The Perfect Couple

by Elin Hilderbrand

  Greer points out Main Street, a certain restaurant she likes that serves an organic beet salad, a store that sells the red pants that all of the gentlemen will be wearing tomorrow. They’ve ordered a pair for Bruce, Greer says, tailored precisely to the measurements he sent them (this is news to Karen). Greer points out the boutique where she bought a clutch purse that matches her mother-of-the-groom dress (though the dress itself she bought in New York, of course, she says, and Karen nearly says that of course she bought her mother-of-the-bride dress at Neiman Marcus in the King of Prussia Mall using Bruce’s discount but decides this will sound pathetic) and a shop that specializes in nautical antiques where Greer always buys Tag’s Father’s Day presents.

  Bruce says, “Do you have a boat, then?”

  Greer laughs like this is a silly question, and maybe it is a silly question. Maybe everyone on this island has a boat; maybe it’s a practical necessity, like having a sturdy snow shovel for Easton winters.

  “We have three,” she says. “A thirty-seven-foot Hinckley picnic boat named Ella for puttering over to Tuckernuck, a thirty-two-foot Grady-White that we take to Great Point to fish for stripers, and a thirteen-foot Whaler, which we bought so the kids could get back and forth to Coatue with their girlfriends.”

  Bruce nods like he approves and Karen wonders if he has any earthly idea what Greer is talking about. Karen certainly doesn’t; the woman might as well be speaking Swahili.

  How will Karen and Greer be related once the kids are married? Karen wonders. Each will be the mother-in-law of the other’s child but no relation to each other, or at least not a relation that has a name. In many instances, she suspects, the mothers of two people getting married dislike each other, or worse. Karen would like to think that she and Greer could get to know each other and find kinship and become as close as sisters, but that would only happen in the fantasy world where Karen doesn’t die.

  “We also have kayaks, both one-person and two-person,” Greer says. “Tag loves the kayaks more than the boats, I think. He may love the kayaks more than the boys!”

  Bruce laughs like this is the funniest thing he’s ever heard. Karen scowls. Who would joke about something like that? She needs a pain pill. She rummages through her wine-colored Tory Burch hobo bag, which was a present from Bruce when she finished her first chemo protocol, back when they were still filled with hope. She pulls out her bottle of oxycodone. She is very careful to pick out a small round pill and not one of the three pearlescent ovoids, and she throws it back without water. The oxy makes her heart race, but it’s the only thing that works against the pain.

  Karen wants to admire the scenery but she has to close her eyes. After a while, Greer says, “We’ll be there in a jiffy.” Her British accent reminds Karen of Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins. Jiff-jiff-jiffy, Karen thinks. Greer drives around a traffic circle, then puts on her blinker and turns left. With the sudden movement of the car, the oxy kicks in. Karen’s pain subsides and a sense of well-being washes over her like a golden wave. It’s by far the best part of the oxy, this initial rush when the pain is absorbed like a spill by a sponge. Karen is most certainly on her way to becoming addicted if she isn’t already, but Dr. Edman is generous with medication. What does addiction matter at this point?

  “Here we are!” Greer announces as she pulls into a white-shell driveway.

  SUMMERLAND, a sign says. PRIVATE. Karen peers out the window. There’s a row of hydrangea bushes on either side of the driveway, alternately fuchsia and periwinkle, and then they drive under a boxwood arch into what Karen can only think of as some kind of waterfront utopia. There’s a main house, stately and grand with crisp white-and-green awnings over the windows. Opposite the main house are two smaller cottages set amid landscaped gardens with gurgling stone fountains and flagstone paths and lavish flower beds. And all of this is only yards away from the water. The harbor is right there, and across the flat blue expanse of the harbor is town. Karen can pick out the church towers she saw from the ferry. The Nantucket skyline.

  Karen has a hard time finding air, much less words. This is the most beautiful place she has ever been. It’s so beautiful it hurts.

  Today is Friday. The rehearsal at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church is scheduled for six o’clock and will be followed by a clambake for sixty people that will include a raw bar and live music, a cover band that plays the Beach Boys and Jimmy Buffett. There will be a “small tent” set up on the beach to shelter the band and four rectangular tables of fifteen. And there will be lobster.

  The wedding is Saturday at four o’clock, and it will be followed by a sit-down dinner under the “big tent,” which has a clear plastic roof so that the guests can see the sky. There will be a dance floor, an eighteen-piece orchestra, and seventeen round tables that seat ten guests each. On Sunday, the Winburys are hosting a brunch at their golf club; this will be followed by a nap, at least for herself, Karen thinks. On Monday morning, Karen and Bruce will leave on the ferry, and Celeste and Benji will fly from Boston to Athens and from there to Santorini.

  Stop time, Karen thinks. She doesn’t want to get out of the car. She wants to stay right here, with all of those sumptuous plans still in front of her, forever.

  Bruce helps Karen down out of the car and hands over her cane, and in the time it takes for this to happen, people pop out of the main house and appear from the cottages as though Bruce and Karen are visiting dignitaries. Well, they are, Karen thinks. They are the mother and father of the bride.

  She knows they are also something of a curiosity because they are poor and because Karen is sick, and she hopes all of them will be gentle with their appraisals.

  “Hello,” Karen says to the assembled group. “I’m Karen Otis.” She looks for someone she recognizes, but Greer has vanished and Celeste is nowhere to be found. Karen squints into the sun. She has met Benji, Celeste’s betrothed, only three times, and all she can remember of him, thanks to chemo brain, is the cowlick that she had to keep herself from smoothing down every ten seconds. There are two young, good-looking men in front of her, and Karen knows that neither of them is Benji. One is in a snappy cornflower-blue polo and Karen smiles at him. This young man steps forward, hand extended.

  “I’m Thomas Winbury, Mrs. Otis,” he says. “Benji’s brother.”

  Karen shakes Thomas’s hand; his grip is nearly enough to turn Karen’s bones to powder. “Please, call me Karen.”

  “And I’m Bruce, Bruce Otis.” Bruce shakes Thomas’s hand and then the hand of the young man standing next to Thomas. He has very dark hair and crystalline-blue eyes. He’s so striking that Karen can hardly keep from staring.

  “Shooter Uxley,” the young man says. “Benji’s best man.”

  Shooter, yes! Celeste has mentioned Shooter. It isn’t a name one forgets, and Celeste had tried to explain why Shooter was the best man instead of Benji’s brother, Thomas, but the story was puzzling to Karen, as though Celeste were describing characters on a TV series Karen had never seen.

  Bruce then shakes the hands of two young ladies, one with chestnut hair and freckles and one a dangerous-looking brunette who is wearing a formfitting jersey dress in a color that Karen would call scarlet, like the letter.

  “Aren’t you hot?” the Scarlet Letter asks Bruce. With a slightly different inflection, it would sound as though the girl were hitting on Bruce, but Karen realizes she’s talking about Bruce’s outfit, the black jeans, the black-and-turquoise shirt, the loafers, the socks. He looks sharp but he doesn’t exactly fit in. Everyone else is in casual summer clothes—the men in shorts and polo shirts, the ladies in bright cotton sundresses. Celeste had told Karen no less than half a dozen times to remind Bruce that the Winburys were preppy. Preppy, that was the word Celeste insisted on using, and it sounded quaint to Karen. Didn’t that term go out of style decades ago, right along with Yuppie? Celeste had said: Tell MacGyver, blue blazers and no socks. When Karen had passed on this message, Bruce had laughed, but not happily.

  I know how to d
ress myself, Bruce had said. That’s my job.

  A tall, silver-haired gentleman strides across the lawn and walks down the three stone steps into the driveway. He’s dripping wet and wearing a pair of bathing trunks and a neoprene rash guard.

  “Welcome!” he calls out. “I’d open my arms to you but let’s wait until I dry off for those familiarities.”

  “Did you capsize again, Tag?” the Scarlet Letter teases.

  The gentleman ignores the comment and approaches Karen. When she offers her hand, he kisses it, a gesture that catches her off guard. She’s not sure anyone has ever kissed her hand before. There’s a first time for everything, she thinks, even for a dying woman. “Madame,” he says. His accent is English enough to be charming but not so much that it’s obnoxious. “I’m Tag Winbury. Thank you for coming all this way, thank you for indulging my wife in all her planning, and thank you, most of all, for your beautiful, intelligent, and enchanting daughter, our celestial Celeste. We are absolutely enamored of her and tickled pink about this impending union.”

  “Oh,” Karen says. She feels the roses rising to her cheeks, which was how her father always described her blushing. This man is divine! He has managed to set Karen at ease while at the same time making her feel like a queen.

  There’s a tap on Karen’s shoulder and she turns carefully, planting her cane in the shells of the driveway.

  “B-B-Betty!”

  It’s Celeste. She’s wearing a white sundress and a pair of barely there sandals; her hair is braided. She has gotten a suntan, and her blue eyes look wide and sad in her face.

  Sad? Karen thinks. This should be the happiest day of her life, or the second-happiest. Karen knows Celeste is worried about her, but Karen is determined to forget she’s sick—at least for the next three days—and she wants everyone else to do the same.

  “Darling!” Karen says, kissing Celeste on the cheek.

  “Betty, you’re here,” Celeste says, without a trace of stutter. “Can you believe it? You’re here.”

  “Yes,” Karen says, and she reminds herself that she is the reason that the whole wedding is being held now, during the busiest week of the summer. “I’m here.”

  Saturday, July 7, 2018, 6:45 a.m.

  THE CHIEF

  He pulls up to 333 Monomoy Road right behind state police detective Nicholas Diamantopoulos, otherwise known as the Greek. Nick’s father is Greek and his mother is Cape Verdean; Nick has brown skin, a shaved head, and a jet-black goatee. He’s so good-looking that people joke he should quit the job and play a cop on TV—better hours and more money—but Nick is content being a damn good detective and a notorious ladies’ man.

  Nick and the Chief worked together on the last homicide, a drug-related murder on Cato Lane. Nick spent the first fifteen years of his career in New Bedford, where the streets were dangerous and the criminals hardened, but Nick doesn’t subscribe to the tough-guy shtick; he doesn’t use any of the strong-arming tactics you see in the movies. When Nick is questioning persons of interest, he is encouraging and empathetic; he sometimes tells stories about his ya-ya back in Thessaloníki who wore an ugly black dress and uglier black shoes every day after his grandfather passed. And the results he gets! He says the word ya-ya and people confess to everything. The guy’s a magician.

  “Nicky,” the Chief says.

  “Chief,” Nick says. He nods at the house. “This is sad, huh? The maid of honor.”

  “Tragic,” the Chief says. He’s dreading what he’s going to find inside. Not only is a twenty-nine-year-old woman dead, but the family and guests have to be questioned, and all of the complicated, costly wedding preparations have to be undone without destroying the integrity of the crime scene.

  Before the Chief left his house, he went upstairs to find Chloe to see if she had heard the news. She had been in the bathroom. Through the closed door, the Chief had heard the sound of her vomiting.

  He’d knocked. “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’m fine.”

  Fine, the Chief thought. Meaning she’d spent her postshift hours on the beach drinking Bud Light and doing shots of Fireball.

  He had kissed Andrea good-bye in the kitchen and said, “I think Chloe was drinking last night.”

  Andrea sighed. “I’ll talk to her.”

  Talking to Chloe wasn’t going to help, the Chief thought. She needed a new job—shelving books at the children’s library or counting plover eggs out on Smith’s Point. Something that would keep her out of trouble, not lead her right to it.

  The Chief and Nick walk past the left side of the main house onto the lawn, where an enormous tent has been erected. They find the guys from forensics inside the tent, one bagging, one photographing. Nick heads down to the beach to check out the body; the Chief sees that the girl has been left just shy of the waterline but she’ll need to be moved to the hospital morgue as soon as possible on this hot a day. Inside the tent, there is one round table surrounded by four white banquet chairs. In the middle of the table is a nearly empty bottle of Mount Gay Black Barrel rum and four shot glasses, two of them on their sides. There’s half a quahog shell that served as an ashtray for someone’s cigar. A Romeo y Julieta. Cuban.

  One of the forensics guys, Randy, is bagging a pair of silver sandals.

  “Where did you find those?” the Chief asks.

  “Under that chair,” Randy says, pointing. “Connor has a picture of them. Size eight Mystique sandals. I’m no shoe salesman, but I’m guessing they belonged to the deceased. We’ll confirm.”

  Nick returns. “The girl has a nasty gash on her foot,” he says. “And I noticed there’s a trail of blood in the sand.”

  “Any blood on the sandals?” the Chief asks Randy.

  “No, sir,” Randy says.

  “Took off her shoes, cut her foot on a shell, maybe,” Nick says.

  “Well, she didn’t die of a cut on her foot,” the Chief says. “Unless she swam out too far and couldn’t get back in because of the foot?”

  “That doesn’t sound right,” Nick says. “There’s also a two-person kayak overturned on the beach, one oar a few yards away lying in the sand. No blood on the kayak.”

  The Chief takes a breath. The day is still; there’s no breeze off the water. It’s going to be hot and buggy. They need to get the body out of here, pronto. They need to start their questioning, try to figure out what happened. He remembers what Dickson said about the best man being missing. Hopefully that situation has resolved itself. “Let’s go up to the house,” he says.

  “Should we divide and conquer?” the Greek asks.

  “I’ll take the men, you take the women,” the Chief says. Nick works wonders with the women.

  Nick nods. “Deal.”

  As they’re approaching the steps of the front porch, Bob from Old Salt Taxi pulls up in the driveway and a kid in his twenties climbs out. He’s wearing Nantucket Reds shorts, a blue oxford, a navy blazer, and loafers; he has a large duffel in one hand and a garment bag in the other. His hair is mussed and he needs a shave.

  “Who is this guy?” Nick asks under his breath.

  “Late to the party,” the Chief says. He waves to Bob as Bob reverses out of the driveway.

  The kid gives the Chief and Nick an uneasy smile. “What’s going on?” he asks.

  Nick says, “You part of the wedding?”

  “Best man,” the kid says. “Shooter Uxley. Did something happen?”

  Nick looks to the Chief. The Chief nods ever so slightly and tries not to let the relief show on his face. One mystery is solved.

  “The maid of honor is dead,” Nick says.

  The bags hit the ground, and the kid—Shooter Uxley; what a name—goes pale. “What?” he says. “Wait… what?”

  Initial questioning, Roger Pelton, Saturday, July 7, 7:00 a.m.

  The Chief meets Roger Pelton in the driveway. The two men shake hands, and the Chief grips Roger’s arm in a show of friendship and support. Roger has been married to Rita since t
he Bronze Age, and they have five kids, all grown. Roger has been running his wedding business for over ten years; before that, he was a successful general contractor. Roger Pelton is as solid a human being as God has ever put on this earth. He was in Vietnam too, the Chief remembers, where he received a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. He’s an unlikely candidate to be Nantucket’s most in-demand wedding planner, but he has a gift for it that has resulted in a booming business.

  Right now, Roger looks shaken. His face is pale and sweaty; his shoulders are drooping.

  “I’m sorry about this, Roger,” the Chief says. “It must have come as a terrible shock.”

  “I thought I’d seen it all,” Roger says. “I’ve had brides turn around halfway down the aisle; I’ve had grooms not show up; I’ve caught couples having sex in church bathrooms. I’ve had mothers of brides slapping mothers of grooms. I’ve had fathers who refused to pay my bills and fathers who tipped me five grand. I’ve had hurricanes, thunderstorms, heat waves, fog, and, once, hail. I’ve had brides vomit and faint; I even had a groomsman eat a mussel and go into anaphylactic shock. But I’ve never had anyone die. I met the maid of honor only briefly so I can’t give you any information other than that she was Celeste’s best friend.”

  “Celeste?” the Chief says.

  “Celeste Otis is the bride,” Roger says. “She’s pretty and smart, but on this island I see a lot of pretty and smart. More notably, Celeste loves her parents and she’s kind and patient with her future in-laws. She’s humble. Any idea how rare humility is when you’re dealing with Nantucket brides?”