by Jean Stone
“How’s it going?”
From the doorway, Ben smiled at her but without luster, his complexion having paled more since the altercation with Ashenbach. In the past week, he’d hardly left the house: if he didn’t go anywhere, he said, he wouldn’t risk getting punched out again. His attempt at humor was thin.
She tensed.
Thankfully the trip to Sturbridge would last a few days, maybe long enough to help Ben put things into perspective and free himself from the paranoia and the gloom in which he was now stuck. Even though Jill would be working, even though his grandkids wouldn’t be with them, maybe Ben would become immersed in the old working village, in the architecture he so loved, and the era he was drawn to. She would encourage him to look for new ideas for the museum, crafts to teach the kids, Early American methods to show them.
Yes, hopefully, the trip would go well. And hopefully, his mood would mellow before she went beserk.
“The packing is fine,” she said to him now. “It’s difficult, though. Having my baby leave home.” She tried to smile.
“It’s a big, scary world out there, Jill. One doesn’t have to leave home to be affected by it.”
“When’s Charlie coming?” she asked abruptly, as much to change the subject as to find the answer. Though Charlie was leaving the apartment “intact”—furniture, dishes, and anything else Amy wanted—because she was “family,” Amy was determined to have her own four-poster canopy bed. She did not want to sleep on the old twin daybed that had once belonged to Jill’s father, used for his refuge from Jill’s tense, stoic mother, the poor man’s wife.
She suddenly thought of Rita. Was the daybed where the soon-to-be baby had been conceived?
“Charlie said he’d be here around two. He’s still putting things into storage.”
Jill nodded and closed another box. She didn’t know what to say next. It had been that way since the party: he’d withdrawn; she’d pulled away. Ben might as well be the one moving into Charlie’s apartment, the one sleeping on the daybed now, for all the communication that they had.
“I know this is hard for you, honey,” he said, “but I think if nothing else, this is working out for Amy.”
She knew what he really meant was that this was working out for him. With Charlie off to Florida and Amy out of the house, the risk that two other people would learn about Mindy would be lower. She wondered how much he would have promoted Amy’s move if it hadn’t been for his arrest. Or if he would have thought this had “worked out” so well if it were his daughter, Carol Ann, moving out, instead of her Amy.
Ben began loading full shoeboxes into a carton. “What time do you want to leave tonight?”
She pushed a sheet of newspaper down into another shoebox, and with it her anguish. “I think we should be out on the six-thirty boat. But I reserved the eight-fifteen, too, just in case.” She tossed in the remaining CDs and handed the box to Ben, who set it in the carton. “It will take almost two hours to drive from the Cape to Sturbridge. I don’t want to get there too late.”
He taped the carton and scanned the room as if looking for more things to do. Then he put his hands on his hips. “What about the sheets and blankets? Are those all packed?”
Why was he asking such an obvious question? The mattress lay barren, stripped of its covers. Even the lace canopy had been laundered, then neatly packed, for Amy to rehang in her new bedroom in her new home, where it would hover over herself and whomever she chose to accompany her in bed.
Jill stood and stretched her legs, wanting to shake off such thoughts. “Everything’s ready, Ben. All we need is Charlie. And his truck.”
Ben had a truck, too. A pickup they could have used, if it weren’t for the fact it was parked at the museum, if it weren’t for the fact Ben refused to go within a few hundred miles, nautical or otherwise, of Menemsha House and the Ashenbach land.
He walked to the window, his back toward his wife. “I spoke with Rick,” he said. The lines of his back, his once well-muscled shoulders, were smaller now, almost bony, as if his pain were eating his body as well as his mind. He put his hands into his pockets. “The pretrial conference is coming up. That’s when they’ll set the date for the trial.”
A sense of foreboding crept from her head to her toes. “When?”
“Tuesday afternoon.”
“This Tuesday?”
“Yes.”
She closed her eyes. “You didn’t just learn this today, did you?”
“No. It was why he called the other day, when I was at the tavern helping Amy decorate.”
The other day, Jill recalled, was when she’d walked in on her husband kissing her daughter. She cleared her throat. “Should I ask why you didn’t mention it? You knew I have to be in Sturbridge a few days. I could have changed the dates.”
“I need to do this myself, Jill. I just need to go to the courthouse with Rick and hear the date. Then I need to come home.”
“So you don’t want me with you. Fine. But we could have gone to Sturbridge next week or the week after.”
“No, honey. I’d already decided I wouldn’t be going with you. That I needed to stay here.”
She wondered if “here” meant the island or the house, where he could hide from the world. “Are you going to stay in the house until the trial?” she asked.
He turned and faced her. “That’s not what this is about, Jill.”
“Really?”
He took his hands from his pockets and ran them through his hair, of which, like the rest of him, there seemed to be less. “Even if you had changed the dates, I still couldn’t have gone. Rick says we can’t be sure what Ashenbach would do if he learned I left the island.”
She kicked a carton away from the bed. “You’re not a freaking criminal, Ben! For God’s sake, you’re innocent until proven guilty, remember?”
He turned back to the window. “Jill, please, none of this is fair to you, I know that. But let me just do what I need to do. Once this is done, I’ll go to the moon with you if you’d like. But right now …”
The muscles around the corners of her jaw tightened. “What if John, Jr. and Emily were still going? Would you have bailed out on them, too?”
He did not move. “That’s a moot point, Jill. They’re not going.”
Her comment had cut deep, she knew. She supposed she should apologize, but she could not. “I thought you were looking forward to Sturbridge.” The tremor in her voice warned her not to carry this too far, for surely it could quickly erupt into anger or, worse, to an out-and-out cry.
He came to her and took her hands in his. “I was, honey. But I’m consumed by this. I can’t imagine myself going off and trying to have a good time.”
She snapped her hands away. Her jaw muscles began working again. “That’s fine, Ben, but as they say on the talk shows, this isn’t just about you.” She stopped short of reminding him that if she weren’t bringing home the paycheck, that maybe she would have preferred to stay home, too. But even in her anger she could not hurt Ben that much. He was not, after all, Richard. He was not, after all, Christopher. Ben Niles was not like the other self-centered men that had screwed up her life.
Was he?
There were six people in the courtroom, not counting the two armed guards who stood at attention at the front and rear doors, waiting for Ben to try and make a break for it, he supposed. He looked around the dreary room, decorated only by two flags—one the Stars and Stripes, one with the state seal. He didn’t think it was the same place that he’d been for his arraignment, but his memory of that was about as clear as a dense Vineyard fog.
The judge, however, was the same. He remembered her at her post behind the “bench,” whose elevated step denoted authority.
In front of the bench was a sober-looking male court reporter.
At a small wooden table facing the judge sat Ben in the suit he’d worn to his wedding. It seemed bigger somehow, as if it had been stretched. The suit and the surroundings reminded him of the g
rammar school assembly when the whole class had been counting on him to spell Appalachian, so they could beat Mrs. Merritt’s class and win the spelling bee.
Of course, he’d screwed up because he never could spell worth a damn.
All things being equal, he figured he’d felt about as humiliated then as he did now. He wanted only to be out of there, only to be finished so he could go home.
Next to him was Rick Fitzpatrick in a navy suit that fit.
At a matching table beside them sat Ashenbach himself, though Ben’s view of him was nicely obstructed by the assistant district attorney, who was not the Mister Rogers look-alike but a tall, beefy woman who wore more makeup than most island women, and whose name Ben could not remember. He assumed she’d been sent down from Boston, though he didn’t know why he thought that.
Maybe because it was something to think about, something to keep his eyes from straining to see Ashenbach and to keep his mind off the fact that he was here at all, or that he had not spoken to his wife since she’d left two days ago.
“The accused is present?” the judge asked, jarring Ben from his trance.
Rick stood up. “Yes, your honor.”
“Mr. Niles, do you understand this is a formal conference to set the date for trial in the matter of The Commonwealth versus Benjamin Niles?” Instead of looking up, she kept her eyes fixed on some papers that must have been more interesting.
Ben glanced at Rick, who motioned him to stand.
“Yes, your honor,” Ben said in a voice that sounded like it belonged to the boy in the grade-school spelling bee. He clasped his hands together in front of him. He wished now that he’d not been so stubborn with Jill. It would have been nice to feel the warmth of her hand in his, instead of the cool dampness of his own palms.
The beefy D.A. stood up. “Your honor, due to the sensitivity of the allegation, and the fact that the frenzy of summertime here on the island does not seem appropriate to schedule such an important trial, the Commonwealth asks for expediency.”
Ben wondered if he could spell expediency. Or if Ashenbach could.
“I agree,” the judge replied. “Is the child receiving regular counseling?”
Ben was relieved that she said child and not little girl.
The D.A. turned to Dave, who whispered something to her. Then she whispered back, and they went back and forth a few times before the D.A. addressed the judge again. “Yes, your honor. The child has been seeing a therapist two or three times a week.”
“See that it’s three,” the judge responded. She looked up briefly, then back down to her papers. “Schedule date for trial is Monday, April ninth, two thousand and one. Is this acceptable for counsel’s calendars?”
It was acceptable.
The judge banged her gavel but said nothing more. Then she rose and swept from the room, one of the armed lackeys escorting her through the rear door.
Rick gathered his legal pad and file folder and snapped them into his briefcase. Ben stayed frozen in place, mute, awaiting the next word, which came not from Rick but from Ashenbach himself, who must have pushed past the D.A. and was now in Ben’s face.
“You’re going to hang, Niles,” he seethed.
Rick raised a hand. “Bailiff!”
The D.A. grabbed Dave by the arm. “Move out, Mr. Ashenbach,” she commanded. “Now.”
In the split second before he moved, Ashenbach leaned over and spat at his prey. The spittle landed on the lapel of Ben’s too-big suit.
With far more restraint than Ben had known he possessed, he stood still and did nothing, did not even look into his accoster’s small eyes.
Then as Ashenbach moved, or was helped to move away, the son of a bitch laughed a deep, disgusting laugh.
Every muscle inside Ben hardened into rock. The only thing that stopped him from exploding was the knowledge that exploding was exactly what Ashenbach would want.
“Let’s go, Ben,” Rick said quietly.
Ben breathed a breath, trying to ignore the ache that had risen in his chest. “Give me a minute.”
In the minute that Rick gave him, Ben made a decision. He was fed up with this bullshit. He was going to regain some control over his life. Jill was right about one thing: hiding was wrong. It was not going to accomplish anything, except maybe kill him. It was time to find some courage and attack this thing head-on.
He would start with a visit to his daughter and his wimpy son-in-law.
Chapter 13
“Where are the kids?” Ben asked Carol Ann. He stood in her kitchen in his jeans and a flannel shirt. If he’d shown up in his suit, he’d have scared the hell out of her—she’d have thought someone died.
His daughter wiped her hands on a towel. “At the school with John. Getting John, Jr.’s costume for the Thanksgiving play.”
Ben laughed because it was less painful than screaming. Or crying. “Pilgrim or Indian?” He did not mention that he had not seen the kids on Halloween, that he had not had an invitation. He did not mention they hadn’t spoken in weeks, because time flew for both of them and now, with Jill in his life, he knew Carol Ann no longer worried about him. He had liked that, he’d thought.
“We’re not sure yet who he’ll be. It depends on what sizes are left over from last year.”
In spite of his anguish, Ben smiled. “That was one of the first things you did when we came to the Vineyard. You were Priscilla Alden in the school play. Remember?”
“A little,” she answered vaguely.
Ben was struck by the sad irony of how hard some parents strive to build memories for kids too young to remember. He supposed that real memory started around age ten, Mindy’s age. Real memory. Ha—manufactured memory was more like it. He sighed and sat down at the table. “I’ll take some coffee if you have it.”
“Sure, Dad.” She went to the sink and filled the carafe. “It’s been a long time since you dropped by for coffee after work.”
Her comment seemed one of observation, not concern. “I’ve been busy,” he said. “You, too?”
“Winding down from summer.”
She kept her back to him, busying herself at the sink. Ben was always startled by his daughter’s strong frame—strong like Ben’s had been until a few weeks ago. A sturdy build was not always desirable for a female, yet Carol Ann had never complained, at least not to him.
He looked around the small kitchen, which had not seemed small when Carol Ann and John first bought the Cape-style house when they got married. He must have been living in Jill’s house too long, his perspective skewed by its large, high-ceilinged rooms. But though Carol Ann’s kitchen was cramped, it felt like home. A good home for his grandchildren to grow up in.
He curled the edge of the woven cotton placemat. “When’s the play?”
“Tuesday before Thanksgiving. Same as always.”
He folded his arms, trying to decide where to begin, wondering what his opening line should be. His gaze drifted to the window. This had been easier when he’d practiced his lines in the car all the way across island. “How’s Emily’s cold?”
Carol Ann scowled and poured coffee into mugs. “She’s fine, Dad. She hasn’t had a cold in quite a while.”
Well, he guessed he’d known that all along. “Not according to your husband,” he said.
She looked bewildered but set the coffee down in front of Ben and did not ask what he meant. He knew he was treading in dangerous waters—pitting the husband against the father. But it was time.
“I thought that was why he canceled dinner last month. Because Emily had a cold.”
“No,” she replied. “He said you and Jill were busy.”
So John had lied to her, too.
He stared into his mug, the black coffee a shimmering mirror to everything but his heart. “Right now Jill’s in Sturbridge,” he said, “alone.”
She pulled out a chair and sat across from him. “I know,” she said. “John told me it didn’t turn out to be a good idea for the kids to go.” She sipped
her coffee.
Ben did not answer because he could not speak, afraid he would blurt out something about John that he’d regret later on.
Stirring her coffee, Carol Ann studied her father. “Why do I sense you’re angry at something? Or someone? For instance, me.”
He grasped the handle and slowly brought the mug up to his mouth. Did he hate his son-in-law now? Was forgiving everyone in the world something one needed to do or risk going to hell? Noepe would probably have advised Ben to forgive John. Then again, Noepe was dead.
He blew on the hot liquid and watched a wisp of steam curl around the mug rim, then dissipate in the air. Without taking a taste, he set the mug down. “I’m not angry at you, Carol Ann.” He closed his eyes and felt as awkward as if he were back inside John’s truck, escorted by the reluctant family member from the courthouse, freed on bail.
He felt Carol Ann’s hand on his. Opening his eyes, he looked down at her short, clipped nails. “Dad?” she asked quietly. “What’s wrong?”
He patted her hand, managing a smile, then looked into her gray eyes that were so much like his. The back door banged open.
“Papa!” little Emily shrieked. She bounded into the kitchen, scrambled onto Ben’s lap, and planted a small wet kiss on his cheek before Ben had a chance to breathe again.
John, Jr. scurried in behind her. “Hey, Papa!” he shouted, “Wait till you see my cool costume.” He rattled a bag close to Ben’s face. “Chief Running Rain.”
Ben mustered up joy, because kids should always have that. “Wow! The chief?” Beyond John, Jr. he saw the boy’s father enter the doorway. He did not make eye contact. He did not want to be arrested for murder as well as child molestation.
“My teacher, Mrs. Galloway, wrote what the chief has to say in real penmanship, not printing,” the boy’s words rushed out. “I was the only one in the class who could read it.”
“Good for you,” Ben said. “You’re smart, like your mother.”
Emily tugged Ben’s sleeve. “I’m going to be in the play, too. I’m a pill-grin baby.”
