The Glory Hand (7 page)

The island of Nantucket lay ahead on the water, a warship cruising towards them in the midday glare, and he slipped an arm around her. 'It'll be okay, once we get there,' he said, and Cassie thought it was to reassure himself as much as her. He had wanted to board up the summer house for good, she knew, and she suddenly wondered if it had been wrong of her to beg him to take her there, wrong to wrench him away from the investigation. He had only agreed because she'd been so insistent. But maybe, she thought, as the boat neared the shore, her need to return to the place where her mother had been the happiest could only end in failure - as futile as her father's search for the murderer.

Runt dragged their luggage over to the gangplank. Like her father and herself, Cassie thought, the bodyguard seemed burdened by his guilt. He kept even closer to them than before, a brooding presence in his wrinkled sharkskin suit. It struck her that each of them who had been with her mother at Woods Hole that morning felt that the guilt was his alone. Her steps were hesitant as she filed down the gangplank after her father, over the brackish water at the dock. She remembered reading about a place somewhere, called Devil's Island, where guilty people were condemned for life.

If Cassie had thought that the weathered lobster boats bobbing at anchor in Nantucket Harbor, the nets drying in the sun, would somehow soothe her with their picture-postcard charm, she had been mistaken. Her gaze crept insidiously over the side of the pier, to the gutted fish that slapped against the pilings, eyes bulging and jaws agape, as though poisoned by the sea.

Her father insisted on taking the wheel of the rented Buick that was waiting for them, leaving the bodyguard to sit in the back seat with Cassie. It was his fighter's instinct, she thought, that made him drive so recklessly over the narrow road snaking away from the harbor up the coast, as if he were lunging to take the first punch at an opponent. A sharp curve, and Cassie slid across the vinyl seat, against Runt. She had refused to speak to him since her mother's murder, and he had responded with an equally brutal silence.

Clay didn't slow down as the car shuddered over a cobblestone street, where saltbox houses hugged the rim of an inlet. Cassie pressed her cheek to the window as the clapboard home where Clay had grown up rushed by. Her grandfather had been a staunch Yankee free-thinker, a bearded fisherman who liked to tell her that any man who had seen the monsters of the deep and weathered the gales of the North Atlantic could never believe in God. Cassie barely remembered her grandmother Broyles, a gentle woman who had expressed herself with a needle the way a writer might with a pen, sewing comforters to sell to summer tourists. Hannah Broyles had seen no reason to leave the island. On Nantucket, she'd said, there was always enough cloth, always enough thread. When she died, her husband's cynicism had turned to despair. He had joined her within the year, as if he lacked the will to endure life without her. Cassie tried not to think how much Clay might be like his own father.

Clay gunned the car out of town and Cassie looked back to see the lighthouse dip beneath a sand dune where the wind rippled the marsh grass. The road climbed over chalk-white cliffs, then leveled off as they reached the northern tip of the island. On the rocky promontory, the waters of the Atlantic met those of Nantucket Sound to spawn fierce riptides, their fury echoed by the wind that threatened to blow the car off the road, flinging a barrage of sand against the windshield. Though oak trees had been planted here a hundred years before as a windbreak, they were still as stunted as saplings.

It had always puzzled Cassie that her great-great-grand-father on her mother's side had chosen to build a home on this precipice, away from the grand whaling-captain's mansions near the harbor. Perhaps the very violence of the place was what had attracted him. 'Black Jack' Meacham had by all accounts been a violent man, a whaler who would pursue his prey far out into the Atlantic if his first harpoon missed its mark, and take out his rage on his family and crew if a whale eluded him. When his ship,
The Harpy,
had broken up in a gale off Point Fear, there had been few mourners.

With its three steep gables, and its Widow's Walk for sighting ships on the horizon, the hundred-year-old house stood out boldly against the sky, like a beached schooner. Though he had built Cliffs Edge in the Victorian era, Captain Meacham had refused to allow it to be festooned with gingerbread latticework like the other sea captains' houses on the island. He had kept its lines sharp, angular, like a harpoon thrust into the sand, and that was fitting, she thought, considering it had been paid for with murder. She wondered how many whales the captain had killed to buy it.

They climbed out of the car and walked hastily across a lawn choked with weeds. The wind fought their every step, assaulting the brick walls and the Welsh slate roof like a cat raking its claws across a dollhouse. The waves bombarding the beach beneath the cliffs semed to roar more fiercely than Cassie had heard them before, and she glanced towards her father: his gait, the way he clenched and unclenched his fists, said he was reluctant - perhaps even afraid - of what he would find inside the house. She hesitated, too. It struck her that maybe she hadn't come to Cliff's Edge for comfort, but to punish herself for her guilt.

The lock of the heavy oak door was rusty, and Clay had to twist the key violently before the door finally yawned open. Sand had seeped under the door, and when they walked inside, it grated underfoot on the warped floorboards. The air in the foyer bore the damp weight of winter, defying the June warmth, as if, Cassie thought, after the chill of her mother's death, it hadn't been able to thaw. She felt as though she were walking into a house that had just been burglarized, looted of something terribly valuable that could not be replaced. She walked cautiously to the foot of the stairs as if fearing that the burglar might still be inside.

No sooner did Clay walk in than he snatched the telephone off its walnut table, as if reaching for a lifeline. 'I'll just check in.'

'Sure.'

Checking in .. .
She knew it meant calling the FBI to ask if they had any news on the investigation. He checked in as often as he might have phoned for an update on election night.

Cassie went into the parlor and began tugging off the white coverlets from the furniture, not wanting to face the green velvet sofa where her mother had liked to sit at cocktail time, with a glass of white wine. The captain's chest before the Queen Anne chair was scuffed from where, in more leisurely times, Clay had put his feet up when he had joined her, sipping his Scotch straight up.

The parlor was a room of compromises, Cassie thought. Her father had insisted on keeping 'Black Jack' Meacham's scrimshaw, the crossed harpoons and grappling hooks mounted along the walls, and though her mother had called them 'bloody trophies,' she had left them on display. But he had compromised, too. He had let Ann take down the seascapes he loved, to put up her own brooding paintings, and he had let her replace the Captain's sea charts in the lacquered Japanese cabinet with art books: Degas, and more Degas, for his dancers.

Cassie glanced uneasily at the one heirloom that neither of her parents had wanted, but which hung over the mantel with a malevolent life of its own - the figurehead from Captain Meacham's ship,
The Harpy.
The rotting wooden carcass, its steel breasts pointed like the tips of two harpoons, had been washed ashore at Point Fear after the ship had sunk, and been returned to the Captain's widow, Cassie's great-great-grandmother, Zena Meacham. The face had been modeled after Zena, Cassie had been told. If so, it was a cruel likeness, its nose a hooked beak, its eyes luminescent blue stones that gave the weathered visage a vengeful intensity. Her mother had called the figurehead 'Neptune's Whore,' ridiculing it, Cassie thought, the way she made fun of things that scared her. Cassie had never understood why her parents had left it there. She snuck a backward glance at The Harpy as she left the room: it almost seemed that the stone eyes of the figurehead were gloating in triumph, as if it took a perverse pride that the sea had claimed her mother the way it had claimed the Captain. That the Chill had won.

Clay was still on the phone when she returned to the foyer. He cupped his hand over the receiver. 'Want to go into town? Get some lunch?'

'But the lobsters ... I thought we were going to broil them.'

'Okay,' he said after a moment's hesitation that told just how eager he was to escape from the house.

'It'll be fine,' she said, and she felt as if she were reassuring him not just about the meal, but about their having come here at all.

The draft from the foyer didn't follow her into the kitchen. Unlike the parlor, it was warmed by a southern exposure, sunlight filtering through panels of yellow stained glass that edged the bay windows, gleaming in the copper pots that hung from a rack over the butcher-block counter. Cassie strained to smell some trace of the fresh bread that her mother used to bake here, but all she could smell was garlic: the knot of bulbs hanging over the door - 'to keep away vampires,' her mother had joked - had shriveled into husks.

Lining the windowsiil overlooking the beach was the collection of wine corks her mother had saved, as though to hoard the memories of dinners at Cliffs Edge. Dried wishbones filled a Mason jar beside them, 'for emergencies,' Ann had said.

The door to the dumbwaiter shaft was open, and Cassie slammed it shut, as if to shield her ears from her mother's screams that might still be echoing inside. The Wedgwood plates and Tiffany silver from the last, uneaten dinner were stacked by the sink. Cassie couldn't bear using them for lunch and replaced them in the locked cupboard, removing two simple ironstone plates and stainless flatware instead.

7 don't give a good goddamn who the Director's in a meeting with
. . Clay was shouting into the phone.
What the hell have your people been doing . . . Playing with themselves
?' She turned on the faucet so that she wouldn't have to listen. Over the running water she could hear the receiver slam down on the hook. 'I'm going out for a while,' he called to her from the hallway, his voice lowered, she knew, to hide his rage.

By the time Cassie had unwrapped the three five-pound lobsters the market had split for broiling, Clay had changed into his white shorts and Golden Gloves T-shirt (he was an honorary member) and was clattering down the stairs. The door banged shut behind him, and she watched him through the window as he descended the steep, rocky trail that slashed down the cliff face to the beach. From the look on Runt's face, the bodyguard was none too pleased. Usually he tagged along when the Senator jogged through Rock Creek Park in Washington. But after that phone call, Cassie decided, her father had felt the need to escape the house, and his shadow. Runt perched sullenly on the edge of the cliff, following Clay's run down the beach with his binoculars. At least for once, she thought, her father would get a moment's peace, the freedom to sweat out his anger.

Cassie picked up the lobsters, scrubbing the shells quickly and scooping the gritty eggs from the tails. As she dumped the roe down the drain she remembered how her mother had tried to avoid this part because she hated the smell of the sea on her hands.

When she had dotted the lobsters with butter and slid them under the broiler, her eyes were drawn back out the window. She tried to catch sight of the red sail of Todd's catamaran on the water, hoping that he somehow knew she was here and would come to see her. But looking at the sea . . . For a moment, in the sun's glare off the surf, it looked as if the tide were rushing in, slithering all the way up the cliff to inundate the house.

Clay was coming back up the beach, the sand scattering behind his feet in little bursts, running at a cruel speed as he punished the last breath out of himself. His silhouette stood out so boldly against the shimmering sand . . . On the wide beach that ran between the cliff and the crashing surf, he was visible for miles, an easy target. The sun burned in her eyes, like the blowtorches from Woods Hole, where she had learned that the water's edge could be a killing ground, as lethal as the open sea. He was taking a terrible chance, she thought. Thank God he was almost through. The tension eased from her muscles, and she waved to him through the window. But he wasn't looking up towards the house. Instead of heading up the trail, he pulled off his sweat-soaked T-shirt, kicked off his Adidas, and . . .

Cassie's throat tightened: he was running towards the surf. With an exuberant leap, Clay dashed into the breakers and dove into a tower of foam.
He's gone.
Cassie's fingers went numb, and the knife she was rinsing clattered to the sink. She wanted to cry out, but the words wouldn't come.

He's going to drown himself . . . he's going out there to join her, the way his father joined his mother. . .

Where was Runt? Why didn't Runt stop him? Cassie spotted the burly figure on the edge of the cliff, his elbows raised awkwardly, watching the sea through his binoculars without so much as a nervous twitch.

Cassie's mind spun. The sea had taken her mother . . . now it was taking her father, and . . .

The sea ... the whitecaps gleaming like the eyes of The Harpy figurehead, shining with vengeance and joy.

Icy tendrils began creeping up her back. She was starting to shake, as if she were plunging into the water after him, the cold numbing her to the marrow.

Then the razor edge of the Chill.
She was staring out of a porthole into an inferno . . . People were floating, their heads bobbing on the night waves, as if they had been severed from their bodies, and this time her father's head
was
among them.