The Perfect Summer (Hubbard's Point) (26 page)

He wondered whether the granddaughter of the number-one pistol shot in the country would be able to handle that. Maybe he should start by shocking the hell out of Tara O'Toole, showing up at this Pumpkin Ball to ask her to dance.

He shoved his paperwork aside and reached into the lockbox.

He had had decent success, tracking Sean's offshore account to a bank in Costa Rica—where the chances of getting access were next to zero. Especially because the code required an additional access number that Joe didn't have. He had started the process to open that account, and it would either happen or it wouldn't. Bureaucracy, nothing more.

Maybe he should go down to Costa Rica himself. He could take Tara. She'd appreciate what a trip that place was. A tropical paradise, magnet for vacationers: located between the Pacific and the Caribbean, great beaches, fishing, hotels, romantic moonlight walks on the beach together.

Stop it.

It was also a mecca for con men. Con men loved Costa Rica.

They didn't get extradited, they had secure banking, they had cheap help and favorable exchange rates, so a million U.S. dollars could buy a luxurious life on the lam. The beach bars were packed with white-collar criminals who'd packed up their families and cash and made the big break—run away from prosecution, or from prison. They'd sit at the bars all day, under the palm trees in the warm sea breezes, talking endlessly about how they'd done it, the fine arts of embezzlement, of conning, of fleecing the people who trusted them most.

Half of them believed their own stories, their own gigs—that they hadn't meant to take anyone's money, if only the victims hadn't gotten impatient they would have paid it back. The other half knew they were lying, thieving scum, but didn't really care because they hadn't gotten caught. Or had, but managed to get away.

Joe thought the first half were actually the most dangerous.

Con men who conned themselves were doubly bad. Because they justified every single move they made. Every theft, every lie.

Sean McCabe had been one of those. Joe knew the type so well. The guy had so much invested in what everyone thought of him; the irony of his crime was that he had probably wanted more money, more toys, to win more friends.

More golf buddies, more women to admire his taste and acumen.

When the idiot bastard had already had paradise in his own house. What a fool . . .

Joe turned his attention to Daniel Connolly's letters to Bay, Sean's wife.

The letters had had significance to Sean, and Joe was beginning to get an idea of why. Reading through, Joe realized that Dan Connolly was as different from Sean as one could get. Dan had something Sean had wanted, and Joe thought Sean had studied the letters to get into Dan's mind, to figure out what he needed to say to manipulate him. How much of his motive had to do with jealousy—that Dan and Bay had once, obviously, connected on a fundamental level?

Joe wasn't sure; and he wasn't sure how much the manipulation had worked. He turned to the silver cup, and stared at it.

Joe knew it needed much more analysis. He had sent photographs to the art lab, hoping they could make sense of the three marks stamped into the rim. If he could trace the cup . . .

Sean McCabe's safety-deposit box had been his equivalent of a serial killer's trophy room. Joe wasn't sure what each of the three items signified, but he knew that the symbolism was probably more important than their actual worth. He wondered whether there was more silver elsewhere: Fiona's silver bowl, for example.

Perhaps the keeping of trophies was a connection to Sean's partner, if he had one; perhaps it had been Sean's insurance policy, against betrayal. Or maybe it had been their way of showing off, one-upping each other.

The number, the letters, and the cup . . .

Joe almost had the connection—it was so close—he was positive he almost had it. But it proved as elusive as holding on to Tara in last night's dream. Now he took out the manila folder he had found on the boat.

He stared at Sean's tortured notations on the cover and in the margins—when had he made them? The girl . . . and Ed. Inside, the accounts he had begun to pay back. Thumbing through, Joe calculated the dates.

What if Sean had started feeling guilty about his crimes? What if he had been determined to make restitution, instead of continuing to steal? Hadn't Bay told Joe, in one of their first interviews, that Sean had promised her he would change? From the dates in the folder, it seemed that Sean had started to do just that not long before he died, late last spring.

What if Sean had actually tried to change—and someone hadn't liked it?

Joe's heart beat faster, and he knew he was on the right track. What if “the girl” wasn't one of Sean's conquests at all—but someone Sean knew to be in danger?

Bay, for example?

Or one of their daughters?

He stared at the truck, and let his mind drift. What role did a truck play in this case? Nothing much, unless you counted the hit-and-run of Charlotte Connolly. Hadn't she been killed by a truck?

He thumbed through the file—there it was: a van. She'd been killed by a dark red van. Now Joe looked back at Sean's drawing. Maybe a van, maybe a panel truck. Too much hood to be clearly a van. A boatyard truck? Still, it was all he had, so he closed up the folder and decided to take a drive east.

25

K
ELLY
'
S LANDSCAPERS WAS BRIGHT WITH
pumpkins,
haystacks, and apples. Filling the back of her station wagon with mulch and lime, Bay couldn't concentrate on next summer's flowers.

She couldn't get Dan out of her mind. The feel of his arms around her. His rough skin against hers. Their closeness. The thing he had started to tell her at the end . . .

She headed for New London. Driving down to the waterfront, she pulled into the parking lot of Eliza Day Boat Builders, parked beside Dan's truck, and walked inside.

She stood inside the vast shed, looking at the various boats under construction. Two were old, in the midst of restoration. A new sailboat appeared ready to be painted. And a new dinghy was being built. A radio was playing, the music echoing through the space. Following the sound, she found Dan standing on a ladder on the far side of a beautiful old boat. Her heart caught as she saw him: his wide shoulders and strong arms, his blue eyes, the lips that had kissed hers.

“Hello,” she said.

“Bay,” he said, eyes registering joy. He wore jeans and a sweatshirt, both smeared with varnish, and he climbed down the ladder two rungs at a time. Their gazes locked as he stood before her, but he picked up on her tension and didn't come any further.

“She's pretty,” Bay said, pointing at the boat, to put an end to the awkwardness of not hugging.

“She's a six-meter,” he said. “Beautiful, graceful boat. She's an old plank-on-frame, filled with dry rot.”

“What's this wood?” Bay asked, running her hand over the rich, fine-grained timber.

“Honduran mahogany,” Dan said, breaking into a big smile. “You've still got a good eye.”

“Thanks,” she said, but she found she couldn't smile back. Her skin hurt, and her heart was solid, heavy in her chest. Even her breath made her ribs ache. Everything had taken such a toll lately. “Can we talk, Danny?”

He nodded, leading her into his office. Again, she admired the magnificent carved desk—it seemed to tell a story, with all of its sea creatures of legend. Taking a chair opposite the desk from Dan, she drew in a deep breath.

“I'm glad you came,” he said.

“Me, too . . .”

“If you hadn't come, I'd have gone to find you.”

She nodded. They stared at each other, unspoken words hanging between them. She wondered whether he felt the same conflicts she did. She had steeled herself for this moment, and she knew she couldn't go forward with Danny until she knew everything.

“Tell me the rest of what you wanted to say. What did Sean want?” she asked quietly. “I'm confused about all of it.”

“I know.” He picked up a brass tool from his desktop, frowned at it, put it back. “It's been driving me crazy. Trying to figure out what he had in mind, and why he came to me. I haven't said anything about it—wanting it to go away, I guess.”

“I want to understand what happened,” Bay said, staring directly into his eyes. “I—there's been so little to trust lately, Danny. I always thought you were the one person who, unconditionally—” she stammered. “It's probably not fair, the way I idolized you. No one could have lived up to that. But I have to ask you this: Did you help Sean?”

“Help him?”

“Are you . . . is the investigation focusing on you?”

“No, Bay. Not that I know of,” Danny said.

Bay let her head drop in relief. “When the police first told me, at the beginning of the summer, that Sean stole from his bank clients, I thought the world had ended,” Bay said, remembering the cold shock of those days. “I really did. And then you were there, and I thought it was such a gift, to have you back in my life, as a friend . . .”

“I'm still your friend, but I'm human,” he said quietly. His forehead was lined, worried. He gazed at her, his blue eyes dark with exhaustion and upset. “Will you let me tell you what happened?”

She nodded, pulling her jacket tighter, wrapping her arms around herself.

“I'd like you to start by telling me why you lied to me, about not having seen Sean until recently. When I first came to you, you said you hadn't seen him before he came here wanting you to build a boat for Annie.”

“That was true, Bay.”

“But if he was trustee for your daughter's trust—”

“Charlie handled that,” Dan said. “The money came from her family, and there was a lot of it. I never cared about that. I know that sounds disingenuous—and maybe, in a way, it is. I mean, I liked not having to worry about the mortgage, the way other people do. But I have pretty simple tastes—I wasn't into flying off to the Bahamas, or buying BMWs and Rolexes.”

Bay nodded. The Dan Connolly she had known had cared about the wind, the stars, the sea, fine wood, good tools, friendship. In that way, he had been so different from Sean, to whom material things meant success, prestige—things that had gained dramatically in importance every year they were married.

“Even Charlie wasn't that impressed with money, or what it could do. I think that's how it is for people who've had it their whole lives: they just take it for granted, and there's no reason to flaunt it. I've had that old truck out there forever; Charlie drove a ten-year-old Ford.”

Bay nodded, listening.

“She . . . Eliza . . . the money was all theirs. I never wanted anything to do with it, and I was proud about not needing it. I come from a working-class Irish family, always pulled our own way. My grandfather was a builder, and he carved this desk . . .”

“For her grandfather . . .” Bay had been struck by the bond.

“We were two kids from opposite sides of town. Her family owned the mansion, my family worked in it. They were landowners, we were tradesfolk.”

“Then why—”

“Why did we get married?” Danny asked. His gaze shot sideways, taking in the pictures on his bookshelf. Charlie looked out from one, blond and confident, elegant but now—to Bay—cold; a woman who walked away, instead of dealing with her daughter's emotions. “Opposites attract, right?”

“That's for sure,” Bay said, thinking of herself and Sean; night and day.

Danny nodded. “I was this big, gawky working-class hero with a tool belt, and Charlie was a finishing-school debutante who always knew which fork to use.”

“You were more than that,” Bay said, in spite of herself.

Dan shrugged. “There were always obstacles. I'm Irish Catholic, she's a WASP. Caused a few problems, on religious holidays, and when Eliza was born. But mainly, we got through them. We learned how to fight: Never do it. Charlie could never stand anyone raising their voices. So the easiest way to be, for me, was to let Charlie win.”

“You gave in?”

“Pretty much,” Dan said. “‘When she's right, she's right; and when she's wrong, she's right,' as the song goes. Maybe I was just afraid that we were too different, didn't really belong together—so I didn't want to make waves.”

Bay caught a glimpse of herself, reflected in the glass of a picture. Her wild red hair and freckles left no mystery about her origins; she was from Irish working-class stock, like Dan, and like Sean. But while she had felt proud of her roots, Sean had spent his adulthood trying to scour his life of any history of toil, any reminders of the fact that the McCabes hadn't always belonged to the yacht club, hadn't always had a membership at Hawthorne Links.

“I thought you were very happy,” Bay said. “The way you said her name that first day.”

Dan nodded. “I know. I do that. Trying to convince myself, maybe. Because I loved her so much . . . we were happy at first, and for a long time. But about a year before she died, something shifted. I don't know what it was, but I know the day it happened. I came home from work one day, and she wasn't there. Eliza was home alone, upset because her mother was gone.”

“I know how that feels,” Bay said, hugging herself tighter, thinking of her children's faces on nights when Sean didn't come home.

“Charlie came home about an hour later, and she was happy and excited, talking on and on about a movie she'd seen. I forget which one—but she'd gone with a friend. She said . . .”

“Did you think—?”

Dan shook his head. “I thought she'd gone with a friend. Period. To this day, I still do.”

But he didn't really—Bay could tell. He was lying to himself as hard as he could.

“After that, her eyes were different. Before, they'd always light up when I came home. But that year, I began to wonder whether she was thinking of leaving. I'd ask her—I'd even beg her to tell me. Charlie didn't like begging, didn't like strong emotions . . . I guess it's the way she grew up. Keep your feelings totally inside, don't let anyone see you hurt.”

“Eliza seems able to express them,” Bay said.

“I want her to,” Dan said. “It's harder for her than it sometimes seems. She strikes out, then shuts down totally. Nothing gets in or out. But anyway—going back to that last year with Charlie, my work really slipped.”

Again, Bay knew what he was talking about. She thought of her own intense level of distraction, trying to help the kids with their homework, keeping things normal, inwardly frantic with anxiety . . .

“I worried I was losing her, and I stopped caring as much about work. I mean, wooden boats are beautiful, and for me they've been a labor of love, but they're nothing compared to my family.”

“But your business kept running—”

“Yes,” he said. “My heart wasn't in it, though. This is all sounding like a big excuse, I know—and it isn't. I don't mean it to be. I just want to tell you the whole story. See, Charlie invested in my company.”

“This one?”

“Yes. It's not a huge moneymaker, to put it mildly. In fact, people say boating is so expensive and basically uncomfortable, it's cheaper to just stand in a cold shower ripping up hundred-dollar bills. Well, building wooden boats is a lot like that. Hanging out in this basically unheated shed all winter is pretty crazy. Some years I'll clear a small profit, but usually if I break even on the boats I build, I'm lucky.”

“So, Charlie helped you out.”

“Yes. She bankrolled me. I never thought it bothered her—in fact, I thought she liked it. She'd say it was romantic. Knowing my grandfather built this desk, and that I had basically followed in his footsteps, working with wood . . . making classic boats from scratch with my hands. She has mariners in her ancestry. But that's looking into the past; maybe we forgot to look forward.”

“Or be in the present.”

“Maybe. Anyway, she began making comments. Who needed another classic gem of a ketch, anyway? She got really into the finances of Eliza's trust, wanting to understand the mechanics of it—talked about getting an MBA. Suddenly I think it seemed to her that I was just another laborer with a hammer.”

Bay thought of Sean, of his superior attitude regarding workmen. He really looked down on them, thought they were a lower class of people. Even though his own father had been a railroad worker.

“So, that year I really screwed up. Took too many commissions, and did a lousy job on some of them. Then I went the other way—stopped taking orders at all. The money I did make went away fast. So I had to ask Charlie for more from the trust, just to cover my overhead, the bills I had outstanding. It all snowballed.”

“Was she upset?”

Dan stared at his desk, as if straight into the eyes of Poseidon. “That's almost the worst part,” he said. “She didn't seem upset at all. She seemed amused.”

“Oh . . .”

“As if it wasn't to be taken seriously; that my work had always been just a hobby, and now I needed more money to keep it going. She seemed to be getting so much more from the people she was meeting at the bank, the lawyers' office—in ‘getting up to speed,' as she called it, regarding Eliza's trust.”

“Sean?” Bay asked. “Was he one of the people?”

Dan nodded. “Yeah. I remembered him from the beach. I hadn't liked him then. I never knew you two had married. I hadn't seen him in all those years, but she talked about him a lot. How helpful he was, how sharp with money, how much he encouraged her to educate herself about the trust, how willing he was to help her.”

Bay had seen Sean in action; it had, at one time, seemed attractive. He had the gift of gab, and he was great at convincing people they were so smart, that he could learn from them, that if they joined forces with him they would form a formidable team. The quality had made him a superb businessman. But with Charlie . . . she was so pretty, and so upper-class, and so everything-Sean-wanted-to-be . . . perhaps with her he had actually meant the words he said.

“I think your husband wanted to sleep with my wife,” Dan said.

“Do you think he actually did?”

Dan shook his head. “No. I swear, I'd have known that. I knew Charlie so well. I could read her like a book. I knew she was turned on by everything he knew, how smart he was in the financial world—all that stuff was diverting her. And I think he flattered her, and I think she liked that.”

Bay cringed at the image, but she believed it totally.

“Long before I met the guy again,” Dan said, “I wanted to kill him. I thought he was after Charlie, and even though I didn't really expect her to fall for it, I didn't like what it was doing to our family.”