I gave her a small, ironic salute. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“Okay. Let me know what he says.”
“Of course.”
“I do actually have a showing.”
“Go. I’ll take it from here.”
She gave me another quick peck on the cheek and trotted back to her car.
I didn’t talk to Tim until after school that day. A whale had washed up on the beach over the weekend, and he wanted to see it. My daughter, Caroline, was conveniently disgusted by the prospect (“Let’s all go gape at a giant, smelly dead fish! I don’t think so.”), which meant the expedition would give me time alone with Tim to talk about his story and the ruckus it had caused.
“I didn’t write it,” he said to me as we circled the giant right whale.
I lifted a hand to say Not now, not here. There were a dozen other people gawking, along with a photographer from the Inquirer and Mirror. We paid our respects to the deceased cetacean and walked on, east toward Madequecham. Soon we were alone on the wide stretch of sand. A south swell was kicking up some good-sized waves, and we could see the riptide running west, like a river below the surging foam. A few surfers bobbed beyond the breakers, but no one seemed to be catching anything.
We were well out of earshot, far from anyone who might have been interested, when I reopened the discussion. “I don’t understand.”
“I found that story in the attic, in a box of junk.”
“What were you doing up there?”
“Just snooping. There was all sorts of weird stuff—pictures we could put on that ‘Nantucket Days of Yore’ Facebook page that Jane likes so much. And lots of other stuff—some gold coins. I couldn’t tell if they were real or not.”
“So—you read the story.”
“I thought it was cool. I’ve been bullied—I could relate. And then I got that assignment and I had no ideas, and I totally forgot about it, and then it was due—”
“So you took the story from the box.”
“I’m sorry, Dad. I shouldn’t have done it. It was dumb. But I, it’s—I never thought anyone would get so upset. I mean, it’s just a story.”
We walked along.
“Am I in trouble?”
“Well…first of all, I’m glad you didn’t write the thing. That’s the most important fact. I’m no fan of Alan Bissell, but he had a point today. That story is creepy. But you’re not.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
“I mean…just on the most obvious level—you made friends with your bully.”
“Sort of. Because of Hector.”
Carrie’s boyfriend, Hector Cruz, was the star running back for the Nantucket Whalers football team, and that gave him authority over a second-string right tackle far beyond that of any teacher, parent, or coach. Hector had negotiated the peace, but it had stuck. Tim and Jake Sauter might never be friends, and they had developed an easygoing camaraderie that impressed me. And Tim would certainly not be carrying bizarre grudges into a twisted adulthood like the character in ‘Nuremberg II.’
“I shouldn’t have ever turned it in, though.” Tim watched the sand. “It’s plagiarism.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that.”
“They’d, like, expel me or something if they ever found out.”
“But they won’t.”
“Dad—”
“Kids make mistakes. If they were born grown-up, they wouldn’t need parents. I plagiarized something once. To impress a girl. But then the kid who really wrote it wound up dating the girl and gave her the poem for Valentine’s Day. I got busted, and everybody found out.”
“That must have sucked.”
“The weird thing is my dad figured it out before anything happened, when I showed it to him. He said, ‘Whoever wrote this is a better writer than you are now, Hank. But he won’t be forever. You’ll catch up. You’ll leave him in the dust. But not until you start really doing the work, and not doing it to get laid. Doing it for…it. For the work itself. Doing it to make your own small, particular noise.’ I always remembered that phrase. My own noise. I never took credit for anybody’s work again.”
“Yeah, but also you didn’t listen to him at first and did it anyway, right? And got caught and totally owned in front of your friend and that girl and everybody else in the whole school.”
I nodded. “There was that.”
“I won’t do it again either.”
“Good.”
We walked along. The tide was coming in, and we had to scamper up into the soft sand ahead of a sluice of cold water.
“That whale makes me sad,” Tim said finally.
“Me too.”
“Why would he beach himself like that?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t get death.”
That startled me into a laugh. “Me neither.”
I looked out to the hazy horizon and it sparked a memory. “I was walking with my dad on the beach in Malibu—I must have been a little younger than you are now. We saw someone parachuting into the water about a mile out. It was a stuntman. They were shooting a film. He got tangled in the cords of his chute and drowned. We found out later on, watching the news that night. I felt like we should have helped somehow, but there was nothing we could have done. The ocean is so—I don’t know—merciless? An older girl I had a terrible crush on had almost drowned the week before, swimming in the storm surf. She was a strong swimmer and she got lucky. But it was terrifying. We stood on the beach for two hours, trying to catch sight of her. It was getting dark, and you could feel death right next to you.”
“Like with that poor whale.”
“Yeah. It seems so cruel, but it’s not even that. More like—indifferent.”
He nodded. He understood. “You can’t fight the ocean. But people do things to each other, and you can stop them. You can catch them, and you can make a difference.”
“That’s true.”
“Maybe that’s why you became a policeman.”
I nodded. “And not a surfer. Or a stuntman.”
We trudged up the beach to a set of wooden stairs, cut through some summer person’s backyard, and walked back to the car along the road.
We couldn’t see the ocean, but we could still hear the waves.
Feeling crowded by the generations and oddly lost in time, I sat down at our unsteady kitchen table when we got home and wrote a poem about fate and death and the generations—all the big stuff. It was a strange poem to write at the start of that dark season, when so much of the past would repeat itself in terrible ways and every miscalculation felt like destiny. Much later, my friend Pat Folger, the grizzled old-school Nantucket contractor, would sum it up with his usual down-east brevity:
“What goes around comes around, buddy. And this time it came for you.”
Chapter Two
Match Wits with Inspector Kennis
The first time I saw her I was throwing up in the women’s bathroom on the slow boat from Hyannis. I was seasick, and I couldn’t make it to the men’s room. I couldn’t even make it to the toilet. The seas were so rough, the boat almost turned back. I had tried to talk to her as we shuffled along boarding the boat. “Pretty windy, huh?” She laughed and said, “I love a rough ride.” That laugh. It knocked me off my foundations. And an hour later I’m retching my guts out in front of her and can see the shock and disgust on her face. Then she was gone, and the door slammed shut behind her. I wanted to call out to her, but I didn’t even know her name.
—From Todd Fraker’s deleted blog
Hours before the first disappearance, on the day after I brought my ailing mother home to Nantucket, I got a frantic call from Mike Henderson.
He’d been accused of robbery again.
“It’s some sort of jug and bow
l set,” he said. “I literally have no idea what they’re talking about. But they’re going to fire me unless I can find it for them, and they owe me almost fifteen thousand dollars. You probably know this, Chief, but just for the record? Cindy and I don’t exactly have a give-or-take-fifteen-thousand-dollars lifestyle. This will ruin me.”
He gave me the address, on Almanack Pond Road. I recognized it instantly as the sprawling estate of Marge and Walter Callahan. I’d had dealings with them the previous summer. From what I’d seen of Walter Callahan, I was surprised he hadn’t already assembled a posse of Range Rovers and hunted Mike down for a dose of leather-trimmed frontier justice. But the Callahans, along with most of the other potential billionaire vigilantes, had vacated the island after the Labor Day weekend. They had whipped Mike into a state of panic with one long-distance phone call.
“You go on and take care of it, honey,” my mother told me. “Jane and I will be fine here.” It was true. They were already best friends, and Mom had actually hugged Jane, not me, when we arrived in California two days before.
I pulled and chewed at the decision to bring my mother to the island as I drove out to Polpis that afternoon, fraying the edges of my resolve. She had Parkinson’s disease. She was never going to get better, despite her heroic eating and exercise regimens. With Parkinson’s you only get worse. Having her in the house would be a burden on Jane, and though she cheerfully accepted the situation now, I worried for the long run. Still, the alternative was untenable.
Ten years into the disease, still relentlessly ambulatory in her midseventies, my mother had been living in a “retirement community” in Long Beach, California, on the fifth floor of a beautifully restored hotel from the golden era of Hollywood, called The Shingle.
The ceiling of the lobby floated twenty feet above the marble floor with intricately worked plaster panels that put the tin ceilings of Greenwich Village cafés to shame. The peaked red tile of its roofs and turrets lent it a Mission Revival feeling, and the top-floor restaurant, the Panorama Room, earned its name with a spectacular view of the harbor while retaining a heady whisper of old-time movie glamour. The staff was charming and helpful, the suites themselves spacious and sunny, sparked with period detail in the moldings and baseboards, with high ceilings and water views. The resident dining room was spacious and congenial, the other residents friendly and patient. You couldn’t ask for a more pleasant and professional assisted living arrangement.
And I hated it, with every fiber of my being.
I hated the way the impeccably courteous and hard-working staff treated my mother and the other residents as a separate, feeble race, inferior but privileged like hemophiliac dwarf royalty, simultaneously catered to and patronized, deferred to and dismissed. I hated the smell in the hallways, some tragic perfume of disinfectant and decay—the sense, so much like the sense you get in a hospital, of a world where human volition and dignity have been sacrificed to the mechanisms of medical technology and routine.
I also hated the dining hall food, tasteless and generic as if the management actually calibrated how many of the residents had no working taste buds left and arranged the meal preparations accordingly. I hated the weak coffee, the fuzzy sausages, and the cardboard pancakes—the sense that the particular texture of life, the look and feel and taste of things, didn’t really matter anymore.
Most of all, I hated the resignation of the people there, the heartbreaking schedule of activities posted in the elevator—exercise classes at noon, crafts at three, casino night on Thursdays—and the stigma that seemed to hang over them. To be there was to be forgotten.
It was a world of decay and extinction. It wore me down, made me feel half-dead already, padding through an upholstered necropolis infinitely removed from a child’s embrace or a home-cooked meal.
Those smog-bound early September days, wandering the husk of the old hotel, so long past its glory, as forlorn as its inhabitants, sitting in the empty bar where Clark Gable and Greta Garbo had once eaten caviar and toasted the New Year, inventorying the unused walkers and wheelchairs, and the coffee dispensers on the sideboard, made all of this uncompromisingly clear, both to me and to my brother, Phil. When Mom said she wanted to get out of there and spend whatever time she had left with people she loved, with people who missed her and wanted to be with her, we scarcely had to discuss it. We just breathed a sigh of relief, grabbed each other for a group hug, and started planning her escape.
Of course, with Phil always on the move, long divorced and living out of a suitcase, chasing sex crimes cases from San Mateo to Ogunquit, Maine, Mom would be living with us. That was fine with me. The worst part of leaving Los Angeles had always been losing our day-to-day contact.
Tim and Carrie would get to know her now. That was a great thing. But the house was small, and it was already packed with two busy grown-ups, three rowdy kids, and a dog.
“We can handle it,” Jane said to me after a solemn kiss to seal the deal. “We’ll be fine.”
I had to hope she was right.
I took the right turn onto the dirt track of Almanack Pond Road, turning my mind back to Mike Henderson. He had his own problems, and, as I was about to find out, the Callahans’ absurd accusation was the least of them.
The Callahans’ Nantucket estate was called “High Meadow,” and the tiny guest cottage behind the stables featured a quarter board like the one above the main-house front door but with the name “Sod Square” cut into the wood and painted gold, bracketed by golden clamshells. A little too cute for me, but accurate enough. The place was tiny, a glorified shed with barely enough room inside for two single beds, the end table between them, and a narrow armchair with a floor lamp. The walls displayed a wraparound mural of the harbor with the Brant Point lighthouse looming above the headboards. The lamp on the table was a miniature lighthouse, and the theme carried over onto the bedspreads and pillowcases.
This preening, proprietary obsession with island iconography turned simple affection for the place into a tacky collector’s mania. These billionaires felt the need to physically connect themselves to the mystique of the island, from the Tervis tumblers printed with local town names to the ACK stickers and vanity Connecticut license plates (SRFSYD, ACK NICE), to the new lightship-basket toilet bowls that local designer Julia Copenhaver had started selling, complete with ivory scrimshaw lids. It reminded me of a teenager tattooing a girlfriend’s name on his bicep.
Mike was inside Sod Square when I arrived, and I squeezed beside him.
“The jug and bowl were on this little table, supposedly,” he said. “Though I don’t really get why you need a jug and bowl, when there’s no water in the place.”
I glanced around the cramped, over-decorated little shrine. “And they say you took this stuff?”
“Not exactly. They never quite say it. You get a phone call and it goes like this—‘Uh, Mike, we have a little problem out at the house? Apparently, our lovely little jug and bowl set has gone missing. You were the last person out there, so…we’re not saying you stole it! But we’d really like it back.’”
“Jesus.”
“Walter accused me of stealing some books last year—because, according to them, I’m the only tradesman who reads. Turns out Marge had donated them to the Hospital Thrift Shop when she got her Kindle. And now this.”
I noticed a string with a plastic tip hanging from the ceiling and inclined my head toward it. “What’s that?”
“Just the pull-down for the attic.”
“Did you look up there?”
“Who’d stash a jug and bowl set in an attic?”
I shrugged. “House cleaners? To get it out of the way? And then they forgot about it.”
“Worth a shot.” He pulled the string, lowered the hatch, took off his shoes, and climbed up on one of the beds for a look. “Bingo!”
He sounded more annoyed than relieved. He handed down the crockery and
let the square batten-board swing shut as he climbed down.
I examined the plunder as he straightened out the bedding. “This is crap.”
He took the bowl from me. “I saw something just like it at Kmart last year. On the sale table.”
“They have you marked as quite the high-class cat burglar! What’s next? The Stop & Shop beach chairs?”
“Good thing they don’t know what happened at the main house today.”
“Something bad?”
“Take a look, and you tell me.”
Mike led me out of the guest shack, around the barn, and across the wide, perfectly manicured lawn, amid the smells of hay, horses, and newly cut grass. I heard nothing but the sluggish breeze moving the high branches of the sycamores and a distant motor of bees idling among the geraniums. The property was serene, Arcadian—and inescapably sinister. This imperial wealth didn’t exist in a vacuum. It was part of a world where billions of people were starving to death and drinking contaminated water; part of a community where ill-paid and overworked minions scrambled in a controlled panic to keep everything on properties like this one perfect—the hedges sculpted, the flower beds weeded and raked so no footprint would show a human presence, the bedsheets laundered and ironed daily, the paint trim flawless and glossy.
And all for the likes of Marge and Walter Callahan with their luck-of-the-draw arrogance and preening self-absorption. I thought of my daughter’s boyfriend, Hector Cruz, and his father, Sebastian, a landscaper like the one who tended these grounds, but also a strident political playwright whose drama about kidnapping people like the Callahans and interrogating them—in one extreme case, waterboarding them—on the subject of their unearned privilege had scandalized the town just a month before.
I took one last look across the rolling parkland dappled with tree shadow before I stepped inside behind Mike, thinking, “Con madre, mi cuate. Adelante con los faroles.”
We moved through the massive, sterile “great room”—with its requisite wooden seabirds, fully rigged clipper ship models, and the grotesque note of a three-foot Queequeg sculpture aiming a harpoon at the giant French doors—and on into the kitchen.
Nantucket Penny Page 2
