The Last Refuge (13 page)

She was still at her station behind the tall counter. She didn’t look up, even after I cleared my throat. I cleared it again.

“Yes?”

“I’m Sam Acquillo. I was here a few days ago about a property up in North Sea.”

“That’s the Town. You’ll have to go there.”

“Yes, we talked about that. The Town told me the records for this place were stored over here. You were going to research it for me and make some copies.”

She looked at me through the tops of her bifocals.

“You were going to come in the next day. I made copies for you.”

Now that she had me on a breach of promise her memory flooded back.

“I had it all ready for you.”

“Yeah. Sorry. If I could have it now I’ll get out of your hair.”

She tapped a few more times on her keyboard, then hauled her mass up out of the chair. Her glasses, secured by a beaded chain, rested on a shelf formed by her uplifted bust. The furrow above the bridge of her nose had formed a permanent crease, casting her irritation into a structural component of her face. She dug a nine-by-twelve-inch brown envelope out from under the counter.

“There’s a charge for these copies.”

“A day late, but,” I said to her, plunking down a five-dollar bill. She snatched it up and held it stuffed in her fist. She waited for me to go.

“I guess that’s all I need,” I said. She nodded once, smiled and went back to her computer. The end of our relationship made her happy.

“Have a nice day,” she said to me, before smacking the enter key on the computer.

“Too late for that.”

Everyone had cleared out from the front steps by the time I got back outside. The autumn leaves were thinning out overhead and the October air was beginning to lose the fight. The sun still had enough strength to warm the paving bricks and the teak bench directly outside the Village offices where I sat
to slide the contents out of the envelope.

There were about ten pages. Some were clean Xeroxes, others were slippery old-fashioned photostats. Some had the fuzzy edges and optical distortion common to microfilm enlargements. On top was a site plan, dated 1939. The lines were neatly drawn and the hand-lettering true to the engineering calligraphy of the time. I’d seen the style before on old drawings. I thought it was incomprehensibly beautiful and otherworldly. The plan was covered with stamps noting perk tests, septic and well locations. There were separate sheets with revisions overlaid, and dated as recently as 1998. These were certified by the surveyors, Spring & Spring, in Bridgehampton, and signed off on by the Town building inspector, Claude Osay. Suffolk County had its own stamp, warning all concerned to submit wetlands clearance with any application for a building permit.

The site itself was roughly rectangular, the borders straight and at right angles, matching the one my father bought about six years later. The adjacent lots weren’t drawn in, but there were numbers suggesting subdivisions distributed around the map in a neat pattern. Regina was number thirty-three. We were number thirty-two.

It didn’t say who owned the property at the time the site plan was drawn. Another hand notation, far cruder than the ones made in 1939, read “Bay Side Holdings, Inc., Sag Harbor,” with an arrow pointed at Regina’s lot. I guessed its vintage to be the same as the recent building inspector stamps. There was nothing at all about a Mr. or Mrs. Broadhurst.

Bay Side Holdings showed up on another document that looked like a contract with a real-estate agent, Arnold Lombard Co., Southampton. The contract was signed in 1977 accompanying another burst of perk testing. Spring & Spring had certified the results, as they had later, in 1998. I flipped back to the site plan to pinpoint where the tests were done and found another rubber stamp impression with the name Bay Side Holdings.

There was an aerial photograph showing all of Oak Point, and the land next door that held the old WB plant. The complex was bigger than it looked from ground level. I counted one main building and at least ten smaller outbuildings. The neighborhood property lines were drawn in and numbered with white ink. Regina’s number thirty-three was shaded by something. A highlighter? So was number thirty-five, next door and the lot after that, and several others on the east side of WB’s peninsula. So was the whole of the WB complex. Our lot had a check mark, as did number thirty-eight and number thirty-nine.

There was a letter to the Town appeals board from an attorney named Jacqueline Swaitkowski of Bridgehampton representing Bay Side Holdings, Inc. She wanted to record their intentions to approach the board on a number of lot size and setback issues, all of which she described somewhat hopefully as routine. It was dated June 30, 1998.

That was it. There were no comments from the Town and no record of any actual appeals. I stuffed it all back in the envelope and went down to the corner place for a cup of French Vanilla coffee and a croissant.

Properly fortified, I walked the block and a half up Hampton Road to the big Town building. While the incorporated Village was defined by the traditional boundaries of Southampton, the Town covered half the South Fork, from Westhampton Beach to Bridgehampton, including the Village itself. The geopolitical complexities of New York State took some concentration to navigate, but I’m a trained engineer. Complex systems are my forte.

Bonny Martinez was on duty at the Town tax collector’s office. She wore a wide smile and a print blouse covered with huge tropical flowers.

“What can I help you with?”

“I’m settling an estate,” I said, pulling out my paperwork. “Here’s the death certificate and documentation showing me as administrator. And my driver’s license.”

She scooped it all up and scanned the information.

“Okay, what can I help you with?”

I wrote Regina’s address on a piece of scratch paper from a stack on the counter.

“She’s been living here for many years, but didn’t own the house. I need to know who’s been paying the taxes so I can notify them.”

“Okay,” she said, cheerily.

It took a few seconds for her to sit down at a terminal, tap in the address and pop back up again with the information.

“Bay Side Holdings. Six hundred seventy-five Dutch Wharf Road, Sag Harbor, New York. Attention Milton Hornsby. We had them on biannual automatic payment. Harbor Trust, account number 41-53245-41.”

She wrote it all down on another slip of scratch paper and slapped it down on the counter. Just like that.

When I got back to the car Eddie was in the driver’s seat looking down at the instrument panel. Planning a getaway.

“Yeah, I could teach you to drive, but who’d pay the insurance?”

He hopped back over to his side and I rolled the window down for him. He stuck his head out and barked at the closest passerby, who jumped back in alarm. I pulled away as briskly as the big car would allow.

“Great. Here I’m trying to get along with people and what do you do?”

He looked over at me happily.

When my daughter was little she had a half-dozen imaginary friends, the most prominent of which was Eddie Van Halen. I have no idea how that happened, but the hard rocker was a constant, if invisible, presence in our household for years. She always made sure I had the seat belt around him in the car. Once we were driving along and “Runnin’ with the Devil” came on the radio. She turned around to address the back seat:

“That’s you, Eddie Van Halen!”

I’d often say the same thing to my eponymously named dog, and get about as much back in response.

My daughter had stopped talking to me a few months before the divorce, so I wasn’t sure what she was up to. I knew she had an apartment in Manhattan,
where she went after graduating from Rhode Island School of Design. She was doing something with graphics on the computer, but I didn’t know what. I didn’t know how to find out without talking to her mother or her mother’s family, which wouldn’t work out. Abby worked hard to keep her away from my family, so she never got to know my sister. Abby always insisted we rent or stay with friends like Burton Lewis, the lawyer, when we came out. My daughter had only seen the cottage on the Little Peconic from the street. Abby said she didn’t want our daughter exposed to that environment, whatever that meant. My mother spent a lot of time with my sister’s kids, little meatballs though they were, so at least she got to have grandchildren. She never complained about not seeing my daughter, though it clearly wounded her. But I deferred to Abby, to my deep and everlasting sorrow.

Since it was on the way to Dutch Wharf Road, I thought I’d I stop at the Pequot for lunch. The woods became more dense as North Sea Road turned into Noyack Road. It was narrow, with a double yellow line down the middle, and twisty as it followed the jagged bay coast and bumpy contours of Noyac’s little hills. The Grand Prix kept its dignity on the curves if you held a firm hand on the wheel.

Eddie finally tired of the wind and jumped into the back seat where he had plenty of room to spread out. I followed the slow arc around Long Beach, the sickle-shaped bay front west of Sag Harbor. The water was rippled and slick, silver-blue like a sharkskin suit. People were walking on the beach, cuffs rolled up to below their knees and hands in their pockets, their
clothes pressed against their bodies by the stiffening breeze. It was too far away to divine their thoughts. Gulls circled overhead.

The clouds and mist of the morning had long ago been chased out by a cool hard breeze traveling down from New England. I lowered my window and let the noisy air swirl around inside the passenger compartment. I dropped the Grand Prix down to a crawl when I got to the houses that crowded the antique streets of Sag Harbor. Slow time was woven into the ivy that hung on the gates and fences of Greek Revival mansions built by bold sea captains.

There was always plenty of room to park at the Pequot. I let Eddie take care of business at a little patch of scrub grass and was about to let him back in the car when I saw Dotty waving to me from the front door of the restaurant.

“Your dog?”

“Eddie.”

“He’s cute.”

“Got to be good at something.”

“You can bring him with you if you sit out on the deck.”

“Outdoor seating?”

“The deck. Go around back.”

I didn’t know the Pequot had a small, slightly raised deck off the kitchen with a white plastic table where the Hodges family probably sat to eat their meals and watch the fishing boats come and go. Dotty was there to greet me and fuss over the dog, which was something you have to get used to when your dog’s got a personality like Eddie’s. Eternally
bon vivant.

“So you weren’t lying,” said Dotty as she wiped off the plastic table.

“I wasn’t?”

“About having a dog to let out. I thought it was an excuse.”

The two of us watched Eddie run his nose over the whole of the deck before coming back to my table to sit down at my feet.

“I guess you’re all checked out.”

“Absolut?”

“Yup. And a shot of water for the dog.”

“With or without fruit?”

“He’d probably go for a slice of lime.”

While I was waiting for her to bring our drinks I spread all the papers I’d collected that morning out on the table so I could capture the information I wanted on my yellow legal pad. I numbered each point and drew a little circle around the numbers I thought were the most important. Then I made a list of the things I didn’t know, that I wanted to know. These I also put in order of priority, with the most important getting double underlines. The task felt satisfying. I hadn’t done anything like that for almost five years.

Hodges came out with two drinks and a bowl of water. I almost covered the pad and was glad I didn’t. I didn’t want to insult him. He sat down and stuck the bowl in front of Eddie’s nose.

“Good-lookin’ dog.”

“He wants you to think so.”

“I got a pair of Shih Tzu back at the house. Little ugly fuckin’ dogs. They were Dotty’s mother’s. She gets ’em as puppies, then dies and leaves them with me.”

He covered the moment by concentrating on Eddie. Dogs are really good for that.

“I got Regina’s bank accounts and a plot plan for her house,” I said.

He looked over at all the papers spread out on the table.

“She got a million bucks?”

“About eight thousand. Didn’t even own the house. Far as I can tell, though, didn’t pay rent, either. Didn’t pay anything, but,” I placed a series of canceled checks on the table, “oil, LIPA, phone—no long distance— propane for the stove, Sisters of Mercy, twenty bucks a month. Then it’s periodic checks to the IGA, pharmacy, the kid that cut her lawn, occasional cabs.”

“Paid the cab with a check?”

“The rest are checks to cash, mostly at Ray’s Liquors. Can’t tell if some of that went to a little fortification.”

“Lived pretty lean.”

“Leaner than me, which is saying something.”

“You got Pequot expenses.”

“No rent, no medical, no taxes.”

“Didn’t file?”

“Not that I can tell.”

“Lived under the radar.”

“Typical of the neighborhood.”

“Who owned the house?”