House of Secrets - v4 (44 page)

Her husband cut in. “Let’s remember the drawings, sweetheart. Robbie was not exactly the next da Vinci.”

Judy Resnick looked annoyed. “That’s an awfully high standard, don’t you think?”

“You know what I mean.” Smallwood’s uncle addressed Megan. “The boy couldn’t draw. I mean, no better than I can draw, and I can’t draw. He was very inward. I think his scribblings were partly so that he didn’t have to talk to people.”

“Robbie liked to read,” Judy Resnick jumped in. “He devoured all sorts of books. He even read poetry. Soon after Robbie moved in with us he discovered Shakespeare. Imagine. A fourteen-year-old boy. But you know the type, don’t you? They’re the ones who sit quietly while everyone else is chattering away, and then suddenly they come out with a comment that shows that they have been hearing everything. Robbie observed people. He was always processing.”

She paused. It seemed to Megan that the woman was expecting her husband to interject. But Philip Resnick remained silent. The woman continued. “I guess I’d have to say he judged people, too.”

Megan asked, “How so?”

“By the time he got to high school Robbie’s sense of himself was… how would you characterize it, Philip?”

Philip Resnick was ready with a reply. “Superior. The boy felt he was superior to everyone. It could get quite tedious. He was constantly going on and on about how stupid everyone was. And how weak.”

Megan consulted her notebook. “What about a Jonathan Cole? Your son told me that he remembered Cole as one of Robert’s closest friends.”

Philip Resnick made a snorting sound. “Eddie Haskell.”

“Excuse me?”

“The show
Leave It to Beaver
. Maybe that’s before your time. Eddie Haskell was an ingratiating phony. A classic kiss-up. ‘You look so nice today, Mrs. Cleaver.’ ‘I trust Mr. Cleaver is doing well?’ That kind of crap. That was Jonathan Cole. His name wasn’t even Jonathan. It was John. He took it on as a pretension. That’s your Jonathan Cole.”

“And your nephew was close to him?”

“They hung around together most of high school. I guess Robbie didn’t find him ‘weak’ and ‘ignorant’ like he did everyone else. Cole was just one of those sarcastic too-clever kids. Sarcastic.”

Megan asked, “Was Robert ever violent?”

“You mean did he drown cats and blow up frogs with firecrackers?”

“You tell me,” Megan said.

Philip Resnick passed the question over to his wife. “You tell her. Does Robbie have a temper?”

Megan felt she was being forced to read between the lines with this couple. It seemed they were working some things out between them. Or perhaps
not
working them out.

“I wouldn’t call it volcanic,” Judy Resnick said evenly. She pulled her lemonade glass closer but did not pick it up. She ran a finger along the condensation. “I’ve seen Robbie throw a few tantrums in his time. His expectations about people are not always reasonable.”

“So, there’s anger.”

“Well, it makes sense that there’d be some anger. My God, look what became of his parents.”

“What can you tell me about that? What was Robert’s relationship with his parents? His mother was your sister?”

Judy Resnick nodded her head. “Robbie was terrifically ambivalent about his mother. On the one hand, he adored her. Physically, Vivien was quite a beautiful woman. But my sister was not the most loyal of wives.”

“She had affairs.” Megan didn’t bother making a question of it.

“Yes, she did.”

“And your nephew knew this about his mother?”

“At least on some level, I believe he did.”

“And this is why her husband murdered her? Because she was sleeping around?”

Judy Resnick’s voice tumbled to nearly a whisper. “It was horrible what he did to her.”

Philip Resnick spoke up. “You have to understand something about Ray, Detective. Ray was very much a beta male. Nice enough guy, in his way, but pretty ineffectual overall. Killing Vivien was probably the one true assertive moment of his life.”

“Don’t you
mean first
assertive act?”

“What do you mean?”

Megan put her index finger to her head and cocked her thumb.

The man got it. “Oh.”

Judy Resnick quietly folded in on herself.

T
he Resnicks had no sense of whether or not their nephew had maintained contact with Jonathan Cole. Judy Resnick recalled that after graduating from high school Cole had attended Brown University and that Smallwood had visited him there several times. Smallwood himself had attended Hunter College but had dropped out before the end of his freshman year and immediately taken his job at the museum.

“I don’t need to tell you what a waste that has been,” she said to Megan as the three made their way back through the house. “Robbie has been hiding from life in that museum. A man with his brains and his potential should be a curator, not a security guard. It’s tragic.”

Megan left the couple standing at the front door and returned to her car. As she turned the ignition she saw Philip Resnick lowering himself onto the stoop and burying his face in his arms. Megan pulled her sunglasses from the visor and put them on. She reversed the car and swung the wheel, backing to the edge of the driveway’s semicircle so that she could exit the property forward. She was shifting into drive when she saw Judy Resnick hurrying over to the car. Megan stopped and rolled down the window.

“I just thought of something,” Judy Resnick said. “The house. On Shelter Island.”

Megan pushed her sunglasses up onto her head. “What about it?”

“It was the place Robbie always seemed most happy. You know how beach places can be. Especially for a child. It’s such an escape from the real world. I was just thinking. If Robbie made a conscious decision to… to do what he did to Joy out there specifically, at the house… or maybe it wasn’t even conscious. But you’re telling us that he also took Senator Foster’s little girl out there?”

“We know he was there. We’re only assuming the rest.”

“You were asking if we could recall anything like a pattern in Robbie’s behavior. Well, isn’t that a pattern? Going to the house to murder Joy and then taking this little girl back out there?”

“That’s a good point,” Megan said. “But I don’t think we’re going to see your nephew pop up there a third time.”

“No, no. That’s not what I’m suggesting. It’s not the beach place. It’s
about
the beach place.”

C
hristine pulled a plastic pass card from the sun visor of Jenny’s car and fed it into the metal slot out the driver’s side window. The yellow swing arm in front of the car pitched up swiftly forty-five degrees, shuddering to a stop, and Christine pulled onto the King’s Hook peninsula. Beside her, Lillian released a barely audible sound of relief. Christine knew this much: Her mother’s story had exhausted them both.

Christine steered the car slowly along the narrow roadway, bordered on both sides by the gray waters of Long Island Sound. Several hundred feet from the gate, the first of two parking areas appeared on the right. On the left, the boulders and grass gave way to the thin white stretch of sand that comprised King’s Hook Beach. A select group of local residents paid hefty sums annually to the King’s Hook Beach Association for the privilege of baking their well-oiled bodies each summer on the sandy white strip of beach. The limited number of users’ passes available were highly cherished documents in the region, often passed along from one generation to the next and not infrequently the subject of rancor in property settlements during local divorce proceedings.

Christine pulled into the parking area and killed the engine. She checked the rearview mirror. The parade of news vans and other vehicles that had been trailing Christine and her mother ever since they cleared her father’s front gate were pulled up short at the gate. She watched the Greenwich police cruiser that had accompanied the parade move past the vehicles and stop at the yellow swing arm. Christine released her own sigh. It was doubtful that any members of the media were in possession of the prized user’s pass for King’s Hook Beach. She and her mother were again on private property. Safe harbor.

Since concluding her tale, Lillian had fallen into an unaccustomed silence. She sat quietly now in the passenger seat, looking impassively out over the gray water. Christine took the opportunity to study her mother’s profile. She shuddered inwardly, noting the astounding resemblance to her deceased brother. The similarities between the two had also gone well beyond physical appearance. It was there in the similar displacement of their hearts, their need for a form of affection that never quite appeared. In Lillian’s case, her ability to accommodate that absence had been sharper than that of her son. Her passion for survival had proved more keen. Or possibly more desperate.

As Christine stole a look at her mother, the revelations concerning the sailor’s assault and the circumstances surrounding Peter’s conception hit her, and she realized for the first time in her life just how unkindly she had always treated this woman. And how selfishly. In reality, Lillian’s tough little heart was a bundle of fractures and fault lines, damage that was achingly evident in the very bigness of the woman’s habitual dismissal of them. Granted, much of Lillian’s damage had been self-inflicted, the result of her own petulance and foolishness and immaturity. But where had
those
come from?

Christine was stunned at her own capacity to condemn. Nobody puts in a request for suffering. It simply happens. Brothers die. Mothers disappoint. Husbands lie. Who was Christine to exile anyone? Who knew what behaviors Christine might be manifesting in the future as a result of the multiple tragedies that were unfolding right in front of her? How cruel it would feel if her less-than-perfect responses to her own calamities were to provoke the sort of judgment and anger that her own mother had been forced to endure for most of her life. Christine felt ashamed. And with the feeling came something else. It was relief. The absolute last thing in the world she would have expected.

Christine reached over and pried her mother’s hand from her lap. It felt as cold as chilled glass. Lillian’s bottomless gaze rode back in with the next small wave, and she turned a wan smile to her daughter. Christine squeezed gently on the fingers.

“Let’s walk.”

T
he rain had let up considerably. It was no longer a slashing attack but had reduced more to a light silver sprinkle. After crossing the road to the slender strip of beach, both Christine and her mother removed their shoes. The sand was cold at first, but after several minutes a natural numbness set in, leaving just the resistant texture of wet sand through the gaps between their toes.

As they made their way silently in the opposite direction of the mainland, Christine was cognizant of the news vans still backed up behind the restrictive yellow gate. No doubt she and her mother were being filmed. No doubt more fodder for the meaningless tape loops. Such was the fishbowl they inhabited, hopscotching from behind one locked gate to another.

The beach itself ran just less than a mile, after which the sand came to an abrupt end at a wooded area at the far end: the hook end that gave the peninsula its name. Christine was keenly aware of what resided back in the dense pines. Six grand stone houses, built several generations in the past. The oldest of the properties, a dark sprawling dwelling that seemed almost to rise up from the earth itself, was particularly familiar to Christine from the days of her childhood. The large stone house had been the original family home of the Wyeth clan, built by Chris Wyeth’s father in the 1930s, soon after he had purchased the slender overgrown peninsula from its cash-strapped owner. Wyeth’s convivial parents had enjoyed opening their home to visitors, and Christine and her brother had always thrilled at the prospect of an afternoon at the big house on King’s Hook. The two never tired of losing themselves in the mansion’s endless labyrinths of rooms and hallways while the grown-ups gathered in either the great living room or out on the pine-needled patio to drink and laugh and argue and do whatever it was that grown-ups did. There were canoes and badminton and, seemingly, always a litter of new kittens with which to play. The Wyeth home was where both Christine and Peter learned to swim. The massive black boulder at the edge of the water — appropriately tagged Courage Rock — loomed large and daunting for years until the day that Peter had dared his first leap. After the deaths of their parents, Chris Wyeth’s brother and his family had moved into the house, while Wyeth himself eventually took up residence at his large sun-drenched property several hours away on the south shore of Long Island.

As Christine and Lillian made their way along the sand, Lillian remained several feet in front of her daughter, her focus very much on the thickly pined acres at the end of the beach. For her part, Christine could not shake — didn’t want to shake — the invisible presence of her brother. It was almost as if the revelation of Peter’s true parentage might serve as the portal for bringing him back from an exile into which he had been unwittingly plunged. No such luck, of course. No third set of footprints was miraculously appearing in the sand.