Amagansett (20 page)

‘Whose idea was it?’

‘Excuse me?’ said Manfred.

‘Going fishing, your sister still warm in her grave.’

Manfred didn’t respond immediately, unsure if he had heard correctly. ‘How dare you,’ he flared.

Conrad took a step towards him.

‘I know about Lizzie Jencks.’

Manfred recovered quickly, but not quickly enough. His eyes had betrayed him.

‘Lizzie who?’

‘And that’s not all I know.’

‘I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about,’ said Manfred with way too much indignation.

Conrad smiled. ‘I’ll be seeing you.’

He stood his ground, obliging Manfred to walk away first. But he didn’t.

‘Who the hell do you think you are, hurling accusations around?’

‘Accusations?’ said Conrad. ‘I thought you’d never heard of Lizzie Jencks.’

Hollis had been trying his hardest to appear interested, so he was a little surprised when Mary said, ‘You don’t seem very interested.’

‘Don’t I? Maybe it’s the blisters.’

‘The blisters?’

‘I have a few.’

It was an understatement; his heels and toes were rubbed raw. This was due in part to the old pair of walking boots she’d lent him, her ex-husband’s feet being a good couple of sizes larger than his own. Mainly, though, it was because of the considerable distances they’d covered since their dawn departure. He had never walked so far in one day, not since a tramping trip in the Catskills with the Brooklyn Boy Scouts many years before. On that occasion the heat had been bearable, the terrain forgiving, and they’d had the roving hands of a buck-toothed scoutmaster to spur them onwards.

Mary, he’d soon discovered, was a keen believer in treading the thorny path. Without so much as a word of warning she would leave the trails that threaded the oak woods north of town, striking out through the brush and briars over uneven ground deliberately designed to turn an ankle. He’d had little choice but to follow. The treasures she sought were only to be found deep in the woods.

She showed him square indentations in the forest floor—the cellar holes of dwellings abandoned centuries before. She pointed
out large flat stones buried in the undergrowth, etched with initials, that had once served as boundary markers for these early homesteads. And as they weaved through the oak, hickory, maple and birch, she drew his attention to clusters of pear and apple trees, gnarled and wretched—the vestiges of orchards considerably older than the trees that now towered around them.

She explained that at one time the early settlers had so denuded this rolling landscape that they’d been forced to drive their cattle and sheep into the kettle holes whenever the English ships appeared off the coast looking to re-stock. The East End, she said, was pockmarked with these deep depressions, footprints of the vast blocks of ice left behind by the glacier when it retreated. She insisted on making a detour to show him one such hollow, its steep sides descending to a sun-dappled pool, the water clear yet somehow black as pitch. And he imagined the farmers cowering there with their beasts, safe from the hungry eyes of the enemy, their former countrymen.

She showed him the graves of those early herders, small family burial plots reclaimed by the forest, the bones of the dead woven through with the roots of the same trees that had dislodged and toppled the weathered headstones. The names, eroded by time, had been destined for obscurity until Mary came along and recorded them, clearing off the lichen, taking rubbings with wax crayons, pulling out on to rice paper names no longer discernible to the human eye.

Some were names that hadn’t survived the years, the male lines cut short at some juncture, although some part of their blood still flowed in the veins of the living, trickling down through the generations via the womenfolk, mingling through intermarriage, surviving in everything but name.

Mary wasn’t a Calder; her husband was a Calder—from Scotland via Madison, Wisconsin—and he was new to the East End of Long Island. Or rather he had been until he left. Mary was a Northfleet, a family to be reckoned with in and around East Hampton ever since Samuel Norfleete first showed up on the scene from England. And just as Mary could trace her descent
right back to the very earliest days of settlement, so they now retraced the footsteps first taken by her ancestor as he headed through the North Woods in search of an inlet or cove with a deep enough draft to accommodate the seagoing vessels that would transport his lumber, cattle and tanned hides to new and lucrative markets. He found the ideal spot at what was now called Northwest Landing, and he became wealthy on the back of the venture, though you wouldn’t have known it to look at the place almost three centuries on. All that remained of the warehouse and the wharf he had built was a handful of blackened stumps poking through the mud of the silted-up little creek, barely visible through the murky water.

It was while he was peering at these few pathetic remnants of the wharf pilings that Mary said to him, ‘You don’t seem very interested.’

It wasn’t the blisters, not if he was honest. And it wasn’t that he was bored. He had enjoyed listening to her stories of days gone by, even if she did have a tendency to talk with earnest, almost irritating, enthusiasm at times. It wasn’t even that her tales of hardy pioneers hacking out a life for themselves unsettled him—the noble clans of farmers and fishermen with their ancient lineages and deep-rooted traditions, wedded to the land and the ocean. It didn’t bother him that he knew almost nothing of his own heritage, except that he sprang from an undistinguished jumble of different races and religious creeds. There was a German great-something (or was it a great-great-something?) who had worked as a stonecutter in the granite quarries of Vermont, and a Danish wet-nurse, then some whispers of Jewish blood on his mother’s side, topped off with a large shot of Brooklyn Irish and a dash of Jesuit French.

No pure pedigree for him. He was a mongrel, genuine homegrown fare, and there seemed no reason to deny it or be embarrassed by it. For all their lofty claims, people were people. Even here in East Hampton, with their time-honored bloodlines, they would still have their share of bastards and backroom abortions and cuckolded husbands blithely bouncing other men’s children on their knees.

No, if Mary sensed a certain distraction in him it was because it was five o’clock on a Saturday—weekend cocktail hour—and by his calculation they had another hour and a half’s walking ahead of them before they reached their destination.

He was wrong.

Some unseen clock was striking eight as they crossed the bridge spanning the creek in Springs. This was the heart of the little community, though you wouldn’t have known it to look at the place. There was no Main Street as such, just a couple of road junctions, an open expanse of land bisected by a creek, and a few isolated buildings, randomly placed, as if someone had blindfolded a founding father and asked him to stick pins in a map. There was a church here, a schoolhouse over there, a barn, a hall, and a lone store on the south side of the bridge, in front of which a group of local men was now gathered, chewing the fat. Mary greeted a couple of them as they passed by.

Beyond the store, a blind lane led down to the edge of Accabonac Harbor and what appeared to be an abandoned boatyard. Closer inspection revealed a few desultory signs of activity—a small rowboat upturned on wooden stays and half painted, an outboard motor stripped down to its component parts, a torn fishing net in the process of being repaired.

Across the yard, on the shore of the creek, stood a small shack, the water lapping at the base of the veranda. An old man was seated in a spring-rocker examining a small round object between his thumb and forefinger.

‘Joe.’

He turned and his furrowed face cracked a smile. ‘Mary. And with a beau in tow.’

‘Just a friend,’ said Mary, stooping to kiss him on the cheek.

‘If you say so.’ He eased himself to his feet, extending a crooked and calloused paw. ‘Joe Milne.’

‘Tom Hollis.’

‘What’s that?’ asked Mary.

Joe handed her the small ball. ‘You tell me.’

She turned it in her fingers. ‘I don’t know,’ she conceded, handing it on to Hollis. It was hard and textured.

‘Flo Barratt back in the woods there, she’s got her an army of cats, that old heifer, scores of the damn things runnin’ all over, pissin’ on the couch and all sorts. Some of ‘em’s gone missing of late. Now I know why.’ He paused. ‘It’s a fur ball out of that greathorned owl I keep for huntin’ crows.’

To have dropped it then and there would have been impolite. Thankfully, Joe took it off him.

‘Must have developed hisself a taste for kitty meat. Best dispose of the evidence while I figures what to do.’ He lobbed the fur ball out into the creek.

Hollis noted that it floated.

Joe suddenly clamped a hand on his shoulder. ‘There’s a clam pie needs eatin’ and some cold beers to wash it down with.’

‘Thank you, God,’ thought Hollis.

They went and dunked themselves in the creek before dinner to wash away the sweat and the grime, stepping gingerly through the rushes, the mud oozing between their toes. Hollis was forced to confess to Mary that he couldn’t really swim. He knew that at a push he could flail his way to the side of a swimming pool, because he’d been forced to do so once on a day-trip to Coney Island when his father had tossed him into the deep end of the marble pool in the Pavilion of Fun. But the atavistic impulse to survive which had driven him through the water that day had little in common with the pleasure others appeared to get from swimming.

He stood near the bank up to his chest in water while Mary stroked around leisurely in the dying rays of the sun, glancing over every so often to check that he hadn’t lost his footing and slipped beneath the surface. He was warmed by her concern, and surprised by the force of the urge that welled up inside him when she stepped from the water.

She slapped his hand away and told him to behave.

They ate dinner inside by the light of a kerosene lamp hanging
from a beam. The clam pie was hot and the beer, as promised, cold—manna and nectar after a day’s hiking.

‘So, bub, you get to see the sights?’

‘I think we covered pretty much everything between East Hampton and here.’

Joe laughed. ‘It’s the one comfort now that my legs is goin’—Mary don’t get to drag me around with her.’

‘He’s lying,’ said Mary. ‘Everything I showed you, Joe showed me first.’

‘Have you lived here all your life?’ asked Hollis.

‘Since the war, the one with the South—1861. Born right over there in back of Hog Creek.’

‘Don’t tell me,’ said Hollis, ‘she’s related to you too.’

‘Goin’ back some, but they don’t like to talk of it, them Nor’fleets.’ Unseen to Mary, he winked at Hollis.

‘That’s not true,’ she said indignantly.

‘We’re Bonackers, you see, us Milnes—clam-diggers. We was poor as muck when we first come here to tend sheep for them Gardiners out on the island; three centuries on we still ain’t got enough real estate to put in a flower pot. There’s some things you can’t change, I guess. What mule ever had another mule for a ma or a pa?’

‘Excuse me?’ said Hollis.

‘You can’t breed mules from mules,’ said Mary. ‘And you can stop bellyaching, for one,’ she continued, turning back to Joe.

‘Why not?’ asked Hollis.

‘What?’ asked Mary irritably.

‘Why can’t you breed mules from mules? I mean, where do they come from?’

‘They’re horses crossed with donkeys. They’re sterile.’

‘Oh.’

‘I’m proud of my Bonacker blood,’ said Mary to Joe, defensively.

‘I know you is. And
you
know most in these parts ain’t of your mind.’

It was the low point of the evening, watching Mary brought to heel, Joe retouching the rose-colored picture she had painted for
Hollis over the course of the day. But he loved her all the more for the speed with which she recovered, abandoning her pout for lively banter designed to draw him into the conversation.

He was being presented to Joe—that much was clear—for the old man’s scrutiny, his seal of approval. Normally, he would have kicked against such a test, but he rose to the challenge without effort, assisted by the bottle of whiskey that landed on the table with a welcome thump once the plates were cleared. And when it came to explaining how he’d come to join the East Hampton Town Police Department, he almost believed his own lies.

It was Mary who brought the evening to a close, attending to the dishes at the sink, prompting Joe to insist that she let them alone. Armed with a couple of extra blankets, they were banished to a large hut out back. It was a shed used for shucking scallops in season, Mary explained, and the mountain of empty shells heaped up outside gleamed white in the moonlight.

They used the blankets to enlarge the bed Joe had made up for her, and they undressed by the glow of a kerosene lamp that cast their shadows around the timber walls.

‘Lie back,’ said Mary, reaching into her knapsack. She removed a pot of Pond’s cream and scooped some on to her fingertips.

Hollis closed his eyes, anticipating some delicious prelude to a sexual romp. The cream was cool against his chest, his neck, his face, his arms. It was all becoming a little too matter-of-fact, her attentions drifting away from the center of his body towards the extremities.

He opened an eye.

‘For the mosquitoes,’ said Mary. ‘They can be pretty fierce around here.’

She wasn’t joking.

‘Are you sure you heard him right?’

‘For God’s sake, Richard, of course I’m sure.’

‘Tell me again exactly what he said.’

Manfred drew hard on his cigarette and exhaled. ‘He said he knew about Lizzie Jencks. And he said it wasn’t all he knew.’ His head snapped round towards Wakeley. ‘I’m not imagining it. He was at me all day, nothing obvious, small things, niggling. He knows. Believe me.’

Wakeley considered his words for a moment. ‘It’s not impossible.’

Manfred laughed—a short, incredulous expulsion of air. ‘No, I’ll say it isn’t!’

‘But how does he know? And what exactly? Was he there when it happened?’

Three unanswered questions strung together, and yet Manfred found them strangely reassuring. Richard was already displaying more clarity of thought than he had been able to muster all evening.

Dinner had been a living hell, spinning in the void of his own head while trying to do the right thing by their house guests. Richard had only returned from visiting friends as cocktails were being served, and there had been no opportunity to share the burden with him until now. But standing there on the bluff at the end of the garden, overlooking the ocean, the others safely in bed, he felt better already. Not exactly restored, but beginning to believe it
might just be possible to shore up the crumbling edifice of his life.

Richard could have that effect on you. Even in the most adverse circumstances he remained reassuringly calm, utterly insightful. It was the reason he had been hired in the first place, the reason they still paid him so handsomely almost twenty years on. They had made him rich, rich enough not to be tempted by the rival offers of employ he must surely have received over the years. And he had earned every penny of his small fortune, isolating and ironing out problems on their behalf.

When the unions had threatened production at the Cuban sugar plantation, Richard had advised against the strong-arm tactics employed by the other operators, opting to fly to Havana himself. He did nothing for the first week other than inform himself about the enemy—the personalities, the politics and, most importantly, the rivalries, both within and between the two labor organizations in question.

And then he had destroyed them from the inside. Not completely—that would have proved self-defeating in the long term—but just enough to undermine the workers’ confidence in their representatives. He fueled tensions, ambitions, turning stewards against bosses, splitting committees, oiling the wheels of discord with cash ‘donations’, which he then ensured were brought to the attention of the workers.

Concessions were made; they had to be. Men were given two days’ paid vacation on the birth of a child. A nursery was provided free of charge, in the knowledge that few would expose their children to the coarse language of the cane-cutters’ buses. A literacy program was introduced, not that anyone in their right mind would want to spend their precious lunch break in a classroom. The cost of these measures was carefully calculated to fall well short of the losses the company had been facing. Moreover, the initiatives created a false impression of high-minded munificence: the caring face of capitalism. It had been a Machiavellian masterstroke on Richard’s part.

And when the girl had stepped in front of the car on that dark,
lonely lane, Richard was the person he had turned to—Richard, who always knew what to do, who never disappointed.

Whatever his counsel had been that night, Manfred would have followed it unswervingly. As it was, he found himself driving the length of Long Island in the early hours of the morning, a traumatized Lillian sitting beside him. Their destination was a rundown gas station on the outskirts of Jamaica Bay. Two men were waiting for them near the pumps. One wordlessly got behind the wheel of the damaged Chrysler and disappeared into the night. The second drove them to a taxi rank on Broadway. He was under instructions, he explained, not to take them home. It was better that he knew nothing about them: better for them, better for him.

The cover story was in its infancy, but already hatched and finding its place in the world. It would undergo certain refinements once Richard had thought it through from every possible angle, but the skeleton was there from the first. The version of events he told them to think about and add texture to was this: Manfred had gone to the dinner dance at the Devon Yacht Club with Lillian and Gayle around seven-thirty. At nine they were telephoned at the club by Justin, who had only just arrived at his house, having been obliged to stay late in the city. They told him the evening was proving to be something of a dud, and it was decided that they leave and join him at his place. Gayle stayed on at the club.

Up until this point in the story, the presence of witnesses demanded that truth and fiction run the same course. They now parted company and Richard’s imagination came into play.

If asked, Manfred and Lillian were to say that they’d been at Justin’s for no more than half an hour when an argument broke out between the two men. Upset with her fiancé’s behavior, Lillian left with Manfred when he stormed out. Manfred was still fuming when they arrived back at their house on Further Lane, where he announced he was returning to the city. Lillian offered to accompany him back. They packed their bags and left well before midnight, something Richard would attest to if called on to do so. A few hours later, as they were entering the outskirts of New York, Manfred’s car broke down. Forced to abandon it, they thumbed a
lift with a stranger to a taxi rank on Broadway and a cabbie drove them the final leg to Lillian’s apartment.

It was a good story, which had stood the test of their remorseless scrutiny, a remarkable achievement by Richard given that he had fabricated it in a little under ten minutes. He was assisted by a few pieces of good fortune, the chief one being that Justin was the only member of his family staying at the house that weekend, so no one saw the three of them leave the place at one o’clock in the morning, drunk, and in two cars.

They hadn’t set out to race, but maybe it was inevitable. Justin had spent a good part of the evening making fun of Manfred’s new Chrysler, a Town and Country Convertible. The mahogany doors and trunk lid, trimmed with white ash, made it look like a mobile sideboard, he said; and while he was sure it would draw admiring glances from every carpenter between Park Avenue and Montauk Point, it really wasn’t a fit vehicle for a man of taste to be seen driving around in. He conceded that the car had its advantages. Should Manfred ever break down in the wilderness he would always have a ready supply of kindling to hand for a warming campfire.

He kept returning to the subject, laughing more raucously each time he did so. Manfred took the joshing in good grace, although he didn’t appreciate Lillian’s disloyalty, chortling at his expense. It was maybe out of guilt that she chose to ride with him when they decided to head over to their house on Further Lane.

Justin led the way in his Packard, heading south down Old Stone Highway, the narrow road weaving its way through the oak woods. As they rounded a bend, a short straight presented itself to them. Lillian, with her uncanny sense for reading his mind, said, ‘Go on. If you must.’

Manfred floored the throttle, and the Chrysler swept effortlessly past the Packard. Justin was better acquainted with the road, but Manfred knew it well enough to head him off each time he came back at them and tried to pass. The turning on to Albert’s Landing Road whistled by on their left—a flicker in the headlights, a vertical break in the trees.

A little further on, Manfred slowed for a sharp left-hand bend. The Packard closed, Justin anticipating the straight that lay beyond, but at the last second Manfred swung the wheel, turning into Town Lane. It was a hard right-hander that seemed to go on and on, the road almost doubling back on itself, the tires screeching in protest, Lillian doing a good job of mimicking them. Manfred couldn’t afford to take his eyes off the road, but he didn’t need to, he could see the headlights of the Packard sweeping over them, still in pursuit.

Justin had taken the bait. It was a mistake. If he’d kept on going he might well have beaten them back to Further Lane and justifiably claimed victory. As it was, they would pull away on the long straight that was Town Lane, ground that Justin would never be able to make up.

The Chrysler didn’t disappoint. As soon as they were clear of the woods shrouding Quail Hill the headlights revealed a road as straight as a city avenue, and the car came into its own, powering away from its pursuer through open countryside. Manfred permitted himself a satisfied chuckle.

‘That was damn stupid!’ snapped Lillian above the rush of wind.

‘Don’t worry, it’s over now.’

But his foot remained pressed to the floor. The needle nudged eighty miles per hour. He glanced over his shoulder to see the Packard falling behind, its headlights barely penetrating the clouds of dust thrown up in their wake.

‘Manfred!’

The idea that time slowed down in such situations, Manfred now knew to be a myth. It didn’t. If anything, it speeded up, compressing moments into an instant: his head snapping back to the road, the ghostly figure frozen in the headlights and the sickening thud of the impact.

The body was hurled heavenwards, clipping the top corner of the windshield as it spun off into the darkness at the side of the road. Manfred could remember turning instinctively and thinking that nothing could possibly spin so quickly in the air, certainly not a body, whirring like the blades of a fan.

He hit the brakes and the car slewed dangerously before coming to a halt. Justin overshot them by a good hundred yards.

‘Oh my God,’ gasped Lillian.

‘I didn’t see him.’

‘It was a girl.’

The figure had made no attempt to move, but had just stood there, facing the oncoming car.

‘She stepped into the road,’ gasped Lillian, ‘just stepped into the road…Oh my God.’

Manfred was aware of a sound filling his head, building in volume. It was the scream of the Packard’s reverse gear. Justin drew alongside.

‘Wait here,’ he said.

He swung the Packard round, the headlights cutting through the night, settling on something in the hedgerow, surprisingly close. Despite appearances, the impact had propelled the body some considerable distance back down the road.

‘Don’t look,’ said Manfred as Lillian made to turn.

Justin was out of the car now, approaching on foot. There was no need to get too close. The angle of the limbs placed the matter beyond any doubt.

Justin hurried over. ‘Manfred, look at me. I said look at me. You have to follow me. Can you do that?’

His hands were trembling, but he appeared to have control of them. ‘Yes,’ he said.

Lillian only spoke once on the seemingly endless drive through the back roads to their house on Further Lane.

‘What are we going to do?’ she asked.

‘Richard will know.’

Richard was asleep, flat on his back in his bed, arms by his side, like a body lying in state. Manfred was a little surprised to find him wearing a hair net, but any embarrassment Richard might have felt was soon forgotten as Manfred described the events of the past fifteen minutes. When he was done, the questions began, rapid-fire: Did anyone at the yacht club know where you were going? Yes. Was there anyone else at Justin’s house? No. Was the
girl killed? Yes. Did you take her pulse? No. How’s Lillian taking it? How do you think? Is Gayle back yet? No, I don’t think so.

Richard thought for a moment then said, ‘Move the car into the garage then pour yourself a large whiskey. I need a little time to think.’

A little time proved to be less than ten minutes, during which he made a call from his room, judging from the small ping given off by the phone in the drawing room. When he came downstairs he had swapped his silk pajamas for slacks and an open-necked shirt, crisp and clean as always.

Justin was seated beside Lillian on the sofa, his arm round her, comforting her. Richard deposited himself in a chair and waited for her to compose herself.

‘You said to Manfred that she stepped into the path of the car.’

‘Yes,’ said Lillian.

‘Deliberately?’

‘I don’t know. That’s how it seemed.’

Richard turned to Manfred. ‘You’ve been drinking, I assume.’

‘Yes.’

‘If you’d been sober, would it have made any difference?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

‘Lillian?’

‘No. It all happened too quickly.’

Manfred suddenly saw it, Richard’s strategy. He was playing to Lillian, the weak link in the chain, steering responsibility away from them and on to the girl, planting the belief that their only error lay in being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

‘This will destroy you, you know that, Manfred, don’t you?’

The words were meant for Lillian’s ears and Manfred dutifully took his cue from them.

‘There was nothing I could do.’

‘That’s clear.’

‘They were racing,’ said Lillian.

‘And who was the one who told me to overtake in the first place?’ retorted Manfred.

‘I’m not sure you should be looking to blame each other,’ said Richard.

‘If we’re doing that,’ interjected Justin, ‘then I’m at fault, for making fun of your car in the first place.’

‘We’re all to blame,’ said Lillian. ‘A girl is dead!’

‘Maybe that’s exactly what she intended,’ said Wakeley.

‘We don’t know that.’

‘Lillian, listen to me.’ Richard’s tone was calm, measured. ‘You see a car hurtling towards you at night on a country lane, what do you do? You hug the hedgerow; you do not step out in front of it just when it draws level with you. Think about it. From where I’m sitting, I’d say you’re lucky to be here at all. She might have killed you both.’

It was clear from Lillian’s expression that he’d convinced her, for now at least.

‘Here’s what’s going to happen,’ said Richard. ‘And it’s going to have to happen fast.’

The mastery of the plan swiftly hatched in his bedroom only became clear at a later date; for now they just did as they were told. Justin was instructed to return home by a roundabout route. While Manfred and Lillian hurriedly packed their bags, Richard took himself off to the garage, where he examined the damage to the Chrysler and cleaned off the gore as best he could. Fortunately, the nearside headlight was intact, reducing the risk of being pulled over by the state troopers on the long drive back to the city.