Of course my mother has always thought Cath was completely wonderful and whenever she was in despair over my antisocial ways, Cath’s name would be invoked as a paragon of everything she would wish for in a daughter. Now don’t get me wrong, I have always adored Cath and she is my best friend, no question.
But recently I have begun to feel that her judgment of me can be a little unfair. I just don’t think I am as bad as she makes out. I suspect that under the surface Cath might just be as neurotic as I am and the only difference is that I am quite upfront about it whereas she pretends her life is eternally perfect.
Well, it isn’t. Cath has been in and out of rehab for a drinking problem that, until quite recently, she kept secret from me.
“I was very good about it, darling,” my mother’s voice continued, “because she is your friend but I do think you might call her and have a word. And there’s another thing. Why haven’t you
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been in touch with poor Tommy? He didn’t have the slightest clue you were even in America. Phil and I came back from the theater one night and found him sitting at the kitchen table with Cath.
He was pretty far gone, I’m afraid. At least half a bottle of whiskey and before you say a word, Cath didn’t touch a drop. It seems he’s lost his job at the BBC and he doesn’t know what to do with himself. His first thought was to come and tell you about it.You can imagine how utterly miserable he felt when he discovered you’d gone to America without telling him.”
Why should I tell him? He was the one who called off the wedding.
“But before you jump on a plane and come rushing back to him—” my mother continued. She was joking, right?—“let me tell you that Cath was doing a fine job of consoling him. She really is the kindest person and—”
I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of this. A while ago, in an un-guarded moment and long before she’d got together with Richie, Cath had confessed to being in love with Tommy.
“—she told me you hadn’t been in touch with her either.
What is the matter with you, Lee? These people are closer to you than anyone and you appear to have just walked away from them.”
Well, hello! There was the little question of the subject of my latest assignment being caught up in a murder investigation. Even if Tommy didn’t grasp the significance of that, Cath was married to a detective, a murder detective, and if my mother had spared a moment to fill them in on where I stood work-wise then Cath would understand that I was probably a little preoccupied.
“Anyway,” said my mother, “I gave them both your numbers so no doubt you’ll be hearing from them. Now, Lee, what’s happening with the construction of the beach house? Have you met the contractor yet? Have they cleared the ground? I want to know when they will be pouring the foundation.”
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I wasn’t really listening. I was trying to work out why Tommy had not mentioned that he had lost his job in his message. He said he was calling after he’d seen my mother. I guessed what must have happened. He would not have wanted to admit he’d been fired in a message. Even if he’d reached me, I would probably have had to coax it out of him having heard in his voice that there was a problem.
I vaguely registered my mother droning on for another minute or two about her travel plans and when they would be returning and what she expected me to do about the beach house.
Her voice followed me around the one-room cabin as I placed my plate in the dishwasher, switched off the lights, and turned down the bed. I would have an early night. I needed sleep to harness my energy to deal with the beach house and Tommy and Cath and what on earth I was going to do about my elusive assignment with Shotgun Marriott. Tucked up in bed, my thoughts turned to Tommy. I wondered if it was too late to call him. I switched on the light and dialed his number.
No reply.
It was three in the morning in London.Where was he? I left a quick message—“I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you called. I’m sorry about your job”—and then, before I changed my mind—“I love you, Tommy.” And then I hung up. Should I have mentioned that I knew he had lost his job? Should I have waited for him to tell me about it himself? How I wished it had been I rather than Cath who had been there to console him. But was it not a good sign that he had come around to tell me the news, an indication that maybe he did still see a future with me?
And then, as I switched off the light and the cabin was plunged into darkness, I saw a flicker of light outside. Suddenly I realized that there were no curtains or blinds on any of the windows. I got out of bed and crept through the darkness to the back of the cabin
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where I had seen the light and, peering through a window, I saw it came from the headlamps of a car in the distance along Cranberry Hole Road.
The car turned into my road and the headlamps were coming toward me. If the lights had still been on in the cabin I would have been clearly visible.
And then the headlamps went out. Whoever was out there had parked halfway down the dirt track to the cabin.
Was it Rufus? And if so, what did he want at ten thirty at night? Well, if it was, he would be here any second.
I grabbed my robe and sat huddled in it on the bed waiting for a knock on the door but it never came. I waited for the sound of the car starting up and driving away but after a while I found that the sheer silence all around me unnerved me more than anything.
I went around to all the windows checking that they were firmly locked and I turned the key in the door.Then I crept back to bed and reached for the TV remote.
I watched Letterman, aware that the flickering of the TV screen must be visible through the window to the person in the car outside. And finally, about twenty minutes later, I heard the sound of the engine and, peering through the darkness, I saw the car back up and drive away.
I lay awake for nearly an hour telling myself it was nothing to worry about. People probably turned down deserted dirt roads at ten thirty at night and parked for half an hour all the time out here in the Hamptons. I was a city girl, what did I know of the habits of beach folk?
The next morning I overslept and woke up to find the television still blaring into the room. I didn’t get to the Old Stone Market till eight o’clock and Rufus was just leaving.
“What happened to you?” he called from his truck. “I can’t hang around now. I’m late for work. Call me later.”
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“Wait!” I yelled at him and rushed over to tell him about the parked car.
“Kids probably,” he said, very matter of fact, “teenagers.
Where else they got to go to make out?”
Then he was gone, leaving me feeling somewhat relieved. It was a perfectly reasonable explanation, after all. I just had this weird instinct that it wasn’t the right one.
Inside the store Jesus was serving breakfast to a couple of construction workers.
“Your pie was delicious,” I told him and he beamed.
“Franny, she in back.” He nodded his head toward the far room.
I found Franny wandering around the shelves with a clipboard in her hand.
“Hi,” she said, “you see Rufus? He waited forever for you.”
“I overslept,” I said.
“He asked me out on a date,” she said. Her head was down and she was studying the shelves so I couldn’t see her face.
Well, this was interesting. “Did you say yes?”
“He’s gotta be ten years younger than I am.”
“So you said no.”
“I said if he found me a babysitter, he could take me out for a drink tonight.” She looked at me sideways. “I told him you might be a good bet.”
“He didn’t say anything about it,” I said.
“Oh.” She sounded disappointed.
I felt a tiny bit of resentment that s
he should take it for granted that I would help her out but I decided to ignore it.
“I expect I could come over for an hour or two.What time?”
I was totally unprepared for her long arms reaching out to envelop me in a hug. My natural loner’s reserve kicked in and I
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backed away from her. I wasn’t the most tactile person until I’d had time to really get to know someone.
But she didn’t seem to notice my lack of response. “Thank you!” she said. “I really do need to get out.You have no idea.This place is beginning to get me down. See, I’m doing a stock check here and it depresses the hell out of me. It’s always the same old boring things that sell—candy, potato chips, cookies, sodas, and you know the only things most people come in for?”
I shook my head.
“Cigarettes and the newspaper. I make a dime on a newspaper if I’m lucky and maybe eighty cents on a pack of cigarettes after I pay all the taxes. How can I raise Eliza on that? And I had such high hopes when I first took this place over. I hired Jesus because he was able to bring in all the Hispanic clientele—the construction workers and their families. They know him and they trust him. He cooks them the Mexican food they like and that’s all fine, but the rest of the locals, they don’t seem to be comfortable with me trying to bring the place into the twenty-first century.
They don’t like change, they want it the way my aunt used to have it when the most exciting thing you could buy was a bologna sandwich. Look at this”—she pointed to a row of packets in front of her—“sea salt from Brittany in France, sesame rice crackers, Thai noodles, anything out of the ordinary and it never moves off the shelves. Meanwhile I’ve got the New Yorkers coming in at weekends and turning up their noses because I don’t have enough of what they want.”
She kicked an apple on the floor.
“And that’s another problem. People pick up the produce and drop it on the floor so it’s bruised and then I can’t sell it. You would not believe the amount of stuff I have to throw away.You can only buy cheese by the case not by the piece. I got a case of
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Brie wholesale last week and so far I’ve only sold three pieces and it’ll only last two weeks.”
I was half listening to her. I was standing right by a notice board and I was intrigued by the ads for secondhand sewing machines, surfboards, garden equipment, and services as varied as psychic readings, house cleaning, and dog transportation to and from New York. There was one particular card that really caught my attention. It was turning brown with age and had clearly been hidden for some time by another card pinned over it. It was only because someone had torn a phone number off the card on top that two words could be read on the card underneath. wedding dresses. I lifted up the top card and read: secondhand wedding dresses, antique, designer, all sizes, alterations offered. martha farrell and then a phone number. An image of Sean Marriott’s body lying on the beach in drenched white tulle flashed before me and I shivered.
Before I could ask who Martha Farrell was, Franny said: “So I hear they arrested Shotgun Marriott.”
“News travels fast around here.”
“My son told me. He says you were over there yesterday.”
“I was,” I said. “And I met Dumpster—and Evan Morrison,” I added. “Why didn’t you tell me your shoplifter was a detective?”
Franny didn’t say anything so I persisted. “Why do you let him get away with it? You told me it wasn’t the first time he’d done it.”
Still she said nothing.
“Franny! Just because he’s a cop—”
“Exactly!” she said, suddenly turning on me. “It’s because he’s a cop.”
“I don’t get it,” I said.
She sighed and gestured for me to sit down with her on one of the benches at the long table in the back room. “I’ll tell you
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because you seem like a nice person and Lord knows I need to talk to someone. Plus Rufus says you’re okay. But I’d appreciate it if you’d keep what I’m about to tell you to yourself.”
“I won’t say a word,” I said, wondering what was coming.
“You met my son, Dumpster?” she said. “Well, it’s because of him that I go along with Evan Morrison. When I got together with Dumpster’s dad, I was just a kid and I thought living in the city was so exciting. But then when it came to raising Dumpster as a single parent, it became a little too exciting. I moved Dumpster back here because he had a problem. He was doing so many drugs, there was no way I could control him. There was a time when he could have had a real future in basketball but he got in with some delinquents at his school and he went downhill from there.”
“Wasn’t his father any help?”
She stared at me. “You have to be kidding. I don’t even know where he is anymore. Anyway, I don’t know why I thought it would be any better out here. We hadn’t been back five minutes before Dumpster started hanging out with some Colombians in Montauk. Evan Morrison busted them dealing cocaine in a parking lot—it was all tied in to a homicide investigation. He did a deal with me over Dumpster. In exchange for keeping Dumpster’s name out of it, Dumpster had to become his informant.”
Now it was my turn to stare. “What does that mean exactly?”
“He’s supposed to rat on his friends. Any drug action he sees, he’s supposed to tell Detective Morrison who passes it on to the narcs. Morrison’s after this dealer who allegedly killed one of his clients when he couldn’t pay for his supply and Morrison thinks Dumpster might get him a lead.”
“And Dumpster works for Shotgun.”
“And Shotgun’s been arrested,” said Franny. “I see where you’re going with this but there’s two things you should know.
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Dumpster worships Shotgun Marriott. There’s no way he’d sell him out even if he was standing right beside that woman when Shotgun killed her. And the second thing is that Dumpster was here with me both nights, when Sean was killed and that woman.”
“All night? Her name was Bettina Pleshette, by the way.”
“All night.” Franny tapped the table for emphasis. “He wasn’t working for Shotgun those nights.”
“Not at all?”
She shook her head.
Well, this didn’t match what Dumpster had told me about the night Sean was killed. I had distinctly heard him say he was putting up shelves for Shotgun that night and had overheard Shotgun canceling Bettina. And what Shotgun had said later had confirmed this. So if Franny wasn’t telling the truth about that night—maybe she was lying about the next one, when Bettina was killed. She wanted to protect her son and that was perfectly understandable but it would only complicate matters if she lied.
“Well, if he wasn’t there,” I said, “how can he give Shotgun an alibi?”
She seemed thrown by that. “I guess he can’t,” she said slowly,
“but I know he wouldn’t say anything about Shotgun that would get him in trouble. If they nail Shotgun Marriott for that woman’s murder, it’s not going to be on account of anything Dumpster said.”
Bettina was still that woman, I noticed. I wondered why.
“So what kind of stuff does Dumpster give Detective Morrison—as his informant?”
Franny grinned. “As little as possible. And never about anyone he likes. He has to be very careful because if those Colombians get to hear that he’s an informant, I dread to think what they might do to him. So you’ll keep quiet about it, right?”
I nodded.
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She glanced at me. “What did you make of Shotgun?”
“I liked him,” I said. “So you told Detective Morrison that your son was here with you?”
“Of course,” she said, “because he was.”
“And that’s the
story Dumpster gave to the detective about himself?”
She looked a little worried. “I wasn’t there when he spoke to him but that’s what he would have said, isn’t it? Because it’s the truth.”
I gave up. She was sticking to her story so I just shrugged and said, “Now what time do you want me here this evening—for when you go out with Rufus?”
“Around seven would be great,” said Franny, and as I went out the door she called after me, “I really appreciate you doing this for me, by the way. I mean really appreciate it.”
When I went back that evening Rufus was already there, lurking downstairs in the store.
“Thanks for this,” he said, giving a sheepish look. “Did you hear about Shotgun?”
“That he was arrested?” I asked. “I was there.”
“Well, he’ll be out on bail soon. It’ll be no sweat to him to post a million bucks bail.”
“Wow!” I was impressed. “By the way, thanks for those directions. You were right, I’d never have found the place without them.”
“Sure,” he said. “So, you’re finding your way around okay?”
“I am. Tell me, have you spoken to your dad?”
“He called last night. He told me you got the job of oversee-ing the construction.You must be a real saint. Vanessa asked me to take care of it a while back but I passed. The last thing I want
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is to be responsible for a bunch of construction guys who are never going to show up.Whatever made you agree to do it?”
“Because I’m an idiot,” I said. “I haven’t even been by the site.
Maybe we could go over there together tomorrow?”
“And maybe we couldn’t.” He laughed. “What’s with the ‘we’?
You’re not going to rope me in that easily.”
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