The Perfect Summer (Hubbard's Point) (12 page)

And now she looked behind her, toward the boardwalk.
He builds things that last,
his daughter had said. And how true that was. The boardwalk—a hundred or more thick planks nailed in line, weathered pewter by storms, battered by the high tides and fierce waves of nor'easters—was a testament to his enduring work. An image of Dan from long ago shimmered in the summer heat: tall, lean, tan, grinning.

The man who builds things that last.

A boat for Annie,
Bay thought.

But for what? What good would it do, what happiness could it bring a daughter whose father had arranged for a wooden boat, a classic dory, to be built—even, say, from the strongest, hardest wood? What good would it do, considering that he had just vanished from their lives?

Just like that?

“Did you see the part in the paper about Augusta Renwick?” Tara asked.

Bay cringed, recalling the story. The FBI had been interviewing all of Sean's clients and discovered that a large percentage of his ill-gotten gains had come from Renwick accounts—money left to Augusta by her late husband, the famous artist Hugh Renwick.

“It could be worse,” Tara said gently. “It could have been someone who'd really miss the fifty thousand or so. He probably singled her out because she has so much.”

“Has she said anything?”

“Not yet. I clean her house tomorrow.”

“Tell me everything she says. Promise?”

“I promise,” Tara said, sounding worried.

They walked in silence, picking up shells. Bay put hers in the pocket of her shirt. It was one of Sean's castoffs, a blue oxford with fraying collar and cuffs. She had always snagged his softest old shirts to wear over her bathing suit; while playing at the beach with the kids, his kids, his shirt would remind her of him, working hard for them at the bank.

Working hard, stealing, and getting murdered . . .

She happened to glance back, over her shoulder, the way they had come. There, walking along the boardwalk, never taking his eyes off her, was a man in a dark shirt. His khakis were freshly pressed, his sneakers were brand- new, and his sunglasses were too cool. But it was the shirt that really gave him away.

Someone should tell the FBI that no real beachgoer would wear such a dark shirt on a day as hot as this. It would soak up the sun, bake the person wearing it. Watching the man watching her, Bay almost felt sorry for him.

ANNIE LAY ON HER BED, CLOTHES STICKING TO HER BODY.
She
felt like a big, wilting flower, with her T-shirt sticking to her skin, her hair clinging damply to her head. Even with the windows wide open, today's sea breeze was in the high nineties.

Murdered. Maybe.

Her mom and Tara had taken the other kids to the beach. They had invited Annie, as they always did: “Hey, Annie, let's go take a dunk together . . . get wet and cool off . . . a quick swim . . .”

Annie launched herself off the bed and padded barefoot down the dark hallway, down the stairs, to the kitchen.

Daddy—murdered? It was impossible . . .

Opening the freezer door, she let a blast of icy air chill her sweaty skin.

As shocking as murder, drugs . . . cocaine! Daddy couldn't, wouldn't have taken cocaine . . . he always told Annie that drugs were bad, that they would wreck her brain, would keep her from being a good athlete, keep her from destroying her opponent on the basketball court. But he had also told her never to steal. And they were saying he stole, too.

Shaking the thoughts away, Annie stared into the freezer, at all the choices. A whole stack of Lean Cuisine—thank you, Mom, for buying these just for me. A pint of lemon sorbet, another of low-fat vanilla yogurt. And there, way in back, was a half gallon of Paradise peach ice cream, bought to go with the blueberry pie her mother was going to make later.

Don't think “murder.” Maybe it wasn't, maybe it was still an accident—and maybe it wasn't cocaine. It couldn't be.
Annie reached for the ice cream just as the phone rang.

Annie paused. She clutched the plastic tub of peach ice cream, hesitating between impulse and duty. Leaving the ice cream just inside the freezer, she held the door open with her extended arm and leaned over to get the telephone.

“Hello?” she said.

“I can't believe I found your number. Believe me, it wasn't easy, in spite of the fact that calling wasn't my idea in the first place. It's not that you're unlisted, because you ARE listed, but it's because a) I spelled your last name wrong, and b) I got the name of your town wrong.”

“Who is this?” Annie asked, even as she felt a thrill under her skin, because of course she knew who it was—Eliza—and because the call wasn't the coach calling for Billy or Pegeen, or the bank or a lawyer or anyone calling for her mother—it was all for Annie.

“Um, I'll give you three guesses, but if you don't get it on the first try, I'll be really upset.”

“Eliza?”

Annie heard her laugh with satisfaction. “Good job. SO, first I looked up ‘MacCabe' instead of ‘McCabe,' and then I asked for Silver Bay instead of Black Hall . . . but I finally found you! Are you okay?”

“Um . . .” Annie began. Her eyes strayed to the freezer door. With most people, she wouldn't even consider telling the truth. But something made her edge toward wanting to tell Eliza:
I think my father was murdered, and I'm about to stuff my face with a half gallon of peach ice cream,
she could say, and she had the feeling Eliza would understand. But instead, she said, “I guess.”

“I don't think you are. I know what they've been saying about your dad.”

“You do?”

“Yes. You don't have to talk to me about it, but I know how hard it is. I do.”

A silence fell over the phone line.

“I'm sorry,” Eliza whispered. “It's so soon for you.”

“I miss him,” Annie said, her eyes tearing up. “I miss him so much, if he was here, I'd even want to shoot baskets with him. And I hate shooting baskets . . .”

“When you feel better . . . after more time has passed,” Eliza began.

Annie nearly hung up; she didn't want to hear that she'd EVER feel better; that the pain of missing her father would ever dull. But the instant trust she had felt with Eliza carried her through the moment, and she just kept breathing, listening for what would come next.

“When you feel better,” Eliza continued, “you'll be able to think of him where he is now.”

“Where he is now?” Annie asked dully, thinking of the cemetery, the stone with his name carved into it: Sean Thomas McCabe, and then the dates of his birth and death, and then the line from the poem Annie had read in church:
Promises to keep
. . .

“Yes,” Eliza said. “It's somewhere so wonderful . . .”

“I wish that were true,” Annie said, more tears stinging her eyes.

“Oh, but it is!” Eliza said. “I know it for sure!”

“How?”

Now it was Eliza's turn to be silent. She breathed in and out, and Annie could hear the rhythm and catch, as if Eliza's lips were on the phone. Annie closed her eyes, breathing along with Eliza.

“I'll tell you next time I see you,” Eliza whispered.

“But when—”

“When will that be? That is the question. If we lived closer, I'd ride my bike over. Do you have a boat?”

“My dad does—did—why?”

“Because Mystic is on the water and your house is on the water . . .” She giggled. “We could commute.”

Annie laughed, thinking of the two of them zooming up and down Long Island Sound to see each other. “Do you have a boat?” she asked.

“You'd
think
I would,” Eliza said. “Considering that my dad's a boatbuilder, and his company is named after me . . . I mean, my grandmother . . . but we have the same name . . . it's a long story.”

“And I want to hear it.”

“And you could, if one of us had a BOAT! I could tell you that story, and I could tell you about our other parents . . .”

Annie cringed again, but just slightly less than before; as if she was getting used to, ever so gradually, during this very conversation with Eliza, the idea of her father being gone. The word
murder
wasn't running through her head quite so furiously.

“We are going to see each other soon,” Eliza said. “One way or another. We'll get my father to drive me over. Or your mother to drive you here.”

“Yeah!” Annie said, feeling almost excited.

“I'll obsess about it!”

“Obsess?”

“That's a word I picked up in the bin. It means ‘think about constantly.' ”

“Oh,” Annie said, not quite getting “bin,” but getting “think about constantly.” She thought about her father, and the way her family used to be. She thought about her little boat, how he was supposed to have it with him always.

Eliza must have kept listening, even though the only sound audible was Annie swallowing and swallowing, all those tears running down her throat. Annie was crying, as all the things she thought about constantly filled her head, all the love she felt for her family and how much it hurt. It made her feel just a little better, though, holding the receiver, holding it tight against her ear, feeling it wet and slippery with her tears, knowing Eliza was still listening, that even in the broken silence, Eliza was
there.

10

T
HEY WERE BLUEBERRY PICKING, TO GET BERRIES FOR
the pie. Fields of blue and green shimmering in the heat. Netting over one whole acre, to keep the deer away. Bay, Tara, Billy, and Pegeen filling their baskets—the only family at the farm today, the hottest day of the summer so far—the hills of northern Black Hall hazy in the distance, softened by humidity, a picture. Looking around, Bay calmed down.

“When you look at that,” Tara said, “you can really see why the artists came here. Why they all came to Black Hall from New York . . .”

Bay shielded her eyes, gazing at the scene.

“I think that when I'm on the beach,” she said. “When I look at the coastline, all the rocks and beaches, the marshes . . . we both love the beach, but you love the land a little more . . . We're true to our names.”

Bay and Tara
. . . sea and earth.

“Let's become painters,” Tara said. “Let's become artists.”

“Oh, Tara,” Bay said. The idea exhausted her. She watched her two youngest children move through the wide field like little ghosts, like small zombies, with none of the spark and verve of previous berry-picking jaunts. A family of deer grazed in the shadows along a stone wall to the east, and the kids didn't even notice.

“I want to become an artist instead of just dating them. They all smell like linseed oil, and honestly, I think I have a much more vivid view of life than any of them. My love life rots. At least I have a great career.” She laughed. “Cleaning the best houses in Black Hall.”

“That's why you get so much beach time,” Bay said. “You get to make your own hours.”

“Damn right,” Tara said. “If only I had that special someone to slather with sunscreen. Besides you, of course. I want to meet someone strong and amazing. The male equivalent of you.”

Bay laughed.

“I'm serious,” Tara said. “I want someone to hold hands with, and go to concerts with, and step out onto the porch to look at the stars with . . . but when an actual man is involved, I can't quite see spending the rest of my life with him.”

“I can understand that,” Bay said softly, crouching by a small bush, reaching beneath the lowest branches for a cache of berries.

“But you did it,” Tara said, kneeling beside her. “You took the risk, fell in love . . . you had three great kids.”

“I know,” Bay said. “But Sean and I didn't have anything real. What you're describing? Wanting to hold hands and dance? I look at my marriage and wonder where that went, if it was ever there at all.”

“Do you think it was?”

“I don't know,” she said. “I think I wanted it to be so badly, I convinced myself it was there. Right now, I hear about the investigation, the things Sean was doing that I knew nothing about, and I want to jump off a cliff. What does it say about me—about our marriage—that the biggest part of his life was a secret from me?”

“He was an idiot,” Tara said. “For doing that.”

“I don't even know how to go on from here,” Bay said.

“That's why you should be an artist. Both of us—we could use all our Irish passion, channel it into our art.”

“I don't have much passion right now,” Bay said, still hunched down, glancing up at Tara looking tall and powerful, backlit by the hazy sun. Bay's body ached so much, she couldn't move; she felt as if she'd been in that car with Sean, had spent all those days crushed by the weight of seawater, had had her fingers and face picked at by crabs and fish.

“Yes, you do,” Tara said quietly. “You live and breathe passion . . .”

“I'm just a suburban mom,” Bay said. “That's all.”

“But you do it with all your heart.”

Bay didn't reply, but Tara's words sank in. Worried sick about her children, especially Annie, she was determined to get them through this, do what she could to find their way back to normal, to show them joy again.

They filled their baskets, paid the woman at the stand, drove back to the shore. Pulling into the driveway, Bay's first thoughts were for Annie. Was Bay wrong to let her—so quiet and withdrawn—have her way these days, to not make her join the family, to let her stay in her room?

But as soon as they walked into the kitchen, Annie met them at the door.

“Mom, I'm going to need a ride,” Annie said. “Not today, but soon—okay?”

“Where to?” Bay asked, surprised and happy.

“Mystic.”

“You don't have any friends in
Mystic,
” Billy said. “You don't even want to hang out with your friends at Hubbard's Point.”

“Yeah,” Peg said, sounding injured. “You don't even want to hang out with me.”

“Who do you want to visit?” Bay asked.

“Eliza.”

“Eliza Connolly? You only met her that one time . . .” Bay said.

“But she called me, Mom,” Annie said, her eyes shining. “While you were at the beach. She wants me to come over. She tracked me down.”

Seeing her daughter's smile, the long-hidden light in her eyes, Bay felt her heart vise.

“She could have just asked her father how to find you,” Tara said. “Considering how well he knows his way back to Hubbard's Point.”

Bay felt herself blush.

“Mom?” Annie asked.

“Sure,” Bay said. “You can have a ride. Just tell me when.”

Smiling across the room at her daughter, she glanced out the side window. There, in a dark car across the street, were two men. She hadn't seen them before, but she knew who they were. They were watching her house. Did they think Sean had given her the money to hide, to keep? Perhaps she should show them her dwindling bank account, the help-wanted ads she had circled that morning. The car windows were up, the air-conditioning running. The men looked as if they might sit there all day.

Just then the phone rang; relieved to be distracted from the men in the car, Bay answered it.

“Hello?”

“Bay, this is Dan Connolly.”

“How are you?”

“I'm okay . . . but something happened. And I have to see you.”

“See me? Can't you tell me on the phone, because—”

“No,” he interrupted. “It has to be in person. Are you free tomorrow afternoon? Around two?”

“Yes, I can be,” Bay said. “Would you like to come here?”

“We can't talk at your house . . . I don't want your kids to hear.”

“Foley's store, then,” Bay said, turning her back to the group, suddenly aware they were all paying close attention. Sean's death had left the family in a state of high alert. “Do you remember it? Come under the train trestle, and go straight—”

“I remember it,” he said. “I'll see you there tomorrow.”

“Fine,” Bay said, feeling off balance as she hung up the phone and glanced out the window again at the sentinels across the street.

THE HEAT WAVE CONTINUED, WITH THE NEXT DAY
dawning every bit as hot and muggy as the several that had preceded it.

Augusta Renwick lived in salty, artistic grandeur on a cliff overlooking the sea, just a few miles west along the coast from Hubbard's Point. The white house had wide porches with white wicker furniture covered with faded striped cushions. Pots of pink geraniums were everywhere. That was the extent of Augusta's gardening: pink geraniums bought at Kelly's. They had the best quality.

But today, walking across her veranda in search of a sea breeze, Augusta was most displeased with her flowers. To call them “wilted” would be to give them a rather generous compliment. The poor dears were, in truth, quite dead.

“You're drooping,” Augusta said pejoratively, leaning on her silver-topped black hawthorn walking stick. She sighed. She had come to appreciate and champion the infirm, even among the plant world. Ever since her former son-in-law, the vile and incarcerated Simon, had coshed her on the noggin while attacking her daughter Skye, leaving Augusta's right side weakened, she had needed to walk with a cane. The upside to this—and, Augusta believed, there was
always
an upside—was heightened compassion for all living things.

With the exception of bad men.

Augusta had no kind feelings for men, or women for that matter, who harmed others. Simon had been just one horrible exemplar of what evil a person can wreak, but he was by no means the only such villain.

Casting another baleful look at her dead potted geraniums, she limped through the screen door into the relative cool of her wide front hallway. A ceiling fan helped out from above. Hugh, her adored and dead husband, had loved Somerset Maugham and Noel Coward; had, in fact, named the house “Firefly Hill” after Coward's great estate in Jamaica. Augusta supposed that Noel had allowed ceiling fans to help out the sea breeze there, too.

Hugh had been a painter on the scale of Hassam and Metcalf, as good as America had to offer. He had lived the life of an artist, wild and unbridled. Collectors had instantly recognized his greatness, and Hugh had been one of those rare artists who became rich during his own lifetime. Wise investments and savvy financial advisors had enabled the Renwick wealth to grow into a fortune.

One of those advisors had been Sean McCabe.

Augusta continued through the great hall, across the living room, past portraits Hugh had done of all three of her daughters, into a small study at the west end of the house. No morning sun came in the tall windows. The room was cozy, made for winter evenings by the fire. Books lined every wall.

Listening carefully for Tara, the cleaning lady, Augusta leaned out the room's doorway. There she was, upstairs—Augusta still had keen hearing, and she could make out the bump of Tara's dust mop against the back stair risers. Dusting her way down, Tara wouldn't walk through the door to this room for at least ten minutes.

Augusta went to the poetry-drama bookcase. Each of the study's four walls had books organized by subject. The largest, by far, contained art books, including twenty or so biographies and picture books of Hugh and his work, and another fifty volumes pertaining more generally to the Black Hall art colony and the artists who had filled its ranks.

Another wall bore history and science books—field guides to the birds, sky, shells, and fish found around Black Hall, as well as more complicated and dense works on the geology and geophysics of the eastern seaboard.

But it was to poetry and drama that Augusta now turned. She adored the erudite; she worshiped the poetic. She reached for her much-thumbed and oft-read copy of the Bard, third shelf up, flush against the right side of the shelf. As Augusta removed the book, a mechanism clicked, and the shelf swung outward to reveal a secret safe.

Hurrying, knowing that Tara would soon reach the room for its weekly cleaning, Augusta spun the dial. The combination was simple, unforgettable: the months and days of each of her daughters' birthdays.

Once into the safe, Augusta pushed aside a sack of gold doubloons and a small case of Burmese rubies her treasure-hunter son-in-law had given her for safekeeping; a sheaf of bearer bonds, a stack of cash, vintage Harry Winston bracelets and necklaces of platinum, diamonds, and sapphires. The Vuarnet emerald earrings.

Augusta sought one single piece of paper. Correspondence from her bank, received that very month. Hurriedly removing it, then slamming shut the safe, Augusta returned Shakespeare to his rightly spot, then settled herself at the desk. Long white hair pulled back from her face, she reached for her calculator, and, staring with fierce concentration at the paper, began to add things up.

TARA WHIPPED THROUGH THE RENWICK MANSE. SHE HAD
just one other house to clean that day, a working artist's small cottage on the banks of the Ibis River. Cake, compared to Firefly Hill. The main thing was, she wanted to get back to Hubbard's Point as soon as she could. Bay was meeting with Dan Connolly at two, and Tara wanted to be there—half to give moral support, half because she was dying of curiosity.

Doing the downstairs with her dust mop and damp cloth, she had saved the study for last. She always did. It was her favorite room in the whole house, snug and inviting, filled with books and family photos. Wheeling around the corner, she was startled to come upon Augusta Renwick sitting at the big mahogany desk.

“Oh, Mrs. Renwick!” she exclaimed. “I thought you were outside, on the porch.”

“No, Tara,” the matriarch said, staring at a paper on the desk. “I'm too worried to be outside.”

“I'm sorry. Should I do this room later?”

Augusta pushed the paper aside, looking up at Tara over tortoiseshell half-glasses. “You knew him very well. Didn't you?”

“Who?” Tara asked, her stomach flipping.

“Sean McCabe. Let's not be coy with each other. He's the one who recommended you to me. I needed a cleaning lady, he told me his wife's best friend had a house-cleaning business, I hired you.”

“Yes, I knew him very well,” Tara said, staring Augusta right in the eye.

“Tell me about him,” Augusta said, gesturing at the cracked leather chair across the desk. Tara took a breath. She was on thin ice right now; she wanted to be loyal to Bay, yet she didn't want to be rude to her employer. Eyeing Augusta, she carefully sat down on the edge of the seat.