Dead In The Hamptons (25 page)

“About Phil and the notebook?”

“And the binge. ‘You’re as sick as your secrets,’ right?”

“I promise.” She sighed. “Don’t you hate it when the slogans fit?”

“Yes, but I haven’t gotten much sympathy about that.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I probably binged because I was keeping it all inside about what happened with Phil.”

“You’re the one who always says if you stuff down your feelings, they come out sideways,” I said. “Don’t fidget. I’m almost done.”

“I have something else to make amends for,” she said. “I’m sorry I gave you a hard time about the driver’s license. I used it as a smoke screen. I figured if I guilt-tripped you, you wouldn’t wonder what was going on with me. That was unfair.”

“I accept your amends.” I dropped a light kiss on the top of her head. Her hair still smelled of chocolate.

“Bruce?”

“What now?”

“Will I have to give up ice cream?”

“I have no idea.”

“I know abstinence in OA is not a diet,” she said. “I think you work out your own food plan with a sponsor. But suppose I do. Will I ever have any fun again?”

It had been a long night. I started laughing and couldn’t stop. I snorted and chuckled until tears welled up in the corners of my eyes.

“That’s just what I said about beer.”

I had to hand it to Barbara. By the time she and Jimmy emerged from their room the next morning, she had obviously come clean. After breakfast, she had a quiet talk with Jeannette. Then they announced to the whole gang that they were going to an Overeaters Anonymous meeting.

“From now on,” Barbara said, “please don’t anybody ask me if I want dessert. The answer is, ‘Are you crazy? Of course I do!’”

“That goes for me too,” Jeannette said. “I admit I’m powerless, and my life couldn’t be more unmanageable right now.” She looked more relaxed than when she’d told us she was Clea’s mother. The program says that taking Step One is liberating, and weird though it sounds, it works. When you surrender, the war is over.

“Good for you both,” Stephanie said. “I think I’ll go with you. I’m not anorexic for today, but a meeting never hurts.”

“I’ll come too,” Stewie said. “Don’t everybody look so astounded. The SCA stuff is the last frontier. Before, I was a pothead and a vomiter. I used to live for the munchies.” He flexed a well-defined bicep. “This gorgeous bod is my recovery body. Too bad it was also my cruising bod.” He glanced at his watch. “Come on, ladies, let’s get there on time.”

“Want the car?” Barbara asked Jimmy and me.

“Nope, I’m going back online,” Jimmy said.

“I don’t drive any more, remember?” I said.

“See you later, then,” she said.

A minute later, we heard all four doors of the Toyota slam. Jimmy walked over to the window to watch the car crunch away down the gravel drive.

“She’s going to be all right,” he said.

“Don’t worry, bro,” I said. “She will be.”

“She said she gave you quite a time last night.”

I looked around. The others had already dispersed.

“Better me than you,” I said. “You would have been more freaked out than me. I’m only the step-boyfriend. I’ve got some distance. Also, she didn’t mind so much with me.”

“She ought to know by now I won’t stop loving her no matter what,” he said. “God knows I’ve got my own dark side.”

“I know. I’m on your dark side,” I said. “But did you know hers had chocolate in its hair?”

“I guessed.” He scratched his head, as if the image made his scalp itch. “I’m okay with you being her confidant.”

“This way I get points. I guess we’re not allowed to call them brownie points any more, huh?”

“The Phil thing freaks me out more than the food thing,” Jimmy said. “I wish she wouldn’t act on every harebrained impulse without telling me first.”

“Barbara is Barbara,” I said. “So we keep the notebook business to ourselves?”

“As long as we can, anyhow,” Jimmy said.

The weather had done one of its flip-flops. It was hot and clear. Barbara came back from her meeting in high spirits, and we all spent the afternoon on the beach, Jimmy swathed in drapery like the Sheik of Araby. I did some body surfing. I’d practiced enough all summer to get a few exhilarating rides in exchange for the abrasions on my chest and the sand in my trunks and behind my back teeth. When I’d had enough, I flopped down on a towel next to Barbara and zonked out in the sun. I felt desiccated as a mummy.

“So what did you guys do this morning?” Barbara asked.

“I just hung out,” I said.

“He mooched around hoping that Cindy would come back from wherever she disappears to,” Jimmy said. “She’s a bit of a mystery, isn’t she?”

“I’m working on it,” I said. “I like her, don’t you?”

“Sure,” Jimmy said, “the little I know of her.”

“She’s nice, Bruce,” Barbara said. “And she seems to be outside this whole mess.”

“I have a dumb question,” I said. “Do you think she’s a lesbian?”

Barbara and Jimmy looked at each other.

“I don’t get that vibe,” Barbara said.

“I think she’s hot for you,” Jimmy said.

“Never mind,” I said. Whatever lay between Cindy and me was not going to get resolved by committee. “Let’s change the subject.”

“You know what Jeannette told me?” Barbara said.

“About what?”

“About Clea and Oscar,” she said. “Now that we know she was Clea’s mother—”

“I hope you didn’t tell her I told you,” I said.

“Of course not!” Barbara frowned, looking ruffled but cute, like the Mad Bluebird. “I was subtle. I got her to tell me. Anyhow, Jeannette’s family was so awful they make us look good. She likes us.”

“What us?”

“The three of us. The Three Musketeers us.”

“We’re her role model for a family?”

“She’s not that far gone,” Barbara said. “We’re pretty oddball, especially you two. But her family was sick. They made her have the baby and give it up and then basically told her she was going to hell and washed their hands of her.”

“I guess when she found Clea,” I said, “she hoped that they could become a family.”

“Exactly.”

“It didn’t turn out that way, though,” Jimmy said. “Clea wasn’t interested in becoming a family.”

“Too narcissistic,” Barbara said. “When she wanted to get it on with Oscar, she didn’t give a damn that she was cutting her own mother out.”

“Jeannette admitted that gave her a motive to kill Clea,” I said, “even though she said she’d never have hurt her daughter. We know all this already.”

“Wait,” Barbara said. “There’s more. And it has nothing to do with what she told you, Bruce, so you’re off the hook. Remember when I went to the nude beach with the women?”

“How could we forget?”

“I told you what Karen said about how she got pregnant. She didn’t want to have the baby, because it couldn’t have been Lewis’s, and she sure didn’t want to settle down with Oscar. She didn’t admit it was Oscar, but let’s assume it was. He wanted a family too. He had fantasies of raising a kid in sobriety, unlike his alcoholic parents.”

“Go on about Jeannette,” Jimmy said.

“Jeannette heard Karen tell that story too. But that day she hid the fact that she was Clea’s mother. She pretended she didn’t know her any better than the rest of them, the ones who’d shared a house with her before.”

“Clea was the only one who’d died at that point,” Jimmy reminded us.

“But here’s the thing,” Barbara said. “Today Jeannette told me Oscar pulled the same trick with Clea that he did with Karen. Clea got pregnant, and he wanted her to have the baby too. Karen said she knew Oscar wasn’t in love with her, but what if she didn’t really believe that? It’s hard not to have a soft spot for a guy who’s in love with you.”

“But he wasn’t.”

“That’s my point,” Barbara said. “And I bet he wasn’t in love with Clea either.”

“He just wanted a baby.”

“Right— with both of them, it was his ACOA do-over fantasy. But Clea wasn’t interested any more than Karen was. And she was younger than Karen. I’d guess she got an abortion with a lot less soul-searching than poor Karen.”

“You could say that gave Jeannette two motives to kill Oscar,” Jimmy said. “He dropped her for her daughter, and then he put so much pressure on Clea that she aborted Jeannette’s grandchild to get rid of him.”

“That’s a motive for Jeannette to kill Clea,” I said. “But I don’t think she did. She was all broken up the other day, after she talked with the cops.”

“Today, too, when she talked about it,” Barbara said. “The whole baby-abortion-grandmother family thing— that’s what she ate over.”

“Jeez, why couldn’t she just get drunk?” I said. “Don’t throw sand! I was kidding!”

“She could have had the family she wanted,” Jimmy pointed out, “if Clea had dumped Oscar, had the baby, and let Jeannette play grandma and share the parenting.”

“But Clea didn’t want a baby,” Barbara said, “and she didn’t want the kind of bond with her biological mom that Jeannette had been dreaming of. Jeannette was an adoption social worker. She must have seen that particular bubble get punctured thousands of times. She knew better, but she couldn’t help hoping.”

Until Clea made that impossible.

“Maybe we’re tackling this from the wrong end,” Jimmy said.

It was evening. We were sitting out on the deck so I could smoke. The days had started getting shorter. At just past eight o’clock, it was almost dark. This late in the summer, evenings were mercifully cool, even after the hottest day. Katydids and crickets made a racket in the yard.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“We’ve been thinking of these crimes as out here crimes because they happened out here. But overdevelopment is a national issue.”

“The embattled environment is a global issue,” Barbara added. “Clea could have used the local material to write about the bigger problems.”

“I haven’t read everything she wrote yet,” Jimmy said.

“So keep going,” Barbara said. “Maybe we’ll dig up something new that’ll cast light on what happened to her.”

“Have you googled Oscar?” I asked. “He had a national reputation.”

“All this sun has toasted my brain,” Jimmy said, “but not quite burnt it to a crisp yet. Thousands of hits, many thousands, but I haven’t spotted anything that’s relevant to the people we know and that the detectives wouldn’t have found out for themselves.”

“They may have suspects we don’t know about,” Barbara said.

“You could ask your friend Jeff Bushwick,” I said, “if he’s heard anything new.”

“I will,” she said. “Was she a good writer, Jimmy?”

“I thought so,” Jimmy said. “She did her homework.”

Her homework might have gotten her killed.

“So go for it, Jimmy!” Barbara said.

Jimmy tucked a wisp of her hair behind her ear and laughed.

“You’re not usually so eager for me to hit the keyboard, pumpkin. How about tomorrow morning?”

“Oh, Jimmy!” she said. “We’re all supposed to go fishing. Lewis set it up with Mr. Dowling for tomorrow.”

“What kind of boat?” Jimmy asked warily.

“A fishing boat,” she said. “I don’t know.”

“Does it have a roof?”

“I’m sure it does,” she said. She took a quick breath to say more, then stopped short. The struggle between honesty and wanting to get Jimmy on that boat played out like a silent film projected onto her face. Finally, she said, “It must have some kind of sun shade. Oh, Jimmy, please come. You can put on a lot of sun block and wear a big hat. We’ve never gone fishing, and you’ve told me so many times how much fun you and Bruce used to have.”

Our dads used to take us fishing out of Sheepshead Bay. Great role models. The fun was less in the fishing than in the three cases of beer they brought along. We could hardly wait to grow old enough to go out by ourselves. Jimmy squirmed, obviously reluctant to refuse Barbara.

“There you are.” Lewis appeared at the screen door. “Dowling just phoned. Our fishing date is off.”

“Saved!” Jimmy burst out. He added, “I’m sorry, peach. I know you wanted to go.”

“What happened, Lewis?” Barbara asked.

“Something went wrong with the boat,” he said. “Engine trouble. They have to wait for a part.”

“Ohhh, I’m so disappointed.” Barbara slumped into a chair.

Karen appeared in the doorway next to Lewis.

“You heard, right? It would be a shame for you to miss it. We’ve been out with Dowling before, but I meant to ask him to take us over to Gardiner’s Island and tell the story of how Gardiner blew the whistle on Captain Kidd.”

“There’s an island?” Barbara asked. “Can we land on it? I love islands.”

“It’s private,” Karen said. “If you land, the caretaker calls the cops. But even a close look from the boat is interesting.”

“If we had a boat,” Barbara said.

“He said it would be fixed in a few days,” Lewis said.

“In time for Labor Day weekend?”

“Well, yeah, but that doesn’t help us. He’s taking parties out all three days, and I bet they’re paying a premium because it’s a holiday weekend.”

“And then the season will be over.” Barbara drooped. “Doesn’t he have another boat?”

“Boats don’t grow on trees, pumpkin,” Jimmy said.

At the same time, Lewis said, “You know, he might.”

“So maybe we could go anyway!” Barbara’s whole body perked up.

“But not one that’s big enough to take seven people fishing. Eight, if you count Dowling.”

“Ohhh. Then we can’t do it.”

“You could call him and ask if he’d take the three of you,” Lewis said. “The rest of us all have a Plan B. Karen and I have errands to do, and everybody else said they’d be happy to spend tomorrow at the beach and let the fishing go.”

“So let’s call and ask,” Barbara said.

“Okay, okay,” Jimmy said. “Make the call.”

“I’ll get you the number,” Lewis said.

While we waited, I lit another cigarette and blew smoke rings. Jimmy sighed and closed his eyes.

“I got him!” Barbara bounded out onto the deck. Her eyes shone, and her unruly hair flew about her head as if it were about to take off. “Do you want the good news or the bad news first?”

“Good news,” Jimmy said without opening his eyes.