his damn name? At least you can tell me that.’ When she didn’t answer he took her arm. It was too thin. Even in the heavy sweater, she was rattling with the cold. Was she already sick, all those years ago? He doesn’t know. That night his voice was so thin and shaky that he hated it. ‘If you loved me, you’ll tell me.’

‘I love you, and I can’t.’ She looked up with tears streaming.

‘Won’t!’

‘Won’t, then.’ For the second time that night, she surprised him. ‘I won’t tell you and you have to promise not to ask.’

Oh, Lucy. What are you afraid of? ‘Mom . . .’

‘I’m trying to keep you safe! Now, promise.’

‘Why do I have to . . .’

This popped out in spite of her. ‘Because he wouldn’t want you to know!’

‘Mom!’

Then Lucy’s fingers closed on his so tight that the nails dug in like little teeth. She was struggling to frame an agreement but she had run out of words. ‘Please!’ she cried finally, out of such grief that the implications silenced him.

For a long time they stood just there, Dan with his back stiff and chin jutting, until she jerked him into a hug. He resisted but she pulled him close. They stood, rocking. With her face buried in his chest – When did I get this tall? – his mother wheedled, ‘And you have to promise not to look for him. OK?’

There was a technical term for the answer Dan made her then, which he didn’t learn until he was in college. Let her think he was giving her what she wanted. ‘As long as we both shall live.’

‘Ever.’

The sound Dan came out with then, that let them end the clinch and go inside, could have meant anything. Because they had to survive the moment, she took it as a yes. He’d managed his first broad mental reservation.

He still didn’t know who he was, but things were good. At least they were done with Burt.

Lucy went to court and got her old name back. Carteret. They took the birth certificate to probate court and got his name changed to match. He became Dan Carteret, and it suited him fine. He still didn’t know who his father was, but he went along all right, not knowing. Lucy went back to work on the sub base; she started as clerk typist and advanced to office manager. She looked better than she had in a long time and Dan started doing better in school. They did fine together, just the two of them. The house was quieter with Burt gone, and they let things relax to the point where magazines sat on the coffee table every which-way and you could no longer bounce a quarter off beds made so tightly that it was hard to get back in at night.

There would always be the central question, but Lucy had said everything she intended to say and he loved her well enough to let it pass, at least for now. For his mother’s sake Dan Carteret went along not knowing who he was. He finished high school and went to college outside Chicago not knowing; his mother loved him well enough to let him go to California to look for work. He hugged her hard, saying, ‘I’ll come back for Christmas.’

‘Don’t worry about me.’ She tightened the hug and then broke it with the little push that means goodbye. ‘It’s your life now.’

That first year was hard: no time, never enough money. He was waiting tables, writing spec scripts because in Los Angeles, everybody hopes. He wrote for one of the free weeklies. He even sold a couple of stories to the L.A. Times magazine – a way in. Three or four Christmases went by – she was celebrating with a nice new man, his mother told him when he phoned; she said, ‘Don’t worry about me, I’m happy. Do you know I’m teaching myself to paint?’ She said, ‘Have a great life,’ which he continued to do, not knowing who he was, really, or how Lucy was. By this time it was tacit that she wouldn’t talk about the father, and he wouldn’t ask. They loved each other that much; they understood each other that well, and he went along fine, not knowing. Dan was going along all right, not knowing whether when he went in on Monday, he’d still have his marginal job at the incredible shrinking Los Angeles Times because there was always something else that he could do. He was going along all right, not knowing who his father was, what he meant to her or what went wrong. For Dan Carteret in his twenties, not knowing was like the weather. A condition of life.

He went along fine, not knowing, until it became clear that not knowing was wrong because he didn’t know Lucy was sick until they called from the hospital to tell him to come, she was sinking fast.

2

Dan

Lucy was one of those people who claimed she never got sick, which he believed, until now. She was critical – cancer, stage four and moving fast; it was time to put the central question. When they phoned, she was too far gone for him to press her on names, places, details from her past, but he didn’t know that.

He flew home on the redeye, too anxious and disrupted to sleep. He and Lucy had a lifetime of unanswered questions hanging between them, but this one knifed him in the heart. Oh, Mom. Why didn’t you tell me you were sick? She’d just say what she always said: I wanted you to have your life. He had to walk into that hospital and fix this. He had to badger and charm them into producing the right specialist, the right protocols, and she’d get better.

Then they could talk.

By the time he raced into her room, Lucy was beyond questions. She couldn’t speak, not really. She just beamed, shaking with joy at the sight of him. Grieving, he took her hands; she was too flimsy to hug. If there really had been a new man in her life, he wasn’t anywhere.

There was just Lucy, shining.

Her mouth was working and he leaned close, the way you do for a deathbed confession: Who is he, Mom? If she won’t tell you now, she’ll never tell you. Even when she knows you love her too much to ask.

She struggled to produce sound, but nothing came out. Dan bent closer, closer even, knowing it was much too late to pour out his heart; all he could do was close his hand on what was left of hers and keep murmuring – with love, ‘It’s OK, Mom. It’s OK.’

Listening. It was too late but he listened hard. He could smell death coming out of her mouth, and there was no way to push it back; it wouldn’t matter what miracle drug they fed, infused or injected, she’d never get out of that bed. She couldn’t even speak, but she tried, God, she tried. He loved her, so he tried to smile and pretended that she’d spoken and he understood.

It was awful, watching her try.

He nodded as if words had come out and they made perfect sense. He said, ‘Yes, Mom, uh-huh,’ smiling, smiling, but he didn’t fool her. She pulled him closer so he could hear what she was trying so desperately to say.

Finally he did. This is what Lucy Carteret had saved all her strength to tell her son. ‘I’m so glad you’re here.’

It was awful seeing her like this. ‘Me too.’

They said they loved each other.

You love her and you say so, even though you can never forgive your mother for certain things. The way she put him off that night on the porch, when he asked the biggest question in his life. All she said, in a voice that floated away was, Just a boy I thought I loved.

All these years later, it was still a puzzle and a mystery; she was afraid to tell him. She made him promise not to ask. It was too late to ask her why.

She tried to lift her hand, but she couldn’t; she was so sick, so thin, she was almost transparent. He begged her not to go.

She said what they say in the movies, ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

Then she died.

Like that! Part of Dan Carteret was gone. Oh, Mom!

And, next? Words exploded in his head – the response he’d cobbled when she made him promise never to ask about his father: As long as we both shall live.

She thought he’d promised, he knew he’d lied. She was gone. OK then.

He is free to search.

Lucy didn’t leave him much to go on. The few things she’d said that night, when she first told him the truth. She loved the guy, she admitted it! Still did. Love like that doesn’t vanish without a trace.

It will be in that jewel box she was so anxious to protect.

The little wooden chest surfaces when he goes through her empty apartment, padding thoughtfully through the silent, abandoned rooms. He finds it in her bedroom closet, stashed behind books on a shelf he used to be too small to reach. It’s tough, going through the things she kept: bangles and mismatched earrings, his high school class ring, important papers and at the bottom items from the deep past, souvenirs of the life Lucy had before Dan was imagined and they ended up living here.

He runs his fingers over raised initials on the little gold football, a cheap high school trinket that his mother cherished or she wouldn’t have kept it for so long: FJHS. OK. Tonight, he’ll type FJHS into the Google search box along with her maiden name, the first step in a global search for Lucy Carteret’s lost life in the years before she married Burt Mixon, who made her so anxious and sad.

Here’s the picture she kept: five jocks snapped on a beach, waving and grinning like fools – a fading Polaroid that he turns over in his hands like an old friend. Wait! Here’s a second one: a black-and-white of Lucy in her teens, smiling for the camera in spite of the glare. At her back, a Spanish stucco house sprawls under a row of tall Australian pines – some builder’s idea of castle, with a grand stairway and two fat turrets. She’s wearing a little white T-shirt that breaks his heart and – what? That corny gold football hanging between her breasts. Did his father take this? Why did she hide it for so long?

Instinct tells him this isn’t all she was hiding. Troubled, he runs his fingers around the box, feeling only a little guilty because the silk lining shreds at his touch. Here. A scrap of newsprint from the paper he thought she’d destroyed before he learned to read. Well, now he can read: Spontaneous Human Combustion. Holy crap! He jumps, as if she’d just set her hand between his shoulders: It’s all right, love. I’m here.

The initialed football, the snapshot. This. He feeds FJHS into the search engines, triangulates with spontaneous human combustion. Fort Jude at the top of every first page, the Florida city where – bingo: there have been three grisly, unexplained deaths by fire in the last fifty years. And, my God, the image search produces the stills that so terrified him as a kid. The crime scene photo of that bedroom slipper with a foot still in it, standing like a solitary bookend on the floor underneath the recliner where she died. He broadens the search, surfing obsessively because on the Web, everything leads to something else and in its own way, it insulates him from the ache in his belly, just below the heart.

He kept clicking; he struck gold at howstuffworks.com, where Stephanie Watson wrote about spontaneous human combustion at length.

Spontaneous combustion occurs when an object – in the case of spontaneous human combustion, a person – bursts into flame from a chemical reaction within, apparently without being ignited by an external heat source. The first known account of spontaneous human combustion came from the Danish anatomist Thomas Bartholin in 1663, who described how a woman in Paris ‘went up in ashes and smoke’ while she was sleeping. The straw mattress on which she slept was unmarred by the fire. In 1673, a Frenchman named Jonas Dupont published a collection of spontaneous combustion cases in his work ‘De Incendiis Corporis Humani Spontaneis.’

Although Lucy was sad more often than she was happy, she didn’t live the kind of inner life that needs bizarre crimes and freaks of nature to explain itself. Unless. What? Dan is tortured by unanswered questions. What does this have to do with us? He browsed obsessively, lingering at this unsigned entry on unexplainedstuff.com and picked up later by a half-dozen other sites:

In December 1956, Virginia Caget of Honolulu, Hawaii, walked into the room of Young Sik Kim, a 78-year-old disabled person, to find him enveloped in blue flames. By the time firemen arrived on the scene, Kim and his easy chair were ashes. Strangely enough, nearby curtains and clothing were untouched by fire, in spite of the fierce heat that would have been necessary to consume a human being.

He should be packaging, storing, doing last things before he locks the door on his mother’s life. Instead, he trolls the Internet, gleaning details. At theness.com, a Dr Steven Novella pushes him into murk and confusion – hey, this is an MD putting his reputation on the line – when he says:

. . . Believers often cite as evidence the fact that a body has been completely reduced to ash, except for the ends of the arms and legs and sometimes the head. But there is a good explanation for this phenomenon. It is called the wick effect. The clothing of victims can act as a wick, while their body fat serves as a source of fuel (like an inside-out candle). The burning of the clothes is maintained by liquefied fat wicked from the body of the victim, causing a slow burn that can nearly consume the victim and resulting in the greasy brown substance often coating nearby walls.

Except for the ends of the arms and legs . . . The foot and the chair. The clipping. Another of those things she kept hidden but preserved: her secret, in code. As his mother tore the paper out of his hands that day, she smacked him hard. He reads on and on, chapter, verse, feeding on details, until he comes to himself with a shudder. OK, lady, what does this have to do with us?

Did she really leave Fort Jude because old women go up in flames for no known reason? He doesn’t think so. Once, when she let herself talk about her life before New London, Lucy told him she’d rather die than go back there, ever.

Which she did.

Die, and she left orders. He will throw her ashes into the Atlantic thousands of miles north of her home town. What came down there, he wonders, what was so bad that she had to go? Trouble in her family, or was it something worse? He won’t find the answers in his browser. He slams his laptop and turns to the pictures she kept.

If he stares at the house behind Lucy for long enough, will he see her parents grouped behind the leaded windows, snapped in black and white? Are they still in there? Would they come out and talk to him? He doesn’t know. In fact, there’s a lot he doesn’t know. When he was a kid he wanted to go live inside that picture, hang out on the beach with those five happy guys, laughing and not giving a fuck. The problem is, they don’t look carefree to him now; they look sinister and guarded.

Stupidly, he sits, half-waiting for a sign from his mother, but the dead don’t leave messages, right? Reason, Carteret. Think. One these dudes has got to be my father, he thinks, why else would she keep this thing?

The hell of it is that he could stare into those faces and never know which one; he could feed the Polaroid into a scanner and enlarge it, he could analyze every facial detail down to the last pixel and still not know, but Dan does know one thing. He’ll hunt down the careless, grinning bastard. He will, and when he does, he will damn well shake him until the truth falls out.

3

Lorna Archambault

Don’t ask me how it happened, don’t think you know what it’s like. Do you know what it’s like? Do you have any idea what it’s like? Did you quit gossiping or leave off gawking long enough to wonder how it felt to burn alive, with your heart splitting and a furnace in your fundament?

Or were you too busy surmising? Was it all about the phenomenon, and did you give me a second thought, or were you only scared because if it could happen to me, it could happen to you? Do not send your children to visit my grave, ladies, and leave me the hell out of your little lectures on playing with matches.

I know you despised me, and you know what I thought of you.

Poor Lorna. Nobody knows what happened, but everybody knows what she looked like at the end. It was in all the papers, on TV, those pictures! How humiliating for a proud woman like her.

In this town, extraordinary things come down – Fort Jude is the lightning capitol of the world. Sinkholes yawn and eat entire cars or get big enough to devour the house, the kids’ climber, the birdbath in your front yard. People by the thousands went to light Santeria candles outside a bank on Route 19 because they thought they saw the Virgin in the glass front. Storms blow up in seconds – hurricanes, tornados, rains that can sweep a man’s car into a culvert and drown him like that. At sunset, sharks come in to feed in the swash. Half a boxer dog floated to the top of Circle Lake and a family in Far Acres found an escaped boa constrictor coiled under the porch, but these things happen to outsiders, not people you know, although our mayor did get struck by lighting on the eighteenth hole.

In towns like ours, where lizards come indoors and scorpions as big as lobsters can tumble off rafters in old garages, anything can happen.

Anything.

But – spontaneous human combustion?

We’ve had three, right here in Fort Jude!

Now, people may combust in broad daylight in London or Paris or even in downtown Dallas, but never in Fort Jude. Some poor soul may burst into flames in public where you live, but not here. The society is much too private. We will do anything to protect our own. Fort Jude’s crimes and love affairs, the betrayals – our great mysteries – unfold in secret, late at night.

In Fort Jude, there are close to half a million people.

Then there are people you know.

The whole world knows about Muriel Keesler, although she wasn’t from here. She’s famous, because she was the first. Old Muriel combusted and burned to a cinder sitting in her chair back in the Fifties, and to this day nobody knows why. Experts still study it. People from all over the world come to Fort Jude to reconstruct the scene and come up empty. Nobody in town knew her until it happened.

Then everybody did. It’s a very great mystery. No sign of arson; it wasn’t suicide. Nobody broke in and set her afire. She just burned up, and nobody knows why. The only things burned were the chair she sat in and Mrs Keesler, of course. Charred bits that fell on the rug. Police and fire marshals, the coroner, scientists, nobody could explain it. Forensics experts and scientists, psychologists, journalists from all over the world came to investigate. Movie people came, even mediums came, psychic pathologists. They studied it from every angle; they wrote books about it, but it’s all speculation. All that snooping, all these theories and all these years later, we still don’t know how it happened, or why.

In the Sixties, a Mrs Arbruzzi flared up in her trailer and burned to a crisp, front page news in the Star, but she didn’t gather a crowd. It was interesting, but she was a foreigner, came here from Sicily or someplace like that. Everybody ooohed and ahed, but for families that have always lived here, it was like it happened to some old lady on Mars.

Things like that don’t happen to people like us.

But the third was Lorna Archambault. Lorna Archambault! Past president of the Junior League and the museum board, her father founded the Fort Jude Club, but she lit up and flamed out all the same.

As if such fires are specific to the person.

When these things happen to somebody in a society as tight as this one, the mystery lingers. Thirty years later, people still talk about it in the bar at the Fort Jude Club. What happened to Lorna Archambault, really?

How am I supposed to know?

Lorna was divorced: nobody to see, nobody to throw a blanket over her or pour water into the smoking cavity where her guts had been. Poor Lorna, how awful. And because she was prominent, it got in the papers and on TV. There were photographs of it in the Star – how embarrassing! Like the others, she just burned up from the inside out. As if a stealth missile homed in and exploded in her belly. Dead. The other two women had to lie in the charred ruins of their lives for hours before the landlady or some other stranger blundered in and found them dead.

When you’re prominent, like Lorna Archambault, they miss you. Somebody misses you and comes looking. They find you right away.

Poor Claudia Atkinson found Lorna, they were roommates in the Pi Phi house at FSU. We were leaving for Europe today. I brought the tour labels to stick on her bags! Her luggage was right there by the front door, all zipped up and ready to go. Imagine. How sad.

Police came, the ambulance came, the fire truck came, although it was too late. The coroner came for Lorna, and until her son Dorian the doctor vetoed an autopsy, the cause was in dispute, but of course she ended up at DeForest, where everybody who is anybody goes. And oh, forensics people in flocks. Experts came. Thirty years later, they’re still coming, convinced they can find the clue that everybody else overlooked. Everybody wants an explanation to things that can never be explained.

Like this one. Nobody broke into Lorna’s house that night, so it wasn’t robbery; her wallet and her diamonds were sitting on the dresser, in plain sight. Some of the exact same experts that came snooping around about Mrs Keesler came back to study Lorna’s case, for all the good it did. She didn’t use a space heater or cheap-jack kerosene stove, only poor people live like that. She used the divorce settlement to redecorate the house. Her designer had covered all the fireplaces, so it wasn’t a spark popping out on the rug. She had a brand-new furnace and all the wiring was up to code. Nobody came to see her that night, at least not that they know of. There were no signs of arson, but Lorna did smoke.

One doctor said maybe her cigarette set off her own gasses. It’s happened to ordinary old women in cheaper neighborhoods, but Lorna was a Southern lady. The idea! She would have died!

It could have been anything, but what? Alone in her empty house that night, snug in her nightie, Lorna Archambault kicked back in her plush recliner and mysteriously went up in flames, burning until the fire ran out of fuel. They found her lying there, split wide open like a hot dog left too long on the barbecue.

Where else but in Fort Jude? Now, the Keesler woman made history, because she was the first. Tourists still come looking for the house the way you’d visit Natural Bridge in Virginia, or in California, the Watts Towers. They keep coming even though there’s nothing left where she lived but a parking lot. This Mrs Arbruzzi was just a snowbird living in a trailer park, and she was foreign. The town is filled with old people from somewhere else.

They drift in from everywhere, looking for a better life. At 4:30 every afternoon you can see them poking at ATM machines on Central Avenue and lined up for Early Bird Specials in cheap restaurants from here all the way to the beach, restless old men and sad old ladies in workout suits or spunky Florida shirts; they’d talk to you if you weren’t in such a rush. They’re everywhere, like the three a.m. test pattern on a TV you weren’t watching.

See, Fort Jude may look like a big city to you, but to the lucky insiders who grew up on Saturday night parties and lessons in ballroom dancing and Sunday dinners at the Fort Jude Club, the ones who spend New Year’s Eve in the club ballroom and children’s birthdays at splash parties in the pool, it’s still a small town and it belongs to the generations. For them, everybody who matters in Fort Jude knows everybody else, and everything is related. Who you are, who your people are, and in this town, the truly local families protect their own. It is a given.

At the Fort Jude Club, somebody in the family – parents or grandparents – saw Lorna in the dining room the night she died, fresh from the hairdresser and dressed to kill, sitting down for a farewell dinner with her son. Dorian didn’t make his family sit down with her all that much, but it was a special occasion. Her favorite waiter brought her favorite Blanc de Noir and Dorian had a bottle sent to every table, so when he gave the toast the whole dining room stood up and drank to her. They still talk about how happy she looked.

These things don’t seem important until something happens. Then the least little detail stands out. Afterward, Dorian took Lorna home. He kissed his mother good night and that’s the last anybody saw of her. Except for whatever they scraped out of the chair.

What happened, really? Does a person like that feel it coming on? Maybe she mistook it for something else: Something I ate. Pressure on the heart. People do. For all we know, she could have been sitting in her BarcaLounger thinking, It’s just gas.

Then she erupted.

Unless she heard something. Intruder. Raccoon in the garbage can. Maybe she looked up, startled. Who’s that?

Or she thought horny, unfaithful Hal Archambault was coming back to her, and she lifted her head the way you do, so he wouldn’t see her wrinkles sag: You called?

Just before she started belching fire.

The police don’t really know if Lorna was awake or out cold when it started. Most people don’t want to know, although everybody wondered. Did she scream for help or try to dial 911? Was she drunk or out on pills, as in, she brought it on herself? These things go down easier when survivors have somebody to blame.

What a terrible thing!

For a few seconds there, oh, lady! She must have been glorious: lit up from within, glowing like a Japanese lantern in her purple silk nightie, which is what the coroner said she was wearing when the flames consumed her. Then the fire blossomed. She split and it came gushing out. Imagine light blooming in her belly, exploding in twin gouts rushing from the holes where her eyes had been, flame shooting out of her belly and her open mouth in a celebration of light.

What was she, anyway. What did she do that brought this down on her?

Was she excited? Scared? Was she in pain?

There are no words for what I was.

4

Nenna Henderson McCall

I walked home from the office last week. It took all afternoon, minus the times I sat down to think. It’s six miles from Coral Shores to our house, and I had on the wrong shoes!

I was writing speeches to Davis that I wanted to give when Davis finally came in from work. Everybody said don’t marry him, you want somebody local, like Bobby, but Bobby was in love with Lucy at the time. I did want Bobby, but there was nothing I could do. They said, northerners just don’t do like we do and that is true. Davis taught at Junior College, he had the tweed jacket with the suede elbow patches, he was cute and now I’m stuck with him – except I’m not, because it turns out Davis is a rat.

I was at the office when I found out. It was the dead, still hour after lunch. The smartass kid realtors were all kicked back, romancing would-be clients on the phone, heavy-breathing over bayfront condos, square footage and with waterfront views and I was opening my mail, everything the same.

Then it wasn’t. It was the bill. The English Department secretary sends it to me because Davis is notoriously cheap. He calls long distance on the office phone. Usually I hold my nose and pay, but, Fifty calls to Toluca Lake! I must have yelled; when I looked up with my bare face hanging out like a wet girdle on the shower rail, seven kid realtors were texting madly, with flying thumbs and sly, snarky grins.

It’s cousin Gayle. His first cousin, what kind of a failure of the imagination is that? Scrawny Gayle Carson, that Davis grew up with, it’s incestuous, plus! Could he not have had the grace to call her on his cell? ‘Gayle’s invited us to California,’ he said last Christmas, all innocence. ‘Steffy’s never been!’ What was he thinking, using our daughter like that? ‘I can’t wait to see it through her eyes.’ Oh, Davis. I should have known that misty smile was not for me. I didn’t want to know.

I booked the trip, pretending not to know. Leaving that woman’s house after the awful week we spent there, I thought, Out of sight, out of mind. I thought, Got to do something about that, just not now, when I really meant, Not yet. Please God, just not this year. I’d been keeping us going, things as they are, but you can’t, not with everybody watching proof positive smack you in the face. All those kid realtors in their tight little outfits sitting there, just waiting for me to cry. I forgot everything and ran. By the time I realized I’d left my bag, my phone – my keys! – it was too late to go back.

Now I’m not a walker like my friends. They’re mostly free to look pretty and sign up for Jazzercize and waterobics if they want to, or dress up for board meetings followed by long lunches at the club, translation: unemployed. But, frankly, we couldn’t live on what Davis makes, not in this showcase at Far Acres. I wanted to live on Coral Shores with all my friends, but Davis insisted. There’s a world’s worth of difference between here and there; it’s just too far, and last week I went the whole distance. I walked every step of the way.

It was four blocks before I felt my shoes. Mocha slides from Nine West, sand kept coming in the toes but I just went on walking, like walking was the most important thing, which in a way, it was. No. It was the only thing.

I was too upset to wait for the light, even though Harrison Rivard got hit by a truck crossing this very street last year because he was too good to wait for stoplights. He used to live in Europe and you should have seen him when he moved back, all arty and continental, although he was probably CIA, and it was a hit to make sure he didn’t go spilling Company secrets in the bar at the Fort Jude Club. What a way to go, in your bloody sock feet with your groceries smeared all over the road. Poor guy, I never thought!

You don’t think, not when you’re sealed in your car, safe from everything, but walking, you’re exposed, like poor Harrison. Walking is like opening your diary, in a way. Our whole past is out there and to get home, I had to walk through most of it. Northshore Elementary is a mini-mart now, with a parking lot where the playground was, I still have the scar where Brad Kalen jumped off the swing and it hit me in the head and I was excited and sad, remembering. We went to dances in the old box factory all through junior high, all dressed up and obsessing about sex because it was so new, thank God I know more about everything now. I walked past the lake where boys drove us to park in high school and the Dairy Queen where they took us after, and oh, oh!

It’s a good thing nobody I knew saw me out in the open like that, trying not to cry. Outsiders wouldn’t see me looking that much different, but all the girls from Northshore would know it in an instant. With outsiders, you can be anything you want – more interesting, younger, new – but in this town we grow up with a history. We aren’t girls any more but we still know how old each other are down to the minute, we know who wet her pants in first grade and which one threw up in her desk. We’ve bookmarked every guy we were in love with, from third-grade crushes to the Coleman twins in eleventh grade – which twin was I in love with, really, was it Buck, or the sweet one that died? – to Bobby Chaplin in senior year . . . Oh!

Thought isn’t all that good for you. You don’t watch where you’re going. I was walking right over my old house before I even knew it. It’s buried like The Mummy’s temple, down underneath that parking lot.

My whole life used to be in this block. Our parents sold out and moved into condos so the company could build the super-Publix. We were all grown and the neighborhood was going downhill anyway, but it was awful. They tore down all our houses! My whole childhood is buried underneath that parking lot, my ruby ring that I lost in Sallie’s sandbox and my kitten Fuzzy, that we buried in my old back yard. I was walking over my parents’ fights that always came out all right, and birthday parties and almost-sex with Bobby in the glider when we were in ninth grade. Everything I cared about is covered with tons of asphalt which is ironic, because old Lorna Archambault’s house is still standing, right there on the other side of the street.

If you draw a straight line between Holt Realty and Far Acres where I was going, it would bisect the big old banyan tree in Lorna’s front yard. I was like an arrow aimed at the heart of Davis McCall, I could have made it home earlier, but the snaky roots hanging off Lorna’s banyan brushed my face like somebody who loved me when I was little, and it stopped me cold.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Oh!’

Lorna used to chase us out of that tree, coming down off her front porch like a battleship. ‘Rats,’ she said, ‘That tree is full of rats and scorpions.’ She said, ‘You girls get out of there before you get hurt, get out and go home,’ but that wasn’t what she meant. She meant that she didn’t want her precious granddaughter playing with dirty little girls like us. She was so shaking-mad that parts of her face flapped, and I remember thinking, You’re so old.

‘Oh,’ I said to that tree even though you’re supposed to be polite to old acquaintances, no matter how much they’ve changed, ‘you’re so old!’

And for the first time ever, I was too. My knees buckled and I slid down the big old trunk and sat there until chiggers or redbugs or something started biting, unless it was the uglies. I jumped up. By that time I was feeling so bad that I had to pat the tree goodbye, and I said, ‘At least you’re OK,’ to make it feel better.

It was time to get home and put on makeup and pray to God that Davis got in today before high school play practice let out and Steffy came home. I wanted to face up to him and get it over with without her walking in, so I walked faster, practicing speeches, and next thing I knew, I was ranting at the stone lions at Pine Vista, two living signs of the ruination of our neighborhood.

Herman Chaplin’s development scheme went bust in the Twenties land crash, before even our grandmothers were born. He had a dream, but as far as he got was the lions and stone markers at every corner and the stucco wedding cake where Bobby grew up.

The Chaplins always were a little bit too good for us, even Bobby, but in high school we never knew it, stupid me, I was in love with him. They went to college up north and settled around Boston and New York, but something happened up there and now all three of them are back, seething around in that big old house like snakes in a basket that’s too small for them.

I used to dream up reasons for us to cruise Bobby Chaplin’s house, back when he ruled the school, but now I drive past on my way in from Far Acres without giving Bobby a thought. Usually I’m sealed in my car with the AC on and my favorite CD, but I’d been walking for too long, and it was worse than crossing 38th Street where Harrison got hit. I ducked my head down and hurried on by, figuring out ways to get back at Davis for betraying me.

That scrawny, lascivious skank, Davis? Really? Is that the best you can do? Wrong. Did you not think I would find out, Davis? No. Were you trying to torture me? No. What are you, retarded? Like, you thought you could get away with it? No. I said, don’t ask, just get the hell out of here. No, you need to guilt him a little bit, make him grovel before you kick him out, tell him . . .

This is embarrassing. I heard Bobby’s front door open and I didn’t hear it. I hoped to God it wasn’t him. I kept going even after somebody called, ‘Nenna?’ and I went faster because I knew it was him.

I didn’t stop until he caught up with me.

‘Nenna Henderson!’

‘Oh.’ Any other day I would have hugged him: Bobby, it’s so great to see you, even though it wasn’t, but I was caught short with my messed-up life hanging out, and partly it was the shock. He’d fallen away in the shanks. In the way of redheads whose lives are over but they don’t know it, his hair had faded to brown. I was too tactful to say, What happened to you? or ask him how he really was. I wanted to say something, but all I could think of was, ‘Oh!’

‘I saw you going by and I had to come out and say hey.’

‘Hey, Bobby.’ He was so friendly – did I smile? Did I look OK or did I look awful? Beyond it, I guess, because he looked all worried, and it pissed me off.

‘How are you?’

‘Don’t ask me now.’

‘I’m sorry. I . . .’ Maybe he was waiting for me to spill so he could pour out his story; maybe he wanted to tell me what brought him down, and God knows we’re all dying to know. I should have said, Are you OK? but it was getting late, I was exhausted, everybody would be home soon and I had cut him off before he had a chance to start.

‘Don’t be.’ Oh, Bobby, don’t linger.

He kept going along beside me. ‘I thought maybe your car broke down.’

‘Not really.’

‘You looked like you could use some help.’

I did, but nothing I could tell him. If I’d shown him mine, he’d have shown me his. We could have hugged goodbye with, maybe, promises of more to come, but not just then. I had to keep going, so I did. ‘Not really. I’m fine.’

Bobby tagged along, whether or not I wanted it. Football captain, May King two years running and there he was following me like a dog. He’d been home in the Florida sunshine for three years but he must have spent it inside, he was that white in the face. He’d gotten skinny in there, but he was grinning and dancing along next to me as though no time had passed, ‘Nenna, wait up.’

It all piled in on me and I started to run. ‘Can’t, Bobby. I’m late.’

‘Late for what?’

It wasn’t just Davis I was mad at, it was him. When you were eighteen you wouldn’t even look at me. ‘I’m in a hurry, Bobby. Why should I stop and talk to you?’

‘I’ve missed you, Nenna. It’s been forever.’ He’s changed but he smiled, just like in our yearbook. Most popular: Bobby Chaplin and Laura DePew. And, this is ironic. Most Likely To Succeed: Bobby Chaplin and Lucy Carteret. ‘Nenna?’

You’ve been home three years. ‘You could have phoned.’

‘It’s. I couldn’t.’

‘And you want me to stop and talk to you?’

‘What are you doing out in this heat?’

‘It’s a nice day, I thought I’d walk.’

‘If it’s car trouble, I can call Triple A.’

‘I’m almost home.’ Home. Davis. Accusations and the fight.

‘Let me ride you, Nenna. You look beat.’

My feet were raw but I wasn’t about to stop now that I was so close. ‘I said, I’m fine.’

At First Street, which you have to cross to get into Far Acres, Bobby did stop, exactly like your dog hitting the electronic fence. ‘OK Nenna, take care.’

‘I’m sorry. I have a lot to do.’

I do. In this town, there’s a ritual checklist: call your lawyer, tell the kids, field a phone call from Coleman Rowell, who must have radar about these things, he’s like a sex vulture waiting to pounce, the list was running through my head. OK, lady, get this over with, then tell Coleman no. Change your hair and dress to kill and go looking for a good man who will for God’s sake do right by you. Bobby would be perfect, we could have started, but I wasn’t about to stop for him. I was bent on getting home. Every nerve and muscle in me was screaming but I had to end my own business before I could think about starting anything.

5

Dan

To find out about the past, you have to go there.

Dan reduced his mother to ashes in a brass box, sealed and weighted as requested, and rented a boat so he could drop her in the Atlantic off the beach at Misquamicut, where she used to take him when he was a kid. She hadn’t asked him to say a few words as the box with her in it plunged into the ocean, but he did. Never mind what he said over her. It is between them.

He did what you have to, the sad, necessary things. Filed insurance forms and settled with the funeral home. Cleaned out the apartment. Without her, the rooms were so empty that in a way it was a surgical strike. Goodwill took most of the furniture and useful small objects. He rented a storage locker for the rest. Met with her lawyer and closed up the house. His week is up, but he and his mother aren’t finished.

All his life, Lucy lived as though history began when she had him. She pretended there was nothing before life in New London, and he loved her well enough to let it go, although he didn’t, really.

He’s been carrying it all these years, and all these years later he’s found the hidden keys to Lucy’s life before Burt. She kept them in her jewel box, like notes that she wrote to him, but was afraid to send. Now that she’s safe from whatever she was afraid of, Dan is free to track down the answers to questions he promised not to ask. He’s in Fort Jude.

It was a gut decision: no questions, no regrets. It made itself. He didn’t quit his job, exactly, but he did call the office. His boss didn’t say yes or no because it wasn’t a question. He said, ‘Remember, your mother can only die once.’

There are so many ways to parse this that he can’t bear to start.

Dan Carteret doesn’t want to kill his mother all over again; he just wants to put this thing to rest. He’s here to strip mine her past and pull his father out.

With its flashy neon and artificial palms flanking fancy wrought iron benches, Fort Jude is nothing like New London – or Los Angeles, for that matter. It’s more like downtown Oz – real palm trees and plastic flowers in cement tubs line Central Avenue, with flowers in pots hanging from the ornamental lamp-posts, and mosaic obelisks marking the major cross streets. There’s so much cosmetic architecture here that it’s hard to tell the difference between what is and what used to be. Brash new buildings compete with old hotels tarted up with false fronts like gaudy party masks. Dan skims the facades like a speed reader, looking for places Lucy would have gone. He wants to walk into her past and figure out what went wrong and why she tried so hard to obliterate Fort Jude.

This is not the time for a Holiday Inn, Marriott, Sheraton, any of your anonymous, clean places. It’s not like he expects to run into his mother in the lobby, he just wants to stay somewhere that she might have come. He’s looking for a hotel with a history, where the homefolks meet for drinks in late afternoon – people his mother might have hung out with, the ones who were born here and stayed here, so that they segued from backstory into now without feeling a thing. He’d like to slide down the bar, all, Hi, I’m new here. Smile and make them like him, which he’s good at, even though he grew up pretty much alone. If he can make friends, maybe one of them will point him to Lucy’s old neighborhood. They might even know the house. Otherwise, he’ll have to go through Fort Jude street by street, block by block in his rented car, matching tree lines and front porches to the ones in his mother’s snapshot until he finds the place.

It takes him two passes to find it, but the Flordana is perfect. Never mind the wrought iron fence surrounding the overgrown courtyard and the gingerbread trim bolted to the long front porch. Behind its Victorian facade, the Flordana is straight out of the 1920s, blunt and flat-footed and sweet. At odds with the false front is the Art Deco sign, blue neon winking at him from behind faded plastic ivy: FLORDANA HOTEL. Set back from the street, the hotel crouches between hulking office blocks like a nice old lady forgotten on the sofa at a high school party, wedged between two jocks too stoned to notice.

It’s all cool until he parks and gets out of the car. It’s hotter out here than he thought. It’s . . . He doesn’t know. In the courtyard he gets an attack of the dry swallows: gulp. The tiled porches are green with moss. The cement courtyard has a tired, dingy look. As if this is too little, and he got here too late. Get over it! he tells himself. Don’t get weird and don’t pin any hopes on this. What does he think, that he can flash a snapshot of his mother and real Lucy will fall into his hands, buried secrets and all? That somebody will say, ‘Why, that’s Lucy Carteret, do you want to see her house?’ Not really. He’s a little crazy right now but he is, after all, a reporter. Was. Gulp.

Check in. Scope the place on the web before you start. This is no big deal. It’s just the beginning.

But what if she and his real father actually came to the Flordana, like, after the prom? Or she stood out front waiting for her bus home from her summer job, praying he would come by in his car. Unless he parked and tugged her inside the Flordana, and she got pregnant here. Don’t, asshole. Her lover could have been a night clerk or a waiter in the hotel coffee shop. Unless he . . .

Just don’t. Hope eats him up from the inside. He’ll walk in and find me. Be here. Would they know each other? He thinks so. It will play like a movie: Father. Son! Wait. The faithless shithead has a lot of explaining to do. Stupid, he knows, but losing people makes you stupid. Reporter, remember. You make your living finding out. Work this like any other story. Hit the right link and it will open up. Chapter. Verse. What happened to Lucy here. What’s so terrible about it, and who his people are, really. The begats.

It lodges in his throat: the begats.

Other people take family for granted, but then other people have photos of people who look like them posted somewhere, letters, birthday cards. Family trees. A chunk of Dan Carteret is missing. It isn’t just the no father that Lucy tried so hard to erase. It’s the gap ordinary mothers fill with particulars: where she’s from, who your grandparents are. What life was like before she got married and had you.

Stop that!

The woman at the desk is either a lot older or a lot younger than Lucy. She’s so carefully put together and made up that it’s hard to tell. Jointed silver fish dangle from her ears, very Florida. So’s the aggressively blonde hair. She looks fit in her frilled tank top, although the wrinkles in the tanned cleavage give her away. Full mouth. Nice smile. ‘Can I help you?’

‘I need a room.’

‘Lucky it’s the end of the season.’ She could do a commercial for those teeth whitening strips. ‘Take your pick.’

Rumpled after the long flight, wrecked by the week of last things and sweating through the back of his khaki coat, Dan realizes that gross as he looks right now, she’s coming on to him. ‘The cheapest, I suppose.’

‘Business trip?’

‘Ma’am?’

‘Jessie.’ The grin says he must look pretty good to her, or that she thinks she’s younger than she really is and he’s older than he looks, unless it’s just her way of adding some color to the day. ‘Now, what shall I put down?’

He doesn’t know.

‘You don’t look like a tourist.’ She means, What are you doing here? ‘If you’re here on business, you get our special rate.’

Words pop out. ‘I’m down here on a story.’ Why does this lie make him feel so much better?

‘You write books?’

‘No Ma’am. For my paper.’ Like a person here on real business. Smile for the lady, she believes. So can you. ‘The Los Angeles Times? A story for the magazine.’

‘Cool. What about?’

He isn’t sure. ‘If I tell you, I lose my job.’

‘So I should put down business,’ Jessie says.

Dan doesn’t answer. He’s thinking hard. There’s some reason he burned out searching the web details on the human fires. Three old women. Here. Cool! Here’s his readymade rationale; two words and he’s justified. ‘Research trip,’ he says, grinning. ‘Preliminary research.’ Just saying it makes him feel better. As a matter of fact, it’s a terrific story, he was just too fried to see it. Like a visa to this strange country, Lucy’s fragment of newspaper justifies his presence here. ‘Now if I could have my key . . .’

She isn’t exactly holding him hostage, but she hasn’t started checking him in. ‘What are you researching?’

‘Just an old story.’

‘Ooooh,’ she says, fishing. ‘We have a lot of old stories here.’

‘It’s a kind of a mystery.’

‘We have a lot of those. Which one?’

‘I. Um. I’m not at liberty to talk about it yet.’ The story shapes up in his head like one of those great unwritten novels – the kind writers only talk about in bars because by daylight, they evaporate. He frames the pitch: FORT JUDE, TOWN OF HUMAN FURNACES. His big break.

‘I said, which one?’

‘Ma’am?’

‘Not Ma’am.’ She has a very sweet grin. ‘Jessie. Which mystery?’

It’s been a long week. There’s no logic to it but he can’t be here at the desk much longer. He just can’t. ‘An old one,’ he says, finishing with a warm smile that he hopes will be enough.

It isn’t. ‘Oh,’ she says, all faux naïve, ‘which one.’

‘Spontaneous human combustion!’ Why does that embarrass him?

‘Oh, that old thing. Lorna and Mrs Keesler and that other lady.’ Nice grin. ‘You know, there are books.’

‘I’ll find a new angle.’

‘Good luck with that.’

‘I have to. It’s my job.’ He slaps his wallet on the counter: business as usual. ‘Now if you’ll just.’

‘We’ll put you down as business,’ she says smoothly, scrawling in the showy red leather register planted like a stage prop on the marble counter next to the brass telephone with its standing mouthpiece and a receiver that you have to point at your ear. ‘But I need to know how long you’re going to be in town.’

‘Good question,’ he says.

‘There’s a rate break if you rent by the week.’

With grin that doesn’t quite come off, he repeats the line written for him by the boss he probably no longer has. ‘For as long as it takes.’

‘OK then.’ She makes a tick next to his name. ‘Now, print your name in the book while I run your plastic. Folders with maps and tourist attractions over there in the rack. Nice handwriting.’ She hands back his card. ‘I have you on Five. Anything else I can do for you?’

‘Not right now, not that I can think of. Well, one other thing.’ He takes it and turns to go. Then need overwhelms reason and he pulls out his picture of Lucy, snapped in front of her house. ‘So. Can you tell me where this is?’

‘Sure,’ she says, now that his card has cleared. Leaning over the counter, she shifts position, letting out a wave of sunscreen and perfumed deodorant compounded by body heat. ‘Always happy to help.’

‘I mean, this house?’ She’s squinting so he slides the snapshot closer adding, ‘For. Uh, an architectural piece?’

That blind, vague smile tells him that she’s one of those women who can’t see without glasses but is too vain to put them on. Handing it back, she rests her knuckles on the counter. ‘Sorry.’

He says, ‘About . . . Old Florida?’

‘Sorry, I can’t help you.’ She shrugs, rearranging her cleavage.

What is she, coming on to me? Damn, all his statements come out with question marks. Damn, he should have slept on the plane. ‘So. You don’t know the house?’

She isn’t looking at the snapshot, she’s watching him. ‘Not really. Is there anything else I can do for you?’

‘So,’ he says, ‘I have this other picture?’ Knowing she’ll need glasses he says tactfully, ‘The faces are pretty small.’ He slides it across the counter.

She may not recognize faces, but she knows shapes. Jessie slaps on her glasses and looks again. Dan is too distracted to pick up the change in her as she says, carefully, ‘No, I don’t know these people. From the looks of the car, that’s from the dark ages. I’m a lot more recent than that.’ She takes off the glasses with her foxy, jagged grin.

‘OK then.’ He puts it away. ‘If I can just have my key?’

Odd. It’s like a study in stop motion photography. Woman, arriving at a conclusion. Click. Click. Click. Let’s get this done. She pulls a big brass key off the hook. ‘Room 51. I’m alone at the desk today. You can find it, right?’

‘Yes Ma’am.’

She does not say, It’s Jessie, please! She dismisses him. ‘OK then.’

‘OK.’ Dan lingers just long enough to be sure she’s done with him. What did I do wrong? At the elevator, he turns and looks back. Jessie is doubled over the register, squinting at his entry. Then he sees her reach for the glasses again. As the elevator doors open he sees her snap open her phone. The woman who could have cared less about the snapshot stabs a number with her fingernail. She looks up with a sweet, distracted smile just as the steel doors snap shut on them.

6

Jessie

She didn’t need glasses to know that was Chape Bellinger’s old Jeep or name the others: Bobby Chaplin, Buck Coleman, Stitch Von Harten. Fucking Brad Kalen, God damn his eyes.

The minute the elevator doors close on the kid, Jessie hits 8 on her speed dial. She entered the number in a blinding rage when she re-entered Fort Jude. Given that she wants to smash her fist into that big, wet smacky mouth of his, she’s avoided Kalen ever since. In spite of the fact that Jessie Vukovich from Pierce Point is now a member of the Fort Jude Club in good standing and last year he was the fucking Commodore, she’s managed, but now . . .

She always suspected that life’s a bitch. Turns out, it is.

His machine picks up, which is probably just as well. Jessie has been sitting on this for so long that acid fills her mouth. Things the bastard bastard needs to hear pile up in her head – packed in like enough nitro to blow up the world. If they spoke, it would all come out too fast, and Brad is stupid. Let the walking slime mold dangle by the short hairs for a little bit. She wants to see him hang by his guts, twisting in the wind while she takes her sweet time, laying it out for him.

As it is, the slick, radio-announcer track he laid on the machine goes on forever, smoothly supplying his cell-phone number and the number at the club. She has a full minute to compose before she spits:

‘Now, don’t call me back and don’t ask questions. Just be aware that nothing you did is ever over. In fact, it’s come to town. After what you did, it damn well serves you right.’

Shaking with fury, she ducks into the office. She has to compose herself before she can do makeup and put on her chic silk jacket and her diamond studs and high heels for lunch at the prestigious Fort Jude Club. She hates that she can’t stop thinking of it as the prestigious Fort Jude Club. People who couldn’t see her for dirt in high school have changed toward her since she came back to town in her Lexus and bought this hotel outright, thanks to the late Billy James, her fourth and final ex. The shittiest snots from Fort Jude High are her new best friends now, and even the boys look at her differently. Last year she sat down on the club patio with the Friday Lunch Bunch – on a trial basis, she thought, but she’s been sitting down with them regular ever since.

It’s silly, but given that everybody used to think of Jessie James, née Jessie Vukovich, as that cheap girl from Pierce Point, it’s a very big deal. She has to get her shit together and get her smile working right so she can go down there and face them.

Even though it’s the desk clerk’s day off, she shuts the office. When he comes back down to the lobby, cute Dan Carteret will think she’s gone for good, which is just as well. She likes the kid, but she doesn’t want to talk to him, not as raw and hopeful and helpless as he is. There are things he doesn’t know and things he should never have to know.

Poor kid, she thinks. Thinks he can walk in cold, ask around, and everybody will open up and tell him everything. Fat chance. There are some things only Jessie knows, and she’s not about to tell anybody anything. She sighs. Poor kid, his knuckles were white when he signed the book, this is a very big deal for him.

Then she focuses on the real problem. The Lunch Bunch. What to say when they ask why she’s late. They’re nice enough to her now, but underneath Jessie knows who she is and they know who they are and there’s still a huge difference between them. She’s learned to hide it. In Fort Jude, the littlest things can give you away, so she has to be careful. Appearances are that important.

7

Bobby Chaplin

It isn’t pathetic, really, it’s just the kind of thing you end up doing when you’re not yourself. He’s been out of work for so long that he isn’t sure who that person is.

For the seventh consecutive day since Nenna McCall limped by, Bobby is out in the sunshine, weeding around the cement lions on the front steps. In the dawn of his doomed real estate venture, Grandfather planted cast cement sphinxes and lions at every intersection in Pine Vista, which is what the late Herman Chaplin named his dream tract at the height of the Florida real estate boom. He poured thousands into private roads out here in the Twenties, when the sky was the limit and a thousand dollars bought something. The old man bought up every plot between here and Far Acres, in the happy expectation that the rich would come clamoring to moor their yachts on private docks behind their new houses. He envisioned a Spanish stucco wonderland out here: golf course, tennis courts, Moorish castles on the waterfront, as many as the traffic would bear. The last of his money went into building his dream house, the model home he could show buyers. One look and they’d come swarming to invest. He laid down octagonal tile sidewalks and convinced the city to pave the streets with red brick an unfortunate six weeks before the Florida real estate crash. It came a full five years before the national stock market tanked: an event that was anticlimactic down here, where land is everything.

Herman’s brick streets are overgrown now, and jungle has reclaimed all his vacant lots. Most of his stony sentinels were stolen or vandalized and the ones that survive are decaying, all but the two flanking the Fourth Street approach to Pine Vista and the ones in front of his dream house. Grandfather kept them in mint condition until he died, at which point Bobby’s father took over, which Bobby is expected to do. Like Bobby, the lions look tired; they’ve been doing what they’re doing for too long.

Like Bobby, they need a change.

He isn’t out here looking for Nenna, exactly, but it would be nice to talk to her. He’d like to know what brought her by here the other day, and why she was walking. The woman looked like she could use a little there-there – which he is happy to give, if she’ll only tell him what’s wrong. He isn’t out front waiting for her, but there’s always a chance that she’ll come by and they can talk.

Not that there isn’t plenty to do. He’s yanking sandspurs out of whatever Bermuda grass remains in the doomed front lawn. Unlike his grandfather, who took to weeding the walks all the way up to Fourth Street, Bobby is not crazy, nor is he going there. He has responsibilities.

Until he lost his grip, Herman Chaplin saw to it that the pink-and-gray octagons in the front walk were lifted and leveled every year. Then Bobby’s father did. His parents died gratefully, like relieved commanders turning over the helm of a doomed ship. Bobby sees to it now. As the only functional Chaplin, he sees to a lot of things. His siblings aren’t fit to go out.

He wishes Nenna had let him help last week, she was so harassed. Lovely woman, looking maybe a tad old for her age – which is his age, more or less, they were in the same year all through school. Little Nenna was at the graduation house parties out at Huntington Beach, at the ruinous end of senior year at FJHS.

It was awful; he’s never had more fun. Until the end.

That June he and Chape Bellinger and Brad Kalen, Stitch Von Harten and Buck Coleman stayed free in a condo Chape’s aunt was stupid enough to loan. He remembers they promised to keep their feet off the furniture, which was covered in flowered chintz; there were all these little china things around and he remembers waking up on the pink shag rug with broken china mashed into his cheek but that’s all he remembers because they were loaded for a solid calendar week.

They ran around until the sun came up and then you slept until three and got up and ran around all night, ingesting whatever until everybody was bombed into insensibility. Then they fell into Chape’s Jeep and roared up and down the beach until the sun came up; at low tide the sand was packed that hard. They tore along screaming, scattering early morning walkers like gulls. Every condo and cottage on Huntington Beach was full that week; kids from five Suncoast high schools converged, so the people you fell down with just outside the circle of the bonfire weren’t always people you knew.

Cathy Rhue had her folks’ beach house for the week, she was famous for her body. She brought all the usual girls. Betsy Cashwell and the cheerleaders rented a cabana at the DelMar, everybody who was anybody came to Huntington Beach. Sexy Jessie Vukovich was there, but nobody knew where she was staying. Even Lucy came, but not until the last night, her grandmother was that repressive. His heart turns over whenever he thinks of Lucy, which he tries not to do. He slipped his tiny gold football into her hand after the May crowning but she never mentioned it. Everybody but Lucy was there for the week, and there were parties every night. Nenna Henderson was there, he thinks, but in the background, because she wasn’t famous for anything. Not that they weren’t all pretty. In high school certain elements gave you distinction and everyone else was a blur.

For instance, Jessie Vukovich was famous because she would do it with anybody, and in spite of the cold distance she kept, Lucy was famous for her looks. The cheerleaders you remembered because you all rode the bus to away games and you did what you could with them in the back. When you were team captain you had the best and the sexiest and the most famous, but that was before.

Nobody at school knew it but Bobby was also smart. He managed to hide it until he got into Harvard, the first in ten years from Fort Jude High. At the time he actually believed getting into Harvard made him better than he was, which turned their senior blast into a curious exercise in detachment.

All week, at least until that awful Saturday night, Bobby was like a passenger poised at the top of the gangplank, waving goodbye to all those little people on the dock, watching them recede as he left them behind.

Nothing turns out the way you thought. Most of us handle it, but people like Bobby are inclined to dwell. Something grave happened to Bobby Chaplin between then and now, and long before Grace left him, it broke him in two. He can’t leave it alone and he can’t figure it out.

People like Bobby actually believe there is a fulcrum, an exact, identifiable point when life tips and everything goes downhill. With people like Bobby, it’s never who they are, or what they did. It’s, I was going along fine until X happened. They need something to blame. The problem is, they can’t put their finger on the X.

He has wasted his life on it. One of his shrinks said, It’s never what happens that makes the difference, Mr Chaplin. It’s how you handle it.

Well, he thinks, that’s easy for you to say. He feels bad about what came down at senior houseparties. No. That he was involved. No. That he was out of his mind on vodka and whatever they were smoking and lying nose down in the mangroves when he should have . . . Don’t go there.

Listen, he finished Harvard magna cum in spite of everything; he went to Harvard Law and ended up in finance, great job with a big firm so, fine.

Then, why is he here? After a year back in Fort Jude, after months of stewing over first causes, Bobby Chaplin is in no condition to analyze.

It’s crazy, but there’s the outside possibility that Nenna knows. He wants to ask Nenna Henderson – no, McCall – what went wrong in that wonderful, catastrophic senior week, like, what does she remember? Were there warning signs? Maybe she saw things he was too trashed to note, or deconstruct. He thinks now that the event that brought him down is located back then, but he can’t be sure. Too much happened. He was drunk and lovelorn, Buck was drunk and mourning his dead twin brother, Chape was off somewhere getting it on with Cathy, Brad was drunk and vicious and Stitch was just drunk. Nothing was clear.

If Bobby had stayed sober maybe he’d remember, but you didn’t. They were kids! The parties were great and you were drunk all the time, it was a given; people said things they’d never say and did things they had to be wasted to do. Worse things happened that weekend and he was too trashed to know if it’s his fault.

The last thing Bobby Chaplin wants to do is stand out here on the front walk strip mining memory lane, but he doesn’t want to go back inside either, not with his siblings idling in there, sour and mismatched, the moth and the toad. You can hear the TV from here. Instead he lingers, listening to the light breeze playing in his grandfather’s stand of Australian pines. In the Twenties these trees were as common as pig’s tracks, but the big freeze took out most of them and the ancient towering pines on the Chaplin property line are among the last. They dwarf the house. All his life Bobby has loved the dry rasp of wind in dead pine needles: the sound of something that he knows is coming, but can not yet name.

In fact what Bobby hears coming is a car, but he doesn’t register until it stops and someone gets out. Startled, he whirls. ‘Nenna?’

It isn’t her. A young man in a new Florida shirt pulls down the brim on his airport Panama to hide whatever he may be feeling. Polite enough. Puzzled. ‘Sir?’

‘Are you looking for me?’ He won’t recognize the spike of hope in Bobby’s voice.

‘I’m not sure. I’m looking for . . .’

‘Bob Chaplin. Goldman Sachs?’ He’s lost everything that he used to be, but Bobby still has that strong handshake.

‘You’re a broker then.’

‘Was.’

The young man considers. ‘Then, no.’

‘Oh. You must be lost,’ Bobby says, disappointed.

‘Not exactly. GPS.’

Of course. Confident post-millennial dude, fully equipped. There’ll be a laptop and a digicam in the backpack, enough DVDs to let him fly home without getting bored; smartphone in the pocket of the Florida shirt. It hasn’t been that long since Bobby himself lived in the high end, high velocity, high tech working world – color copiers, CD and DVD burners, extra screens so you can do everything at once. Blackberry, iPhone, which is the phone of choice? He’s lost track. He rocks with homesickness for all that. Whoever this kid is, he probably thinks Bobby is retired, as in, over with. Nice old fud tending his front walk. I’m not that old! ‘iPad.’ What am I forgetting? ‘WiFi booster.’ He adds, to establish his credentials, ‘Next-generation everything.’

‘Pretty much.’ Nice grin. Nice looking kid, sandy hair, not from around here, too pale. Tourist, probably, fresh off the plane.

It’s not half-bad, standing out here with him. If Nenna comes along she’ll see that he is by no means Mr Lonely Guy. He has other people in his life. Nice kid, Bobby thinks. If we hit it off, ask if he’d like to meet for a drink later, down at the club. The psychic accident that brought Bobby back to Fort Jude makes him reluctant to look up old acquaintances but it would be extremely cool to walk into the Fort Jude Club with this personable young guy from up north. Don’t just stand here, start the conversation. It would be rude to ask what he’s doing in Pine Vista, where tourists never come.

Bobby says what you say to outsiders. ‘I bet you’re enjoying our sun.’

‘What? Oh. Yeah, I guess.’ The young man isn’t attending to the conversation, not really. He’s studying the house. If they were in a horror movie he’d see Maggie Chaplin’s pale face bobbing at the window; she never goes out. In real life Al Junior could wander out on the porch any minute now, scratching the wedge of belly where his T-shirt has ceased to meet his jeans. To Bobby’s relief the face of the house stays blank.

‘Oh,’ Bobby says. ‘You came to see the house. It’s a kind of a landmark.’

‘The house.’ Whoever he is, the kid jerks to attention. ‘Is that your house?’

Oh God, don’t ask him if he wants to look around inside. Not with things the way they are. ‘If you’re a contractor, we’re not looking to renovate right now.’

‘I’m not.’

‘Who are you, anyway?’

Now the kid tilts back the hat to prove that he has nothing to hide. He has a very sweet grin. ‘Nobody you’d know.’

‘I guess I mean, what are you doing out here in Pine Vista?’

‘Is this Pine Vista?’

Bobby says drily, ‘It was supposed to be.’

‘Sir?’

‘Just an idea my grandfather thought he had. But you.’

‘I. Um, I’m looking for . . .’ Whatever he’s looking for, he isn’t ready to say. Instead he jerks his head at the house. ‘Do you know who lives there?’

‘I do. Temporarily,’ Bobby adds, but not fast enough. Who are you kidding? ‘I mean, for as long as it takes.’

The stranger looks disappointed. Bobby isn’t exactly doddering but the kid says, the way you do to an old person who gets confused, ‘You’re sure.’

‘Hell yes I’m sure.’ Oh, don’t dismiss me like that! ‘What are you really here about?’

He has a hard time getting it out. ‘Do you know who owned it before?’

‘I told you, my father.’ Bobby isn’t sure why this makes him so angry. ‘And his father before that. And tell whoever you’re representing that we don’t intend to sell.’

‘I’m not here to buy anything!’ Wounded, the kid thrusts a picture at him. ‘Look, I just. I’m looking for this lady’s house?’

Everything in Bobby stops. All he hears is the rush of his own blood. It takes him a while to drag a response out of the dead silence in his heart. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Did you know her?’

Shaken, Bobby is glad that he, and not this young guy, is the old person here. He is too young to know how carefully we are taught to dissemble. ‘I don’t think so. No. No. It’s not the only Spanish castle in Florida.’

Too much, probably, but the outsider carrying Lucy’s picture is in no shape to read the fine print in Bobby’s face. Every line in his body sags. He shoves the snapshot back into his pocket. ‘I see.’

He looks so messed up that Bobby says kindly, ‘Is there anything else I can do for you?’

The young man thinks before he answers. When he does it’s nothing Bobby expects. ‘Did you ever hear of a woman named Muriel Keesler, got on fire?’

‘Keesler. Oh,’ Bobby says, relieved. ‘That. Moms used it to scare us. This is what happens when you play with matches, kids . . .’

‘And two others.’

Bobby says sharply, ‘What are you really here about?’

The answer is so careful that it may not be an answer. ‘Going up in flames. I’m down here on a story.’

‘Reporter!’ This makes Bobby feel better. ‘You never said your name.’

‘Dan. I’m looking for the house?’

Bobby does not say, Dan what. They can’t be out here in the road much longer. He needs to be alone so he can think. ‘Where it happened? The last one standing is over on 57th.’

‘You mean the one where Mrs Archambault.’ Changing expressions race across his face. ‘I saw the photos.’

Bobby says, ‘Pretty bad. If Lorna’d seen herself like that, she would have died.’

The wind in the pines doesn’t stop, but the air around the newcomer’s head is still. There is an odd moment before he says, ‘You mean the foot and the chair.’

‘My point. In her day, she was quite the lady. If you’re researching the family . . .’ Bad idea, Chaplin. Stop your mouth.

He doesn’t have to. The kid cuts him off. ‘I need to see the house.’

For a frantic half-second, Bobby thinks he means this house. Maggie, doing a Mrs Rochester in the window. Al watching QVC. ‘This is not the best day.’

‘No. Her house.’

‘Of course.’ Make a smile for him, Bobby. Make it good. ‘It’s back that way, one block in from the corner of Fourth and 57th. Where you made the left at the Publix? If you see the water, you’ve gone too far. Look for the banyan, it’s . . .’

‘Thanks.’ The kid is halfway to his car.

Bobby says anyway, ‘The oldest one in town.’ Then he goes inside to do what he has to do.

Maggie’s fussing over her African violets. The sunlight playing on those white, white hands is just sad. After her 9/11 meltdown, it’s the best she can do. Younger than he is, and she has Little Old Lady written all over her.

His big brother is kicked back in front of the Shopping Channel with a beer. If anybody asks, Al is retired, which is a good cover if you don’t know. Retirement is as good a name for it as any. He’s not that far north of fifty, too many idle years ahead, but is that an indictable offense? Between them, QVC and The Shopping Channel have everything Al wants and they have it in his size, second day delivery, which gives him a giddy feeling of control. Al’s happy, Bobby thinks, or what passes for happy, and this is even more depressing then the set of his sister’s mouth as she nips dead petals off yet another African violet.

He’s going upstairs to phone when Margaret looks up from her violets. ‘You had a phone call.’

‘When?’

‘Just now. I called you, but I guess you didn’t hear.’

‘I was talking to someone.’

‘You.’ She snaps a head off a violet. ‘You’re always talking to someone.’

Not really. ‘Did they leave a message?’

‘I am not your answering service,’ Margaret says resentfully, apparently pissed off by his contact with real life.

He loves his sister, he hates seeing her like this. He says, ‘Look, you can’t just go into mourning and stay there.’

‘OK, it was Chape Bellinger.’

‘Shit.’ You reach a stage in life where you can’t tell whether a phone call from somebody you used to know is a good thing or a bad one. It’s embarrassing, given that they were bonded in high school. They haven’t spoken since Bobby got home, and that was last spring. When you get right down to it why would they, Chape is a litigator, Bobby’s heard, demon in the courtroom, president of the Gryphon Club, kids’ soccer coach, king of the world. Given what just happened, they have to talk anyway. Lucy’s picture, in this stranger’s hands. He has it planned: Bob Chaplin, returning Chape Bellinger. Sound official, arm’s-length. Businesslike. Give him the bad news, whatever it is, and at this point he isn’t sure. But the number Chape left is not the office. It’s the house. They’ve known each other for so long that when Chape picks up, Bobby says, ‘It’s me.’

Big, handsome guy, big voice. ‘Hey, you.’

‘You called?’

‘I did.’ Chape’s third generation Fort Jude. He never starts a meeting until he’s made his manners. ‘How’ve you been?’

‘Good. You?’ Bobby winces.

‘I can’t complain. How long have you been home?’

People gossip. It’s not like Chape doesn’t know. ‘Too long.’

‘All this time and I’ve been meaning to . . .’

‘I know.’ Chape is waiting for him to say, ‘I have too,’ so he does. He did mean to call Chape, really. He just hasn’t, is all. Now he has to offer, ‘Maybe I can give you and Sallie dinner at the club.’

‘We’d love to, just as soon as . . .’ Wait for it. The hesitation. The apologetic, ‘You how it is when you get busy.’

‘Everybody’s busy.’

Like a teacher handing out the consolation prize, Chape says, ‘But we’ll look for you at the party tonight.’

Bobby laughs. ‘I’d rather see me dead in the rain.’

‘That’s kind of why I called. Listen, Bob. We have a problem.’

Confused, Bobby asks, ‘How did you find out?’

‘Word gets around.’ Chape laughs, to show Bobby he’s in charge. Then he rethinks. Puzzled, he asks, ‘How did you?’

‘He was here.’

‘Brad?’

‘Brad!’ Bobby’s stomach sours. ‘Fuck Brad. I haven’t seen Brad since college. Listen Chape, we have a real problem.’

‘Explain.’

‘A kid was here. Could be Lucy’s.’

Fucking lawyer, Chape asks in that controlled tone. ‘How do you know?’

‘He came looking for her house.’ Bobby is deciding whether or not to tell him about the snapshot.

Chape should ask him why, but he doesn’t. For a long, uncomfortable moment, he doesn’t say anything. When they were kids, Bobby’s pal Bellinger drove teachers nuts with his empty, innocent stare: Who, me? Bobby doesn’t have to be there to see it – the smooth, untroubled look of a man whose mind is as empty as a pond. ‘What does that have to do with me?’

‘He’s asking questions.’ Take that, you bland, self-important bastard. Like I’m going to spell it out.

‘I see.’ Chape says smoothly, ‘Let’s keep it to ourselves, OK?’

Bobby groans. ‘You know this town. One phone call and everybody will know.’

Bellinger uses the dramatic pause. Take that! Then: ‘They don’t have to know we’re connected. Can you hold? Another call.’

Bobby holds, wondering what would be lost if he just hung up.

Before he can, Chape is back. Crisp and urgent. Agenda Man. ‘Something’s come up. Give me your cell number. I may need you here.’

8

Dan Carteret

Not every decision Dan makes is rational. They said, ‘Your mom just died. Don’t try to make big decisions or operate heavy machinery until you’re over it.’ Yeah, right. He dropped everything and flew to Fort Jude – on what? Two snapshots and a gold plated football. Weird stories about human furnaces, printed out at a Kinko’s in New London.

What was he thinking?

That his mother stashed her past in that box on her high dresser for him to find, but it’s a long way from there to here.

His first try fell flat – ten minutes, an hour ago – how long has he been sitting here under a tree outside the Publix? Stupid, thinking he could walk up to the house in Lucy’s snapshot and find Family. Grandparents. Aunts. That they’d hug him, all, My how you’ve grown, ply him with milk and cookies and tell him everything. Or that Lucy’s secret lover would show up for the Greek recognition scene: Father! The smack of flesh on flesh colliding. Son!

Instead there was only Chaplin. Was the curtain moving in the Magic Kingdom turret behind him, a woman peeking out? He can’t be sure. He should have stuck it to the charming bastard while he had him, flashed the Jeep snapshot, but Chaplin is too – what. Faded to be one of them. Even thinking about it makes his belly shrink. The man was laid open, standing out there in the road with his hands floating up like origami cranes.

Shit, Dan should have stuck it to him. —You knew her, you probably took this fucking picture.

The trouble is, he can’t prove it. He should have homed in: —What else would she be doing out in front of your house, back when you could still afford to paint it? Back when she was happy.

He should have leaned on Chaplin, hard. —What changed her, or is it who? Was it you?

He was too seized up to ask, —Are you him?

He isn’t ready yet. Afraid Chaplin will say yes and when Dan gets old, he’ll be weak and apologetic, just like him. Coward, he took directions to the Archambault house, thanked the guy, got back his car and left. It’s not like he was running away, he just couldn’t be there, OK? Not that he’s dodging that particular question. It’s just too soon.

In fact, he is running ahead of the answer.

He used to think anything was possible; kids do. When he found his real dad everything would change. When Lucy said it wasn’t Burt his heart jumped. Now! But she bound him with, He wouldn’t want you to know. The rest is gnawing its way out of his belly now. What was she afraid to tell him? That his genetic package contains a wild card, he decides. That he’s been holding it since birth. He knows in his gut that there’s something waiting inside him that he has no name for, some buried shame or latent power or unimaginable secret, and here in the town where his mother grew up and – he thinks – met his father and fell in love, the knowledge leaves him laid wide open.

Waiting for it to show itself.

It can’t be Chaplin. He has to know. He runs his fingers along his jaw, divining the bony structure. He and Lucy have the same eyes, but the shape of his skull comes from someone else, not that polished failure he left paddling in the road. He holds his hands up to the light, half-expecting to see the truth outlined in the tapering fingers or written in the network of veins on his naked arms. A man with superpowers would see everything, down to the last capillary, illuminated, but this is just Dan Carteret, hunched in the dirt under a tree in the Publix parking lot in Fort Jude Florida, wondering.

He needs to look into his father’s face and see.

How he will age. Whether he can be happy.

What he will become.

Too much bad coffee, no food and no sleep breed questions. They swarm round his head like gnats. Batting them away, he lurches to his feet like Swamp Thing and goes into the Publix to refuel. He grabs potato chips, hot dog buns to sop up stomach acids – when did he eat? Nuts and Slim Jims for protein, Red Bull for that caffeine jolt and the essential sugar rush. He carts his stuff outside and sits down in the shade to eat.

He starts a list.

Scope the Archambault house, now that you’re here. Take digis and make notes so you can write a feature to justify your presence here. Find neighbors who lived here back in the day, before the neighborhood went to crap. Line up interviews for tomorrow, when you’re not so fried. Go back to the hotel for a WiFi connection and file a pitch. Then you can crash. Tomorrow, look for Lucy’s life before him, find it in the morgue at the Fort Jude Star.

Good, he thinks. A sensible plan.

But Lucy’s snapshots seethe in his pocket like unanswered letters or overdue bills: his smiling mother, clasping her notebook in front of Chaplin’s house. She was there that day for a reason. The more he thinks about it, more he knows he isn’t finished there. When the camera caught her with that lovely smile, was she coming out or going in? Chaplin damn well knows. What else does Chaplin know?

What she was really like, Dan thinks bitterly. Before.

Standing, he heads for Archambault’s, but his mind is stuck somewhere between here and there.

In the lexicon of next things, there’s one more thing he has to do today. If he can prove that Chaplin knows her, he’ll nail the bastard to the wall. Fuck yes he knew her. In a town this small, how could he not? All he needs is a clipping, yearbook, prom photo to link the two of them, or letters . . . just something he kept.

He has to go back to Pine Vista. Tonight. When you think your source is hiding something you lean on him, hard, but Dan is too messed up to tell whether Chaplin is hiding something or just plain hiding out in that Spanish stucco heap. This time he’ll go armed. Bring takeout. This may take a while. Jumbo coffee. Maybe a six-pack. Eat while you wait. Black jeans, he decides, black T-shirt so nobody sees you out there in the night; sneakers, so they won’t hear you creeping up.

He’ll hole up in the car for as long as it takes, waiting for him to go to bed. No, better. To go out.

Then he’ll break in.

9

Steffy McCall

The next person to meet Dan Carteret is Steffy McCall. The last thing Steffy wants to do is meet anyone. Not today, not with her mom and dad running around crazy, all ragged and disrupted. Something happened last week, and they have gone to a place that there’s no getting back from.

Steffy saw her very own mother from upstairs in this deserted house. Her mom came wandering out of the Publix lot and across the street. She was way too close to where Steffy and them hide out and smoke weed, like, right down there in the yard. She was this close! She plopped down under the banyan tree underneath the attic window, which scared the shit out of Steffy. Your mother, outside your private place!

Mom! She’d wreck everything if she found out.

Steffy and Carter Bellinger that she is secretly in love with, plus Billy and lascivious Jen, have been hanging out here ever since the day Carter broke in. For the first time, Steffy had her own safe place and it was wonderful. Then, last week – last week! – her clueless, fat-assed mom wandered across the street from the Publix and sat down under the big old banyan; you could see the top of her head from here.

They were all loaded by that time, out of their heads on Jolt Cola and weed and it was killing Steffy, but she had to play mean bitch and shush them before Mom heard. ‘Shut your hole,’ she told Carter who she really is in love with, and she almost fucking cried. ‘That’s my mother, so shut your fucking hole.’

If she saw them it would be the end of parties in this house, and Mom would be up her ass with a fine-toothed comb. As it turned out Mom’s mind was on something else. She just flapped like a confused penguin and went tottering off, so, whew.

It was good she was too distracted to hear them, but as it turns out, Mom was distracted by something really bad. By the time Steffy got home that day she had written a whole cover story that her folks were too upset to hear. Dad was dragging the rollaway bed to the far end of the house and everything was different.

Thank God for this place. She and Carter and them were rolling out of the Publix with the trunk full of beer and munchies that day. Instead of driving out to Pierce Point to get loaded like always, he broke into this creaky old house and they ran everywhere. In the attic, Carter said, ‘This is the place.’ It was like fate. Yang.

Steffy was all ying, ‘And we are the ones.’

They scavenged outside the big places on Coral Shores and Carter stole some great stuff from his pool house. Jen had an air mattress and pillows and a step-on pump to keep it fat and Billy brought the beer. Their attic looks like home now – except for this ancient dressmaker’s dummy, saying a snotty fuck you to their X-Box posters and Cinemart lobby cards which are kind of mocking her now that she is here alone and everybody else is on the bus.

If Carter really loved me, he’d have stayed back. But no, he was like, ‘Come on, it’s fun!’

Fun just doesn’t seem right to her, given the way things are at home.

Nobody knows where she is.

Mom thinks she’s on the class trip to Busch Gardens. Her friends think she’s at the dentist. If Carter really cared, he’d have known that Steffy was too messed up to go. He’d have stayed back with her and they’d be kissing now. They might even be, oh, Steffy’s too young, but she thinks about Doing It; she thinks about it all the time. Alone in the dry attic, she has to wonder: do other kids sneak in here when we’re not around?

If Carter had stayed back today . . . Yeah, right. Shit. If he wants to get with Jen Cashwell in the back of the bus, OK, let him, Steffy is on to bigger things.

Like personal space. She only just found out she had one – it was in a magazine Mom had. Unless this is her own personal down time, which people need more than they need beer or weed or even Carter, that she loves so much, heavy-breathing in their ear. It’s hot in here, but she’s cool. Some people would say Steffy was hiding, but she’s not. She just doesn’t want to be around anybody right now, not even Carter Bellinger.

All Steffy wants to be in the world . . . All she wants to be is alone, which is what she is. Or she thinks she is. Even in a town as safe and sleepy as Fort Jude, you never know.

Another girl would think the attic was creepy, but Steffy and Carter and them have had so many beers and smoked so much weed and told so many secrets in this old place that it’s like home.

At this point, it’s better. No parents all undertones, hissing and spitting over things they don’t want her to know about, and no Dad desperately pretending it’s not a fight. No Mom, all smirched from crying and, like, trying to be brave.

Steffy can hardly bear the sight of her mother these days, trotting around in her perky pastel outfits and heavy makeup, with a lipstick line that she can’t keep straight because her mouth won’t hold still. No Mom for Steffy for a while, thank God, and please, no Dad. She doesn’t know how she feels about Dad, the way he is. He is not bearing up well under the pussy whip, and, what Steffy can’t stand?

All this, everything that’s coming down on him? Davis brought it on himself. She found out about him and Aunt Gayle before Mom did, you know, from that time they flew out to California? Mom dyed her hair and bought outfits for the trip – gaudy colors that she hated, so she must have known something was up. You’d have to be blind, deaf and stupid not to see it. Like, from the minute they walked into the house in Toluca Lake. A blind wombat would pick up on the loaded looks, that cunty smile on Gayle, and if Steffy didn’t know it for sure, by the time they got back from a day in Ventura she did. Gayle took Stef and her folks and her second husband Clueless Ed and their assorted kids for a day at the beach. After lunch she sent Ed off for charcoal and some obscure item that she knew would take him forever to find, sunscreen SPF 2000, maybe, or eye of newt. That left Steffy and her sort-of cousins beached while Gayle took Dad body surfing and Mom sat on a rock looking confused.

That night Mom went to bed early and everybody else sat on the back deck of the house Ed built, listening to Gayle and Dad talk about the great times they had when they were kids back at the family camp in Myrtle Beach, the cousins just played and played. Grampa McCall was Superintendent of Schools in Columbia, South Carolina, and Dad never lets you forget it. He built the camp so the generations could gather, Dad said, and Aunt Gayle said, We had the best time. It was like an opera or some half-assed sentimental duet that went on and on.

Dad hardly noticed when Mom stuck her head out the upstairs window, he and Aunt Gayle laughed and talked while Clueless Ed cleaned up and toasted marshmallows for the kids, and they talked on while the kids lit sparklers and ran around screaming in the dark and they went on talking instead of putting the kids to bed, which they were supposed to do, so Steffy was up almost all night. After all, Mom said later, it’s the only thing I asked you to do. This was a first in both households, surprise. The forgetting. They got laughing so hard that around midnight Mom came out in her bathrobe and rasped, ‘Keep it down.’

After that trip Mom bought a whole ’nother wardrobe; she even lost a couple of pounds, but by then it was too late.

No time for that now, Abernathy, Steffy thinks, Dad’s joke.

She is in a really strange mood. If she goes home any time between now and 5:30, when her folks are out the door for Patty Kalen’s engagement party, they’ll drag Steffy, even though the whole town knows Patty and her dad are hardly speaking because he was so drunk that he tried to pick her up outside Mook’s Bar. ‘You’re going,’ Mom said. ‘Everybody who’s anybody is. After all, that poor girl lost her mother. Cecilia Kalen was one of our nearest and dearest.’

Steffy couldn’t say, Mr Kalen creeps me out, although it’s true. ‘Do I have to?’

‘Yes. We’re giving it.’

By ‘we,’ she does not mean her and Dad, Nenna means her and her girlfriends that she hangs out with because he and Mom live in separate worlds.

It’s like Dad is here, but he isn’t, and Steffy has no idea whose fault this is. If she goes home now he will be lying in wait. He doesn’t pounce, it’s more like lurking. Or melting into a puddle that you could fall in, which he’s been doing a lot this week. Get too close and you’ll sink. He schlumps around with every line in his body screaming Hit Me, unless it’s Forgive Me, and Mom . . . Mom will tell her, ‘Go put on something decent, you’re not going out looking that.’

She’s been to those parties, and those parties are crap. So are her parents, both of them. It’s crap being with them right now.

She’s better off here.

This is her place, if Steffy has a place, but late afternoon sun chased the last bit of shade off the roof and now it’s too hot. Hell with it. I’m not moving until the party’s started and I’m sure Mom and Dad are gone. It’s harder to breathe than it was when she first lay down on the air mattress, trying to get up the strength to sob out her heart.

She’ll sit out the next hour out back.

By the time Steffy hits the back porch she’s gasping for air like one of those girls some creep stole and buried alive.

Oh, shit.

There’s a guy on the steps. Just sitting there.

Perv alert!

Why am I not scared?

Whoever he is, he’s cute. Not scared. I am sooo not scared.

Be cool. Breathe. Ask, like you belong here and he doesn’t, ‘Who are you?’

He looks up. Nice, like it’s no big deal being a grownup, more like he’s another kid. ‘Oh, sorry. I didn’t know there was anybody home.’

‘Somebody lived here but she’s dead.’ Steffy ought to be on guard right now, hopping off the porch for a head start in case he lunges, but he is not that guy. ‘Nobody lives here.’ He is hanging in place like a sentence ready to be completed or a song waiting to be sung. She almost smiles. ‘Not even me.’

His head comes up. Noted: this is not her house.

‘But I sort of do,’ she says, to forestall questions.

Nice guy, he doesn’t ask. ‘I see,’ he says, waiting for whatever comes next.

God he is cute sitting there with the sunlight on his hair. God he is too old for her. Steffy should get out of this conversation and off the premises, but she won’t. Not yet. ‘I thought you would say, “What are you doing here?”’

‘That would be a no.’ He gets up. ‘None of my business, right?’ He shakes one foot and then the other to see if they’re still working, like you do when you need to get the blood running so you can move on.

‘It’s OK, you can stay.’

‘Can’t.’ He grimaces. ‘I’ve got stuff to do.’

Steffy discovers that she’ll say anything to keep him. ‘No problem if you want to hang in. Really.’ Question, keep him with a question. ‘So. What got you here?’

‘Long story.’

‘Want to tell it?’

‘Not really. Well, part of it.’

‘Which part?’

‘We’ll get to that.’ He has this sweet, wide open look; it’s what Steffy’s guidance counselor tries and fails to hit with her because he’s a jerk. Guidance guy strikes out in spite of all the heavy eye contact and trust exercises he makes them do in fifth period Sex Ed, never mind that it’s humiliating. But this guy . . . The smile.

Steffy is sort of smiling too.

‘So. Can I see inside?’

‘Not really,’ Steffy says. It’s not her house, but it is, and they both know both these things.

‘Look, I’m down here for a newspaper? It would be a big help if you let me look around inside.’

‘Are you writing a story or what?’

‘If you’re worried I can show you my press pass.’

‘I believe you,’ she says. ‘I just can’t . . .’

‘Like you’re not allowed to . . .’

‘Talk to strangers? Not really.’ She lifts her head in that proud, cocky way her mother hates. ‘I can talk to anyone I want.’

He almost-laughs. ‘Because you’re a big girl.’ He’s not being condescending or anything, he is doing a great job of imitating Mom.

‘Pretty much.’ How can she not grin?

‘Look, if this a bad time, no problem. I can come back.’

‘That won’t make it OK.’ Don’t go.

‘Me talking to you?’

‘Me letting you in.’

‘Did you know this Mrs Archambault?

‘Not really.’

‘This is her house.’

She bristles. ‘Not any more.’

‘I’m doing a story about some bad old stuff that happened here.’

Right, Carteret. Early American History. ‘When?’

‘You don’t know?’

‘Not really.’

Instead of hitting on her or trying one of those sinister things the TV teaches you to beware, he backs away from the house, pointing up. ‘That’s the room where it happened.’

Steffy moves out into the yard so she can see where he is pointing. ‘Where what happened?’

‘The last spontaneous human combustion.’

‘Holy crap!’

‘Crash, bam. Whammo, she just. Burned up.’ As though he already has her cooperation, he says, ‘That’s why I have to get inside.’

If Carter came by right now he would be jealous, seeing the two of them standing together here. Steffy backs into the steps and sits down. He is still out there studying the second floor. ‘So, what are you looking for?’

‘That’s the trouble. I don’t know.’ Unlike grownups, he doesn’t sweep the step with his hand; he isn’t scared of sitting on something gross. ‘Why this woman burned down to grease spot, I suppose.’

‘Ewww.’

‘First they thought it was the husband.’ He pulls a notepad out of a pocket on his thigh. Cool cargo pants. Muttering, he runs his pencil down the page. ‘Harold P. Archambault.’ He taps the eraser on the note.

‘You have notes?’

‘Big story. Research.’ He looks up. ‘They were divorced.’

Steffy hates that word. Divorced. ‘Like, he set her on fire?’

‘No. Nobody knows what did it, that’s the thing.’ Frustration makes him squint. ‘But, you’ve gotta wonder. What if he was here and they had a fight?’

‘People fight all the time,’ Steffy says uneasily. ‘It doesn’t mean anything.’

‘These things, it’s usually the husband.’

‘Just because they had a fight?’ She is really uncomfortable now.

‘Because usually, it is. But this guy was with his girlfriend at the Prince Edward, out at the beach, it’s on the Web. They were together all night.’

Steffy gulps. Oh God. Oh, God. She’s not afraid of this gentle guy with eyes that turn green in direct sunlight, but she is afraid. She’s scared of something that she won’t name and hates to think about. ‘Like, he set her on fire because they had a fight?’

‘No. It was spontaneous. I’m not creeping you out, am I?’

Yes. ‘No.’

‘Sitting there one minute,’ he says thoughtfully, ‘and the next minute – whoom.’

‘Ewww!’

He ticks off another point. ‘But the room was untouched.’

She has quit breathing. It comes out in a rush. ‘Up there?’

‘Yeah. And I’m here because . . .’ Steffy has no way of knowing that this is not a sentence he can finish. After some thought he says, ‘If I can just get into that room and mail back a couple of screen shots . . . I can buy some time.’

‘Time?’

His face changes. ‘It’s hard to explain.’ When she doesn’t say anything he says helpfully, ‘If you want, I really can show you my press pass.’

Steffy would like to see it; she’d like to follow up with a question but she’s squirming. It’s nothing he said. Something else is gnawing at her. ‘So they were divorced. She burned up and it’s the husband’s fault.’

‘The girlfriend said he was with her all night.’

Oh God. ‘Girlfriend.’

‘“Other woman,” they called it back in the day.’

Oh, God.

‘He opened a magnum and turned up the music and that was it. They didn’t know until the police came.’

‘So it couldn’t be him.’

Bemused, he says, ‘It wasn’t anybody. It just happened.’ He’s waiting for her to follow with another question, say something, but Steffy is too far gone to speak. He jogs her arm. ‘Are you OK?’

‘Yeah.’ But she is thinking, thinking, boy is she thinking. The sun burns hotter. The breeze stops. She gets up. ‘So. Want to see inside?’

‘I thought it was your private place.’

‘Not really.’ She is never coming back here. ‘Not any more.’

‘I did creep you out. I’m sorry.’

Still sitting, she opens the screen door. ‘Really. Feel free.’

Nice, he says carefully, ‘Are you sure? After all, it’s, like, your house.’

She gets up. ‘Come on, it’s anybody’s now.’

Now that she knows, the house is over with for her, but she sort of owes it to him to show him where this lady burned up and in its own way the prurient, curious part of her has to see. In school she flunked spatial relations on the standardized tests, which means she never knows where she is in a building, which is weird. Between that and the house being all cut up after this divorced person burned up, she has a hard time leading him to the right room. Plus, she’s a little scared. Like, what if the old lady is still up there, like they’ll open some door and her skeleton will spring out and chase them outside and all the way down to the bay.

Upstairs, there are so many partitions that she can’t tell which window he was pointing at or whether it’s on this side of the dividing wall or somewhere else. Plus, she’s freaking. Nothing this nice guy did, nothing he said.

The Archambaults had a fight and then the mother caught fire. After the divorce.

She says, miserably, ‘I don’t know which room.’

‘It’s that one. There.’

Everything in her sinks. ‘Oh.’

He’s very nice about it, really. There is nothing special or different about the right room, only that it’s the right one. Yellowed window shades sag at half mast and the linoleum is pocked with dents where generations of different furniture stood after she died. The wallpaper has faded to nothing. There are no smoke marks, no charred woodwork. Just water stains and nail-holes where pictures used to be. It’s as if nothing ever happened here. He studies the sketch in his notebook while Steffy fidgets. He paces, considering, until she snaps, ‘Are you done?’

‘What? Another minute. If you don’t mind.’

Her mind roams out and when it comes back, Steffy is disrupted and writhing, so her voice comes out all freaky and weird. ‘I have to go.’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Matter? Nothing. I’m fine. It’s just. I have to go!’ Gulp. Start over. ‘Do you know what time it is?’

‘Five.’

‘Shit. I’m supposed to be home.’ She isn’t but she has to be; she has no idea why she’s so scared.

‘No prob,’ he says easily. ‘I’ll take you.’

‘No,’ she says. ‘No way.’

‘Right. Never get into a stranger’s car.’

‘That isn’t it. OK, I really have to go.’ Steffy isn’t exactly crying when she bolts, it’s just sweat running down, it’s . . . OK, if she starts in front of this guy she will totally lose it. What scares her second most in the world is that if she does cry, she won’t be able to stop. Shit, he’s following! Her voice trickles out. ‘Take your time. Look around all you want.’

‘You’re upset.’

‘I’ve gotta go.’

‘It’s too hot to walk.’

‘It isn’t far.’

‘At least let me buy you a Coke for the road.’

‘Can’t,’ Steffy says urgently. ‘Can’t!’

‘What’s so important that you can’t wait and I can’t take you?’

Grief boils up in Steffy and runs over. ‘I have to get dressed for this stupid party, OK?’

She walks until she’s sure he’s gone back inside, where he can’t see her. Then she starts to run. When she gets home nothing has happened and everybody is fine.

10

Nenna

It was weird at Lunch Bunch today, acting like everything was all right with me when everything was all wrong, what with Davis turning out to be a rat and me laying down the line and not knowing which side of it I was on. I should have stayed back, but in Fort Jude you have to go out and show yourself to the people because you don’t want to hear what they say about you when you don’t.

In a way it was a relief, sitting down with the girls like always, pretending nothing’s changed and it’s all fine. We were assigning chores for Patty Kalen’s engagement party, which we’re giving because her dad’s a drunk and poor Cecilia died before the divorce went through. Davis or not, tonight I’m dressing, if not to kill, then at least to maim, because in this town acte de presence is everything, and four hundred people are coming to the club! Kara Coleman had Buck order Champagne from a Napa vineyard and the club staff is doing the wet bar and the buffet, and if Brad bitches we’ll tell him, ‘Cheap at the price.’ He’s paying, but we’re in charge. Cecilia suffered at his hands but she loved him so we never said a word, and whatever she suffered, tonight is our big chance to make it up to her. We’re damn well helping Brad do right by their daughter, so she can look at the pictures years later and be proud.

It was an odd day. Sallie put down her checklist. ‘Wow,’ she said, and I still don’t know if she was sorry. ‘Lucy died. My nephew saw it in the New London Day. It’s not like it’ll be in the Fort Jude Star,’ and then she said, because Sallie is that kind of awful, ‘Turn your back on Fort Jude and Fort Jude turns its back on you.’

We weren’t close, but she was prom queen in our year! That’s too close. I saw the grave yawning and it scared me because to tell the truth, it didn’t look all that bad to me.

Sallie picked up her clipboard. ‘Moving right along.’

Jessie sailed in before she could start; she looked amazing. ‘Big news.’

‘You’re late!’ Sallie hates being interrupted and she hates women attractive to Chape. Lucy was one, back in the day. ‘We were just . . .’

‘You’ll never guess who just checked in at the hotel.’

I guess Jessie made two. Sallie stepped on her hard enough to squash her flat. ‘Shhh. We’re mourning,’ she said, although it wasn’t exactly true. ‘Lucy died.’

‘Oh!’ Jessie said, and the ones of us that don’t like Sallie all that much listened hard. She looked shaken. ‘I hadn’t heard.’

‘Of course not.’ Sallie stuck it to her, the bitch. ‘You were never close.’

‘No.’ In fact, Jessie was a parade of different faces. There are things we don’t ask now that she’s one of us, and with friends, you don’t really want to know about their sordid past. She got it together, but it cost her. ‘As a matter of fact, this guy . . .’

Sallie struck back. ‘We were deciding on the centerpiece.’

‘Shut up and listen!’ Jessie pre-empted, take that. ‘It’s her son.’

Of course all Fort Jude will know by the time the party starts, but thanks to Jessie, we were the first.

Sallie was like steel. ‘What makes you so sure?’

‘Name on the credit card. Dan Carteret.’

‘That doesn’t mean . . .’

Then Jessie shut her up for sure. ‘I saw Lucy in his face.’

Now, Jessie grew up over on Pierce Point along with the Pike brothers and other people we don’t know, but even then she was sharp, didn’t study, never raised her hand, but you knew. What if she did leave town under a cloud? She came back a different person. The boys used to call her ‘anybody’s,’ but Jessie Vukovich is somebody now. High-end car, designer clothes, bought the Flordana outright, started in with United Fund and Meals on Wheels, months and months of selfless volunteering and now she’s practically one of us.

‘Green eyes, I wonder where that comes from. I looked at him and I swear I saw Lucy Carteret, he must be here because she’s . . .’ She sort of choked. ‘Now, Carteret. That’s not a common name.’ If there’s more, Jessie wasn’t saying it.

Betsy said, in that flat tone that means the opposite, ‘Isn’t it wonderful Lucy has a child.’

‘Had.’

And one of us said what we were all thinking, ‘I wonder who the father is.’

Even Sallie realized we were on Jessie’s side in whatever war she thought they were having. She said, ‘Poor Lucy,’ and we knew we were done talking about Jessie’s news. Then, wham! She got me in her sights. ‘Nenna, what were you doing, risking death out on 38th Street last Thursday, what’s going on?’

‘Who, me? That wasn’t me.’ I thought fast. ‘Listen. We should do something for poor Lucy.’

‘Why? She never did anything for us.’

I saved Betsy from Sallie a dozen times back when we were little. She owes me, so she jumped in. ‘Don’t blame Lucy, blame her grandmother,’ she said, and we were off.

Even Cathy Rhue lined up with me. ‘We could have a little memorial down at Trinity, you know, since she died so far away from home.’

Sallie said, ‘What for? We didn’t know her all that well.’

Kara said, ‘That was Lorna’s fault,’ so there was nobody left on Sallie’s side.

‘Making her ride everywhere in that big old car, like she was too good for Fort Jude.’

‘It must be awful, dying up north, with nobody around to mourn.’

Jessie laid back, the way you do when you’re not sure of your position, but we were all glad to have someplace new to put our miseries. I said, ‘Maybe we can get the deacon at Trinity to do it here at the club.’

And everybody but Sallie said, ‘Let’s do!’

Things happened and we wouldn’t, but planning helped. It was all the funeral we could give her, you know?

We went around the table, all, Lucy was pretty, she was nice, she was too nice for us, because you had to be a mean girl to make it through high school, you just did. So were our mothers; it’s something you don’t outgrow. They said Lily Archambault started Northshore Elementary with them but Lorna yanked her out, like Fort Jude was some kind of social disease that she could catch, and packed her off to Ashley Hall. She married a man in Charleston without telling her mother, things between them were that bad. Lorna brought Lily back to Fort Jude in her coffin – toxemia in the last month of pregnancy with Lucy, our mothers said, so you cut down on the salt.

She also brought home the baby like a prize.

Poor Lucy! If Hal Archambault hadn’t dumped her and moved out to the beach with Eden Rowse it might have been different, but Lucy was all she had left. She was always overprotective and cranky, but it got worse after the divorce. She locked Lucy up like Rapunzel in that tower, so it’s not our fault she didn’t fit in.

I said what everybody else was thinking, ‘I guess the old bitch got what she deserved.’

‘You mean the fire.’

‘Whatever it was.’ My God, last week I was in her front yard!

Out of the blue, Jessie said, ‘She lost her man. No wonder she was a bitch.’

I choked on my B.L.T. and ran to the john before anybody could say, ‘Are you all right?’

11

Dan

Burt Mixon, that unwitting genius of negative reinforcement, taught Dan the absolute integrity of personal space when he was old enough to know he had one, but not big enough to defend it.

The gawky, anxious girl’s strung so tight that the kindest thing he can do is let her go. When you get like that, you don’t want people to see you. Not the way you are. Dan knows. At the corner she turns around to check. He waves and goes back into the kind of heat that stops hearts. It’s exponential; even the cockroaches have died. Stalled in the sweltering shotgun hallway, Dan considers. He’s looking for so many things in his life that he can’t be sure what brought him here. It’s those fucking news photos, he thinks. The ones Lucy tried so hard to hide. As if your mother can protect you from certain things.

The gabled frame house where the old lady died may have been nice back in the day but it morphed under the hands of multiple tenants, who made it hideous. Heading upstairs, he picks his way through a jumble of makeshift partitions, amateur wiring and crap fixtures, searching with no clear idea of what he is looking for: diaries, perhaps. Notebooks. Some trace. A hook to hang his story on. He’d settle for a note crumpled in a kitchen cabinet or a cry for help scrawled on the plaster under torn wallpaper, but all he finds are insect carcasses and desiccated mice, empty roach eggs. Dust.

‘Come on,’ he says to no one. ‘Give me something.’

The attic, he thinks, even though it’s clear there are no secrets there. It’s hours until dark and he’s running out of next things to do. The girl left her pack, he notes, disproportionately cheered. The teddy bear tag has Steffy McCall scrawled on its belly, with the address. He can always drop it off at her house. Dan shoulders the pack and with a false sense of purpose, doubles back on the room where the woman died, looking for something – emotional detritus or some forgotten object or her outline scorched in the floor – anything to mark the fact that something stupendous happened here.

He studies the splintered floor and peels away wallpaper. He peers into her empty closet, but Lorna Archambault might as well have blasted off, shooting up through the ozone layer to flame out on the surface of the moon. He needs to go, but heat drops on him like a dentist’s protective lead blanket. Like a collapsing lawn chair, he folds into lotus position in the spot where her recliner stood.

Absorbing the space.

His breathing slows. His hands lie palms up on his knees, relaxed, open to whatever comes. It is the posture of meditation but there is the outside possibility that sleep throws a switch somewhere inside him; he won’t know. When he next looks up, his perception has jolted into a new place. Flies drop in mid-flight in this heat; reason is stillborn. In this place, in his exaggerated state, even pragmatic reporters like Dan Carteret can inhabit the bodies of the dead.

The room is as it was in the photos, flowered wallpaper still fresh. My mother’s taste, not mine, cabbage roses and that ghastly rug. Press photos of the death scene are black and white, the room was stripped years ago, how does he know what the colors were?

He just does.

Lavender because it’s Hal’s favorite . . . Lorna means the ex-husband’s. This rocks him. How do I know? In that flash she is in this room with Dan, cynical realist that he is, sinking into cushions molded to her bulky form. Lodged in the spot that smoldered long after her soul fled the fire, he undergoes a profound change. Holy fuck! . . . lavender ruffles at my throat. Even the BarcaLounger is restored. Gold brocade, he notes, but from a recumbent position, as though this is him kicked back in the chair, just in from dinner with Dorian, sweet boy (‘she is survived by a son, Dorian Archambault, M.D., and two grandchildren, all of Fort Jude’), a little drunk after an evening with his family, I ate too much, but . . . looking over the toes of her purple slippers at the TV. Studying the tiny feet on the raised footrest, my best feature, he notes her plush bedroom slippers, the trim, pale ankles laced with purple veins, but for a woman my age, still sexy.

‘God, where did that come from?’

Lavender nightie, Hal’s favorite color, in case he comes. If I’d worn lavender to dinner that terrible night at the Flamenco, if I’d reached under the tablecloth and touched It through his pants, would he have insisted on the divorce?

Perfume, fresh lipstick, in case he drops in for a bon voyage. The TV’s on, but she has no interest in TV. Hoping, Hal’s ex-wife waits up for him. It is, after all, my last night at home. She’s brought a nightcap to the chair with her, a little cognac on ice because this calls for a little celebration. She is tired and anxious and excited, not because of the coming trip but because maybe Hal . . . He didn’t come to the club to say goodbye because he doesn’t want Eden to know. I’m going around the world, of course he wants to see me alone . . . And when he comes, if I touch him the way he wants he’ll forget that bitch Eden Rowse and stay.

She waits.

Seething with anticipation, Lorna waits beyond all waiting. If he remembers his manners, he’ll come tell me goodbye. She hopes beyond the point of hope. She is not yet angry, even though she knows the bastard is out somewhere with that woman, he took up with her before the . . . If he loved her he’d marry her, it’s just the sex. Listening to the doleful sound of ice in her empty glass. He’s coming, he’s just a little late and then, That selfish bitch! This is her fault.

Sad, Dan thinks. No. Angry!

What do I care, this time next week I’ll be having espresso in front of St Peter’s in Rome . . . Her glossy nails knead the brocade. Where is he, why won’t he come? She knows, but she doesn’t want to know. Dammit, Harold Archambault, come here! Inheriting that fleshy white body, inhabiting the gold BarcaLounger, Dan Carteret moves through Lorna Archambault’s hopes into grief and staggering rage because in the posture of meditation, in the hyperbaric chamber of this still, hot room, he sees. In some way he can’t begin to comprehend, he and the dead woman are linked.

There are, however, things he can’t possibly know.

Sweating and stultified, hallucinating or mysteriously unleashed, Dan Carteret inhabits the old lady’s last night. Damn you, Hal Archambault, I didn’t have to wait up. I didn’t have to sit here for so God. Damned. Long, smiling like a painted fool . . . He plays out another scenario: My God, Hal what are you doing, dear God, please don’t light that match!

No. The husband was nowhere near. He had witnesses, the mistress, the night clerk at the beach. The girlfriend must be pretty long in the tooth by now, did she stay in town, can I track her down for an interview?

Wait, what if Hal got fed up with her whining and actually torched the place? Why would he, he had what he wanted, boffing his girlfriend 24/7 at the beach.

Don’t be disgusting.

Right. Hal doesn’t care if the she lives or dies.

Stop that!

‘All right,’ Dan shouts at her, ‘All right!’

One more sip and he’ll come. She is rocking and sucking on the cognac; if he comes in drunk all I have to do is touch that thing and he’ll beg me to drop the trip and stay with him. Even though it’s too late, she plans: I’ll pull him into this chair and vulgar as it is, I’ll show him around the world.

Time dies. Resentment catches fire. Forget me, will you, well, I’ll show you. Pills she needs in the pocket of her robe. He’ll come in and find me and then we’ll see who’s who and what’s what. Right, it’s logical, if not inevitable. Sitting with his hands open on his knees, Dan falls into her bitterness: Take the pills and when he finds me with my tongue out and my eyes rolled back, it will serve him God damned right. Resentment twists in her belly and ignites. Damn you, Harold Archambault. God. Damn you.

Something changes. She cries out in Dan’s voice: ‘What are you doing here?’ His head comes up so fast that his neck snaps. There is somebody new in the room. Astonished, Lorna hisses, You.

Dan lurches to his feet, blinking. He can’t see, but he hears:

Get out.

Shuddering, he calls, ‘Who! Who?’

How did you get in? She’s frightened. She’s furious. What are you doing here? Dan cracks his mouth wide, listening, but there is no hearing the other side of this dialog. His gut cramps as the old lady’s entrails knot. You have no right to be here. How dare you come here, making demands? Disappointment boils in her belly. Instead of Hal. There is shouting: not hers – someone else.

Troubled, Dan hears only Lorna, screaming, Get out. Shut up and get out. What are you . . . my God! Livid, rocking and furious, she sees it coming.

Whatever it is.

Dan doesn’t know. Then he does. In this room, someone else cries: ‘Dear God, watch out!’

She rasps, I will die before I let you take . . .

Someone who shouts, ‘It’s too late!’

Here in the room.

His voice. Whoever he is. ‘God damn you, old woman.’ The room shakes.

I’ll see you dead. Words boil out of her, leaving Dan riven and shaking. I’ll see you in hell. And in a plume of flames, she imagines it. She sees me writhing and howling in the heat. But who am I. Who am I? Rigid and furious, she envisions the murders – Hal, once she starts there will be no end to it, Eden Rowse. You. The ball of heat inside her grows; in the unlikeliest of cavities it flickers, getting brighter as she seethes in the depths of her recliner, unaware and unprotected, roaring, Who’s sorry now? Furious, she is too angry to comprehend the fire inside her, any more than she will know the exact moment that her soul explodes and flies out in a shower of sparks. By the time her body splits and flames shoot up there is nothing left of Lorna Archambault but the chair she sits in and the shell of her body in its melted shreds of lavender that she put on especially for him; everything else is consumed from within, everything but the husk. For a few seconds she flames brilliantly – gorgeous, Too bad Hal can’t see, and then collapses inward. What little is left of her curls back on itself and fuses with the melting fabric of the ruined chair. Only rage remains, a nugget of distilled evil so powerful that Dan yelps in pain.

The guilt.

Whose? ‘God.’ He lunges for the door.

‘God!’

The guilt is terrible.

How did this door close? Did I shut myself in? Did she? Drenched and shaking, he grapples with the knob and finally breaks out. He’s free, but the knowledge follows him out of the room. Changed by forces he doesn’t recognize and can’t name, he hurtles downstairs and out into beginning night.

12

The guys

It’s a nice enough day out here on the water, but it’s getting late. Not that Stitch Von Harten and Buck Coleman want their afternoon on the water to end. Every Friday they find ways to back out of the office – Stitch from Von Harten Printing, which his dad founded, and Buck from Coleman Chrysler, where he shows up only reluctantly because his father hung the business around his neck like a stone.

Every Friday they come out here with a couple of six-packs, whether the grouper are running or not. Stitch knows it sounds cheesy, but it’s their special time. They’re dragging their feet because of the party. They did their part – they’re paying for it, stood back and admired the dresses their wives bought for the event – should be enough. The hell of it is, they’re under orders to show up early, to help Cathy and Buck’s pretty wife Kara cope. They’re supposed to be home in time to shower and shave, break out the clippers for nose-hairs and put on the clothes the wife laid out for them and stand there until she approves.

They will do their job and walk in smiling, but, shit. All that social agro and nicey-niceness when there are egrets and blue heron in these waters, astonishing birds that take Stitch’s heart with them when they take flight. If he had his druthers, he and Buck would be out in the boat watching the sun go down, but time is thumbing its nose at them and they have to go.

‘Fuck,’ Stitch says. ‘How did we get to be so old?’

‘We’re not old, we’re just domesticated,’ Buck says. For a guy who’s spent his adult life grieving, Buck is more or less content. ‘We were hot shit, weren’t we? Back in the day?’

Stitch laughs. ‘Still are. But I see what you’re saying. At reunions, they’re sizing us up, looking for things to cut off.’

‘Because we ruled that school.’ Buck hasn’t exactly pulled up the anchor. He is staring out at the bridge. ‘We were good, weren’t we?’

‘We were.’

Moodily, Buck cracks another beer. ‘We didn’t know how sweet it was.’

Stitch has problems of his own, but he prefers not to dwell. He says sympathetically, ‘Nut cancer. What a bitch.’

‘Oh, that. That’s nothing.’ Buck looks up. ‘We had everything, and we fucked it up.’

‘Only at the end.’ Stitch knows where this is going. ‘Darcy. We all felt bad.’

The summer before senior year Buck’s dad told the twins their future was Coleman Chrysler, no ifs, ands or buts. Darcy Coleman was drunk by noon. By four, he was crazy-ruined – they couldn’t cut him off, couldn’t bring him down. At midnight Buck’s twin drove a demo model off the lot and crashed into the biggest tree on Beach Drive. It took hours to pry him out. Buck threw himself in on top of Darcy, like he wanted to be buried too. He’s been going around like half a person ever since.

Then Buck surprises him. ‘No. I mean the end of senior week. You know when.’

Stitch knows exactly when and he groans out loud. ‘Right.’

‘If Darcy’d been there, she’d have stayed back. No room in the Jeep.’ Buck is getting weird and agonized. ‘It wouldn’t of come down the way it did.’

‘Don’t beat yourself up over things you can’t help.’ Stitch starts the motor so he won’t have to hear what Buck says in reply. He takes off in high and doesn’t slow down until they turn into the estuary off Pierce Point.

They are in low, putt-putting along the shoreline to the Marina when Buck says, ‘Look!’ He can’t point; it’s too obvious. He jerks his head at the shore. Weird business: they are being watched.

‘Holy crap,’ Stitch says, and he means it in a good way. ‘That’s Walker Pike.’ Even from here, although he is half-blind without his glasses, Stitch knows. Pike is so unlike them that there’s no mistaking it: that cigar-store Indian profile, the proud lift of the head. Even back in high school he was a little scary, strung tight as a string on a crossbow. Not Like Us. Stitch Von Harten personally has changed shape in the years intervening and so has Buck. It happens, but not to Walker Pike.

If anything, he stands taller, so lean and easy in his body that Buck sucks in his belly at the sight. ‘Fuck, in high school he was nothing. Now look.’

‘Yeah. Pierce Point trash,’ Stitch says. ‘What goes around comes around someplace else, I guess.’ Walker Pike that they used to walk past without speaking is somebody now, sitting there on the deck of his neat redwood house with its glittering solar panels. ‘I heard he invented Google or Ebay or some damn thing. Now he’s rich as God. Look at that house!’

‘Yeah. Kara says it’s in Architectural Forum, just what you can see from here. They never got inside.’

‘All that, and he wouldn’t let them in?’

‘He always was one weird bastard.’ Stitch waves. ‘Hey, Walker.’

‘Look, he sees us! Walker, hey.’

‘Remember us?’ Not that Walker would recognize him, heavy as he is. ‘It’s Stitch and Buck, Buck Coleman? From Fort Jude High?’

Fluid, fearsomely easy within his body, Pike stands. Like a priest, he lifts one hand, showing them the blade but stopping short of the blessing. Then he turns and goes inside.

Stitch says, ‘Well, it’s nice to see you too. Son of a bitch couldn’t afford a clean T-shirt when we knew him. Now look.’

Buck is slapping at his pockets. He motions to Stitch to shut the motor. ‘Phone. Crap. Too late.’

‘Probably the girls, getting on our case.’ In Stitch’s pocket, his phone is vibrating off the hook. He pulls it out and checks caller I.D. ‘Wait. No. It’s Chape. Buck, it’s Chape. Yo, Chape!’ He listens carefully. ‘There’s trouble with Brad. He wants us at the shack. We’re on our way,’ he says into the phone and slaps it shut. ‘Damndest thing. He says Chaplin’s coming.’

‘Well, shit.’ Buck looks happier than he has all day, probably because unlike them, all-American high school hero Bob Chaplin is slipping, so much for the leader of the pack. Every man needs somebody to look down on, and now it’s Chaplin’s turn. ‘It’ll be nice to see him. He’s been home, how long? It’s damn well time he showed himself.’

13

Walker Pike

It was funny and sad, watching the two old fuds out in their motor boat, idling a little bit too close to his house. Walker didn’t mind; they looked harmless enough until they hailed him, which drove him inside. He can’t be with people he knows. Walker knows them, all right, but he doesn’t know them well enough to predict what they’d say or do if he let them in, or what might come down if it went wrong.

In high school he had their faces by heart, but he wouldn’t have recognized either one if Stitch hadn’t broadcast their names. Von Harten. Coleman. The least of the fabulous five – football captain and four rich kids from the Fort Jude Club. In high school he hated them. Face it, in high school he envied them. Well, look at them now, bobbing in that crap boat in their floppy crew hats and nose guards and zinc oxide, probably because the wives said it was that or metastatic melanoma from exposure to the sun. Poor bastards, they never had a chance.

Walker’s mind usually travels on another plane but in a way it was gratifying, thinking at ground level, where he left these good old boys the night he left Fort Jude – forever, he thought. He never belonged, for which he’s always been grateful. He didn’t run with them in high school. He observed. An outsider then and an outsider now, Walker is a behaviorist. To him they’ve always been specimens from another culture because they acted so big and thought so small.

In a way, he’s sorry he didn’t wave back when Von Harten hailed him – they’re nice enough and sad, really, with one already dead. It would be fun to see. Too bad he couldn’t invite them to tie up on his dock and come up to the house for a beer.

He’d like these two old guys to see what the kid from Pierce Point made of himself with what little he was given, but it isn’t safe. Now, Walker Pike is safe enough in New York or London or any of the big cities where he does business, but he can’t let himself get close to anybody he knew growing up in Fort Jude. There’s too much backstory between them. Interface and there’s a chance that in spite of his best intentions, it will end badly.

Given the givens, Walker knows it was weird to build down here, when he fought so hard to escape. It’s the terrain. He was driving along the coast outside Cape Town with the crashing surf on one side and mountains rising at his back when he was leveled by homesickness, not for Fort Jude, for sandspurs and summertime heat mirages on blistering white sand. He came back to Florida for the sawgrass and mangroves in certain inlets and the creatures that fed among the roots, these horizons with thunderclouds at one end, and at the other, orange sunset and pink afterglow.

He’s rich enough to telecommute, so he built this place. He bought the plot and surrounding property on the water not all that far from Pierce Point, where he was so miserable as a kid. It’s risky, but heartbreak brought him back. It’s as good a place as any to be alone.

Too bad, Walker thinks, but I had to let them go. They were good old boys, Coleman and Von Harten; Chaplin was OK, although his feelings for Chaplin are ambiguous at best. The problem lies with the other two, whom he will not name. It’s too much like summoning demons. Name them and they show up. And everything goes to hell. Trouble is, he can’t say whether those two are the demon or he is, so. Sorry, Buck. Sorry, Stitch. Not today.

Even people you like may bring up things it’s dangerous for you to remember. First proof of the existence of . . . No. Don’t go there.

So Walker locked his door and dropped the louvered shutters, not because he’s scared of those two good old boys, same as they ever were, but because he’s scared of what he might do.

If.

That’s the problem. It was his problem back then, it’s his problem now and always will be.

The if.

14

Nenna

Crazy, but when the doorbell chimed I thought, What if it’s Bobby? A nice man to hang out with when Davis goes. Not that I’m sure he is. Going, I mean. We haven’t sat down over the details, but when I walked back from work last week, my mind ran along ahead and by the time I collapsed at home, I knew.

I can do this!

Five whole miles, and I only stopped once. I’m stronger than you think.

I know it’s Bobby out front. A woman would phone ahead. It wouldn’t be half bad, walking into Patty’s engagement party on Bobby’s arm. One look and they’d all know without me having to explain. I can ask him in and make a fuss over him, and Davis McCall, who’s out in the car somewhere sulking, well, Davis can go to hell.

But my face! All dressed up, with my face all naked and smeared with grief. After days of not speaking, Davis picked today to have the fight. Frankly, life was a lot more tolerable when we weren’t speaking, but these things have to be done.

I’ve been putting it off for months. What with parties and Steffy and my job and a hundred dozen household things, I don’t have the time. I thought we might hash it out this summer when everything slows down, so I have to wonder. Did Davis plant that phone bill to smoke me out? Tomorrow, I kept telling myself, tomorrow we’ll start, but we didn’t. Then God cursed me with an empty afternoon – two clients canceled, no new houses to list. With Davis home early on Fridays and Steffy safely off at Busch Gardens, I walked right into it.

He let me have it before I got in the door. ‘OK, Nenna. I’m done.’

All the blood rushed to my head. ‘That’s all you have to say?’

‘I’m not spending the rest of my life on that sofa.’

Push leads to shove; I shouted, ‘Then you’re not spending it here!’

Crafty Davis, leading me on. ‘You want me to move out?’

‘I don’t know what I want!’

God damn Davis, he lit up like it was Christmas morning. ‘Great, I’ll need the weekend to pack. Do you want to me to pick up cartons or can I borrow the roller bags?’

I’m glad Steffy crashed into the kitchen just then, before I screamed at him. She thumped through the Florida room in a panic, calling, ‘Mom?’ like the world was ending. ‘Dad?’ She tumbled into the living room with her hair gone wild and when she saw us facing off, all hostile and stony, she stopped cold, and I can’t tell if she was disappointed, or just surprised. ‘Oh! You’re all right.’

‘Steffy!’ And we tried so hard to keep her out of this. ‘Honey, of course we are.’

‘I was so scared!’

She looked so stricken that, forgive me, I yelled at her. ‘Well, get a grip!’

And God damn Davis, he just blinked, sticky sweet and bland as custard pie. ‘Scared, honey? Tell Daddy what you’re afraid of.’

What do you think she’s afraid of, you sniveling cheat. I was furious at Davis, but that’s not who I hurt. ‘Go upstairs and get decent. You look like shit!’ She ran out sobbing even though I called after her, trying to make it right. ‘I bought you a great dress. Carter’s coming to the party, Sallie made him swear.’

Now she’s upstairs, crying in the tub.

Davis let loose as soon as she cleared the room. At least she didn’t have to hear her dad swearing and slamming as he stomped out through the Florida room and drove away. That’s the beauty of central air. We’re sealed up tight against heat and street noises and outside interference of any kind.

Except Bobby, waiting for somebody to answer the bell. I have to wipe my hand across my face and go to the door with a smile. Live in this town long enough and you learn how to do that in seconds, bump up the rheostat so nobody knows what just happened or how bad it was, and I will be charming. ‘Bobby?’

‘No Ma’am.’ Who is this lovely man? Look at him! Good-looking in a blurred, messed-up kind of way, with such a hopeful grin that you just know he’s OK. I come to the door a walking shipwreck, and here he is on my doorstep, like a gift. ‘Mrs McCall?’

‘Nenna. It’s short for Genevieve.’ As if we’re already friends.

‘I’m Dan. Your daughter left her backpack and I . . .’ He hands it off like a calling card.

‘Oh, you must be from the school.’

He takes a little bit too long to answer but that’s OK, the poor thing is so rumpled and sweaty that his day was probably worse than mine. ‘I’m new. She left her bag at the . . . Um.’

‘Bus.’

‘Anyway, here it is.’ And here he is, lingering.

OK, so am I. ‘Well, thanks! She’d thank you herself, but she’s in the tub.’

‘Tell her I said hi.’ On any other day I’d close the door and that would be it, but he’s the first nice thing that’s happened in a week of terrible things. Besides, he’s so attractive and hopeful, leaning into our lovely, cool house, yearning – sort of like me, looking for inspiration in decorators’ model rooms.

‘She’ll be down in a minute. Come on in, you look dead beat.’

I park him in the Florida room with the kitchen island between us, although he’s way too flustered and grateful to try anything. I duck behind the fridge door so he won’t catch me smoothing my lipstick and fluffing up my hair. Then I fix two iced teas with crushed mint and sugar on the rims. He’s not the only one who needs a lift. When Davis comes back and I’m sitting here sweet as Jesus, laughing and talking to a new man, he’ll have to re-think the awful things he said at the end.

The trouble is, we aren’t what you’d call talking. He’s cradling that glass like a Magic Eight Ball, you know, if he stares long enough, the right answer will float to the top.

‘How long have you been at Fort Jude High?’

‘Um. I just got in today.’

‘New teacher?’

‘Not really.’ Why does he look embarrassed? ‘I’m um. I’m a reporter?’

‘Oh. I thought you were from the school.’

‘No Ma’am.’

‘Nenna.’

‘Nenna. For the Los Angeles Times? Here’s my press pass. I’m here on a story.’

‘Oh.’ I can’t read a damn thing without my glasses, so I pretend. ‘Writing up the school trip to Busch Gardens?’

‘Not really.’

‘Then where did you get Steffy’s . . .’

‘I knew she’d want it back, and I thought maybe you’d do me a favor. There’s this other thing I’m trying to . . .’

‘Favor?’

‘Look, Nenna. I need your help.’ He pulls out a snapshot that’s way too faded to read. ‘I was looking for this house?’

‘House.’ The thing’s a blur but I’d rather die than go groping for my bifocals, that’s such an old lady thing, and now that he’s here, I’m working my way back to being young, and if he wants to . . . Stranger things have happened. ‘What are you looking to find?’

‘It’s hard to explain. Um. My mother was from here?’ He’s doing that kid thing where the voice goes up in a little hook at the end. ‘Lucy. Lucy Carteret?’

God. ‘She’s your mother?’

‘Was.’

My God. ‘Oh!’

‘She died.’

I know! ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Did you know her?’

I should be saying, Know her, I went to school with her, but oh, this is so stupid, pretending I couldn’t be anything like that old. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Yeah. Me too. Well, thanks anyway.’ He has such a nice smile!

‘Don’t go.’ I put two fingers on his wrist. Oh, this is embarrassing. Me, flirting with Lucy’s son but he’s so . . . I don’t want to be old!

‘Pink, much?’ Before anything else can happen, Steffy blunders in, twirling her skirt. ‘I look like a fucking shrimp.’

That ruffled dress looked much nicer on the dummy at Norma Jean’s Boutique and I go all Mom on her, instead of whatever I thought I was when it was just us together, him and me. ‘Don’t use that word in this house.’

Oh, she is scornful; she hasn’t seen him yet. ‘Or a fucking Barbie doll.’

Sweet man, he intervenes. ‘Hey Steff, I brought your backpack.’

‘You!’ She’s embarrassed – or something. ‘You told my mom?’

‘I would never do that.’

‘Told me what?’ I’m too distracted to follow up because I hear Davis rattling around in the breezeway, just back from wherever he went to sulk, the rat. I’m hurting so bad that I want him to come in on the two of us sitting close on the sofa, me and my new man. Then he’ll know who’s sexy, eat your heart out, you son of a bitch.

Steffy scoops up her backpack, glaring. ‘You didn’t say any . . .’

Something passes between her and this Dan Carteret but there are so many particles piled up in the room by now that I can’t read what he’s telling her when he says, ‘Nope.’

It’s the proximity – his young, lean body sitting this close to mine, and everything – the way my body feels this minute, how hard it was with Davis and how long it’s been – all piles up in me and meanwhile my girl Steffy stands there posing in the archway with her head lifted and wet lips like a model for something you want but are afraid to buy and then, damn, she gives me The Look! I saw it coming the day she was born, I just didn’t know it would be so soon: Now I’m the fairest in the land, and I have to be hard as nails.

‘Go upstairs and don’t come back until you find the right shoes.’ Meanwhile Davis slams the door and goes roaring off in that rattletrap without saying yes, aye or no, so much for that. He hates all these parties, he always has; God knows if he’ll even bother to come, and I’m damn well not going alone.

So I block what I’m thinking: Lucy’s son, and I say, all casual, ‘Want to come to this party with us?’

‘I’m sorry I . . .’

‘Come on, Steff and I would be thrilled.’ Then, my God, I take his hands. Did Davis see us together after all, and that’s why he burned rubber getting away? ‘Tout Fort Jude will be there, so no matter what you’re looking for, somebody at the party’s bound to know.’

‘I couldn’t.’ He shrugs, stirring up the gators on his tacky tourist shirt. ‘Not like this.’

‘Oh, no problem, Davis has plenty of jackets. You’ll need one from before he porked up.’ I sit there, willing him. ‘Hot hors d’oeuvres and an open bar.’

‘I’m sorry, I . . .’

‘And dinner.’ I was thinking, He doesn’t look like Lucy at all.

Then he got up. ‘I can’t. There’s this thing I have to do.’

15

Bobby

Bobby didn’t expect to be here, at the door to the Bellinger family fishing shack. Chape’s grandfather built it in the boondocks before he or Chape were imagined, when land was cheap. It sits alone on an inlet, so far out that whatever they did there, stayed there. No outsiders saw and nobody heard. Bobby would just as soon forget some of the stuff that went down when Chape brought him and his posse out here in high school, but here he is.

As instructed, he’s dressed for one more endless evening at the club. Chape phoned an hour ago. ‘We have a problem.’

‘Damn straight.’ Lucy’s son in a holding pattern, circling Fort Jude like an unanswered prayer.

‘Can you come?’

‘When?’

‘Usual place. Six.’ For a second there, Chape dropped his take-charge manner. ‘I need you, dude.’

Like it or not, Bobby is walking into his past.

He’s here because Chape was his best friend in high school and together they ruled. The guys he cared most about in high school will be inside. Well, all but Darcy, who wiped out at the end of junior year. Their names are carved in the unpainted door, along with the name of the one guy he ran with but never liked. If there is a call to accounting in life, this is the group he has to report to: living yardsticks, measuring him off. At another level, although he knew then that he was nothing like these men, Bobby Chaplin is thinking, These are my people, and this is my place.

In spite of everything, it still makes him grin.

They used to hide out in Chape’s shack on the inlet; all through high school they got wasted on the Bellingers’ booze. In a town where everybody knows everybody’s business and your friends’ parents know you well enough to call you down for bad behavior, it was the secret place in their lives. Out here where the scrub pines give way to mangroves they could do anything, and Fort Jude would never know. It was all about whiskey, weed and pipe dreams: five kids too young to drink and barely old enough to drive, kicked back around the keg mainlining Jack Daniels like good old mountain boys, the only thing missing was the coonskin caps.

Even when you look happy you aren’t, really, he thinks. Even though outsiders can’t see it, there’s always something wrong.

They still got together here during college breaks but they were coming from different places in their heads, and that bad last night of houseparties pushed them over the edge. They landed in a new place and nobody could say which ones stood on which side of the rift, although Bobby knew that wherever he landed, he would stand alone.

The rift widened as the four of them solidified, like puppies growing into their feet. Whatever they used to be in common was no more. Chape was always going to be a lawyer like old Judge Bellinger, but until he grew into his father’s face, they could pretend. Stitch Von Harten’s dad set him up to take over the printing business. His family started it in Fort Jude during the Depression, so Stitch could forget the dive shop and the fishing boat, whatever he really wanted, although at that point, he still believed. By the time they were twenty his head was settling into that thickening neck; he didn’t look quite like old Mr Van Harten, but it was only a matter of time, and the twins? Doomed to take over Coleman Chrysler, no wonder Darcy rammed that tree and bled his life away on Route 19. Second and third-generation businesses, Bobby thinks uneasily. That’s what makes this city great. It explains a lot.

None of which explains the problem of Brad. The Kalens had him when they were too old, and spoiled the crap out of him because they didn’t know what else to do. By the time he hit Northshore Elementary he was a gorilla; even teachers cringed. Old Orville Kalen used to go to the club in that white suit with a gold chain across the vest and if you ran into him it always came up in conversation that the watch fob was his Phi Beta Kappa key, he graduated magna cum from Yale. Brad got kept back in first grade, so he was seven when they started. They found this big kid slouched in his seat with his feet on the desk like a hard timer when their moms brought them in on the first day. He glared and showed his teeth, like, watch your back, but they did what you had to, and made friends. They used to play over at Brad’s because the house was so big that nobody cared what they did and his folks were too old to do anything about it when and if they found out. Brad’s mom kept cold Dr Pepper and a freezer full of Dove bars and there was an attic where she never came; ‘please don’t make me climb up all those stairs.’ He had a toy race car you could drive around in and a Noah’s Ark with thirty hand-carved animals that were supposed to be paired off on the gangplank, which they never were. Most of them were missing tails or legs and half of them were smashed because Brad used to make his animals fight and kill each other; Bobby saw it once, so he was never easy with Brad.

Kalen grew up handsome and stupid wild. He was an ugly drunk but they hung with him anyway because he was the first to turn sixteen and get his license, and until Judge Bellinger bought Chape the Jeep in their senior year, he was the only one with a car.

Six friends. Well, one’s dead now and another’s an alcoholic, and Bobby? He’s been better. Still, he feels the same pleasure, going in. It’s like slipping into a pair of hightops you’ve worn for so long that the canvas is like part of you, softened by wear and ripe with thirty years’ accumulation of foot smell.

He opens the door, making a big smile for them.

But Chape is alone.

‘Where is everybody?’ He knows Chape has an agenda; he always does. Why else would he call? ‘What’s up?’

‘Long time no see.’ Of course Chape won’t show his hand right away. He never does. He’s set the ritual bottle of Jack Daniels out on the crate with a bowl of Cheetos and some weed, a gesture to the past. Chape is drinking Diet Dr Pepper out of the can but he greets Bobby with the usual: ‘Hair of the dog?’

Bobby says the usual: ‘No thanks, I’m driving.’ Har har. Cheap, but it’s the easy way in. They can jump cut to the present without stumbling over the years between then and now.

‘Beer?’

‘No thanks. You called?’

‘We have a problem.’

‘You said.’

‘It’s not what you think.’

His best friend from high school is touchy. They both are. What stands between them is the thing they never talk about. It’s tacit. They never did. They’ve spent their lives since that night avoiding the matter even though, walking away, silent and dumbfounded, they recognized it as a central event. In a way, it would be a relief to get it out and get it over with. Chapter and verse on what happened. The guilt.

If unpacking the business of that old, bad night is on Chape’s agenda, Bobby thinks, bring it on. He starts. ‘About this Carteret kid.’

Chape cuts him off. ‘That’s not why you’re here.’

‘Chape, I saw him. He’s got to be Lucy’s . . .’

‘Don’t.’ Chape rakes him with a look sharp enough to cut him off at the knees.

Bobby finishes anyway. ‘. . . son.’

‘I said, don’t.’ There are things they never talk about. They aren’t going to talk about them now.

Bobby goes cold. ‘Then why am I here?’

‘Yeah, well.’ Amiable Chape mends it all, with that familiar, polished grin. ‘I had to get you here somehow.’

Bobby shrugs. ‘I’d have made it sooner or later.’ They both know this is not necessarily true.

‘OK. It’s Brad.’

‘Brad!’

‘He’s out there somewhere, raving, puking drunk.’

‘So what else is new?’

‘He’s supposed to be hosting this great big fucking party at the club.’

‘You got me all the way out here for this? For another stupid party at the club?’

‘No. For Brad. For the Famous Five.’ The tired tagline makes Bobby flinch. They are both embarrassed by what Chape says next. ‘I thought maybe you could help us, you being A.A. and all.’

‘How did you know?’

Chape shrugs. Everybody knows everything in this town. ‘Buck is checking the bars on Baywater Drive and Stitch is covering the beach dives as we speak.’ He adds, to make Bobby feel better, ‘You might as well know, Buck isn’t doing so good.’

‘What’s the problem.’

‘Depression. He’s scared shit he’ll catch it.’

‘Catch what?’

Chape gives him a you-know look. ‘What Darcy had.’

‘Suicide isn’t catching . . .’ After Darcy’s funeral the Colemans took Buck away sobbing, but Bobby and Chape and the others got crazy in the parking lot, cackling with relief. Next day they brought Buck out here to the shack and they all got loaded – survivors, same as it ever was. It’s funny how easy it is to get over a thing, when you have friends. He falters. ‘. . . I don’t think.’

In that spirit Chape offers, ‘Stitch has prostate cancer.’

‘Men die with it, not of it. He’ll be fine.’

‘He hates to sit down. Says he feels all those radioactive seeds, sliding around.’

‘Ow.’

Chape is studying him. ‘You look good.’

Bobby approximates a smile. ‘You said dress for the club.’

‘With Cecilia dead, the girls are throwing the engagement party for Brad’s girl. Grand ballroom, silver everything. The works.’

‘Brad has a daughter?’

‘Somebody has to do it,’ Chape says.

‘You got me here for a party?’

‘I know how you feel about the club, but we’re all going, for Brad.’

‘You got me all the way over here for a party?’

Chape adds with a stern look, ‘Even you. Re-entry.’

‘I should have known.’ He understands what’s happening here, at least part of it. With Chape, it’s never just the agenda. There’s always the hidden one.

‘Brad needs all the help he can get.’ Chape falls into one of his rhetorical silences that he thinks of as a significant pause.

During the beat, Bobby does not say eagerly, Whatever you say! He narrows his eyes. OK then. Show me your hand.

Here it comes. When he thinks the pause has done its work Chape adds, ‘If you can find him.’

‘What do you mean you, white man?’

‘Given the . . . you know.’

He sighs. ‘A.A.’

‘Give me a little bit of credit, Bob. It’s more than that. You know that girl Brad kidnapped in college? Hauled her off the Chi Psi front porch screaming, Fourth of July in our junior year?’

‘Secret marriage, Mrs Kalen’s opal ring.’

‘Valdosta was just a story,’ Chape says. ‘It cost the Kalens plenty to keep Brad out of jail.’

‘I was away.’ Every summer Bobby fled his parents’ expectations; he can still see that sad, hopeful pair, blinking like frogs whenever he came into the room.

‘But you’re the only one who ever saw the woman. Remember, Labor Day?’

‘Brad’s Georgia girl.’ Everybody has to come home sometime. He fills his cheeks with air and lets it out through tight lips. ‘I did.’

‘He had you out to his secret place, wherever he was keeping her,’ Chape says.

‘He did.’

‘God only knows why you went.’

Because Chape has made clear that they aren’t going there, he keeps the worst memory at bay. ‘I had to see if she was OK.’

She looked OK when Bobby met her, pretty but the kind of girl who has sharp elbows, cheap clothes – not the kind whose parents call 911 when she doesn’t come home; he saw Mrs Kalen’s gold slave bracelet riding just above the long bruise on her skinny arm as she flashed the ring. Given Brad’s history, were those K-mart rhinestones or was that a real wedding band? Kalen clamped her to his side maybe a little too tightly but he was proud and smiling, like this was the most important thing he’d ever done: ‘Bobby, meet the wife.’

Even so, Bobby whispered to her while Brad poured him another of whatever they were having, Are you all right? She lowered those spiky eyelashes and touched Mrs Kalen’s diamond lavalier with a sly smile. There were roaches running on the Formica and flies buzzing in the plastic curtains in that awful place but she was laughing and Brad seemed happy, maybe the only time he was allowed to be, but the Kalens put out enough money to make it all go away. Later he married Cecilia Parker. ‘Her mother was an Arnault,’ Bobby’s mother wrote him, ‘third generation in Fort Jude, charter member of the Junior League.’

Knowing how that one ended he asks uneasily, ‘Did Brad ever tell you what happened to that girl?’

‘There are things you don’t need to know if you want to stay friends.’ In a tone loaded with reproach, Chape takes Bobby where this meeting is going. ‘You’re the only one who knows the place.’

‘It was a trailer.’

‘Now you need to show me where.’

‘Oh, hell,’ Bobby says, and he means it on several levels. ‘Don’t make me go back.’

‘The man is passed out in his own vomit somewhere, with that poor child waiting for him at the club. Now let’s go find our friend and pick him up and scrape him off.’

‘Sorry, I can’t.’

‘Won’t, you mean. Harvard didn’t do you all that much good, did it?’

Bobby shrugs.

‘Look. If you won’t show me where he kept her, at least tell us where to look.’

He shakes his head. ‘I can’t. It’s all freeway now.’

It’s as if Chape hasn’t heard. ‘OK then. One way or another, we go out there and find the bastard. We have exactly one hour to do this and get him to the club.’

16

Jessie

It’s still fun thwarting Fort Jude’s expectations, so for the biggest party the Lunch Bunch has mounted, ever, Jessie sidesteps the pudgy prospect they picked out for her and teams up with Wade Pike. She needs backup for this one.

And oh, they do turn heads, coming in. Jessie chose a simple red silk sculpted to her best self – plus diamonds, all high end and stylishly low-keyed, and bless him, Wade looks almost elegant in his bespoke linen suit. She sees people’s heads snap around as they enter, and thinks, OK. Fine.

In a way, it’s kind of funny, her new best friends’ eyes glistening with envy, their tight smiles. Look at them all, looking at us. She elbows Wade, who hasn’t noticed. ‘We clean up real nice, don’t we?’

For Pierce Point trash. Fort Jude society never says these things out loud, but that’s what these ex-girls said behind her back, from first grade through high school graduation week and on until she left town. She came back somebody, and that changed. They pretend there was never any difference between them, and for complicated reasons, Jessie lets it play. She is, after all, one of them now. She almost forgives, but she never forgets. In first grade she fell down in the lunchroom and it was horrible. Girls giggled and boys and scraped their fingers at her because her mom didn’t so much wash her clothes and eewww, she smelled. It was so bad that she got up and socked Brad Kalen. The fat little shitass started it, but Jessie’s the one who got sent home for two weeks.

When you get up fighting, you get strong. From then on Jessie scrubbed out her underpants in the sink and later she shoplifted a little bit, so she’d never have to go out dirty ever again. She worked at K-Mart afternoons and the early shift at Mook’s Tavern, although she was underage. She handed over grocery money, but she kept back enough for makeup and cute things. She turned heads in tank tops, hoop earrings and flippy skirts, and fuck the snots from Coral Shores, they were just girls. Jessie did what she had to, and mostly it was fun, until life boiled over and she got the hell out of Dodge.

At the time she swore she’d never come back and she didn’t, not even to bury her mom. With Pierce Point behind her, she swore to God she’d make something of herself, and she has. She never intended to come here even though she could buy and sell those bitches, but Fort Jude has a way of calling you back, and here she is.

She’s known the Pike brothers since forever, she and Wade used to play together in the dirt. In first grade they got bussed in to Northshore Elementary along with Walker, something about testing better than Southside Elementary kids. Walker was in second grade. He was handsome and broody and in fifth grade Jessie was sort of in love with him because he slouched around under a shadow, all, don’t bother me. At recess he paced the playground like a captive wolf and Jessie yearned. Boy, did she yearn. If the Pike boys had a mother, she was gone. Wade never said what happened. Either he didn’t know, or he didn’t want to say. Wallace Pike put chicken wire over the doors to keep his babies in the house while he worked, and they crawled around filthy until Walker was big enough to take Wade outside. Mr Pike was a mechanic, running his business out of a shack, and the boys had to work in the shop. They came to school with black grease under their fingernails and raw, stained hands.

Jessie hated how the Coral Shores girls flirted with the Pike boys, smarming up against them in the halls, all excited and shivery: Oh, you dirty boys.

Wade’s come a long, long way since their white trash days. He’s not as interesting as Walker, who got a scholarship to MIT, but unlike Walker, he moves in the best circles in Fort Jude. With a shove from Coach Askew, Wade played football at F.S.U. and pledged Sigma Chi, and now he hangs with the good old boys. He started at Coleman Chrysler before Buck and he rose fast. After all, growing up in a body shop, the man knows cars. When Mr Coleman died, Wade was senior so Wade runs Coleman Chrysler now.

She’s proud of him, standing here like an A-list contender in his Palm Beach suit. He looks a hell of a lot sharper than Sammy Kristofferson that the girls keep pushing at her, plus, unlike Sammy, Wade has kept his hair. The Kristoffersons may be a first family, but in the realm of survival of the fittest, Wade’s the comer now. He, and not Sammy, will probably be the next Commodore of the Fort Jude Club.

Smiling her brightest smile, Jessie takes Wade’s arm. Together, they’ll work the room, where Fort Jude’s nearest and dearest plus friends and relations from as far away as Atlanta are here in their best, making a party for little Patty Kalen.

Which is, of course, the problem, and for Jessie, it’s big. Sooner or later, the creeping slime mold on the backside of the scuzziest sector of the rank, stinking universe, will have to come. The Father of the Bride.

He’s also a problem for the good old girls in the Lunch Bunch, who seize on her with frantic smiles. With three bars set up and banks of white flowers and silver streamers in the ballroom, with the Tony Crimmons orchestra tuning up, the F.O.B. is nowhere around. Sallie Bellinger grips her wrist. ‘Jessie, have you heard anything from Brad?’

She jerks away. ‘Why would I be hearing from Brad?’

‘Wade, we have to borrow Jessie for a little bit.’ Betsy Cashwell separates him from Jessie with an expert sweep of the hand. ‘Girls, we have to rally.’

Through locked teeth, Sallie says, ‘When Brad comes in, we’re reading him the riot act!’

‘If he comes in,’ Kara Coleman says. ‘The boys are out looking for him.’

‘He is, after all, the father of the bride.’

Jessie is a pageant of mixed emotions. ‘And we’re going to . . .?’

And in a frenzy of social innocence, Sallie grins, motivating like the head cheerleader. ‘Why, we’re going to make this the best night of Patty Kalen’s life!’

17

Steffy

Steffy would rather lurk in the gold chairs babysitting Grammy Henderson than talk to her mom right now. The woman she used to think of as pretty much OK is up the wall and halfway across the ceiling tonight, and it’s weirding her out. Something happened with Dad, and Mom is a different person now.

The way she dragged Steffy into this party all girly and giggly, you’d think she was back in high school and this was her fucking prom. ‘Are we early? Is my hair all right,’ she chattered nonstop. ‘Does this dress make me look fat?’ She hissed, ‘Stephanie, don’t slouch, I can see your boobs,’ instructing through her teeth with that heinous party smile, going on as though she and Steffy are girlfriends, not mother and slave. ‘Oh look, the Greenes are here but I don’t see Mr Kalen, isn’t everything beautiful,’ she said falsely, ‘I did the tables last night, don’t you love all the white-and-silver, is my hair OK?’ and the whole time her hand was jittering up and down Steffy’s arm like a tarantula. ‘Oh God, there’s Kara Coleman, at least try to smile. Take care of your great-grandmother . . .’

‘Mom, let go.’

‘. . . and for God’s sake, if your father shows up, come get me.’ Then she jumped into the party like a cliff diver into a shark-infested pool.

It’s a lot safer here on the shore by the bandstand, where the town’s oldest old ladies are beached in gilded bamboo chairs. They sit with tilting champagne glasses stuck in rigid hands so their old, old kids and middle-aged grandkids like Steffy’s mother can pretend they’re enjoying the party, at least a little bit.

Thank God Grammy isn’t talking tonight, she just sits like a doll on top of a cheap candy box and nods and smiles, smiles, smiles. She doesn’t care how she looks or who’s here and she certainly doesn’t care what happens to her at this party, thank God. Furthermore Grammy always kind of likes Steffy when her brain is home, which it isn’t right now. Mom’s parents like to dress Grammy up and drag her out to parties even though she doesn’t always know where she is. It’s their way of making it up to her for sticking her in Golden Acres. Grammy’s nurse put her in her best party dress and fluffed up her white hair so the scalp hardly shows. Grandpa Henderson got her a drink and plopped her down and that’s fine with Grammy. She looks the same kind of happy no matter where she is.

When ladies come over to make nice, shouting to cut through the fuzz in Grammy’s head, she lifts her hand like Queen Elizabeth, accepting the praise of a grateful nation with that sweet, old-lady smile. Although Grammy still has her moments, tonight she can only find one word. She says it nicely, ‘My. My my my.’

The ladies all say, ‘Why Grammy, how nice you look.’ Then they say, ‘Why Stephanie, what are you doing tending your gramma instead of dancing with cute boys?’

And with a vindictive smirk Steffy sells Nenna down the river: ‘It’s only until Mom . . .’ so they see her Mom out there flirting. In green satin, she’s hard to miss; she’d fit right in if this was the Emerald City. Ozma would have a cow.

To a woman, the ladies tsktsk. ‘You ought to be the one dancing.’ Like she’d dance to that crap. Plus, her friends are all at fucking Jen’s party, especially Carter, so Steffy makes one of those noises where people can’t tell if you’re belching or answering or what.

Sweet Grammy takes up the slack. ‘My,’ she says, ‘my my my my my.’

Then they say, ‘Girls together, you and your great-grandmother,’ and, the bitches, they’ve had enough of old so they run away.

Very well, Steffy thinks grandly. Alone. This party will never end. It’s late and they still haven’t had the toast so she can go. Four hundred people and not one of them Carter Bellinger, if he doesn’t come she’ll die stuck to this chair. Waiters know old ladies don’t eat so the hors d’oeuvre trays never come here. By the time she’s free, the buffet will be picked clean. Fine. They’ll be sorry when they find her desiccated corpse. The band is repeating numbers, everybody’s hanging in even though the party is beyond tired. Mom’s getting loud; that laugh sets Steffy’s teeth on edge. The grownups are drinking buckets because it’s rude to leave before the father of the bride gets up on the bandstand and makes his stupid speech.

Funny. Mr Kalen isn’t anywhere. Neither is Dad. Steffy would just feel better if he walked in and explained. By this time Mom’s run out of people she knows. She’s so lame, faking fun conversations with the bandleader and cute waiters because she can’t leave until it’s over, she just can’t. Will Dad and Mom will dance together or fight and kill each other if he does come in? God she hates being here, listening to Grammy breathe, but it beats being out there pretending to have fun.

‘Look at Nenna dancing, she’s frantic!’ For crap’s sake, can’t Mom’s friends wait until they’re out of fucking earshot?

‘Shh, the girl! Poor thing, it’s always hardest on the kids.’

That’s Jen Cashwell’s mother, grinning like a shark: ‘It’s what Nenna gets for fishing in cold water. She could have married somebody local, but no.’

And Mrs Von Harten, Mom’s best friend! ‘Northerners, it’s anybody’s ballgame. How can you tell what a man will do when you don’t know who his people are?’

The worst was the Carlson sisters, after they made their manners and pushed off into the mainstream. The ugly one said to the entire room, ‘Lord, Nenna’s plastered to Sammy Kristofferson like a dog humping a tree.’

When Carter comes she’ll get up and punch them in the face.

After a while Steffy knuckles. To survive around here you have to pretend, and she hears herself saying in her mother’s fake party voice, ‘Lovely party, don’t you think?’

Parked next to Grammy Henderson, Carter’s great-grandmother rises to the occasion. ‘Yes indeed it is.’

Old Mrs Bellinger is no picnic, talks to herself, ugly things, but Carter’s mom will make Carter stop by and kiss her as soon as he comes in, so Steffy sits here with the great-grandmothers on velvet seats that were new back when these old ladies were still real. He’d better not bring some skank with love bites and her boobs all smeared with whisker burn, this is one insult she is not prepared to take.

‘Steffy honey, what are you doing stuck back here?’ Oh shit, it’s Dad, squinting like a shipwrecked sailor washed up on the beach. He looks OK, except he isn’t. His outline is unstable, like a first-grader quit drawing his face before it was done.

Everything piles in on her and she cries, ‘Where were you?’

He won’t exactly look at her. He doesn’t know where Steffy stands with the mess between him and Mom. He doesn’t even know if she knows there is one, clueless Dad. He’s all ulp. Blush. ‘I was on the phone.’

‘Where were you all this time?’

‘Long distance.’ There’s too much to explain so he doesn’t explain any of it. ‘Business call.’

‘Aunt Gayle.’

Does he have to yap like a dog? ‘She’s not your aunt!’

Crap. Steffy’s just too tired to say anything back. Distressed by her silence, he adds a sweetener: ‘Tell you what. I’ll send Mother Henderson to rescue you, OK?’

Steffy just sits, trying to figure out how she feels about him.

‘OK?’ He waits a little too long for her to say it’s OK, which it isn’t. He gives her a miserable wink. ‘Tell you what. We’ll go out after, Heath Bar Mint Blizzards, my treat.’

‘Whatever.’

He’ll be too far away to hear her groan. Dad pushes off from the gilt chairs and he’s gone for good, just like everybody else. Probably he and Mom are out on one of the long porches, having a fight. No. Look at him, he’s trying to grab Mom out in the middle of the floor. She breaks free and dances away with Mr Rivard the club tennis pro like they’re in love, all sexy and fuck you.

Steffy hates her dad for being helpless and stupid. It’s late and she’s starved but the thought of chewing and swallowing in front of all these people brings up issues. Sometimes it’s easier to die.

Then like a shot out of nowhere, Grammy Henderson rouses herself. It’s as though all the lights in her head just went on. ‘Inconsiderate, unfaithful bastard, he isn’t worth it,’ she says so clearly that it’s scary. Then she turns to Steffy with tears in her eyes. ‘Tell your mother not to be so frantic, it’s mortifying. Look at her, throwing herself around like a ten-dollar whore.’

‘God, Grammy.’ Steffy reaches out to her oldest living relative, closing her hand on that translucent arm. ‘Are you in there? Oh, Grammy. Please stay!’

But as quickly as Grammy’s lucid flashes come, this one goes and the best part of Grammy is locked up inside again.

She’s been stranded forever when, like one of those visions saints used to have, previews for an upcoming miracle, Carter appears. He’s alone, which is good, never mind that he and not Jen Cashwell has the purple hickey on his neck. If you send your guy on an all-day field trip without you, with a long busride home in the dark, it’s bound to happen. The miracle is, he’s bending close, so his breath is like a kiss. ‘Hey.’ Like she thought he was only here for Mrs B. He’s here for her! Carter doesn’t even notice his great-grandmother which is OK because she doesn’t much notice him, but Grammy Henderson rises to the occasion, lifting that gracious hand to Carter, saying, ‘My my. My my my my my.’

‘Girl,’ he whispers into Steffy’s hair. ‘It took forever to find you in this mess.’

Over his shoulder she sees Dad approaching, all helpless and baffled, so, is Mom still with the tennis pro, or did he escape? No grandparents in sight, just Dad with his hands floating up like party balloons while Carter murmurs, ‘Babe, let’s go get loaded and do stuff to each other.’

Rats. Words pop into her head. They’re all rats.

Ordinarily she’d flow upward into Carter, bod on bod; she’d grab his hand and put it there, but Dad is flailing in plain sight which means that her mother really is lost somewhere, glued to Mr Rivard or Mr Kristofferson, whoever she can get; Steffy caught her hitting on nice Dan Carteret in the Florida room today when it was her he’d come to see, she knows because of the grin he flashed when Mom started on her about the shoes.

She turns Carter slightly, scanning the surface of the party like a pirate with a spyglass until she locates Mom. Her mother and Mr Rivard are dancing close, like Steffy’s awesome friend Dan means nothing to her, so that’s good. Dad’s crazed but hey, he brought it on himself, and meanwhile Carter’s hand is winkling into her dress even though his great-grandmother is swaying and moaning and Grammy’s my-my-my-my-ing because they’re so tired and Steffy, well, she has fucking had enough of Carter Bellinger, she thought she loved him but he is fucking insincere.

Instead of letting him lock her in place with the other arm, she edges away. Carter doesn’t get it, he leans a degree closer for every inch she slides off the gilded chair, breathing, ‘Babe?’

She stands up so fast that she clips his chin with her skull. ‘Go to hell, Carter. I have a new boyfriend,’ she says.

The minute she says so, it’s true.

18

Dan

He picks up takeout at a drive-thru and parks near the Chaplin house, munching on Slim Jims while he processes his material. He has a lot to process, starting with this compulsion to break and enter. He’s fully equipped, waiting – no, praying – for Chaplin to go out so he can search the house. He has no idea what he expects to find. His mother was no stranger to this house, he’s sure, but he can’t start with Chaplin without proof, and this is bad.

He can’t start at all unless Chaplin goes out.

It’s been hours since he left the Archambault house, but weirdness filled up that stifling bedroom, weirdness drove him out of the house and followed him here, and the question is driving him nuts. What was that?

Where did it come from? Product of exhaustion or the heat, hallucination or what? Listen, it was nothing he did. All Dan was was there, laid wide open by her rage. Alone in that house, in the room where she died, he heard it! He heard her voice! My God, the woman’s been dead for thirty years, but all the hatred and humiliation of the night she burst into flames exploded, boiling inside his head.

He could hear her yowling, trapped and raging inside his skull like a frustrated ghost.

Unless I am fucking nuts.

Eat. Get your shit together. Wait.

He’s too jittery to eat. It’s quiet in Pine Vista, nothing to see here, no signs of life in the Chaplin house, although the lights are on. The last commuters went by hours ago, heading home. He’s alone on this road, as far as he can tell. If someone else is out here in the dark somewhere, if there’s someone watching, Dan Carteret has no way of knowing. In fact, anybody could be parked out by the garden shed or behind the bank of oleanders that marks the property line and Dan wouldn’t know because he’s new to the territory. To him, Pine Vista is as bleak and strange as the face of Mars. And as still.

Waiting, he absorbs the night and silence in a neighborhood where nothing happens and nobody comes. After living on Ventura Boulevard where the traffic never sleeps, it’s like a soundproof headset. The silence is profound. Then a night bird cries and he jerks to attention. What was I thinking? Doh!

He slithers into the garage by a window on the far side, shielding his light. It picks up a dusty SUV, and in the space next to it, a patch of oil left by a second car. Chaplin’s been gone for hours. There’s nothing going on inside the house that he can see, but instinct tells him to wait.

He’s back in the car, gnawing his fajita wrap down to the paper when the front door opens. So he wasn’t, like, fantasizing about that blur in the tower window today, the pale face that came and went faster than you can say Mrs Rochester belongs to the woman coming out. So that was her he saw, flickering like a silent movie wraith. The man is put together like Bob Chaplin, tall and loose-jointed, but he’s so heavy that he shuffles. The two flick on the porch light and fuss over the keys in one of those practiced departure rituals, like pet owners patting the house and telling it be a good dog until they come back. Locking up against whatever comes.

Which will be Dan Carteret. With no evil intentions, exactly. He can’t be sure what his intentions are. If he’d known there were others living here, would he have come? Belching, he slouches behind the wheel, waiting for them to roll up the garage door and get the second car started, which takes a while, and back it out into the oyster-shell driveway and go.

Then he waits a little longer, to make sure.

What else does he have to do tonight, besides go back to his room at the Flordana and brood? He’s locked and loaded: flashlight and screwdriver from Ace Hardware in the messenger bag he’s wearing, in case. It’s big enough to conceal anything he decides to take. Another hour passes. Nothing moves. When he’s satisfied that there are no signs of life anywhere, he makes a cautious circuit of the house. He doesn’t know whether to be disturbed or grateful that these people are either timid or lazy. They left all the lights on.

Crunching through the bushes, he goes from window to window like a voyeur at a Times Square peep show. If he rocks forward and up on his toes, he can see in. For Dan, houses at night are like decorators’ display windows, advertising better ways to live. There are complete, happy lives available inside if he can just find the right place, and come up with the cash. Walking home from school in New London, he dawdled, lingering in spite of the cold. He stood around in the snow until his toes froze, waiting until people’s lights went on so he could look into those bright houses and will himself inside, happy Dan on his belly in front of their TV with brothers and sisters, snug in a tight family unit, waiting for suppertime. Night after night he prowled, stealing other people’s lives.

He does not yet know what he is here to steal.

His first glimpse of the lives inside this house is depressing. Through the front window he sees Victorian side chairs and threadbare brocade sofas, nineteen twenty-something to the day. Did Lucy sit here with Chaplin? Wait. Did they make out? More? The idea gives him the shudders. Next question. The mahogany table is thick with magazines and junk mail, neatly stacked according to size and type; he sees cut glass decanters and massed house plants and art that looks like something picked out by last-century maiden aunts. Somebody has lined up a six-pack’s worth of Heineken empties like soldiers on a side table by the recliner. Tropical fish hang in place in their lighted tank, fixing to float to the top, belly up. Except for the flat screen TV, the new century hasn’t made its way into the living room. These are not lives he wants to walk into.

He is here to steal. Given a choice, Dan would lurk in the bushes forever, but he doesn’t know how long he has. It’s time.

Even though there’s nobody around to see and nothing coming, Dan enters from the back. He pries the rusting screen off a back window overwhelmed by a thicket of Bougainvillea and forces it with the screwdriver. Planting his hands on the sill, he hoists himself up and inside, swift and neat as a swimmer clearing the pool.

Unlike the rest of the house, the original kitchen was redone, probably back when dinosaurs walked. Bleak under the fluorescent strip light, it’s bare and stark as a biology lab. The vinyl flooring has been mopped to death; the pattern on the green Formica counters has been scrubbed white. The room is so antiseptic that it’s hard to believe people eat here. It glistens like a place where food has been banned.

Sobered, Dan ducks into the shotgun hallway. In the windowless hall he can’t be seen from the street, probably because the architects were under orders to keep Herman Chaplin’s maids busy, but out of sight. Maids! It’s a straight shot from the kitchen to the heavy front door, with hall doors opening on pantry and dining room to his right, living room to the left. Golden oak bookcases line the hall, with dusty books shelved like prisoners behind dusty glass; this house hasn’t seen maids in years. The pattern in the Persian runner was worn to nothing before the present generation of Chaplins learned to walk and the place smells of mildew. Old, all these things are old.

He whirls, wondering. What is he looking for? It’s not like he’ll find his Lucy’s initials carved into the woodwork, or a hastily lettered sign pointing the way. There must be something left of his mother in this dismal house: letters, a snapshot of the two of them together. If he has to, he’ll hack into Chaplin’s hard drive and find her there. Entering the dining room, he drops to a crouch so he won’t be seen from the street. Not, he thinks, that there’s anybody out there, but still.

It’s been a long time since Chaplins sat down to family dinners here. He opens cabinets, looks in drawers, uncovering yellowed linens, mildewed table mats, tarnished silverware. The living room looks just the way he thought it would. Cluttered. Inhabited. Sad. Gnarled, hairy African violets crouch like spiders on ancient shelves in the round turret off the living room. The Naugahyde recliner dates from the Sixties, but like the art, all the other furniture looks as if it was nailed to the floor back in the day. Only the electronics are new.

Everything is in stasis.

Troubled, he stands quietly, listening. Trying to imagine his mother back when she was happy; why she was here. What she might have left behind. When you don’t know what you’re looking for, it takes you a while to figure out what you’re looking for and even longer to find it. If you ever do.

Upstairs, he stalls outside the third bedroom door. The two others are easy to identify: the brother’s is strewn with fat-guy clothes; hers is papered in violet, scented, with floral touches on everything that doesn’t move. It has to be this one. Matched leather boxes on the dresser, monogrammed. Everything neat. New laptop sitting open on the table, like an invitation. He should start with Chaplin’s dresser, then go in the closet and check out his jacket pockets, ransack the shelves, his desk drawers. His hard drive. Piece of cake, right?

Not so much.

Practiced reporters are trained to steal bits of people’s lives when they think the conversation is about something else, but they aren’t necessarily prepared to break into their subjects’ empty houses and ransack their things. A normal thief would do that, no problem. To his surprise, Dan is not that guy. It takes him too long to unlock his body, joint by joint, and move on.

He has to satisfy himself with a look into the family medicine chest: Xanax, Ambien, Zantac, laxatives, estrogen, everything but Viagra; this is a family with problems. Like the kitchen, their problems just make him sad. Sighing, he goes back downstairs.

Around now, if Dan is still thinking, he should be thinking that time is running out. It’s late. Chaplin has to come back sometime, and whether or not he does, the others will, probably soon. He needs to get done and get out before they walk in and find him here.

He should hurry; he can’t.

Instead he is stalled in the central hallway, revolving slowly, like an extra in Night of the Living Dead.

Um, he is thinking, if he’s thinking at all. Just, Um.

In fact, the only thing Lucy Carteret left in the house, the only vestige of her is here, hidden where he’ll never think to look, but Dan doesn’t know that. He’ll have to be satisfied with the useful item he will find, assuming he gets a grip. It’s in this hall.

If there’s someone else in the house with him right now, and if this stranger is marking time, willing him to give up and leave, Dan is too fried to know it. Disoriented, he rubs the glass front of a bookcase out of a pressing need to see his reflected face: first proof of the existence of Dan. He’s been standing between the bookcases for – how long? Stupid, but for the first time, he looks at the books behind the glass. Titles line the walls like people imprisoned here and forgotten. The history of Chaplin’s world.

Browsing the titles like a speed-reader, he finds the chapter he needs.

Decades’ worth of high school yearbooks fill the last bookcase, just outside the kitchen door. The logo is stamped in gold on the spine of every single fake leather binding: FJHS. The Fort Jude High School Swordfish, dozens of green padded covers faded in degrees, fill the golden oak shelves. The collection runs from the 1920s at the top to the late Seventies. Kneeling, Dan peers at the numerals on the books in the bottom row, chapter and verse on the last generation of Chaplins to grow up in this house.

The glass front rolls back easily. Greedily, he pulls them out, rummaging for his mother’s graduation year. Finds it. Plunges in, too preoccupied to know that he isn’t the only one looking for vestiges of Lucy here, or that the most important item pertaining to Lucy Carteret is not in this hall.

The object is in fact in Chaplin’s dresser, in the bedroom Dan was reluctant to invade. He might feel better if he knew that there is one item in this house that says it all, but it’s hidden so carefully that it’s stayed hidden for thirty years. He could have torn up Chaplin’s bedroom, rolled back the rug and emptied the closet and rifled his dresser, drawer by drawer without finding it, but he doesn’t know.

He doesn’t even know that a second intruder made his way inside while he was searching the upstairs, or that this nameless somebody is in the kitchen now, flat against the far side of the refrigerator, willing him to leave. Engrossed, he doesn’t know anything except that his mother was so ordinary in her freshman year, just another clueless, pretty girl.

Squatting, he skims the class pictures, looking for Lucy among the group shots of high school sophomores and juniors, working up to the senior yearbook. He finds Lucy at her best among the senior class portraits suitable for framing that kids can also order in wallet size: white T-shirt, silver hoops in her ears, Lucy smiling brighter than he knew. And, he thinks greedily, if he keeps looking he’ll identify the carousing personnel in that Jeep. All five.

Including him. Stare into their senior portraits until you know which one he is. Find your father. Then hunt him down. Shake the truth out of him.

He folds up on the floor with the yearbook open on his knees and studies it, rapt. Now, a yearbook is just a yearbook until somebody you know writes in it. Lucy has written in this one. This incriminating scrawl on the end papers: Love ya, Bobby. And thanks for that.

Dan is too intent on what he’s doing to understand that he is being watched more closely now, or to know that the stranger who kept pace with him as he closed on the Chaplin house, greedily assessing him by what little moonlight there was, the man who has been following for longer than he knows, is very close. Absorbed, he won’t be aware of exquisitely slow movement in the kitchen, as, like a sneak thief intent on stealing a closer look, his stalker fills the doorway at his back. Then the silence splits wide, torn open by a scream.

‘Ou . . . hou . . .’

Thumping.

‘Ouutttt!’

The intruder is gone before Dan whips his head around.

Outside the roar amplifies, half bellow, half subverbal screech, compounded by hammering – blind Furies pounding on steel drums.

Dan leaps to his feet. He shivers at the touch of a sudden breeze blowing in from the back of the house. The muffled roar amplifies. Then something happens and the roaring stops. He grabs the last yearbook and bolts.

Escaping, he runs through the kitchen and leapfrogs the porch rail without noting that the back door is thrown wide, as is the window he thought he secured behind him when he came in. Clearing the house, Dan spins like a dime, scanning his surroundings. He expects to see trembling bushes, moving shapes, some sign that something just happened here, but he quit the house too late to see anything that will make all this make sense.

There is nothing visible, nothing to hear, just a disturbance in the air, as though something tremendous just moved out.

19

Bobby

Now that they’re here, Bobby’s glad Chape called them back to the cabin to regroup after the search. It’s the first time he and these old friends have been together in this room since his life went south. He thought it would be hard, reading the truth about himself in their faces, but, these poor guys! Whatever life did to him, it hasn’t spared them, either – except maybe Chape with his burnished, impregnable smile. This is Bobby’s rehearsal for re-entry, which this party will be, unless it’s death by total immersion, and so far, it’s going pretty well.

Stitch and Buck were uneasy with him at first, but Bobby’s always been good with people, a tremendous asset when he was in finance. A few words, a warm grin and they were his again. The unfamiliar, surprisingly old faces of his friends morphed into the kid-faces he remembers, and Brad? Passed out somewhere. Dead drunk, doubtless, he might as well be in Atlanta or on Mars.

Buck reported, ‘I saw every bartender on Bay Drive. They all claimed he threw up in their toilets.’

Stitch grinned. ‘He punched a guy out at Diggers.’

‘There was breakage at Mook’s Tavern, but I paid.’ Bobby was thinking, Schadenfreude?

‘Brad always was a schmuck.’

‘Face it. Brad is one mean bastard.’

‘We did what we could,’ Chape said.

20

Walker Pike

‘I guarded them, and none of them was lost . . .’ Walker doesn’t know when this verse lodged in his flank like a harpoon but day and night it goads him, trailing implications: ‘. . . except the son of destruction.’

Walker thinks, He can’t mean me. The lines are, after all, two thousand years old, but he can’t shake them. Truth sticks in his flank with the verse trailing behind like a whaler’s line through dark waters. No matter how fast he goes or how deep he dives it follows because – whether as mandate or warning – he knows without knowing that this pertains to him.

Some translations read, ‘except the son of perdition,’ and boy, has he studied the translations. The one he is most comfortable with goes, ‘While I was with them, I protected them in your name that you have given me. I guarded them, and not one of them was lost except the one destined to be lost, so that the scripture might be fulfilled.’

Now, that leaves room for interpretation. With the Redeemer long gone and the language diffused by centuries, who knows the exact meaning?

Hell, he doesn’t even know if he’s still a Christian.

He has spent his life pondering it.

He didn’t live in those times; he was never that person but on bad days he has to wonder, Did Judas ever do a hideous thing and not know it?

Successful, a rich man or close to it, Walker Pike keeps to himself. And he has reasons. What am I? He paces the dock behind his house, considering. Afraid of being destroyed? Or of being the destroyer?

This is what circumscribes his life: the potential for destruction. He saw it once. God, it was an accident! Angry and desperate, grieving for personal reasons, he saw it unleashed and it was terrible. It happened long before Walker had any idea what it was and – God! Long before he learned to control it.

All his life since then has been circumscribed, meticulously calibrated and configured to be uneventful. His high-tech career lets him interface, but from a safe distance. He teleconferences from his tight, orderly little house in a place where no people come. In his black and stainless-steel office, he designs sophisticated applications for high level clients, and he works alone. He never sees colleagues, he won’t meet clients offline, although he is famous on the Web. Only Walker knows how many patents he owns. All his conversations take place on the screen. He is comfortable at long distance, and he has options. He can always quit the application before the other party pisses him off.

Walker loves the predictability of computers. They stay where they’re put and do what they’re told and for every problem, there is a logical solution. All he has to do is work it out. Unlike people, computers present problems that can be solved.

He keeps the world at a distance. Walker buys most things he needs on the Web and finds the rest in all-night supermarkets that he knows will be empty at certain hours. He keeps his anger tightly controlled. And the. Ah. Incident? That was an anomaly! A freak accident that overturned him.

It scared him shit.

He doesn’t know who did what to who, really. He isn’t even sure what happened to her that night. Still, he lives with the risk. The weight of responsibility, which is why he avoids any circumstance that could possibly devolve into a confrontation, the unexpected friction of souls that might lead to . . .

Walker doesn’t know how it would come down. The path he’s set is lonely, but it’s safe.

It’s not his fault he fell in love with Lucy Carteret. And the rest? The rest is a source of constant pain to him.

Bad then, that Fort Jude’s quintessential drunk driver plowed into the back of Walker’s vintage Beemer outside the 7/11 tonight, just when he was feeling safe in life as he has defined it.

Rage kindled even before he found out who hit him.

Instead of lunging out of his car to confront the fool, Walker sat behind the wheel with his teeth locked, intent on defusing the encounter. Count down. Decompress. Get out and look at the damages. Don’t say any of the things you are thinking and whatever you do, make your face do something that looks like a smile. Take this dude’s license number, his insurance card and his contact numbers, and go. Stick to the particulars and if he’s at all belligerent, write off the damages and split before it gets any worse. Don’t argue, and whatever you do, don’t . . .

Before he could get his door open a mass thudded against the car like a side of meat, followed by a greasy face that slid down to his side window, mouthing apologies.

Careful Walker, don’t . . .

Don’t!

A drunk, he thinks, suppressing anger. Over time, he’s taught himself to keep his rage contained. It’s one of the conditions of his life.

A fucking drunk. It figured. What Walker hadn’t figured on was the rest. The drunk was wearing a face that he knew, even though time had morphed it into a red, bloated version of itself like a C.G. projection of the soul within: Brad Kalen. Oh God, he thought, even though he’s not sure he believes there is God.

Oh, God.

The gross, hulking drunk he remembered as a slick, arrogant kid looked right at him – Was he that drunk? Have I changed that much? – and did not see. Decaying Brad Kalen blinked as though Walker was just some guy, and they had no history. Rage flared but Walker locked his teeth and held his breath for as long as it took to damp the furnace. He still could have come away clean if Brad hadn’t pulled a mess of bills out of his pocket with his free hand. Grinning like a clown hired for a kids’ birthday party, he mimed Walker rolling down the window so he could shove money at him and buy his way out of whatever followed.

With a grunt he smashed the door open, hitting Kalen so hard that he fell on his back, flailing. That was his first mistake, if it was a mistake. Walker still isn’t sure where he is with this.

He could have cut his losses right then. He could have slammed the door on Kalen and scratched off, but he got out of the car, like, Are you all right? Shit, he even helped him up. The paper bag the drunk was clutching had turned into a mess of broken glass and leaking rum. Walker had to pry off his fingers, one by one. Then Kalen put his hands over his face and dragged them aside like a kid pretending to open a theater curtain, drawing little streaks of blood over his spreading grin.

‘Pike,’ he said, laughing as though there was nothing between them. ‘Awesome!’

Never mind what the two old enemies said to each other before Brad passed out. Remember, everybody knows everything about everybody who is anybody in Fort Jude, so Walker knew that Kalen was falling-down drunk out here in the boonies on the very night that he was scheduled to go bopping down town to the local swinery. He was supposed to be toasting the bride at some big party for his daughter – things Walker knows thanks to his fool brother Wade, who chose to rise in Fort Jude society and actually feel honored to be invited.

What he doesn’t know is what compelled him to lug the stupefied drunk around behind his car where they won’t be seen and stuff the filthy, reeking Brad Kalen into his crumpled trunk and slam the lid on him. Or why he turned the car and headed for the Fort Jude Club, planning to roll him out of the trunk and flee before the valet parking kids came out and found him. Nor does he know what in God’s name drove him to stop in Pine Vista before he made his delivery. Unless he does.

He was driving into town on Fourth Street, straight shot to the Fort Jude Club, but he failed to make the one zig-zag where Town Planning and Zoning gave Herman Chaplin his variance back in the Twenties, when he mapped out Pine Vista. Walker was driving in Fourth Street, not thinking, or trying not to think, when his body remembered what he has been working so hard to forget. He wasn’t on Fourth Street any more. The road narrowed. Curbstones gave way to pulverized oyster-shell shoulders and the asphalt road turned him out on the last red brick streets that marked the entrance to Pine Vista. He was entering territory he used to know. He stopped, but it was too late to turn.

Ahead, Herman Chaplin’s stone lions crouched, regarding him. Not judging, exactly. Just noting his presence. Guarding a neighborhood that never made it off the drawing board. Like certain other things.

Walker said goodbye to Lucy Carteret in front of those lions on that lost, terrible Thanksgiving in the year that changed his life. ‘Grandmother thinks I’m out with Bobby.’ She trailed her fingers across his cheek and said, ‘I’m sorry it has to be this way,’ and Walker groaned. In the silver twilight, the future hung between them like a veil. She walked between the cement brutes and went to Bob Chaplin’s house without looking back.

He followed on foot; he had to be sure. He waited in the bushes until the big car came for her, just as she said it would. Chaplin: what the old woman wanted for her. Walker will love Lucy Carteret to the grave but nothing he said or did back then would change that old bitch or touch her heart, not given where he comes from and who his people are. He and Lucy were doomed, and that was even before he and the vindictive old bitch collided – and Walker Pike became what he is.

He thought he’d gotten past it, but here he was. Again. Oh, shit.

Maybe Walker zoned out; maybe he has been heading back here all his life. Never mind. A quick K turn would put him back on track to dump this drunken bastard at the club without unnecessary detours, but Walker was smoked by the past. Foolishly, he lingered. He coulda-shoulda-woulda but then in a doppelgänger moment another car – Chaplin’s? – came heading out of the abandoned development.

Gulping air, Walker cut his lights and waited for it to pass.

Lucy, he thought, unless he said it aloud. Oh, Luce.

Like certain other things in his life, it was an accident, it just came out. He couldn’t help it. With Brad Kalen in the trunk and pressing duties elsewhere, Walker found himself back in Pine Vista.

Twilights in Florida are ambiguous; there’s no predicting when the day will drop off the face of the earth. The light was changing by the time he reached the Chaplin house.

A light went on upstairs. They’re home, Walker thought, sagging with relief. So I can go. OK then. Time to make that K turn and get going. But he couldn’t, quite. Instead he cut the motor and rolled into the long shadow of a utility shed. He had no idea what he was doing here. Maybe he just needed to think. With his captive halfway between out-cold and sleeping-it-off, he could sit here until he got strong enough to stop his inexorable slide into the past.

In fact, Walker’s heart was going downhill by noon today, long before Kalen recklessly rear-ended him and came out grinning as though there was no bad history between them.

Wade called. He’s sick of his brother’s love affair with Fort Jude society, so he let the machine pick up. ‘This just in. Jessie called, and she says . . .’ Wade’s voice filled the room; like everybody else in this town, he loved to beat those jungle drums. ‘She says a somebody Carteret just checked in at the Flordana. Young guy, she’ll tell me the rest tonight but, hey. Walker, he has Lucy’s eyes.’

Walker’s mouth dried out and his heart staggered. Stricken, he whirled in the beautiful space he had created, a soul circling the drain. Fuck you, Wade. Fuck you for dropping this on me.

Generally a strong person, Walker Pike plunged into grief for what was lost years before he even guessed what he was, or could conceive of becoming what he is. Grief drove him out of his perfect house, and although he never intended to come back to the Chaplin place, memory brought him here.

Don’t, Pike. Don’t be here. Get out of Pine Vista, fool.

He was fixing to scratch off when the other car approached. He tracked the headlights, troubled when the driver slowed down in front of Chaplin’s house. Not Chaplin, nobody he knew, not expected here. The driver cut the motor and coasted past silently. He stopped in a sheltered spot just beyond the house, as if, like Walker, he wanted to watch without being seen.

Him, Walker thought, without knowing who he meant or why it was so disturbing. Me.

He should leave, he couldn’t leave. OK then, wait the fucker out. A lurker had come into a place so specific to Walker that he could not bear to have him here. When he goes, you can go, he told himself. For years he’s tried to put all this behind him. He thought he had, but here he is. Tough as he is, driven and tightly controlled, Walker Pike understands why he’s here. Part of his past is hidden somewhere inside that house, a fixed destination point in his existential GPS. When she told him goodbye, Lucy left it here, like a magnet. He still felt the pull.

He slipped out of the car and sat down on the pine needles to wait. With Kalen passed out in the trunk, he could take his time. Hey, he was doing the asshole a favor. Let him sleep it off, wake up and get his shit together before you dump him in there among his people, no hard feelings, if you can manage that.

His domesticated brother was stoked about the extravaganza at the club: ‘Brad’s daughter is engaged, and I’m invited.’ In way it’s pathetic, how Wade hangs on what those surface-feeders think, maybe because it’s all on the surface.

And here you are, custodian of the so-called host. Wash the bastard’s face even if you despise him, comb his hair and get the vomit off his shirt. It’s his party, after all.

After a time, Walker saw Maggie and Al lock up the house and leave. Fine, he told himself. Now I can go.

Then the intruder’s car door fell open and Walker froze. The intruder got out of his Honda and headed for the house. Quick. Anxious, judging by the angle of the shoulders. Young, judging by the lean, unfinished look. Now Walker had to wait until the stranger finished doing whatever he came to do and left.

Then he could go.

Stupid, stupid. He fell into a tracker’s crouch and followed. Woulda-coulda-shoulda. The lurker snaked in through a back window and Walker groaned. Yeah, right. And you thought you could control your life.

He couldn’t leave until the creep came out.

In the still, dense night, lost years played behind Walker’s frontal bone like grainy film on a drive-in movie screen, scored by the dry needles of the Australian pines stirring in the wind: the look and feel of Lucy’s body that first time, the sibilant whisper of pine branches overhead. God he loved her. God he had no choice. He gave her his mother’s wedding ring, but that was much later, and in spite of forces marshaled against them. He can still see the way it looked, sliding onto her left hand.

Given what happened later he and Lucy were fated, but in his own way Walker is blind and persistent as a zombie: dead, but he won’t lie down. The night he pressed the ring on Lucy they were in such distress that he was never clear where she went afterward, or where she hid the ring. He loved her so much!

The son of destruction. Walker backed out of her life to protect her, and he had to do it without telling her why; he had no choice. It destroyed him, but he would do anything to keep her safe. If only he’d been able to explain! He has spent his life since then researching the anomaly, meditating, trying to get to the truth of it. Years, with no answers. Years of grief.

Astounding need froze him where he stood, under the pines outside the Chaplin house. Whether out of need for the girl or the moment or who he used to be, Walker’s heart cried to heaven, I want it back.

But they were gone: Lucy. The boy. Whatever they were to each other was beyond all retrieving and Walker knew it. The only thing he can hope to get back is the ring. Not that having it would make anything better; it’s just an object he wants to hold. So with Brad in the trunk and certain issues pending, Walker waited for the man in the house to finish what he was doing and go.

Time wore on.

What does he think he is, Walker wondered. Entitled? Taking his goddamn time. It was hard at first, but he has schooled himself in patience over the years since then. The young man inside the house was nobody he knew, nobody he had any reason to hate. He had to wait. OK then, he told himself without affect. For as long as it takes.

Squatting in the pine needles, he waited beyond waiting. Shut inside the trunk of the Beemer, Brad could damn well stew in his own fumes. Eventually he’d come to. If I’m going to do this, I have to do it soon.

Moving so slowly that he barely disturbed the air, Walker got to his feet. He circled the old stucco, looking in. The front rooms were seedy, but so richly furnished that he was struck by the disparity. The function of money and position in this town. He entered the house through the back window. In the kitchen he paused, absorbing the space.

Where he was listening for footsteps, drawers being rifled, something, the sound he did hear was so subtle that at first he couldn’t identify it. It was . . . Walker shrank into the shadow of the fridge while his mind scurried here, there. It was . . .

The slither of glossy pages. Slowly, he emerged, silent and insubstantial: just one more ghost of the past in this old house. Poised in the doorway, Walker studied the intruder kneeling with his back to the kitchen where he stood, absorbing the set of the kid’s head, the whorl in his sandy hair, the concentration with which he studied the book on the floor in front of him. Like a high school time capsule, The Swordfish lay open, disgorging the past.

Him, Walker thought, riveted by an unaccountable pressure on the heart. Me.

He caught his breath as if to speak.

There was no time for discovery and confrontation, no time for Walker Pike and this kid to face off and say what they had to say, because out there in the damaged trunk of Walker’s Beemer, Brad Kalen came awake. Walker’s mouth opened; looking down at the bent head of the stupendously vulnerable new person in his life, he was on the verge when the banging and howling began, fucking Brad.

The kid’s head came up.

The night cracked and Walker turned into something else. Fucking Brad. Fury boiled up. Get out of here before . . . He had to go! In a miracle of compression, Walker turned and left before the kid could turn and discover him.

Shit! His heart shuddered. Shit, he thought, without being clear exactly what he thought he was escaping. That was close.

21

Bobby

They rode to the party in Chape’s Escalade. It made things easier for Bobby, coming in.

With Chape walking point and Stitch and Buck flanking him, it’s almost like the old days. He is aroused by the stir they create even now, after so long. Women Bobby used to know turn, touching dyed hair and rearranging their faces at the sight of him. The ripple swells into the wave he and his main men made back in senior year, stalking the corridors in torn football jerseys and jeans that had gone white at the knees and over the bulge at the crotch. Kids fell away like the Red Sea, making a path for the chosen ones because he and his cadre owned the school. Now here they are again, four good buddies – too bad about Brad . . . No. He’s glad he eluded them, given that Brad when he’s boiled is an ugly thing. And Bobby? There are times when he trips on one of the Twelve Steps but mostly he’s OK. Good, in fact.

Here in the grand ballroom of the Fort Jude Club, it’s as though the bad things in his life never happened. The grappling hooks release his heart and he forgets how old he is and how long it’s been. People he was afraid to see again light up. For the first time in a long time Bobby Chaplin is a kid again. He sizes up the women like an impulse shopper scanning soup can labels, thinking, I can have any girl in this room, the problem being that the ones he can have are no longer girls.

Oh, there are plenty of women. Dozens of foxy twenty- and thirty-somethings gift-wrapped in strappy little dresses sail past without seeing him. Like the surly teenagers with nose rings and tongue studs removed for the event and silky shifts designed to expose their precious tats, they’re all depressingly young.

Well, he thinks, fair’s fair.

Then there are the women he knows. Betsy Cashwell is as fit and cute as she ever was, but growing up in strong Florida sunlight isn’t just bad for these women, it’s a catastrophe. She looks like a white raisin now. Cathy Rhue’s put on weight and she’s not the only one. It’s sad! Guys have gone bald or run to fat like Stitch and Sammy Kristofferson, who did both, and the thin ones look wasted and insecure.

You’d think an atom bomb just hit Fort Jude and when these people walked out of the ashes they were old, cardboard cutouts of people he used to know. In high school he imagined rich inner lives for them, but now he has to wonder. Then he catches them squinting at him like photographers matching negatives to prints, and thinks, Do I look that bad? Does he?

‘Dude.’ Chape snags his elbow. ‘Meet the blushing bride.’

Poor kid! Patty Kalen and the fiancé stand fixed under the oleander trellis like plaster dolls waiting to be plopped on a wedding cake. Waiting for the F.O.B. Patty’s smile has been set for so long that the surface is about to crack.

‘Why Patty,’ Bobby says, noting that her hands are slick with the sweat of too many well-wishers, ‘you don’t know me, but I knew your dad.’

Reloading the smile, she says miserably, ‘Oh.’

‘I’m sorry.’ It just pops out. He covers his mouth.

Brad is famous, and not in a good way. Patty acknowledges it with a nod. ‘This is Stuart, my fiancé. He’s from Atlanta. And Stuart, this is . . .’

‘Bob Chaplin.’ His gift to the girl is not shaking her hand. ‘Your mother was a wonderful person.’ Young as she is, Patty is weary, weary. Her lips move in response, shaping a silent, I know.

‘Chape Bellinger.’ Chape inserts himself with that smile. The fiancé is awed by the high sheen of prosperity, but by the time he extends his hand to shake, Chape has moved on to shinier pastures. To spare him embarrassment, Bobby takes it.

‘Bob,’ he says, shaking firmly. ‘Bob Chaplin. Goldman Sachs.’

The fiancé has one of those soft, smooth faces, like the mask of an unused baby. He says, ‘Nice to meet you, Mr . . .’ and hands him off as the bride’s sorority sisters strike. Worn thin by waiting, Patty whirls and falls into their group hug with a grateful shriek.

Damn Brad, Bobby thinks, and not for the first time. Damn him for everything.

He washes up in a stagnant corner near the bar, watching bartenders pour refills. He won’t deny that he’s getting off on the fact that he’s dry, has been for almost two years and, like Chape and Buck and everybody else here, Stitch is getting loaded.

Stitch downs his double. ‘Did I tell you I lost a million bucks?’

‘Shit,’ Bobby says. ‘At least you can cover it.’

Stitch grunts. ‘Not any more. Gonna have to go Chapter Eleven soon.’

‘That’s terrible.’

‘Don’t be thinking it happened overnight.’ He pats his empty pocket – he used to smoke. ‘It was the alligators. Supposed to make our fucking fortune.’

‘Alligators.’ In high school they drove out to the reptile ranch at three a.m. Brad made them wake up Earl Havens so they could make Earl wrestle the alligator, which he did for tourists on weekends to help his dad. Earl was humiliated. He didn’t want anyone at school to know. Bobby and Stitch made Brad back off before Earl lost it and broke down in front of the girls. Just remembering makes him sad.

‘Alligator backpacks. Alligator boots, bags, alligator skin wallets. Do you know how much people pay for these things?’

‘High-end,’ Bobby offers. Vicious bastard, Brad.

‘They’re worth thousands,’ Stitch says mournfully. ‘You get a fortune for the hides. I went to Louisiana to see the ranch.’ He lights up like an inflatable Santa. ‘Bobby, I held that egg while my alligator hatched! It came to life in my hands!’

‘Oh, great.’ Oh God.

‘I was in deep by the time we were done. Breeding, monthly charges, herd of vicuñas, feed ’em with the meat, sell the fleece for coats. It was a win-win, the ranch took care of everything, it would amortize when my gators grew up. We were close to the big payday when the lady called from the ranch. Thermostat busted in my sector. Do you believe my little fuckers all boiled to death?’

‘That’s terrible.’

Stitch brightens. ‘Shit, Katrina. I would’ve lost ’em anyway.’

‘Yeah well, we all have our losses,’ Bobby says.

Then Stitch’s grin splits wide open. ‘Fuck, it was a scam.’

Bobby turns, distracted by laughter – clear, a little too loud. Nenna is spinning on the dance floor. Her face hasn’t gone to hell and her body hasn’t either – the girl he could have had in high school, he realizes, if he hadn’t been wrecked in love with Lucy Carteret. Lovely Nenna, out there whirling on her own.

Buck sidles close enough to mutter in his ear. ‘Trouble in the marriage.’ He hocks and swallows. ‘Husband’s two-timing her with his sister or some damn thing.’

If there’s a moment, Chaplin, this is it. The way things are for her, the way she is tonight, he could probably start the conversation and she’d be his, but miserable as she looks, abandoned on the dance floor, he can’t.

Buck says, ‘’Nother drink?’

‘Not right now.’

He just can’t.

God he hates this. It will end the way these parties always do: personal disasters interwoven with thank-yous and reproaches, somebody crying in the coat room, everybody saying what a good time they had, an orgy of regret. God he wants to leave. Soon, he promises himself. When the band comes back from break I’ll go out front and have Marco get me a cab.

He would have, too, but a human infernal machine slams into the bandstand before he can give it a name. The fast-moving, flailing tangle scatters chairs and music stands, toppling the microphone in a rush of static and clashing metal with one man howling like a vocalist straight from hell, and Bobby shouts in relief. ‘Finally!’

It’s . . . It’s . . .

It looks like two bears grappling, like a baggy, snarling grizzly locked to a swift, lean black bear, the two bodies tangled and bucking so violently that the racket clears the floor. Men back away and their wives shrink behind them with little shrieks, leaving Bobby alone at the base of the bandstand as the struggle ends. The lean gladiator tries to haul the fat one to his feet and right the microphone at the same time, but it’s a losing battle.

Glaring, he lets go and his burden drops, wallowing and gargling spit. As he does so, Bobby recognizes that fierce, handsome head and his heart turns over. You look the same. After all this time.

Blind to him, Walker Pike turns the body over with his foot and the room comes to life in a communal Oh, no! It’s one of their own.

‘The father of the bride.’ Walker’s rasp reaches even the clueless eddying at the fringes, laughing and talking as though nothing else is happening. ‘Say hello to the people, dude.’

Brad Kalen settles into a puddle of flesh with his tongue lolling and his body bulging through gaps in his stained dress shirt like parts of a ruined, badly stuffed doll. Disgusted, Walker prods the baggy mess with his toe, but Brad is beyond speech. Did Walker bring him here to make him do right by Patty? To make a spectacle of him? He doesn’t explain and Bobby doesn’t know.

Looking up, Walker Pike says in a tone roughened by contempt, ‘He’s sorry he’s late.’

Any other daughter might be in tears by now but hardship has made Patty Kalen strong. With a little nod of acknowledgement, she turns and leaves the room.

‘Be careful where you leave your garbage,’ he says to everyone present, and he is rigid with compressed fury. He turns and stalks out, muttering so only Bobby hears, ‘It’s a fire hazard.’

22

Walker Pike

So it isn’t really Kalen’s fault that the fat drunk imploded at the Fort Jude Club, spilling Walker out in a treacherous place – unless it is.

There was too much history in that room, repeating like something bad he ate. It cracked his protective shell, exposing the man he used to be.

What was he thinking? That he could dump Brad Kalen and get shut of him? In one of those toppling domino displays, everything Walker did that day led to something worse. The collision at the 7/11. The detour to Pine Vista. Profoundly shaken by his near-encounter with the stranger who looks like him, he teetered in Chaplin’s kitchen, poised to speak. Then Kalen shattered the night, kicking and yowling, battering the interior of the Beemer’s trunk until he rocked the car.

Bad things happen when Walker goes out, and he knows it.

Hurry, he told himself, fleeing the house. Drop him at that fucking club. Vanish before you do something worse.

He should have burned rubber and rolled Kalen out on the steps of the Fort Jude Club, but the stink creeping into his car from the trunk told Walker that he’d thrown up. He was back there rolling in it. Walker despises him, but it was so appropriate that he laughed. He stopped at an all-night car wash to hose out his trunk. To silence Kalen and clean him up. Planning, he was relieved to find that he was no longer angry, just resigned. Get him there. Dump him and go. You have disrupted me enough.

‘’Onna sue your brains out.’ Brad spat on his shoes. ‘Fucking Pierce Point trash.’

Walker just finished hosing him down.

‘Scumbag junkyard shit.’

Pathetic.

‘Your father licked assholes for a living, that fucking drunk.’

‘Take this,’ Walker said, throwing him the T-shirt he uses to wipe down his car after a rain. ‘Yours smells like puke.’

‘And your mother was a cunt.’

Walker handed him a comb. Pleased, maybe, that Kalen couldn’t make him angry. ‘Get the crud out of your hair.’

‘I know what you are,’ Brad snarled through a mouthful of spit, ‘and I know what you did.’

Not likely. Nobody knows.

Walker gave him another blast with the hose. It wouldn’t matter what Kalen said or did now. It took years, but Walker has gotten comfortable with, OK, he doesn’t want to be pretentious, but. He’s gotten comfortable with what he is. He and it have come to terms. He threw Kalen a roll of toilet paper.

‘Wipe your face.’

‘She’d go down on a coon dog for a nickel.’

‘Get in.’

‘And your father’s a crap mechanic.’

‘My father’s dead.’ Belted into the passenger seat, Brad was too drunk to continue. In spite of the hose-down, he stank; it will take more than simple detailing to get the Kalen out of this car. Leaving the Fort Jude Club, Walker rolled down all the windows but his sweet vintage Beemer still stinks. It will stink for days in spite of the towel he put down on the passenger’s seat before he shoveled his captive in. Interesting, then, that he kept his cool. Intent on finishing the job.

But Brad! Brad belched insults. In the lexicon of blunt instruments, he was rummaging for the right one. As they rolled into the Fort Jude Club he came up with it, hissing wetly, ‘Lucy whispers when she comes.’

I could kill him now. Walker rocked with pain. Thank God we’re here. He reached across Kalen’s baggy front, unbuckled his bulging belly and shoved him out. Dump him and go.

But Kalen wasn’t going. As Walker leaned across the seat to close the door on him, Kalen yanked it wide. His head revolved like a cheap effect in a bad movie as he sprayed, ‘You want to know what she whispers? She whispers your name.’

Whose name, Kalen? Mine? Yours?

So Walker had to jump out of the car and beat the crap out of the baboon before the thing escalated, pushing him into a dangerous place. The valet parker and the maitre d’ guy in the uniform vaporized. Which of us are they afraid to touch? Kalen? Me? He doesn’t know. In a way, Walker was glad nobody saw. He needed to re-organize his face before he delivered his package which, for reasons, he had to do.

Grimly, he dragged Kalen upstairs to the grand ballroom, astonished by how leaden he was. Pleased, really, that nothing worse had happened. No. Surprised and relieved. But that was last night.

Snapping awake at first light, he sits up and – God! Daylight crashes into his head, streaming into him through the crack.

Locking his arms around his knees, Walker shudders, rocked by loss.

23

Dan

This isn’t where Dan expects to be, but in a strange way, he’s finding it extremely pleasant.

Where he should be down at the Star digging up clips on the incinerations, he is in the McCalls’ sunny Florida room with Mrs McCall, who for the fifth time has instructed him to call her Nenna. They’re side by side on her flowered sofa, bent over Chaplin’s old yearbook. Mildew has turned the faux leather to silver. Flattened insects breathed their last between these pages years ago, and a smell he doesn’t recognize rises from the gutter between the glossy pages. Mrs McCall is pointing out pictures in The FJHS Swordfish, although for reasons that are opaque to Dan, she hasn’t forgiven him for carbon-dating her.

He didn’t know what he wanted when he broke in to Chaplin’s house. God knows what made all that noise; he had to leave! With his search cut short, he grabbed The Swordfish and bolted. He got stupendously lost, escaping on back roads where everything looked like everything else. By the time he found his hotel he was too wired to sleep, but too wiped to do anything but crash. Maybe he slept, but if dreams are bookmarks, there’s nothing left to prove he did. Mostly he remembers thrashing.

His eyes popped open long before it got light. Four. Colon. Oh. Oh., the digital clock reported aggressively, taunting him. Four. Colon. Oh. Eight. Nyah, nyah. At Five. Oh. Oh. he declared the sun over the yardarm and opened the book. Sitting cross-legged in his briefs like a kid with a fresh porn mag, he scoured the pages, in hopes. Of what?

The answer fell into his hands like a gift. His mother’s photo led the senior class portraits: pretty Lucy Carteret, silenced for once, composed for her photograph. Smiling as ordered, but with that defiant glint. Looking into her face captured more than thirty years ago, he understood that Lucy had always been the same person. At eighteen, she faced the camera with her chin lifted in the proud, I-can-do-this way that Dan knows; seconds before the end she lifted her head and faced the future with that exact, intelligent glare.

The biography was like Lucy, short on detail. She’d listed only the necessary: May Court, 1, 2, 3, 4, May Queen, 4; The Liveoak, 1, 2, 3, editor, 4; president, National Honor Society, 3, 4. There was no nickname specified, even though high school kids without them usually improvised. There were no favorite sayings or flip mottoes to bring real Lucy to this page, no boyfriends named that he could interrogate and no girly lists of favorite flowers or songs to remember her by. The only thing personal about the entry was her smile. It hit him in the chest. These people, like their photos, began fading the moment the camera’s iris flexed and snapped shut, fixing them in time.

Maybe cows are right, he thought. The photographer who captures your image really has stolen your soul.

He wouldn’t have known the others. Chaplin’s text ran for several lines, beginning with Nickname: ‘Bobby.’ The list of achievements covered every sport, plus: FJHS Swordfish, 1, 2, 3, editor 4. Senior musical, 1, 2, 3, 4. Fort Jude Chamber of Commerce Sun King, 4. Science Club, 1, 2, president, 3, 4. The things they did, Dan thought, wondering if these itemized exploits carried the same freight as objects in that Vietnam vet’s story, ‘The Things They Carried.’

It was hard to reconcile this jaunty, bulletproof boy and the guy with the crumbling house in Pine Vista. At eighteen, with a fresh shirt and an untarnished grin, Bobby Chaplin was a different guy, brash and freshly minted. Chaplin is not a bad-looking guy but he looks – well, defeated. Thinner, with telltale shadows in the hollows at his temples and eyes making their inevitable descent into the skull.

Where other seniors cited songs and slogans, dropping hints about epic bashes they’d survived or naming their loves, Bob Chaplin included one personal item. Favorite saying: ‘Harvard Fair Harvard.’ His staff added an editorial comment in italics: ‘We always knew he was gonna be a star.’

Yeah, right, Dan thought. Like that worked out. All those expectations, and now look.

He said to the photo, ‘I’m sorry.’

He found Mrs McCall accidentally, because she looked exactly like Steffy on a fat day. The plump teenager’s glossy hair had that freshly ironed look and her eyes gave back the bank of studio lights. She was smiling – happy and excited, open to whatever came next. Her thumbnail bio was touchingly girlish. GENEVIEVE HENDERSON, he read. Nickname: ‘Nenna.’ Pen Club, 4; Drama Club, 3, 4; FJHS Tarponettes, mascot, 4. Slogan: Puh-leeze. Favorite color: blue. Favorite player: Number 67, Now it Can be Told! Favorite song: ‘The Way We Were.’

‘Oh, lady,’ he said to the photo, to all of them. ‘What happened to you?’

Looking for his mother in endless group photos, he studied all the group shots: May Court, N.H.S., kids lined up over cutlines identifying them, left to right. Lucy wasn’t among them. Pretty as she was, she didn’t show up among the laughing kids caught partying or mugging for the camera in the candids either. He had to wonder, did the woman have no friends? Skimming for anything that would link her to the guys in her cherished Polaroid, he overlooked the ragged spot where somebody razored out a page. He won’t find the photo of Lucy Carteret standing with Bobby Chaplin on the steps of City Hall over the cutline, Most Likely to Succeed.

He turned to the inscriptions in Chaplin’s yearbook, loving screeds in flashy colors, but Lucy wasn’t anywhere. Desperate to be different, girls wrote gushy notes with curlicues and flourishes, dotting their I’s with hearts or smiley faces, scrawling cliches like, ‘You’re the best.’ Sallie, Bethany, Betsy, Jane, began, ‘Remember that time’ or ‘houseparties!!!’ followed by paragraphs of bla, bla, bla, ending with multiple Xes and Os. He found Nenna Henderson’s timid, ‘Love ya Bobby,’ almost by accident, she wrote so small. The guys’ were briefer, scrawled in drunken haste. A gifted speed-reader, he skimmed them all.

At Six. Oh. Oh. he was still in lotus position, reading long after his feet had gone to sleep.

The last note he found was neatly printed. ‘Thanks for that.’ No explanation, no effusions in contrived script, just the signature in a spot so obscure that he had to look twice before he noticed it. ‘Sincerely, Jessie Vukovich.’ Flipping back, he found her photo. Less angular. Brunette back then, the woman who signed him in yesterday with the same brash smile, the same sultry toss of the hair. There it was. A plan.

He snorted orange juice and ate his way through the mini-bar before he showered and prepared for the day. Dumping the promotional bumph out of the Flordana’s complimentary goody bag, he slipped The Swordfish inside. Flash it at the people you know. See what they do when you point to Lucy’s photo. He took the stairs, peering into dim corridors as though he expected Jessie Vukovich to pop out and tell him everything.

What did she mean when she wrote, ‘Thanks for that’? Do she and Chaplin have a secret history? Yesterday she handed back his snapshots with an indifferent shrug. The woman graduated the same year as his mother, could they actually not know each other in a school that small? Perched on a tapestried love seat outside the coffee shop, he mainlined swash from the coffee machine, lying in wait for her. As if he really believed that aging, overtly sexy Ms. Vukovich could solve his life.

A skinny old guy with a comb-over came out of her office at seven sharp, straightening his black string tie on his nerdy white short-sleeved shirt. Dan retreated behind the Fort Jude Star and settled down to wait.

At nine – late enough to make house calls, he gave up on Jessie Vukovich, FJHS grad who owed something to Chaplin, and what else did he have? The inscription. ‘Love ya. Nenna.’ He stuffed the yearbook in his Florida Trends bag and drove to her house.

Mrs McCall opened it, grinning as though something – life? – had just delivered a present, gift-wrapped, and she could hardly wait to get it inside and rip the ribbons off. She went all actress on him, trilling, ‘Daniel, how nice!’

‘It’s Dan.’

‘Come in, come in!’ Was she playing to a full house or an empty one? He wasn’t sure. He never saw the husband yesterday, just heard him stomping out. The lady was carefully put together for a Saturday, good hair and full makeup, yellow shoes. Was she expecting him, or did she always fix herself up like Barbie, just in case? ‘Come on, you could get heat prostration out there!’

‘Ma’am, if you’re busy . . .’

‘Who me? You’ve got to be kidding. Please.’ She moved him along to the Florida room a little too fast. Still, it was nice to be welcome somewhere.

The Florida room was a little creepy. Where Lucy loved the light, Mrs McCall had layers of fabric covering all the glass. All Florida might be blooming outside but Nenna McCall kept this place hermetically sealed against the heat. The flowers were fake irises embellished with silk leaves so finely made that he could see the veins. Rose patterns crawled across the squashy chairs flanking the sofa and ivy crept up the legs of the wrought iron table and chairs. Underfoot, beige roses bloomed on the Chinese rug. On the walls, he saw gaudy hibiscus prints and watercolors of the Fort Jude scenes framed in bamboo. Having shut out nature, the intelligence that chose this room had tried and failed to replicate it inside.

It made him reluctant to sit down.

She reached as if for his arm but at the last minute bent and patted the sofa. ‘Sit here. I’ll get us some iced tea. Unless you’d prefer lemonade,’ she went on in that nervous, girlish way. ‘Or coffee. Peet’s, from California? It’s really good.’

‘Thanks, I’m pretty much caffeined out.’

‘Oh,’ Nenna looked at the shopping bag like a child jonesing for a present. ‘Is that for me?’

‘Kind of. I wanted to ask you a couple of things.’

‘Sure!’

He proffered The Swordfish. ‘You were in school with my mother?’

Guilty. She jerked away. ‘When?’

‘At FJHS?’ He sat down so she would sit. Then he opened the book. He couldn’t say what, exactly, happened to her face when he pointed out plump little GENEVIEVE HENDERSON. ‘You knew my mother, right?’

She jumped up, as if to prove it wasn’t true.

‘So, did you?’

Her tone chilled. ‘Wait here.’

What pissed her off? Waiting, he leafed through the yearbook, wondering what just went wrong. It was sweet in a way, seeing these long-ago kids’ faces, because they were so young. Flashing on Lucy in her last hour, he saw the future; smart or stupid, pretty or not, these people were hostages to biology and destiny. Nothing that the eighteen-year-olds facing the camera with such hopes could say or do or buy or get would prepare them, or help them arm themselves against what was to come. Today Nenna wore white jeans and a tank top that exposed her tanned, buff upper arms. Her hair was almost perfect, but her face betrayed her; she worked too hard on it.

Right. Now he gets it. She’s pissed at me for knowing how old she is.

By the time she comes back, she’s forgiven him. Smiling, she puts down the tray and offers homemade cookies that he doesn’t want. Offended by being nailed as a late-late Seventies person at Fort Jude High in the Middle Ages, she makes him take two before she asks, ‘Who was your mother?’

He shows her the picture.

‘Lucy. Carteret. You kept her name.’

‘It’s the only name I have.’

Her head snaps back as if everything inside it just jerked to a stop. ‘I’m sorry!’

He flushes. ‘It’s no big.’

Recovering, Mrs McCall – sorry, Nenna – bends over the book with him, dropping details like breadcrumbs along a forest path. ‘Lovely girl but she kept to herself, which is why . . . OK,’ she says in that youthful tone aging women work to maintain, ‘OK. We thought she was snotty.’

‘She was shy.’

‘It’s not like we didn’t like her.’ Defensively, she adds, ‘She didn’t want to be friends. I’m sorry, we should have tried harder.’

‘Don’t feel bad.’

‘Maybe living with your grandmother makes you weird. Her mother died having her and the old lady flew to Charleston and scooped her up.’

‘Charleston?’

‘Carteret’s an old Charleston name. She said David wasn’t fit to bring up a child, and that was that. They duked it out in court and she won.’ She taps the page. ‘Which is how Lucy ended up down here.’

‘So you did know my mother.’

‘We didn’t, like, hang out with her.’ She sighs. ‘I’m afraid nobody did.’

Like a good student, she waits for his next question, but he is dead beat. Flat out of questions, he sinks into the down sofa cushions. The Florida room smells of cleaning products; so does nice Mrs McCall.

Finally she offers, ‘She didn’t hang with us. When we were little, it was the car and driver. Later she had her own car.’

‘She gave my mother the car?’

‘Oh, she gave her everything she wanted. Clothes. The car, when she was old enough to drive. Lucy was the only thing she had. It’s sad,’ Nenna adds without explanation, ‘they used to be so close.’

‘Lucy and her grandmother. What happened?’

‘She was your great-grandmother, I suppose.’ Smiling, she proffers the plate.

Deflection, so ladylike. Must be a Southern thing.

‘Another cookie? I’m famous for these.’

He is both grateful and sorry that she isn’t wearing perfume. For Dan, perfume is a distinct turnoff; this lady smells of toothpaste and fresh shampoo, which makes it harder to refuse. For the first time since the hospital he is aware of his body, which is waking up after a week of grieving. Yo, Dude! ‘Thanks, but I’d better not.’

‘Do you have a girlfriend?’

He did but he doesn’t. Nenna doesn’t need to know. ‘Did she have a boyfriend?’

‘Who?’

‘Lucy.’

‘Oh, Lucy. Everybody was in love with her.’ Nenna’s face turns into a mix CD, producing music from several different albums all at once. ‘We thought she and Bobby . . .’ She waits a beat too long, considering, before she buys him off with a smile. ‘But you never know.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Hidden fires,’ she says.

Reporters know silence works better than a question. ‘Yes Ma’am.’

‘Oh please,’ she says. ‘We are way past Ma’am.’

‘About these hidden fires . . .’

‘You never know what’s going on behind people’s faces, do you?’

‘No.’

The pause that follows takes on a life of its own. He hears ice cubes dropping. Footsteps upstairs. The husband stomped out like Bigfoot yesterday. Must be Steffy. Wish she’d come down.

‘Something happened,’ Nenna says finally.

Keep your head down, Carteret. The best interviewers are invisible. ‘And . . .’

‘And . . .’

Repeat, so she’ll have to complete the sentence. ‘Something happened and . . .’

Generations of ice cubes drop before she says, ‘To be honest with you, we never really knew.’

This brings his head up fast. ‘Ma’am?’

‘Nenna.’

‘Nenna.’

She goes on, but in a new direction. ‘Lucy’s father went to Clemson, I think. Unless it was The Citadel. Either way . . .’

‘David Carteret.’ His next source. ‘Still in Charleston, right?’

‘We heard he died.’

Oh fuck.

‘Suicide.’

Oh, fuck.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I never knew him. It’s OK.’

‘Either way,’ she finishes, as if this explains it all, ‘he wasn’t from around here.’

‘I see.’ This is a lie. He will never understand this town.

‘I mean, he wasn’t one of us.’ Nenna pauses to regroup. When she goes on, it is about nothing he expected. ‘You know, Davis and I are what Fort Jude calls having trouble.’ She lets this float between them.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘You don’t know what it’s been like.’ She reaches for his arm, rethinks and laces her hands like a child playing this is the church and this is the steeple. ‘He fell in love with his first cousin. How obscene is that?’

Because he has noplace to go with this, he sinks the same old hook. ‘Did she have a boyfriend?’

‘Who, Gayle? Hell no. She’s already used up one husband, and she’s getting cranked up to dump number two . . .’

‘I meant Lucy.’

‘. . . Clueless Ed. Who knows what the law is in California. For all I know, she has Davis lined up to be number three.’ Nenna raises her head, looking at him until he softens and meets her eyes. ‘It’s my mistake, really. Davis wasn’t local either.’

The silence stretches so thin that he is obliged to ask. ‘Um, about my mother . . .’

‘I’m so stupid, how was I supposed to know? I mean, it’s practically incest, but how could I not see the signs?’ Now that she has his full attention she says, ‘I may have to divorce him.’

‘I see.’

Her voice lifts in a trill of discovery. ‘In fact, I think I will.’

‘Thanks, Mrs Um.’ He’s tired. They’ve been sitting here too long. Clumsily, he weighs exit lines. ‘I’ve wasted enough of your time.’

‘Oh, not at all.’ Nenna puts her hand on his so swiftly that he jumps. ‘You need more ice.’

‘Not really. I should go.’

‘It’ll only take a minute, and I’ll get more cookies too . . .’

‘No thanks. Really,’ he says, too late. Rounding the island that separates the territories of Florida room and kitchen area, she strikes for the interior, rattling utensils, foiling any attempt to shout goodbye and go.

Dan is alone, surprised by an unexpected message from his body. Hi there. Nenna’s too old, but the presentation is very nicely done.

Stop that. There’s only one safe way to do this. Get the fuck out. He can’t, quite. He needs to go but now that the possibility is obvious, messages keep coming. Available. Coming on to you.

I have to get out of here.

As if she has powers and can hear him thinking, Steffy McCall slaps into the room on rubber flip-flops. Dead on target, she says, ‘You don’t have to stay just because Mommy says you do.’

24

Bobby

‘How drunk was I?’

‘You were pretty disgusting.’

‘The shit I was, I don’t remember that.’

‘Do you remember anything?’

‘Not if I can help it.’ That grin.

Bobby sighs. ‘Right.’

Trailing Al Chaplin’s old sweats, which Bobby threw on him after the shower, Brad surges up from the sofa like Jabba the Hutt, all phlegm and bad odor. ‘Where am I?’

Bobby grimaces. ‘My house.’

With Brad, there is always the possibility that he will rise up and pound the shit out of you. Instead he blinks, belching, ‘What am I doing at your house?’

‘Beats the crap out of me.’

Some lame idea Chape had, that smug, privileged bastard, gearing up to remove his glossy nuclear family from the fiasco at the Fort Jude Club. Efficient, too. Chape couldn’t herd his nuclear support group into his Escalade and return them to the safety of their showy house with its gold bathroom fixtures and terrazzo floors until he processed certain particles. Hugging busty little Sallie like a kid with his squeeze at the senior houseparties, he turned and handed Brad off to Bobby with the condescending smile of a man who was born knowing how life works.

‘Best you take him. You people are supposed to be good at interventions.’

‘There’s a difference between intervention and garbage disposal,’ Bobby said, too late.

‘Carter will help you shovel him into the car,’ Chape said, propping Brad up against a surly teenager who looked too much like Chape.

‘But my car is . . .’

‘No problem. I had Marco bring your car in from the shack.’

Astounding, the man’s level of organization. He dumped Brad and that was that. Smart kid, Chape’s son came armed with one of the club shower curtains, ripped off a rod in the locker room, to keep the damage contained, and there was damage. It will be days before Bobby gets the smell out of the car.

Thank God his siblings left last night to go birdwatching in Homosassa Springs. With her life in tatters, Maggie loves to study anything smaller than she is, solemnly checking off creatures sighted against her guide book. It gives her the illusion that she’s getting a grip, which she isn’t. And Al? Al has nothing better to do. There’s a bar he likes in Homosassa, so he indulges her.

When he made it to his feet after several tries, Brad went padding out through the dining room without breaking anything, although it was close. If the gods are kind, Bobby will get shut of him and expunge all traces before they get back tonight.

The fat fuck is in the kitchen now, sticking his head under the faucet, Bobby knows the sound well enough. Then he hears the fridge door slam. He’s out there drinking Bobby’s seltzer straight from the bottle or orange juice out of the carton, smearing the opening with disgusting Brad-drool. Worse. Brad’s always been a backwash kind of guy, you didn’t want to drink after him, so he’ll have to throw everything out. Bobby waits a minute because he doesn’t really want to see it going down. He goes into the kitchen reluctantly. Brad doesn’t see him at first.

Then he does, with a resentful, ‘Oh, it’s you.’

Bobby shrugs. ‘My house.’ He shouldn’t have to explain these things.

‘And I’m here . . . why?’

‘Chape sent you.’

‘It figures. Fucking Chape.’

‘Chape is overorganized.’

‘That’s one way of putting it. And you brought me here after . . .’

Brad Kalen, thinking, is alarming, but Bobby isn’t about to help him out.

He stands there scratching his armpits like a monkey. Oook. Oook. After a long time he asks, ‘Who bailed me out?’

‘You weren’t in jail.’

‘Where was I?’

‘You don’t remember?’

‘Not really.’ Brad’s grin drips vestigial charm. ‘Where was I?’

‘The club. Engagement party for your daughter.’

‘Oh, fuck. Patty. I forgot her fucking party.’ The grin gets sweatier as he asks, ‘But hey, I made it to the party anyway?’

‘If you want to call it that.’

‘Is she still speaking to me?’

‘I wouldn’t.’

‘Don’t look at me like that.’

Bobby says grimly, ‘It’s the best I can do.’

‘Ug. I’m beginning to get the picture. So, the party. Um, did I do anything?’

‘It was pretty bad.’

‘Something I said?’

‘You weren’t rightly talking.’

‘What did I, flash my dick? Yack in somebody’s lap?’

‘You were out cold. You didn’t do anything.’

Brad blinks with that wide blue, innocent, who-me? look, he’s been getting by on it ever since first grade. ‘Then what was so bad?’

‘If you have to ask, I can’t explain it.’ Bobby isn’t really listening to this conversation. He’s weighing his options. Chape’s done with his personal pro bono renovation project and it’s clear Brad’s daughter isn’t about to come and get him, she probably never wants to see him again. Is there a removal service he can call, or is he going to have to shovel rank, disgusting Brad Kalen back into the car, which already reeks of him?

‘What the fuck happened?’

He says harshly, ‘You landed on the bandstand like a side of beef.’

‘I did?’ Brad’s face is working. He is casting around for ways to make the best of this, but the whole thing is too much, even for him. He tries for a smile. ‘But, hey, I made my appearance.’

‘If you want to call it that.’

‘So Patty can stop complaining. It’s not like I’m never there for her.’

‘You don’t want to know what Patty would say.’ Bobby would do anything to scrape that pleased, smug look off Brad’s fat face. ‘You know who dragged you in and dumped you, right?

‘Fucking Walker.’

‘Right.’ Funny how Brad gets this part so quickly. Is this what he does, pretend to forget things he knows, but would rather not remember?

Brad says heavily, ‘Walker Pike.’

‘So you did know.’

‘I do now.’

‘I’m surprised he didn’t kill you.’

‘Who, me? Why would he want to do that?’

Every muscle in Bobby’s face tightens. ‘After what you did.’

Brad bulks up, a monument to denial.

Stupid lout, Bobby thinks, as Brad’s shoulders sag into a simian slope and his head sinks into a mess of baggy sweatshirt and rolls of flesh. Fucking Neanderthal. Standing here in my kitchen all rank and foul. Even though they aren’t standing close, the hangover smell is strong enough to unpack its luggage and hang up its dirty underwear inside Bobby’s head.

Eighteen months sober, Bobby hates the feeling because he knows it so well. He hates the memories filling his kitchen; they came in with fucking Brad, he’s already knee-deep but they’re still pouring in. Overweight, drowsy and not exactly harmless – benign for the moment at least, Kalen scratches his belly under the sweatshirt and waits for the next thing. It’s like watching fruit rot. Bobby wonders how they could have been friends. If Brad’s folks hadn’t given him the motor bike, the car, the money, if they hadn’t let him throw those big parties when they were out of town and asked no questions when they came back, would he and Chape and the others have hung out with Brad in the first place? Would they have tolerated him?

Aware that his unwanted guest hasn’t responded, Bobby tilts his head and leans closer, trying to get a good look into those dull eyes. ‘Are you in there?’

‘Shut up.’ Brad is thinking. It is excruciating to watch. Awareness comes in stages. Finally he looks up. ‘Shit, he can’t still be mad about that old thing.’

‘He wanted to kill you after what you did.’ Bobby is listening hard. He waits for Brad to fill in the blanks, which he refused to do back then. ‘That night. After you guys rolled me out of the car. What happened, anyway?’

Whatever happened, Brad stonewalled Bobby then. He is stonewalling him now. ‘Shit happened.’ It’s his way of saying: Nothing.

‘Then why did Lucy leave town before graduation?’ God he despises Brad.

‘Man, that was a hundred years ago.’ Looking briefly at his fingernails, Brad lifts both hands and scratches his head: the thick gold hair has gone dark, but he still has those spoiled-rich-kid curls. ‘Besides, we just got there, I barely had the girl’s . . .’

‘Don’t say it.’

‘. . . pants off. Well, I didn’t.’ Guilt makes him insistent. ‘We didn’t do shit.’

‘You would have, and Walker knows it.’ Bobby knows Brad is too stupid to grasp the relationship between the intention and the act: crazy night at the end of a bad week, they were all out of their mind on vodka, stoned and high on whatever else they were taking, wrecked by the pressure of last things. What would Bobby have done if he hadn’t been laid out facedown in the mangroves by the time it came down? What could he have prevented, that changed certain lives? He doesn’t know.

‘Fuck that old shit, Chaplin, forget it. It’s over.’

‘That’s not what Walker thinks.’

‘That night is long gone.’ Kalen jams his fists into his mouth, gnawing thoughtfully. Then he looks at Bobby over his knuckles and says cleverly, ‘Besides. How do you know it was me?’

‘Who else did you roll out of the Jeep before you got her to Lands End, Kalen? Buck and Stitch too? Chape?’

‘You were too loaded to know who was there what went down, asshole. Face it, you were drunk. You’re nothing but a fucking drunk.’

My name is Bob Chaplin and I am an alcoholic. If Bobby had been in his right mind he never would have let Lucy get into the Jeep that night, not after that thing with Jessie Vukovich, which was an abomination. He’d have grabbed the wheel and wrenched the Jeep off the road if he’d been in his right mind, he would have done it before they ever reached the turnoff to Lands End. Bobby groans. ‘I should have stopped you.’

‘Yeah, right. Like you were there at the end.’

‘But Walker was.’

‘Walker, Walker, what does Walker know?’ There is a pause during which Brad casts around for suspects. ‘It was probably Coleman, Buck always had the hots for her. Yeah, everybody knows he wanted that – what do I want to call her – that sweet little piece of . . .’

‘Don’t.’

‘Lucy.’

So Bobby lets him have it with both barrels. ‘She has a son.’

Now it is Brad’s turn to shrug. ‘She wasn’t pregnant that summer when she left.’

‘He’s in town.’

‘She wasn’t pregnant when she came back for Thanksgiving, either.’

‘That doesn’t change what you did.’ He means: what we did.

‘Maybe not,’ Brad says genially, ‘but it’s somebody else’s problem.’

‘That’s what you think. He’s been asking around.’

‘Tell him it was Buck.’

‘I don’t lie.’ It hurts Bobby to say, ‘This isn’t about just one of us, Brad, if it was, it never would have happened.’ Bobby was crazy-drunk that night, yes, and psyched to be riding along in the back next to Lucy Carteret, and what would have happened if he’d had her alone, would he have gone too far because he was in love with her? His voice drops a register. ‘It was all of us.’ Grieving, he thinks: It would have been different. I’m not like them.

Brad chooses not to hear. ‘Now, if you’ll just get me a cab . . .’

‘You can’t say a thing’s over just because you’re done with it,’ Bobby says gravely. Why is he so disturbed? OK, he loved her, he still does, and when she got into the Jeep that night he thought – he doesn’t want to know what he thought; they were all crazy out of control.

‘So I can get out of here and into some decent clothes. Back off.’

Bobby says, ‘We’re all involved.’

‘You’re standing too close.’

‘I’m responsible . . .’

Brad pushes. ‘Fuck it, Chaplin. Move.’

‘. . . and you’re responsible.’ He pushes back.

‘Shit I am. What makes you think it wasn’t Walker?’

‘Well now, there we have a problem,’ Bobby says. In another minute he’ll either have to back off or suffocate. ‘You pushed her down.’

‘How do you know?’

Bobby’s voice is low and clear. In a kinder world, he could be heard in the back of a courtroom or in balconies far above any stage, but his life went a different way and he’s just-Bobby, here with just-Brad. ‘I saw you.’

Bobby is too close to the truth about himself. He did see, but he was drunk and raving, too trashed to get up off his face.

Brad’s voice is a congested rattle. ‘Like, you think I did all that single-handed?’

‘What did you do, Brad? What happened?’

There it is: that hateful, careless shrug. ‘Beats me.’

Bobby grabs those baggy shoulders and starts shaking. ‘Tell the truth, you fucking asshole.’

And with a practiced, guileless, who-me grin that confirms all Bobby’s suspicions, Brad glides out of his grip. ‘Dude, I was too fucking drunk. How am I supposed to know what went down?’

25

Steffy

Slick as a scam artist, Steffy springs her friend Dan from Mom’s lair, a.k.a. the flowered sofa, before the woman can weight him down with a ton of cookies and talk him to death. The way Nenna scowls, you’d think Steffy was running off with her new boyfriend, not saving a helpless stranger from Death by Monologue. When her mom sucks a person into those soft pillows and starts, you can practically see the cobwebs form. Usually it’s one of the hags she hangs out with, but even though the big party was last night, not one of her Lunch Bunch phoned and nobody came by. It’s weird. Unless it’s sad.

Steffy might stop to feel sorry, if she wasn’t in such a rush. Poor Mom was spilling her troubles to a stranger because her friends don’t call and she’s had a shitty week. God, how embarrassing! She probably went off on Dad in gross detail, up to and including the humiliating fact that he has to drag his pillow downstairs after Steffy goes to bed, like they don’t think she knows that he’s slept on the rollaway ever since the fight.

Please God, don’t let her complain about the sex. Mom is so pissed off right now that she doesn’t care what comes out of her mouth. Right now it looks like she’s quit caring what she does. The woman is flat-out flirting, when she needs to get her ass to a marriage counselor and buy lessons in putting everything back where it belongs. She can vent for $150 an hour and do something useful at the same time and, boy, does her mother love to vent. Steffy read a book once that had a whole chapter called ‘The Human Swamp.’ Well, that’s Mom.

‘Hey, Dude!’ She storms the room and Dan lights up.

‘Steffy. Hey!’

‘So, Mom,’ Steffy calls, releasing him from the sofa. ‘Dan and I have a Thing we have to do.’

‘Wait! Oatmeal cookies!’

Steffy nudges Dan through the door with a bright, ‘He’s going, Mom.’

Behind them, Mom bulks up like Swamp Thing, all waving tendrils and mournful eyes. ‘Where?’

‘Emergency,’ he chokes, clicking his cellphone open and shut to prove it. ‘I’m sorry, and thanks.’

Bingo, zot, it’s like magic. They’re out the door.

26

Jessie

Out of nowhere, Sallie Bellinger says, ‘If you want to know the truth, I always thought it was a gang bang.’

Oh shit, Jessie thinks. Just when she was getting comfortable, chattering over coffee with the Lunch Bunch. Let’s don’t go there. ‘I thought we were talking about . . .’

Sallie’s voice drops. ‘Shhh! Here she comes.’

Rounding up the usual suspects at the club’s beachfront annex, they’d agreed to skip Nenna this time because she, and not Brad Kalen, was topic A. That dress! The way she ricocheted from man to man, making all those desperate ex-wife moves, they should warn her, but her best friends can’t say anything or ask her about it because she hasn’t told them. And here she is, coming in all la-la-la, like Davis isn’t a philanderer and everything’s just fine. Like every woman at this table but Jessie, she’s practiced at glossing over life’s dirty parts.

Entitled insider that she is, Nenna nudges Kara aside and slides into the banquette. Jessie’s pleased to be included, but, wow. Last night’s party lies like a patient etherized upon a table, but this patient is kicking and screaming because the anesthetist didn’t show up and the dissection is well under way. The sunlight is dazzling even through layers of tinted glass. The water glistens and from here swimmers bob like lazy ants in the gentle swells. Dolphins and egrets and gulls wheel against the cloudless backdrop, but given all they have to talk about, nobody but Jessie sees.

‘Jessie?’ Sallie Bellinger elbows her. You’re on. ‘You were saying what he’s like.’

‘Who?’

Betsy does that thing with her eyebrows. ‘You know. Lucy’s son.’

Sallie serves a hard ball. ‘If he really is her son.’

Cathy Rhue enters the game. ‘Is Carteret really his name, or is it some kind of scam?’

‘It was on his credit card, Cathy.’

‘Not to put too fine a point on it, but. Does he look like her?’

‘Yes.’ Jessie’s uncomfortable with this, but if she wants to stay, she has to play. ‘Same hair, just a little darker. Green eyes.’

Sallie serves. ‘Wonder who that comes from.’

‘Oh, the father, I suppose.’

Betsy hits it over the net. ‘Whoever that is.’

‘As a matter of fact, he looks a lot like Lucy. I should know.’ Heads whip around. Nenna! Jessie has to admire the woman; she knows she was topic A. before she walked in, but she volleys like a pro. ‘He was at my house!’

Score! New to the game, Jessie slips. ‘No shit!’

Nenna grins. ‘We were having iced tea.’

‘Get out!’

‘And my oatmeal cookies. That’s why I’m late.’

‘You’re not late, you’re . . .’

Cathy says kindly, ‘Just in time. We were just starting.’ Never mind the empty coffee cups and pastry crumbs and ruined paper napkins; they’ve been at it since ten.

‘Good thing I baked last week.’ Nenna glows – not like she’s lost her man, more like she just scored a shiny new one. ‘He ate about a dozen.’

‘What’s he doing in Fort Jude?’

‘He’s here on some big story.’ In training since nursery school, Nenna waits a beat before she adds, ‘For the Los Angeles Times.’

‘Is he really Lucy’s son?’

‘He says he is.’

‘I could say I’m the queen of France, but would you believe it?’

‘Where else would he get The Swordfish from our year?’

‘He had The Swordfish?’

Topic A. when she came in. Now look at her, with yellow feathers in her teeth. ‘Bobby’s, actually,’ she tells Betsy and Jessie relaxes, but only a little bit.

‘He knows Bobby?’

‘I saw what you wrote to him in The Swordfish, Betsy. And I thought you were my friend.’

‘Houseparties. It was a crazy time,’ Betsy says, propelling Jessie into a bad place.

Kara’s from Chicago, but that doesn’t stop her. ‘I hear they were pretty wild.’

Sallie says, too fast, ‘Don’t believe everything you hear.’

‘You’re the ones who laid it all on me, how crazy it got, especially the last night when your friend Lucy showed up . . .’

‘We were never really friends.

‘Lucy kept to herself until that night.’

‘White bikini, see-through shirt, you might call it her coming out party.’

Resentment crackles in the room. ‘Like she was asking for it.’

And Jessie’s automatic censor breaks down. ‘Nobody asks for a rape.’

‘A rape! At houseparties? Don’t even think it.’

‘Puh-leeze.’ Sallie’s smile scrapes Jessie raw. ‘People like us don’t do things like that.’

Don’t, Jessie thinks. Just don’t, but she’s sliding into the zone. Everybody who was anybody was at the beach the week before graduation, running around crazy, like it was the night before the Battle of Waterloo, and this was the Last Good Time. She hadn’t exactly been invited to camp out in one of the beach houses because she had, OK, she had a reputation, so she crashed at home and slipped into the parties in all those houses after it got dark, stayed up all night when the parties spilled out on the beach and never left until the last dog was hung and the last of them staggered off to bed and, man! It was almost like she belonged.

So she was at the bonfire on the famous last night when Lucy showed up for the first time ever, all gorgeous and sexy and brash. She sneaked out. That grandmother kept her on a short leash.

Jessie knows how her own night ended – Don’t go there – but Lucy? The girl was everywhere, she danced with everybody, all these aging girls’ boyfriends, captains of this and that and a bunch of guys that nobody knew. They rolled in from Broward and Sarasota and as far away as Tarpon Springs. Fort Jude houseparties were that famous. By the time the night ended Jessie knew why Sallie and Betsy and all were so pissed off at her, she just didn’t know who Lucy left with or what happened after that, and the rest? She jerks herself back into the present, where it’s safe.

Fucking Sallie is going, ‘These things do happen. Just not to people you know.’

‘Don’t be so sure.’

And as if she knows what Jessie’s thinking, Betsy scowls. ‘Probably one of the Pierce Point boys, you know, like the Horshams or the Ackleys, Lanny Rucker or the Pikes.’ Take that.

And Sallie drives in the stake. ‘People like that don’t get invited to our things, they just don’t.’ She covers her mouth like a priest crossing himself after the stake goes in. ‘Oh! Sorry, Jessie. Wade is soooo not the same person now. He was much, much different back then.’

‘So was I.’

‘No offense!’

Jessie does not back off with the traditional, ‘None taken.’ She won’t. But leaving is out of the question. All she can do is sit, waiting for this to end.

As if to make up for what she just did, Sallie Bellinger diverts the pack. ‘I wonder if Brad’s OK. Brought down in front of all of us, and by . . .’ It’s a close thing. She almost says, ‘Pierce Point trash,’ but substitutes, ‘Walker Pike.’

‘Poor Brad!’

‘We ought to go check on him. He could be a danger to himself.’

‘Brad hates these things, now tell me he didn’t get belching, puking drunk so he wouldn’t have to come.’

‘And he wouldn’t, if Walker hadn’t dragged him kicking and screaming. We should be over at Patsy’s, apologizing.’

‘Frankly, I don’t think she wants to hear from us. We talked her into that humongous party, and now look.’

‘Cecilia would have died.’

‘I bet Brad’s ashamed.’

‘Humiliated, I hope.’

‘He ought to check himself into rehab.’

‘Or do us all a favor and hang himself.’

‘Oh, he’s much too self-centered to do that. Like, what would Fort Jude do without studly, stupid old Brad?’

‘Who would we have to talk about?’

It’s interesting, watching Nenna writhe, Jessie thinks, but after a lifetime with these women, she’s expert at the quick save. ‘But if he did do anything drastic . . .’

Sallie twists her beads in a show of remorse. ‘It would be on our heads. We made him give that party, after all.’

‘For Cecilia. She’d want us to make sure he’s OK.’

‘After the way he did her?’

‘Because he did.’ Nenna is all wronged wife today, rehearsing for the divorce.

‘Did you see how he threw himself on her coffin down at St Timothy’s? He loved that girl in spite of everything.’

‘If Brad wants to kill himself, let him! It’s not our fault.’

Betsy sighs. ‘Unless it is.’

‘It isn’t safe. You know what he’s like when he gets mad. Let one of the guys check on him. Buck, maybe, or Stitch. They’re still friends.’

Kara says, ‘Not after last night. They’re over him.’

Betsy turns to Sallie. ‘Chape can do it. After all, they’re best friends.’

‘They weren’t that close,’ Sallie says. ‘Besides, Chape’s at the Florida Bar Association in Deland, and he won’t be back until tonight.’

‘By then it might be too late.’

Oh, Betsy, head cheerleader. ‘OK, then. It’s up to us.’

‘We can’t all go.’

‘You brought it up, Nenna. Maybe you should . . .’

‘Can’t.’ Their old friend’s mouth narrows. Her eyes are gun slits with a massed army behind them, glaring out. ‘I have a lot on my plate right now.’

‘It’s our duty.’

‘I would, but this is my acupuncture day.’

‘I promised to take Gramma Bellinger shopping after lunch.’

Betsy sets her cup down hard, like a gavel. ‘After all, we started it.’

Somebody ought to do it but nobody really wants to do it. Nobody present really likes Brad. Jessie gets up, broadcasting contempt. ‘When the check comes, my number is V48. Since you’re all too chicken, I’ll go.’

27

Steffy

And how she brought it off? Timing. When Mom went into the kitchen, she hissed, ‘Don’t tell Mom. I found something scary at the house.’

She didn’t have to say which house. He dropped that ancient yearbook he came with. Now all she has to do is make up some story, right?

But Dan’s all over it, like white on rice. ‘OK. What did you find in the house?’

‘Yeah, well. Whatever. It’s hard to explain. You kind of have to see it.’

‘Letters? Papers? Skeleton? Disembodied corpse?’

It’s just something she made up to spring him. ‘You mean, like, ghost? Not really.’ She fishes, but comes up empty. ‘It’s a lot and a lot stranger.’

‘Explain strange.’

Come up with something, quick. All she hears in her head is, duh. Duh. Duh. Only three more blocks. Duh! ‘So, where did you get that old Swordfish?’

‘Yard sale!’

Did he just turn red? Her tone says, Gotcha. ‘Yeah, right.’

Dan counters with, ‘So, what’s this, like, scary thing you found at the Archambault house.’

And Steffy knuckles. ‘Oh, that. That was just a story to get you out of Mom’s clutches. Like, you were desperate. Look, we’re here.’ Carter is here too. Her heart leaps up at the sight of his car. She jumps out.

He says, ‘OK then.’

‘Are you coming or what?’

‘Can’t. Researching down at the Star.’

‘OK. The something strange was just a story, but it wasn’t,’ she says heavily. ‘There’s. Um. Something in the attic that you have to see.’ That, at least, is the truth. She needs to get him in there long enough to mess Carter up a little bit, you know, to get him back for the hickey Jen plastered on him like a fruit label, then he can go. She leans into the car, wheedling. ‘Really.’

‘Look, you got your ride. If you’ll just close the door?’

‘Come on, it won’t take long.’ When he greets this with an apologetic shrug, she comes clean. ‘OK, I need a favor. It’s my boyfriend? It’ll only take a minute, just enough to make him jealous, please?’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘It’s important. You don’t even have to talk to him.’

He cuts the motor. ‘OK.’

It’s kind of trippy, going into their place with a gorgeous man, knowing that Carter, who might actually be watching from the attic window, will hear them talking on the stairs. But of course they aren’t talking. Dan just follows politely so she is rummaging again, weighing setup lines. Think of something to say that will make him answer, Stef, think fast. She blurts, ‘I told him you were my boyfriend!’

‘What?’

‘Carter. Carter Bellinger. It’s a long story,’ she says, thinking: Take that, perfidious Jen.

‘I bet.’ He isn’t listening, he’s inspecting the scarred wallpaper as they climb the stairs, as though what he needs is written there.

‘So if you wouldn’t mind . . .’

‘What, holding your hand?’

‘Playing like you care.’

But he is running his fingers over initials carved in the old newel post with a weird, visionary squint.

‘Come on!’

Opening the attic door Steffy says, to keep the conversation going, ‘Mom told me you have, um, family down here?’

‘Sort of. Maybe. I don’t know.’

‘Where else would you get a copy of the world’s oldest Swordfish? I mean, fuck, it’s from my mother’s year.’

And for the first time since they left her house, her new guy smiles. ‘It was my mother’s year too. Her name was Lucy,’ he adds, as though she’ll recognize it and start to talk. ‘Lucy Carteret?’

‘Awesome!’ she says as her head clears the top of the attic stairs. We’re practically the same age. This makes her so happy that she laughs. She’s trying hard to make this sound like a party. ‘That is sooo cool!’

What follows is everything Steffy hoped and more. ‘Babe!’ Carter is energized by the unfamiliar voice. He greets her with a studly hug. At the same time he is craning over her shoulder to see who . . .

‘This is my friend Danny,’ she says carelessly, as Dan Carteret emerges from the stairwell. ‘Danny, Carter. Carter, Dan.’

Nicely – he really is a good guy! – her friend slips a possessive arm around her. ‘Any friend of Steffy’s . . .’

Carter gives him a diffident, ‘Hey.’

‘He’s a reporter. How cool is that?’

‘Really.’ Not a question. Period. Carter is trying way too hard to sound unimpressed. ‘And you brought him up here because . . .’

Steffy says, all, everybody-knows-this, ‘You mean you don’t know what happened here? When you get home, Google Lorna Archambault. She burned up right here in this house.’

‘No shit.’

‘Yeah, shit. Dan’s doing a story about it, for his paper? It’s . . .’

But her trophy is too absorbed to pick up on his cue. Instead he spooks around the attic, peering into gables, turning over trash with his toe, running a hand over the dressmaker’s shape which might in fact be dead old Lorna’s shape, poking at defunct Venetian blinds. When he does speak, he says nothing that Steffy expects. Instead he pulls out a tired old picture, which he hands to Steffy first. ‘I can’t stay, but, hey. Do you know these guys?’

More than anything, Steffy wants to help him, but she doesn’t know these guys. She hands off the snapshot to Carter, who’s so close that her flank twitches, from her armpit all the way down. His warm breath swirls around in her ear; she wants to finish this fast so Dan will leave. Then she’ll do whatever she has to with Carter, to get him back from Jen.

But the least likely person to recognize somebody in Dan’s crap snapshot turns out to know. Carter yips like a pirate with a treasure map. ‘Well, yeah!’

‘No shit!’

‘Yeah, shit. There’s one a lot like it tacked up at my dad’s fishing shack? Except my dad isn’t driving in that one, go figure. I mean, it’s his Jeep. That’s Millicent Von Harten’s father in the back with Mr Coleman and his twin brother, the one that died in the wreck? And the guys hanging off the sides? Oh hell, I don’t know who this one is, that has all the red hair? But the one on the driver’s side is definitely Mr Kalen, you can tell by the unibrow.’

28

Dan

A quick study, Dan leaves the attic before the kids can distract him, rehearsing their names. Coleman. Von Harten. Kalen. Bellinger. Four names, sixteen steps. It won’t take long. Chaplin’s off the list – those watery blue eyes. With four locals to research, it won’t be hard. Then he can hunt down and slay, or . . . He doesn’t know. It’s like that old movie: I know who you are and I know what you did. Except he doesn’t.

He aches all over, as if they just told him that his father died. How do you grieve for somebody you never knew? It’s odd. He does. He always has.

Get down on your knees and thank your God.

What? He trips, nicking his hand on a latch. ‘What!’ Oh, crap, this house is not good for me. Why is he still on the second floor?

It’s in the blood.

‘Get the fuck out of my head!’

Not him. Never. Do you hear?

The hell of it is, he does. Where he should be downstairs and out of here at a dead run, Dan’s like a car with a dead battery, stalled in front of her bedroom door. Either he’s batshit crazy or the old bitch really is yelling, It’s in the blood.

Out, he thinks, got to get out, but he lingers, boiling with questions. Then, my God! At his back, there’s a disturbance in the air. Before he can swivel to see, there’s a thump between his shoulder blades. Mom!

Air knifes into his chest.

Liberated, he runs for the exit, wondering how the fuck his mother got into this house.

29

Jessie

Jessie has been in worse places. The cavernous front room of the Sixties Modern shrine to Orville and Mildred Kalen is littered with the expected: crumpled beer cans, miniature airline empties and ranks of full-sized dead soldiers; clothes strewn every whichway; unopened bills and second notices, sleazy skin mags and months’ worth of old newspapers, some still in their plastic wrappers like snakes that died before they could slough their skin.

The architect’s vision went to hell the day Brad Kalen shipped his ancient parents off to Golden Acres, that’ll teach you to have a baby way too late in life, that’ll teach you to spoil him rotten. Mold overtook the white stucco walls the day they left; their pictures faded. It’s been a long time since anybody opened the dusty fiberglass curtains on their panoramic view of the inlet, or opened the sliding doors. Dead dieffenbachia droop in porcelain urns on the filthy terrazzo and the whole place smells of sour laundry.

He’s here, she thinks, sailing into the kitchen as though she’d swept down the curved staircase all dressed up for the next party every night of her life here, the privileged child of the house.

Yes she has been here before. No she doesn’t want to talk about it. Junk from Brad’s tux pockets litters the kitchen counter: wallet, keys, dented silver flask. Somebody jammed last night’s dress clothes into the washer, tuxedo and all, and started it; through the glass she sees the stuff revolving, a study in black and white. A stinking load Brad washed but left to mildew in the machine is heaped on top; it was too vile to put into the drier. Brad’s black patent leather dress shoes sit in a bucket of suds, he’d probably puked on them. Somebody – not Brad – somebody’s fastidious.

Bobby, she thinks. He lugged Brad out of the club last night, an unlikely pairing. Sure, they hung out back in the day, but they were never friends: the gorilla and the thinking stork. That load is sloshing into the rinse cycle; he must have just left. Good old Bobby. She nukes water in one of the few clean mugs she can find and with a grimace, takes the only thing available – instant – and makes coffee. Get the bastard up. Then we can start.

She goes up the pink granite stairs, wondering whether she’d rather find him awake or stupefied. All she has to do is see whether or not he’s dead, but Lucy Carteret’s son is in town, and Jessie has questions. Snores rip through the upstairs hall: asleep, not dead. Too bad. It would have settled a lot of things.

Fuck. He’ll be hard to wake up.

Brad is on the rumpled platform bed in the ruined master bedroom, drooling on his black satin sheets. Round bed, mirrored ceiling. Looks like a set for a porn shoot, but not anything you’d want to watch. Bobby maxed out on Brad around the time he should have been shoveling him into the shower. The room stinks of puke and hangover.

There are things it’s OK to do in high school. Kids don’t cut as fine a line when it comes to niceties, but adults discriminate. People who used to hang out together stop being friends or realize they never were friends, really. Age makes men cautious. Judgmental, and once they judge, it’s final. Yeah, Bobby dumped Brad on the bed naked and filthy, and walked away. He was that anxious to get shut of him.

A rank pile of grey sweats by the bed tells her Bobby did finish the job and left before Brad yacked again and crawled away from the stink. She has no problem seeing him like this. Because she was a Pierce Point girl, not one of the cool kids, it’s the only way she’s ever seen him. Not naked, necessarily, but real Brad, neither charming nor social in the Fort Jude way. Underneath, he’s always been willful, brutish and blunt.

Now it shows, and if it hadn’t been for Walker taking control last night . . .

Fucking Brad will strut right back into that circle like the gypsy’s daughter, miraculously turned back into a virgin again. It’s the Fort Jude way. The Fort Jude way is a little miracle of denial. Jessie should know. There’s a thin line between organized society and raw nature. She knows how the town’s anointed nice boys looked at her back then; she heard the girls’ savage whispers snaking down the halls, but now everything is pretty, pretty, now everybody’s nice. Nice is the product of a powerful group effort. Societies like this one survive on the strength of a pact created by the group and mutually agreed upon. Nobody needs to know the truth if we act the part.

In this town the chosen are born smoothing over rough spots and ignoring the boggy ones – even Brad, at least they do in public, where people can see. Jessie shudders. As a kid, she envied that entitled, happy little circle. Now she’s in it – more or less. The kid who used to be nobody is somebody in this town. It’s comfortable. Fort Jude’s chosen do what they have to, to keep their pretty creation intact.

She’s been studying it ever since first grade. In a way, she’s like the anthropologist who moves into a jungle village, alien at first, fitting in so she can crack the place open for examination even as she’s welcomed into the tribe.

She knows now. Boy, does she know.

Before they bussed her across town to Northshore Elementary she was happy. She played in the dirt with kids who could care less who had what or who got invited or who your folks were, and if somebody pushed you down, you got up and started over. At Northshore, she spent solitary lunch hours and moody afternoons on the school bus, scheming all the way across town. Sure she could talk the talk and walk the walk if she had to, but she despised the superior little snots with their cotillions and sailing lessons at the Fort Jude Club. She loved to push their buttons. Never mind the cute outfits. She could turn heads, just boogieing down the hall in her trashy clothes.

Back in the day, there were still things nice girls just didn’t do, whereas Jessie didn’t give a crap. At Fort Jude High she sent those girls – the very friends she sits down with now – a different message: I can take your boy away from you, no matter who you think you are. I can have any guy you have and every one you want. Those girls used to look right through her, like, slut.

Well, she has their number now. But Jessie has mellowed.

Defiance sat better on Jessie back then. Odd how in the end you always come home to the town you stepped out of like dirty underwear and kicked away. Back in Fort Jude thirty-some years after the fact, she chose to assume protective coloration because for Jessie Vukovich these days it’s restful, fitting in.

Like a declared state of peace.

She has money; she still has her looks and she doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life alone, rising on company ladders in strange cities. She’s proved herself. She doesn’t need to prove anything to these candy-faced, aging girls and she certainly doesn’t need to fight them. In fact, they’ve grown into nice, likable women that it’s fun to sit down with. Every one of them has been seasoned by troubles they don’t talk about: fucked-up kids, unfaithful or insufficient mates, some illness. They’ve all suffered losses and every one of them has chosen to smile in spite of it and keep going. These people have welcomed her, and at her age, Jessie is grateful. She needs a context, so she can rest.

There isn’t much else she needs, except a new man that she can go to all their parties with; she wants this one to be a keeper, so that when push comes to shove, they’ll both be around to help each other die. Odd what passes for happiness. Jessie’s led several lives outside Fort Jude so far, starting as a Blackjack dealer in Vegas at nineteen – high-end table at La Mirage, she might still be there if she hadn’t started marrying up. Her men were all good in their own ways, just not good at love.

It’s time to decide which of the good old local boys will wear well, and settle down.

First, Brad. Wake him up. Ask.

Even though the smell is disgusting, she puts coffee on the bedside table and jiggers the alarm clock to go off in five. She opens the heavy, lined curtains so the room is bright and pushes aside the sliding door. Then she sits down to wait.

In a way, it’s kind of wonderful. Pavlovian. He slams the clock off at the first beep, stumbles down the carpeted steps from the bed and lumbers into the shower. He comes out toweling his head with that useless dick flapping under his slack belly.

God she despises him.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I’m supposed to see if you’d offed yourself.’

‘Why would I do that?’ He does not move to cover himself.

‘Call it wishful thinking.’ She tosses him a throw from Mildred Kalen’s brocaded chaise longue. ‘Give me a break. Put this on.’

Only a fool with no sense of how he is perceived by others would crack that lewd grin, like, woo hoo. ‘I thought I was giving you a break.’

‘While you’re at it, cover that smirk.’

He drapes the Afghan over one shoulder and lets it drop as he heads into the walk-in closet, finishing his turn with a stripper’s bump of that hairy butt. She hears hangers sliding on the rack, drawers opening, Brad farting. When he comes out, the shorts and polo shirt hide the worst of the damages. Matchy green, one of those golf outfits Orville left behind when Brad shipped him off to Golden Acres. He faces her in an old man’s coordinated colors. ‘What are you really doing here?’

‘Lucy Carteret.’

Offhand: ‘I heard she died.’

Jessie’s head snaps back. ‘Who told you?’

Lucy? Dead? How does word get around anyway, zeitgeist? Jungle drums? Or do these people communicate like certain kinds of trees – bamboo, she thinks – with a common root system deep underground, woody tentacles interlocking?

He doesn’t answer. Instead he burps a question like that old TV comic who played the belching drunk, ‘What about her?’

Fuck if she’ll tell him that Lucy’s kid is down here from the north, Brad may not know he exists. Let him sop up that information like some fucking tree draining its secret life from the sandy Florida dirt. Better yet, let the kid smack him in the face with it. Let this Dan Carteret track him down and put the fucking question, and when Brad answers, she hopes the kid beats the crap out of him.

She hates this but she has to stay until she gives him the last, hard shove down the road to hell. The question she came to ask, and, as it turns out, can’t leave until she asks. ‘So. That time. Did you rape her?’

He picks up the mug like a defensive weapon. ‘When?’

‘Don’t insult me. Did you?’

‘Did I rape you?’

Vile, she thinks. Filthy, she thinks. Bitter. Bitter. ‘You know fucking well what you did.’

Instead of answering, Brad says, ‘Shitty coffee.’

‘So did you? Rape her?’

Brad raises the mug to mask whatever is going on with his face, which is not necessarily completely under control. He looks at her over the rim, snarling, ‘Why would I do that?’

She does not have to say, ‘You have a history.’

Brad does not have to say, ‘I suppose you want to know if she enjoyed it.’

They have no need to dig up old shit. He does not have to respond with another insulting question, or force her to deconstruct the only possible response she can make to it. Instead she fixes him with a look that makes even Brad crumble. He seems to be melting all at once, a decomposing lump of flesh like Jabba the Hutt, or a monster from a kids’ picture book.

Jessie watches.

Then Brad says through a spurt of bile, ‘You might wanna split before it hits the fan here. I’m gonna puke.’

30

Bobby

Al and depressed Margaret just came in from Homosassa Springs with a pelican mounted on driftwood, a souvenir for him. Al is busy putting his arrangement of newspapers and empties back exactly how he had them, although Brad didn’t disturb much that Bobby can see. Margaret is tending her African violets with that apologetic air, as though she’s lamenting something so intense that she’s sorry Bobby’s not in on it. She bobs in the turret like a faded paper doll, picking off dead blossoms with a half-smile because death, at least, is something she can count on.

Ever since 9/11, Margaret’s had trouble going out. Bobby only lured her into the yard last month and Al got her into the car so she’s improving, but it’s slow. She claims it’s chronic fatigue syndrome, but Bobby is secretly convinced that after she lost the baby and her husband bailed, she just quit. She hasn’t exactly turned her face to the wall, but it’s close.

He’s grateful and singularly touched when he makes her smile.

Al is the most nearly content of the three. He never aimed all that high, which means he’s always been pretty well satisfied with whatever mark he happens to hit. Golden parachute, few demands, why not? He has something going with a waitress out at the Lighthouse; that’s all he seems to need, but Bobby. He had dreams.

He walks through these rooms grieving, but the other two will never guess. He’s that good at dissembling. It isn’t exactly the Fall of the House of Usher, but it’s close. How did we get this way, Bobby wonders. How did we go from being what we were to this?

Margaret floats by. ‘Have you eaten?’

‘Not really.’

‘You look awful.’

‘Late night.’ Before they can ask questions he adds, ‘No big.’

Al says, ‘I’ve got Domino’s on speed dial.’

Margaret shudders. ‘All that grease! I’ll thaw my turkey soup.’

She’ll cry if Bobby doesn’t say, ‘Sounds good.’

‘And hot croissants,’ she adds. ‘Poppin’ Fresh.’

In New York, Bobby ate business lunches in the Oak Room and dinners at Lutèce and the old Le Cirque – all places, he realizes, that have ceased to exist, at least as he knew them. ‘That would be lovely,’ he says, just to see her smile.

‘I’m at the Lighthouse,’ Al says. ‘If anything comes up, you’ve got my cell.’

‘You don’t mind canned peaches, I hope.’ Margaret drifts into the kitchen. It’s a foregone conclusion that he’ll sit down and pretend to enjoy her idea of food.

How did it get to be twilight? Hard night, he supposes. Long day. It was nearly noon by the time he offloaded Brad and hosed down the Kalen laundry room, and the afternoon? He doesn’t know. He spent a certain amount of time roaming the house because he thinks somebody broke in last night, but he can’t prove it.

In the uncomfortable fug of Brad’s incursion he didn’t pick up on it, but when he walked into the house after delivering him, he got the idea that the air in here had changed. First he checked the obvious: strongbox. Yes. Family silver. Untouched. Then in a panic he upended the right-hand top drawer to the dresser he had as a kid.

The ring was still taped to the underside where he put it for safekeeping. He closed the drawer with an almost-sob, unless it was a groan.

Alarmed, he scoured his hard drive, but he found no tracks. Every file is timestamped: last accessed 6 a.m. yesterday, when he gave up on his piece about Fort Jude in the late 1800s and shut down. He headed downstairs, relieved.

There had, however, been a breach in security. He just didn’t pick up on it. Now, lingering in the shotgun hallway because he can’t bear to watch Margaret stirring her gummy turkey soup, he jerks to attention. The shelf with all their copies of The Swordfish is missing a tooth. He drops to his knees, disturbed.

His yearbook, the one with so much of his past in it, is gone.

Like the maid in that Ionesco play Bobby liked in college, he thinks, My name is Sherlock Holmes. He is sitting on the hall floor, double-checking, when Margaret sticks her head in. ‘What’s the matter with you?’

‘I was just. Ah. Getting a rock out of my shoe.’

‘Don’t give me that. You were looking at Lucy’s picture.’

She doesn’t need to know that he razored it out. It’s in the back of his closet in a morocco frame. She doesn’t need to know that his yearbook is gone. He cares even though Lucy is long gone, so even though his sister is all too prone to psychic disruption he has to say, ‘No. Something’s missing.’

Her eyebrows shoot up but she decides to forget it, for now. ‘Dinner.’

At the kitchen table he sits with his head bent as though they are Pilgrims waiting for somebody to say grace. He is looking into a bowl of Margaret’s turkey soup, the last cube of a batch she froze in a post-Christmas fit. Glutinous rice, cubed celery and overcooked carrots float among shreds of white meat in gray broth. She’s waiting for him to say, ‘It looks great.’

‘It’s my specialty.’

Oh, God he is tired of sitting down to awful dinners under fluorescent light.

They’re going along safely enough, hiding behind his dutiful Q. and A. about Homosassa, when Margaret pounces. ‘So, what are you going to do about it?’

‘About what?’

‘Lucy had a baby, and he’s here!’

Even she knows. Like the soup, it is depressing. ‘What do you mean, what am I going to do?’

‘Is it yours?’

‘What?’

‘You heard me. I saw you and him out there yesterday, talking. What’s he like?’

A direct answer would give her too much pleasure. He parries. ‘Like, you think he’d drop by? Just another stupid tourist, lost in Pine Vista.’

‘Did she have your baby, Bobby.’ It’s supposed to be a question but Margaret lets her voice drop at the end, like a person setting down a rock.

She doesn’t know. A part of him unclenches. ‘Where’s this coming from, Mag?’

‘Who else would come looking for you, Bobby? Who else could it be? Tourists don’t come here. Turns out Nenna invited him to the Kalen party so you saw him, what’s he like?’

This town, he thinks. This town. ‘I wouldn’t know.’

She removes his half-full soup bowl as if to punish him, and dumps it in the sink. Because her parts are not all that carefully strung together, he has to be careful not to let her see that this is a relief. She squints. ‘Were you finished?’

‘It’s wonderful, but I had a huge lunch.’

‘At the Flordana.’

‘No.’

‘That’s where he’s staying, I just thought . . .’

‘Who?’

He has to be grateful that she does not say ‘your,’ or ‘Lucy’s.’ Just, ‘The son. It’s time you and he connected.’

‘Margaret, I don’t know what you’ve heard or who you’ve been talking to, but they’re full of shit.’

She sets down bowls of canned peaches with blobs of Cool Whip. Margaret isn’t speaking to him, but he’s too preoccupied to notice. The missing yearbook, the Kalen disaster at the club, the last thing Brad said to him, run on a loop inside his head. He can’t stop cross-hatching the territory, chasing a question he can’t quite frame. OK, maybe he’s been silent for too long, but he’s closing on it.

Then his sister, who he thought he was being strong for, astounds him. Reaching across the table, she grips his arm in a spasm of sympathy, crying, ‘Oh, Bobby. How can you stand your life?’

I’m fine, eighteen months sober and still counting. Consolidating. Trimming the portfolio and fixing up the house for sale. Walking into that party was a piece of cake, so it won’t be hard to re-connect. ‘You know what, Mags? It’s probably time we got you to a better shrink.’

‘Oh, Bobby.’ When she raises her hand like that he thinks he can see light through it. ‘Don’t do me like that.’

‘No no, I mean, you’re doing so well. Al says you were great in Homosassa,’ he says, and the whole time his mind is racing after its quarry. ‘You’re getting strong.’

Her face clouds over. ‘You didn’t hear about the trouble. At the Dairy Queen.’

‘Even the best people have setbacks, Mag.’ Last night’s train wreck had common ingredients: Kalen. The kid. Pike. And . . .

‘What makes you so sure?’

‘Eighteen months sober, remember?’ And the last element – Ionesco’s maid would be proud. The final ingredient is . . . ‘If somebody as lame as me can get my shit together, so can you!’

Margaret’s big problem is that in every respect, she’s too easy. Her eyes are brimming. ‘I’m so glad.’

The final ingredient is. Finally. Bobby knows. ‘I have to go out for a while, OK Mag? You’ll be fine.’

Performative utterance or self-fulfilling prophecy, she buys it. She says firmly, ‘I’ll be fine.’

‘Hang in and tomorrow we’ll go out to lunch.’ Her face does that jerky, frightened thing. ‘Nowhere scary. Just the Pelican.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Pierce Point,’ he says. ‘It’s hard to explain.’

It’s either hard to explain or hard to orchestrate, because Bobby is gearing up for a confrontation. He takes the long way because he and Pike haven’t spoken since that night Walker came to the house, OK, thirty years ago. They were never friends, although he suspects they’re a lot alike. Oh, God this is hard. He takes the oyster shell road that hugs the shore, making time to write the necessary speeches. For all the good that does. When he arrives at Walker Pike’s neat redwood house on the far side of Pierce Point, the only opening line he’s managed to come up with is, ‘You have something of mine.’

Like Florida beach houses in the 1920s, Walker’s place is built with a tin roof and wooden shutters that drop to protect the glass from storms. Even though it’s late spring, he has the shutters down. Except for running lights on the deck and the yellow bulb in the lantern above the door, no light shows. For all he knows, Walker is gone. He goes up on the deck and knocks, rehearsing his opening line.

OK then. Knock again. Again. If nothing happens, walk away. Go on, admit it, it would be easier. Unless you think you can break in.

The door opens.

Everything Bobby lined up to say evaporates. ‘Hi.’ Weak, Chaplin. Fucking lame.

Standing on bleached teakwood planks worn smooth as the deck of a square-rigger, Walker Pike regards him. Like silvered teak, he’s weathered well.

‘It’s me.’ Bobby adds foolishly, ‘Bob Chaplin, from school?’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘I had to see you.’

The face Walker has prepared for him is carefully assembled. Neutral. Handsome. He’s lost the hungry, vulpine look he had as a kid. ‘I don’t do drop-ins,’ he says in a level tone but he adds, to make clear that he is by no means hostile, ‘If you want to know the truth, I don’t do people.’

Write too many undelivered speeches and you write yourself backward, into cliché. Bobby blurts, ‘We need to talk.’

‘No we don’t.’

‘You have something of mine.’

‘No.’ Then Walker astounds him. ‘You have something of mine.’

Troublesome facts drop into place like tumblers, with an audible snick. Suppressing a groan, Bobby dips his head in acknowledgement. ‘I do.’

Walker snaps to attention. ‘I thought she’d sent it to you.’

‘Let me in?’

‘I’d rather not.’

‘If I go home and get it, then will you let me in?’

‘No,’ Walker says, and that’s the last thing they’ll say about Lucy’s wedding ring.

Desperate, he tries, ‘Lorna.’ Walker’s face clangs shut, which makes Bobby babble on about her snobbery, that big old car, her outfits with matching gloves and shoes until he hits, ‘All she cared about was Precious. Fat as a toad. And mean.’

‘She loved that dog.’

Bobby does not have to add, Probably the only thing she loved. ‘Some expert came all the way from Tampa to do its hair.’ Walker speaks. I’m almost there!

But Walker ends it. ‘Precious was mostly bald.’

It’s weird. Bobby’s articulate by nature and by no means a stupid person but thirty years of pain and confusion, the bulk and weight of raw experience compressed, boil up and present as a single word. ‘Please!’

Walker stops Bobby with the flat of his hand and holds him in place. ‘Wait.’

‘It’s urgent.’

‘Not yet.’ The green eyes move faster than any scanner, assessing. His fingers tighten on Bobby’s arm as if he’s testing for vibrations. Fiber. Intent. Something inside Walker goes: Click. He says, ‘OK. You’re safe.’

Relief makes Bobby too bluff, too hearty, just one of the guys. ‘Shit yes I’m safe.’ What is the man, a walking metal detector? ‘I’m not here to rip you off.’

Walker says coldly, ‘Safe, as in, I can’t hurt you.’

‘I think you ripped me off,’ Bobby blurts. ‘The Swordfish.’ Oh shit. Oh, shit!

Walker’s face changes, perhaps too fast. ‘That wasn’t me.’ He stands aside, revealing polished floors, teak furniture with clean lines, shelves filled with books by the thousands. ‘Come in.’

31

Dan

Exploding into the Fort Jude Star parking lot, Dan finds a note on his windshield. The oversized sheet of rag paper is neatly folded and tucked under the wiper blade. Whoever left it has an enviable printer; the heavy stock unfolds to poster size. The writer chose quality paper, 72 point type, to deliver a message that there is no mistaking:

DON’T BE HERE

DON’T DO THIS

IT ISN’T SAFE

Dan grunts. It’s like taking a blow to the heart – not fatal, but he feels it. The puzzle is not that somebody has been watching, or why the note. This is the mystery: the design, the quality of the stock. The message is the medium. He knows without being told that this is not a threat. Carefully matching the original fold lines, he zips the paper into his messenger bag. He locks it in the car and walks away, pacing the streets with no certain destination.

He has to think.

When he left Archambault’s this morning he came directly to the Star building, jittering and loaded for bear. His thinking has done a 360 since then, and it’s getting dark.

He went in to research the story he devised to justify his presence here. His projected in-depth story about Fort Jude’s spontaneous human combustions got him into the morgue, a.k.a. library. Three unexplained deaths by fire in the same city within thirty years – what a story! If he could find something new on them and get it right and sell it, Fort Jude’s incendiary women would jump-start his career. If he could force himself to go back into that terrible house.

It’s in the blood.

The librarian brought him everything he needed: photocopies of front pages and folders of individual stories, folders of cracked photos, city directory, tax records on the one burn site still standing police reports, personal data on the victims – everything he needed – but he could not bring himself to look at them.

In a miracle of avoidance, he cut to the chase.

He called for everything they had on Chaplin and the four names supplied by this guy Bellinger’s kid. The boys snapped in that Jeep on a prehistoric beach before he was imagined are middle-aged men now, but if his mother kept that snapshot she kept it for a reason, maybe as a message to him.

Maybe Lucy, who told him nothing, saved the big stuff for last so she wouldn’t have to sit through a painful Q. and A. Searches always begin in crazy hope and end in the usual way, but, hey. Maybe he can find and confront the guy.

Maybe she knew he’d use the photo to track the suspects to their lairs. She never said much but she loved him, she’d want him to get what he wants. What he wants? He wants to bag his biodad like a deer and take him home tied to his roof rack, antlers and all. Then the fight, the joyful reunion, whatever Dan Carteret really needs – an explanation – will follow. To hell with the story. He can get out of this town without going back to the Archambault house.

Meeting Bob Chaplin yesterday, Dan never would have guessed that the miserable, defeated guy he found weeding his sidewalk in Pine Vista used to be a big deal. Amazing, he’s front and center in a full-page spread in the Sports section, flanked by his main men Bellinger, Von Harten, Coleman, Kalen, holding their helmets like trophies – five guys with Seventies sideboards and toothpaste grins.

All but Chaplin stayed local. He moved north and rose fast in the food chain, up to a point. Eagle Scout, Harvard graduate, summa cum; Harvard combined law degree and M.B.A., Goldman Sachs; New York wedding, reception at the Metropolitan Club but no photo, wonder what happened with the wife; regular promotions. Then the stories stopped.

Scowling, Dan studied young Chaplin the way he used to study Burt Mixon’s blunt, mean face, convincing himself all over again: It isn’t him.

He thinks.

The others? Their lives continued, boring or not. The Bellinger kid’s father did well over the years, still is: high school fullback, University of Florida all the way, marriage to a local girl, partner in a leading law firm, officer in the Florida Bar Association, ecology activist, local tennis star, all good. There wasn’t much on Von Harten or Coleman; Jaycees, pillars of the community, printing company, car dealership, prizes for whatever they’re still doing, no big, but at least they’re still doing it. Possible. They’re all possible.

The thick Kalen file started with a sixth birthday party – carousel and pony rides, family must have a lot of jack; at six the kid had the same bulldog scowl as Chaplin’s beefy tackle. Dan scowled reflexively. Kalen smiled for his photo in suit and tie graduating from some jerkwater college, couldn’t get in anywhere decent, Dan thought; could he be that stupid and be my dad? Wedding photo: Kalen in a tux, strong-arming his cute, tiny bride with big boobs out of the Episcopal cathedral in a shower of rice, reception at the Fort Jude Club. There were mug shots with announcements of each new job – Bradley J. Kalen, second V.P., Bradley J. Kalen, publicist, Bradley J. Kalen, representative – about two a year until they stopped. Bradley J. Kalen, unemployed? Divorce notice buried in City Briefs: irreconcilable differences, one of those legal niceties constructed to protect the perp. Drunk driving arrests starting in high school, ongoing. Assault, probably bar fights, ongoing. Charges filed, charges dropped. Oh, fuck. It better not be him.

Sitting there in the library, a.k.a. morgue of the Star, he could not have told you whether he came in to research the whole human torch thing because it was a good story or because of the newspaper photo that Lucy ripped out of his hands when he was five years old. It may be a message too.

Dan still doesn’t know why she kept it, but that’s not the worst thing he doesn’t know. What is it with that house? Yesterday something happened to him in the old woman’s stifling bedroom and for longer than he can say, life as he knows it stopped dead. Hallucination or fever dream? He doesn’t know. She came boiling into his head, ugly and raw and raging over something that he sure as hell didn’t do. Wherever she is in time, she smacked into him again today. While he was in the attic with Steffy, he was OK. He was OK talking to her boyfriend Carter. He was OK starting downstairs. Then outside her bedroom, she crashed into his head again roaring, Not him. Never. Do you hear? The words scorched, driving him out of the house a fraction of a second too late. There in the hallway, hot as a branding iron he can still feel, she marked him:

It’s in the blood.

Things we think of to say after the moment for that pissed-off, snappy comeback evaporates: Chill, lady. You’re just a story. If that’s the way you feel about it, then fuck you.

In a day centered on searching, why did he save his mother for last? Achievement, achievement, achievement, high school P.R. boilerplate with a head shot of Lucy Carteret smiling like any pretty girl. Then, three grafs under a mug shot. Local Girl Wins Radcliffe Scholarship. Radcliffe?

One of those things about his mother that she never told. Lucy loved talking to him, she’d say anything, but when he asked her about her life before him, when he asked her about anything in it, she shut down. He always thought she was smarter than he was; he knew she’d dropped out of college. He never knew which one, or why she quit. A Star staffer wrote the scholarship story. It ended:

‘Daughter of the late Lorna Carteret of this city and the late William Carteret of Charleston, S.C., the FJHS senior lives with her grandmother, Mrs Lorna Archambault at 4343 Azalea Street.’

This is how Dan Carteret, a good reporter in normal times, ran head-on into the detail he did not know he was avoiding. Like a crash test dummy in a high-speed experiment, he hit the wall. Something inside him went splat!

No wonder he couldn’t get out of that house fast enough. No wonder Lucy kept the tearsheet from the Star. No wonder he didn’t know – and after he knew, which he freely admits, now that he is up against it, he didn’t want to know. The ruined foot. The chair. Images long burned into his brain expanded and magnified until they filled the world. Directly related to him.

Fuck, she was his great-grandmother. It’s in the blood.

All this unexplained fire and probable damnation is specific to him.

The discovery drove him boiling out into the twilight, to the rented Honda and the note on the windshield. A demon in his head is busy writing background music for what lies ahead: possible scoring for the Greek Recognition Scene.

DON’T BE HERE

DON’T DO THIS

IT ISN’T SAFE.

Fuck. He has to source the note.

32

The Lunch Bunch

There’s nothing like a good fire to bring out all your best friends. It’s ghoulish but true, it’s a fantastic bonding time. Thank God nobody was hurt.

Most of us went to bed early – imagine, on a Saturday night, but it was the day after the biggest bash of the year and the Kalen party wiped us out! We went to the Colemans’ for cocktails about Kara’s brother from Detroit but it was a done deal; since we were getting over Friday night, we’d be at Kara’s all dressed up and smiling at five sharp and out by eight. No stylishly late arrivals for us and no kicking back with the Colemans after, dishing the other guests and finishing off the wine. When everybody’s seen everybody for two nights running, you just get tired.

Some people went out for fried shrimp and slaw at the Shrimp Tank afterward, but most of us were so worn out by all the work we did on that party and drained by the disaster that we ate all Kara’s hot hors d’oeuvres and went straight home to crackers and cheese, TV in our jammies, early to bed.

Our kids might be out helling around but nobody begrudges them; our good old boys were thinking, shit, it’s their turn. Then they thought, but it’s still my turn! We felt it in the way they shifted in the bed, twitchy as horny high school boys, and we knew what was up front and center in their heads. Then we rolled them over and they forgot.

The sirens woke us up.

We went running out, and everybody that wasn’t within earshot, Cathy or Betsy Cashwell phoned. We have everybody that matters on speed dial. Even Nenna snapped to, although of course by the time she got here there wouldn’t be much left to see – her fault, really, for letting Davis stick her in that corny Venetian knockoff over in Far Acres, where only rich outsiders live.

We ran out in our sweats, shortie gowns, raincoats, kaftans, the first thing we grabbed; lipstick, of course, but no makeup, we barely had time to comb our hair. Half of us look OK when we’re au pretty much naturel, but the other half are a fright – no names, please! Face it, some women should never be seen without a bra, insulting the public with native-lady boobs and bellies rolling out of control, and, you want to know what’s unfair? This is unfair. Except for the stubble and their hair being mussed up, our men looked pretty much the same as they do in the day.

Outside the sky was all the wrong color, talk about your unearthly glow.

Every piece of rolling stock in the city came pouring in to Coral Shores; they rushed down Coral Boulevard like the spray out of a fire hose, cop cars and fire trucks, city cars with giant speakers and ambulances toting machines to restore breathing, or jump-start your heart. Our street looked like a laser tag park, what with all the revolving strobes and all those sirens! Cop cars, yowling like cats in heat. The Bellingers came boiling out of Sallie’s Lexus; naturally they were the first people Betsy phoned. They were first over the bridge after the rescue units passed, too bad they have to live in town, but Grammy Bellinger’s Victorian on Bay Drive is too nice to leave. Poor Chape looked distracted and crazy with worry, and Sallie, my God! She almost got hit by TV Nine. We lit out after the news van, crazy to see what burned. Sallie got up and dove into the mainstream along with us, running down the road to Coral Circle. The night turned orange, what a sight!

God-almighty, the Tills’ house was on fire.

Now, Boyd and Carole Till fly to Paris every spring even though it’s still beautiful down here, and they jet to Maine as soon as they get back from France. With Boyd’s money, everybody could. Easter Monday rain or shine they pull down their teakwood Rolos and arm the alarms and walk away without a care. You can do that in Coral Shores; we are protected. Shoresafe Security is that good.

Besides, we watch out for each other here.

Why, in Coral Shores you can throw a stone in any direction and hit a friend. We all grew up together, like one big family! We learned manners and flirting at the cotillions in junior high; never mind that we smoked grass outside the Malobar at intermission or that in eighth grade, sex disrupted the flirting and we cried all the way home in the car. We’ve been through so much together that whatever happens to you, there isn’t a one of us who can’t sign her sympathy note: Been There.

We live so close that we can walk to our friends’ parties in our Manolos, all silky in the night. At Christmas if it’s cool enough, we throw on our furs that we bought for New York and go house to house. Last year the Tills had a living crèche outside, with people in robes and shepherd outfits in a life-sized manger; we thought Boyd hired them but Betsy says they were volunteers from Carole’s church.

The Tills can take off whenever they want because they have more than Shoresafe Security. They have friends! We watch out for their house, and for more reasons than Carole thinks. Sad to say, Boyd has some pretty weird friends dropping by when his wife goes away. Stitch picked up on it when he was out speed-walking last year, bikers and worse people spilling out at dawn.

Richer than God, and Boyd has a personality disorder. You wouldn’t know it to look at him and we’ve never seen it in Fort Jude but, poor Carole, Boyd is a cross-dresser, which is probably why they travel so much. Maybe that kind of thing goes over better in Paris than here. If he’d let Carole have that baby she wanted so bad, maybe he wouldn’t be flouncing around in Carole’s pretty things. Once she came back from her Godchild’s christening in Atlanta and found grease spots all down the front of her black velvet, and he ruined her Fortuny pleated dress! Carole started FJHS after we left for college and Boyd is way older, which probably explains a lot.

But why did Boyd’s house get on fire?

Fortunately, it stands all by itself the far side of the circle, so nothing else caught. With the circle jammed with city trucks, we ended up in Lillian Lipton’s front yard. Buck and Stitch had to bang on her door because Miss Lillian isn’t deaf exactly, but age has made her just a little dumb, and they didn’t want her to see the fire and get confused. She came out blinking, but she has the sweetest smile, and she was thrilled to see them. Of course they promised to keep the flames off her roof. She thanked them and invited us up on the porch, so we’d get a better view. Then she went in the kitchen to make coffee, which is what you do.

It was interesting, being together with nothing but our nightclothes between us and all the others’ bodies; it made us softer, unguarded and rumpled from our beds. Man, woman. Woman, man, with only the smoke and the products we put on to keep us sweet to mask our body smells. Here in the night we had a choice between flirting and the usual sibling etiquette, which protects us all.

Generally we treat each other’s men like sandbox friends – big smile, no agenda, it’s for the best, but seeing Buck in briefs and a dress shirt and baggy old Stitch in his striped pajamas and Chape with those ripped-looking abs and thighs, with nothing between us but the underwear he slept in, brought it home:

How many things polite society protects and defends, in and of itself.

Watching Chape, we had to wonder whether Sallie has a harder row to hoe than she lets on, as in, whether Chape is gone for a reason all those times he says it’s work. Then there was Al Watson, twenty years younger than Bette so we only see them at big parties, but who could keep from looking at Al?

Miss Lillian came out with a nice coffee tray and she put on the porch light so she could see to pour; the Nabisco wafers were a nice distraction, which was just as well. Then the light went off and we focused on the fire.

Tills’ kitchen wing roof caved in and flames shot up. You wouldn’t expect a tile-roofed stucco to burn so bright, but the parquet floors and poor Carole’s antiques and draperies fed it for quite a while. When the firemen bashed out the Rolos we half-expected to see kids in drag screeching and flailing inside, you know, Boyd’s special friends, or Boyd himself in one of Carole’s shifts or at the very least some vagrant running out with his hair on fire, but whoever broke in was either dead already, or long gone.

Thank God our kids are OK. As soon as we heard the sirens, we phoned.

At first there was so much racket that we couldn’t hear ourselves think but finally even the TV people and the ambulances left. The fire had died and officials were going into the wreckage to inspect. Sane people would have gone home, but we weren’t finished here.

We had to talk. Not that we hadn’t already begun to speculate.

Somebody said, ‘Good thing they weren’t home.’

‘Just so you know, the paramedics took Cal Simmons away on a stretcher. Heart failure.’

‘Good thing they found him in time.’

‘Good thing,’ everybody said. Good thing this. Good thing that.

‘Thank God nobody was hurt.’ Good thing.

‘That we know of. Boyd was into people we don’t know about.’

‘What do you mean?

‘What if one of Boyd’s scuzzy bikers . . .’

‘You don’t know that they’re bikers.’

‘They sure as hell aren’t regulars at the Fort Jude Club.’

‘Whatever they are. Shit, so, what, he gave one a key to the house?’

‘Like, it was a grudge fire? Like, because Boyd pissed off someone?’

‘What makes you think it was arson?’

‘It had to be arson. Look how fast it went up.’ Buck is on the City Council, so he’s in tight with the police and fire chiefs, who were buzzing around in yellow-taped slickers like hornets looking for somebody to sting. ‘I’ll find out.’ he said, and trotted across the street to ask.

‘These things don’t just happen.’

Sallie was maybe too quick to reassure us. ‘Sometimes they do. Could have been the furnace.’

‘In April?’

‘Or their wiring!’

Somebody snapped, ‘Or their grandmother blew up,’ and everybody laughed.

Old stories never lose their power. Tribute to maturity: only one of us brought it up. Testimony that even accidental fires make us nervous? We had to turn it into a joke, although it was nervous laughter.

Mariel said, ‘Well, it’s not like there haven’t been a lot of little fires.’

‘You mean the Warrens’ trellis.’

‘And the Boyles’ garage.’

‘Plus, our cabana at the beach!’

‘That was nothing like this. Those were all nuisance fires.’

‘Little things. Things kids do. Hell, we set a few in our time.’

‘This is different.’

‘Kids,’ Chape said stiffly, and God only knows why he scowled the way he did. ‘What makes you think it was kids?’

At that very moment Sallie clapped her hands to her face. ‘Oh my God,’ she said, loud enough to distract us. ‘Poor Carole! What’ll she do when she hears?’

Naturally Betsy already knew. ‘It’s insured. The adjuster’s on his way.’

‘Who says?’

‘Carole, of course.’ We had to forgive Betsy for being just a little smug. She’s the only one of us with Carole’s Paris hotel on speed dial. ‘After all, somebody had to break the news.’

‘How did she take it? Did she scream when you told her? Did she cry?’

‘It’s morning in Paris. She was very calm.’

‘Poor Carole! Is she OK?’

‘I’m worried about her, if you want to know the truth. She was too calm. Everything burned to a cinder and all she said was, “You know, Betsy, it might be just as well.”’

‘What might be just as well?’

If it had been one of us asking we would have ragged on her, what are you, clueless? But it wasn’t any of us, standing here in our jammies, it was Nenna, showing up late in high heels and full makeup, a living reproach.

‘I came as soon as I heard.’

After an hour in front of the mirror. We could tell.

‘Too late, you missed it. It’s nothing but cinders now.’

We love Sallie, she’s so forgiving. ‘Come on up here, girl.’

‘Miss Lillian made coffee.’

We gathered around, hot to fill her in. Kara said, ‘Look! I’ve got pictures on my phone.’

Then our voices went from warm to cold. ‘Oh, Davis.’

‘Hello, Davis.’

We all said hello although we aren’t speaking to him after what he did to her.

Ironic, in a way, that the group’s known philanderer was the only man out here fully dressed. He and Nenna didn’t look too happy, really. They looked like they were fighting when the phone rang and on the long car ride over they fixed their faces so we wouldn’t know.

It’s interesting. We were all furious at Davis for how he did Nenna, but even though we’d always thought he was not nearly good enough for her, now that we knew about his secret lover, he almost looked good to us.

Where our men were running around looking like they’d been slept in, Davis looked cool in an oxford cloth shirt and ironed jeans, new topsiders, no socks. He had his collar open and the cuffs rolled back, and something about standing out here in our night-things talking to Nenna’s soon-to-be-ex husband made us over-conscious of bodies: his, ours.

Davis did a pretend salute with the smile he’d probably been using on girls behind Nenna’s back for years. ‘Ladies . . .’

Then something better came along and we forgot.

Whoever he was, this new man looked good, exciting, and only partly because he was new. Young. Very much himself out here in the dark with us. Tall, with a forelock that kept falling in his face.

Then somebody whispered, ‘It’s him!’

It was. Dan Carteret, that we’d heard so much about. He was the spitting image of Lucy, and now that he was here, we wondered why Jessie didn’t say he was gorgeous, like, was she was trying to keep him for herself? What was she, sitting down there at the Flordana thinking up ways to lure him into her suite, like, Me first? Well, tough. Instead of falling down with Jessie Vukovich who, sweet as she is, would do it with anybody, he was here among us, and backlit by the cops’ headlights and the smoking afterglow of the Tills’ ruined house, like maybe he’d come to tell us who did what to his mother that we still talk about, but never actually knew.

Somebody turned on Miss Lillian’s burglar light so we could all take a better look. He stood down there on the walk, knuckling his head until Nenna – no, our friend Nenna – turned to see what we were staring at, and didn’t she light up.

And didn’t she trill, all surprised and charmed, ‘Why, Dan!’

We thought he’d bound up the steps so she’d be forced to introduce him but he hung back, swiveling from us to the smoldering remains and back with a baffled squint. Then he said, ‘You called?’

Oh, you clever bitch.

Well, didn’t Nenna rush down the steps like a girl on prom night – and who could blame her, with Davis the rat standing right there, picture of a man asking for it?

For a woman who’s been flattened and tromped on by a slick liar like Davis McCall, it was like landing a karate kick in his whitened teeth: take that. No, better. And why shouldn’t she leave with him, she’s practically single now . . . but, Lucy’s son! We’d give anything to know what Nenna told this lovely man to get him here, and more to know what happened after they got in his car and rolled out of Coral Shores.

Things finally died down but we were all too disrupted to go straight home, so Betsy had us over for toast and coffee in the glossy new kitchen she built with the settlement from Clive. Kara ran home for her banana bread and Cathy went next door for butter and that calamondin marmalade she loves to make. Somebody thought to bring Miss Lillian and she sat among us in her chenille bathrobe, looking thrilled. Nobody saw where Davis went. He knew we didn’t want him here.

We looked at our men, who were sweet and rumpled and ordinary now that we had all come in out of the dark, and we thanked whatever gods take care of us that we were here with them, not Davis. We took turns talking to poor Carole in Paris while our men pestered Buck for details he’d picked up from the fire marshal. Somebody turned on the TV and we waited for video of the fire to show up on the news.

Of course we were upset!

If a thing like that could happen to Carole, what could happen to us?

Being together like this, homefolks getting down in Betsy’s kitchen, made us feel better. It always does. The coffee was good, and worn and frazzled as we were, we felt more or less restored. While we were still debriefing, rehashing everything we knew and guessing at the rest, the sun came up and there wasn’t a one of us who wasn’t thinking: Too bad it has to end. It took us a long time to say good night because we were tired as hell but we didn’t want to let it go. We and our men started home, walking through the early morning two by two, and that weird, weird night ended up in a normal morning way.

33

Walker Pike

Every time a siren sounds the vibration starts, deep in Walker’s belly. It turns him into a tuning fork, but you wouldn’t know it to look at him. It’s been this way for longer than he cares to remember. Going in to confront Lorna Archambault at twenty-one, he had no idea what he was, or that it would end in fire. He was young and so in love that he’d do anything. He met the perfumed monster smiling, even though she despised him.

How could he guess that he was the monster?

He didn’t know. He didn’t know!

Tonight he hears the sirens long before Nenna wakes Dan Carteret out of a sound sleep to stage her rescue from the scene on Coral Shores. Walker shudders as engines from North and Southside stations roar past the Flordana, screaming down Central Avenue toward Bayfront Drive and over the bridge to the island. Something’s ablaze out there. The sirens tell him it’s big. Good thing he’s parked here in front of the Flordana, praying – insofar as Walker prays – that the kid will sleep through the racket and stay inside. He does not want to go out to Coral Shores where the commotion is and he certainly doesn’t want the kid to go. Walker hates to see anything burn, won’t let Dan see. Or put either of them out there, where they can be blamed.

The trucks recede and Walker shakes himself, trying to unclench. Nothing to see now, Pike. Nothing to do here but sit behind the wheel, waiting. Stay until morning, just to be sure this new person in his life is safely stashed. Now that his son is here, it’s his duty to – he supposes it’s: protect, and if Dan wakes up and races out to chase fires, he’ll follow, and . . .

He doesn’t know what comes next, only that it’s important.

Yes, Walker’s been tailing him. When he left the warning on Carteret’s windshield today he thought his job was done, but it isn’t. He went home thinking, He’ll be fine, but that was a lifetime ago. Chaplin showed up at his house tonight. He looked like a carcass washed up on the beach, standing under the porch light leached of substance. ‘We have to talk.’

Walker didn’t want to. They did.

When it was done, Walker did what he had to. He came here. He’s been standing vigil ever since. Responsible.

Sad, square old Bob Chaplin came inside all shaky and diminished. God, that was weird. He begged Walker to hear him out, all, I alone am left, I alone am left to tell. It was hard for him, just being there. It was hard for Walker too, but he let Chaplin talk, and Chaplin brought it back. All of it.

Walker gritted his teeth and held back, even during the hardest part, because he must never even think what he’s thinking. He can’t go there. Correction: must not go there. Ever.

At the end, Chaplin choked out an apology for everything he’d ever done and the one grave thing that he had failed to do. Protect her. In a way, it released both of them.

It was the first time they’d ever sat down together, and in another life, in a different society, Walker thinks, he would have liked the guy.

As it was, they were alike, with Fort Jude society like a ditch between them. The grimy kid whose dad ran a failed body shop out on Pierce Point came into Northshore Elementary under deep cover. The Coral Shores kids thought he didn’t belong. When he shambled off the bus at Northshore Elementary in Pop’s flapping shoes and torn castoffs they laughed at him. They pointed, they mocked his walk. Hurt, he turned his back on them, even on Chaplin, who tried to make nice when they landed in the same advanced math class. Nobody gets to see the cluttered, filthy rooms where Pop raised him and his little brother. He’d die. The grilled windows. The chicken wire that kept them inside before Walker got big enough to look after Wade and strong enough to work in the body shop. Nobody. He turned away in a protective slouch, put on a scowl that hid whatever he was thinking.

To his surprise, compared to most of those kids he was pretty smart, but you hide smart because you know it will make them hate you. In classrooms he grabbed the last seat in the back, kept his head down, never raised his hand, solved math problems no problem, but he did it on paper only. Teachers knew he knew, but he wouldn’t go to the blackboard, so they stopped asking. They got along with Walker after they stopped trying to praise him. They never pressed because even adults were a little scared of him; by then he’d perfected the glare, growing up under deep cover. He graduated a year ahead of his class; nobody noticed, nobody cared.

Chaplin was just as smart, but he was better at dissembling. He knew how to please the people. In high school he was way too smart to show how smart he was, although Walker knew.

Once, they bumped into each other in Cambridge – the high school hero was at Harvard and Walker was on scholarship at MIT. Surprise. Tight smiles. Oh, it’s you. He could see Chaplin reassessing him. Grinning, he asked Walker to come back to Eliot House for a drink, but he refused.

In Cambridge, he was a new person. It made him wary of people who knew where he came from. More important: by then he had more important secrets to keep. In Cambridge he and Chaplin never mixed – they never would, but tonight they sat down as equals, although in real life Walker has the edge and Chaplin said as much, coming in. Failure humbled him, Walker thinks over coffee. He has nothing left to lose. When they got down tonight, talking in Walker’s beautifully spare, well-ordered living room, he and Bob Chaplin turned out to have more in common than he knew, because for all those years when Chaplin was being noble, he was in love with Lucy. They have plenty to talk about, but he let Chaplin do the talking.

Skirting certain matters. The ring. What did she do with the ring? The guilt. Where, exactly, that guilt should lie.

The ex-Harvard, ex-golden boy cradled his coffee, careful not to mar the polished teak table Walker designed and had made especially for this house. Grimacing, Chaplin talked about his failure – and not in a twelve-step way, although Walker noted the watery eyes and unsteady smile, the classic recovered-alcoholic’s way of putting things. He laid it to one spectacular mistake at Goldman Sachs, although they both knew his grief was lodged farther back and somewhere much deeper. Fort Jude’s golden boy was in mid-divorce when he messed up at the brokerage, he was fighting tooth-and-claw with Bethany and her lawyers, which skewed his judgment, and that was just before the crash. He jumped too fast on a major I.P.O., it tanked and he cost the firm their biggest client.

‘It’s like falling off a horse,’ Chaplin told him. ‘It shakes your confidence and day after day you have to get up and go out riding, but you’re scared. You seize up and everything you do from then on goes wrong.’

It was only the first in a string of wrong calls that unspooled and ruined him, and that was the end of Bob Chaplin, Goldman Sachs. Now, Walker could have warned the man off that particular transaction. When he isn’t working with the A.I. boys in public and private sectors, Walker Pike codes models of everything from stock market futures to burgeoning world wars. An intuitive coder, he’s a genius at projection.

As he is living his life alone in every sense, it’s what he does for fun. He could have warned Chaplin off that first I.P.O., and that just on the basis of what he has stored on his hard drive, which is only the beginning of what Walker knows. He could have warned Chaplin off a lot of things. He’s never been much of a drinker but Pop was, so he could have warned him never to take a drink just because he felt bad, which is what tipped Chaplin down the chute into blackouts, rehab and the remaining eight yards into A.A.

If life is a race and he used to think of Chaplin as running way ahead, Walker passed him a long, long time ago.

Funny, the fourteen-karat kid from the right side of town told Walker Pike more than he needed to know about his own life and about what went wrong with his marriage, and Chaplin did all that on the way to talking about the last night of houseparties in his drunken last year at Fort Jude High.

Because the mangrove patch at Land’s End was where their separate lives and this conversation had been heading from the beginning, Chaplin doubled back on the matter of that chaotic night at Huntington Beach. It hurts to know that polished failure that he is, Chaplin can tell Walker things he’d never have found out alone, because he shut himself up inside his head and locked all the exits a long, long time ago.

No matter how many models he runs on his powerful machine, Walker Pike was and always will be a terminal outsider.

‘That last night of houseparties,’ Chaplin said, underscoring the difference between them with a rueful, insider’s grin. ‘Oooh, man! You know what that’s like.’

‘No. I don’t.’

‘But you understand. Dude, you’ve gotta remember those parties.’

‘Not so much. Not invited.

‘Shit, everybody’s invited.’

Walker’s voice flattened. ‘Not everybody.’

‘Oh, shit.’ Like Walker, Chaplin has been brooding over the matter of that night. He was brooding long after the particles settled because unlike Walker he felt responsible for what happened. Walker wouldn’t know until Chaplin confessed to him, but the football hero blamed himself then and on and on, to this very moment.

‘You might as well know, I was in love with her. I thought I could tell her and she’d love me back, if I could only get her to come! Last party of the year, my last chance. Please try to understand.’

‘I’m trying.’

‘So it’s my fault she came out to the beach to spite that bitch grandmother. I begged. She had her own money by then, from her dad’s family. She had a new car so she could come and go when she wanted, and the hell with the queen of the Fort Jude Club. Did you know our moms were scared of her?’ Walker keeps his face so tightly closed that Bobby added, ‘You know, big old Lorna. Lorna Archambault?’

Tightening every thread in his body in a miracle of compression, Walker kept it all in. Regret. Rage. Everything that could send this encounter to the old, bad place. ‘Yeah.’

‘I begged Lucy to sneak out and come with me.’ Chaplin sighed. ‘I waited for hours before I gave up and the hell of it is, by the time she walked down on that sand in that silky white thing I was too drunk to take care of her!’

‘Not the first time,’ Walker said, too low for Chaplin to hear. He would get through this without hurting anybody; he had to. He gripped the arms of his chair and filled his head with white sound, through which Chaplin’s voice still came, but buffered. Remote.

‘I was so fucking drunk!’ Chaplin was the dog, begging to be whipped.

‘I saw.’

‘I loved her so much! It was my last chance to tell her, so I pulled her into that Jeep.’

Everyone has to sob out their story, Walker thought. Letting Chaplin talk was an act of mercy.

‘Beautiful girl, us guys puking drunk. What was I thinking?’ Chaplin wanted Walker to cry with him.

‘In hell,’ Walker said without explaining. He was at the beach that night, but for a different reason. Too late to protect her.

Then Chaplin told him a lot of other things: what happened before Walker caught up with them, what was said, and who . . . Walker would never show it, but it left him sick with anger. Clamped shut. It was unfair, really, letting the poor guy strip naked without giving anything back, but before everything, he had to keep control. There are things Bob Chaplin doesn’t know that Walker will never tell him.

There are things about Walker that nobody needs to know. That he struggles to keep hidden.

‘It’s OK,’ Walker said. ‘You can stop now.’ Please.

‘I was so wasted.’ Chaplin was bent on laying down his burden. At the end he looked relieved, like a Catholic coming out of Confession. As if he’d finally shaken off whatever sat on his head – monstrous, leaden. ‘Please try to understand.’

Grieved as he was, shaken and suffering, Walker overrode it. He stood, and Chaplin stood. Surprised, Walker found himself raising the blade of his right hand – not as weapon and not in warning, but as though to bless the man before he released him.

‘OK then.’ Then he let him go.

‘Oh, thank you.’ On the porch, Chaplain cried, ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Don’t.’

It saddens him to think that men like Chaplin actually believe that there are things you can get off your back by confessing them, as though destiny is fair and open-handed. That he can get past what he did by giving it a name.

The poor sod believes there is in life an identifiable moment at which, when for good reason, everything goes bad.

Well, Walker is here to tell you that’s a crock of shit. Whatever is wrong within Walker Pike has been burning in there since the day he tumbled into the world, hopeful and unaware.

What happened with the old lady was inevitable.

He knows what he is and he fears it. The potential staggers him.

I’ve always been this way.

Knowing circumscribes his life in ways he freely acknowledges and does not resent. Walker is a solitary. He lives alone and walks shy of others’ lives. He stays out of their houses because it is important – not to keep his secret, but to keep them safe.

Please God, the kid will stay safe in his bed inside the Flordana tonight.

But when the last sirens die, just as the first EMS van comes back up on Central Avenue, he sees young Carteret come barreling out of the Flordana. Some kind of reporter, Bob Chaplin told him. Of course he chases fires, but the damn thing must be out by now. With a groan, Walker kicks his car into gear and coasts downhill as Carteret runs for the garage. He keeps the motor running while the kid goes inside. When the grate comes up and the rented car rolls out Walker falls in behind, gliding along behind.

He is here to follow, not stalk, Dan Carteret. He keeps pace, thinking as long as he stays in the shadows and keeps his distance, they’ll both be safe.

There is this with the kid, but there’s more.

If they see him, he may be blamed.

He goes over the bridge and along Coral Boulevard with his lights off, turning into a side street when the kid turns, parking at the corner so he won’t know. Out in the circle, people he knows by sight are kicking at the embers of Boyd Till’s pretentious, ruined house. He can smell the size and scope of the fire. Walker wants to see, he isn’t here to see, he is here to protect Dan Carteret, although he does not know why and could not say from what, exactly.

Much as he’d like to walk up to this decent, attractive kid who looks like him, much as he wants to clamp Carteret’s skull in his hands and pull him close, look in the eyes and see into his soul so he can confirm the likeness; much as Walker wants to grip the kid’s hands and sense the truth of him, he’ll keep a safe distance, and he must never, ever identify himself or tell Dan that he loves him, and he does. He may want to let his son know him and know everything about him, but the burden of knowledge that Walker Pike carries and has carried all these years must, at all costs, be contained.

It’s for Dan’s protection.

This is why he stays put when the kid finally comes back to his car – and not alone, which is a surprise. Dan comes back to the car with a woman Walker recognizes. That he knew, but not really, no big thing.

Keeping his charge’s tail-lights in sight, Walker follows the rented Honda to the house where Nenna Henderson – no, McCall – seems to live; he pulls past the Honda and stops in the shadow of the jacarandas two doors beyond Nenna’s house. He tilts his mirror, watching as Dan follows her inside.

When his son leaves here, Walker needs to see that he makes it safely to the next place. For reasons not altogether clear, he’ll wait here for as long as it takes, wondering what’s going on behind the Florentine façade and whether the sun will come up on the new day before he gets through doing whatever he’s doing in there, and comes back to his car.

Dan, he thinks. He lets the word out. ‘Dan.’

34

Dan

‘Why am I here?’

Poor lady, she looks tired now that they are in the light, uncertain and wounded by Dan’s tone, does she have any idea how late it is? Did she expect him to thank her for yanking him out of a stone sleep to chase a dead fire? After which she scammed him into this ride home, getting into his car on the strength of information that she shows no sign of delivering; you bet he’s pissed.

She says lamely, ‘I thought you were into fires.’

‘Who told you that?’

‘Everybody knows.’

His eyebrows shoot up.

‘After all, you told Jessie. You’re not in Los Angeles with a billion strangers, this is Fort Jude.’ She’s maneuvered him into a chair in the French Provincial living room – one of those orderly, hushed places where no people come. Cold, like a decorator’s model room. ‘Davis won’t be back tonight.’

‘Ma’am . . .’

‘Don’t.’

‘I have stuff to do.’

‘We won’t bother Steffy, she’s over at Jen Pritchard’s.’

Oh, lady. Don’t smile at me like that. ‘It’s late.’

‘It isn’t late, it’s early.’ Mrs Um, Nenna will say anything to keep him, lilting, ‘So. Talk about your suspicious fires. Want to hear what they’re saying about Boyd Till?’

‘I’d rather hear about my mother – whatever you know.’

‘They’re saying some bike buddy of Boyd’s set it, you know Boyd goes around in Carole’s evening dresses when she isn’t . . . Oh, please don’t look at me like that!’

‘Look, you said . . .’

‘I know what I said. I had to tell you something.’

And don’t scrunch up your face like bubble wrap, it’s disfiguring. And would you stop sighing? ‘If you don’t have anything . . .’

She blurts, ‘I was afraid you wouldn’t come!’ Everything is sliding around now. Her face, her stated reason for this encounter.

‘. . . I’ll just go.’

‘I couldn’t bear to get back in that car with Davis. Not with everybody knowing. Not after I kicked him out for good.’

‘Right.’

He can leave, but he can’t stop her from following him to the door with that sweet, frenzied smile. ‘This is a really hard time for me.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘So am I. If you want the whole truth, I just wanted to show Davis.’

‘Show him what?’

‘That I have friends!’ She grabs his arm. ‘Was that so terrible of me?’

Pressed, Dan bares his teeth. As a smile, it sucks, but at five a.m. it’s the best he can do – a rictus to get out the door on.

But she goes all life-or-death on him. ‘Wait! Ugh.’ Nenna groans. Something inside her is struggling to the surface. ‘Agh. This is hard. I . . .’

Shit. He has to stay until she coughs it up.

Finally she blurts, ‘I had to show them all I’m still attractive. Is that so terrible?’

‘You don’t have anything on Lucy, do you.’ Say no, so this night can end.

‘No.’

‘OK then.’

‘I mean. No, I do!’

Now it’s his turn to groan. There is no way of seeing into urgent, worn-out Nenna, no telling what she has stored up for him. To find out, Dan has to follow her back into that Louis-Whatever parlor, sit down and wait.

‘Coffee?’

‘No.’ He sits, but does not speak: an interviewing tactic he learned on the job. Let silence do its work.

‘I should have told you yesterday,’ she says, ‘but it’s hard. We never talked about it at the time and we didn’t talk about it afterward and we don’t talk about it now because you don’t in Fort Jude, especially since nobody’s sure what went down and it would ruin one of us. Am I making any sense?’

Looking into his hands, he waits.

‘See, certain things are best forgotten. Everybody has something to live down and we respect that, aren’t we all here to help each other through?’

They sit until the period clock on the marble mantel strikes again.

‘When you get mixed up in something shameful in Fort Jude you’ll shoot yourself dead before you let on, because your nearest and dearest will badger you until the story comes out – and when it does, you are implicated. Tarred with the same brush, you just are. We think your mother was . . .’ She blushes. ‘Well . . . A thing like that can toxify your life. You don’t talk about it with your best friend, you don’t even whisper it to your lover, you wouldn’t dare because we are all connected. Tell one single human being and they all know. You have to protect yourself!’

Oh fuck, he thinks. Talking in circles.

‘What if people found out that was you, laid out drooling by the bonfire when it happened, squealing drunk with a bunch of boys so out of control that there was no telling what they’d do? What if people knew you were so loaded that you don’t even remember what you stooped to or with who, what would everybody think of you then?’

‘Ma’am?’

‘What if they started asking why didn’t you stop them?’ All her breath comes out in a sob. ‘Understand, when these things happen, they always blame the girl.’

‘What things?’

‘Like it’s all your fault,’ she says bitterly, ‘for being jealous of her and so wasted that you didn’t lift a hand. You didn’t make it happen but you let it happen. Do you know what that’s like?’

He needs his digital recorder. The tangle of words is unraveling too fast, with loose ends everywhere.

‘I mean, look at poor Jessie. It took her years to live down all the things she did with all those boys, because everybody knew. She had to make all those donations, drive all those miles for Meals on Wheels to . . . What do I want to say here? Atone for whatever she did with those boys. And she enjoyed it!’ Frowning, she corrects. ‘Or what we think she did.’

A bad wind blows in out of nowhere. ‘At least I’m not the only one.’

‘The only one what?’ Shut up, Carteret. Just let her do this.

‘The only one they blame for letting Lucy go off with them,’ she says impatiently.

‘Off with who?’

‘If our folks knew their girls were laid out on the sand with their knees up just like Jessie Vukovich . . . Oh, that sounds terrible, but this is Fort Jude.’ Another long, time-sucking sigh. ‘Around here we drag our pasts around like Marley’s ghost, because whatever you do, if even one person finds out, everybody knows it. You’d have to move to Alaska to escape it! In Fort Jude people forgive, God knows we all do it every single day, but nobody ever, ever forgets,’ she says.

She says, ‘And if you’re a slut, that’s what everybody thinks of you.’

‘You’re saying my mother was a slut?’

‘Hardly.’ Something ugly breaks the surface. ‘She thought she was too good for us!’

The thing about period clocks is the pendulum. Every fucking tick.

Nervously, she zips and unzips the hoodie she threw on to go out tonight. Color keyed to the silk tank top, what was she thinking? Was she dressing for him? ‘Oh this is embarrassing. Girls like us, no matter what we did back then or where we did it or who we did it with, the day we get married we’re all virgins again.’ She rocks with anger. ‘Because it’s expected! If nobody finds out, it just – un-happens. It has to. Am I making any sense?’

‘Not really.’

‘It doesn’t matter. I’m sure up north things are a lot freer, but this is a small town locked up inside a big city and down here everybody minds everybody else’s business – that is, everybody that matters.’ She fixes him with her eyes. ‘It’s how we keep each other safe.’

He lies politely; anything to keep her going. ‘I see.’

‘We keep quiet.’ She spreads her fingers in apology. ‘It’s what we do, and I’m sorry. If the truth came out, it would ruin more lives than just Lucy Carteret’s. So I hope you understand, and I’m sorry.’

He doesn’t. He wants to pick this woman up by her hoodie and batter her with questions but he has to wait until her head comes back from wherever it’s wandered off to. It takes longer than it should.

‘OK,’ she says finally. ‘So what I wanted to tell you was, it got way too late that night; there were at hundreds of us there, everybody that mattered and all their friends, all the team captains, cheerleaders, prom queens and the whole May Court except, of course, for Lucy because she was beautiful but she was never one of us, which is why . . .’

He leans forward to catch what comes next.

Instead she takes him on a detour. ‘It’s like Lucy was above us all even in first grade, birthday parties in the club ballroom and we had to dress up for old Lorna’s little princess, unless . . .’

‘Unless?’

‘Unless she was her prisoner! Then Lucy’s dad died up in Charleston and she came into some money. All those years trapped in the tower. She bought a convertible! Came down on the beach at the tag end of houseparties, amazing body and her hair was perfect. It just was too much. We hated her. I’m sorry, that’s the way it was, like, if it had happened to another girl, we might have—’

‘What?’

‘Warned her off!’ Is she drunk or just used up? The girlish way Nenna rearranges her breasts inside the tight tank top makes clear that she’d have sex with him to keep from having to explain. ‘I must look awful.’

‘You look fine.’

‘I don’t, but thanks.’ Oh, lady, don’t sigh! ‘Sometimes I wonder how it would have come down if we’d been friends. But she was not like us!’

‘You said that.’

‘God knows what her problem was.’

Carefully, he leads her back into the interview, asking little, giving nothing – no hint of an agenda, framing a question from what he knows. ‘Shy?’

‘Like, we were never close. I don’t know if she was shy or just too good for us. She just didn’t do like we do. She lived in her own little world, and maybe if she’d stayed there, she wouldn’t have . . . And the saddest thing?’ Her face is all messed up.

‘Ma’am?’

She wails, ‘Not Ma’am!’

In the silence, he counts heartbeats.

‘Bobby Chaplin was in love with her. He begged her to come out in his car so maybe it was his fault, what happened. She came sailing down at the tail end of a long week fresh and shiny as the sun goddess, when the rest of us were wrecked. Did you know that when you’re sleep-deprived, it’s like being drunk?’

Just when he thinks she’s getting to the point, Nenna lapses. He nudges. ‘You were saying . . .’

‘I was saying Lucy came down on the beach because Bobby begged, but she didn’t come with him. Maybe she was a little bit in love with Bobby too, but I doubt it or she wouldn’t have come so late. He gave up on her and got blind drunk plus whatever else Chape and them were taking. Listen, there’s something you should know.’ It takes her some time to formulate what she has to tell him and when she does, it’s nothing he expected.

‘You know, when you hang out with people all your life, you learn some necessary things. What to look out for. How to handle yourself. But Lucy was like Edie Sedgewick at her first party.’

‘Who?’

‘Crazy-wild. Too wild.’ She leans in, desperate to explain. ‘We sure as hell never would have . . . She shouldn’t have . . . Well, she just shouldn’t!’

This is harder than he thought. He’s tried all his life to get inside that head but when he thinks of Lucy, even at eighteen, it’s as going along with that brave chin up and her elbows clamped to her sides, resolutely on her own. In all the time he knew her, the only stupid thing she ever did was marrying Burt. ‘Shouldn’t what?’

‘Oh.’ She hesitates. ‘A lot of things.’

‘Like . . .’

‘White bikini bottom and nothing under the white gauze shirt, no matter how gorgeous, that’s one. Two, the way she drank and what she was smoking, and three, going off with those boys. You don’t do that, not the way they were.’

‘Which boys?’

‘I guess you had to be there. It was the last night of life as we knew it – you know, dance, drink and get loaded, for tomorrow you die. Well, not really, but Sunday was graduation and the end of everything that mattered. We had a humongous bonfire, with a ton of hot dogs and hamburgers from Sharp’s Market – our graduation present from Stan Sharp’s dad, even though they lived on the south side. Nobody ate, but we were drinking, people brought six-packs and pints, airport minis and whatever pills our mothers were taking, stole pills, uppers, downers, believe me, we had everything out there, along with everybody you could hope for, even sluts and skanky glue sniffers from junior high that we never saw any more. The sand was hard enough to dance on, and the music, oh my God, the music.’ She names a bunch of bands from the dark ages. ‘Can you see what it was like?’

‘Who did she go off with?’

‘Crazy. It was that amazing, wonderful kind of crazy. Lucy Carteret waltzes into the mist of it, for the very first time. It’s a wonder we even noticed, we were so blasted, I mean, what’s one kid more or less in that mob? Except, she looked so hot! If you want to know the truth, it pissed us off. Boys forgot who we were and went lusting. It’s not fair!’

‘Ma’am?’

She doesn’t bother to correct him. ‘She was a perfect size four, except on top, where she was bigger.’

In spite of himself, Dan blushes.

‘Now that I think about it, she probably stayed over at the Carleton Inn and left after her grandfather went to bed. He and Eden Rowse were shacked up in there, had been for years before the divorce. Probably that’s why old Lorna was so mean. She hated Lucy. She hated everyone. She hated us.

Oh, Lucy. Oh, Mom. A good reporter, he prompts: ‘Why?’

‘She hated us for, I don’t know, corrupting Lucy. I’m surprised she didn’t show up with the cops and wreck the party. God knows what-all she had bottled up inside. No wonder she burned to death.’

‘So.’ Shaken, Dan sets his jaw. Do this like a professional. Just do it. ‘You were at the beach.’

‘I was? I was. We all were.’

‘That night.’

Mrs McCall’s eyes are shifting here, there. ‘Oh, God. I’m thirsty, are you thirsty? A little brandy? Coffee? It’s hard to know what to offer at this ungodly hour.’

‘No thank you.’

‘I need some water. Be right back.’

It takes forever. She returns like a car just out of a cheap body shop, with all the dings and scratches retouched, but not repaired. ‘There.’

‘The beach. You were telling me about the . . .’

She says apologetically, ‘There isn’t that much more to tell.’

He is careful to control his tone. ‘What do you mean, there isn’t that much more to tell?’

‘Understand, by the time Lucy got there we were all pretty far gone. Then at the ass end of that night Lucy went off in the Jeep. We saw her go.’

Her voice drops. ‘God help us, we were thinking, Serves her right.’

‘Ma’am!’

She sighs. ‘That’s pretty much it.’

‘Wait!’

‘Remember, we were eighteen. So Lucy went off with them and that’s the last we saw of her, she was valedictorian, but she didn’t show up for the speech. Something went down, nobody will talk about it and we try not to ask. The School Board never did get names so everybody’s safe – Sallie’s dad let that cat out of the bag and he never guessed what a big relief it was for all of us. See, those were not boys from South Side High that Lucy went off with and it wasn’t that gang from Bradenton, they were our boys that we wanted to grow up and marry, and some of us have.

‘By the time the School Board met on it we were all off in college in Gainesville or Tallahassee or Atlanta so we couldn’t forget it, but we didn’t have to testify.’

‘And?’

‘That’s it.’ She spreads her hands, and they are empty.

‘That’s all you have to tell me? That’s your big secret?’

‘Yes. Lucy went off with them and we let her go!’ She’s trying hard to come up with something more for him, but this is all she can manage. ‘We weren’t there and God knows the boys won’t tell.’ She takes his hands. She is desperate to explain. ‘We protect each other, OK?’

‘No.’ He finds it necessary to drive it in. ‘You wouldn’t even tell me who was in the Jeep,’ he adds, although he already knows.

A bad sound comes out of her. It is the sound of a woman losing it, so when Nenna answers it’s a partial answer. ‘Brad was driving.’ Tears are coming down her face, so swift and dense that they roll into her mouth and a bubble seals it as her mouth stretches wide in soundless grief. It shimmers until finally it pops. Words come out, but nothing he can use. ‘We saw what was happening and we let her go!’

35

Steffy

They’ve been riding around in Mr Bellinger’s ragtop Buick, like, forever. Wild, being out with Carter at this strange, still hour when real people are locked inside their houses, but while they were running free at the tippy end of Pierce Point the dark bled out of the night; too late turned into too early and Steffy is fucking exhausted.

Carter looks tired too, hunched over the wheel with his cheeks caved in, but Steffy isn’t about to end this, even though she’s beyond ready to go home.

She can’t.

She loves him so much!

Plus, she can’t go back to her house just yet. It’s way too early to get caught sneaking in, and her mom hasn’t been sleeping much since the big fight. Cough in the night and the woman comes in to check on you; get up to pee and she springs out. Steffy doesn’t dare show until it’s time for breakfast somewhere, or her mom will find out that instead of staying over at Jen’s house as advertised, she’s been out all night, running around with Carter Bellinger.

When he yanked her aside after the Saturday night movie she thought, OK then. This is it. He grabbed her elbow in the parking lot, clamped her hand under his arm and growled into her hair, ‘Want to do something really trippy?’

Steffy’s heart jumped. In a shitty week, maybe things weren’t so shitty after all. She had to act like she could care less – because this was Carter, that she was in love with, asking her, and it was so very, very important to her, so she shrugged him off and mumbled, ‘Sure.’

Perfidious Jen smiled that smile and pretend-zipped her mouth as though she and Carter never did Whatever: Nobody will ever know.

Pathetic, her being this excited. God only knows what she was expecting when they headed for Bayfront Drive. It’s been this and that with Carter for so long that Steffy needs it to get serious, even though she’s scared. It’s way past time.

When was that, around midnight? Forever ago. She was excited to be in the convertible, which Carter’s dad loans him even though his license got suspended last month. She wished he’d put the top down so all Central Avenue could see the two of them going along together in that cool car: her and Carter Bellinger, Carter and her. Probably he wanted privacy, given what they were just about to do.

When they left the Cineplex she thought tonight was the night, they were finally going to do the scary, private thing that would bond them forever, body and body, heart and heart. Naturally Carter would want to keep the top up, so nothing could interrupt and no fool cruising on Bayfront Drive that late would accidentally see in. When they finally Did It, she thought, it would be a relief. Then Carter would be hers and Jen and every Tiffany and Britney in Fort Jude could go the fuck to hell.

Now she’s not so sure.

They didn’t park on the bay they just drove on, past the usual place where she and Carter almost got started once. He kept going even though the makeout spot was deserted and the moon was making one of those paths of light on the water that your heart follows to the stars. They didn’t park, at least not then. Carter just kept going along the waterfront to the two big old cement sphinxes guarding the bridge to Coral Shores. It was so late that all the houses on Coral Boulevard were dark; they were all safe in bed while she and Carter . . . She doesn’t know.

They sneaked into the Tills’ house on Coral Circle, they were there for hours and she still doesn’t know!

Carter had her breaking into somebody’s house in the dead of night and messing with their belongings, and the weird thing? She never gave it a thought.

She would have followed him anywhere.

Never mind that everyone knew the Tills were in Europe and the house was alarmed, never mind that or that Shoresafe Security could put them in jail. Carter walked her up to the side door just like they’d been invited. He found the key under the cement hoptoad and let her in! How did he know what numbers to tap into the alarm? The Tills have a deal where when you walk into a room the whole ceiling lights up – awesome, right? It was like walking into a private club with the floors waxed and everything set up and waiting, just for them.

‘This is the place.’

‘What about the Tills?’

‘Fuck ’em.’

The minute the lights went up on the humongous playroom, Steffy freaked. ‘They’ll see us!’

Laughing, Carter pointed. ‘No they won’t.’

She saw stainless steel Rolos locked over the windows like armor on a tank. If the Tills ever had kids it was a long, long time ago, but somebody spent a lot of money on this paneled rec room with fake stuffed grouper and swordfish on plaques, a pool table and a pinball machine complete with flashing lights and a bucket full of quarters so anybody could play. They had an old-timey soda fountain left over from Early America – Mr Till’s bar. Champagne glasses and Gators mugs stood on glass shelves under a barroom mirror with an alligator at the top in frosted glass.

‘There’s beer in the fridge.’

‘How do you know?’

His voice got raw. ‘He has parties here.’

‘What . . .’

‘You don’t want to know.’

There were squashy sofas and fat chairs at the far end of the room so Steffy thought probably this was the place where she and Carter were finally going to get down to it; he’d picked here because it was private, she just hoped to God they didn’t get caught. It was exciting and scary and weird.

Instead they played pool for, like, a hundred hours. She didn’t think it was because she kept winning, but the longer they played the madder Carter got and the more she won, the more he wouldn’t let her quit.

Her boy was pissed at something; he started out pissed tonight. He was pissed before they broke into the house. Then he was pissed because all he found in the minibar was Diet Coke, like Mr Till hid all the liquor because Carter was coming, or Mrs Till had put Mr Till into rehab and poured his booze down the sink. In fact, Carter was pissed about a lot of things, which was odd since Mr Till nicely left the key for him, and Carter tapped in the alarm code like it wasn’t the first time.

Maybe if she’d let him win the trouble wouldn’t have started, but Steffy wouldn’t lose. The more games she won, the madder Carter got. What was his problem? Losing at something as stupid as pool wasn’t that big of a deal but he got a little crazy, like he’d dropped something nasty into his Diet Coke. Then it got worse. When Steffy broke down and pretend-lost so they could get the hell out of there, he jerked her around so sharply that he hurt her arm.

‘Don’t pull that shit on me,’ he yelled. ‘Do this fair and square and I promise, we’re done in one game.’ Of course they weren’t. The more they played, the more bent Carter became, turning the game into pool hell. He made them play until Steffy felt tears running, and Carter was furious and out of control. Thank God the fury ended it, but not like you’d think. Steffy was winning for, like, the hundredth time and Carter freaked. He ripped the crap out of the pink felt top of Mr Till’s pool table trying to kill her last ball.

‘Oh, shit,’ Steffy said. ‘Let’s go!’

‘We can’t have that!’ Carter shouted, loud enough to wake up the neighbors even though the Rolos were down. He kept stabbing the felt with his pool cue as if he hadn’t already done enough, gouging like he could make the table bleed, yowling, ‘We can’t have that!’

It was awful. He was out of control and nothing Steffy said or did could move him away from the table or get him outside, where it was safe.

By the end she was praying to him, ‘Please. We have to go!’

He showed big square robot teeth in a yellow robot grin. ‘Not yet.’

With security off, Carter got into the Tills’ storage no problem by punching a panel to open a secret door. He dragged in a pile of old newspapers and crumpled them on the pool table, grinning. ‘Smart, right?’

He was trying to make it look like it was not a kid with a pool cue who wrecked Mr Till’s special watermelon felt, it was death by accidental fire. Steffy was not about to help him. She stood back while he kicked the slats out of a chair; there was no stopping Carter now. She couldn’t stop him from sticking them underneath the newspaper either, when any asshole knew you piled the kindling on top. At the end she ran outside because she couldn’t bear to see him light the match.

It’s OK, she told herself, shivering in the dark, and on quiet Coral Shores she could almost believe it. She had to! It’s only a little fire.

By the time Carter came back to the car, she was telling herself that he hadn’t just done that. This was her boyfriend, after all. He might get mad and do stupid things but nobody starts a fire in an empty house. In fact she was sure of it, because he got in the car grinning like nothing had happened, and they both started to laugh. A song they liked came on the radio and Carter was singing which made Steffy feel better, so she sang too.

They ended up on Bayfront Drive after all. He put the top down so if kids saw them together, they’d be impressed. At the curve nearest the bridge, they parked. It was sweet, very sweet, sitting under the palm trees with Carter’s lips going all those nice places. It was sweet and sexy and sad, clinging in the dark. Steffy thought they were just making out, but she knows now that while Carter was doing all those nice things to her, his mind was not on it. It was somewhere else.

God she was scared when the sirens started to howl.

Carter quit doing what he was doing and faced forward.

They watched the sky light up over Coral Shores.

They quit talking, too. It was too weird out; Steffy was too scared. Even Carter was scared; she felt him jittering, pressed close with one leg over the stick shift and Steffy pulled so tight that the ridge on the bucket seat hurt her ass.

Heavy trucks rumbled past. There were so many that the street shook.

When it was all done they just sat. Finally when the glow died and the sky was empty over Palm Shores, a long time after the last city truck rolled past on its way back to town, he grunted and started the car.

Then he said, ‘You know I love you.’

‘I’m so glad.’

The next thing Steffy knew the two of them were way the hell out here on Pierce Point, walking around on crushed shells and dead mangrove leaves in the sand spit at the end, picking up driftwood and bits of shell that might turn out to be pretty or useful which was hard to tell, because it was too dark. Sheltered by the mangroves they wandered, talking only about stuff they found in the sand, hanging out in that nice, nowhere place as if nothing strange had come down, wandering until it got light. When the first trawler rounded the point on its way to the Gulf, Carter bundled her back into the car.

They’ve been riding around ever since.

This is sad, Steffy thinks, looking at the boy she’s loved for so long. Now she’s not so sure. Wait. Didn’t she just get everything she ever wanted? Carter Bellinger all to herself, and for a whole, entire night? Here they were in his car. With the top pulled up over them like covers, they could be lying close in bed, and didn’t he just tell her again that he’s in love with her, which she’s been waiting to hear since fifth grade?

She and Carter are close now, closer than she’s ever been to anyone. They just went through so much. She ought to feel happy, but she doesn’t. She wants to feel excited and loving and totally bonded, like they are the same person under the skin, but she can’t.

She just feels bad. An entire night together and she doesn’t have enough from him, or he doesn’t have enough from her.

Steffy’s not sure what this means, only that where she ought to be feeling all the right things, all she has is a terrible, terrible sense of loss.

‘Oh,’ she murmurs accidentally. This is just so sad.

God forgive her, Carter takes it wrong.

‘Oh Steffy,’ he barks, so abruptly that it startles her. ‘Let’s drive to Valdosta and get married!’

This makes her feel so guilty that she can’t stand to look at him. She does not say the obvious. She doesn’t even say, why should we, we haven’t even had sex? What she does say, and it takes her a while to think of it, is, ‘I can’t, Carter. I’m babysitting Grammy Henderson today. I have to go home.’

36

Nenna

I woke up feeling awful. If I slept at all. I mean, by the time I fell down on the bed it was light outside.

How can you grow up along with all your friends, smart women who talk about everything all the time and still end up knowing the tune, but not all the words to your life? I tried to tell Dan how it happened, I mean, I opened up my soul but my nice new friend ran out of the house at dawn like his hair was on fire and it breaks my heart.

On top of Davis, it was just too much. At least that’s done. Kicking him out was like lopping off a foot to stop necrotizing fasciitis or gangrene; you have to amputate to save your life. You’re not dead but you hurt so much that you roll around on the bed, too messed up to sleep.

Oh, I know where he is. Davis, I mean. He’s out at the Pierce Point Marriott where every other man in God’s creation is having more sex than Davis ever had with Gale. Instead of screwing, he’s on the phone with that quasi-intellectual skank, do you know what he said to me? He said, ‘She may not have her doctorate but she’s the most intelligent woman I know,’ but he means she will go down on him in a broom closet if she has to, anything to get what she wants and what she wants is my husband.

Well she can have him, credit card debt and all, thank God Chape Bellinger’s office made me separate our finances before this thing blew up in my face. God, I’m depressed. It’s lonely in here without Davis, the rat, and Steffy’s off at my friend Cathy’s house for a sleepover with Jen, I’m one woman alone in here with no one to talk to, but at least Steffy has a best friend.

No Davis coughing or thumping around downstairs; it’s so quiet that I can’t sleep, I’m too tired to do anything, but it was almost time to start getting ready for church, so I shuffled downstairs and made coffee – instant, since it’s just me. I was half minded to call Cathy and ask her to wake my daughter, say I need her to . . . something. Too early. Instant coffee and.

And nothing.

Morning paper, for all the good that does me, nothing I really need to know, like what in God’s name made Davis bump fronts with his own first cousin. It’s practically incest. Or what’s going to happen to me.

‘Mom. Mom?’

‘Steffy!’ Rescue! Thank heaven you’ve come.

But she was running in like I just saved her from sudden death and before I could say, ‘Why are you home so early,’ or, ‘Did Cathy drive you,’ or, ‘Where’s your stuff,’ she ran smack into me with this ginormous hug. ‘I’m home!’

‘Sweetie, you’re early!’

Her smile was so wide that I should have started with the questions, but she headed me off with such a nice surprise. ‘It’s Sunday, right?’

‘I guess so.’

‘Duh, Mom. Church.’

‘Church!’

‘No way are you going to church alone.’

And my heart went out to her; there are things about your nearest and dearest that you know, and things you don’t want to know, and what’s important to me right now is making it through. That’s the only thing any of us really needs – somebody to help us make it through; I was so excited! ‘Aren’t you sweet! I’ll make blueberry muffins.’

‘If you want, I’ll wear the pink dress.’

‘You hate that dress.’

She looked at me, all, Oh, Mom. ‘It’s church.’

‘I thought you hated church!’

‘You’re not going in there all alone.’ She gave me the sweetest smile. ‘Since Dad . . .’

‘Say no more.’ You understand! And didn’t I hug her then, and didn’t I think we might make it without him after all. ‘Don’t you worry about Dad. And don’t you worry about me. We’ll both be fine.’

Now Steffy’s sitting at the kitchen table with her head bent in the morning sunshine, as if we’re already in church. She has the funnies open in front of her but she isn’t reading, she’s just sitting like a little sponge, soaking up the room, and me? The kitchen smells so good with my muffins baking, the sunlight looks so pretty on my daughter’s hair that I don’t feel half as bad as I thought. It’ll be nice living here, just the two of us. We can be ourselves. Now that I know prickly, resentful Steffy’s on my side, I can handle this. I can do anything, now that I know.

I turn the oven up a notch so the muffins will be ready sooner and I can slather them with butter and honey and serve them to my wonderful, loyal only daughter and best girlfriend before the mood evaporates and we have to go out and face the rest of my life.

37

Walker Pike

‘What are you doing here?’

Blinking, Walker jerks to attention so smartly that his head bumps the glass. Is he drooling? God. A minute ago it was dark and he was asleep, and now he’s in his Beemer on the main drag of Fort Jude in broad daylight, across from the Flordana Hotel. Even though he’s parked in the shade, the heat’s piling up in the vintage car. Downtown Fort Jude on a Sunday is deader than a beached manatee, but his brother Wade is at the window on the passenger’s side, making a comic fish-in-a-fish-tank mouth on the glass. Walker rolls it down so they can talk. ‘What do you want?’

‘I said, what are you doing here?’

‘Oh. This.’ Walker comes back to himself in stages. ‘Waiting for a guy.’

‘On Central Avenue?’ This gives Wade such comprehension problems that he is blinking too.

‘Pretty much.’

‘On Sunday morning?’

‘Is that a problem for you?’

‘Dude, look at you!’ Wade is all dressed up today: white shirt with white-on-white striped tie, white handkerchief tucked into the breast pocket of his light-weight French blue suit. ‘Are you sleeping in your car?’

‘No.’ Countering his kid brother’s suspicion with suspicion, Walker squints. ‘What are you? Going to a funeral?’

‘It’s Sunday,’ Wade tells him. ‘I’m taking Jessie to church.’

‘Jessie.’ In high school Walker and Jessie had a history, but he’s not the only one of her men, and that’s not all he was to her. There’s something bigger between them. He trusts her. She trusts him. They’ll always be friends. Nice woman. He’s glad she’s happy now. ‘Nice.’

‘In case you haven’t noticed, I think we’re an item.’

‘So, cool!’

‘And in case you haven’t noticed, you’re parked in front of her hotel.’

‘I am?’ Walker hesitates just long enough to make it look as though this is a surprise. ‘I am.’ Then, ‘Church,’ he says thoughtfully.

Grinning, Wade touches the silver cross locked to the buttonhole in his lapel. ‘I’m getting elected head of the vestry today.’

He doesn’t envy Wade, but in a way he envies Wade. ‘Pop would be proud.’

For a second there, his staid younger brother shows a gleam of the old Wade sparkle. ‘Pop would be astounded.’

Where he hasn’t smiled in days, Walker breaks wide open in a grin. Put it to the lazy morning, the sunshine, the fact that soft as he is, tubby and out of shape, his baby brother cleans up real nice. And unlike his older brother, Wade Pike is happy now. ‘OK then, enjoy.’ Walker starts the motor.

‘I thought you were waiting for a guy.’

‘I am. But he said if he didn’t show up by ten, I should look for him in front of the Fort Jude Club.’

Wade says, ‘We don’t open until noon.’

‘We?’

His brother grins that insider’s grin. ‘I’m the next Commodore.’

‘Well, look at you.’ Walker takes off the hand brake and lets the car roll an inch or two, to let Wade know that talking or not, he has to go. ‘Better step back, you don’t want to crud up your suit.’

‘Noon sharp. For the champagne brunch.’ Even though the car’s moving, Wade sticks his head in the window to add, ‘When we all get out of church.’

‘Bye, Wade.’ Walker pulls away gradually, so his brother has time to jump aside. When he comes around the block again he sees Wade handing Jessie into that shiny Explorer he likes so much, What is it with these people and big cars. Jessie has the pocketbook with matching shoes today, Manolos, he thinks, take that, motherfuckers. He sees that for Morning Prayer at the Fort Jude Episcopal Cathedral, his childhood friend from Pierce Point is elegant and subdued in silk. He also sees that Jessie’s body is sexy as ever and every man in that church will know it, no matter how carefully she pins up the front of her staid little dove grey wraparound dress, but nothing will come of it. They are, after all, in church.

He is struck by the way ritual keeps these people in place. Dates marked on every monthly calendar. Everything by the book.

Watching the Explorer go, Walker marvels at how sweet this is.

He loves this town in spite of itself because in Fort Jude at least, for some people, Sunday mornings are boring and predictable because the core society works hard to keep everything in place. They set store by ritual. The inevitability of certain things. People here rely on the power of shared history, ceremony and the continuity of the seasons to reinforce and support them, beginning with Buccaneers and Gators games in the fall and the Chamber of Commerce Harvest Festival on through the Christmas debutante ball and January Superbowl parties, relying on the predictability of meetings and fundraisers, cocktail parties and dances to keep them in place until baseball season starts for the Devil Rays and members gather for the big Easter egg roll at the Fort Jude Club, the first big event of the spring. In a subtropical city with no autumn, no dreary winters to mark the seasons, Wade’s friends use these events to signify the time of year as surely as church bells remind them that it’s Sunday again.

The Pikes’ position in this tight society was always marginal, predetermined by birth and signified by their location, clinging like sandspurs to the sandy tip of Pierce Point. His parents were peripheral personnel that the inner circle of Fort Jude might recognize on sight, but wouldn’t know, because in this town there are people you know, and people you don’t need to know. Walker saw it in the way they looked at him when he got off that school bus at Northshore, and if Wade wants to change that? Fine.

When Wade Pike goes out now, they all know him. He’s one of the invited. The society tells him who he is, even as each occasion tells him what to do. The Fort Jude his brother fits into so smoothly is a complex living organism, a self-contained, self-sufficient unit, but it’s nothing Walker wanted, then or now.

It took Wade years to slip into the stream where he flows along with the others, serene and comfortable, perfectly safe. No matter what hopes or doubts or what burden of dread or private grief keeps pace with them, on Sunday mornings these people get up and dress nicely and go to church, where they can sit or kneel under colored light filtering in through stained glass windows, thinking whatever they’re usually too busy to think.

It makes life so simple, Walker reflects – lovely, in fact. Too bad I’m not that person.

He knows what he is.

Sometimes Walker wonders if the dead stay around, watching even though you don’t know it. He used to wake up screaming, with the old woman roaring around inside his head. Nightmare, he told himself. Vicious, revolting. Done, but now that Lucy’s dead, he has to wonder if these things are ever really done.

He wonders if Lucy’s spirit is out there, if it ever comes near enough to know how he feels, whether she knows all the things he wishes he’d said when he left her run on a loop, filling his head. Whether she understands now why he had to keep his secret, or how hard it was to keep from running back to hug her, so she’d know.

How do you explain to the woman you love that fate or physics or bad chemistry or a great psychic accident transformed you into a toxic avenger, a ticking bomb?

When he fell in love with Lucy Carteret it was forever, but look at the sorrow that brought down. When he left this town he thought it was forever, but even when you are unarmed but dangerous, you never know which things are forever or how much you can lose in a flash. Far as it was from Florida, Cambridge wasn’t far enough; he ran into Chaplin in Harvard Square in his troubled third year at MIT.

By then Walker was living two lives, ambitious and conflicted and in love.

—Bob Chaplin, imagine. Small world.

—Why, Walker, what are you doing in Harvard Square?

Chaplin was friendly; Chaplin had no idea what Walker Pike was hiding, his sweet life with Lucy in that wonderful, tiny room. Swift and intuitive – interested, Chaplin never guessed. They should have talked but Walker was with Lucy, which was intensely private, and they were pledged to keep it that way. He was busy reinventing himself, bent on protecting her, so he muttered politely and backed away from Chaplin and his old life in Fort Jude as if from the far side of a chasm he’d crossed safely.

Protective and cautious Walker, months before it all blew up.

He had no idea what was coming; who would? Nobody in his right mind could divine or even imagine such a thing. Then his life went up in flames and, sobbing, he left Lucy behind – no farewell, no warning, no explanation. A thing like that. How could he explain? He loved her so he left her in the middle of the night.

Love, he thinks, or prays, now that there’s a chance that Lucy’s spirit can hear him, I hope you can forgive me now that you know, but nothing happens, really, except raindrops on his windshield when the hotel sprinkler starts up.

A man like Walker has resources. A man like Walker knows how to disappear in the same big city without running away. The year he got his doctorate in computer science from UMass, Boston, not even Wade came to see them put on the hood and shake his hand. Wade didn’t know. With his life with Lucy destroyed, Walker did what he had to, losing himself in the stream of thousands driving to high tech jobs in the ring of glossy megaliths lining Route 128. Blending in. He reinvented himself as safe, boring, reliable, and up to a point, it worked.

Too bad things went wrong whenever he tried to start over with someone new.

Which he did once too often, because he was alone and grieving and afraid. He left Lucy to save her but he could not stop looking for her in other women’s beds. When they disappointed him: not-Lucy, the anger grew. The last thing he can allow back into his life is anger, so that ended that.

Picture Walker Pike: backing out of life.

He can’t get close to anyone. Not the way he is. For Walker, human contact beyond the simplest transaction is dangerous.

What he does for a living he can do anywhere, so at forty he doubled back on Pierce Point. Kicking off his shoes to walk in the sand where he dug as a kid, Walker considered. It was home. Lucy would never go back to Fort Jude; at the time it felt right. The sand here is, after all, what he came out of. He fit. Using profits from one of his software patents, he bought Pop’s garage back from the bank. He tore down the building and commanded a house where he might not be happy, but he could be content. Contractors built to his design. Brass fittings. Teak floors, everything perfect.

When things are good in his heart, which they aren’t right now, he can sit on his deck and watch sailboats and trawlers and fishermen go past on their way out into the Gulf. He loves the light on the water and the restless, panoramic skies; he loves feeling the people he grew up with living with their children in the growing city at his back, souls joined and familiar as the ganglia in his right hand.

Walker loves this place. He loves it even though unlike Wade he hates the society. They’ve always been different people. Wade’s a sweet, ordinary, even-tempered guy, while he . . .

Oh God, Walker thinks because at bottom what he is, is so terribly wrong. This is so awful. He never should have come home to this town!

Just then a shadow moves in the hotel courtyard. He snaps to attention. It’s the kid.

38

Bobby

Over at the Chaplin house in Pine Vista, Bobby’s on the phone with Nenna McCall, a fact that both delights and frightens him, the latter because of what prompted this call. Talking in the shotgun hallway, he can hear his sister rushing around overhead. Al is off somewhere. It doesn’t matter that they never know where.

Instead of getting to the point Nenna says, ‘I can’t talk long, just while Steffy’s in the shower.’

‘You called to tell me.’ He waits for her to fill in the blank.

‘I did. Maybe I should stop by after church.’ Her voice lifts in surprise. ‘Do you believe we’re going to church?’

‘In this town most people do,’ Bobby says sadly. He used to have a place in this tight little community of the like-minded, good people all. He left for Harvard belonging, but in the years since then he’s gone too far in this life of false steps and unexpected complications to be comfortable with them.

‘They’re inducting the new canon today with coffee and mimosas afterward,’ Nenna says. She called with an agenda, but she’s eminently distractable. ‘And sticky buns in honor of Wade. If you happen to drop by.’

Hope surfaces. He doesn’t always have to be this way. ‘I’ll try.’

‘Buffet at the club afterward?’

Then reason kicks in. ‘I wish. I promised to take Margaret to Shell Art for supplies.’ He also promised his sister brunch at the Pelican afterward, although since the misery and confusion of that stupid, botched high school party, he’s never been comfortable at the beach. The memory, he can handle. It took him years to process, but he can. It’s the flashbacks that bother him. He never knows when they will hit. ‘So probably you should tell me now.’

She can’t seem to begin. ‘Just so you know.’

‘Please. I have to go.’ Margaret will be coming downstairs dressed for the Pelican in another minute, nervously gnawing the edge of her purse. His sister feels safe there because the family went on special occasions when they were small. As Margaret clatters out of the upstairs bathroom he hurries Nenna along. ‘About the Carteret kid . . .’

‘Believe me, he’s not a kid.’

‘Neither are we,’ he says mildly when he wants to bark at her.

Nenna sighs. ‘Not any more.’

‘Could you just say what you called to say?’

‘OK. Here’s the thing. I . . .’ Another false start.

‘What!’

‘Look,’ she says finally, ‘it was an accident. I had him here for no reason, and I couldn’t just send him home, so I . . .’

From upstairs comes the sound of Margaret psyching herself up for the excursion, nervously trotting back and forth from mirror to mirror while his anxieties keep pace with her. He snaps, ‘You what?’

‘I didn’t mean to, but I told him what happened that night.’ Nenna sighs.

‘That night!’

‘You know, when Lucy was . . .’ She breaks off. ‘Was whatever she was that night.’

The sound Bobby makes comes from somewhere deeper than a groan. ‘I didn’t know you knew.’

‘When whatever happened – happened.’ Waiting for him to supply the details, she lets it hang. ‘I tried to tell him but I don’t really know.’

Then, frustrated by the long silence, Nenna cries, ‘I don’t know anything! I’m sorry, Bobby, but she was his mother. I’m just so sorry she’s dead, and besides, I got him all the way out to my house last night for no real reason, poor guy, I felt so guilty. I couldn’t send him off empty-handed. I . . . I had to give him something.’

‘I see.’

‘Maybe I was just tired.’

During the pause that follows, he hears Margaret circling like a 747 in a holding pattern. ‘Nenna . . .’

‘Look, I know it was a mistake but I ended up saying a lot of things that we don’t talk about to somebody who doesn’t know us, and that’s really bad. About that Saturday night, and Lucy coming down on the beach so late, after you’d given up on her and gotten . . .’

‘Don’t.’

‘. . . so drunk. I just thought you should know. In case he comes your way? To ask? The thing is, he . . .’ In a heartbeat, her tone veers from dark to festive. ‘Oh, Steffy, look at you! Bobby, Steffy’s here, I have to go.’

‘Thanks for the heads up.’

‘Just so you know.’

‘Just so I know.’

Nenna covers the mouthpiece while she and the girl confer. Then she says in that bright, artificial, Fort Jude way, ‘Right then. Take care, Bobby. Lovely to talk.’

‘Wait. I need to know what you told him.’ What he really needs to know is how much Nenna knows.

But his friend is caught up in her daughter’s rhythms now. Like a girl she says, ‘Later, OK?’ Giggling, she delivers a punchline dug up from the deep past when they were so young that it was still funny, ‘See you in church.’

39

Dan

Confused by the scene he played with Mrs McCall after the fire, too wired to sleep, Dan lurched into the lobby of the Flordana. He ran his credit card in the crap business center and starred their houses on the grainy printout of the Internet map.

Done. Sleep.

When he emerges, the town is preternaturally quiet. Jazzed on caffeine and carbs from the machines, with no Fort Judeans around badgering him with guilty secrets, he comes out into the sunlight feeling, well, what passes for happy in this weird time.

He has a plan. This one looks rock-solid: grill the peripheral witnesses, one, two, three, building questions on answers, fact-checking as he goes. Nail them at home before he grills the prime suspect, who, although the northerner hunting his father can’t know it, is still snoring on stinking satin sheets in a house suffering a steep descent from shiny high tech into deep slobbery.

It’s a curse, having an orderly mind, but how is he supposed to know? OK, he’ll start with Carter Bellinger’s dad, in hopes. It was, after all, his Jeep. But there’s more. There is always more. He knows from what the McCall woman said that his mother suffered. He still doesn’t know exactly how, or why. First he will identify the bastard and confront him. Then he will . . . OK. This is the thing. Does he not look more like Bellinger in that Polaroid than Kalen, with his leering, gorilla grin? Squint and he can almost see himself in Bellinger’s face. Nose to nose with George Chapin Bellinger, LLD, he’ll can him: face, body mass, stance. Soul, which is what rules Chaplin out. If there’s anything in the configuration; if, counter to expectations, Bellinger’s the guy, he can forget the other two – forget Kalen! – and put his heart to rest.

Otherwise, it’s on to Coleman and Von Harten, solid Fort Jude business types with houses on the same block in Coral Shores, because he needs to triangulate. If it really is Kalen, then he’ll damn well go in there armed with facts. Sick of hints, slippery truths and polite evasions and sick to death of Fort Jude, Florida, Dan’s given up on that heartwarming ‘Father!’ ‘Son!’ moment. He won’t even hit the guy. He just needs to know, so he can walk away. He thinks: Closure. Damn that orderly mind.

Leaving the Flordana, he’s too preoccupied to notice the car keeping pace as he heads down Central Avenue and around the corner to the hotel garage. He’s trying out lines.

‘You don’t know me, but . . .’

‘I think we have something in common.’

‘You remember Lucy, right? Lucy Carteret?

‘Um. Hello.’

Lame, but better than, ‘Are you him?’

Fuck, Bellinger’s house is sealed up tighter than an entomologist’s catching jar. It’s a vintage Spanish stucco with a contemporary add-on doubling its size. They keep the king-sized yard beautifully groomed, like women of a certain age. The ancient Royal palms in front look like fat cigars with Sideshow Bob fright wigs bobbing at the tops. The long porch overlooks the water between here and Coral Shores.

Trying on speeches, Dan rings. Well, hi. Nobody comes. He bangs with his fists. He shouts. Nothing.

He circles the house on thick, springy Bermuda grass, dodging hibiscus and gardenias and crunching through Mrs Bellinger’s bougainvillea hedge to get a closer look. Boat trailer’s here, convertible with FSU decal and wife’s coupe gleam in the driveway, no Escalade. The Bellingers are gone.

All right then. Coleman’s. Nobody answers at Coleman’s house, even when he quits knocking and yells. They were just here, he can smell coffee. Now they’re not. The windows stand open behind their ironwork grills. The Von Harten house around the corner is deserted too. His orderly plan disassembles, with parts rolling away in all directions.

Dan tries a dozen other houses, thinking the neighbors will know when his marks will be back, but the Sunday morning streets in Coral Shores are like the decks of a ghost ship. Where is everybody? Why aren’t they firing up the BBQ or sitting over late morning coffee with the Sunday Star? Only the sound of a baby crying tells him that he’s not in some crap movie where the hero wakes up to discover that everybody else on the planet has been wiped out by a neutron bomb.

He calls, ‘Anybody home?’

He gets back the sound of nothing.

‘Where is everybody?’ Dazzled by sunlight bouncing off the white sand that borders the road, the white cement underfoot and bleached pastel houses with flat, white roofs, he whirls under a bleached sky. All his opening lines evaporate, replaced by a crap line from the end-of-the-world movie playing inside his head. ‘Where is everybody anyway?’

Frustration drives him back to his car and on, cross-hatching the deserted city. In the absence of a plan, he circles new and old neighborhoods, searching because for once contingencies elude him, thinking, thinking, until this rises up in front of him like Munch’s screamer and stops him dead:

It’s in the blood.

He is at the Archambault house.

Why here? Dan wonders. Why today? He is also thinking, Why me? but he knows. Shivering, he enters the hundred-degree temperature and makes his way up the stairs and into her bedroom, thinking, What does she want from me, human sacrifice?

He shouts, ‘What do you want from me!’

Dan Carteret, apparently related by blood to the woman who died in this room, folds up on the floor like a contemplative, waiting for the bitch to answer.

It’s time to come to terms with who he is.

Or what he is.

Whether it’s really in the blood. The foot, the chair. Twenty-some years later, and at the visual memory of that newspaper, he still shudders. Everything changed the day he opened Lucy’s jewel box. In a flash she snatched it away: that’s that. As though she could throw away the past and protect him. As if he could forget what he saw. The photo burned into the soft tissue behind his eyes. It brought him here.

Scorched, he gasps.

Behind the curtain of the known, something stirs, signaling the presence of the unknown fury, unless it’s a terrible power.

Which? This is the mystery that keeps Dan Carteret fixed in lotus position in the house he vowed never to come back to. Sitting in Mrs Archambault’s abandoned bedroom that first day in Fort Jude, he comprehended her. Old Lorna occupied him in a way he can’t specify. Rage flickered in his belly and he cried out, unless she did.

Who’s there?

Was the old woman really inhabiting him, squalling and raging inside his head? Did she really scream at him yesterday, when he fled the house? God knows he felt the heat – whether fever dream or hallucination, he can’t say. He’s been running ahead of it ever since. He and the fury that flamed out in this room hang from the same tree. Like armed thugs in a home invasion, Lorna broke into his head and he thinks, asks, wants to know and is afraid to know: Is it something I did?

Fixed in lotus position in the spot where the Barcalounger stood, Dan closes his eyes and summons her. He expects some intimation – insight, shared memory, altered consciousness, something – but nothing happens and nothing comes. Flies buzz. Sweat runs down. Whatever vibe he got in this overheated room is gone. Instead his mind scrambles like a cockroach circling the drain in a summer flood. What did he think: she would come down on a fluffy cloud and explain everything? Resolutely, he occupies the splintered floor like a player in Sartre’s No Exit, unless it’s the schlub in that movie Groundhog Day. Shit, he thinks because he could sit here forever and still not know. Just, shit. What do you mean, it’s in the blood?

In the end he begs, but he is nothing more than Dan Carteret, alone in an empty room. Extreme, sitting on the splintered floor in the heat, but he has been driven to extremes. One thing. Just tell me one thing. Did someone strike a match or is it in the blood. Stretched to the limit by waiting, he explodes.

‘Damn you, answer me!’

Outside a car door slams and whatever he thought was coming . . . evaporates. A girl shouts, ‘I said, I’ll get a ride home from here.’

He hears the tiresome, reasonable sound of a mother intent on making her point, ‘. . . budda-budda-mumble, you . . .’

‘I told you, Carter’s driving me!’

The woman goes on with her ‘but, but, budda-budda’ in that sweet, sweet voice. It’s distracting, but at this point Dan could use a little distraction. He came into this house alone. He got down in all humility and he laid himself wide open but nothing came in. Face it. Nothing will.

‘Three on the dot, I promise. If I have to, I’ll call a cab!’

The girl’s voice rises in a stagy sing-song. ‘Bye-eeee . . .’

Pathetically grateful, he unlocks his joints and scrambles to his feet.

Steffy McCall to the rescue. She comes in the back, calling, ‘Carter? Carter honey. Dude!’

Shit, is that kid Carter in the house? Did he hear me screaming like a psycho? Dan goes into the hall, half expecting Carter to come thudding down the attic stairs all onka-bonka, but there’s nothing moving overhead and nobody around but the girl calling from the front hall, ‘Carter, is that you?’

Dan hangs over the banister. ‘It’s only me.’

Sighing, she starts upstairs. Her hair is combed out today; she’s wearing pink lip gloss and a pink headband that matches her dress. She doesn’t exactly hide her disappointment. ‘Oh, OK.’

‘You’re all dressed up.’

‘Church. Then the club, like every other stupid Sunday. Is Carter here?’

‘I told you, no.’ She looks like a doll set up in real Steffy’s place. He eyes the matching bag and shoes. ‘Patent leather.’

She scowls. ‘Is that a problem for you?’

‘Looks nice.’

‘You’re sure you haven’t seen him.’

‘No, and I’ve been here since . . .’ He looks at his watch. ‘Wow. Since one.’

‘He would of bombed in here straight from church, he felt so awful. Like, because of the fight? So you didn’t see him? Carter? Carterrrr!’

‘I told you, nobody’s here but me. What fight?’

‘Are you sure you didn’t see him?’ Dan shakes his head but she goes on calling. She cranes, trying to see past him. ‘Carter? Carter, it’s me. He could be hiding. Maybe he sneaked in.’

‘Nobody gets past me.’

She tilts her head, studying Dan like an entomologist coming to conclusions about a bug. ‘I don’t know, you look kind of . . . Are you sure?’

Dan knows he lost time sitting there in the ruined bedroom, but he would never lose control. ‘No,’ he says firmly. ‘No way.’

‘He could be hiding.’

Now he’s getting pissed. He says meanly, ‘Because he set that fire last night.’

Astonished, she swivels: Is it that obvious?

Dan shrugs: It is.

And they’re friends again. ‘OK,’ she says. ‘His dad found out it was Carter and he went ballistic at church. He went off on Carter just as Mom and me were coming out, like, right in front of everybody who’s anybody in Fort Jude? He said a whole bunch of shitty, shitty things to Carter and Carter punched him in the chest. Mr Bellinger went ooof and slugged Carter in the belly, like, wham. Shit! They couldn’t stop.’ She isn’t exactly crying, but she’s close. ‘Mr Pike had to help Mrs Bellinger pull them apart, and they aren’t even friends!’

‘Church,’ he says thoughtfully.

‘Everybody saw. Now they’re all down at the club, talking about it over sticky buns, you should hear it, you wouldn’t believe what they’re like. I hate them all. I hate this town!’

Musing, he shakes his head. ‘They were all in church.’

‘Where else? They always are, and then they come out and say the shittiest things! It was awful, like, right up there the main archway? It was like he was reviling him in the middle of Sunshine Stadium and you could watch Carter crying on the giant screens. Everybody in Fort Jude saw Mr Bellinger beat the crap out of Carter and they heard what he called him. No wonder Carter bailed. Shit,’ she says, listening at the bottom of the attic stairs, ‘he’s not up there either.’

‘I told you . . .’

‘Right.’ Her face fragments like a bad transmission and snaps back into focus: resilient kid. Big, getting-down-to-business sigh. ‘Guess I’ll go get Grammy over with.’

‘Do what?’

‘At the old folks’ hatch. It’s my Sunday, we take turns.’ She is busy brushing schmutz off her pink dress. ‘It’s not so bad, except for the smell. Lysol or some shit, like, they even disinfect the food. So. Was my mother hitting on you?’

Now it is his turn to be surprised. He gets to the answer in stages. ‘Not really. I’m sorry. Yeah, pretty much. What are you doing?’

‘Calling a cab.’

‘Don’t bother. I’ll take you.’

‘It’s out in west hell.’

Church, he thinks. Then the club. They won’t be home for hours. ‘Come on,’ he says. Whatever he thought he was doing here is over now. ‘I’ve got nothing but time.’

‘Awesome!’ The crafty look she gives him is a masterpiece. ‘Would you mind coming in with me? Grammy doesn’t talk much, and it’s a lot and a lot easier with two.’

40

Walker

It’s not unpleasant, sitting here in the car outside Golden Acres, although after a day spent stalking, he’s sick of being in the car. Grief has taught him patience; he’ll live. He always does.

Meanwhile, it’s pretty out here on the bay, at a point that’s a little too close to the end of the world, given the function of this place. Low-lying Spanish stucco apartments and a handful of cottages sit in the landscape like Herman Chaplin’s dream community compressed by the exigencies. Some people say he started this miniature village as a demo model, some say the grand old entrepreneur was planning an amusement park, but the compound went up so long ago that nobody is sure. When the Methodists bought the property from Herman’s estate, several problems were solved. Fort Jude society had a place to stash its frail and unpredictable parents when they got too old or too crazy to take care of themselves. They were installed at Golden Acres well before the likes of Wallace Pike came to town with his pregnant wife and first-born son – not crazy yet, but there were intimations. Generations of oldsters had passed through by the time Anna Pike ran away from her husband and, with Pop the way he was, six-year-old Walker understood he was in charge of everything, including Wade.

Pop was good enough at what he did, running the garage and taking care of the bills, but daily life dumbfounded him. By the time Walker was old enough to worry, he thought that sooner or later, he’d have to make the money so Golden Acres could deal with Pop. When the old man set the shop on fire in Walker’s first year at MIT, he and Wade checked into it, even though old Wallace swore it was an accident. He was erratic, forgetful. You never knew.

Walker came down from Cambridge during term to scope the place, and this was after he’d vowed never to come back to Fort Jude. He and Wade went around with the girl from the front office; she was new. Golden Acres looked pleasant enough, with an activities director and a pianist in the dining room every Sunday. They even had a little pool. There were parties in the Health Center for every hundredth birthday, of which there seemed to be a lot. You could see they took good care of people, photos of hundredth birthday parties lined the halls. Fragile guests posed for the photographer in wheelchairs and on walkers, all dressed up and smiling bravely in their party hats. The aides and social workers Walker met were all nice enough, but when they met the director, everything changed. Odd that in an establishment depopulated by death on a regular basis, there were no vacancies. Walker was still in college but he was already earning, and Pop was slipping fast. Together he and Wade could cover it somehow, but the woman in charge took one look at them and said with the nicest smile, ‘Your father wouldn’t be comfortable here.’

It’s a cool afternoon for April and Walker has the windows down. He is parked in a spot the shade will protect until late afternoon. As Sunday is the world’s official visiting day no matter what the institution, he won’t be noticed in this crowd. Everybody in town seems to be out here, visiting somebody from the generations that went before – and there are several degrees of age from the look of it, from hale but vacant-looking grands who got struck sick or stupid too early in life on up to the wispy great-greats, skeletal old people with only a few white hairs left standing on their pink heads. Considering where he is right now and where he’s followed Dan Carteret so far today, and considering how close he’s come to being seen at every stop the kid has made, Walker finds this parade of residents extremely peaceful. Nice old couples just about his age come past, pushing old parties in wheelchairs or supporting elbows so their shaky friends and relations can totter along the walks with blissed-out smiles. The visitors all come out of the building headed for the choice benches overlooking the water, but nobody seems to mind when their charges cut out, homing in on the first available place to sit down.

Some visitors from the outside world have brought gift baskets and some go by carrying flowers. As the afternoon flows past, Walker watches as the young and healthy run out of conversation and begin picking at the contents of the baskets, proffering food they’ll end up eating themselves, nibbling out of sheer nervousness. Nobody wants to admit that fruit and candy are nothing to passengers on the long slide to the exit interview. They are beyond being interested in food. They’re beyond being interested in much of anything, and it is this that Walker finds so restful – the absence of striving. Ambition went to sleep in these old people before they lost it, or consciously relinquished control, turning over the pressure of responsibility to whoever checked them into this place.

Driven as he is, ambitious and highly competitive, Walker is happy to be surrounded by people who have just . . . let go. In a lot of ways, it’s a relief.

His . . . No. This Dan Carteret and that girl, Nenna Henderson’s daughter, have been inside the main building for a long, long time. Ten more minutes and he’ll be gnawing his wrists to keep from lapsing into a doze. Walker loves sleep, thinks about it, misses it and invites it, but he works so hard that he never has much time for it. Sleep is the one place in his life where it’s more or less safe.

Sleeping, he can let down his guard because whatever it is that drives him is quiescent, enclosed. Locked inside his skull. Then he can rest. Only then. The power or potential for destruction, whatever Walker Pike chooses to call the force that changed him forever, will lie dormant until he awakes. He can’t hurt anybody.

He’s in the zone when a tap on his windshield rouses him. It’s Jessie, still in that slinky dove gray silk she had on when he saw her going into church with Wade but the neckline’s looser, she undid a pin or took off a belt – something – he doesn’t know.

She comes around to the open window. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Visiting an old party.’

‘Who?’

‘Nobody you know.’

‘Then why are you alone?’

‘He can’t come out until they change his bag.’

But they’ve known each other for much too long. ‘I don’t think so,’ Jessie snaps, ‘it’s not like your dad’s in there.’

Your father wouldn’t be comfortable here. His teeth clamp. ‘You remember! Yeah, I wanted to firebomb this place.’

‘But you didn’t. You hired Florence Rivers to take care of him.’

‘Damn near broke us. There was a lot of stuff missing after he died.’

‘Cheap at the price.’

‘She cleaned us out.’ Walker says thoughtfully, ‘We were so broke we had to plant him out in the boonies. Or let the city plant him.’

‘The boneyard.’

‘Public, the city calls it. It was sad. We did what we could afford. He went into Poinsettia Gardens, out by the Interstate. Probably right next to yours.’

‘You’d be right on that,’ she says, grinning, ‘if I’d ever had a dad.’

‘You told everybody he died in Vietnam.’

‘Unless I told them he was lost at sea.’ They fall into the rhythm like the old, good friends that they are. ‘You have to tell people something, you know?’

Walker grins. It’s been a long time since he’s been this easy with anyone. ‘Unless you don’t.’

‘Like you, Mr tight-mouth. Wade says you’re making a bundle in stuff so techy that he can’t get a grip on it.’

God, did she really make him laugh? ‘It’s just computers. That’s giant electronic brains to you.’

‘Why aren’t you off floating around on a yacht?’

‘Can’t swim.’

‘Son of a bitch, I miss you!’

‘Me too.’ Don’t explain it. Never explain.

‘Why don’t you ever come around?’

‘I can’t,’ he says, and that’s that.

Her voice drops into a new place. ‘I wish you had.’

Walker sees his whole life passing before his eyes, and it is over. ‘Oh, Jessie,’ he says with real regret, ‘Wade says you guys are getting close.’

‘He’s a good man.’ She can’t hide the sigh. ‘Yeah, we are.’

He does not say what he is thinking. I wish it could be me. With Jessie, he is never angry. They go back so far that he knows what she will and won’t do, and there’s so much between them that the main ingredient is trust. Right now she is listening. She’s listening hard, but Walker is too much what he is to risk it.

He will not mess up another life. He loves her, just not the way he loved Lucy, and it makes him generous. ‘Go for it, Jess. Enjoy your life.’

She says for both of them, ‘I am.’

‘You’ve been through a lot.’

‘So have you.’

‘Wade will take good care of you.’

Walker tried to relinquish the possibility; she’s trying too, but she’s still out there, waiting for something he can’t give. It’s hard, watching her face come to terms with the future she’s trying to project. ‘After a while you just want somebody to be there when you get old.’

‘You deserve the good stuff.’

‘We all do.’ Her tone lifts. ‘Wade and I are looking at a wonderful house in Coral Shores.’

‘Coral Shores. Where everybody who is anybody . . .’

‘They’re nice people, Walk.’

‘I’m sure.’

‘And you won’t be a stranger, will you.’ Statement, done deal, as far as Jessie’s concerned. ‘Sunday dinners, after we move in?’

‘I don’t know.’ Walker wants to tell her he’d love that – he would, but he’s much too conflicted to guarantee anything. His temper is such that he can’t be sure what will come down in any given situation. At bottom, he’s always aware of the potential and it makes him afraid, not for his own safety but theirs. Because of what could happen to people he loves if something comes down and they are standing too close. ‘I don’t think so.’ But this is Jessie. Like a dedicated artisan, he makes a smile for her. ‘But I’ll try.’

Then her voice changes. ‘I don’t know if I ever thanked you for what you did.’

‘Please don’t.’ Brad Kalen. Fucking Brad fucking Kalen, with Jessie flattened in wet sand under the mangroves where the rich bastard dragged her one drunken night, bent on battery and humiliation. After the rape. Heedless and stripped right down to his hairy, brute arrogance, convinced they were alone. After he beat the crap out of Kalen, he should have turned him in. For all the good that would do. Old Orville’s money will get him out of anything – it always did. Then the part of Walker that he can not suppress pre-empts with: If I’d had the power then . . .

But Jessie’s saying, ‘It changed a lot of things for me.’ She adds sweetly, ‘How I valued myself.’

‘You don’t need to thank me, it was a given.’ He pulled Jessie out of the sand and took her home crying; at the front door she hugged him and they never spoke of it again. Fucking Brad Kalen. Walker’s belly tightens and his fists clench. Yeah, he had to lay waste and pillage on the way to Jessie’s rescue. Years before he knew what he was. Is.

‘That’s not what Brad thought,’ Jessie says without inflection. ‘He said since I was everybody’s, he should get the biggest piece.’

‘I should have killed him.’ It would have prevented a lot of things. Walker is too distressed to number them, but the worst one ended in the release of the terrible power that changed his life. He grips the steering wheel, anchoring himself. It takes him a moment to realize that Jessie is still talking.

‘It made a tremendous difference to me.’ Framed in the car window, she bends down to make clear how important this is. ‘Like, all the difference in the world, and I never really thanked you.’

But Walker can’t keep on talking about it this way; the ugly inside him is simmering. Shit, he thinks. And I hoped I was done with that. Reaching up, he touches her face to get her attention. ‘I knew,’ he tells her. ‘I love you Jessie, but you’d better go.’

‘It’s OK.’ They know each other so well that he doesn’t have to explain. She knows he’s upset. ‘Wade and I came out here to see our old kindergarten teacher, remember old Mrs Earlham from Pierce Point?’

He doesn’t, but he needs to release her while he can still contain himself. If he doesn’t he’ll start ranting, and that is the best-case scenario. ‘OK then,’ he says nicely, ‘I’ll let you go. Tell her I said hey.’

‘You aren’t here to visit an old party, are you?’

He shakes his head.

‘I know you’re following the kid.’

‘You what?’

‘Dan Carteret, Lucy’s son.’

‘Who says?’

‘Somebody on Coral Shores saw you. Everybody knows. What do you want with him?’

‘I’m just following, it’s no big deal.’

‘He’s a nice kid,’ she says. ‘Just, whatever you do, don’t hurt him.’

Walker cries, ‘I’m here to protect him!’

‘Dear one, here’s Wade. I have to go. Oh, Walker, take care!’

41

Dan

‘You never know what you’re gonna get. Sometimes she’s all talkatalka, and the rest, she just stares. You’re not leaving now.’ Steffy pushes Dan into the room and closes the door as far as the institutional doorstop permits, giving it a kick to make her point. She peers into the Geri-chair where her great-grandmother is tipped back, apparently to help blood make it all the way up there to her brain. In spite of the touch of lipstick put on by an aide, she looks transparent, like what’s left after an insect sheds its carapace.

‘Oh.’ Dan has never seen anybody this old. ‘Oh!’

‘GRAMMY, ARE YOU IN THERE?’

Where she had been staring at the TV in its ceiling mount, old Mrs Henderson turns to see who yelled. She lights up like a paper lantern.

Triumphant, Steffy hisses, ‘See? She knows me. That’s why somebody has to come.’

‘Can she hear us?’

‘Sort of.’

‘Hello, Mrs Henderson.’

Just as suddenly, she lapses. All the lights go off inside.

Sighing, Steffy studies the lunch tray with its plastic dishes and plastic-looking food. ‘GRAMMY, YOU HAVEN’T TOUCHED YOUR CUPCAKE. HAVE A BITE.’

Dan turns to go.

‘LOOK, GRAMMY, IT’S CHOCOLATE. Sugar usually perks her right up.’ Steffy will say anything to keep him here. ‘When she gets going it’s a riot. Plus, you’re looking for something or somebody, right? Give her a minute to perk up, OK? She knows some amazing shit.’

‘She doesn’t look very perky to me.’

Everything is in stasis here. Dan delivered Steffy as promised, and when she asked him to come up to the room it was clear that she needed it so he walked point, seeing her up the stairs and down terrible pastel halls lined with saccharine repros chosen to help people forget that they came here to die. He kept Steffy talking to cover the babble in the health care wing, which is where they are. They talked about her boyfriend Carter, but not really; they talked about why stain-proof flooring, why the wide bedroom doors; they talked about Nenna not at all. They jabbered, trying to blur the occasional outraged cry coming from rooms they passed, the spontaneous groan, but old voices knife into a sensitive nerve. Dan came inside Golden Acres because the girl needed it, but he can’t stay. He doesn’t have the time.

‘If she comes to, tell her I said hi.’

‘Give me a minute!’ Steffy’s fingers lock on his arm like teeth. She yanks him into the space between Mrs Henderson and the TV. She mutes the set. ‘That’s better, isn’t it, Gram? Dan,’ she says in her mother’s exact ceremonial voice, ‘this is Grammy Henderson.’

‘I don’t think she’s in there any more.’

‘Fuck she isn’t. Grammy!’ She ratchets up the volume. ‘Grammy, this is my friend Dan.’

‘Look, I really can’t . . .’

‘You have to! GRAMMY, THIS IS DAN.’

‘Hello, Grammy.’

‘Her name is Blanche.’

‘Hello, Blanche.’

Waiting, Dan is aware of life going on elsewhere – conversations hitting the same dead end in rooms all along the hall. Sudden, inadvertent cries. Half Fort Jude’s history is deposited here, stored inside of old people a lot like this one, who remember, but can’t explain. Did Steffy’s great-grandmother know the incendiary Lorna Archambault? God knows she’s old enough, but at the moment she is beyond speech. He can wait forever and never find out. He imagines every room in Golden Acres is like this one, dense with history, but history under lock and key.

In a city where everyone seems to know everything that goes on, these old parties have probably processed and stored all the information he needs. If age didn’t kill, they could tell him everything. Solve his life. Decades worth of answers are layered inside these old patients’ heads. Soon they will all be gone. Their random access memories are shot. Death will erase their hard drives and local funeral directors will deal with what’s left. He’s running out of time! Talk to me. What would he uncover if he could go from room to room, cracking secrets out of their shrinking heads?

Shit, Dan thinks. It’s just as well I didn’t come here for answers. Look at her!

Dressed in pink seersucker today, with knotted bones that used to be feet tucked into sheepskin booties that have never walked a step, Blanche Henderson stirs. There’s a button missing on the dress and someone has closed the neck with an oval brooch which, he notes uneasily, seems to contain human hair. Other people have the good grace to die off before they reach this age, but Grammy is still among them. Studying the husk of a woman who’s been around too long, Dan marvels. How did you get to be so old?

Sensing his impatience, Steffy says, ‘Grammy?’

The old woman’s body has given up on her but the spark won’t let go, no matter how much she wants it to fly up.

Grammy’s in there somewhere, fixed on something only she can see. Great age has one compensation. Time and space are nothing to her. Dan has no idea how long it will take Grammy to get back from wherever she is roaming; she could be anywhere, wandering around in search of the white light or spinning her wheels on memory lane or excavating truths that at the time she didn’t recognize as such.

Is Blanche aware that Steffy has brought an outsider into the close, obscenely intimate space where – soon, if she’s lucky – she will die? Does she have any idea that Dan is willing her to speak so he can escape? He gnaws his lip until blood comes.

‘Hang on and I’ll get some cupcake into her.’ Patiently, the girl holds a sticky cube to her great-grandmother’s lips. Steffy tickles Grammy’s cheek until the mouth pops open. She slips in the cake like mail into a letter slot. ‘There.’

Like a vet giving a dog a pill, she strokes Grammy’s throat. It takes a long time for her mouth to move. They wait a long time for her to swallow. Watching for signs of life, Dan thinks: Steffy’s right about the smell. Then he thinks: There isn’t enough Lysol in the world. Everything is desperately pretty in Grammy’s room. Pink eyelet curtains, matching dust ruffle, pink comforter and ruffled eyelet pillow shams that in no way obfuscate the fact that this is a hospital bed. Aqua walls. Above the bed hangs a framed repro of that pretty-pretty painting of a Southern belle at a piano; Dan thinks the dress comes in different colors according to which company supplies the repro, but he isn’t sure. Then the chair clanks into upright position and he jumps out of his seat.

‘Hello,’ the old lady says, blinking. ‘Hello?’

‘It’s me, Grammy. Stephanie. Nenna’s girl?’ She shoves him closer. ‘And this is Dan.’

‘How do you do,’ Dan says, looking into opaque eyes. The disturbing thing about Grammy Henderson is that she is pretty much bald. What little hair she has stands up bravely, a handful of white threads that one of the attendants has brushed to a shine and fluffed so it will look like more. She doesn’t exactly look at him. She just holds up the knot of bones that passes for a hand as though she’s used to having it kissed. Instead, he bends down and carefully – every segment of this lady ought to be stamped FRAGILE – he takes it. It’s like shaking a bunch of dried flowers.

Startled, she looks up, shouting, ‘Company! Stephanie, get my wig!’

Steffy whispers, ‘It’s been years since she wore the wig. This is a very big deal.’

‘What did you say your name was?’

‘Dan. Dan Carteret.’

‘Little Lucy’s boy!’ That flash. As suddenly, Blanche goes back inside.

How does she know? Did Nenna come running with the news? He snaps forward, hanging on the next word, but Grammy’s gone. Amazing how still a person can be, for so long.

Long becomes too long and Dan gives up on her. It’s late. He turns to Steffy, assuming they are done. ‘OK then. Where do you want me to drop you?’

‘Oh, I have to stay. Staff’s night off, I have to feed Grammy when her dinner comes.’ She turns with a steely glare, all teeth. ‘You’re hanging in with me, right?’

This is a moral dilemma that Dan will not have to face.

Grammy has fought her way to the surface. ‘Those poor babies!’ she pre-empts, rolling down a track that was laid more than thirty years ago. ‘I warned Lorna not to steal Sam Carteret’s baby away after Lily died, but she didn’t care. She went up to Charleston with lawyers and took Lucy away from him. I said, “Lorna, that baby is all he has left!” I said, “You’ll be sorry,” and she was. I said, “That girl will never forgive you,” and she never did.’

The next thing Blanche says is so bitter that it astounds him. ‘No wonder Hal Archambault divorced her. She was a mean, willful . . .’ Her mouth is working, but lady that she is, she can’t use that word. Instead she spits. ‘We used to be friends!’

Steffy dabs at the glob with a tissue and Grammy goes on. ‘The Carteret boy was sick with grief, but she was bent on it. I said, “Lorna, if you do this you will live to see history repeating,” but I swear, that woman marched on Charleston like Hitler, she hated all men. That’s why Lily sneaked off to Valdosta to marry Will, and Lucy . . .’

‘Lucy.’

Thoughts rush across the space behind Grammy’s eyes like cloud formations; she reaches out and snatches one. ‘Sam sent Lorna a post card. Your new granddaughter is named Lucy. P.S., it killed Lily. In case you cared.’

Lily was Lucy’s mother. Chapter. Verse. Verified. Thud. My great-grandmother. It’s . . . Blinking, he tries to shake it off. In the blood?

‘Lorna had a hard heart before Hal Archambault left her for that tramp, so no wonder, but the divorce turned it to stone. Poor Lucy! She was Lorna’s perfect dollbaby, all dressed up with nowhere to go. No boys allowed in that house, and as for men, men! She looked at men and she saw . . .’

‘Wait.’

‘Liars, fornicators and cheats. Lucy couldn’t go with any boy her grandmother didn’t approve, and nobody was good enough for Lorna Archambault. She had to sneak away from parties at the Fort Jude Club to see poor Hal! I said, “Give that girl little freedom or you’ll lose her,” but she was like the Gorgon, beating Lucy to death with snakes. No wonder it ended the way it did.’

His mouth forms: How?

With a tremendous effort, Grammy spits, ‘Her girls fell in love and she couldn’t keep them. We all know how that ended, with Lily dead and Lucy dead to her.’

Dan is aware that he is holding his breath.

‘She was awful to those boys,’ she says without naming them because at Grammy’s age people become interchangeable and time is all the same. ‘Both times.’

This rolls in like news in a foreign language. Beggared, he murmurs, ‘Ma’am?’

‘Lily eloped – so sad – and then she died and Lorna swooped down like the wolf upon the fold and took Lucy away from poor Sam, she was a spiteful, controlling old . . .’ Grammy’s mouth knots, twitching while she searches for the euphemism. Finally it pops out like a cherry pit. ‘Witch!’

Steffy murmurs, ‘Wuow, that’s the most I’ve heard out of her in weeks! Here, sweetie, just a little more cupcake, OK?’

But Grammy is rolling now, heading for the exit ramp. ‘It was spite, pure and simple,’ she says, just before she runs down. ‘Spite!’

Dan gives her a gentle push to keep the recital rolling, ‘You said, both times.’

‘She didn’t care how much in love they were. She saw Hal in every man. At least Lucy was forewarned.’ Grammy’s eyes crackle. ‘Thanks to me.’

‘You knew my mother?’

‘Lucy was too smart for her. Sweet girl!’ Abruptly, she seizes Dan’s hand and pulls him close. He can smell death coming out of her mouth. ‘You look like her.’

It hits like a mallet and his breath catches. ‘Yes Ma’am.’

‘Your mother fell in love but she kept it a secret. She had been warned.’

Everything in him rushes forward. ‘You warned her?’

‘God help me, I tried to warn them both!’ Grammy is tiring. She drops his hand.

‘I tried to tell them history repeats itself. It always does.’ She sighs. ‘When she got pregnant, she went where Lorna couldn’t hurt her.’

More, Grammy. More. ‘Who did?’

‘Oh, those poor boys!’

‘Boys? Which boys, Ma’am? Ma’am!’

Lapsing, she comes back with, ‘He was devastated.’

‘Who?’

Used up, Grammy Henderson waves her hand, fighting off invisible flies, but she’s still in there, and at some level she knows that Dan is waiting with teeth clenched so tight that the enamel cracks. She says with finality, ‘Terrible, what got old Lorna, but she brought it on herself.’

Oh, lady, don’t stop now. ‘How? Oh, please, Mrs Henderson, just one more answer. What set her on fire?’

But Blanche has talked a lot for a woman her age – what is her age? Half past ninety and hurtling to the finish line – and she’s spent. She says crossly, ‘That’s enough.’

‘What did it?’ Oh, please. ‘What?’

With the wave of a southern lady banishing anything unpleasant, she changes the subject. ‘Nenna, has my dinner come?’

‘Not yet, Grammy,’ Steffy says.

‘You were telling us about Lucy.’

Blinking, she asks politely, ‘Who?’

‘Lucy Carteret, remember?’ Dan presses even though he knows Grammy is shutting down. He gives her everything he has. ‘I’m her son.’

‘Don’t.’ Feebly, she swats him away.

‘Please!’

‘Oh, don’t!’ Exhausted, the old woman cries, ‘I want my dinner now!’

Silence overtakes them.

‘I have to go,’ Dan says when it’s clear that this time, Grammy won’t be back.

‘Dude . . .’

He turns. ‘And I’m not kidding.’

‘Dude!’ Then Steffy sees his face, and lets him go.

42

Jessie

Alone in her office, Jessie is both glad and sorry she ran into Walker out there at Golden Acres. She loved talking to him after all this time. He’s so dark and remote that these old girls – her friends – are scared of him, but she and Walker go way back. With her, he is so easy! They’ll always pick up where they left off even if it’s another hundred years. It was the best thing about a routine, perfectly pleasant Sunday in Fort Jude. Then on the way out of Mrs Earlham’s room she got in a fight with Wade, but that isn’t the downside.

It wasn’t really a fight, just one of those emergency exits women build out of words when they’re feeling crowded by a lover who is not quite enough and expects too much. Everybody needs a little down time, but Wade got pissed – hurt feelings, she supposes. ‘All right then!’ he said, and dropped her here. After a long day with big old Wade, who wouldn’t know a boundary if he fell over it, she’s relieved to be by herself again, in a place where she won’t be distracted by the pressure of his expectations or weighed down by that sweetly persistent, clueless will.

Jessie did not flee Golden Acres because she was freaking – unlike Dan Carteret, who will admit as much when he comes back to the Flordana at dusk. Old people are ancient history to her. She’ll be living among them when her time comes and she knows it. She just hopes that if he survives her, Wade sees to it that she gets a single room. Hell, even if they check in together she needs a single room.

Yep, she tells herself, and this is not such a bad thing. It’s gonna be Wade.

Seeing Walker today disrupted her; there is shared history. The crackle of what might have been. As long as she was inside Mrs Earlham’s sunny corner room in the assisted living wing, she could put it aside. Their spunky old kindergarten teacher is still bright, and she laughs a lot. She gets around her quarters better than can be expected; she knows more gossip than Jessie. She’s cool; they let her keep her dog. She asked after Walker who, she would not stop reminding Wade, was handsome as Lucifer and smarter than a bundle of whips. ‘I always knew that boy would go on to do great things,’ she said, and when Wade didn’t respond she said, ‘what’s he up to, honey? How is he, anyway?’

‘Oh,’ Wade said carelessly, and Jessie cracked her mouth open wide as a baby bird, hoping to be fed. ‘He’s fine,’ Wade said, and that’s all he said.

When they came outside Jessie couldn’t help checking – was the car still there? – and she can’t help what her heart did when she spotted Walker slouched behind the wheel, but that isn’t it, not really. That isn’t the downside.

Everything came back in on her. Everything.

Hurting, she started in on Wade, but she shut down the fight before it could get too bad. She said what with the party and the fire, the pile on her desk back at the Flordana was so high that scorpions were nesting in it.

Wade came back with: no problem, he’d come in and smash the little suckers flat, so she had to tell him she was really, really tired – which she is, but not in a way Wade Pike would understand. When she flared up at him he got over-solicitous, which he always does. He still thinks that Jessie, who had it all scooped out at nineteen – thank God she would never be pregnant – isn’t really upset when she gets mad at him, it’s only P.M.S. which, OK, it’s a little late for that. She was out of the car and halfway across the courtyard before he could open the door for her.

She needs time and space to sort out the sorry about running into Walker, which at the moment is overriding the glad. She sent the desk clerk home and slipped into the office, where she can keep an eye on the front desk and the entrance, in case.

It doesn’t take long to figure out what the matter is. Memory has been rolling in from so far off that for a long time she didn’t hear it coming. Now it hits with all its terrible freight, and mashes her flat.

The tastes, the sounds, the crap they were all drinking that lost, bad night come back in on her, everything rank and sour and so sudden that she shudders. The pain is old but still fresh. Her mouth fills with the taste of mingled snot and blood the way it did when it happened; she feels the cold, hard sand behind her head and under her bare back and she can feel wet sand creeping into her crotch as she gasps under the weight of the sleek, arrogant, angry bastard grinding the sand deeper into her most private part, and before anything she feels the humiliation.

She was never sure which ones ran off and which ones stayed to watch.

A high school sophomore. Stupid kid, what was she thinking, crashing the seniors’ houseparty when it wasn’t even her year, and they couldn’t see her for dirt? Lord knows she was pretty enough, stacked and sexier than those fucking Barbie cheerleaders, and with people who didn’t know, she could easily pass for older which is how she got in the door in the first place, but she was too young! The trouble was, Mollie Regan knew her from church and she never liked her – jealous, Jessie supposes, that woman was still stuffing her bra when she was old enough to afford implants. Jessie blended in fine, she was dancing with Billy Pouncey when Mollie spotted her. Ms. Head Cheerleader dug those purple fingernails into her arm, hissing, ‘You don’t belong here,’ and yanked her off the floor, which is how she ended up out on the curb in the middle of the night.

Her own damn fault for crashing, everybody knew houseparties were for seniors only and it didn’t matter how cute or sexy you were. She was sitting on a cement sea turtle out there on Coquina Alley waiting for Billy or some other boy to come out that she would consent to ride home with in exchange for a little of the one thing Jessie did best. But then Chape’s brand new Jeep came along, filled with sophomore boys scoping the scene like it was their senior year and they were the killer dudes laying waste and pillaging the maidens, come what may. Six first-string players from the FJHS Tarpons riding around drunk as bastards, acting like they ruled the world which they did, in a way, rolling to a stop at the sight of her.

‘Girl, you want a ride?’

Stupid, she thinks now. Stupid, heedless little bitch.

Stupid ever to get in any car with Brad Kalen, never mind who else was along. The boys were all loaded but so was Jessie, so what else is new? Besides, she recognized the car which was Chape Bellinger’s sweet sixteen present before she saw Brad was behind the wheel. She thought it was Chape stopping for her which, given who he was and given where Jessie came from, was an honor. Plus, given how late it was, she could use the ride. But Brad was driving, with Chape out cold and insensible, wedged in the back behind the bench seat, which was full of guys. Brad gunned the motor, laughing. ‘Are you getting in or what?’

He was a little heavier set than most even back then, but he was also a year older than them. Back then he worked out and Jessie is here to tell you that he oiled the biceps and the pecs. With tight gold curls and that big, heavy head Brad Kalen looked like fucking Tiberius, riding in to take the throne. She was a little scared of him so she said, ‘There isn’t room,’ but the guys in the back all said like one person, ‘You can sit on my lap.’

Cute Bobby Chaplin was riding shotgun, smart and safe as houses, so why not? If the look Bobby shot her should have told her that he had misgivings, she wasn’t about to pass up a ride. Who wouldn’t want to be seen out riding around these cool guys? She tossed her hair like a cheerleader and jumped into the back.

Stitch Von Harten and the Coleman twins skooched over so she could slip in between Buck and Darcy instead of jouncing along on their knobby knees – too bad about Darcy but who knew he was already doomed? Brad passed the bottle – God only knows what they were drinking – and Jessie knocked one back. Stupid, stupid, stupid, she thinks now, but in the beginning, so crazy and so very much fun, being with these guys – top of the line, leaders of the pack. They were singing, and she remembers riding along thinking, Now I’m in with them, these are my main men.

When you grow up on the outside and something like this happens, you think, Now everything is going to be different. They’ll want you at all the parties now, and not just because you have big knockers. Yeah, right. Brad took a turn nobody expected and her neck snapped. They were at the head of a coral road going nowhere. ‘Shit,’ Bobby said, and Brad said, ‘No shit.’ Then Bobby, who Jessie was so psyched to be hanging out with, said, ‘This is where I get off.’ She remembers just exactly how it sounded. ‘This is where I get off.’ He reached over the seat and grabbed her hand. ‘And you should come too.’ He was asking her to jump down and come along but she was out with the boys and they liked her and by that time frankly, she was too fried to think about that big of a decision.

Oh shit, Jessie thinks, jumping up so fast that she upsets her chair. Done is done. She can’t go back and she can’t make it change. The trouble is, she can’t get rid of it, either, and seeing Walker again today the way she did on a bright Sunday afternoon after so long and just when she thought she was on top of things – she can’t handle it. She just can’t.

It isn’t the pain or humiliation, it’s the knowledge that Walker Pike saw her like that, tattered and bawling in the sand, which he did because it was Walker who ended it. Just when she thought she was going to die – and by God she wanted to die that night and at certain times every night for years afterward – Walker came. Alone by that time, and she can’t know when the others fled – alone, and brutish, vengeful Brad Kalen was rolling her over to try something new when headlights exploded the night and everything changed. A car door slammed and Walker Pike came down on them like the Trojan army and ended it.

Everything stopped in a shower of sand and flying spit and her attacker’s bloody teeth and the hell of it is that every time she sees Walker now, and she does love Walker, Jessie knows he is remembering. No matter how old they get or how pretty she makes herself, Walker is seeing her like that. Like that.

It isn’t fair, she thinks bitterly, he never looked that way at Lucy. In spite of all that.

Distracted and miserable, she finds herself running around the lobby of her hotel thumping tapestry pillows and misting her bromeliads – anything to escape the sense memory, which is overwhelming. She is straightening lampshades when the kid from up north comes out of the elevator with a Jiffy bag under his arm – when did he come in? Was she so wrecked that he went past the desk without her noticing?

Lucy’s boy.

It breaks her heart to see him. Then she looks at his face and her heart goes out, and for more than one reason.

She chooses the easy one. ‘You look like you’ve been hit by a truck.’

He grins, probably because Jessie is smiling. ‘Long day.’

‘Bar’s closed, but I can buy you a cup of coffee.’

‘I just came to pick up something. Gotta be somewhere.’

‘Have you eaten?’

‘Not so’s you’d notice.’ Now, why does this embarrass him?

She says kindly, ‘You need a Flordana burger so you don’t die on your way to wherever you’re going. Chips on the side, and guaco. Come on, come and sit five minutes while Sibby fixes it, it looks like you could use the mercy.’

‘Mercy?’ He stands there, juggling the Jiffy bag while he thinks it over. Should he stay or should he go? His lips aren’t moving but they might as well be. It’s not clear what he is considering, but she can see that he’s sifting through significant material.

‘I can get it to go, if you’re in that much of a rush.’

‘OK.’ It’s a good smile. Honestly pleased. ‘Thanks.’

This is nice, Jessie thinks, studying the kid while he stirs too much sugar into the iced tea she ordered for him because, she said laughing, he needs a caffeine jolt to keep him going while Sibby gets his hotel Happy Meal into the clamshell. All these years childless and she’s sitting here with a great-looking man, and instead of flirting she’s coming on like Mrs Mom. It’s kind of restful. Besides, it’s taking her out of herself. Sweet, sitting here with a sweet guy who doesn’t know how they did me, talking about nothing. ‘So,’ she says, ‘Fort Jude. Scary, right?’

Then he puts the snapshot on the table. Yes, she saw it the first day. Yes, she knows what he wants. No. She knows what she wants. It’s time.

‘Do you know these guys?’

Him. She puts her finger on the snapshot so she won’t have to see that face again. ‘Oh,’ she murmurs, ‘Oh, shit.’

‘So you do know them.’

She grimaces to mask what she is thinking. ‘Always did.’

‘I’m looking for my father?’ Not a statement, a question.

Jessie says gently, ‘We don’t always know what we’re looking for.’

‘You’re going to help me, aren’t you.’ Not a question.

‘If I can.’

‘These guys.’

She takes a long breath. OK, as the guy who led her business seminar in Vegas said, Let us begin.

‘Lucy should have known better than to get in a car with those guys, no matter how many there are. There is no safety in numbers in this town.’ Like it or not, she is back there. ‘You don’t do that when you see him, not even when it’s full of boys which is why you get into the car in the first place. Son of a bitch loses the others along the way, he just throws them out the back or they get fed up and jump out because they can’t stop him and they know where this is going, and where you thought you were safe . . .’ She breaks off, hoping she can jump from here to the business about Lucy without telling him too much about herself, but it’s too late.

‘When you get to be my age, you get used to a lot of things and you learn how to handle it, but I was only fifteen!’

‘You.’ Daniel is too quick for her. ‘You?’

So she has to tell him. ‘Yeah. Me.’

‘Same guy?’ He grimaces. ‘Same guy.’

‘After he did it he beat the crap out of me.’ This pops out even though she is trying hard not to talk about herself. She pulls her voice back together and starts over. ‘Your mother should have known better, she was eighteen.’

Sad, what his face does then.

‘It’s OK, it ended differently.’ Then without explaining because she can’t bear to tell another living human what happened to her when she was young and stupid, Jessie makes the jump cut to Lucy’s story, that is, as much of it as she knows.

‘Nobody in her right mind gets in a car full of drunks, but look. She was sheltered, it was her first beach party, how was she supposed to know? Oh shit, I should have warned her but we didn’t talk – not that she was snotty, just standoffish, and besides, I was distracted. I was with Clete Rucker that night and hey, I was invited, getting down with all the kids out there just like I belonged, down with the bonfire and great music and moonlight on black water, God only knows what we were drinking; we were all crazy and by the time I looked up, she was getting into that Jeep and it was too late to warn her.

‘When I saw what was happening I screamed and ran after them but by that time they were bombing down the beach and I knew. I ran along after them it seemed like all night, crying and screaming to stupefy the dead. I yelled, “Lucy, watch out,” but the wind took it. Forgive me I ran screaming and forgive her she didn’t hear and then I lost sight of them.’ She is swallowing tears. ‘There was sand in my eyes and in my mouth and in my hair and my God, I cried and cried.’

Ashamed, she meets his eyes; it’s what honest people do. ‘I should have called the beach police, I should have brought the Air Force down on them, I should have taken their guns and shot him dead or howled to break glass and kept on howling until she heard me and took warning, Watch out for Brad . . .’

‘Brad. Kalen, you mean.’ Click.

‘. . . but I was so drunk I was puking sand, and . . .’ She breaks off. The kid is sitting across from her with his mouth cracked open, not drop-jawed, just trying to hear more than she is willing to say.

‘And what?’ He drops a warm hand on her wrist, squeezing until she flinches and pulls away. ‘And what?’

Now they arrive at the heart of her pain and, OK, Jessie thinks, it’s time to admit it, her bitter, bitter jealousy. She tells him, ‘Thank God Walker saw them go.’

‘Who?’

Jessie Vukovich loves Walker Pike, she always will and they both know it but that’s as far as it goes; Walker is a very private person. Never mind that she knows without having to look that he’s parked out front on Central Avenue right now, that he’s sitting out there in the dusk waiting for the kid to come out so he can follow him, and never mind that Jessie isn’t sure why Walker is tailing him, but she has her suspicions.

She says lightly, ‘Just a boy I used to know,’ and the kid’s irises explode. Then because she can’t just drop it and leave it lying there she says, ‘But he got there in time. Walker caught up with the son of a bitch, which is why the ugly fucker graduated missing three teeth. I guess he beat her pretty bad. Walker had to clean her up before he took her home, and Walker . . .’ She is rolling into a little threnody when Dan Carteret lunges up like a shark, all teeth. ‘Wait! Your food!’

‘I can’t.’ Choked with anger, he wheels. ‘I have to go.’

‘Not yet. This is important. You might as well know . . .’ The details pile in on Jessie and she is surprised that even though she will never outlive her own misery and humiliation, what became of perfect Lucy after Walker saved her from Brad Kalen is a source of greater pain than anything Brad did to her. ‘Wait,’ she cries. ‘Wait for the rest!’

Too late. He’s out the door. Running for his car so hard and fast that he won’t see Walker parked there.

She says anyway, ‘If you’re looking for your father, Kalen’s the wrong guy. You got born a lot later. A whole year later, at the very least.’

43

Bobby

The sun is over the yardarm, always a bad time for Bob Chaplin, Goldman Sachs. There will be no drinking, but his hands shake and his mouth waters every evening just about this time. His brother and sister are no help. Margaret’s trotting around upstairs, pray God she isn’t planning another of her Sunday night suppers, and Al is off at his favorite bar, leaving Bobby alone to replay tapes in his head – all those lost conversations, old and recent – with no way to rewrite them and nothing to take his mind off it. He won’t call friends. He found out last night that it really has been too long. He loves Von Harten and Coleman but they have their own problems, and after seeing his designated best friend up close last night he remembers what he always knew. Bellinger was never his friend, not really.

No problem. He’s used to being alone. He’ll be fine.

He is surprised and grateful when the doorbell rings. ‘Nenna! This is nice.’

‘Are you busy?’ She’s holding a basket covered by a checkered dishtowel with that freshly washed look, as if it just came out of the drier. She looks pretty in the creeping dusk, maybe a little shaky but hopeful. ‘I made too many corn muffins this morning, I hope you like . . .’

‘I just started a pot of coffee.’ Bobby is hopeful too.

‘I hope you don’t think it’s too late for . . .’

He lifts a corner of the cloth and peeks in, quick to reassure her. ‘They look great. Hey, Margaret brought orange blossom honey back from Homosassa Springs. Would you like . . .’

‘I’d love to.’ She smiles. ‘Can I come in?’

Her smile makes him smile. But, this house! He covers quickly. ‘It’s too pretty out to be stuck inside.’

‘The light really is beautiful at this time of day.’

He walks her around to the picnic table. ‘Let’s sit out here.’

‘Let’s do.’

‘Wait here, I’ll bring a tray.’

He likes the way she scoots her legs over the bench and sits. Bobby notes that unlike the girls when he knew them back in high school, Nenna does not jump up and offer to help, which is the Fort Jude way. She seems to know that he’d find it intrusive. When she had him at the front door she didn’t try to push her way inside. Maybe she knows he’d rather not have her nosing around in there feeling sorry for him, he thinks, going into Margaret’s dim kitchen.

She doesn’t need to see how he lives, which . . . yes!

Which he is going to change. Apartment down town, he’ll gentrify a neighborhood. Fresh resume; he’ll add a line that says consultant to explain the gap. With his credentials, he can get a new job.

Bobby collects coffee cups and the full pot, sugar bowl and two spoons, butter and two butter knives, honey with its wooden dipstick, proof against drips. Two of his mother’s Minton dessert plates. He works quietly because he doesn’t want to bring Margaret downstairs. He’s rather not hurt her feelings – which he would, if she found the tray and asked him to explain. When he comes back outside Nenna is waiting nicely in the twilight, sitting there with her head bent, like a child. He sets down the tray. ‘I’m sorry it took so long.’

‘This is so nice!’ She smiles.

‘I’m glad.’

She breaks one of the muffins and puts it on a plate. She butters the halves, drizzling them with honey and pushing the plate across the table. ‘Here, this one’s for you.’

‘Wonderful.’ Soberly, he pours the coffee, setting the first cup down in front of her. ‘Sugar?’

‘No thanks, Bobby, I’m fine. Nice to see you.’

‘You too.’

She is sitting there fishing for thoughts. Surprised by what surfaces, she laughs. ‘And let’s don’t talk about our problems!’

Bobby grins. ‘Let’s don’t.’

‘It’s just so nice to see you.’

He jumps up. ‘I forgot napkins!’

‘Don’t worry, we’re fine.’

‘I guess we are.’

She says, ‘We have a lot to talk about.’

They are both smiling now. Bobby says, ‘We do.’

44

Dan

Rushing out of the Flordana, overcharged and crackling with frustration, Dan feels like a fugitive from the static Fort Jude Sunday afternoon. In Grammy’s room, in the Flordana coffee shop, he turned into a convict in a holding pen, waiting for – helicopter rescue? Darkness, so he could swarm over the wall and escape?

The key, he realizes. Jessie Vukovich told her story, liberating him. He drives through the soft Florida night like a death-row murderer with a last minute reprieve. He is going to confront the man Lucy sent him all this way to meet. He knows she did: the whole jewel box thing, the contents she left behind like a message to him. The thump between his shoulder blades. He finds certain details encoded. How could she not want this?

He isn’t sure how the encounter with the father will end, but tonight by God he will end it.

Darkness changes everything. By day Coral Shores looks orderly and civilized, bisected by the boulevard, with neat cross streets intersecting. It looks like a grid, but only to outsiders. At night it turns into a warren. Coordinates keep sliding around, defying his GPS. In a better world it would be a straight shot to the peninsula, but in a community committed to privacy no road is straight and nothing is clear-cut. The route Dan mapped so carefully sends him down identical side streets that turn suddenly, looping back to Coral Boulevard, unless they dead-end at a stand of trees or dump him at the edges, stymied by yet another private driveway to a protected house with its private waterfront. At night all these houses look alike; every tree on Coral Shores looks like every other tree and landmarks repeat themselves so he can never be sure whether he has been this way before.

In the dark on Coral Shores nothing is as advertised, and to make things worse he almost sideswiped a stranger’s heavy car the last time he went around that circle and discovered it was the same old circle all over again.

He’s pissed off at himself for being careless and for getting lost, and he is even more pissed because angry as he is, Dan is torn. Where he grew up hoping for better – forget Jor-El, he thinks bitterly. Werewolf is more like it, if werewolves have were-children, which would explain a few things.

This is the hell of it, then. All his life Dan has traveled on the knowledge that the man he looks like – who looks like him! – is out there, a loving stranger built from the same genetic material as him, blood and bone, fiber and mysterious power, but now . . . He’s not searching for his father the defrocked superhero, he is tracking a monster.

In a way, he’s grieving for the myth. Dan’s last remaining suspect was never a brave prisoner of war, government witness, valiant secret agent under deep cover. It’s hard, letting go of the idea of his father as a silent hero walking out of his only son’s life for good and compelling reasons. Heroic elements like honor, valor, duty did not call his real dad to serve just when he most needed him. Those are stories unhappy kids tell themselves so they can keep on going just like all the other kids.

Now, in the realm of suspects Kalen looks like the biodad. The father Dan is tracking tonight turns out to be a drunken ape who beats the women he forces into sex. Or, and this is what troubles him. Destroys them. The template he appears to be modeled on is all that and, worse: he doesn’t even know what the fucker looks like.

Like me? He says through locked teeth, ‘I don’t think so.’

When he finds Kalen, he’ll drag the designated father-to-be outside and beat him with a tire iron, one lick for every soul he’s ruined or betrayed, including Lucy’s, One lick for every year he stole from my life. Unless all he wants is to get him down and beat the truth out of him – whatever it is. Fuck knows there are questions. Fuck knows the bastard deserves it. But even though he’s rigid with anger, a vulnerable part of Dan is in stasis, poised for the exculpating ‘Father!’ ‘Son!’ moment in which things are made right and everything is explained.

A crazy thing to expect. Kalen, in extremis, yacking up truth?

Fuck! Wrong turn.

Question. Is Kalen also a murderer? The thought darts across his mind like a spray of sparks running along a fuse. What if he torched old lady Archambault?

Fuck! Another wrong turn. Fuck! Another question.

Did he?

Wrong turn . . .

He has to wonder: wrong question?

A voice he barely recognizes fills the car. ‘Asshole, what do you want here?’ Yes he is shouting.

Not knowing makes him even angrier.

When he gets to the house he’ll break in and pounce, drag Kalen out into the street and then he will . . . Imagination betrays him. Father! Son! What would that be like? It makes him shudder.

Whatever Bradley J. Kalen is to him, whatever the gross, rotting brute of a rapist says or does or denies doing when he confronts him, He is no father to me. I will not have it. OK then, he thinks, smoking with fury. When you get to the house, smash the lock and yank him out the door no questions, no explanations, and when you drag your quarry into the light, take your long look into its face, God knows you’ve been waiting long enough. Then beat the crap out of him.

Roaring with frustration, he shouts, ‘If I can find the fucking place!’

45

Walker

Maybe some deep, unsuspecting part of Walker wants to get caught but it’s unlikely, given the care with which he circumscribes his life. More likely he’s played out his string, trailing young Dan Carteret night and day without stopping for more than the rudimentaries, running hard last night and all day and into tonight, blindly rushing along on no sleep, on exhaustion compounded by intolerable tension and aching grief. Although he refuses to acknowledge it, Walker Pike is strung out on hours of following without being seen, taut and driven because he does not know how to do what he has to without hurting anyone.

In fact he isn’t sure what he has to do, but that’s not the hardest thing. The hardest thing is being this close to his son without showing himself, even when he most wants to speak to him. With no idea what he would say if they did talk, because they are strangers and he’s afraid to find out what said son, the baby he, OK, the child he walked out on, would have to say to him.

Or maybe he’s sitting out here in plain sight because he is flat-out exhausted.

Unless it’s the function of geography.

At night on Coral Shores it’s harder to follow a man without his picking up on it. Bright moonlight defies him. This is, furthermore, a tight community where solid citizens hunker down at home after dark, particularly on Sunday nights when the nesting instinct strikes. All partied out after the weekend, they hole up in front of the electronic fire, snug and sanctimoniously self-satisfied.

There’s nobody on the streets but Walker Pike and the man he is following.

Inevitably, the kid will pick up Walker’s headlights in his rear view mirror; he’ll notice that when he turns, Walker turns. They’ve already come close; that rented tin can almost nicked him back there on the circle. He had to lay back and run with his lights off for several blocks, until the driver was done stopping to see if Walker would pass him, and fed up with screeching around corners to trick the driver keeping pace with him. Out on the barren peninsula road even a blind monkey would know that he was being followed.

Better get there first, Pike, if you hope to control what goes down out there when the kid comes charging in to storm Kalen’s house.

Walker will wait for him outside Orville Kalen’s dream house. It’s easy enough for Walker to find – not because he’s local, but because this is not the first time he’s been here, parked outside. Never mind when that was, or what Walker Pike considered when he stopped in front of the gleaming modern house one night not that long ago, riveted and trembling with suppressed rage. Shattered, he hit the gas and scratched off while the enemy he most wanted dead was still alive. Correction. Still safe.

Unlike the northerner from the real world, who will keep cross-hatching Coral Shores until he hits the right road, Walker goes like an arrow to the end of the peninsula. Out here, planting is sparse. Scrub pines and travelers’ palms cling to sandy dirt that blows across the city’s poshest piece of real estate same as it did in the white trash neighborhood on Pierce Point back in the day, when Walker and Wade lived with Pop in four rooms above the garage.

In denser neighborhoods on Coral Shores where Walker Pike never comes and certainly would never be invited, homeowners have trees and topsoil, tons of sphagnum moss and fertilizer delivered by the truckload. Gardeners roll out sod richer than Persian carpeting and set down plants like bric-a-brac, whereas Pierce Point families cemented over front yards to get rid of sandspurs, or battled nature with rye grass and supermarket shrubs doomed by the sandy soil before they patted dirt over the roots. Like the others in his part of town, Orville Kalen had all the right things trucked out to garnish his expansive Sixties modern house at the nether end of Coral Shores, but without constant attention nothing lives long, not even a man with all the money in the world.

When you die, they die.

There are days when Walker wishes that he could.

Kalen is home, right where Chaplin dumped him yesterday – yes, Walker knows. Over the years, he kept track. All that money made Kalen lazy and self-indulgent. Careless about how he got what he wanted. At this hour he’ll be staggering from bed to the fridge and back to bed with an overloaded plate, unless he’s sprawled on those greasy sheets with a freshly opened fifth, stupefied. First prize, he has choked to death on his own vomit, but that kind never dies. The rangy kid from New London will find the place; it is inevitable. He’ll bang on the door and something terrible will come down.

What Walker is most afraid of: fire.

He has to stop the kid before he gets close enough to knock. Until then, he waits. He cuts the motor and glides in next to the house. Yes he’s exposed, but his son won’t see Walker parked in the shadows with his lights off, at least not right away. Walker needs to be where he can see him coming. My boy.

Given who he is and the line he has walked with such vigilance, Walker Pike is far from careless, but sometimes you just. Get. Tired.

He closes his eyes but does not sleep. Exhaustion greases the ways and instead Walker recedes into reverie, slipping away from solid ground as smoothly as a newly launched ship; he is adrift now although he doesn’t know it, that’s how bad it is.

Put it to too many hours behind the wheel. He is stretched to the limit by proximity and the need to keep his distance. All those years keeping them safe. Lucy. The boy. He loves them so much!

‘Don’t give your heart to anyone,’ Pop said to his sons after their mother ran away, ‘look what it made of me,’ and Walker took it to heart.

He took it to heart and didn’t let go until he followed Lucy Carteret to Huntington beach that night for no known reason except that she was lovely and she didn’t know he was alive. As far as she knew, he was just the guy who fixed her grandmother’s car, a necessary piece of the infrastructure, but he was his own person by that time, with a real life three thousand miles away from Pop’s garage and the judgmental society of Fort Jude. She didn’t need to know.

She smiled at Walker without seeing beyond the smudge on his face or the grease on the coverall. He wouldn’t tell her that he’d been called home from Cambridge during exams because Pop was in the hospital. Wade phoned him, sobbing; he had to come. Nor did she have to know what the old man said to him that same night, tossing in the bed with his belly swollen and the toxic whites of his eyes the color of Betadine from the years of drinking that did in his liver and brought Walker home from MIT.

Pop was drunker than shit when he said it, Walker told himself, then and now. That damn fool pint of Jack Daniels on top of what the hospital was giving him; didn’t they frisk his friends before they let anybody in to visit him?

Pop was dead drunk when he said that terrible thing to me, Walker told himself resolutely; Pop didn’t know what he was saying; Pop was disconnected and raving. He was out of his mind with pain and alcohol and heavy duty meds compounded by whatever was in the IV flowing into him.

That night Pop raged for hours and Walker discounted it. Overturned, he took it for what he thought it was, but truth will always find you. The words followed him out of the room like a plague of hornets. Then the old lady died and for all these years he has wondered.

Were you trying to warn me, old man?

‘Walker, watch out! I see it!’ Wallace Pike rose up out of the bed in a surge of blankets like a shark attacking. Words came out of his face in a spray of spit and alcohol fumes. ‘It’s in you too.’

‘What is, Pop? What is?’

‘It’s in you, I can see it.’

‘Pop?’ He shuddered: bad memories. Certain fires. ‘Pop?’

The old man gargled words but couldn’t spit them out. What were you trying to tell me?

At the time Walker thought it was sheer agony that unhinged Pop and set him to screaming; he asked, ‘Are you in pain?’

‘Hellfire,’ Pop howled like a man running ahead of a pack of demons and it came out like vomit, ‘the flame!’ He thrashed and bellowed until the nurses came and shot him full of downers; his flame died and the next day he forgot.

By the next day, Walker was in love with Lucy Carteret.

It still mystifies him because the fact of it is so profound: that a man can fall in love in a single night. That it can happen in a flash. They went to the same school but Walker didn’t know her. He finished Fort Jude High a year ahead of his class; there was no reason for her to know him. If you didn’t play sports or do any of the stupid things that kept all those fresh-faced, privileged Fort Jude insiders at school for hours after the last bell rang, you could spend three years there without knowing anyone. Walker went home after school to work for Pop. He didn’t mix with people outside the classroom. He didn’t much want to. Even before the trouble, Walker kept to himself.

At MIT he was a new person. Dean’s list, all that. Easy among people as smart as he was, and there were many. Then Wade phoned. His baby brother took on like Pop was on his deathbed, which wasn’t exactly true. Wade’s ‘emergency’ put Walker right back where he started, in the Pierce Point Garage, finishing the job Pop was doing the day he went belly up in the grease pit.

Lucy came in on his first morning. ‘How soon can you have it back?’ Shredded jeans on her, tie-dyed T-shirt, which was big that year, she was dressed just like everybody else but not. Diamond studs in her ears – her dead mother’s, he learned later; that nice-girl hair held back by prescription sun glasses – how does Walker know? There’s not much Walker doesn’t know. She apologized, the way you would to any man who was doing a job for you, ‘It’s my grandmother’s. She always expects things back yesterday.’

It was graduation week. Turned out this was Wade’s big emergency. He couldn’t deal with Pop because it was Senior Week; he was too busy out at the beach, carousing. Walker said, ‘When do you need it?’

She gave him a nice, indifferent smile. ‘Um, tonight? I’m going to the beach and she won’t let me out of the house until she gets her car back.’

‘Right,’ he said. He did not say: senior houseparties – not Walker in his old man’s coverall, with his hands filthy and his face thick with sludge. Not Walker, who knew as well as anyone what houseparties were, but had never been to one. Not Walker, looking the way he did. Pop was replacing a cracked block when he took queer and Wade rushed him to the E.R.; he had to finish the job.

There was no way she could know who Walker Pike really was. Not that day. ‘If you could do it by six . . .’

Why was she so anxious? You’d think it was her first beach party. He pretended to mull the estimate. In fact, he was taking her in – not the face, not even the body. He was absorbing the truth of her: the intelligence. The touching vulnerability. ‘Six o’clock, no problem. Ride you home?’

‘No thanks.’ She gestured to the road outside. Walker saw that redheaded Chaplin kid out front, idling in his father’s car: brainy Bob Chaplin, he noted. Safe as houses. Apologetic smile. ‘I have a ride.’

Walker drove to the beach that night anyway. In case.

Houseparties, what was he expecting? He wasn’t sure, but he knew what happened to Jessie after one of those things; it ate at him. He pulled her out, but too late. His heart told him to watch out for this one. No. He had to see her. He had to let her see him when he looked like himself, not like a greasy swamp bunny in Pop’s big old coverall. He would never walk into a private party even with an invitation, but everything opened up on the last night of Senior Week. The parties merged for the big bonfire on the beach. All creation would be down there on the sand, partying. Walker hated himself for knowing those things about matters he had moved beyond and could care less about, but he had to go.

On Huntington beach in a crowd that size Walker could lurk without having to explain himself; he could take all the time he needed to scope out Lucy Carteret and watch her from a distance; he would lay back until it seemed like the time was right. Then he’d invent a reason to speak to her. She probably wouldn’t recognize him right away, all cleaned up and looking fine. When he reminded her who he was she’d be surprised. She’d thank him for getting that grandmother’s car fixed in time. Then he could ask where she was going to college in September and the conversation would start. She’d have to ask him where he went. Then he could tell her he went to MIT, which even people down here admitted might be as good as Duke.

Driving out to Huntington beach that night Walker wrote dialog in his head. It’s where all his best conversations take place.

The party wasn’t hard to locate. From the causeway he could see the bonfire staining the night sky. He turned off on beach road and left his car on a side street. He walked the half-block to the path over the dunes where high school seniors and hangers-on chattered like monkeys, going back and forth from the beach. There were too many; they might ask who he was, or what he was doing here if he ran into them, so he stopped short of the path and started up through sawgrass and sandspurs, climbing the steepest part of the dune. When he reached the top, the spectacle stopped him cold.

The party sprawled on the beach below.

He couldn’t make himself go down. There was Walker Pike, all cleaned up tonight and looking pretty good in his white linen shirt and faded cutoffs, with his sandy hair washed until it shone, combed wet and pulled into a pony tail, in preparation. Why could he not go down there on the sand like a normal person, walk into that crowd and find the girl?

In Cambridge, Walker had no problem going out and showing himself to the people. In Massachusetts, it was easy. He was lean and handsome and good at what he did. Reclusive as he was in high school, he had changed. MIT turned him into a good talker – better company, he supposes. They got what he was saying. All those smart people with no crippling preconceptions. In that world, Fort Jude dichotomies did not pertain.

Now he was back home, poised at the crest where he could study the people on the sand. He stood there for a long time, scanning the crowd, looking for Lucy Carteret until his feet went to sleep and his muscles twitched as the sand shifted under him. A term on the Dean’s List, headed there again this spring, work-study job in Computer Science, the chairman wanted him to go on for an advanced degree, and he was still reluctant to go down there on the beach. The hard-packed sand was swarming with the cream of Fort Jude society, a distinction he hated as much as he hated this town. He couldn’t bring himself to penetrate that mob of heedless drunks and acid heads who knew Walker Pike as Pierce Point trash, if they knew him at all.

Bad idea, Pike. This was a bad idea. He turned to go.

He would have, too, but the angry snarl of a motor filled the street below. Walker wheeled to see what it was. Then he jumped aside as a Jeep rolled over the curb, aimed up the path through the dunes. Howling, the driver came on, and to hell with anybody who happened to be coming up from the beach. To hell with everybody, they could get the fuck out of his way. Near the top the Jeep foundered, wheels spinning. When he recognized Bellinger’s Wrangler, Walker’s heart seized up, and that was before he saw who was at the wheel. The car wasn’t the only thing he recognized. Memory told him where this would end. Rehearsing the future in a spasm of nausea, he saw it all. Hulking Brad Kalen was behind the wheel, filthy-drunk and fueled by rage, hollering at the others to get out and push the fucker, get moving you sniveling assholes, I smell pussy down there.

If Walker thought Lucy would be safe tonight, he was a fool. Like an obedient footman, Bob Chaplin – the kid he thought was Lucy’s protector tonight – jumped out of the Jeep like an obedient lackey and put his shoulder to the car, along with the others. Walker should have acted then; he should have yanked Kalen out of the Jeep and throttled him on the spot. He should have shaken him until his ears bled but before he could shout, the Wrangler belched and started moving. Chaplin jumped in with the others as it pitched over the crest and headed downhill, hurtling out of Walker’s reach.

The despicable bastard Walker had to pry off of Jessie Vukovich that time went roaring down on the crowd with sand flying and music blaring out of the speakers and his main men screaming as he aimed for the heart of the party.

The Jeep breached the crowd and everybody scattered. Walker started to run. As he did, he spotted the girl he knew he was in love with dancing with her lacy shirttail flying out from her long body, white lace skimming the white bikini. Lucy let go of some boy’s hand and spun out, laughing. Oblivious. She was oblivious. Walker saw that his beautiful, stupid girl was stoned out of her mind, loose-limbed and weaving in front of the fire with her arms flying and her mouth open to the skies. Then he saw her whirl at the sound of her name and he saw her wave, laughing. Like a fool she trotted over to the Jeep, flattered and ignorant. He saw Kalen laughing and waving.

He shouted, but he was too far away. He ran, but it was too late.

Walker died. He saw the future, and it was vile. The night he pulled Kalen off Jessie Vukovich, Jessie sobbed all the way home. Dripping bloody snot, she explained, ‘You only get in because there are others in the car. You think you’re safe.’

Crafty in the way of stupid people who know how to get what they want, Brad Kalen used his buddies like inflatable state troopers when he went stalking, propping them in place before he made his move to signify that this would be a safe ride. Then – how many times has this happened? He knew how to lose his buddies along the way; either he was too selfish for a gang rape or they weren’t the type; Walker didn’t know, any more than he knows what binds them to him. He did know where the bastard would take her to do it because they had both been there before. Walker was pounding back over the dune, running for his truck before Kalen and his cohort left off grinning for Bethy Bellinger’s camera like rock stars and helped Lucy into the Jeep. Walker knew, if not to the minute, how long all this would take and he would damn well get to Land’s End before Kalen did.

This time, he wouldn’t fuck up. He would be there in time to stop it.

Which Walker did, springing on Kalen before he could get that flimsy shirt off Lucy although, God, he had already hauled off and split her lip with his fist. Even tonight, Walker doesn’t know why he didn’t shout or throw something or figure out how to warn the girl before it came down. He should have plowed into Kalen the minute he nosed that Jeep into Lands End Road and stopped. Maybe it was Pierce Point wariness – cops would assume he was the offender – or maybe he was waiting for the son of a bitch to convict himself. You fool. Either way he still grieves over the pain his waiting caused her. Whatever ate Walker up evaporated when Kalen pushed her down and started pounding; Walker was on top of him, snarling and dragging him off before Lucy understood what was happening to her.

‘What are you doing,’ she cried, and Walker didn’t know whether she was talking to him or her assailant. ‘What are you doing!’

He dragged Kalen’s bloody hand out of her tiny white bikini pants and beat the living shit out of him, noting with satisfaction that there was no way they could get false teeth into that blunt, brute face of his in time for him to make that big smile for the graduation-day group photograph. He kicked Kalen over onto his face and left him in the sand. Too rough, Walker, he realized when he saw how the girl looked at him, shrinking, terrified and sobbing.

‘Oh, please,’ he cried, holding his hands out to her like a plaster St Francis.

‘Oh,’ Lucy sobbed, covering her mouth.

‘I had to.’

She looked into her hands and saw blood. ‘Oh, oh!’

‘I had to stop him.’

Her wild face was just now coming back together and she did not back away. Lucy came back into herself in stages – aware and thinking. When she could speak she acknowledged this in a voice so low that he had to guess at the tone, ‘You had to stop him.’ Then everything lifted. ‘You did!’

Then, with Kalen laid out in the mangroves like an eviscerated shark, Walker hugged her close, crying, ‘I’m sorry, I am so goddamn sorry,’ because he was afraid that he had in fact fucked up, just not in the same way as with Jessie Vukovich. Then Lucy bowed her head and leaned into him, so he could feel her lips moving on his chest and he felt the warmth of her mingled blood and wet breath through his shirt as she said loud enough so that there would be no question, ‘I’m sorry too.’ He wouldn’t kiss her – that torn lip – but he wrapped her in his shirt and took her home, riding along with the extraordinary sense that his life was about to change. It was, just not the way either of them in their wildest feat of clairvoyance or naked intelligence could possibly imagine.

Yes he was in love with her. He knows she was in love with him too, which is why he tried so hard with the old lady and how his heart broke afterward.

The next day she was gone. ‘Up north,’ he was told by the smug old woman when he went to ask for Lucy at her house. Mrs Archambault filled the doorway with her tidy permanent wave and perfect choker pearls and fixed glare. Why are you here?

‘She’s on a trip,’ she told him in that cold, flat tone she kept for people who came to cut her grass or repair broken windows. That sneer: Yard men.

‘I need to see her.’ He meant, I need her.

Then she looked at him and said, in a voice that tore him in half and made tears choke Walker Pike, who never cries, ‘Did you do that to her? Did you?’

‘No,’ he shouted. He was still shouting when she slammed the door on him. ‘Dear God, no!’

Like she would believe anything he said.

Well, fuck her. They were both home over Labor Day Weekend, Lucy with all her bruises healed and only a small white scar on the lip because while Walker struggled with Kalen, the bulky drunk struck out and clipped his captive again with the back of his hand, tearing it with his ring. Now she was home.

His brother Wade was the social one so he knew who was in town, and when. Walker phoned the house. She muttered, afraid of being overheard. Colluding. His heart sank. The grandmother would never approve of him. That night Lucy came out to meet him on the waterfront across the street from the Fort Jude Club. The old woman thought she was inside, at the big party. They rode out to Land’s End; it was something they had to do.

They parked near the spot. They got out. They had to, given her pain and his determination to save her again and again. Without discussing it, they walked out on the strand where the mangroves were thick, studying the sand until they found the place. They didn’t do anything; they just stood, looking. For a long time they were silent. Then she turned and started back to the car.

He touched her cheek. It was one of those things.

Immediate and sure. No transaction needed. It fell into his hands like a gift.

They loved each other: she loved him. She was starting Radcliffe. Perfect.

In Cambridge they were equals, close and getting closer in love. They saw each other some nights and every weekend; they saw each other whenever they could. Walker thought they could be together on Thanksgiving weekend in Fort Jude, but Lucy went back to her grandmother’s and he went home to Pierce Point.

‘I’m so sorry. Grandmother.’ Her face told him the rest.

He cried, ‘If I could only talk to her!’

‘Not yet,’ Lucy warned and she was begging. ‘Just not yet.’ It was Wednesday of the long weekend. She touched his cheek. ‘Pick me up at the club. She’s running the Thanksgiving dance – Friday night? She’ll be too busy to notice.’ She saw his face. ‘Please, hiding is only for a little while. She just doesn’t need to know.’

His heart staggered. ‘So nothing has changed.’

‘Not yet.’ She touched his lips, sealing them. ‘Not yet.’

He picked her up outside the club just the way he had on Labor Day weekend. The ballroom windows were ablaze. Another big party that she could leave without being noticed. They drove to the beach; it was what they did. She’d booked a room. They made love for the first time.

Walker thought: Now. Everything will be different.

Coming in on the causeway, she had him take the Fourth Street exit. Walker said, ‘Why?’

‘Please, just drop me in Pine Vista?’

‘Why, Lucy? Why should I do that?’

Her face went eight ways to Sunday. Her voice was so low that he could barely hear. ‘I told her to pick me up at Bobby Chaplin’s house. She thinks he’s OK because his great-grandfather started the Fort Jude Club. It’s crazy, but I had to tell her something.’

Like a fool, he pressed for reasons. The more she tried to explain, the worse he felt and the more he pressed.

Finally Lucy pushed him away with both hands, crying, ‘I can’t let her find out about you and me!’

The bitch found out anyway. Somebody saw them coming out of the Laughing Gull Motel and phoned the house. Lucy never told Walker what went on between her and the old woman at the end of that long weekend. She came to his room in Cambridge, ashen. ‘I love you. She and I are done.’

It wasn’t only the old woman. The society stood between them. Walker said, ‘And Fort Jude?’

‘Hush. I’m never going back.’

Didn’t he take her into his arms and hold her tighter than ever then, and didn’t he love her even more?

He and Lucy were together in Cambridge all that spring. They made love in Walker’s cubicle in the cold cement block dorm at MIT and because he loved her so much they were careful, so very careful. Just not careful enough. In May, he gave her his mother’s ring.

When he slipped it onto her hand, she flinched. ‘What’s this?’

‘I love you. It’s time.’

‘I can’t,’ she said, but she didn’t take it off.

‘Please!’

‘I can’t,’ she said, and his world crumbled. ‘I just can’t.’

‘Why?’

Emotion reamed Lucy out and left her transparent. Everything showed in her face. Her choice and the consequences, what he was and who she was. Her voice was low; he could barely make out what she was saying but he could not deny that she’d said it. ‘I won’t let her hurt you!’ The next words came from some dark place that Lucy had never let him see. ‘You have no idea what she can do.’

‘She won’t hurt me.’ Walker was desperate. Angry. ‘And she won’t hurt you.’

God help them both, she was crying. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t let her. I’m out of there, I’m done with all that.’

Why did it kill him, knowing how much this cost her?

In Cambridge he and Lucy could be anybody they wanted, but Fort Jude was another story. He hated that she cared what the city thought; it ran in her blood. Without telling her, he drove to Florida to confront the old lady. Lucy was pregnant. They would be married. She would have his baby and Mrs Lorna Archambault, pillar of Fort Jude society, would damn well acknowledge it.

What Walker will never know is why old Lorna left her front door unlocked and ajar that night, or what she was waiting for.

He let himself in and went upstairs to the room where she sat with the television blaring. The door was closed. He could have left; the TV was so loud that she’d never know. Instead he knocked. Like a prom queen the woman inside lilted, ‘Harold, is that you?’

‘No Ma’am,’ he offered in the cultivated tone that pleased people in Cambridge. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, but.’

‘Hal?’

‘It’s Walker Pike, Mrs Archambault. It’s about your granddaughter.’

‘At this hour?’

‘I’m sorry. I came about Lucy.’

The voice went cold. ‘Lucy is dead to me.’

You bitch! ‘It’s urgent.’ He opened the door.

The old woman was sitting right where he thought she’d be, commanding that recliner like the evil queen on her brocade throne. Regal bathrobe. Monograms on the purple slippers. Lipstick. Salon blue curls and massed diamonds on her knobby hands. That look. Everything about her telegraphed contempt. Oh, it’s you. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Lucy and I are getting married.’

‘Oh. No. You’re not.’ She spat questions like poison darts. Walker did his best. Everything he offered made her angrier. Never mind what she said that set him off. It was vile. Never mind what Walker spat back. She used every word she had to revile him, pushing, pushing, ‘She’s an Archambault.’

‘Fuck that,’ he said finally, ‘she’s having my baby.’ It was all he had.

‘In hell.’ She coughed it up like blobs of phlegm. ‘I’ll get it reamed out of her.’

‘No.’ He was controlled. Drawn tight and vibrating with rage. ‘You’ll never see her again.’

Fuming, she rapped the wooden claws of her brocade chair with such force that her diamonds left scars. ‘I’ll file charges. I’ll see you in jail.’

The sound that came out of Walker then left him white and shaken. The terrifying words. ‘I’ll see you in hell.’

He said it more out of grief than anger although inside he was blazing with it. Rocking with hatred, murderous and stricken, Walker fled the place before he lost control and hurt her.

So in fact Walker may have done it; decades spent pondering and he still doesn’t know.

How could an unwitting kid like him suddenly set a woman on fire? With no matches, no flaming torch, only his consuming rage in the room between them, with nothing to strike sparks on but the hatred that consumed her, had he actually done this? She was smoldering before he cleared the city limits, although it would be hours before Walker knew it.

Nobody saw him come or go.

There was nothing going on in the darkened house behind him that Walker could see in his rear-view mirror. Still he left Fort Jude pursued by a sick, bad feeling. The encounter left him feeling soiled, corrupted by emotions like sparks that ignited somehow, filling the room behind him. Furious, he tried to outrun his rage. Anger kept pace, but whether it was his or hers, he is still not certain. He hit the accelerator hard, hurtling away from the house, but the anger followed, with guilt sniffing at its heels. In the dark street behind Walker Pike, something happened. He didn’t see it, but at the exact moment his gut twisted.

Knowledge went through him like a tremor along a fault line.

He drove straight through to Boston.

By the time he got there it was all over the news.

The Globe carried photos courtesy of the Fort Jude Star.

Walker locked himself in his room at MIT, reflecting. So that’s what I am.

Lucy telephoned; she called and called but he was too deep in self-disgust to pick up the phone. Recognition came in stages. It marked him to the bone. Lucy knocked on his door, crying out, but he sat there like a figure cast in bronze, the image of what he had become. The son of destruction. She went away. For a long time he kept to his room, riven and terrified.

Before that night Walker Pike lived safely on the fringes but he was in it now, body and soul; he had no name for the power that rocked him.

He couldn’t begin to know what it meant, he only knew that he was dangerous. What he was, or what he was becoming put him outside society. He loved her so much! He couldn’t see her again. Not if he loved her and wanted to keep her safe. It moved and terrified him to care so much about a woman, and to be afraid to be around her for fear it would happen again. Whatever I did. His body shook to the foundations as certainty took hold. He was afraid for Lucy’s safety and the safety of the child he knew he would never see, and that was the end of them as a couple. Walker. Lucy Carteret.

He had to let her go.

Walker let her go because he saw what he was, and it was terrible. The knowledge and the potential. That kind of thing doesn’t happen just once. What kind of monster sets an old woman on fire without touching a match to her? What awful power does he have, that made him destroy another human being without getting close enough to light a fire?

He had too much to tell Lucy, too much he couldn’t tell her. To keep her safe, he telephoned. It almost killed them both. ‘I just want you to know, I love you.’

‘Did you do it?’ Her voice shook.

I love you and I always will. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Did you murder her?’

‘I love you, and I have to go away.’

‘Did you?’

He wanted to say he loved her at least once more; he knew it would be the last time, but the words seized up in his throat and he choked, ‘Forgive me, I have to go!’

He left for a year to take the job his department chair had lined up for him with Sony in Tokyo. He sent money to her at Radcliffe. It was the only address he had. Somebody rubber-stamped the envelope: NO FORWARDING ADDRESS and sent it back. Back in Cambridge, he went to see the Radcliffe registrar. With Walker sitting across from her, visibly distressed, she broke precedent and told him Lucy dropped out of college. Nobody knew where she went, the dean told him with a judgmental scowl. She was having a baby. He left Lucy to save her life. Its life.

That should have been the end of loving her, but it wasn’t. Some things don’t end.

He loved their baby too. He loved them both but given what he was, he walked away from them. He had to. For years Walker slouched along alone, miserable and shaggy. He went inside his work to hide.

On bad days he thinks of himself as the sea captain in the story Pop loved to tell back when he and Wade were small. The captain’s wife promised to keep a candle in the window until his whaler came back into port. Instead his ship went down with all hands on board, and he was reported lost at sea. The widow mourned, but finally she gave up hope and remarried. Pirates plucked the captain off a desert island – not dead! Joyful, he headed home, looking for the candle in the window. The house was bright but his candle was gone. When the long-lost husband looked inside he saw his wife, his children at the hearth with another man sitting in his chair, a nice, happy family gathered around the fire with their heads bent in the golden light. His heart blazed and then died.

For her sake, he turned and walked away.

For her sake he lived on other people’s happiness, glimpsed through lighted windows at night.

Walker became that person. He never went where Lucy was, but he kept track. He located her in New London; he knew their baby was a boy; he knew when she married Mixon; he’s never followed because he can’t let her be with him or come anywhere near, but he kept track. Dear God, has he kept track.

It was hard. He loved her. He missed them to extinction, but he managed. He managed until that freakish night when the kid turned five and he weakened and sent the clipping, as though one day he would find it and know. Walker left Lucy Carteret to keep her safe – to keep them safe – but he sent the clippings, trying to explain. He sent them because from the brain he was given to the whorls in his fingertips, this boy was his, and he should know.

But, God. What is he? What kind of monster abandons his only son?

46

Both

Wham!

Walker jumps. This is what you get for drifting.

Someone’s banging on the roof of his car.

‘What,’ Walker shouts. ‘What?’

It’s the kid.

It’s Dan Carteret, with his angry mouth squared like the door to an open furnace and his eyes peeled stone naked, wider than Pop’s, glaring in at him. He rocks the car, shouting at Walker through the glass: ‘WHY ARE YOU FOLLOWING ME?’

Shit, Walker thinks, I guess this is what I saw coming. Sighing, he rolls down the window. ‘No real reason, son,’ he says evenly, although he has damn good reasons.

‘Don’t call me son!’

‘I’m sorry.’ Anything to talk him down. ‘Quiet. He’s sleeping in there.’

‘I know. I know!’

‘You don’t want to wake him up.’

‘The fuck I don’t!’

‘Shut up, will you? Shut up!’

Dan grabs the door handle, shaking it violently. ‘Get out of the fucking car!’ He kicks the door with each word.

With Walker unshelled, his son starts pounding on him instead of the car, livid, and yelling so loud that the commotion sets off Kalen’s automatic burglar lights. Suddenly the driveway is brighter than day. ‘What the fuck,’ he shouts, blinded by the glare. ‘What the fucking fuck?’

Walker takes advantage of the distraction and grabs the kid, holding him at arm’s length to make him stop hurting himself. Not only are his eyes peeled wider than Pop’s, they are the exact same cobalt as Pop’s eyes and Walker’s eyes, and the set of the brows, the whorl of hair at the top of his head, everything – even the line of that jaw – signifies that this crazed, out-there guy directly related to Walker can do more damage than he knows.

Straight-armed by Walker Pike, he digs his fingers into Walker’s forearm. ‘Let go.’ Wild, he is shouting loud enough to wake the dead-drunk.

‘Shhh, honey.’

‘I said, let go!’

‘Shut up,’ Walker says in a level tone, ‘shut up, if you don’t want the cops.’ He has been following this boy it seems like forever, frightened and proud and dubious and hungering for a glimpse, a moment in which he knows and the kid knows. For the first time since this thing started they are close enough for Walker to see him plain. Certain now, stricken and joyful, Walker lets go. He looks like me.

The kid’s eyes fly even wider.

Walker is used to dissembling. He covers quickly. ‘Keep it down or Brad will . . .’

‘You mean Kalen.’ Astounded, Dan softens. He looks like me. All those years looking for the truth in a mirror and here is the man he was looking for, blood and bone, spit and image. Right now, it’s too stupendous to process. Like Walker, he has grown up vigilant. Schooled in protecting himself. ‘Yeah. That’s who I’m looking for.’

‘He’s usually passed out stone drunk at this hour.’

Walker should know. He drove back to Fort Jude years after the fact, grieving for his life and bent on satisfaction. He sat in front of the Kalen house, considering. What he is: the son of destruction. What happened to the old lady was a mystery. If he caused the fire, it was accidental. Unless. He hated her, but he walked away. He walked away and she caught fire anyway. What would he become if he knowingly torched the slouching monster he’s hated ever since that night? He tries too hard to sound easy, adding, ‘Dead drunk and senseless.’

‘I heard.’

‘He usually is,’ Walker says easily, trying to discourage this kid who is by no means a kid. He must be thirty now. Lucy’s baby is a grown man, older than Walker was when he lost them both. No. Loved, wanted to keep, but for their own peace and safety, let them go. Don’t. You’re too strong to go there now. ‘You better be glad he’s put himself away, so he’s no threat to the population. He’d be out here charging us with his SUV.’

Not Walker’s fault the kid is struggling with this. All of it. Frustrated and raging. ‘Fuck that shit!’ Pulling free of Walker he wheels, shouting loud enough to wake the dead but not the dead drunk. ‘Come on out here, asshole. I know what you did to my mother.’

‘He’s beyond hearing you now.’

The next thing Dan says overturns him. He turns back to Walker so fast that pain smears his face. ‘Well, so is she!’

Walker staggers.

Reflexively, Dan reaches out to steady him. ‘You didn’t know?’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Tears start in the stranger’s eyes, but the desperate man Dan found here in the dark is no stranger. Where he had been struggling, Daniel Ames Carteret comes to a full stop.

My God, he really does look like me.

There is so much to say, so much to tell and so much to ask boiling up in him that he can’t breathe. For the first time in his life, he’s flat out of words. All he can come back with is that name. It comes out like a sob. ‘Lorna Archambault.’ What is he trying to do, repel all boarders with his lame cover story? Get this man who looks like me to reassure him, tell him the old woman is no kin? ‘Fucking Lorna Archambault.’

Walker doesn’t want the kid to know who he is or what he is – what his son may, under pressure, become. He shouldn’t, he can’t, but at bottom he does want the kid to know and it’s killing him. He doesn’t know whether to unburden himself or deny everything, but he will not let Dan Carteret see him crying. ‘Yes. Lucy’s grandmother.’

The next thing comes out of his son in a great rush of air – is it a sigh of relief or an agonized groan? Walker can’t tell. ‘She got on fire.’

‘You’re Dan Carteret,’ Walker says. ‘Lucy’s son.’

Dan dips his head in acknowledgement. ‘Lucy’s son.’

‘I’m Walker Pike.’ It’s as close as they will get to the Father! Son! moment.

Words boil out of his son. ‘He has to pay for what he did to her.’

Walker says, ‘I know.’

‘I’ll make him pay. He has to pay.’

‘No!’ It’s all coming in on Walker, whole and fully realized: what happened back then and why he thinks it happened, the scream of rage that overflowed the old woman’s bedroom; it could have been hers; the anger flickering between them, what his anger did to her . . .

Or what he thought it did to her.

He will not pass this burden on! Walker is frightened not for himself or for Brad Kalen but for Dan Carteret, the son of destruction. He will not have it! He grips his son’s arm, profoundly moved by the contact after all these years. Walker wants to keep him here, he wants to sit with him, talk and keep talking until certain things are understood between them but all he can do now is what he has to do. He starts moving Lucy’s son – their son – back to his car and he keeps pushing in spite of the fact that Dan digs in his heels, resisting every step of the way. Walker says through tightly locked teeth, ‘Now, leave.’

‘No!’

‘I mean it. You can’t be here.’

Naturally he’s struggling. This is Walker’s flesh and blood! ‘Not until I . . .’

Swift and urgent, Walker backs him up against the rental car. ‘You have to go.’

‘But this dirty, fucking . . .’

‘Go,’ Walker says firmly, forcing his will on his son without being able to explain why this is essential. Central to both of them. ‘Leave it to me.’

‘No way.’ Anger makes Dan incoherent. ‘That fucking bastard fucking hurt her and I’ll make him pay. He wrecked her life! I have to . . .’

He shoves Dan backward, into the car. ‘No, I do.’

‘But the bastard, bastard . . .’

‘I’ll take care of it.’ Here is Walker Pike, the most father he will ever be, speaking to the only living person he loves, and he does love Dan Carteret in ways he will reflect on from now until his death: Walker Pike, sending his only son away. A light goes on inside the house. Walker closes the car door on him. ‘Now, go.’

Sure and gentle as Lucy, his father thumps him between the shoulder blades. Dan backs sags, but he can’t give up. Quite. ‘Wait.’ Torn, he cries from the gut, ‘Wait!’

Everything Walker is thinking and everything he is afraid of rushes into his face. Words pile up, but they stay locked inside. Then Kalen’s front door opens and Walker slaps the car door like a NASCAR starter, dispatching everything in the world that he cares about, sending it away with an order that will not be defied because Walker Pike is taut with urgency, his mouth an open grate, the air bright with his soul blazing. ‘Just go.’

Dan dips his head in acknowledgement. That’s all.

Later that night Kalen’s bedroom window will bloom for no known reason, and not for long enough to cast any light on the deserted street.