New Jerusalem News

by John Enright

  A small gang of herring gulls came to check them out. Dominick went out to study them as they hung in the breeze beside and above the boat. Then he went back into the cabin to get one of the sandwiches he had packed. He ate it back out on the fantail, sharing it with the gulls, occasionally tearing off pieces of bread or bologna or cheese and holding it out at arm’s length. One of the gulls would glide down to take it gently from his fingertips. The bread seemed to be their favorite. Dominick went back inside and came out with a bag of potato chips and his Nikon with the big lens. It took some trial and error, but after a while the gulls got used to the idea that if they stayed around and did a fancy turn or two in flight there would be more chips coming. A gull that wasn’t a herring gull—smaller, whiter, sharper winged—tried to join the potato-chip party, but was viciously repulsed. Dominick got some good shots of the attack.

  It must have been the way the wind was blowing, but the helicopter was upon them almost as soon as they heard it, coming in low. It made one pass and then came back, buzzing them. Dominick wasted some film, clicking off shots of it as it went by. It was black and bifurcated in his view finder, like an insect, a wasp or dragonfly or something Amazonian. He and Atticus met at the cabin door. “What was that?” Dominick asked.

  “Not a friend,” Atticus said, clicking the throttle out of idle and up to slow forward. “Our side doesn’t have any of those.”

  “And wouldn’t yours be painted green? Where to now?” Dominick opened two ales and passed one to Atticus.

  “Back to port, but first a little diversionary tactic.” Atticus clicked the speed up another notch and headed for shore in the opposite direction from Larsen’s Marina. Sure enough, the helicopter made one more pass before turning and heading inland. When it was out of sight, Atticus turned the trawler around and headed back where they had come from, running in close to the shoreline. “What the hell were you taking photographs of out there?”

  “Just the gulls,” Dominick said. “I’ve never been so close to gulls before.”

  “Filthy, useless birds, the definition of pests.”

  “Yes, they do seem to rule hereabouts.”

  Somewhere in the cabin a cell phone started making one of those disagreeable sounds that passed for a ring.

  “Find that, would you?” Atticus said.

  The sound got gradually louder until Dominick found the little black device in a net bag hanging on the back of the steersman’s chair. He handed it to Atticus, who flipped it open. “Lucy Anne II,” he said and then listened. “Yes, we just got buzzed.” Pause. “Negative, no idea, no markings.” Another pause. “Roger, we’re coming in. We’ve been made. Can you get another boat out here? Something may be coming down.” Atticus flipped the phone shut and handed it back to Dominick.

  “I thought you said we were within or rights out here,” Dominick said.

  “Absolutely. Unless they decide to accuse us of being spies, and I can’t spare the time. You don’t want to flaunt your rights too often, because what the state giveth the state can taketh away.”

  It was another ale each before they got back to Larsen’s Marina, where they tied the Lucy Anne II up where they had found her, dropped her keys at the office, and drove away without incident. It was still light out. They easily caught the last ferry back to the island and stopped for a takeout pizza at the pizza place in the village. Mushrooms and peppers with extra cheese.

  Chapter 12

  On one wall of the short entryway between the back door and the kitchen at Mt. Sinai there was a board with a line of pegs for hanging up coats. In warmer weather it was almost empty, but now it was almost full with the various outer garments they each needed for the variety of weather days. There was no mistaking whose was whose. As various as the weather was from day to day so was Lydia, alternating back and forth between a mutual world and one she occupied all alone. One morning she showed up in full makeup, which, seeing as she never wore makeup, was applied badly, making her look like either a very cheap whore or a corpse. But the next morning she was just Lydia again and remembered Dominick’s name and didn’t nail the toast she burned to the wall. She just automatically threw it in the garbage as if that’s what one does with things that come out of toasters. Another day she mistook Dominick for the plumber and told him to go away, that nothing needed fixing.

  Both Atticus and Dominick now just went along with whatever scenario was playing. That was easiest—both for them and for Lydia—and what harm could it do to indulge her? Dominick thought of them as circus days, never knowing what to expect. Then one day around lunchtime they all found themselves in the kitchen simultaneously. It was now the only room in the house kept warm, with the oven. Lydia was still in her layers of paint-spattered studio clothes, no earphones. She seemed as herself as she ever had. She wanted to talk and asked them to stay and sit down.

  It was a long speech for Lydia. She wanted them to know that she knew sometimes she acted strange and that they put up with her and that she appreciated that. “I know I’m going batty, but I’m harmless, I think. You don’t have to watch me all the time. I don’t need a babysitter.

  “Dominick, I have come to think of you as family, almost like the son I never had, and I am so glad you are here to help out Atticus and keep him company. You know, it’s quahog season. Why don’t you two go quahogging? If you catch them, I’ll clean and cook them up.”

  Up to that point Lydia had been making sense. Dominick wasn’t aware that there was any particular season for quahogs, those thuggish local cousins of clams, but finding them involved getting wet while slogging around tidal mudflats in hip boots with a rake and a bucket, not something even the looniest and hungriest of natives would do on a near-freezing late November day. “I think I will pass on that,” he said.

  “What? You don’t like quahogs?” Lydia asked.

  “To tell you the truth, they have always tasted to me like the last thing from the sea you would want to eat no matter how they were fixed, just a nasty chewy vehicle for neurotoxins.”

  “It’s one of those acquired-taste things, I guess,” Atticus said.

  “How can anyone not like my quahog stuffies?” Lydia asked, sounding miffed.

  Any further discussion of the relative culinary merits of bivalves was cancelled by the sound of a helicopter closing on and then hovering above the house. “Them again,” Lydia said and went to the window. “Yep, the same black one.” She raised an imaginary can of aerosol spray and pointed it at the window, making a hissing sound. Atticus and Dominick joined her at the window. The helicopter was the same as the one that had buzzed their boat. It circled again and hovered and then sped off. Atticus and Dominick exchanged a mutually bewildered look.

  “Again?” Atticus asked.

  “Oh, it was here the other day when both of you were gone, though it stayed longer that time. It got so low I thought it was going to land.”

  The phone in the front hallway started ringing, and Atticus went to answer it.

  “I thought maybe I had imagined that helicopter, too,” Lydia said. “It was one of my off days. I thought it was coming to get me, so I took Atticus’s old gun outside and pointed it at them. That’s when they left. That seemed too easy, and it left so fast I wasn’t sure afterwards if it was real or not. But now you’ve seen it too, so it was real.”

  Atticus came back from the hallway. “That was Angie,” he said. “She’s on her way here.”

  “Angie?” Lydia said. “You mean your lovely daughter Angelica? Coming here? What the heck for?”

  “She said she is worried about us.”

  “Strange timing,” Dominick said.

  “If she wants something to worry about, she can worry about her face if she steps foot in my house.”

  “Lydia, dear, try to remember that she is your daughter.”

  “That’s no excuse.”

  “And that, legally at least, this is her house.”

  “If she wants us out, she is going to have to carry me out
dead or alive.”

  Dominick hated to interrupt this little skirmish. “You said she was on the way here. Where did she call from?”

  “On her cell phone from New Jerusalem. She said she was waiting for the ferry.”

  “So, she could be here anytime. I should make myself scarce then.”

  “Why is that?” Lydia asked.

  “Because I met with your daughter in Boston as Lord Witherspoon. If she sees me here, that game is up.”

  “And your car?” Atticus asked.

  “She never saw my car, but the Virginia plates might make her suspicious that something was going on here. I’d best leave.” Whatever bad news Angelica was bringing really did not belong to him anyway. It was Atticus and Lydia’s problem, not his.

  “Then I’m not staying either. Dominick, you can take me with you. I’m not setting eyes on that woman. Atticus, you deal with her. I’m going to change. Dominick and I are going out on a date.”

  “Lydia, really . . .” Atticus addressed her departing back.

  “Can you deal with it, Atticus?” Dominick asked when they were left alone.

  “Of course I can. She’s my daughter. This is all overreaction.”

  “I don’t like the black helicopters, Atticus.”

  “We’ve done nothing wrong. We have nothing to fear.”

  “Atticus . . .” Dominick didn’t know what to say. “I’m going up to change, too. I’ll pack a few things to take with me as well. I’ll drop your wife back when the coast is clear, but I’ll be staying away a few days until things have settled down.”

  “Sure, of course.” Atticus went to the sink and started washing the few breakfast dishes still there. “I’ll just straighten up a bit. It’s been almost two years since I’ve seen Angie.”

  As Dominick was changing and packing he heard the helicopter return and hover at a much higher altitude than before. He didn’t like the fact that they would see him leave. There was no tree coverage. He wasn’t sure why he didn’t like it. What would they do? Follow him? He didn’t even know where he was going. If Lydia went with him, he couldn’t leave the island because there would be no late boat back to return her home, and he wasn’t about to check into a New Jerusalem hotel with her. But if he didn’t leave the island, where would he stay? There was always Brenda and Charlie’s. He knew where the key was. But that wouldn’t be much of a hiding place, not from the feds. Dominick dawdled a bit, waiting for the sound of the helicopter to go away. It finally did.

  Lydia was waiting for Dominick at the bottom of the front stairs when he came down with his rucksack. She was wearing a full-length mink coat, cut in an old sort of Betty Davis style with squared-off shoulders and wide lapels. He couldn’t see what she had on underneath. She was ready to go.

  “Let me get my coat,” Dominick said. He turned toward the hall to the kitchen, where his denim jacket was hanging on a peg beside the back door, when he heard car tires crunching the driveway gravel.

  Lydia looked out the window beside the door. “It’s her,” she said, “Massachusetts plates.”

  Dominick kept going toward the kitchen door. Lydia was right behind him. Atticus was drying dishes.

  “Atticus, your little girl is here, and so, still, are we,” Dominick said as he glanced around the kitchen for an escape route. Lydia rushed by him like a bear on the run and out the back kitchen door. The doorbell rang. “Stall her,” Dominick said. He was still carrying his rucksack. The only other door out of the kitchen was the one that opened on the stairs down to the cellar. He could hear Atticus and Angelica exchanging greetings at the front door. He had enough time to settle himself and his rucksack comfortably on the top steps of the cellar stairs before closing the door behind him. The darkness smelled ancient, an unforgotten smell. For some reason it made him think of buried treasure and pirates.

  Dominick heard Angelica’s voice first as they came into the kitchen. “Daddy, why do you keep it so cold in here? See, this is why I worry about you. You’re not taking care of yourself. It’s freezing in here.”

  “Ah, it’s not that cold, honey, but keep your coat on and I’ll turn up the oven.”

  “Daddy, it is the twenty-first century. People do not heat their houses with their kitchen stoves. Where is Mum?”

  “Oh, she is . . . um . . . out.”

  “Out? How can she be out? You’re here. The car is here.”

  “I can’t lie to you, Angie. When she heard you were coming she went out to her studio. You know she doesn’t like surprises.”

  “She doesn’t like me, you mean.”

  “She knows you are here. If she wants to see you, she will come in. Let’s leave it at that, okay? It’s good to see you. You’re looking fit. I’ll fix some tea. Have you lost weight? How’s the hubby?” From behind the closed cellar door Atticus sounded like some adolescent on his first date.

  “Daddy, I do not understand why you and Mum are not already at the condo in Florida. This is so silly, you just camping out here off season while the condo is just sitting there waiting for you.”

  “Angie, I happen to know you have rented the condo out for the season.”

  “Well, what was I supposed to do when you refused to follow the plan? Just leave it sit there empty, sucking up maintenance costs? I could cancel those rentals.”

  “No, Angie, we’re busy here, and besides, someone has to look after the house, keep it up, show it to potential buyers, if there are any.”

  “Busy? You’re busy? Busy with what? Your terrorist friends and their plots?”

  The teakettle started to whistle.

  “My what?” Atticus sounded truly mystified. “My terrorist friends and their what?”

  “Plots, Daddy, their plots to blow things up and stuff.”

  “Angie, I don’t know what you’ve heard or who you have been talking to, but—”

  “The FBI, Daddy, that’s who I’ve been talking to, the frickin FBI, about my parents and my property!” Angelica had jettisoned her daddy’s-little-girl disguise. The teakettle was still whistling. “That’s why I am here. Why I dropped everything and drove all the way here today, because the frickin FBI came to my house and asked me what the heck was going on here.”

  “Why would they . . . ?”

  “Because I am the registered owner of the property now. They looked it up and found that out. And do you know why they care about that? Because if there are activities taking place here that are against their frickin Homeland Security laws they will seize the property. That’s right—seize the property.”

  “Angie, I can assure you that there are no such activities occurring here. That’s ridiculous.” Atticus must have turned off the kettle because it stopped whistling.

  “This is the FBI, Daddy. They don’t make this stuff up. They don’t lie. They told me that they have an ongoing investigation into an underground terrorist operation, including foreign agents, which they suspect is using this house as a base of operations in the area. They called them armed and dangerous, suspected bombers. They said that people in this house have threatened federal agents with guns, for chrissakes.”

  “Did they tell you they already raided us and found absolutely nothing?”

  “They said a federal judge issued a search warrant, but that the group must have been tipped off because when the officers arrived only the elderly couple was here. The elderly couple—you and Mum, my parents! And my house being raided!”

  “They found nothing, Angie, nothing for all their trouble and upsetting your mother terribly.”

  “They said that the absence of evidence only meant that the evidence was absent. Daddy, there is a grand jury looking into those bombings your group was involved in.”

  “Now, hold it right there, young lady. Bay Savers had absolutely nothing to do with those bombings, nothing. We have never threatened anyone. I can’t believe you believe that.”

  “They have photographers, Daddy. They showed them to me—Mum taking a shot at them, you on board a boat with
binoculars spying on the target site with another, bearded sailor taking photos with a telescopic lens.” There was the sound of a chair being pushed back. “I want you and Mum and your terrorist friends out of this house immediately. The agents wanted me to come here and spy on you. They said that if I, as property owner, cooperated with them, they wouldn’t pursue the seizure. But I don’t trust them, or you. I just want you and your coconspirators gone.”

  “What coconspirators? What terrorist group?"

  “I don’t care if the place is empty, if it doesn’t sell.”

  “Angie, will you listen to me?”

  “No coconspirators? How many other people are living here? Whose black sedan with Virginia plates is parked in the drive? Who do all these man-sized coats by the back door belong to? Come on, Dad. I don’t have to listen to you. If everything is so innocent, why all the secrets? You can’t explain it away. It’s not like you assuring me when I was six that there wasn’t a giant slug beneath my bed that was going to eat me when the lights went out. Maybe Mum is right. What’s the point of talking?”

  Dominick had the impulse to burst through the cellar door and say, “Wait. This has gotten way out of control.” Federal grand juries and children throwing their parents out of their house. Trumped up charges and exaggerations—more than a little bit out of control. Why not just blow open this whole Lord Witherspoon hoax? So then Angelica will know, so what? He stood up. But wait. So what? Angelica would tell the feds—she would have to—and it wouldn’t solve anything. Angelica would just feel doubly duped and even more suspicious, and she would still throw them out of the house for sure. She was just aching for an excuse. The feds would just feel confirmed in their suspicion of a conspiracy going on—people switching identities—and that we—“the terrorist group”—were hiding the actual “Lord Witherspoon,” the agent provocateur passing as an English noble, whoever he was. Had it gotten that far along? So that it didn’t even matter if Lord Witherspoon existed or not?