The Best American Mystery Stories 1999

Gary Krist An Innocent Bystander from Playboy

The girl had nothing on her feet. It was the first thing I noticed about her. That and the oval splotches of mud running up one side of her pale leg and onto her short white shorts.

The mud was actually what made me stop. I don’t usually pick up hitchhikers, no matter who they are or how unthreatening they look. But the sight of those mud spots was ominous. This girl looked like she was in trouble. As if she’d been running away from something, barefoot, through the mud.

This was a Monday, early October, around twilight, the day after Keszler had given me the boot — “seeking more vigorous representation elsewhere” was how he’d put it. Pompous jerk. I was feeling a little dazed and was driving out to the Island to think things over. Keszler was my biggest client.

Anyway, I’d gotten off the LIE around Nesconset and was taking secondary roads out to the beach house. The weather was warm for October, and there are some beautiful roads back there, where you can pull off and hear the wind in the pines and get the resiny smell of pine sap.

A look of relief broke out on the girl’s face when I pulled over.

“So was she actually hitchhiking?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did she have her thumb out, or did you just see her by the road and stop?”

“I’m not sure. I mean, she must have been hitchhiking, right? Why else would I have even thought to stop?”

“You said she looked like she was in trouble. Maybe you just stopped to make sure she was all right.”

“No... no, she was hitchhiking. Now that I think about it, I can remember seeing her thumb out. She had it out in this defiant way, almost daring me to stop.”

“So she was hitchhiking.”

“Why? Does it make a difference?”

“It might.”

“Thanks,” she said as she climbed into the car. Her long brown hair swung toward me, and then swung back again as she leaned out to pull the door shut. Now that she was in the car, I could see that she was a little younger than I had first thought — seventeen, eighteen, maybe. She wore an old, oversize work shirt that made her look like a kid.

“You okay?” I asked.

She looked up at me through stringy bangs. “Yeah, are you?” She had an accent, something a little Southern, I thought, but sometimes the locals out on the Island sound Southern to me.

“Where are you going?” I asked.

She hesitated, as if that issue hadn’t occurred to her yet. She shifted her legs. They were long for her body. Long and white and spotted with mud. “You going as far as Riverhead?”

“I could go that way,” I said. Then I shifted into gear and pulled away. “What happened to your shoes?”

“I threw them at somebody.”

“Oh.”

We rode for a few minutes in silence. The girl smelled strongly of cigarettes and something else, something like insect repellent. She had her hands folded in her lap and was quietly examining her varnished nails.

“Where in Riverhead do you want to be dropped off?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you when we get there.”

“But which part of town? So I know which way to go.”

She heaved a big sigh and turned away from me, toward the window. “Look, mister,” she said, “I just been thrown out of my apartment, okay? And I’m not really sure where I’m going, okay? I have friends in Riverhead, but I’m not sure which ones are home.”

I just nodded, a little pissed that this girl was getting impatient with me.

“Sorry,” she said after a while.

I nodded again.

Night had set in by this time. I flipped on the headlights, making a white tunnel of the trees ahead of us.

“My name’s Maddy,” she said then, in a different tone. “Short for Madeleine, my aunt’s name.” She held out her hand.

“Jack,” I said, looking away from the road for a second to shake the offered hand. She was smiling. Nice smile.

“And what do you do, Jack?”

“I’m an agent.”

She seemed to think this was a joke. “Like, a secret agent?”

I laughed. “No, no. I represent people. Artists. Writers, mostly.”

“You represent them?”

“I negotiate contracts for them. Sell their stuff. Keep them calm.”

“You mean writers like Stephen King?” she asked.

“I wish,” I said, thinking again about Keszler. “But that’s more or less the right idea.”

“Shit,” she said. “And you do that for a career?”

“Yes, I do. And what do you do for a career?”

“Hah,” she said, as if my question had been a worthy retort.

Feeling guilty then, I added: “Well, I guess school is pretty hard work, too.”

“I wouldn’t know,” she said. She dragged her hands through her long hair, lifting it and letting it fall, so that it pattered on the vinyl. “God, I hate fighting with people. Even with assholes like my boyfriend.” Then she looked at me, hard. I could feel her eyes on me. “I just bet you’re sitting there thinking what it would be like to go to bed with me.”

“She said that?”

“Her exact words.”

“Christ, I’m surprised you didn’t drive off the road.”

“It took some effort, believe me.”

“Incredible! You should have pulled over right then and told her to get out of the car.”

“I know.”

“It should have served as a warning to you.”

“I know.”

“So what did you say to her? How do you answer a statement like that?”

“With the truth.”

“The real truth?”

“Yes, damn it. The real truth.”

“I hate to disappoint you,” I said after I’d recovered, “but you’re absolutely wrong. For one thing, I have a daughter about your age.” I eased my foot on the accelerator and brought our speed back down to fifty. “I don’t know what could have brought on a comment like that, I really don’t. I’m trying to help you out here.”

“Okay, okay, I’m sorry,” she said. “It was a stupid thing to say. Let’s just forget I said it.”

“Because, you know, you don’t say things like that. You don’t have any idea.”

“Okay, okay,” she said, and then — to my amazement — she started to cry quietly. She wiped her eyes on the tail of her oversize shirt. “I said let’s forget it. I say stupid things sometimes, I know that.”

We drove on in silence for a while. I looked at my watch. I was supposed to give McManus a call at 8:00 — it wasn’t going to be a fun call, with the thing about Keszler — but I really didn’t want to use the car phone. It’s virtually impossible not to look like a self-important asshole with a car phone in your hand.

“Okay if I smoke?” Maddy asked after a while. She pulled a crumpled pack of Camels out of the breast pocket of her shirt.

“Sure,” I said.

She took one out of the pack, lit it with a white plastic lighter, and inhaled deeply, stylishly. She had a self-consciously careless way with a cigarette, something you see in a lot of kids her age. You wonder if they practice all day in front of mirrors.

“So what’s your daughter’s name?” Maddy asked finally. “The one who’s my age?” We’d already passed through Stoat’s Hollow. The pines had given way to farms — dark, empty fields of corn stubble on each side of the road.

“Megan. She’s fifteen.”

“That’s a lot younger than me,” she said. “Any other children?”

“No.”

“You going to meet up with the family now?”

I hesitated a second. I could have lied, but what I said was, “No, my wife and I have been divorced for eight years. Megan lives with her in Portland. Portland, Oregon.”

Maddy nodded. The light of the dashboard threw a green glow over her face. Green smoke seemed to be rising in the dark space of the car. “Everybody’s got a sob story these days, I guess.”

“Yeah,” I said, turning on the air.

Maddy was asleep when we got to the outskirts of Riverhead at 8:30. I pulled into the parking lot of a 7-Eleven near the edge of town. There were some teenagers hanging out next to the Dumpsters at the other end of the lot. Two girls — just younger than Maddy, I guessed — pranced around in ripped jeans and leather jackets, their teased hair floating around them. The boys were grabbing for the lapels of the girls’ jackets, laughing and generally acting like goons.

I shook Maddy awake. “We’re here,” I said.

She jumped when I touched her, and blinked furiously. “What?”

“We’re in Riverhead — I need to know where you want to be dropped off. Where do your friends live?”

She didn’t answer right away. She rubbed her eyes, then groped for her pack of Camels. She lit one, took a long pull, and exhaled noisily. “Acquaintances, really,” she said.

“Do they know you’re coming?”

“I didn’t get a chance to call.” She stared down at the cigarette in her hand. “Look, I was hoping I could maybe stay with you. I mean, now that I know your intentions are honorable and all.”

Apparently, her comment about my wanting to sleep with her was some kind of test, and I’d passed. “You can’t stay with your parents?” I asked.

She rolled her eyes the way my own daughter does. “Well, if you can find my mom, you should be a detective instead of a secret agent. And my dad’s been dead for eight years.”

I had to ask then: “Maddy, how old are you?”

“Eighteen,” she said. She scratched the edge of her mouth with the pinkie of her cigarette hand. “Look, have you got room in your house? Just for the night? Until I can figure out what to do.”

What could I say? Megan’s room was empty. She probably wouldn’t be needing it until the next summer visit.

“Okay,” I said. “Just until you figure out what to do.”

“Let me make sure of this: She asked you if she could stay at your place?”

“Yes.”

“You didn’t suggest it yourself in any way, verbally or nonverbally?”

“Nonverbally?”

“Use your imagination.”

“Jesus, will you stop?”

“You asked for my advice. I’m just asking questions that would be asked. By people who don’t know you as well as I do.”

“Fine, fine, fine. The answer is no. I didn’t say or do anything suggestive in any way.”

“Good. Go on.”

The house was dark when we arrived. The light timers were out of synch somehow, probably from a power failure during the week, but there was a half-moon that night. I pulled into the drive and parked. As we got out of the car, I could smell the damp salt air and hear the roll of surf from behind the dark bulk of the house.

“I’ll go ahead and turn on some lights,” I said. “Wait here. And watch your bare feet on the gravel.”

I walked quickly up the path, opened the front door, and went inside, snapping on lights. The house had that thick, stale smell to it. I’d been coming to the house like this — at night, after a long drive — all summer and fall, but it still made me a little uncomfortable. I usually put the stereo on right away, or the television.

I turned on the outside floods and went back to the car. Maddy wasn’t there. She’d left the passenger door slightly open, so that the overhead light was on and the warning bell was chiming. “Maddy?” I called. I leaned gently against the door until it clicked shut, then went around and opened the trunk for my suitcase. I grabbed it and a bag of corn and tomatoes I’d picked up at a farm stand on the way out. “Maddy?”

I thought she must have gone around back, so I followed the flagstone path along the side of the house and through the overgrown trellis to the beach. The floods from the house threw huge buttresses of white light toward the water. Maddy was standing at the foot of her long shadow, staring straight out, her arms folded. Something clenched in my chest when I saw her. A few months earlier, my own daughter Megan had stood there, just like that, watching the ocean for hours. Something had seemed wrong, and I asked Megan again and again what the problem was. But she said she just liked to look at the water — she liked to look at something that big and oblivious to everything. I thought there was more to it, so I kept asking until she got pissed off. “You will never understand anything anyway!” she shouted at me on her last night, and then marched into the house. This comment worried me. I mentioned it to her mother on the phone, but Claire told me I was paranoid. “She’s an adolescent, Jack,” she said. “Adolescents brood. It goes with the territory.”

“So did she seem depressed?”

“Megan?”

“No, the other girl. Maddy.”

“No, not depressed. Pensive, maybe. Thoughtful. But, hell, everybody gets thoughtful staring at the ocean. It’s like a fire in a fireplace.”

“Was there anyone else on the beach that night? Anyone who might have seen her standing there?”

“No one I could see. The houses are pretty far apart at our end of the beach. And this was a Monday night, a month after Labor Day. Most of the houses on the beach were probably empty.”

“You’re sure?”

“No, I’m not absolutely sure.”

“Do you like the ocean?” I asked, coming up behind her.

She turned and looked at me. Her face seemed unbelievably pale and thin in the glare of the floodlights. “Jesus,” she said, shading her eyes, “you must do pretty good as an agent to have a house like this.”

“I’ve had it for a long time. My parents bought it. Back when there was nothing out here but fishermen and abstract expressionists.”

The comment was lost on her. She just kept staring at me from the shade of her upraised hand. “You must be forty and something, right? Forty-five?”

“Forty-three,” I told her.

She smiled and turned back toward the water. “God, wouldn’t Drew be surprised to see me here? He probably thinks I’m spending the night in somebody’s car or something.”

“Drew is your boyfriend?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “Or at least he was.” She reached into her pocket for another cigarette.

“Hey, are you hungry?” I asked her. “There’s not much in the house, but I stopped for some corn and tomatoes before I picked you up.”

“Do you have eggs? And maybe some cheese?” she asked.

I shrugged. “I think so.”

“Well then, listen. I’ll make omelettes — my famous cheese-and-tomato omelettes.” The idea seemed to give her energy. “You just sit back and let me make you some dinner, okay? As my way of thanking you for being such a good guy and putting me up and all?”

“Sounds great,” I said. “I have to take a shower anyway. Let’s go inside and I can show you around the kitchen.”

We went in. Maddy looked around the house, clearly impressed, running her hand over the furniture, the vases and ashtrays and books. I found it a little embarrassing. I don’t think of myself as particularly rich, but to this girl I guess I was. When I led her into the kitchen, she pulled a couple of copper pans off the hooks and inspected them like they were artifacts from some lost civilization.

“Show me the eggs and where you keep the canned stuff and then go away,” she said.

I did, and then went upstairs for my shower. By the time I came back down, dressed in sweatpants and a T-shirt, I could smell onions and cigarette smoke all through the house. The table in the dining room had been beautifully set, and she’d opened the sliders to the deck so that the ocean sounds came in on the breeze. There was a bottle of white wine in the ice bucket, and a Dylan CD in the stereo. Maddy came out of the kitchen with a platter of steaming home fries. “I couldn’t find any mushrooms,” she said, slipping past me and putting the potatoes down on the table. “We’ll just have to suffer.”

“You know, I might be able to find you some shoes,” I said. Maddy was still barefoot. “I think my wife left a box of old sandals up in the attic.”

“Later,” she said, slipping back into the kitchen for the eggs.

We both ate quickly, conscious of the clicks and clatters of the silverware and the ridiculous little gongs the wineglasses made when we knocked them against our plates. At one point, I thought I noticed Maddy shivering — it had gotten a little chilly — so I went and got one of my cardigan sweaters. I put it around her shoulders and she just stared at me, as if amazed that anyone would do something like that.

“You were drinking wine. Do you have any idea how much she drank?”

“Well, a lot. I’m not sure exactly how much, but she kept refilling both our glasses.”

“How many empty bottles did you find?”

“Hell, I don’t—”

“How many?”

“Three.”

“You drank three bottles of wine between you?”

“I probably had just one myself. She was drinking more than I was. I mean, when I found her later in the TV room, she had another bottle open.”

“Two bottles then. A girl of, what, 120 pounds?”

“Thereabouts.”

“Shit. Not good.”

We finished dinner. Afterward, I brought down the box of sandals and let her go through it in the TV room while I cleaned up the dishes. She was already pretty far gone, and kept coming into the kitchen, modeling the different pairs of sandals while I loaded the dishwasher. Her feet were a size or two smaller than Claire’s, and some of the sandals looked huge on her. She was getting kind of silly, parading around in these oversize shoes, with a lit cigarette hanging unsteadily out of her mouth. When I was about finished, she came in with the worst sandals of the bunch — rainbow-colored, plastic-strapped things. She pranced over to the refrigerator and pulled out another bottle of white.

“Hey,” I said. “Maybe we should go easy on that.”

“Fuck it, Jack,” she said, an edge of real nastiness in her voice. “I’ve had a bad day, okay?”

The surprise must have registered on my face, because she softened immediately. “Oh come on, Jack,” she said. She slinked over to me in the godawful sandals. “Let’s be friends again.” She put her hands on my ass and leaned against my chest.

“Oh, Christ.”

“I want you to understand that I didn’t invite this in any way.”

“Yeah.”

“I made that very clear to her. I repeated... I reiterated what I’d told her in the car.”

“She sounds a little crazed, this girl.”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

I babbled on, but she lifted her head and stood on tiptoes to kiss me. Finally, I put my arms around her and started to kiss her back, but then there was an incredible crash to my right. Broken glass and a big brown rock skittered across the kitchen tiles. Maddy screeched and jumped back. I collected myself and ran to the broken window to look out, but I couldn’t see anything but darkness. Then I heard somebody moving through the dining room. He must have run around to the deck and come in through the open sliding doors. He burst into the kitchen — a tall, heavy guy with long brown hair and a goatee, about thirty, in a denim shirt and black pants. He was spitting curses and heading right toward me.

“So this is the boyfriend?”

“Drew, yeah. She must have called him when I was in the shower. Told him where she was.”

Before I knew what was happening, the guy straight-armed me into the refrigerator. “What the fuck is this?” he shouted. Maddy was behind him, trying to drag him off me. I started talking, trying to explain, but he just pushed me. Just as I was bouncing off the refrigerator again, he threw a punch. His knuckles caught me on the ear and suddenly I was going down. My head hit the refrigerator handle on the way.

The next few minutes are a little unclear to me. My left ear was hot and buzzing like an alarm clock, but I could hear them shouting at each other. Pots were hitting the tiles all around me, and then I heard dishes crashing. Maddy was screaming, trying to get the guy to calm down, but it wasn’t working.

Finally, they moved out of the kitchen and continued the fight somewhere else in the house. I tried to get to my feet. My thought processes started coming back. I could hear them in the living room. He was banging around, ranting about how he can’t trust her, calling her cunt, whore, everything in the book. She was shouting back at him. I stumbled over to the kitchen telephone, figuring to call 911, but then I stopped. There was no more sound in the living room. I could even hear the ocean again. He was gone.

“So wait a minute. I don’t understand. Why did she call the boyfriend?”

“She told me she just wanted to rub his nose in it, make him jealous. ‘Hey, guess where I am, asshole’ — that kind of thing.”

“So this guy drove over and was watching you through the windows? Did she know that he was there? Was that why she came on to you, for the audience?”

“It’s more complicated than that.”

I picked my way through the pots and broken glass in the kitchen. Maddy sat on the living room floor in the corner near the stereo, her head down and her arms hugging her knees to her chest. She was crying.

“You okay?” I asked.

She didn’t look up. Through the tangles of her hair, I could see a red contusion on her cheek, where he must have slapped her. “I’m sorry,” she kept saying. “I just wanted to make him jealous. I didn’t think he’d go ballistic.”

“It’s okay.”

She looked up at me. Her eyes were puffy and red, but I think that was just from crying. “There’s no hope for me and him. I keep thinking, maybe, but there really is no fucking hope.”

I looked around the living room. He’d turned over a few chairs, and there was a framed antique map of Europe that he’d smashed against an end table. The corner of the table was jutting through the parchment, right where the Alps would have been. “You think he’ll be back?”

She sniffed a few times and then said, “No. He’ll never be back. Didn’t you hear him? He never wants to see my fucking face again! Me and my fucking big ideas.” She began crying again, really weeping.

I crouched beside her and held her shoulders, which were amazingly thin under the rough, heavy cotton work shirt. “Shhh,” I whispered to her. “Everything will be okay.”

We stayed like that for a few minutes. Finally, I said, “You need some sleep.”

I helped her to her feet. She gave me a pathetic little smile and then I took her upstairs to Megan’s room, half holding her up, like a hospital intern leading a patient. I pulled back the covers and settled her into bed in her clothes. She went along without a word. “Goodnight,” I said. Then I turned out the light and closed the door.

I went downstairs and spent the next hour cleaning up, cursing myself for getting into this situation. I taped a piece of cardboard over the broken kitchen window and swept up all the glass. Then, sometime around midnight, I double-checked all the locks and went upstairs to my own room. I brushed my teeth, looked over my bruised face in the mirror, and went to bed. But I couldn’t sleep. The sound of the surf, which usually lulls me, seemed to be keeping me wide-eyed. I lay in the dark room and thought about how this situation would look to anyone on the outside. I thought of what my friends would say if I ever told them about it. “Did you hear, Jack picks up this eighteen-year-old hitchhiker — at least she says she’s eighteen — and takes her back to the beach house...” I felt nauseated at myself and what I’d turned into — a forty-three-year-old man, alone, a washout as a husband and as a father, making a fool of himself with a girl half his age, a girl in a vulnerable situation.

After what must have been two hours of lying awake, I got up and cracked the door open. Megan’s room down the hall was dark, the door open, but there was a light from downstairs. A flickering light — the television in the living room.

I crept down the stairs. Maddy was lying on the couch, still in the work shirt and muddy shorts, with one of my ex-wife’s sandals dangling from a single toe. She held a wine bottle against her chest and stared blankly at the television.

It took me a second to realize what she was watching. An old family video. She must have found it in the cabinet under the VCR.

The tape was of Megan when she was a baby — a little after her first birthday. It had been taken on the beach, right out behind this house. Claire and I had just given her a new red sand pail and shovel, which she seemed delighted with but somewhat confused by. This was when she was just walking. I hadn’t looked at the tape in years.

It was an ordinary family video, I guess: beach scenes, dunking baby’s feet in the surf, building sand castles. Megan’s diaper was sodden with seawater. She sat, digging the shovel into the sand and laughing, totally self-absorbed.

“She looks so happy,” Maddy said then from the couch. I hadn’t realized she knew I was behind her. “She looks so goddamn fucking happy.”

On the screen, Megan lifted a shovelful of sand to her mouth. The camera shook, and a female arm shot into the frame to stop her. Then a cut to a different scene — Megan running toward the camera, then running back to her seat, then starting all over again. Laughing.

I leaned over and pulled the wine bottle out of Maddy’s arms. She let it go easily, her eyes never leaving the screen. “You made a mess of it, too, I guess,” she said. “Just like everybody else.”

I took the bottle out to the kitchen. It was half full, and I poured the rest of it into the sink.

When I came back into the TV room, Maddy had gotten up from the couch and gone outside. She’d left the sliding door open. I shut it but didn’t lock it, turned off the television, and then went back up to bed.

“Did she ever come back in?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she did. I’m not sure.”

“And she was very drunk by this time?”

“Very.”

I heard her walking around outside, muttering. Then she parked herself under my open bedroom window and started calling to me in stage whispers. “Come on, Jack,” she said. “Come out and play.” She threw a couple of pebbles at the window. “I said, come out and play, Jack. Don’t be this way. We can take the car and go get some cigarettes someplace. Pleeeease.” She laughed — a bitter, sort of mirthless sound. “What difference can it make, Jack? Come on out.”

I ignored her. Eventually she must have gotten bored, and I heard her voice trailing away down the beach.

In the morning, she was gone. I got up around eight, went down to the kitchen, and made some coffee. I made a full pot, enough for two. I assumed that she was outside, maybe taking a walk on the beach.

I cleaned up. The living room smelled of cigarettes and day-old wine — she must have spilled some. The sofa pillows were wrinkled and jammed into a corner. I could see the dent from her head in one of them.

By ten-thirty I knew she wasn’t coming back. I figured she must have gone out to the main road and hitched a ride into town. Back to the boyfriend, I thought. Give it another shot with old Drew.

I tried to do some work — I had a contract to sign off on by the end of the week — but I couldn’t make any progress. The whole mess was too much in my head, so to clear it I decided to take a walk down the beach. It was a windy morning but surprisingly warm. There were a few people out — some of them walking dogs, some jogging, some doing both. It was that weird limbo stage at the shore — halfway between crowded summer and deserted winter.

About a mile or so down the beach, I saw a guy in an overcoat, looking totally ridiculous, walking through the sand in shiny brown shoes. I watched him for a while and realized suddenly that he was heading straight toward me.

“Morning, sir,” the guy said, trudging up to me. “I’m Detective-Sergeant Michaels.”

I stopped walking. “Good morning.”

“Are you looking for someone?”

Every instinct in my body was shouting out the answer to that one. “No. Why? Somebody lost?”

He shrugged. “You might say that. Some kid washed up down the beach a way. Just a couple hours ago.”

“Boy or girl?” I asked carefully.

“Girl. Woman. Whatever. Looked about seventeen or so.”

I felt nothing right then. I don’t understand why, but I felt nothing. “Drunk?”

“Probably.” The detective gave a kind of commiserative sigh. He was about my age, maybe a little older. Gray just starting around the temples. “You didn’t see anybody on the beach last night, did you, Mr....”

“Avallone. I’ve got a house about a mile down that way.” I was thinking all kinds of things now. Could the boyfriend have come back and drowned her? “No,” I said after an awkward pause, “I didn’t see anybody.” Then: “It wasn’t, well, a murder or anything, was it?”

“No, no, nothing like that.” He turned and looked toward the surf for a second. “Anyway, Mr. Avallone, if you hear anything or talk to anybody who might have seen this girl, let us know, okay? Most likely it was suicide. Too cold for a midnight swim, and kids her age, they get into a scrape, this is their solution.”

“Seventeen isn’t exactly a kid,” I said.

The detective laughed. “You sound just like my daughter.” He shook my hand and walked back toward the dunes.

“You realize that what you did there was a crime, right? If somebody wanted to nail you, you’re nailable right there.”

“Okay, so I’m nailable.”

“You lied to a cop. In the moral universe, that’s no big thing. But a judge could make a big thing of it if he wanted to. Besides, it was stupid. The boyfriend. He knew she was with you. He was bound to tell them, eventually.”

“Not necessarily.”

“Why not necessarily?”

“Just hold on. I’m coming to that.”

I spent the rest of the day recleaning the house, trying to get rid of all traces of the night before. I kept the local news on, on every radio in the house, to see if anything was mentioned about a drowning. Nothing. Then, as I was getting ready to start dinner, I noticed the note on the refrigerator. It was written in pencil on the back of a takeout menu: “What we did was a mistake, like everything else in my life. Maddy.”

I carried the note over to the table and sat down.

“But Jack, you didn’t—”

“Shut up a minute. Just let me finish the story.”

The boyfriend’s call came about an hour later. “Listen, asshole,” he said. “I don’t know if you did it or if she did it to herself. Basically, I don’t care. Either way, you got a big problem. But for $20,000, I could forget that whole thing last night. She didn’t call me, I didn’t go to your place, I didn’t see you groping her ass or sticking your tongue down her fucking throat or nothing.”

I was too stunned to say anything.

“Do we understand each other?” he asked after a second.

I didn’t answer. I was unable to speak.

“I’ll give you a minute to think about it,” he said. “I can wait.”

I drove into the city the next day. He’d said he wanted the $20,000 in cash by noon, but when I told him that would be impossible, since I didn’t have an account on the Island, he gave me until five in the afternoon.

It wasn’t difficult to put the money together. I cashed a couple of checks against my personal and business accounts and got the sum together by lunchtime. Then I drove out to the mall in Islip where he wanted to meet.

“You paid him. I can’t believe you paid the guy.”

“I had no choice.”

“What do you mean, you had no choice? Some miserable kid does something stupid, it’s not your fault. You were a bystander, an innocent bystander!”

“Come on, you’re the lawyer. You know what kind of trouble this guy could have made for me. It’s how it all looks. The girl committed suicide practically in my house. It’s a lot to explain.”

“But Jesus Christ, Jack.”

“Besides, I’ve got Megan to think of. And what would Claire say? Would she let Megan come here anymore if this got out?”

“No. Okay, I see your point. It’s just, I don’t know. I’m a little surprised.”

“Surprised that I would pay $20,000 to keep my life from going down the tubes?”

“Well, when you put it that way—”

“And when you get right down to it, $20,000 isn’t a hell of a lot of money.”

“I guess not. For what it’s buying. But from a legal standpoint, if this ever gets out, it’s practically an admission of guilt.”

“It won’t get out.”

“You can’t know that for sure.”

“Believe me, it won’t get out.”

I arrived at the mall a little before five. Drew was already there, in a satin Mets jacket, eating a taco in the food court. He looked up and grinned when he saw me. “Put it on the table,” he said.

I took the envelope from my coat pocket and placed it beside his jumbo soda. He put down the taco, wiped his fingers daintily on a napkin, and picked up the envelope. He looked inside quickly and then stuffed it into the pocket of his jacket. “If it’s not all there, you’ll be hearing from me.”

“It’s all there.” I stood for a few seconds, looking down at him. “You don’t feel anything for her, do you.”

He smiled, wiping his goatee with the napkin. “Nah,” he said. “She was a pain in the butt anyway. Too emotional.”

I gave him one last look of contempt and then walked away.

I spent three more days at the beach house, working on the contract, trying to concentrate. I went out every morning to get the paper. I read through the whole thing, but there was no story about a girl drowning herself on the beach. I even took the chance of asking around town. Nobody had heard a thing, though the guy at the wine store told me they don’t like to report suicides. Too many copycat adolescents in the world.

By Saturday morning I had finished with the contract and decided to drive back to the city. On the way, I found myself exiting the LIE again. It was morbid, I guess, but I wanted to go back to the place where I’d picked up Maddy on Monday night. I pulled off the road, stopped the engine, and got out. There were high bushes bordering the road, and on the other side of them was a cluster of garden apartments — cheap, poorly built townhouses — which could have been where Maddy lived. I was afraid of meeting up with Drew, so I didn’t investigate. After a few minutes, I got back into the car and drove away.

At this point I was hungry, so I drove into town to get some lunch. There was a big, busy-looking diner on the main drag in town, so that’s where I stopped. I had to wait a few minutes, but finally the waitress took me to a tiny table near the kitchen and gave me a menu. I decided quickly, ordered, and then settled back to look around. That’s when I noticed a familiar-looking guy sitting in a booth across the diner, near the windows. I tried to place him for a few seconds before it hit me: Detective-Sergeant Michaels. The cop on the beach.

I was confused. I wondered if he could be in town investigating Maddy’s death. Or was it just a coincidence? Maybe he lived in this town, where property had to be cheaper, and just worked out in the Hamptons. But then a girl came out of the ladies’ room and slipped into the seat across from him. It was Maddy.

“Maddy? The same one?”

“The same one.”

I sat there, staring, until the whole story became clear to me. Then I got up and walked over to their booth. As I came up to them, I heard Maddy saying, “Right, Dad. I’m sure he would,” or something like that. Michaels — or whatever his name really was — caught sight of me. “Shit,” he said under his breath.

I stopped right in front of their booth. Maddy looked up, recognized me, and then looked down into her coffee cup. “Oh, dear,” she said in an ironic little singsong.

“So you three do this a lot?” I asked. “Or was I just the first sucker?”

“Listen,” the father said, “I don’t know what you think you’re going to do about this—”

“Relax, Dad,” Maddy said. “He won’t do anything.” She looked up at me again, with a little smile. “Isn’t that right, Jack?”

I kept my eyes on Maddy, but I said to her father, “This is the kind of thing you teach your daughter?”

“Hey, loverboy,” Maddy said. “You’re one to talk about fine, upstanding behavior with young ladies in distress. Besides, at least his daughter talks to him.”

I didn’t answer. I just kept looking down at Maddy, looking for some sign of regret or guilt — something that would tell me that at least part of what happened that night was real. But there was nothing like that in her eyes.

“So,” she said then, “we’re okay on this, right, Jack? You don’t talk about us to the police, and we don’t talk about you to your wife and daughter. Right?”

I couldn’t believe an eighteen-year-old girl was saying this.

“Right?” she asked again.

“And what did you say?”

“What do you think I said? What do you think I should have said?”

“I think that you should have said, ‘Right.’ ”

“And so I did. I said it and walked out of the diner. And I haven’t seen or heard from them since.”

“So that’s it, then. You don’t need any legal advice. Chalk it up to experience. True, you’re out twenty grand, but meanwhile your ex-wife and daughter won’t find out about any of it.”

“Right.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong. You were the victim here.”

“Yes.”

“And so you move on. A little wiser, maybe, but none the worse for wear.”

“Right. None the worse for wear.”