At Salisbury Beach the other night they had spread a blanket far back, close to the dunes. It was twilight. The sand belonged to the dog owners, the water to the whales or the sharks, if you believed the rumors. Nobody was paying them any heed. They took it easy at first, some kissing, some through-the-clothes stuff, more kissing, then it all started to heat up. Alexa was wearing one of her sundresses that fell to midthigh when she was standing, but inched up alluringly, up and up, when she was prone, offering, when the moon allowed, a glimpse of lace panties in virginal white. She pressed harder against him as they kissed, and, with his hand on the captivating protrusion of her hip bone, he thought he could die a happy man.
And then she had said, “It’s my first time, Cam.”
He couldn’t be the first. Of course she had slept with Tyler. Right? Hadn’t she?
“No,” she said, shrugging her beautiful, beautiful shoulders in answer to his questions. And into his neck she whispered, “You’re the first.”
He said, “Are you sure? Are you absolutely one hundred percent sure you want this?” Because he’d been raised by two solid parents and he’d come of age in the #metoo movement and he understood his responsibilities to retain decency in a world that didn’t always value it.
“Yes,” she said. “I want this.”
The awkward fumbling with the condom was the worst part of the whole business, especially considering the sand, but obviously necessary, and when that part was done he put one thumb on each of her perfect temples, and he asked one more time: “Okay?”
“Yes,” she said, “okay.”
And he didn’t understand anyone who thought Alexa Thornhill wasn’t nice. What people didn’t see about Alexa was that beneath her tough exterior, beneath her beauty, she was actually smart and funny and even vulnerable, tender, like a lobster that had shed its old shell and hadn’t yet grown a new one.
He paused the television to answer the phone. His heart jumped when he saw Alexa’s name on the screen.
“Hey,” he said. “What’s up? Are you done babysitting? You can come over here, if you want, nobody’s here, my parents are at—”
She cut him off. “I’m not done babysitting,” she said. “I called to warn you. Tyler’s coming. To talk to you. He’s on his way now, from my house.”
Cam stood up, disturbing Sammy, who roused and looked blearily up at Cam, offended. The remote fell to the floor.
“Tyler?” said Cam. “Tyler is coming here?”
“He’s all worked up,” Alexa said. “He came over here and he was, like, threatening you, and then he took my mom’s keys, right from the bowl, and then he just took off in her car—”
“Wait,” said Cam. “Where’s your mom?”
“She’s at Brooke’s end-of-summer party. I had her car here. And Tyler is on the warpath. He’s drunk or something. High. I don’t know. It’s like he’s coming to challenge you for me. He called me his girl. Blech. How gross is that? And now I think he wants to fight you for me.”
“He’s coming to fight me?” A decade ago, Cam was briefly obsessed with martial arts; he went thrice weekly to Tokyo Joe’s on the Bridge Road, where he’d made his way to the junior advanced level. But he was not, in general, a fighter. Tyler played lacrosse; he was a big guy, six one, at least, and strong. “And he’s driving drunk?”
“Maybe high. Just don’t engage with him, okay? And don’t let him drive away, it’s not safe.”
Adrenaline surged through Cam. He stepped on the remote, and the Masters recording unpaused. Mickelson putted. Thirty-four years old, and he’d finally won his first major tournament. The crowd went wild. “Got it,” he said.
“Do whatever you have to do, just take the keys and hang on to them. Promise? I really need you to promise.”
“I promise,” said Cam. “I’ll take the keys; I won’t let him drive home. What should I do with Tyler, though? Is there somebody I should call?”
“Throw him in the bushes, I don’t care.”
“I’ll bring the car back to you. How about that?”
“No! No, Cam, don’t do that.”
“Why not? Are you okay, Alexa? You sound scared. Are you scared about something, besides Tyler?”
“Just stay where you are, okay, Cam? I’ll call you later, and we’ll deal with the car. Just take the keys, and stay where you are.”
She disconnected the call, and now Cam’s doorbell was ringing, and ringing, and in between rings someone was pounding on his door.
To call their exchange brief was a bit of an understatement, like calling a long iron shot into the wind moderately challenging.
Cam said, “Keys?”
“What the fuck?” said Tyler.
“Keys,” said Cam firmly. He stepped out onto the front porch, held out his hand, and Tyler dropped the keys into it.
“What am I supposed to do now?” Tyler sounded petulant, like a little kid who had his electronics taken away by a parent.
“Call somebody for a ride, I guess.” Cam made a great show of locking the door behind him. “I’m going to take this car back to Alexa’s house.”
She had told him not to. But he would go anyway.
80.
Alexa
After she hung up with Cam, Alexa crouched down so she could look out the front window without being seen, and for the second time that night her heart stopped. There was a car in the driveway.
It was a black SUV.
This was it. This had to be the same car Hannah called from the Cottage to tell her about. It was sitting in the spot vacated by her mother’s Acura.
That was when the doorbell rang again. And Alexa’s breath caught and she started to feel a little dizzy.
The only answer was the one there had always been, as obvious, as inevitable as a sunset. The bad men were coming.
She shouldn’t have told Sherri it was a false alarm.
The bad men were here.
“Alexa!” called Morgan. “The doorbell!”
“I know!” she called back. Her voice sounded amazingly normal considering how her insides were flipping around. The lights in the foyer were on. The outside lights were blazing.
Briiiing.
She couldn’t answer.
She had to answer.
Briiiing.
She’d tell the bad man he must have the wrong house, the wrong person, the wrong idea. She’d tell him to go away.
She opened the door.
81.
Cam
Cam drove fast down Hale Street. He didn’t like the way Alexa sounded. He wanted to get to her. He forced himself to rely on what made him a good golfer: patience, and focus, and calm in the midst of chaos. He thought about Mickelson and that final putt in 2004. He put his hands at ten and two on the wheel, the way he’d learned to drive. He focused on the road; he focused on Alexa.
“I’m coming,” he said out loud. “I’m coming, Alexa.” She had told him not to come, but of course he would. He’d get the car back to her; he’d make sure she was okay.
That’s when the deer ran out in front of him and froze.
Cam’s last coherent thought—his very last thought ever—was “That looks like a deer in the headlights!” which was something he’d have to remember to tell Alexa, because even though she’d roll her eyes he knew she’d laugh on the inside, and sometimes the inside laughs were the best kind.
He swerved to avoid the deer, and the pole was coming toward him, and there was the most terrific crunch of metal, and then everything went black. Except for a far-off light in the distance, no bigger than the head of a pin. And he wanted to say, “Alexa, hold on, I’m coming for you, I love you.” But he couldn’t say anything at all.
82.
The Squad
Rebecca’s car wasn’t there after all, where Melanie thought it was, in Brooke’s driveway. We didn’t know what had happened until later, when the details of the night started to sort themselves out. Apparently, Alexa’s Jeep was running funny. So she left her Je
ep on Merrimac and took Rebecca’s Acura.
At some point Melanie decided she didn’t need to leave after all. Why should she be the one to leave, when she hadn’t been (in her mind) in the wrong? Let him be the one to leave. She was going to stay and enjoy the party, and, yes, she would like to have one of those Aperol cocktails! And when that was done, she just might have another one. Since the line was getting long, why didn’t she just grab two now?
Melanie found Rebecca, who was at one of the stand-up cocktail tables with the mystery man, whom by then we knew to be Daniel Bennett. Melanie told Rebecca she didn’t see the car, but never mind, she’d changed her mind anyway. Rebecca didn’t think much of Melanie not being able to find her car. By then the party was really very crowded, and the cars had more than filled Brooke’s long driveway and were snaking onto Merrimac Street. She’d probably just overlooked it.
Did we hear the sirens from where we were? Some people said later that they had. But most of us viewed that as unlikely. Anyone coming from the police station would have cut up to High Street almost immediately to get more quickly to Hale Street. And it would have been nearly impossible to hear the ambulance from Brooke’s backyard.
Somebody said later that before all of that happened, they saw Sherri Griffin throwing up in the bushes. That wasn’t a surprise. Did you see how much alcohol she drank in a relatively short amount of time?
83.
Alexa
There was a man outside. He was around her mother’s age, with sandy hair and a wide freckled face. There was something about him—something in the set of his eyes, the shape of his nose, something that reminded her of someone she knew.
“Alexa Thornhill?” said the man.
“Maybe,” said Alexa. Her fear was so strong and all-consuming that it felt like an out-of-body experience.
“I’ve been trying to get hold of you! You are one hard person to find. I went to your place of employment earlier, looking for you.”
The man held out his hand to shake hers and Alexa thought, Are these the manners of a murderer? She found herself shaking back—really, it was the only way to keep her hand from quaking right off her wrist, and also, for good or for ill, she had been brought up to respond in kind when presented with an outstretched hand. She peered around the man to see where the other men were. The accomplices. But there was nobody else there. Maybe they were still in the SUV. Readying the weapon, preparing for a clear shot.
“And I was told that the specialty of the house is something called the Ring? Which involves a doughnut along with the ice cream?”
“The Ringer,” whispered Alexa.
“Ah! Of course. The Ringer. Right.” He chuckled and rubbed his belly. He was awfully friendly for someone who was about to kill her. But then again, so was the psychopath in Killing Eve. Right before she killed her victims, she was utterly charming—seductive, even. “I have something to show you, if you don’t mind.”
The man furrowed his brow. Again there was something familiar about him, a flash in his expression. He reached into his back pocket and Alexa’s knees came close to giving out. She thought, Here we go. He was going for his gun, and she had nothing to protect herself with. She squeezed her eyes shut. Would Morgan know to call 911, once she heard the shot? Would Katie?
She waited for what seemed like hours but was probably an eighth of a second, and when no shot came she opened her eyes. The man was holding a small bronze coin.
“This is my five-year sobriety coin,” he said. “I bought it on Amazon, and it cost less than six dollars, but it’s incredibly meaningful to me. I told myself that when I earned this coin I would allow myself to come and find you.”
“What?” Her veins were still flushed with adrenaline; she couldn’t quiet her breathing into any normal pattern. “I don’t understand.”
“I’m sorry,” said the man. “I should have led with an introduction. My name is Jacob.” He paused. “Jacob Thornhill.”
“Thornhill?” she said. “But that’s my—”
“That’s right,” said the man. He waited, as though giving her a chance to figure something out. “Go ahead,” he said finally, encouragingly.
“Wait. Are you my—?” No, this couldn’t be right. This was insane. She couldn’t bring herself to say the word out loud, and then she could. “You’re my father?”
He nodded. “And I don’t mean to intrude on your life, really and truly I don’t. I only want to see that you’re okay. I just want to know that you survived what I put you and your mother through. I can disappear as quickly as you want me to. We can have zero contact after this. I just needed to—” He took a deep breath and looked almost teary. “I just needed to see. With my own eyes. And look at you! You’ve survived and thrived. You’re just as lovely as you are online, on your channel . . .”
“My channel?”
“And that’s why I started leaving those comments.”
“Comments?”
Alexa’s brain couldn’t catch up.
“Yes, as JT76—”
“JT76?”
“My initials. Plus my birth year. I tried to be kind. It’s just, Alexa, I really needed to know I didn’t destroy your life by giving things such a bad start. I don’t expect to be involved in any way, but I needed to lay eyes on you and know I didn’t ruin everything forever. That’s why I got in touch with your mom, last year. Though I don’t blame her for not answering, really I don’t.”
“Got in touch with my mom?” repeated Alexa. “Last year?”
“And I know I’m supposed to wait until your eighteenth birthday. But since you’re leaving soon . . . I didn’t wait. And I really do know a good Realtor in L.A. I really can help you get set up.”
“Wait a minute,” said Alexa. “I’m still catching up.” Her phone, which she’d been gripping in her hand, started to ring. Her mom. She declined the call: she’d call her back.
Then it started ringing again.
“Seems like I caught you at a busy time,” said Jacob Thornhill. “But I’m on the East Coast for a week or so. I’d love to talk more, if you’re willing. I understand you may need some time to think about it.” He pressed a business card into her hand. “There’s no rush. Here’s my number. When you’re ready. If you’re ready.” He turned and walked back to his car.
Again Alexa’s phone rang, stopped, started again. Her mother must have noticed that the Acura was gone from Brooke’s driveway, and now, of course, there would be hell to pay.
84.
Sherri
False alarm, said the next text from Alexa to Sherri.
She was starting to sober up now; getting sick in the bushes had sped that along.
In their situation, she didn’t think there was any such thing as a false alarm. It took some serious maneuvering but Sherri was eventually able to work her car out from its spot and out of Brooke’s long driveway.
She pulled up in front of the house on Olive Street. The front door was locked—that was good. She unlocked and entered. The kitchen light was on, and so was the light in the living room.
But nobody was there.
“Hello!” she called. Nobody answered. She screamed: “Katie! Morgan! Alexa! Where is everybody?”
Nobody was home.
Nobody was home.
She could hardly breathe. She pulled her phone out of her bag and texted Katie:
Where R U.
The reply came immediately. Morgan’s house. Out in front w morgan there’s a police man here.
Ohmygodohmygodohmygod. Katie, Alexa, Morgan, a policeman. I found out who you are.
Coming to get u.
She was leaving the house, locking the door behind her, when she saw Miss Josephine peering out of her own front door.
“All this yelling and banging around!” said Miss Josephine.
“I’m sorry,” said Sherri hurriedly. “I thought Katie was here, but she’s not. I’m so sorry to disturb you.”
“And what on earth did you do to your hair?”
barked Miss Josephine. “That color doesn’t suit you at all.”
Sherri was at Morgan’s house in under thirty seconds. And yes: There was a police car in the driveway. Its lights were on. Morgan and Katie were sitting on the front steps in pajamas—Katie’s were unfamiliar—the lights from the police car casting an eerie glow on their faces. When Sherri got out of the car, Katie ran up to her and threw herself into Sherri’s arms. “Alexa’s mom’s car was in an accident,” said Katie. “That’s why the police are here. But Alexa’s mom wasn’t driving it.”
“Who was driving it?”
“I don’t know,” said Morgan. “My mom’s in there now, talking to the police.”
“I want to go home,” said Katie. “I don’t like this. Can we take Morgan home with us?”
“Yes,” said Sherri. “Yes, absolutely we can take Morgan home with us.”
85.
The Squad
When Cam Hartwell’s obituary ran in the Daily News of Newburyport, we all looked at the picture for the longest time. In the picture he was smiling and holding a golf club.
The line for the wake at Twomey, LeBlanc & Conte, the funeral home, stretched a full block down High Street. The service, at Immaculate Conception, was standing room only. We didn’t go; we didn’t know Cam, or his parents. Cam and his brothers hadn’t been through the public school system, and they were older. But Gina’s ex-sister-in-law, Veronica, had once been in a book club with Cam’s mom and she told Gina it was the saddest funeral she had ever been to. Ever. And that Alexa was inconsolable.
86.
Rebecca
Rebecca knocked on the door of Alexa’s room the day after the funeral. It was ten thirty in the morning; the day was shaping up to be cruelly, unfairly perfect, with the sun resplendent and the air dry. Rebecca knew that Alexa would have preferred rain.
Two Truths and a Lie Page 30
