Toby grinned. ‘The turkey was good.’
‘That’s true. My sister is a good cook.’
‘Your sister is a very good cook.’
Toby sat with Megan in companionable silence, staring at his coffee. His phone chirped and he checked it. He looked up and saw her watching him, a long dark curl hanging over her glasses. She looked very little like her sisters. She was shorter than them, darker, less leggy. Her eyes were almost black, compared to Alice’s grey, or Maya and Brooke’s clear blue. But she had the Guth sisters’ chin, of course.
‘Do you know what happened on that submarine?’ he asked.
‘Not really,’ said Megan. ‘No more than you do. Mom told us all before she died, which was, like, seven years ago now. She spoke with us one by one. She had cancer, the treatment hadn’t worked and we knew it was terminal. She said Dad would never tell us himself, but she wanted us to know that he had stopped his captain blowing up the world. She just said that the submarine had received orders to launch their missiles, that the captain of the ship was about to obey them and Dad stopped him.’
‘She didn’t say how?’ Toby asked. ‘Because I was wondering whether your father . . . ’ he hesitated. ‘Whether your father might have stopped him permanently.’
‘What, you mean killed him?’ said Megan.
Toby nodded. ‘It’s just a guess. But if the captain was dead, presumably he couldn’t order the missile launch. And Sam did imply that the captain was no longer around.’
Megan raised her eyebrows. ‘You realize that’s my dad you’re accusing of killing someone? Your father-in-law?’ She seemed surprised rather than offended.
‘Yeah, I’m sorry. I have no proof. It’s just a guess. Did your mother say anything about it?’
‘A wild guess,’ said Megan. ‘And one I wouldn’t share with Alice if I were you. No. Mom gave me no details. But she did say we weren’t to tell anyone, and we weren’t to let on to Dad that we knew. She told us we could tell our own children eventually. Obviously we talked about it among ourselves. We were amazed and really proud, which is of course why Mom told us.’
‘But now Bill knows you know?’
‘Yeah. That was my fault. Naturally. He and I were having a fight. I think it was about me dropping out of college to be with my boyfriend – what a bad idea that was – and I said something dumb like: “Just because you stopped us all from getting blown up, doesn’t mean you get to decide what we do with our lives.” Oops.’
‘He wasn’t pleased?’
‘No. You’ve seen how seriously he takes that Classified crap – as if it still mattered. But to Dad it does. He signed up to serve his country when he was eighteen and, as far as he’s concerned, he’s never going to stop doing it, however dumb it may be.’
She winced at the memory. ‘The worst bit was he thought Mom had betrayed him. But after a while I think he realized it was a good thing. It was like a bond between us: our own family secret. And we did a pretty good job of keeping it. I haven’t told anyone. Neither has Maya, I don’t think. And Alice didn’t tell you, did she?’
‘No. But she seemed pleased when Bill asked me to join him with Sam.’
Megan smiled. ‘That was his way of cutting you in, without him or Alice having to tell you directly. That’s so typical. Of both of them.’
‘Brooke told Justin, though, didn’t she?’
‘Yes. Brooke tells Justin everything.’
‘That has something to be said for it,’ said Toby.
‘Maybe. It pissed the rest of us off. But we figured Brooke felt bad about Craig being Justin’s father and no one telling him. You heard Justin just now, didn’t you?’
‘Yes. What was that all about?’
‘Justin’s mom Maria was married to Craig. Then, soon after Craig died, she married a guy called Tony Opizzi. Justin was born, and everyone assumed he was Tony’s son. Justin’s older than us, but we used to see him a lot when we were kids. He used to come to stay with us when we were living in Europe; he even went on vacation with us a couple of times. We all thought he was great: the big brother we never had.
‘Anyway, as Justin got a little older he started looking a lot like Craig. I mean, a lot like him. Mom and Dad noticed. Justin’s mom noticed and Tony noticed; but they probably knew right from the beginning. Obviously they didn’t tell us kids. Or Justin. Then Alice and Justin were looking at that photo of Dad and Uncle Lars and Craig in the living room. We were living in England at the time, in Cobham; Justin was about sixteen and Alice must have been ten. And Alice was like: “Hey, Justin, this guy Craig looks just like you.” And Justin figured it out.’
Toby winced.
‘Yeah. Justin lost it. And you know what? He was right: they should have told him. After that, he stopped coming to visit us. We didn’t see him until a few years ago when Brooke went to grad school in Chicago and hooked up with him there. I think she always had a thing for him. She’s seven years younger, but that matters a lot less when you’re twenty-four than when you’re nine. We all worshipped him, even Maya who was only little. He played with her all the time and she loved it.’
‘All of you? Even Alice?’
Megan’s dark eyes flashed and she smiled. ‘Especially Alice.’
Toby opened the bedroom door with some trepidation. Alice was sitting on the bed, her arms wrapped around her bunched-up knees. Her face was flushed but there were no tears. ‘Oh, Toby,’ she said.
Toby closed the door and hopped on to the bed next to her.
‘Toby, you’re not going to ask me any questions, are you?’
‘No, Alice. No I’m not.’
Alice gave everyone, even her family – especially her family – the impression of extreme competence, of absolute self-confidence, of an ability to deal with any crisis. But Toby knew that underneath she was just as vulnerable and insecure as anyone else. More so. She had spent her girlhood, her adolescence, her adulthood working to hide this from everyone. But Toby knew. It was their secret.
‘Come here.’ Toby pulled her towards him. After a minute or so, she looked up and kissed him, softly at first and then with more urgency. Toby’s groin knew what was coming next before his brain did, and within a minute they were naked and entwined on the bed, moving against each other with just enough restraint not to be heard downstairs. But then the bed creaked and Alice let out a little cry.
Afterwards, he lay on top of her, spent, resting his weight on his elbows, protecting her.
She smiled up at him.
‘What’s that?’ she said.
Toby raised his head. A gentle murmuring seeped into the bedroom from the marshes outside.
‘I don’t know.’
‘I think it’s the geese.’
The murmur became a clamour. They both climbed out of bed and went to the window. The sun had just set, and the sky above the marshes to the west was on fire, as red and gold burnished the underbelly of dark clouds. Beneath these, a swirl of hundreds of long black shapes with sweeping wings beat their way northwards towards the sea. They were coming in waves of V formations, which elegantly shifted shape as if in response to a set of complex commands or a mysterious pre-arranged routine.
Geese. Hundreds of them. No, thousands. Making a hell of a racket.
‘They’ve come from the fields inland and they’re headed back out to the mudflats to roost,’ said Alice.
‘They’re magnificent.’
‘Aren’t they?’
Still they kept coming. Alice and Toby watched as the fire in the western sky slowly burnt itself out and darkness took over. The last V had just passed overhead when two pairs of headlights approached the house along the lane outside. Two cars pulled up, one with police markings and the other a silver Ford Fiesta, presumably belonging to a detective.
‘Oh, shit,’ said Alice as she drew back from the window and picked up her clothes.
‘They may not want to speak to you,’ Toby said.
‘I think they probably will,’ said
Alice, as she wriggled into her jeans.
Toby pulled on his own clothes and followed his wife downstairs. DC Atkinson and two other police officers were waiting for them in the hall, with Bill. Megan was watching from the kitchen door.
The detective took a step towards the staircase, his expression grave.
‘Alice Rosser. You are under arrest on suspicion of the murder of Sam Bowen.’
Fifteen
September 1983, Groton, Connecticut
Craig, Lars and I met Vicky, Kathleen and Donna at the New London Union Station in my old 1975 Mustang.
I had phoned Donna the evening after our date in Little Italy and the conversation had gone well. We had spoken several times and then I received a wonderful letter from her: warm, witty, frank. I had thought I was not much of a letter writer, but my reply had gone better than I had expected. I told her about life on the base, and about Craig’s mood swings between despair over Maria and a determination to get very drunk. She told me about the woman at the desk next to hers who had taken the day off because she was too embarrassed to show up for work with a giant spot on her nose, and the old guy who liked to declaim filthy Restoration poetry to her on the steps of her apartment building. It had taken her some time to identify the poems, but now she was sure they were by the Earl of Rochester.
Then she wrote me a six-page letter about her brother. She had just received a letter from him; the first for three years. He was living in the woods somewhere in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. He said he was ‘getting his shit together’ and had gotten a job at a hotel as a bartender for the summer. I wrote her about my dad’s newspaper, how proud I was of it, and how I thought maybe the real reason I hadn’t taken up journalism was that I couldn’t do it justice. I asked her for more about her brother.
She said he had been really smart in high school. His teachers encouraged him to apply to an Ivy League college, but he had decided not to defer his Vietnam draft. He had gone; he had come back; he had changed for ever. He had refused to speak about it to her or to anyone else, except for once, when he was drunk and in tears. He had told her it wasn’t what he had suffered in Vietnam, or even what he had seen that screwed him up, it was what he had done. He wouldn’t say what that was and Donna wouldn’t ask him.
She didn’t have to say that that was what had made her a pacifist, but I knew she wanted to explain it to me, that she wanted me to understand. I took that to mean she cared about my opinion of her, and that pleased me. But I couldn’t help thinking about the guy in Battery Park I had tried to give ten dollars to.
The phone calls were brief and light; it was always good to hear her voice. The letters were the real communication between us.
I went down to New York to stay for the weekend with Donna in her tiny studio apartment in the East Village. I don’t know whether it was the letters, or what it was, but it seemed like we knew each other really well, even though this was only the third time we had met. I knew her and yet there was so much I wanted to find out. We talked and talked. I had a lot I wanted to tell, a lot I wanted to hear.
We avoided discussing nuclear weapons directly, or nuclear power in general, but it was obvious she had been an active protester in college, and still was. She was upset about South Africa too, and apartheid; she wanted the big multinational firms to divest from the country. I hadn’t really given the subject much thought before, but she persuaded me.
Of course, we didn’t just talk. We fooled around. A lot.
She announced that she, Kathleen and Vicky had decided to come up to Groton for the following weekend. Being married, Craig had his own small house off base, and their idea was that the women would stay there with him. There must be plenty of room now Maria had moved out.
I wasn’t so sure. I came up with a plan.
Donna smiled when she saw me at the train station and she kissed me, but unlike the week before in New York, I sensed she didn’t quite share my excitement. It worried me for an instant, then I decided to ignore it. At least she had left the little anti-nuclear buttons off her denim jacket for her visit to a naval base.
The New London Submarine Base wasn’t in New London at all, but over the bridge on the opposite side of the Thames River from that port, a couple of miles north of the town of Groton. Craig’s house was in a large development of small cookie-cutter cream-and-light blue dwellings plopped down on to acres of sun-browned mown grass just a half mile away. It might have seemed bland and suburban, but actually the place had a warm, friendly, secure feel to it. There were kids and signs of kids everywhere: swings, bikes, small trampolines. It was a little patch of suburban America that the men who lived half their lives there were serving to protect when they were away at sea: the loyal wives waiting to greet their husbands after their tour, the toddlers running to Dad.
Maria had left Craig a single man among happy families, and he hated it. But his house was a good place for Lars, him and me to bring a case of beer and drink it.
Lars joined us. It was a warm September day, in the seventies, and Craig poured the girls iced tea, and a beer for himself. Lars and I stuck to the iced tea.
‘This is a great place!’ said Kathleen with credible politeness.
‘It’s a little small,’ said Vicky.
‘Yeah. It’s probably too small for the three of you,’ said Craig. ‘But Bill has a solution.’
Donna looked at me, eyebrows raised, half-smile poised.
‘Have you ever been to Mystic, Donna?’ Mystic was the next town up the coast, an old port and shipbuilding centre.
‘No,’ she said.
‘I’ve booked us a night at an inn there. Right in the middle of town. You know, to make space here for the others.’
Vicky laughed. ‘Can’t you take me as well?’
For a second, Donna’s half-smile froze. Then she grinned. ‘That sounds great.’
We had lunch at Craig’s house, tuna-melt sandwiches – his specialty and then Donna and I set off for Mystic, which was only ten miles away.
‘Are you OK with this?’ I asked as we hit the highway just outside the development. ‘It’s just I wanted to spend some time alone with you. And it’s a nice inn.’
Donna smiled warmly. ‘Of course I’m OK with this,’ she said, and she leaned over to kiss my cheek. ‘I said it’s a great idea.’ She put her hand on my leg. She had sensed my apprehension. ‘I meant that.’
Donna was as charmed by Mystic as I hoped she would be. The inn I had booked was right by the river in the centre of the small town, next to an old iron drawbridge that was periodically raised in a grand salute to let a yacht pass through on its way out into Long Island Sound.
We found a place for dinner with a terrace overlooking the water.
In the nineteenth century, the port had been a thriving centre of New England industry, and many of the old buildings and ships still survived. On one side of the river they were preserved in a museum, exactly as they would have looked over a century before. On the other, they gleamed in white clapboard, with immaculate lawns and picket fences beneath a green wooded ridge.
One house in particular caught my eye. It was slightly bigger than the others, stuck out on a point in the river. I wondered who owned it. A current captain of industry, probably, or finance. Maybe it was inherited. I wondered if I would ever own a house like that. I couldn’t quite see how, unless I became an admiral. I had no idea how much admirals earned or houses like that cost, but it seemed like a suitable house for an admiral.
‘What are you looking at?’ Donna asked.
‘I was looking at that house,’ I said, pointing to it. ‘And wondering whether I could ever own one like it.’
‘Dream on,’ said Donna. ‘Where would you get that kind of money? Unless you became a pirate? You know, a kind of modern-day John Paul Jones, sneaking up on galleons in your submarine.’
‘He wasn’t a pirate,’ I said. ‘He was a hero of the US Navy. I could become an admiral one day, I guess. An admiral should be able to
live in a house like that.’
Donna’s eyes widened. ‘An admiral? That’s ambitious.’
I shrugged. I was tempted to apply modesty, and I normally would have done, but with Donna I felt an urge to be honest. Honest with myself as much as with her.
‘I guess I am. Secretly. I really like the Navy. And I’m a pretty good naval officer. Our commanding officer is a guy called Ray Driscoll. He has this air of calm about him that makes you trust him, makes you want to please him. Makes you want to do the right thing for him and for your crew. I admire him. And I think I could do what he does just as well as him.’
For a moment, I thought Donna was going to tease me, but she smiled. ‘I can see that. You’d be good at it.’
‘Of course, being an admiral is different to commanding a submarine. Administration. Politics. But I like to think I can do that too. So I guess I am ambitious. What about you?’
‘Me? God, I don’t know.’ Donna sipped her wine. ‘I’d like to make the world just a little bit better, but that turns out to be really hard. You’d think the UN Development Program would be able to do that. All those people. All that money. The big shiny offices. All those staplers.’ She smiled. ‘But sometimes I wonder how much it achieves. Whether its purpose isn’t just to make people like me feel good about themselves.’
‘They must achieve something, surely?’
‘Oh they do, I guess. But I have this friend who was at Swarthmore with me. He wanted to do the same thing as me, make the world a better place. He’s doing a master’s in Agriculture. He says it’s all about digging one well at a time. He’s right.’
A couple of sculls glided along the calm evening water, their oars flowing in an easy rhythm. It was almost dark. The restaurant was full now, conversation a relaxed murmur as the diners enjoyed the dusk.
Donna grinned and reached across to take my hand. ‘Hey. This is a lovely place. I’m glad you brought me here.’
‘So am I.’
‘Did you ever do that?’ Donna asked. ‘Row? It looks fun. Especially on an evening like tonight.’
Launch Code Page 9
