I Love You More: A Novel (24 page)

With no additional leads, there was every indication that Diana Lane, Julie Lane, and Roberta Miles would get away with murder. This boiled Mack. I understood. In all honesty, I was feeling righteous too, but not because of the wives. Because of Oliver Lane. Here was this guy who had successfully conned three women, and most likely would’ve continued had he not been murdered. I would’ve loved to put the asshole in jail, but where was the crime? Sure, he’d led them on. Sure, he’d lied. He might have lived the role of husband with all of them, but legally he’d only married one. The marriage certificates for the others were bogus, the ceremonies shams. Diana Lane was the only one who could openly grieve. Julie Lane and Roberta Miles were little more than
concubines. Whether or not the three of them did it, and whether or not we’d ultimately catch them, I was happy they’d spend at least one more Christmas with their children.

That year, like every year, Cooper’s Island did Christmas up right. There was an annual Christmas dance held at Cooper’s Alleys. Our chamber of commerce did a nice job with the Christmas decorations. All the trees and storefronts were wrapped with little white lights. The local hardware store ran Christmas music on a loop on its outside speakers. A huge tree stood in the town’s center. Our one nondenominational church held a yearly Christmas Eve service. The mayor, like most politicians, hadn’t wanted to risk losing voters by bowing to any one religious group, so he had declared the church open to all worshippers and their various gods. I had always loved Christmas on Cooper’s Island. In my heart, even with our cheesy plastic Santa and reindeers flying in place above Main Street, the ancient mechanical window displays sporting elves with broken ears and chipped paint, and Jimmy O’Neill’s drinking problem (our Santa had spent more than one Christmas Eve in jail overnight), there was no place I’d rather be for the holidays.

On Christmas night, Lisa, Mack’s wife, invited me to their house to celebrate a combination Christmas and birthday party. Mack turned twenty-eight on the thirtieth; twenty-eight was a distant memory for me. Mack and Lisa had bought a fixer-upper on the west side of the island, the denser side, one street off the beach in the midst of rental land. It was the first time I’d been over since they’d completed the renovations. The permanent fixtures were decidedly male—dark cabinets, dark wood floors, stone fireplace. The decor was all Lisa—red canvas slipcover on the sofa, brightly patterned easy chairs, useless pillows, white pine dining set. After dinner, while Lisa cleaned up and put Evan to bed, Mack and I smoked a cigar on the front porch. Because the house was on a hill and rested on stilts, we could see the ocean through neighboring
properties. The night air was crisp but pleasant, the temperature in the high fifties, the smell of the ocean still overpowering, the sound of the waves as robust as a Rachmaninoff symphony.

Mack sucked on the end of his cigar, tore off the tip with his teeth. “Damn, I forgot, want a drink?”

“Nah,” I said. “Taking a break from the juice.”

“What’s up with that?”

“Trying to lose a few pounds.”

“Really?”

“No,” I said. “Not really.”

“Oh,” Mack said.

I didn’t want to belabor this line of questioning, so I switched the subject to one that made me even more uncomfortable, domestic bliss. “Lisa seems, well, happy. Being a mother and all.”

Mack laughed. “She is. She keeps telling me she’s found her true calling. Who would’ve guessed it? Tomboy Lisa loving motherhood. When we were kids, she was always beating the shit out of me.”

It was my turn to laugh. “Her cooking has definitely improved.”

“You liked the cioppino?” he asked. “Fresh catch.”

“Cioppino?” I said. “When did you learn that soup came in flavors?”

“Don’t tell her I told you, but she’s been taking cooking classes over in the church basement. You wouldn’t believe all the new cooking terms I’ve learned. Did you know there was a difference between basil and oregano?”

“Wow, really?” I smiled. “Well, tell her it was great. Fine dining to me.”

“You should tell her yourself. It’ll make her night.”

We were making small talk, trying to avoid talking about work, but some conversations are unavoidable.

“Did you find out anything more about our vic’s background?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Mack said.

“Not even a parking ticket?” I asked.

“Nope. How is that possible?”

“It isn’t,” I said. “Trust me, he made a mistake at some point.”

“Any luck on that safe-deposit box key?”

“No, you?”

“Maybe there isn’t a key,” Mack said.

“Or maybe the killer has it,” I said, and smiled. “Could be what he was looking for at the beach house that day.”

“You still doubting that the wives did it?”

“I’m not doubting anything. Only …”

“Only what?” Mack asked.

“Even if the three of them did get together before the murder, there’s no indication they’ve communicated since. Don’t you find that strange? Seems if they did do the crime together, they’d have a hard time staying away from one another.”

“Maybe they don’t want to be reminded of what they did,” Mack said.

“Maybe. But I will say this: Whoever did pull that trigger probably did the world some good. Guy was an asshole and a sleaze.”

“Yeah, but no matter what he was, it’s still a crime,” Mack said.

Although I didn’t say this to Mack, in my opinion the law isn’t a one size fits all. It’s fallible. Innocent people go to jail more than we like to believe. Guilty people go free. Mobsters, goddamn financial crooks, and dope-running kingpins don’t do time because they have resources, or serve shortened sentences at facilities that are more or less spas. And here were these three decent women, three loving and caring mothers, who were just living their lives, when some narcissistic asshole blindsided them, changed their whole world outlook, sucked them into a dark vortex where the code of civilization—honor, integrity, compassion, hope, strength, and love—was meaningless, where sin was the only way out. Sure they’d crossed the line, but at some point hadn’t we all?

By the time I’d made the decision to return to Cooper’s Island, my mother’s Alzheimer’s had advanced to the point that she didn’t know me. My sister had moved down from Wilmington several months earlier; the kids stayed with Brian, their dad. Kelly was happy to have me there; she’d had it rough. The house was exactly as I remembered it, a midcentury modern up on a hill, the only one like it on the island. My dad had it designed. I remember him saying that the house style was all the rage in the big-city suburbs, all the architects were designing them, all the jet-setters lived in them, and obviously the islanders were backward with their colonials, cottages, and stilted ramshackles. From our living-room window, you could just get a peek of the ocean. Growing up, the kids at Saint Anne’s school on Bodie Island had judged your status, and thus popularity, by whether or not your house had an ocean view. Mine just squeaked by and, as it turned out, so did I. I was almost popular, almost handsome, almost smart, but I thought then, and still do, that being “almost” gave me character. We weren’t lifers, my family. I’d spent the first five years of my life in Detroit, and though I hardly remembered it, and probably because I knew I’d have an in, I chose to start my law enforcement career there. My dad had worked for Detroit PD as a beat cop, and while he was well respected by his peers and superiors, his lack of a college diploma meant no chance for advancement. So when a position opened up on this little island in North Carolina that we’d never heard of, even though it wasn’t a promotion per se and was located in the “backward, mandolin-playing South,” he had romantic visions of small-town life, of the sound of seagulls instead of car horns, the smell of the sea instead of our neighbor’s bacon, a backyard instead of a fire escape, of slow nights, clear skies, and warm ocean water, the stuff of a leisurely and stressfree existence. The stuff that would cure his taste for alcohol. The stuff that would make him a better man, a better father. Unfortunately, life on Cooper’s Island didn’t turn out the way he planned.
He was too gruff, too determined, too busy in his mind to live the island life. With no friends, and no social outlets, he took to the bottle even more. He slept through entire mornings, blew off dispatch calls, got in barroom brawls, pissed off half the island and scared the rest, and then one day the employment termination notice came and he lost his pension and his pride. I was nine then, old enough to understand that something really bad had happened but too young to worry much about it. Maybe if I had known how to empathize, how to console him, he wouldn’t have beat me. Maybe if I had loved him more, he would’ve loved me more. Maybe if I hadn’t gone crying to my mother, he wouldn’t have beaten her too.

My dad died when I was fifteen years old, six years after he lost his job. In the last months of his life, he was a changed man. Cancer had eaten away his meanness and left him a sniveling, shriveled-up invalid, and my mother, after all that man had done to her, after years of surviving his abuse, years of working herself to the bone to pay the bills he should’ve been paying, years of spending what little free time she had helping those less fortunate, my dear sweet mother dutifully changed my father’s bedpans and wiped his fucking ass until the very end. Until the day, unbeknownst to her, I saw my mother remove my father’s oxygen mask, wait patiently through his choking coughs, and after she was certain he was dead, replace it over his mouth.

I never told my mother what I saw, but for years I could barely look at her, and the day after I graduated from high school, I headed to Detroit. I wrote off my hatred and my leaving as a normal reaction to what I’d seen; my mother had done the unthinkable. Then she got sick. I told myself that obligation brought me back to Cooper’s Island. My sister shouldn’t have to care for my mother alone. Those last few months as I watched my mother fade away, I had a lot of time to think about why I’d mentally and physically left home. It’s hard to admit to yourself that you’re
capable of murder, so much easier to deflect a weakness in oneself onto another. When I understood my anger had been misdirected, that it was me I hated, it was as if the dark clouds that enshrouded me had lifted. When I saw what my mother did that day, I’d not only felt a perverse satisfaction; I’d realized my father’s murderer could’ve been me.

After Lisa put Evan to bed, she came out holding two guitars and the rusty harmonica I’d left at their place several months earlier. “How about we do some caroling?” she said.

The three of us strummed and hummed our way into the night. And, as I always do on magical nights like that one, I thanked the angels for putting me in that place at that time. And even though I’d been asking a lot of questions and having a lot of doubts about
my
religion, I thanked the god of cops for choosing me to be one of his sacred messengers.

Mama’s funk reached an all-time low after the holidays. She slept all the time; quit shopping for anything, including groceries; ignored basic beauty essentials like getting her nails done or waxing her eyebrows; and the only baths she took were these really long, weird ones late at night where instead of using bubble bath, she’d put a bunch of rose petals in the water. More than once I thought I heard her talking to someone in there even though I knew she was alone. I remember worrying she might be going crazy. The sleeping and bad-hygiene thing got so bad that sometimes I’d shake her awake and make her take a shower. Other times, especially at night, I felt so sorry for her that I’d just lie down next to her. That’s how I found out about her nightmares. She’d talk or scream or thrash or cry, and sometimes she’d say Daddy’s name. I always woke her when the dreams got bad, mainly so I could get some sleep myself. I’d started nodding off in class, which got me sent to the principal’s office.

One morning, after I got dressed for school and found the Pop-Tart and cereal boxes completely empty, not to mention the milk sour, I decided I’d had enough. If Mama was going to sleep her life away, then I was going to take money from her stash drawer and do the grocery shopping myself. I knew where at least one
grocery store within walking distance was, but I had a hankering for fresh jelly-filled doughnuts and I knew for a fact that that grocery only carried the boxed kind. Now, it’s not that I’m entirely opposed to preservatives, it’s just that the fresh doughnuts Mama always got from either Krispy Kreme or Whole Foods (which carried Krispy Kreme), both of which were at least a twenty-minute car ride away on a good traffic day, tasted so much better. They practically melted in your mouth they were so tasty. I decided to do an Internet search for grocery stores or bakeries that carried Krispy Kreme or something comparable, but couldn’t find any. I even called the bakeries, thinking maybe they just didn’t list everything, but everybody acted like I was from some other planet. Three bakeries in my town, and not a one of them had doughnuts? In my opinion, the world is carrying this healthy-food-item thing way too far. Then I remembered how Mr. Dork was always eating doughnuts, and that his came out of a white paper bag, not a box, so it stood to reason they’d be fresh, so even though I didn’t find the prospect of asking Mr. Dork for anything, given that he’d obviously interpret my question as me thinking he was smart, what choice did I have?