Storm Tide (13 page)

“Most of us don’t seem to get it right the first time,” Judith said, taking my face between her palms. “But it might be possible to do something about your custody arrangements …. How old is your son now?”

“He was nine last month.” I dug in my wallet. “Every year they send a photo after his birthday with a card he signs thanking me.”

“Who did you cut out of the photo?”

“Wynn, Vicki and her two new kids.”

“Ah …” She was silent, staring at the card-sized image of a tanned and healthy little boy beneath a palm tree. Under a shock of dark brown hair, his pale eyes stared into the camera with a big grin—not at me, at whoever was taking the picture. He had broad shoulders and chubby red cheeks; the son I wasn’t allowed to name.

“I do a lot of custody law …. If you want things changed, we can talk to someone I trust down there ….”

“What do I have to give him, Judith?”

She looked at me the way no one else ever had. “I’d say a lot.”

“When I get hopeful, I imagine him striking out on his own to find me when he gets to be seventeen or eighteen, being curious, maybe as a kind of rebellion. But none of the Hardy kids ever left home. It’s a fantasy.”

“Maybe not,” she said. “It happens. Think of it this way. If your marriage had worked out, you would never have moved back here. You’ll have a house again, and a wife, but more suited to you. More caring.”

“I doubt it,” I said.

“I don’t.” She kissed my lips lightly. “Are you hungry?”

J
OHNNY

    Johnny Lynch was up at four
A
.
M
. with a feeling so foreign that he had to talk to himself to understand it, coax himself down like a cat from a tree, as he’d coaxed his wife so many times. Although he was no stranger to the rush of adrenaline and the cold draft of sweat on his forehead, it wasn’t until the drive into work that he could even name the problem. Fear. Back to his own office for the first time in eight weeks, at the desk he’d had custom built—thirty-two inches high to accommodate his knees—and instead of speeding down the highway, he slowed for every yellow light. He was as scared as he’d been of the nuns in school, of his father’s rage when he couldn’t make good grades. In order to succeed, he had purged himself of fear, learned to plunge through it, and in so doing understood that the others were more scared than he was and would fall in behind him once he cleared the way.

Johnny Lynch was sixty-eight. He’d lived twice the life of most men his age and felt half the man he used to be. The last time his dog had flushed a duck from the tall reeds behind the dike, he’d had all he could do to lift his shotgun and aim; the recoil nearly brought him to his knees. By the grace of the Lord, or maybe to provide Him with a good laugh, Johnny had survived this last bypass—if he could call the list of foods he couldn’t eat, the things he couldn’t do, surviving.

This was the day he had anticipated for three weeks in bed and another five in a Fort Myers resort that felt like a cemetery with palm trees. Now, three hours back in his office, the well-wishers dismissed, the mail stacked in piles of importance, he sat at his big cherry desk like the ruler of an empty kingdom. The phone didn’t ring, the door didn’t open. Maybe he shouldn’t have demanded this afternoon’s meeting with the bank. A wiser man might have waited; a lesser man wouldn’t push. But finally, he was John Mosley Lynch, and he preferred bad news to silence.

He used to order his desk blotters thirty at a time. From them, Maria copied notes he scribbled while on the telephone, the numbers and contacts he gleaned, the names and the tips and reminders. Now there were few of those. He still had the real estate business, which did well despite the competition. (There hadn’t been any when he
began because there was no housing market in Saltash. He created it.) But the big deals were few and far between. To develop property you needed major financing now, for the endless surveys and design reviews, the regulatory hearings created to discourage all but the most determined. He had little interest in summer rentals and second home sales and left that to the girls, most of them grandmothers by now. They were demanding a new secretary, a younger girl who understood computers. As for the law practice, the indictment had all but ended that. He’d beaten the bastards, but it cost him a fortune and his reputation. Before he was indicted, even as the rumors swirled and his partners ran scared and the newspapers descended like vultures on a roadkill, there was no other lawyer worth hiring in this town. He had written the damned bylaws: zoning, health, conservation. Only after the case went to court did he find out who his friends were, who gave him their business and who turned their backs. Six years had passed, six long years of damage control. The worst of it fell on his wife, God rest her delicate soul; a finer woman had never lived.

Emily Ann was too good for this earth, and that was the cause of her troubles. This bitter world was hard on everyone’s nerves, but that a woman so sensitive and pure, so good to the marrow of her bones, would succumb to its pressures was no surprise. She had everything a woman could ask, as she herself said a thousand times—a fine home, three children, a town in which she was a veritable queen—but what she needed was a world clean of petty rumors and people who lied for the sheer pleasure of causing pain. It was the indictment that claimed his wife of forty years. All those whispers about a mistress and a love nest, as if he was some Turkish pasha with a harem; those charges of sweetheart contracts and that bad business with Kevin, their second-born, Emily Ann had endured; with help from the doctors they’d gotten through her bad spells. But the indictment had been too much. Two months or three, that was all she’d ever needed to be away up in Boston; then she’d come home, how did she put it? Refreshed. But she had never come home again after he’d been hounded into court, and those who had pursued him had killed her as surely as if they’d hammered a stake straight through her heart.

For a long while he thought it was revenge he was after. He would sit in this chair, staring into the marsh as the shadows lengthened. He would watch as the tide receded and the herons returned to feed, imagining the pain he would deal his enemies. But for all that he had endured, he was not a vengeful man. To be sure, he could deliver an eye
for an eye, but to waste time brooding about his enemies was only to play into their hands. Time was his real enemy.

Johnny had built this town not by thinking about it but by making the contacts that mattered, by forging alliances with the governor and the legislature. When he had first moved to Saltash, the selectmen saw Boston as the devil; one, Larsen, boasted that he had never in his life had a reason to go over the bridge—and the idiot died of a burst appendix, diagnosed by a local physician as gas. They tried to make Johnny ashamed of where he came from. Washed ashore, they called him, the mick from South Boston. But it was Boston State House money that built the highway to this town and the pier and dredged the harbor deep enough for yachts. It was all his trips to Boston, three and a half hours each way in those days, that made Saltash a place to visit and put its men to work. “John Mosley Lynch,” Emily Ann used to say. “Just what do you do from seven in the morning till twelve at night?” What he’d done was build this town.

They tried to push him out. Those who’d moved into the houses he built, on the land he had cleared: in forests so thick the sunlight didn’t shine, off roads no wider than wagon trails. First it was counsel to the town. Thank you very much, if you please, we’ll find our legal advice elsewhere. Then selectman. Defeated after two decades on the board by fifty-four votes. They wanted him stuck in an office with three yattering women who rented summer cottages. They wanted him dead and buried.

At a quarter before twelve, apologizing lest she make him late for his one o’clock meeting, Maria brought in the new girl. Maria had worked for him for twenty-two years and knew enough about this town to run it. She was a small Portuguese girl, mother of five, and he’d watched her age over the years as if watching his own face in the mirror. Dark, sensual Maria, whose body had moved with the grace of a cat, with black curly hair and a magnificent round rump. Was she really the gray-haired matron who stood before him? She used to leave the office a half hour early and meet him at the cottage by the lake. She liked to be completely naked when he arrived. She never turned the lights on and didn’t like to talk. They knew each other’s secrets. Her husband, Pepe, was captain of a scallop dragger; a pot smuggler Johnny had bailed out of trouble more times than he cared to remember. His drinking was under control unless the fleet was frozen in, when he got bored and beat his wife. Johnny never told Maria about the warning he gave Pepe, that if he hit his wife again, he’d bill him for every cent he had, including the boat.

“Mr. Lynch, this is Crystal.” Maria dropped the girl’s résumé on the desk blotter. In twenty-two years she had never touched him in the office. “Crystal Sinclair.”

This was a big girl, a head taller than Maria, substantially built, with strong wrists and a fine heavy bosom. Her white blouse was frayed at the collar and cuffs. There was a yellow stain just below the left shoulder. She needed this job. Good. He didn’t want a retired woman, back to work after she’d moved down here; he wanted loyalty. Thirty-two years old, according to the résumé. Same age as his son Kevin. Well, they needed youth around here. Strange, the color of her hair, not blond or silver, but something in between. She was a pretty girl. Her smile was confident and she held his eyes. He liked that.

“Sinclair,” he said. “You wouldn’t have known a Dr. Sinclair?”

“I’m his daughter.”

“No, sir! Well sit down, sit down. He did have two daughters,” the sorry bastard. “You know we haven’t had a dentist in this town since he … moved on.” Johnny scanned the résumé with interest. It didn’t surprise him that she’d been educated out West. “University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Fine school. Fine school.” He didn’t know a damned thing about it except they had a basketball team. He’d never been to Las Vegas. Never had the time or interest to gamble. There was something (he didn’t want to stare) coquettish? made up? about her. The dark lipstick. The perfume. The tight skirt. Nothing that put him off, exactly. It just wasn’t Saltash. “I see you’ve worked in a law office before.”

“Well, I’m not really a legal secretary.”

“But you’ve worked with computers. You’ve got WordPerfect, Word, Excel.” None of it meant a thing to him. “And what brings you back here?” He watched her carefully. He listened for the stammer, the hesitation. The eyes flitting to the floor. Her gaze didn’t falter. She was sharp, this one. She’d have the other girls eating out of her hand.

“I wanted a good education for my son.”

“You have a boy?”

“He’s just turned eight. And, well, I know we have a great school here and it would be perfect for him.”

“You thought right. What’s his name?”

“Laramie.”

“After the western town!” What the fuck kind of thing is that to name a child? “Very nice, very nice.” He noticed there was no wedding ring. As soon as he saw her address, he knew her story. Four twelve Dock Street. The closest Saltash had to a housing project. But he wasn’t
a man who judged people by their morals or their circumstances. Frankly, he thought their politics a better gauge of character. Do you believe in caring for the sick and the hungry or do you babble a few words on Sunday morning? That was the test. “Well, Crystal.” He rose, offering his hand. “Welcome aboard.”

“Then I have the job?”

“You had it before you walked in. I’m just the rubber stamp around here. Maria’s the real power behind the throne.”

The meeting was two towns over, fifteen miles up the highway, in the bank’s main branch. He was five minutes early. Bernice Cady came out to meet him and escort him back. Bernice had polio as a child, and if her bad leg dragged slightly as she walked, she still walked as fast as anyone he knew. Her family had discouraged her from applying to college and assumed that she’d look after her widowed father the rest of her life. Johnny remembered her buck-toothed smile, her bony arms waving, full of questions, whenever he read stories to her class. When she graduated high school, she asked him for a job at the bank, and in spite of the other board members’ reluctance and her father’s disapproval, Johnny saw to it she became a part-time teller. The kid surprised him, landing the job full-time within a year. Then she became head teller, branch manager when the local bank merged, most recently a loan officer.

“Mr. Lynch, I’m sorry, no one’s back yet. They called to say they’d be a few minutes.”

They were still at lunch. Years ago this meeting would have been called for lunch and drinks in a private room in the best restaurant in town. Now, he could wait. Bernice couldn’t do him any special favors, other than tell him the truth: it was going to be a hard sell. She saw him daub the bead of perspiration from his cheek and she knew what he had left in the world: the house he lived in and 120 acres behind the dike. He had a pain like a burning lump of coal in his chest, and it only got hotter when her bosses walked in. Two boys of forty, one bald with glasses, the other smelling of onions, both in navy suits, Roger and Steve with the power of money.