“What? Sorry, Gramma… I mean, what is it?”
“Have you read Jane’s book Beyond Brant Point Light?”
“I started it. I’m kind of busy with school right now? And we had assigned reading in the summer.”
“Which you didn’t start until August,” Tim put in smugly.
“Shut up!” Back to Gramma: “What about Jane’s book?”
“Well, it had a girl in it who sounds a lot like you, and another girl who sounds a lot like this Judy Gobeler. I guess things don’t change much over the years. But, anyway, in the book the Gobeler girl comes back just as the other girl is about to get married. She wants revenge. And it doesn’t end well for anyone. Revenge stories rarely do. I think revenge is like scratching a poison ivy rash. It feels good for a second, but you wind up making things worse. Anyway…I guess the point is, people remember when you make them feel bad.”
Carrie let out a tight little breath. “Well, I didn’t make anybody feel anything, and I’m not some character in some cheesy mystery novel. I’m a real person, and I don’t appreciate being ganged up on after a really bad day!”
She stalked out of the room, and Mom said, “She’ll be all right. It’s hard being sixteen.”
Tim snorted. “It’s easy for her. She makes it hard for everyone else.”
“So Debbie’s part of her gang now?” Jane asked.
“They used to hate each other. Now they’re besties. I can’t keep up.”
“Are you going to patch things up with her?” I asked. I always liked Debbie Garrison.
“I don’t know. Maybe. If she’s interested in someone else, that’s fine. She’s gotten so awful lately. I don’t even know what to say to her. All she cares about is stupid stuff and what brand of jeans to wear and who’s following who on Instagram or whatever. Maybe I should ask Judy out. Or at least have lunch with her. She always eats by herself.”
Mom said, “You might start a trend!”
Tim’s doleful look doused the optimism. “Let’s not go crazy, Gramma.”
Meanwhile, Sam had come over to sit on Jane’s lap. He seemed younger and smaller than his eleven years this afternoon.
“What is it, honey?” Jane asked him.
“Nothing.”
She ruffled his hair. “Everything is something.”
She gently lifted the test paper from his hand. “You studied so hard for this!”
“Ms. Fox hates me.”
“No, I don’t think she really—”
“She does! She hates me! I always get detention for no reason, and she said I was stupid yesterday!”
“She what?”
“She said I was stupid, and I could never learn anything, and I ought to be in some special school and ride the short bus.”
“Sam!”
“She did!”
“What about that English paper we worked on together?” She turned to me. “Fox is obsessed with trivial shit like indentation and the Oxford comma. So I went over Sam’s last assignment—he had to write a story about a pet—”
“I wrote about how Dervish chases everything, even the moon!”
Dervish was Billy Delavane’s beloved pug whom Sam had known since he was a baby, long before I met Jane or we adopted Bailey, our Portuguese water dog, currently circling the table, always hopeful for a scrap of food.
“Sam wrote the piece all by himself,” Jane added hastily. “I just line-edited it, the spelling and punctuation, made sure every paragraph was indented exactly six spaces. And only one space after every period.” She sniffed. “All the important stuff.”
“What did Ms. Fox say about it?” I asked.
Sam started to answer, but a pulse of tears silenced him.
Jane smoothed his cheek dry with her thumb. “Sam! What did she say?”
“She’s so mean, Mommy.”
“Tell me what she said.”
Sam sat up a little straighter, bunched up his face, and lowered his voice. Despite his upset, some part of him obviously enjoyed imitating his teacher. “‘So! You finally did something right! Amazing.’”
Jane held him away a little to look in his eyes. “She said that?”
“She hates me.”
“That’s it. It’s time for me to have a little talk with Diana Fox.”
“Don’t get me in trouble, Mom.”
She smoothed his forehead. “You’re not in trouble, honey. Ms. Fox is in trouble.”
He sighed. “She didn’t even like my riddles.”
I sat forward. I liked riddles. “What riddles?”
“I found an old joke book at take-leave-it, and I thought the puzzles and stuff were so cool. Ms. Fox said they were dumb and took away the book.”
“Do you remember any of them?” my mom asked. She’d been listening to the conversation carefully, though she hadn’t said anything.
Sam grinned at her. “Sure! Here’s one! Ready? Two girls are born to the same mother on the same day and the same hour in the same hospital, but they’re not twins! How can that possibly be? Wanta hear? Wanta hear?”
Ms. Fox was forgotten for the moment.
“Wait a second,” I said. “Let us think.”
Mom got it first: “Triplets! They’re two girls in a set of triplets.”
Sam raised an arm and slapped her five. “Nice one, Mrs. Kennis.”
“Call me Hope, sweetie. Everyone else does.”
“Okay, Hope. Try this one! What gets wetter the more it dries?”
“I know this one,” Tim offered.
“Then shhhhhh!!” The urgency of Sam’s frown made me smile.
“Okay, okay,” Tim said.
The rest of us were stumped. “A towel!” Sam crowed. “Here’s the last one. What word is always spelled incorrectly in the dictionary?”
I got that one. “The word ‘incorrectly.’”
His face fell for a second. “Yeah.” Then he brightened. “Good one, Henry!”
“Great riddles,” I said. “You know the best thing about them? For me? They teach you how to be a better detective. Like the first one. So often you look at a problem the way it was presented, and all you see are the terms you were given—twins who can’t be twins, like a suspect with a perfect alibi. You have to move outside of those rules you make for yourself—to imagine triplets or to figure out that the suspect was standing in front of a clock where he’d shifted the hands back forty minutes.”
Sam’s eyes widened. “Wow.”
“Or the second one. The trick there is making us misread the word ‘dries’ as something that happens to the towel instead of something it’s doing. Like the time I arrested someone for framing someone else—making it look like someone else had committed the crime? And, in fact, someone was doing the same thing to him—making it look like he was setting someone else up…actually framing him for framing someone else. Just like one of your riddles—tricking me into seeing things the wrong way. Those riddles really make you think. They’d be a fantastic teaching tool. Too bad Ms. Fox couldn’t figure that out.”
Sam nodded solemnly. “Yeah.”
It turned out that the third riddle, and the easiest one to solve, was the most germane to my life and to the case I didn’t even know I was working on.
The lesson: see the obvious—before it’s too late.
***
Rob Roman, our island’s newest private investigator, came into my office on Thursday morning with his newest client, Mike Henderson, slouching behind him. Mike’s face was drawn down with worry and lack of sleep, his long hair was unruly, and it looked like he hadn’t changed his painting clothes since the day before. By contrast, Roman, short and bulky, wearing a crewneck cotton sweater, khakis, and horn-rimmed glasses, looked like a college adjunct who’d been grading papers all morning.
“Mike,” I said. “I w
asn’t expecting you.”
“Well, I had to come, Chief. Rob and I are having kind of a disagreement, and I wanted to make my case in person. We need another pair of eyes on this.”
I stood up behind my desk and reached across it to shake Roman’s hand. “Rob, good to see you. How can I help?”
He pulled up a chair next to Mike’s, let himself down heavily, and shook his head. “Well, Chief, I gotta tell you, this is one crazy little island you got here.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“Kind of a plantation police state, ghetto gulag, moated elite resort, high-crime, pill-popping, post-preppie playground, am I right?”
I had to smile. “Let me take a second to process all that.” I gave it maybe five seconds, then shrugged. “Pretty much.”
“And don’t take it wrong, I’m new to the place, so what the fuck do I know? But it’s getting crazier all the time.”
“How so?”
“People ditching, people breaking up, people taking off, people disappearing. The disappeared! It’s starting to look like Argentina around here! Without the junta.”
He had my attention now. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about, Rob.”
“Sure. Makes sense—someone goes missing, most people would rather hire a PI than bring the cops into it. Especially small-town people. Nobody likes the gossip machine, am I right? When it’s probably nothing. But, see…everybody I talk to? They’re just dealing with their own problems. They don’t see the big picture.”
“Who exactly are we talking about?”
“Well, take David Trezize, for instance. Local newspaper editor?”
I nodded.
“Okay, let’s start with him. He texts his girlfriend he was working on a big immigration story, supposed to run in The Shoals this week. She was in Boston at the time. See the paper yet? No story.”
“I don’t really see why that would—”
Rob held up his hand. “The girlfriend, Kathleen Lomax? You know her, right? She gets back home and there’s a note. Says he’s going off-island, following up another big scoop. Some lead in Brewster.”
“Go on.”
“Well, I looked into it. I found no trail at all. No record of plane or boat tickets. Did he swim?”
“He could have a commuter book.”
“I’m hearing that a lot lately. The all-purpose commuter book. How many people really buy those things, Chief? And Trezize went off-island, like, once a year, that’s what Ms. Lomax says. The two of them fly JetBlue to New York and see plays in the summer, but they always go together. Then there’s the whole texting thing. Trezize hates texting, always griping about it. And he never told his ex-wife anything about this trip. He was supposed to have the kids last night, but he never said a word. Total no-show. Which isn’t like him. He’s a good father, even the ex admits that. But now, all of a sudden, he turns into Mr. Deadbeat Dad. His phone goes dark. Calls go straight to voicemail, no more texts, no email. No message on Facebook. I tell Kathleen, ‘He’ll turn up. Relax.’”
“Which is just what I would have said.”
“But I don’t like it.”
“Me neither.”
“And now Cindy is gone,” Mike put in. “I knew Mark Toland was coming to the island for Lena Perry’s wedding, and Cindy told me she wanted to see him and settle things, and I said fine, but then I freaked out.”
“He asked me to keep an eye on them,” Rob finished.
“Mike mentioned that he’d hired you.”
“Right, well, this was just part of the job. I checked the hospital first, then the steamship and the airport. No one dead or injured or traveling. I picked them up at Toland’s house—”
“—and lost them at the wedding.”
“Hey, Mike—”
I sat forward. “How did that happen?”
Rob frowned. “If I knew that, I wouldn’t have lost them. They separated. She went off with the bridesmaids, he went to the can. I didn’t want to follow him in there. Turns out there was another door, led into some kind of service area and the rear exit. The bridesmaids wouldn’t say a word, and that’s that. Cindy and this Toland guy are both in the wind. Looked to me like they had it planned.”
“Tell him the rest.”
“It’s just a theory.”
I set my elbows on my desk and rested my chin on my clasped fist. “Let’s hear it.”
“You see as much crime as I do, maybe you start looking for it.”
“Go on.”
“What if they didn’t run off together? What if they were kidnapped? You know—first this David Trezize, then Toland and Cindy. Makes you wonder—who’s next?”
“Unless that’s not happening at all.” I thought for a second, rummaging, then pulled out a loose fact from the junk drawer of my memory, like a stray triple-A battery. “There is an actual connection between the three of them, you know.”
Mike shrugged. “Vampire Weekend fans?”
“Maybe. But also—Dalton.”
“Dalton?”
“Cindy and David both spent at least one year of high school in New York, attending the Dalton School. One of the first times I spoke to her, she was trying to decide whether or not to go to her reunion. The main draw was a guy named Mark Toland. It was a classic high-school sad-sack love triangle: David crushing on Cindy, Cindy crushing on Mark, and Mark paying no attention while he dated the cool girls. And Toland wound up here for his senior year. She never mentioned this to you?”
Mike studied his lap. “We don’t talk about Mark Toland a lot. Cindy and I didn’t get together until college. If she was mooning over that prick in high school, I wouldn’t have known about it.”
Rob pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. “So, this is some kind of Dalton reunion?”
“Could be.”
He grunted. “Some kind of long-delayed three-way? The fantasy hookup that never happened?”
Mike winced like Rob had just spilled something on him. “Please.”
“It could be a normal reunion. Or a fundraising session. One way or another, David and Cindy know quite a few of the local billionaires. Toland is probably the head of the alumni association.”
“I guess.”
“Or it could be a get-together for some teen organization, something that would connect the cool kids and the geeks—the AV club or the drama department. David writes, Mark’s a director—”
“—and Cindy played Alma in the school production of Summer and Smoke.”
I lifted my hands, palms up. “There you go.”
Mike sighed. “Well, maybe, but I think it’s a lot simpler than that, Chief. No bizarro high school reunions or impromptu fund drives. No serial kidnappers haunting the Nantucket wedding receptions. Just a confused woman and an old flame.”
“What about David?”
“I can see him in Brewster following up some crazy lead. And he forgets his phone all the time. He came to some jobsite a few years ago where the people had built their house two inches over the property line and the neighbors were suing. David wanted to interview the contractor and the homeowner. Anyway, he left his phone on a sawhorse, and some kid who worked for me knocked it into a bucket of paint. Kind of a perfect Nantucket story in so many ways. The point is, David gets oblivious when he’s working. Kathy should have figured that out by now. But that has nothing to do with Cindy and Mark Toland. Or what’s going on in my marriage. I did some snooping on my own, and I found this.”
He pulled out his phone, located a screen grab, and handed it over to me. I caught Rob Roman’s long-suffering, save-us-from-the-amateurs eyebrow lift.
“What?”
Rob shrugged. “Read it.”
“It’s from Cindy’s diary,” Mike added.
“Not a great idea, reading your wife’s diary.”
“I kno
w, I know. But this particular entry made me feel a lot better.”
Rob said, “You might need your glasses. The text is small, and her handwriting doesn’t help.”
“I don’t wear glasses.”
“Not even for reading?”
“I know—it’s annoying. Drives Jane crazy. She has six pairs of drugstore glasses, and she can’t hold on to any of them. I found one pair in the vegetable drawer of the fridge last week. They must have fallen off while she was looking for the spinach.”
“Sounds Freudian to me. She hates wearing them, so her unconscious mind keeps sabotaging her.”
I looked up at him. “Probably true. But stunningly unhelpful.”
I tilted the phone for the best angle.
I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know
I can’t sleep
Everything I think is wrong everything I want is bad everything I write is lie. And all the things I don’t write, why do I leave them out? That’s a bigger lie, sins of omission. That drive out to Snake Hollow, why would I hide that? No one’s going to read this. And why would I even want to go back there, especially with Mark? It was perfect, we almost got stuck in the sand just like the old days. Flat cactus souvenirs, quoting Eliot, Hollow Men in their local habitat. All the echoes. Mark said remember rowing against the tide? He was laughing but it was one of the scariest days of my life. So many awful scary bad days with Mark Toland. Why do criminals revisit the scene of the crime? Why do they want to? Maybe—to feel it again, to know it really happened, not to feel better but to feel worse, to keep the wound open.
But those are just—thoughts. I can control my own thoughts. I can stop this. I can say no. Turn around and walk away. Never look back, finally stop looking back.
I can end it and I will.
I handed the phone back.
Mike slipped it into his pocket. “Is that a woman heading off for a romantic tryst with the long-lost love of her life?”
“She’s conflicted, Mike. But if it was easy to close things down with Toland, she would have done it already. She wouldn’t be fretting about it in her diary.”
“I’ll email you the file, so you can look it over if you want. Read it over, you’ll see what I’m talking about. When I read it, I thought of that poem of yours, the one that got honorable mention in that Glimmer Train contest. Yeah, yeah—I googled you. And I thought—wow, the Chief has been there! Your wife was cheating on you with some long-lost lover, right? And you said it perfectly—what was that line? ‘The fire has to burn to burn out.’ That’s it. That’s what’s going on here. She’ll be back. The proof is, she left a penny on our pillow. It slipped off, but I found it when I made the bed.”
Nantucket Penny Page 11
