Son of Destruction (29 page)

The Pikes’ position in this tight society was always marginal, predetermined by birth and signified by their location, clinging like sandspurs to the sandy tip of Pierce Point. His parents were peripheral personnel that the inner circle of Fort Jude might recognize on sight, but wouldn’t know, because in this town there are people you know, and people you don’t need to know. Walker saw it in the way they looked at him when he got off that school bus at Northshore, and if Wade wants to change that? Fine.

When Wade Pike goes out now, they all know him. He’s one of the invited. The society tells him who he is, even as each occasion tells him what to do. The Fort Jude his brother fits into so smoothly is a complex living organism, a self-contained, self-sufficient unit, but it’s nothing Walker wanted, then or now.

It took Wade years to slip into the stream where he flows along with the others, serene and comfortable, perfectly safe. No matter what hopes or doubts or what burden of dread or private grief keeps pace with them, on Sunday mornings these people get up and dress nicely and go to church, where they can sit or kneel under colored light filtering in through stained glass windows, thinking whatever they’re usually too busy to think.

It makes life so simple, Walker reflects – lovely, in fact.
Too bad I’m not that person
.

He knows what he is.

Sometimes Walker wonders if the dead stay around, watching even though you don’t know it. He used to wake up screaming, with the old woman roaring around inside his head.
Nightmare
, he told himself.
Vicious, revolting. Done
, but now that Lucy’s dead, he has to wonder if these things are ever really done.

He wonders if Lucy’s spirit is out there, if it ever comes near enough to know how he feels, whether she knows all the things he wishes he’d said when he left her run on a loop, filling his head. Whether she understands now why he had to keep his secret, or how hard it was to keep from running back to hug her, so she’d know.

How do you explain to the woman you love that fate or physics or bad chemistry or a great psychic accident transformed you into a toxic avenger, a ticking bomb?

When he fell in love with Lucy Carteret it was forever, but look at the sorrow that brought down. When he left this town he thought it was forever, but even when you are unarmed but dangerous, you never know which things are forever or how much you can lose in a flash. Far as it was from Florida, Cambridge wasn’t far enough; he ran into Chaplin in Harvard Square in his troubled third year at MIT.

By then Walker was living two lives, ambitious and conflicted and in love.

—Bob Chaplin, imagine. Small world.

—Why, Walker, what are you doing in Harvard Square?

Chaplin was friendly; Chaplin had no idea what Walker Pike was hiding, his sweet life with Lucy in that wonderful, tiny room. Swift and intuitive –
interested
, Chaplin never guessed. They should have talked but Walker was with Lucy, which was intensely private, and they were pledged to keep it that way. He was busy reinventing himself, bent on protecting her, so he muttered politely and backed away from Chaplin and his old life in Fort Jude as if from the far side of a chasm he’d crossed safely.

Protective and cautious Walker, months before it all blew up.

He had no idea what was coming; who would? Nobody in his right mind could divine or even imagine such a thing. Then his life went up in flames and, sobbing, he left Lucy behind – no farewell, no warning, no explanation. A thing like that. How could he explain? He loved her so he left her in the middle of the night.

Love
, he thinks, or prays, now that there’s a chance that Lucy’s spirit can hear him,
I hope you can forgive me now that you know
, but nothing happens, really, except raindrops on his windshield when the hotel sprinkler starts up.

A man like Walker has resources. A man like Walker knows how to disappear in the same big city without running away.
The year he got his doctorate in computer science from UMass, Boston, not even Wade came to see them put on the hood and shake his hand. Wade didn’t know. With his life with Lucy destroyed, Walker did what he had to, losing himself in the stream of thousands driving to high tech jobs in the ring of glossy megaliths lining Route 128. Blending in. He reinvented himself as safe, boring, reliable, and up to a point, it worked.

Too bad things went wrong whenever he tried to start over with someone new.

Which he did once too often, because he was alone and grieving and afraid. He left Lucy to save her but he could not stop looking for her in other women’s beds. When they disappointed him: not-Lucy, the anger grew. The last thing he can allow back into his life is anger, so that ended that.

Picture Walker Pike: backing out of life.

He can’t get close to anyone. Not the way he is. For Walker, human contact beyond the simplest transaction is dangerous.

What he does for a living he can do anywhere, so at forty he doubled back on Pierce Point. Kicking off his shoes to walk in the sand where he dug as a kid, Walker considered. It was home. Lucy would never go back to Fort Jude; at the time it felt right. The sand here is, after all, what he came out of. He fit. Using profits from one of his software patents, he bought Pop’s garage back from the bank. He tore down the building and commanded a house where he might not be happy, but he could be content. Contractors built to his design. Brass fittings. Teak floors, everything perfect.

When things are good in his heart, which they aren’t right now, he can sit on his deck and watch sailboats and trawlers and fishermen go past on their way out into the Gulf. He loves the light on the water and the restless, panoramic skies; he loves feeling the people he grew up with living with their children in the growing city at his back, souls joined and familiar as the ganglia in his right hand.

Walker loves this place. He loves it even though unlike Wade he hates the society. They’ve always been different people. Wade’s a sweet, ordinary, even-tempered guy, while he . . .

Oh God
, Walker thinks because at bottom what he is, is so terribly wrong.
This is so awful
. He never should have come home to this town!

Just then a shadow moves in the hotel courtyard. He snaps to attention. It’s the kid.

Over at the Chaplin house in Pine Vista, Bobby’s on the phone with Nenna McCall, a fact that both delights and frightens him, the latter because of what prompted this call. Talking in the shotgun hallway, he can hear his sister rushing around overhead. Al is off somewhere. It doesn’t matter that they never know where.

Instead of getting to the point Nenna says, ‘I can’t talk long, just while Steffy’s in the shower.’

‘You called to tell me.’ He waits for her to fill in the blank.

‘I did. Maybe I should stop by after church.’ Her voice lifts in surprise. ‘Do you believe we’re going to church?’

‘In this town most people do,’ Bobby says sadly. He used to have a place in this tight little community of the like-minded, good people all. He left for Harvard belonging, but in the years since then he’s gone too far in this life of false steps and unexpected complications to be comfortable with them.

‘They’re inducting the new canon today with coffee and mimosas afterward,’ Nenna says. She called with an agenda, but she’s eminently distractable. ‘And sticky buns in honor of Wade. If you happen to drop by.’

Hope surfaces. He doesn’t always have to be this way. ‘I’ll try.’

‘Buffet at the club afterward?’

Then reason kicks in. ‘I wish. I promised to take Margaret to Shell Art for supplies.’ He also promised his sister brunch at the Pelican afterward, although since the misery and confusion of that stupid, botched high school party, he’s never been comfortable at the beach. The memory, he can handle. It took him years to process, but he can. It’s the flashbacks that bother him. He never knows when they will hit. ‘So probably you should tell me now.’

She can’t seem to begin. ‘Just so you know.’

‘Please. I have to go.’ Margaret will be coming downstairs dressed for the Pelican in another minute, nervously gnawing the edge of her purse. His sister feels safe there because the family went on special occasions when they were small. As Margaret clatters out of the upstairs bathroom he hurries Nenna along. ‘About the Carteret kid . . .’

‘Believe me, he’s not a kid.’

‘Neither are we,’ he says mildly when he wants to bark at her.

Nenna sighs. ‘Not any more.’

‘Could you just say what you called to say?’

‘OK. Here’s the thing. I . . .’ Another false start.

‘What!’

‘Look,’ she says finally, ‘it was an accident. I had him here for no reason, and I couldn’t just send him home, so I . . .’

From upstairs comes the sound of Margaret psyching herself up for the excursion, nervously trotting back and forth from mirror to mirror while his anxieties keep pace with her. He snaps, ‘You what?’

‘I didn’t mean to, but I told him what happened that night.’ Nenna sighs.

‘That night!’

‘You know, when Lucy was . . .’ She breaks off. ‘Was whatever she was that night.’

The sound Bobby makes comes from somewhere deeper than a groan. ‘I didn’t know you knew.’

‘When whatever happened – happened.’ Waiting for him to supply the details, she lets it hang. ‘I tried to tell him but I don’t really know.’

Then, frustrated by the long silence, Nenna cries, ‘I don’t know anything! I’m sorry, Bobby, but she was his mother. I’m just so sorry she’s dead, and besides, I got him all the way out to my house last night for no real reason, poor guy, I felt so
guilty.
I couldn’t send him off empty-handed. I . . . I had to give him
something
.’

‘I see.’

‘Maybe I was just tired.’

During the pause that follows, he hears Margaret circling like a 747 in a holding pattern. ‘Nenna . . .’

‘Look, I know it was a mistake but I ended up saying a lot of things that we don’t talk about to somebody who doesn’t know us, and that’s really bad. About that Saturday night, and Lucy coming down on the beach so late, after you’d given up on her and gotten . . .’

‘Don’t.’

‘. . . so drunk. I just thought you should know. In case he comes your way? To ask? The thing is, he . . .’ In a heartbeat, her tone veers from dark to festive. ‘Oh, Steffy, look at you! Bobby, Steffy’s here, I have to go.’

‘Thanks for the heads up.’

‘Just so you know.’

‘Just so I know.’

Nenna covers the mouthpiece while she and the girl confer. Then she says in that bright, artificial, Fort Jude way, ‘Right then. Take care, Bobby. Lovely to talk.’

‘Wait. I need to know what you told him.’ What he really needs to know is how much Nenna knows.

But his friend is caught up in her daughter’s rhythms now. Like a girl she says, ‘Later, OK?’ Giggling, she delivers a punchline dug up from the deep past when they were so young that it was still funny, ‘See you in church.’

Confused by the scene he played with Mrs McCall after the fire, too wired to sleep, Dan lurched into the lobby of the Flordana. He ran his credit card in the crap business center and starred their houses on the grainy printout of the Internet map.

Done. Sleep.

When he emerges, the town is preternaturally quiet. Jazzed on caffeine and carbs from the machines, with no Fort Judeans around badgering him with guilty secrets, he comes out into the sunlight feeling, well, what passes for happy in this weird time.

He has a plan. This one looks rock-solid: grill the peripheral witnesses, one, two, three, building questions on answers, fact-checking as he goes. Nail them at home before he grills the prime suspect, who, although the northerner hunting his father can’t know it, is still snoring on stinking satin sheets in a house suffering a steep descent from shiny high tech into deep slobbery.

It’s a curse, having an orderly mind, but how is he supposed to know? OK, he’ll start with Carter Bellinger’s dad, in hopes. It was, after all, his Jeep. But there’s more. There is always more. He knows from what the McCall woman said that his mother suffered. He still doesn’t know exactly how, or why. First he will identify the bastard and confront him. Then he will . . . OK. This is the thing. Does he not look more like Bellinger in that Polaroid than Kalen, with his leering, gorilla grin? Squint and he can almost see himself in Bellinger’s face. Nose to nose with George Chapin Bellinger, LLD, he’ll can him: face, body mass, stance. Soul, which is what rules Chaplin out. If there’s anything in the configuration; if, counter to expectations, Bellinger’s the guy, he can forget the other two – forget Kalen! – and put his heart to rest.

Otherwise, it’s on to Coleman and Von Harten, solid Fort Jude business types with houses on the same block in Coral Shores, because he needs to triangulate. If it really is Kalen, then he’ll damn well go in there armed with facts. Sick of hints, slippery truths and polite evasions and sick to death of Fort Jude, Florida, Dan’s given up on that heartwarming ‘Father!’ ‘Son!’ moment. He won’t even hit the guy. He just needs to know, so he can walk away. He thinks:
Closure.
Damn that orderly mind.

Leaving the Flordana, he’s too preoccupied to notice the car keeping pace as he heads down Central Avenue and around the corner to the hotel garage. He’s trying out lines.

‘You don’t know me, but . . .’

‘I think we have something in common.’

‘You remember Lucy, right? Lucy Carteret?

‘Um. Hello.’

Lame, but better than, ‘Are you him?’

Fuck, Bellinger’s house is sealed up tighter than an entomologist’s catching jar. It’s a vintage Spanish stucco with a contemporary add-on doubling its size. They keep the king-sized yard beautifully groomed, like women of a certain age. The ancient Royal palms in front look like fat cigars with Sideshow Bob fright wigs bobbing at the tops. The long porch overlooks the water between here and Coral Shores.

Trying on speeches, Dan rings.
Well, hi.
Nobody comes. He bangs with his fists. He shouts. Nothing.