Except for the Bones (2 page)

Ten o’clock on a July evening. Cape Cod. Sunday. Foggy. Chilly. Except for The Haven—the summer people, eating and drinking—the town was closed down. Inside the expensive German car with its expensive gadgets glowing in the dark, she was alone. She and the BMW, nothing else. Nothing more, nothing less. Still alone.

Always alone?

Four hours ago—five hours ago—she’d been in New York. If nothing changed in Carter’s Landing, everything predictable, locked in, nothing changed in New York, either. Prisons. Herself the jailer of herself. So she’d gotten in the BMW and cranked up the sound and driven down the road, herself outrunning herself, watching the lights of New York disappearing in the mirror. Manhattan. The East Side. Park Avenue. The beautiful people, posing for the beautiful people. Even when they were alone, they posed. Was her mother at their view window now, posing, wineglass in hand, staring out at the East River?

Whenever they fought, her mother’s face changed. Beneath the socialite’s mask, the features of a fishwife were hidden. Expose the fishwife’s face, and the fight was over. Not won, but over.

For both of them.

For her mother, on Park Avenue.

For her, slowing the BMW as she drew abreast of the Village Dry Cleaners.

Like every business establishment in Carter’s Landing, all of them dependent on the tourist dollar, the Village Cleaners had the approved Cape Cod saltbox look: weathered gray shingles, white trim, a scrolled Colonial sign illuminated only by small spotlights. Neon was forbidden. But now, at ten o’clock, the sign was not illuminated; the shop was dark. Likewise the living quarters behind the shop were dark.

Signifying, therefore, that while his mother slept, early to bed, Jeff was either cruising or fucking. Or else he was drinking at Tim’s Place. The exact sequence was a question of chance. Opportunity plus chance.

She pressed the accelerator, shifted from second to third, felt the car surge.

Yes, she could always drive.

S
URPRISINGLY, THERE WAS ALMOST
no blood.

She’d lost her urine, and the room reeked of feces. But there was almost no blood. There was only enough blood to turn her mass of tawny hair a thick, congealing crimson.

Her wide-open eyes were as inanimate as two stones. Lying on her back beside the limestone slab of the coffee table, her body had already begun to flatten on the bottom. No longer circulating through her body, her blood was settling.
Ultimately,
someone had said,
gravity claims us all.

Two hours ago, locked together, inciting each other, guiding each other—reveling in each other—they’d made love.

Now, incredibly, she was dead.

He’d drawn the drapes and turned off all the lights, leaving only a single table lamp lit. He was sitting in a chair that faced the ocean. He could hear the sound of surf, that timeless, endless sound. He looked at his watch, but somehow the time didn’t relate to reality. It was as if the surface of his consciousness was too fragmented to retain even the most elemental information. His data base was closing down. His—

From a nearby speaker the sound of the telephone suddenly warbled, shattering the silence. A cordless phone, that constant extension of himself, lay on the lamp table beside him. He’d already touched the phone, an automatic response, before he remembered: Carolyn, lying motionless less than ten feet from him. Carolyn, dead.

But why shouldn’t he answer the phone? What was the connection?

His recorded message was short, followed by Kane’s voice:

“Yeah, this is Bruce. I wanted to check whether you’d left for the airport yet. We shouldn’t wait too much longer.”

Listening to his pilot’s voice, Daniels realized that he was frowning. Always, there was a hint of arrogance in Kane’s manner, especially if he was exercising his pilot’s safety-related prerogatives. If Kane refused to fly, plans were changed. There was no appeal. Accounting, Daniels knew, for Kane’s habitual insolence. A pilot made life-or-death decisions. His life. His death.

Daniels realized that he’d risen to his feet and was moving to his study, to the telephone control panel. It was impossible to talk in the same room with the body.

The simple act of walking helped. He could feel himself surfacing, willing himself to take charge. From this moment on, time would begin to work for him, not against him. The jangle of the telephone had jolted him back to self-command, self-salvation.

He switched on the antique green-shaded brass study lamp, lifted the master phone, touched the button opposite N-50SR, the Beechcraft’s identification. Moments later, Kane answered.

Without preamble, Daniels said, “Listen, Bruce, there’s been a change of plans.”

“Ah—” It was a noncommittal response. “So?”

“So Miss Estes isn’t going to go with you tonight.”

Silence.

“And—ah—I’m not going, either. I’ve got to stay here, at least until—until tomorrow.” His voice, he knew, was ragged, his delivery uneven. Would Kane notice? Would Kane remember?

“It’s just as well. I just talked to Flight Service, and they—”

“But I want you to go anyhow.”

“What?” It was a single, flat-sounding monosyllable, Kane’s specialty.

“I want you to go to Westboro. I want you to leave an envelope for Jackie, at the registration desk. Then—” Quickly, he calculated: it was a little more than an hour to Westboro, if everything went right. Three hours, probably, round trip. Once more, he looked at his watch. Time: ten-twenty
P.M.
Plus three hours—he ticked off his fingers. One-thirty, at least. Two o’clock, if Kane had to wait for takeoff clearance.

“Then I want you to come back here. To Barnstable.”

“What?”

“That’s what I want you to do.”

“But, Christ, that could be four hours.”

“It can’t be helped.”

A long, angry silence followed. Then: “That’s assuming I can land here. Visibility’s down to minimums.”

“Do your best.” He hesitated. Then, reluctantly: “There’s a bonus if you get back tonight. Five hundred.”

Another silence, this one for calculation. Finally: “Have you got the envelope for Jackie ready?”

“It will be, by the time you—” Momentarily surrendering to a knife-flick of panic, he broke off.
By the time you get here,
he’d almost said. “By the time you’re ready, the envelope’ll be there. I’ll bring it to the plane. Now. Right now.”

“You will?” It was a curious, speculative question. Even though the airport was close by, a precedent was in question. Servants carried envelopes, not the master.

“I want to get out of the house, get some fresh air. I’ll be at the airport in a few minutes. If I miss you, I’ll leave the envelope at the desk. When you get back, call. Tell the answering machine what time you got in. Then go to bed. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

On the other end of the line, Kane was chuckling: an insolent chuckle, Kane’s little joke. A five-hundred-dollar joke.

Daniels replaced the phone in its cradle, took an envelope and five sheets of blank paper from the desk drawer. Folding the paper, his fingers shook. He sealed the envelope, found a pen, began addressing the envelope. The pen magnified the trembling of his hand. Slowly, as awkwardly as he must have written when he was a child, he began forming the two words:
Jacquelaine Miller.
As he wrote, it seemed that he could hear a prosecutor addressing the jury. The prosecutor would hold up the envelope, for the jury’s inspection.

“You’ll notice, ladies and gentlemen, how utterly different this childish scrawl is from the defendant’s normal handwriting. The cause of this difference, we will show, is acute anxiety resulting from extreme guilt.”

A
S THE MUSIC HIT
her she let her body go with it. Manhattan to Carter’s Landing to Tim’s Place, the last of it, the best of it.

Behind the bar, Polly coolly nodded, then let her eyes wander toward the far wall. Yes, Jeff was there. He was holding a beer bottle, his body moving with the music. He hadn’t seen her. Others were looking, though: the townies, looking over the tourist, then looking away. Everywhere on the Cape it was the same: the tourists looking through the townies, the townies spitting behind the tourists’ backs. Meaning that money made the difference. Manhattan, Caen, Rodeo Drive, the Cape—it was all the same: the beautiful people posing for each other while the peasants looked on. Last week, at the Barnstable airport, she’d seen Teddy Kennedy. He’d looked chubby and old and angry.

Jeff was sitting at a small round table with two other men and a woman. As she watched, one of the men saw her. He touched Jeff’s arm, said something. Quickly, Jeff turned toward her. He was surprised: his standard slow-smiling, lazy-lidded look of sensuous surprise, Elvis without the sideburns.

Carrying the bottle of beer, Jeff rose, said something to the others at the table, walked toward her. Smiling. Strutting.

“Surprise …” He raised the bottle, an invitation. “Have you got that ID?”

“I’ve got better than that, in the car. A lot better.”

He moved closer, put his free hand on her waist, drew her close. He could feel her body pulsing, throbbing. An engine, revving up. Tonight, Diane was ready for anything—everything.

But she’d only left the Cape last Thursday, flying back to New York in her stepfather’s plane. And now she was back. Would he have gotten involved, if he’d known she would come up so often? How far did she think a bottle of booze and a handful of pills and some New York grass could go? Didn’t she ever look in the mirror?

“Okay, gotcha.” Taking his time, he finished the beer, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, put the empty bottle on the bar. “Let’s go.” He turned her toward the door. As she went through, he turned back, winked. The message: score one more tourist.

D
ANIELS DEPRESSED THE BUTTON
that drew the drapes covering the floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windows. Because beyond the window, they waited. All of them.

There were only three elements: Carolyn’s body, himself, and the rest of them. The body was the problem. The world was the threat. And he was the fulcrum, the focus. Move the fulcrum, and the equation failed. In prep-school algebra, the illustration had been a teeter-totter, always in balance.

Until now—until this hour—always in balance.

An hour ago his mind had gone numb, leaving him helpless.

Now, an hour later, his mind was racing. But it was a cacophony of confusion: a once-efficient machine gone wild. When he’d been a boy, his father had given him a steam engine, red-painted, with gilt letters and brass piping. The engine’s governor, his father explained, was essential. Otherwise, the machine would fly apart.

A smooth, efficient machine. The phrase, he knew, described his mind. The proof was in the statistics, the balance sheet. The proof was in the
Forbes
biography, the cover story.

The slate slab that had been fashioned into a coffee table was further proof. The table had cost more than most men made in a year. It had taken six straining, sweating workmen to carry the slab into the house from a flatbed truck and set it on its base. The base was a section of bristlecone pine, thousands of years old, absurdly rare and therefore valuable. The table was placed in the approximate center of the museum-quality Persian rug that covered most of the oak-planked floor.

And the rug was stained with Carolyn’s blood.

“W
HAT’RE THESE?” JEFF LOOKED
down at the two capsules she’d given him.

“Xanax. ’Ludes.”

“You think you should do booze and ’ludes and still drive?”

“It’s just out to their place.” She looked at him, that look she thought was so sexy.

Except that Diane wasn’t sexy.

She was rich, and she was wild, and she was willing. But she wasn’t sexy.

Whatever it was, Diane didn’t have it.

Did she think she had it? Was that why they were there, parked in her BMW, beginning to touch each other, letting it slowly begin, letting the booze and the pills and the grass carry them along?

“Your folks’ place, you mean?”

“I mean my stepfather’s place. Preston Daniels, tycoon.” She spoke with bitterly exaggerated precision.

“We can’t go there, though.”

“We can most certainly go there.” Now the bitterness was bleary, blurred by the backwash of whatever she’d taken. But, still, she spoke like the rest of them. He could clearly hear the sound of the private schools, and hired servants. The voices never changed. Neither did the cars, or the houses, or the clothes—or the airplanes.

Private schools and hired servants …

Servants like him, paid to clean up their messes.

He swallowed one of the capsules, swallowed a mouthful of beer. With three other cars—tourists—they were parked in a view area overlooking Nantucket Sound. On the beach below, two figures walked hand in hand along the water’s edge. Two dogs, barking, bounding, circled the figures, a man and a woman. Across the dunes, toward town, a forbidden campfire glowed behind the dunes.

Dropping the second capsule in the pocket of his shirt, Jeff touched her bare forearm, let his hand linger. At the touch, she leaned toward him, sighed, rested her head on his shoulder. Whenever he was ready, she was ready.

He moved closer, used his right forefinger to trace her profile, forehead to chin, then down the curve of her jaw to the top of her blouse.

“Hmmm …” Languorously, she let her head fall back against the crook of his arm. Her blouse was cut wide and deep. With the little finger of his right hand, he felt the first swell of her breasts.

Summertime at Carter’s Landing …

Tight jeans and scoop-necked blouses and a BMW that still smelled new. The last time they’d done it, started like this, he’d smelled her musk mingled with the BMW’s musk, a turn-on that had made him smile. When she’d asked him about the smile, he’d—

A bright white light suddenly caught them: a cop with his goddamn spotlight, cruising. Joe Farnsworth, fat old Joe, getting his kicks. If Cindy Jensen, thirteen years old, had decided to testify against him, Joe would be on the other side of the badge now.