Nantucket Nights (9 page)

“She was going to confess something, Val,” Kayla said. “Maybe she was telling us she was going to disappear.”

Val looked doubtful. “I don’t think so.”

“Why? Do you know what she was going to say?”

“No.”

“What were you two talking about while I was asleep?”

Val fiddled with the refrigerator magnet—from the Islander liquor store—and furrowed her brow. “I can’t remember. I was probably doing most of the talking. I usually do.”

“So she didn’t tell you her secret?”

Val put her hands on Kayla’s shoulders. “No, friend, she didn’t.”

“Well, do you think she—? I mean, we know she tried to kill herself before.”

“That’s true.”

“You think she’s dead, don’t you?”

They heard a voice-clearing from the bathroom and then Paul Henry, “Ladies, would you come in here, please?”

Val raised her eyebrows and mouthed the word
ladies.
Kayla looked out the front window at Raoul, still in the driveway, systematically smoothing the dirt with the edge of his work boot.

They entered the huge, brightly lit bathroom.

The floor alone, jade green tiles, was worth
several
thousand dollars, according to Raoul. Paul and the detective had their paws all over Antoinette’s collection of little brown bottles—they were popping the child-proof caps off and shaking a few pills out onto the countertop between the double sinks. The detective wrote the names of the drugs into a little notebook.

Out the window Kayla saw the sky brightening; it was almost half past five. If things had gone as planned, they would be waking up on the beach ready to hit the Downyflake for some chocolate doughnuts before heading home. Raoul would be putting on his boots, sliding his lunch box from the top shelf of the fridge and driving out to the Tings’, who, Jack Montalbano had so pointedly reminded them, were
Chinese.
But no. No.

“Do either of you know why Ms. Riley had so many prescription drugs?” the detective asked. He pronounced
either
“eye-ther,” which Kayla found annoying.

“Menstrual cramps,” Val said. “Bad ones.”

Kayla looked away.
Migraines,
she thought,
depression.
Was Antoinette’s committing suicide such a far-fetched idea? Kayla remembered back to the first Night Swimmers: /
want to be able to kill myself if that’s what I decide.

On the back of the toilet Kayla saw a perfect whelk shell that she and Antoinette had found on Tuckernuck, back when Theo was a little boy. Kayla remembered the afternoon well—they’d borrowed a seventeen-foot Mako from one of Raoul’s workers, and Antoinette had motored them through Madaket Harbor and out past Smith’s Point until they reached the next island over, Tuckernuck, which was still mostly wilderness. Kayla had Theo bundled in an orange life jacket, and she made him sit on the floor of the boat with both arms wrapped around her legs. And then Antoinette lifted him onto the deserted beach and they had a picnic and swam and collected a bucket of perfect shells like this one.

Kayla lifted the whelk shell, disobeying the detective’s orders to not
touch anything,
but he was engrossed with Antoinette’s Fiorinal and his notebook, and didn’t notice. Underneath the whelk shell Kayla saw a white plastic stick that made her catch her breath. She practically slammed the whelk shell back down.

Val had moved around her to look at the pills with the police. “These are the ones for the cramps,” she was saying. “These blue ones, I’m pretty sure.”

Seven green tiles separated Kayla from Val and the policemen. Val was shielding Kayla from view. Kayla picked up the whelk shell again and slid the plastic stick into the pocket of her sweatpants, completely unobserved.

Detective, ha!

They probably wouldn’t even have known what the stick was, but Kayla, the mother of four children, knew only too well.

A pregnancy test, with two purple stripes showing. Positive.

When they emerged from the house, Raoul was still smoothing the dirt in the driveway. The detective flipped out.

“What are you doing?” he shouted. His voice was sucked into the dark woods surrounding the house. “Have you given any thought to footprints? Tire tracks? You just destroyed evidence!” He threw his hands up in the air and with them, his dinky notebook, which fluttered to the ground like an injured bird.

Raoul looked stunned. And exhausted. “Sorry, man. It was just a nervous thing. You know, something to do while you snooped around.”

“Well, shit,” the detective said. He couldn’t have been older than thirty. He wore wire-framed glasses and had dark hair turning gray around the ears. Funny, Kayla hadn’t really looked at him until then.

Paul Henry retrieved a coil of yellow police tape from the Suburban, and he and the detective wound it around Antoinette’s house, sealing off the doors. They were going to head back to the station to file a report and send the fingerprints and some other samples to a forensics lab on the Cape. The coast guard would do a sweep of the outlying areas in the chopper at seven, and the divers would start their recovery mission. But now it was clear that neither Paul nor the detective thought Antoinette was in the water. They thought something else was going on.

“We’ll have our men check the airport and the Steamship right away, see if they find her leaving the island,” Paul said to Kayla before she left. “Can you get us a photograph of Ms. Riley? I didn’t see any pictures in the house.”

“Antoinette isn’t fond of the camera,” Kayla said. “But I’ll look at home. I think I have one.”

“Thanks,” Paul Henry said. “We’ll call as soon as we get any news.”

Kayla drove home as the sun was coming up. The sky was a band of deep rose along the horizon, then yellow, then dark blue. A
V
of Canadian geese passed overhead. Val snored softly in the passenger seat. Kayla had insisted that Val ride with her. Besides, Raoul said he wanted to stop by the Hen House, where his crew gathered for breakfast every morning, to let them know he wouldn’t be working today.

“Tell Jacob I’ll call him,” Val said, and Raoul had simply nodded. So he knew about Jacob. Kayla wondered if
that
was what he and Val were discussing in the truck: Val’s secret was a secret no longer.

Well, now Kayla had a secret, too. Antoinette was more than just a missing woman. She was a missing woman with a long-lost daughter showing up; she was a missing woman with a house that had been ransacked; she was a missing woman who, at the age of forty-four, was pregnant. By whom? It wasn’t as if Antoinette had been celibate since she divorced—she had flings every once in a while, the most notable with a man who stumbled across her house by accident when he was on his bike looking for Jewel Pond. But these were week-long summer flings, or one-night stands, no one sticking around, and certainly no one leaving behind anything as lasting as a baby. Kayla was at a loss. Who had fathered the baby? That part of the secret Antoinette had taken with her, wherever she went.

Kayla woke Val up when they reached her house. Kayla didn’t know what to say. “Get some sleep? We’ll talk later?” The pregnancy test was practically glowing in her pocket, but she wasn’t ready to tell Val about it. Not yet, anyway.

Val nodded. “I want to leave John.”

Kayla groaned. “Oh, Val.”

“What?”

“Not today, Val, okay? Don’t leave him today.”

“I’m miserable with him. I’d like to be less miserable. I’d like to do something drastic, something dangerous.”

Kayla looked at the perfect façade of the house; it was hard to believe so much unhappiness lived inside. “Do you think Antoinette disappeared on purpose?” she asked. “Do you think she did this to be
drastic?”

“Of course not,” Val said.

“So you think she’s dead?”

“They didn’t find her alive, Kayla.”

“They didn’t find her dead, either. They didn’t find her at all. It’s like she vanished into thin air.”

Val smiled sadly, and with obvious fatigue. “You’re right. Call me later.” Val shut the car door and limped across her manicured lawn to her house. Kayla sat in the driveway until Val disappeared inside, and then she headed for home.

Kayla’s house looked the same, which seemed odd, given all that had happened. It was almost as though she expected it to be burned down or torn apart, but it stood solid and steady. She had beaten Raoul home, and from the looks of it, Theo had already left for work. Island Air flights started at six, and since this was when Raoul usually began his day, Theo didn’t mind getting up early. He and Raoul rose together and drank coffee quietly in the kitchen before going to their respective jobs, although since his outbursts started, Theo had taken to getting up half an hour earlier and drinking his coffee at Hutch’s at the airport. Or so he told Kayla the one time she was brave enough to ask.

Kayla extracted herself wearily from the car, looked in the back at all the picnic stuff—the towels, the tub of lobster shells that would start to stink as soon as the sun came up, the empty Methuselah— but she didn’t have the energy to deal with it. The lobster shells, though. She opened the back of the Trooper and managed to lower the tub to the driveway, where she could just leave it for now. And then she saw Antoinette’s black Chuck Taylors and she welled up with tears and hurried into the house. She needed sleep.

As soon as Kayla entered the kitchen, she remembered that Jennifer was sleeping at a friend’s house, which meant Luke and Cassidy B. were here alone. An eight-year-old and an eleven-year-old—she was one hell of a mother. True, Theo had probably only left twenty minutes before, but still. She was lucky the house
hadn’t
burned down. Before she went upstairs, she checked the answering machine. There was one new message. Kayla imagined hearing Paul Henry’s voice pumped with the adrenaline of victory,
We found her!
Or better still, Antoinette’s voice. But it was dead air, a hang up: Kayla calling from the Wauwinet.

She checked on Luke and Cassidy B. All four of her children had Raoul’s thick, dark eyelashes, which curled against their cheeks when they slept. God, she loved them. She stumbled into bed herself, too tired to even take off her clothes. The sun was up now, peeking through the rosewood blinds. She put Raoul’s feather pillow over her head and let the waves of sleep wash over her.

Twice Kayla tried to float to the surface of her sleep and break into consciousness—once when Raoul joined her in bed, and once when Luke padded in wearing his blue pin-striped pajamas, like a little business suit—and both times she failed. Her eyelids fluttered, and she was sucked back down.

She finally awoke with Raoul shaking her. “Kayla. Kay-la.”

Kayla focused her eyes. The blinds were up, the room filled with sunlight. It was hot, and she felt sticky and hazy and uncomfortable. She had a pounding headache; the inside of her mouth was powdery and tasted like egg yolk, her hair was stiff with salt. Then it all flooded back: too much champagne, Antoinette gone.

She blinked. “Are the kids okay?”

Raoul touched her cheek. He was showered, dressed, his dark hair damp. “Of course they’re okay. Jennifer came home and left again to sit for the Ogilvys. She ate a banana, but that was all I could interest her in. Cass and Luke are downstairs watching TV. I told them it was okay until you got up. They want to see you. They’re worried about you.”

“What did you tell them?” Kayla asked. “Do they know Antoinette is gone?”

“Gone
is a strong word. I said you had a rough night. I said Antoinette got lost and we’re having trouble finding her.”

“Fair enough,” she said. “Can you get me some water? What time is it?”

Raoul went into the bathroom and brought her water in the green plastic cup that held their toothbrushes. Not a cup she wanted to drink from, but she kept quiet. “It’s twenty past eleven,” he said.

Kayla drank the water, handed Raoul the cup, and swung her legs so that they rested on the floor. It felt wildly luxurious to have him at home waiting on her like this, and she wanted to stay and enjoy it, but she couldn’t. With effort, she stood up.

“I have to go,” she said.

“Kayla.”

“I have to go to the airport to meet Lindsey,” she said.

“Lindsey who?”

“Antoinette’s daughter,” Kayla said. “A daughter that she gave up for adoption a long time ago and who is coming to visit today. I can’t explain it all to you right now, but I have to go meet her.”

“Whoa,” he said. He stuffed his hands in the back pockets of his jeans. He was wearing a crisp white polo shirt instead of his usual MONTERO CONSTRUCTION T-shirt. He looked so beautiful: clean, tan, barefoot in his jeans and white shirt. What a handsome, lucky man. Kayla felt sure right then that she would never get enough of him, even if they both lived to be a hundred, and especially not if he continued to work the way he did. “What are you going to tell her?”

“I don’t know,” Kayla said. “But if she wants to stay here tonight, I’m going to let her.”

“She’ll stay where—on the pullout?”

“We’ll put her in Luke’s room,” she said. “Luke can sleep in here with us.” Luke would pretend not to like that—he would say he was too old to sleep with his parents, but secretly he’d enjoy it. Kayla’s mind traveled a predictable path: changing the sheets on Luke’s bed, vacuuming, clearing space in the closet. God, she was such a
housewife.

“She might not show up,” Kayla said. This was, of course, her hope—that this girl the color of a wine cork would get cold feet about seeking out her birth mother and find an excuse to miss her plane. Nantucket was tricky to get to, she reasoned, especially on a holiday weekend.

“It’s possible,” Raoul said, but Kayla heard doubt in his voice. He was lucky; she was not.

Kayla showered quickly and put on a pink sundress with thin straps. It looked summery and nonthreatening, and it flowed nicely over her stomach and thighs. She took three Advils, spritzed on a little Coco, which she hoped would mask the smell of hangover, and went downstairs.

If Luke and Cassidy B. were worried about her, she couldn’t tell. They were engrossed in a wildlife program about the Komodo dragon.