Amagansett

Thirty-Nine

Conrad capped the fountain pen and replaced it in the chipped mug on the desk. Wandering through to the bedroom, he tugged at the bedspread, straightening it.

Everything in order. Just one last act to perform.

He took the deer trails through the pitch pines north of the highway. He hadn’t walked on Napeague since her death, fearful that the memories would hunt him down. She was everywhere, it was true, but now he drew comfort from her presence: her narrow footprints pressed into the firm sand around him, the fallen branch she had once tripped over, the clearing with the lone tree in the middle, the one she felt so sorry for, shunned by its companions.

Maybe she had seen herself in that tree, standing apart from those around her. Strange that it hadn’t occurred to him before. And as he stared at the twisted little pine, it struck him just how alone she must have felt at the end, during those final moments of her life—the long walk back along the beach to her house, striding in anger beside the water’s edge, angry with him.

She had overreacted; if she had lived to see the new day she would have realized that, she would have understood his hesitancy at her proposal.

It had caught him unawares as they lay intertwined on the damp sheet.

‘Come away with me, Conrad.’

He had grunted, suspended in the sweet limbo between reality and dreams.

‘I mean it. Come away with me.’

‘Where?’

‘I don’t know. You decide. It doesn’t matter to me.’

‘You mean a vacation?’

‘I mean life.’

‘I have a life.’

‘A new life.’

He swiveled to face her. ‘Why?’

She didn’t reply at first. ‘Because I’m asking.’

‘Is this a test?’

If it was, the look in her eyes suggested he had failed it.

‘I can’t just move away like that.’

Ten minutes later she was gone, still sulking at his challenge to her flight of fancy. At least that’s how he’d read it then.

He saw it differently now.

They had killed her for a reason, they had killed her because they knew what he hadn’t known at the time: that she was about to blow the lid on Lizzie Jencks.

No, there’d been nothing infantile about her anger that day, she was just fraught and scared, poised as she was to risk everything on a matter of principle—family, friends, even him.

How close had she been to sharing the truth with him that last time he saw her alive? Very close, he suspected. And he wondered how things might have turned out if he’d only been more enthusiastic about her talk of a new life, if he’d only offered her the assurance she was looking for, that he would be there for her, come what may.

One thing was for sure—she would have stayed with him that night as they’d planned, and the killer lying in wait for her would have been denied his victim.

Conrad cut off the trail. It was a short walk over the low dunes to the tangle of bearberry bushes.

He dropped to all fours and clawed at the sand with his fingers. He came upon something hard and rounded and shifted his attentions a little to the left, scooping out a deep hole.

Taking up the whale vertebra he had carried with him from the house, he turned it once in his hands, caressing its familiar contours, then he returned it to its original resting place.

He filled in the hole and patted down the sand.