Off Season (17 page)

“I don’t know, probably not. But the world is different today. It won’t be so hard. For me or for him.” She could not believe that her words sounded so convincing. She could not believe that she could stand here and lie and practically believe the lie herself. “Thanks for the concern,” she added, patting her stomach. “But we’ll be fine.”

He looked back to her belly, then up at her. “So you’re glad, then?”

She nodded, hoping he couldn’t see how hard she’d just swallowed.

“Well, if you’re happy then, well …” He laughed. “Hell, I think I’m jealous. I was so pissed off and now I’m jealous. Kind of stupid, huh?”

No, she wanted to reply, it wasn’t kind of stupid, it was really kind of nice.

“Jesus,” he repeated, “Well, if you need anything, Rita …”

She shook her head, this time with her heart truly up in her mouth, this time with her brains truly down in her ass. Somehow she managed to stand on her toes and kiss his cheek. “Have a great time in Florida. Write if you get work.”

Charlie smiled and ruffled her hair. “You’re okay, kid, you know that? You’re right—you’ll be fine. We’ll both be fine.”

Rita nodded so she didn’t have to speak again, for if she did, it might trigger a nonstop crying jag.

She opened the door, and he stepped past her.

“Give my best to your mother,” he said. “I guess I’ll see you in the spring.”

“Yeah,” Rita said, “have a nice life.” Then she closed the door on the father of her two kids and wondered why she felt so sure it was right to let Charlie—the one man who had ever loved her—walk down the sidewalk and out of her life.

The following weekend brought moving day. Jill had once hoped that she’d be helping Amy pack her suitcases to go to college, not to leave home. Not at eighteen.

“Two blocks is practically next door,” Amy had argued again this morning while loading heaps of clothes into the car. “In fact, if there was a huge roof over Water Street, it would almost be like I was only moving down the hall.”

Packing CDs in an old shoebox, Jill mused that once one left home, it was often for good, or for twenty-five years as it had been for her, which was about the same. In the past, Amy had gone off to private school or visited her father in England, but until now she had not removed her belongings
—all
her belongings, from beaded shoes to linen skirts, from crop sweaters to feather earrings—from under Jill’s roof.

Still, Jill worked busily, wanting to be finished, looking forward to leaving for Sturbridge tonight to return to some work, to return to normalcy. Whatever that word meant.

She sealed the box and realized that right now the best
she could hope for in the normalcy department was that the freelance shooter from Boston would show up in Sturbridge and be moderately good.

“How’s it going?”

From the doorway, Ben smiled at her but without luster, his complexion having paled more since the altercation with Ashenbach. In the past week, he’d hardly left the house: if he didn’t go anywhere, he said, he wouldn’t risk getting punched out again. His attempt at humor was thin.

She tensed.

Thankfully the trip to Sturbridge would last a few days, maybe long enough to help Ben put things into perspective and free himself from the paranoia and the gloom in which he was now stuck. Even though Jill would be working, even though his grandkids wouldn’t be with them, maybe Ben would become immersed in the old working village, in the architecture he so loved, and the era he was drawn to. She would encourage him to look for new ideas for the museum, crafts to teach the kids, Early American methods to show them.

Yes, hopefully, the trip would go well. And hopefully, his mood would mellow before she went beserk.

“The packing is fine,” she said to him now. “It’s difficult, though. Having my baby leave home.” She tried to smile.

“It’s a big, scary world out there, Jill. One doesn’t have to leave home to be affected by it.”

“When’s Charlie coming?” she asked abruptly, as much to change the subject as to find the answer. Though Charlie was leaving the apartment “intact”—furniture, dishes, and anything else Amy wanted—because she was “family,” Amy was determined to have her own four-poster canopy bed. She did not want to sleep on the old twin daybed that had once belonged to Jill’s father, used for his refuge from Jill’s tense, stoic mother, the poor man’s wife.

She suddenly thought of Rita. Was the daybed where the soon-to-be baby had been conceived?

“Charlie said he’d be here around two. He’s still putting things into storage.”

Jill nodded and closed another box. She didn’t know what to say next. It had been that way since the party: he’d withdrawn; she’d pulled away. Ben might as well be the one moving into Charlie’s apartment, the one sleeping on the daybed now, for all the communication that they had.

“I know this is hard for you, honey,” he said, “but I think if nothing else, this is working out for Amy.”

She knew what he really meant was that this was working out for him. With Charlie off to Florida and Amy out of the house, the risk that two other people would learn about Mindy would be lower. She wondered how much he would have promoted Amy’s move if it hadn’t been for his arrest. Or if he would have thought this had “worked out” so well if it were his daughter, Carol Ann, moving out, instead of her Amy.

Ben began loading full shoeboxes into a carton. “What time do you want to leave tonight?”

She pushed a sheet of newspaper down into another shoebox, and with it her anguish. “I think we should be out on the six-thirty boat. But I reserved the eight-fifteen, too, just in case.” She tossed in the remaining CDs and handed the box to Ben, who set it in the carton. “It will take almost two hours to drive from the Cape to Sturbridge. I don’t want to get there too late.”

He taped the carton and scanned the room as if looking for more things to do. Then he put his hands on his hips. “What about the sheets and blankets? Are those all packed?”

Why was he asking such an obvious question? The mattress lay barren, stripped of its covers. Even the lace canopy had been laundered, then neatly packed, for Amy
to rehang in her new bedroom in her new home, where it would hover over herself and whomever she chose to accompany her in bed.

Jill stood and stretched her legs, wanting to shake off such thoughts. “Everything’s ready, Ben. All we need is Charlie. And his truck.”

Ben had a truck, too. A pickup they could have used, if it weren’t for the fact it was parked at the museum, if it weren’t for the fact Ben refused to go within a few hundred miles, nautical or otherwise, of Menemsha House and the Ashenbach land.

He walked to the window, his back toward his wife. “I spoke with Rick,” he said. The lines of his back, his once well-muscled shoulders, were smaller now, almost bony, as if his pain were eating his body as well as his mind. He put his hands into his pockets. “The pretrial conference is coming up. That’s when they’ll set the date for the trial.”

A sense of foreboding crept from her head to her toes. “When?”

“Tuesday afternoon.”

“This Tuesday?”

“Yes.”

She closed her eyes. “You didn’t just learn this today, did you?”

“No. It was why he called the other day, when I was at the tavern helping Amy decorate.”

The other day, Jill recalled, was when she’d walked in on her husband kissing her daughter. She cleared her throat. “Should I ask why you didn’t mention it? You knew I have to be in Sturbridge a few days. I could have changed the dates.”

“I need to do this myself, Jill. I just need to go to the courthouse with Rick and hear the date. Then I need to come home.”

“So you don’t want me with you. Fine. But we could have gone to Sturbridge next week or the week after.”

“No, honey. I’d already decided I wouldn’t be going with you. That I needed to stay here.”

She wondered if “here” meant the island or the house, where he could hide from the world. “Are you going to stay in the house until the trial?” she asked.

He turned and faced her. “That’s not what this is about, Jill.”

“Really?”

He took his hands from his pockets and ran them through his hair, of which, like the rest of him, there seemed to be less. “Even if you had changed the dates, I still couldn’t have gone. Rick says we can’t be sure what Ashenbach would do if he learned I left the island.”

She kicked a carton away from the bed. “You’re not a freaking criminal, Ben! For God’s sake, you’re innocent until proven guilty, remember?”

He turned back to the window. “Jill, please, none of this is fair to you, I know that. But let me just do what I need to do. Once this is done, I’ll go to the moon with you if you’d like. But right now …”

The muscles around the corners of her jaw tightened. “What if John, Jr. and Emily were still going? Would you have bailed out on them, too?”

He did not move. “That’s a moot point, Jill. They’re not going.”

Her comment had cut deep, she knew. She supposed she should apologize, but she could not. “I thought you were looking forward to Sturbridge.” The tremor in her voice warned her not to carry this too far, for surely it could quickly erupt into anger or, worse, to an out-and-out cry.

He came to her and took her hands in his. “I was, honey. But I’m consumed by this. I can’t imagine myself going off and trying to have a good time.”

She snapped her hands away. Her jaw muscles began working again. “That’s fine, Ben, but as they say on the talk shows, this isn’t just about you.” She stopped short of reminding him that if she weren’t bringing home the paycheck, that maybe she would have preferred to stay home, too. But even in her anger she could not hurt Ben that much. He was not, after all, Richard. He was not, after all, Christopher. Ben Niles was not like the other self-centered men that had screwed up her life.

Was he?

There were six people in the courtroom, not counting the two armed guards who stood at attention at the front and rear doors, waiting for Ben to try and make a break for it, he supposed. He looked around the dreary room, decorated only by two flags—one the Stars and Stripes, one with the state seal. He didn’t think it was the same place that he’d been for his arraignment, but his memory of that was about as clear as a dense Vineyard fog.

The judge, however, was the same. He remembered her at her post behind the “bench,” whose elevated step denoted authority.

In front of the bench was a sober-looking male court reporter.

At a small wooden table facing the judge sat Ben in the suit he’d worn to his wedding. It seemed bigger somehow, as if it had been stretched. The suit and the surroundings reminded him of the grammar school assembly when the whole class had been counting on him to spell
Appalachian
, so they could beat Mrs. Merritt’s class and win the spelling bee.

Of course, he’d screwed up because he never could spell worth a damn.

All things being equal, he figured he’d felt about as
humiliated then as he did now. He wanted only to be out of there, only to be finished so he could go home.

Next to him was Rick Fitzpatrick in a navy suit that fit.

At a matching table beside them sat Ashenbach himself, though Ben’s view of him was nicely obstructed by the assistant district attorney, who was not the Mister Rogers look-alike but a tall, beefy woman who wore more makeup than most island women, and whose name Ben could not remember. He assumed she’d been sent down from Boston, though he didn’t know why he thought that.

Maybe because it was something to think about, something to keep his eyes from straining to see Ashenbach and to keep his mind off the fact that he was here at all, or that he had not spoken to his wife since she’d left two days ago.

“The accused is present?” the judge asked, jarring Ben from his trance.

Rick stood up. “Yes, your honor.”

“Mr. Niles, do you understand this is a formal conference to set the date for trial in the matter of
The Commonwealth versus Benjamin Niles?”
Instead of looking up, she kept her eyes fixed on some papers that must have been more interesting.

Ben glanced at Rick, who motioned him to stand.

“Yes, your honor,” Ben said in a voice that sounded like it belonged to the boy in the grade-school spelling bee. He clasped his hands together in front of him. He wished now that he’d not been so stubborn with Jill. It would have been nice to feel the warmth of her hand in his, instead of the cool dampness of his own palms.

The beefy D.A. stood up. “Your honor, due to the sensitivity of the allegation, and the fact that the frenzy of summertime here on the island does not seem appropriate
to schedule such an important trial, the Commonwealth asks for expediency.”

Ben wondered if he could spell
expediency
. Or if Ashenbach could.

“I agree,” the judge replied. “Is the child receiving regular counseling?”

Ben was relieved that she said
child
and not
little girl
.

The D.A. turned to Dave, who whispered something to her. Then she whispered back, and they went back and forth a few times before the D.A. addressed the judge again. “Yes, your honor. The child has been seeing a therapist two or three times a week.”

“See that it’s three,” the judge responded. She looked up briefly, then back down to her papers. “Schedule date for trial is Monday, April ninth, two thousand and one. Is this acceptable for counsel’s calendars?”

It was acceptable.

The judge banged her gavel but said nothing more. Then she rose and swept from the room, one of the armed lackeys escorting her through the rear door.

Rick gathered his legal pad and file folder and snapped them into his briefcase. Ben stayed frozen in place, mute, awaiting the next word, which came not from Rick but from Ashenbach himself, who must have pushed past the D.A. and was now in Ben’s face.

“You’re going to hang, Niles,” he seethed.

Rick raised a hand. “Bailiff!”

The D.A. grabbed Dave by the arm. “Move out, Mr. Ashenbach,” she commanded. “Now.”

In the split second before he moved, Ashenbach leaned over and spat at his prey. The spittle landed on the lapel of Ben’s too-big suit.