by Linda Barnes
“Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t everything, not by a long shot. It’s part of a bigger picture, but I can’t talk now.” His sweeping glance encompassed the red car and the wandering tourists. “It could make a book with real consequences, a once-in-a-lifetime story, and they’re all in it, the politicians, the landowners, the government, I wouldn’t be surprised. I mean, they own the rest of the land, don’t they?”
Hands in his pockets, head ducked low, he retreated to the van and gunned the engine while the tourists posed for cell phone photos with the lighthouse in the background.
CHAPTER
forty-two
A criminal investigation into your death. A need to watch my back. I shifted my eyes from the trio of harmless tourists and stared blankly at the crumpled envelope that McKenna, with the grim élan of a cold war spy, had shoved into my unresponsive hands. Chilled to the bone, bleached and bloodless as a rock, I felt my lower jaw tremble. How could even a madman abandon me on a windblown bench in the raw April cold? I hardly knew, but I was intensely relieved when the navy van disappeared in a spurt of gravel and shells. As the tourists investigated the lighthouse, calling to each other in high-pitched tones, I stumbled toward the Focus.
A criminal investigation into your death. I unlocked the car, ducked inside, started the engine, and turned on the heater. Prying open the envelope, I withdrew a single snapshot, smoothed its curling edges, and ran a finger across the central image. If this photo had gotten you killed, it should have been the death of me, the death of McKenna as well, since both of us had already screened it on his preview Web site.
McKenna had to be playing some kind of game. The conviction grew and strengthened with the stream of warm air from the vents. He knew I was staying at the Big House, assumed I’d developed a rapport with Garrett. He was jealous and vindictive as well as crazy.
I grabbed the purse I’d stashed under the seat. As I pushed the photo into the outside pocket, I noticed the lighted screen of my cell: a missed phone call, a voice message. When I entered my password, Detective Snow’s rumbling voice filled the car, asking me to call, repeating his number twice in a stern monotone. The horizon line seemed to tilt, and I thought I might faint again.
McKenna hadn’t lied: Snow wanted to talk again. Something must have changed. His visit to Garrett, which I’d filed under routine, might not be routine after all. Garrett’s silence on the subject, which I’d attributed to his harried director’s schedule, now seemed sinister.
Snow was investigating your death. How quiet it seemed. The tourists on the hill were distant stick figures, distorted by the windshield glass. Were they calling to each other or was that the keening cry of the swooping gulls, snatching at seaweed?
I followed the flight of a gull, skimming, sinking, then rising on an invisible current. Did the gull notice the car? Sense my gaze? If I left the tepid warmth and threw myself off the cliff, how would that final unconsciousness differ from the fleeting unconsciousness of a fainting spell? What would fill the void?
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.
Hamlet, Act Three, scene 1. How could anyone make sense of it, Teddy, the massive significance and utter insignificance of a single life, a single death? And not end up barking mad, howling at the tide, taking ship for England in the company of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern? I plucked the photograph from the envelope again and carefully centered it at the hub of the steering wheel so the horn wouldn’t sound and alarm the tourists or the gulls.
A younger Garrett Malcolm gazed at me steadily from the lower-right-hand corner of the unposed shot, his left arm outstretched, hand tugged by the hand of the cut-off figure of the dark-haired woman. I stared at the image until it blurred, recalling the caption as it appeared on the Web site: 939495. I let my eyes close, but the image stayed, as though the picture had burned into my retinas.
Waves crashed against the rocks and the wind tried to penetrate the crack at the top of the window. I considered other images—on McKenna’s Web site, the girls frolicking in the waves, then the framed photos on the wall behind Malcolm’s Oscar-laden desk. When I got as far as the photo of young Jenna Malcolm dancing in the sand in front of the beach shack, my lips tightened. What if I ignored the figures in the foreground?
Where had I seen that low, flat building, that diamond-shaped sign? The letters were unfocused and illegible, but the conjunction of shapes, the curbed sidewalk, the narrow driveway brought a glimmer of recollection. That sign, or a similar sign, fronted the women’s clinic situated next to the hair salon, and the couple could have been headed for the entrance.
CHAPTER
forty-three
No lingerie shops lined this drab street in this drab town. Hours earlier, I might have called the narrow lane charming, the small shops with shingled exteriors and hand-painted signs quaint. But color had been washed from the day, the sky, so vivid over the ocean, had dulled to gray, and I had no eyes for dainty window displays. The aperture had closed, the lens narrowed, and I was left with tunnel vision as I studied the small figures in the foreground of the print.
Garrett was ten years younger, probably more, possibly twenty, so that he would have been perhaps twenty-five, a year younger than I am, a young man still. There are long years in which men change very little. The lines at the corners of his eyes cut deeper now; the shadows beneath them had darkened.
McKenna’s mind was as twisted as a nest of snakes, but one of those serpents had dug a fang into my veins and injected pure poison. The gossipmonger believed Garrett had done something to harm you, Teddy, believed you’d discovered some dire secret in the director’s past.
A picketing protester tried to catch my eye, but I ignored him and concentrated on the photo. The hairdresser at the beauty salon next door said that local girls who got in trouble with baseball players or actors came here for relief. “In trouble” as in pregnant, “relief” as in abortion. This could be a photo of Garrett escorting a local girl, some underage girl he’d impregnated, to the clinic. The hairdresser said the actors joked about a local “directory” of female “talent.”
I concentrated on the female. She didn’t look like a teen. She seemed older, but it was hard to say why, hard to peg her age. Women too, have those years, twenties to thirties, even forties, when the facial muscles hold fast and makeup aids the youthful illusion. Little of her face was visible, just the corner of an eye, the shadow of a cheekbone. She was defined by her hair, that dark flying wedge.
I stood on the pavement near the hair salon, careful to keep my distance from the few picketers who kept vigil across the street from the entrance to the women’s clinic, glancing down at the photo, up at the clinic, easing myself into the exact position where the photographer once stood.
Garrett was easy to identify, but I was sleeping with him; I knew his every pore. I’d studied photos of the man in his teens and twenties. McKenna had picked him out as well, but McKenna, too, was a specialist who recognized his celebrities. Garrett’s fame was a fairly recent by-product of his success. His renown as a film actor, dependent on a variety of chameleon-like roles, had been less than his glory as a director.
Until recently, Garrett had been a man who walked under the radar, but in the photo, he wore a trench coat with the collar turned up. Since he had made an effort at disguise, the woman might have tried to alter her appearance also. There were costumes at Cranberry Hill, rods laden with them, neat rows of wigs on the shelf in the Old Barn. I shifted my grip on the snapshot so that my thumbnail covered the wedge of dark hair.
“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.” Not Hamlet, but still Shakespeare: Antony and Cleopatra, Act Two, scene 2. If Claire Gregory had ever played Cleopatra, I might have recognized her sooner in her dark blunt-cut wig.
A man in a trench coat, a woman in a wig. Garrett and Claire. In disguise.
I stared down at
the photo, up at the clinic, and experienced a strange dissonance, a sense of disconnectedness. It was the same clinic, but not the same clinic. The sign was the same, the sidewalk the same, the building to the left that housed the hairdresser the same, but the clinic building itself was set closer to the sidewalk. As though wandering in a hypnotic trance, I perambulated toward the door.
A gray-haired, gray-faced man intercepted me. “Don’t kill your baby.”
“Get your hands off me.”
“You don’t have to go through with it.”
I brushed him aside and rushed through the door. Disinfectant and air freshener battled for dominance in the refrigerated chill. Someone had made an attempt at a homey touch, scattering throw pillows across mismatched chairs and a low sofa, but the waiting room still screamed doctor’s office. Magazines studded a circular coffee table. A water cooler burbled in an alcove. A sign read OUR SERVICES and listed them in alphabetical order: abortion, body image, men’s sexual health, morning-after pill, sex and sexuality, sexually transmitted diseases, women’s health.
“Your name?” A snub-nosed young woman shifted her gaze from her laptop screen.
“I’m not here to see anyone. I—is there another clinic that looks almost the same as this one?”
The woman assumed a defensive posture, straightening her back and pursing her lips, making me wonder whether the picketers ever sent anyone—say, a young woman with questions—inside for the express purpose of annoying her while she worked, or if working in an atmosphere of constant, muted, daily threat, disconcerted her.
“I’m sorry, are you looking for another address?” She stayed barely polite, her tone caustic.
“Is there another branch, another clinic with the same sign?”
“No, miss, but we might be able to help you here.” Her smile, when it came, was surprisingly warm. It seemed she had decided I was too young and naïve, too scared to mention the reason I might wish to see a doctor. I hesitated. I didn’t want to show her the photo. Garrett Malcolm was definitely recognizable now.
“She might mean the old building.”
I turned my head and caught the glance of a second receptionist, this one plump and motherly, her right hand raised to fit a sheaf of medical records into a bookcase that stretched across the rear wall.
“The old building,” I repeated.
She offered a wide smile with a dimple at one corner. “Yes, this isn’t our original space here. When they rebuilt, they made a few changes.”
“Remodeled?”
“Not intentionally. The old clinic burned to the ground.”
“Fire-bombed,” the younger receptionist chimed in, “and they still let those picketers stand there every day, harassing us and bothering our clients.”
“No one ever proved it was arson,” the motherly woman said mildly.
“But it burned?” I said. “When?”
“A long time ago.” This from the young one, a dismissive snort.
“When dinosaurs ruled the earth.” The older woman raised an eyebrow. “And, yes, I was working here at the time.”
“Was anyone hurt?”
“Oh, no, nothing like that. It happened late at night, thank God, must be fifteen years ago. Back when we kept paper records. Nothing on line, so the whole thing was a nightmare.”
I turned away, took a step or two, and sank into a sagging armchair. Claire might have undergone an abortion prior to Jenna’s birth, but she would never have considered aborting Jenna, the long-awaited child. Unless Garrett, worried about his father’s bias toward boys, compelled her to come, forced her to find out the sex of the unborn child.
That didn’t work; the baby girl hadn’t been aborted. But the clinic, the clinic in the photo, had burned to the ground. Surely McKenna wasn’t accusing Garrett of burning down a clinic. The director certainly had a thing about fire; Darren Kalver pointed out the fire extinguishers in the barn on my first visit, cautioned me against smoking, mentioned a fire that occurred when Garrett was young. And he used fire with great effectiveness in his films. But to base an accusation of arson on such sketchy ground was as bad, worse than having O’Toole, the fool of a district attorney, accuse Garrett of being involved in Helga Forester’s death just because he hadn’t volunteered to step up and swab his cheek.
“Miss, are you sure we can’t help you? Doctor Gerson will be free in fifteen minutes.”
Garrett got in trouble with the DA because he refused to give a DNA sample. When other men in Truro and Wellfleet and Eastham volunteered to help with the Forester investigation, Garrett refused.
The clinic burned. The records burned.
I stared up at the motherly face of the older receptionist. “My brother—that is, my boyfriend—” I lowered my eyes to my lap. “Um, do you think, uh, can you give me a rundown of the services you provide, um, for men?”
“Birth control, infertility, testicular cancer, and UTIs. That’s urinary tract infections.”
When I wrote, when I organized my writing, I thought of facts as beads, each a hard, round object, each complete in and of itself. Facts, like beads, need to be strung on thread of a certain length and composition, arranged in a particular order.
“Do you want to make an appointment for him?” the younger woman said impatiently.
Facts, like beads, can be manipulated, restrung, crafted into kaleidoscopic patterns. A dangling necklace of facts can be broken, with each isolated bead taking on a new and separate significance.
“Miss?”
“Uh, no, uh, that is—um, I’ll have to talk it over with him. Thank you. Thank you for your help.”
CHAPTER
forty-four
Tape 063
Sybilla Jackson
3/15/10
Teddy Blake: Good morning, I have—
Sybilla Jackson: I can’t believe Garrett actually wants me to talk, but then he knows I’m not the type to harbor a grudge. Still, I find myself surprised he didn’t send me the finished script, tell me exactly what I could and couldn’t say. Such a control freak, really, who could live with him?
TB: You did.
SJ: Yes, for three years, almost four, wasn’t it? But we were apart so much of the time. I was traveling nonstop, making big money then, absolutely in demand, Rio one week, Milan the next, with a layover in Paris for a runway show. Those were my best years, really, and Garrett was such a lovely man for putting up with the hullaballoo. He wasn’t so much the big director then, but he was already leaving acting behind, turning the tables, which was so clever of him because he was a good actor, but he wasn’t going to be a star, just a flash in the pan, and then a has-been in a year or two, you know the kind. It’s a dog-eat-dog thing, acting, not that it’s any worse than modeling. In my business, you’re lucky if you get to be the flavor of the month. Actors have a teensy bit more time to develop a career. A model simply has a look, and if it’s your time, it’s your time.
TB: He started writing screenplays when the two of you were together.
SJ: We didn’t talk about work, really, we went to parties, and I went even if he refused to go. He had a bit of a dreary streak, to tell the truth. I always wanted to run out and play, and he was sometimes just a tiny bit stick-in-the-muddish, something about that dour New England background, that stuck-up theatrical family. He was overinvolved in his career. You tell him I said that. I know it all paid off, all that dreary work, but I certainly didn’t want to be stuck slaving with the ants when the grasshoppers were hosting a blowout.
TB: Did he drink a lot then?
SJ: Well, listen to you! Who said he ever drank a lot? I’m not talking about drugs and drink, dear, you always get in trouble for doing that, and I am the very soul of discretion. Except when I’m drinking, I suppose, but you’ve caught me cold stone sober. This isn’t exactly a party we’re having here.
TB: Touché, and speaking of parties, you went to the Academy Awards with Malcolm when he won for the first time, didn’t you?
SJ: God,
do you remember my dress?
TB: Tell me about it.
SJ: Well, everybody wanted to dress me that year, because they all knew I’d be on the red carpet, front and center, and the competition was brutal. Malcolm felt quite overlooked in the brouhaha. Dior was phoning every day—Galliano, you know—and after Dior, then Versace. Both Armani and Marchesa were in the final four, and I desperately didn’t want to offend anyone because gowns were my absolute bread-and-butter then, because they wanted younger and younger talent for bathing suits, and makeup ads were going entirely celebrity, which was—and is—infuriating. I wanted to go with something risqué, cut down to here and up to there, and then, well, then Malcolm and I had a terrible fight and I thought the whole thing might turn to ashes and fall apart. I was devastated.
TB: Did you argue often?
SJ: Hardly at all. What’s the point, but I was so upset. It turned out to be nothing but a particularly ill-timed pregnancy scare. Nerves, you know, and I just wasn’t eating enough. And I wound up wearing Versace, and that gown became an international hit. Everyone copied it. You remember? A deep tangerine color, one shoulder, and slit to the top of the thigh?
TB: Did you ever consider marriage, the two of you?
SJ: Oh, if I’d gotten pregnant, he’d have married me in a flash. That was the deal. And I tried. I mean, I wasn’t opposed to the idea, but nothing ever happened. Beyond that scare. I remember I was angry with him at the time. I figured he’d gotten himself fixed. But then didn’t Claire go and prove me wrong?
CHAPTER
forty-five
RE: D’Arcy’s Garage
SENT BY: [email protected]
SENT ON: April 17
SENT TO: Paul Jericho, Chief of Police
Paul,
Stopped by D’Arcy’s, and guess who’s working for him? Remember that kid, Gary Blessing, with the scarred face? We used to have him and his dad in regular before you were made Chief. Kid would never talk, even though we figured his old man was beating him pretty bad. D’Arcy hired him five months ago, followed all the rules, ran a CORI on him. Kid’s got no police record, but his dad’s over in Plymouth, beat up a girlfriend evidently didn’t know about the code of silence.
