Robert B. Parker’s Fallout

Thirty-One

There was one race about which Michael Crane had talked, what he called his white whale, the Clipper Round the World Yacht Race, starting up again after being paused for the past two years because of the pandemic.

He’d explained it to Molly by showing the course to her on the huge wall map in his study, how you ended up crossing six oceans over ten or eleven months, depending on how good your boat was, and the men crewing it. You could sign up for some of the legs or all of them. Michael always said he’d be in for all if he ever got his chance, a chance to participate in what he called the Olympics of yacht racing, because you were up against people from all walks of life and all corners of the world.

Now he had gotten his chance, because of Teddy Altman, the billionaire for whom he’d crewed before in big races, because Teddy’s new yacht had finally been finished during the Clipper’s two-year hiatus. Teddy asked Michael to captain the crew, offering him more money than Michael would normally make in five years. Michael accepted.

“I have to do this,” Michael told Molly.

“I know.”

But they both knew it wasn’t just about the Clipper Round the World Yacht Race, that this was a way for them to separate without legally or officially declaring that, or telling their children, for them to be separated by six oceans, for nearly a year.

It was because Michael now knew about Molly and Crow.

She had finally confessed to her husband about her one-night stand — did people even still call it that? — with an Apache whose real name was Wilson Cromartie, a career criminal at the time Molly slept with him, but now one who had, for all Molly and Jesse knew, gone straight. Or as straight as he could manage, being Crow. Molly would eventually be shot in their investigation of Neil O’Hara’s death. Crow would save Jesse’s life shooting a hired gun named Darnell Woodson. That was how Crow ended up back in Paradise.

And back, at least temporarily, in Molly’s life.

Just not all the way back, the way he wanted to be.

Molly didn’t know whether it was Catholic guilt that finally caught up with her, about something that she’d told only Jesse and her priest, just the one time, in real Confession. Whatever brought her to the moment, and realizing what the consequences might be and how it would hurt him, Molly told the man she had loved since high school about Crow.

She only left out the part about how fully aware she’d been last year that her attraction to Crow was as powerful as ever, like it was part of her goddamn DNA now.

Bless me, Father, for once again taking your name in vain.

Michael didn’t get angry. Did not ask for a lot of details.

“Just the one time?” is what he said.

“Yes.”

“But once was enough, wasn’t it?”

He said he would need to get a place of his own, and then they’d figure out how to tell their girls. But then Teddy Altman had called. Michael told Molly that it would be like a story from another time, and that he was going off to sea. He told her he would update her on his progress occasionally. He showed her an app that enabled her to track Teddy’s boat, which would eventually end up in London next year, hopefully ahead of everybody else.

“I love you,” Molly told him on the day he left for Teddy Altman’s private plane.

“I know,” he said, and then was gone.

That was a month ago. She still hadn’t heard from him, but Michael had told her that it might be a while before she did, and that might not be a bad thing.

Molly had always told Jesse that he was the alonest person she’d ever known. Now, on nights like this one, on most nights, she at least had a sense of what it was like to be him.

Like she was now the deputy chief of aloneness in Paradise, Mass.

Someday, maybe even soon, she would tell Jesse the truth about Michael the way she’d once told him the truth about her and Crow.

Just not tonight.

Tonight she was working, sitting at the kitchen table, trying to find out other people’s secrets, even in a place that was pretty much, far as Molly could tell, the opposite of secrets.

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