The Last Refuge

TWO

THERE WERE THOUSANDS of bars in Greater New York City that looked exactly like this one. It’d been there since before World War II. All the woodwork was simulated mahogany stained a deep, Victorian brown. It ran like wainscoting three-quarters of the way up the wall. Above that the plaster was painted pale green and decorated with framed, faded covers of magazines that had ceased circulation about the time MacArthur returned to the Philippines. The carpet was probably red at some point, but had turned a brown dinge. So had the vinyl stool cushions. Around the bar itself the floorboards had worn down to the grain. The footrail was solid brass, shiny on the top. At the corners of the bar were racks of hard candy and Tums. Bottles lined a back wall that was mostly mirror, decorated with false muntins.

It was a few doors down from the entrance to the stairs that led two flights up to my father’s Bronx pied à terre. One of our family myths was that my sister and I had spent our early years in that apartment, but I never remembered it that way. We’d visit, occasionally, and sit on the scratchy living-room sofa and watch TV while my mother cleaned the bathroom and put my father’s clothes back in the drawers and closets. The place smelled like grease, gasoline and oil, because that’s what my father and all his clothes smelled like.

He wasn’t a drinker in the traditional sense. But he preferred sitting in that bar to sitting alone in the apartment. He’d nurse a shot and a beer for hours, alone at a small round table along the wall, discouraging anyone who might want to engage him in conversation. Not that he had to try that hard. Some people have that unapproachable aura about them. Like me. People get close, then veer away, bouncing off the invisible shield.

Thirty years ago I went there to talk to the bartender. I had my gym bag with a change of clothes at my feet. I was also nursing a beer, partly for financial reasons. I was living on a starvation budget, all my money going toward night school. The bartender was about my father’s age. He’d inherited the place from his uncles. The standard bartender look was fat and grizzly gray, but this guy was slender and handsome, with a squared-off jaw and black crew cut. A Navy man, with an anchor on his forearm and a portrait of a destroyer above the cash register. He spoke out of the side of his mouth, and rarely put a T at the start of a word when a D would work better, so you knew he belonged in the Bronx.

I didn’t know how to go about asking him what I wanted to know, so we’d been talking about the Yankees and the economy. He had a nephew my age who was going to Penn State. For some unaccountable reason I told him I was out of school and working as a carpenter. Maybe I thought going to night school at MIT would put him off. I don’t know. I was young.

When the conversation drifted into crime on the streets I had an opening. I looked around, appraisingly.

“This place seems pretty quiet. You must keep it that way, huh?”

“Yeah, I get it done. Don’t like any funny stuff.”

“Wasn’t there something in here, though, a big fight or something? That’s what I heard, is all.”

He was wiping off the bar at the time, which gave him an easy way to move away from me. I sat there with my beer, acting disinterested, until he drifted back into earshot.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m just being nosy.”

“Sure. It’s nuthin’. Dis guy got his ass beat to shit. Tha’s all there is. You ready?” he asked, pointing to the empty glass.

“Sure.” My heart thrilled at the expense.

I tried again.

“D’you know him?” I asked.

“The guy?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah. He come in here all the time. Ornery bastard. But never gave me no trouble.”

“A regular.”

“Yeah, I guess so. I never knew his name. Mechanic. Always come in cleaned up, but you can tell by the index finger here, see? Mechanics can never get this part along the side completely clean. From holdin’ wrenches. Gets in the cracks. You can scrub the shit out of it with Boraxo, but when you’re workin’ every day, the grease just gets in there.”

“So I guess you didn’t see anything.”

He straightened his back and looked at me, still holding his hand so he could show me how to identify car mechanics.

“No. I didn’t see anything. Nobody saw nuthin’. What’s with this? You know him?”

“No. No, I’m just curious.”

“Well, enough about all that, okay?” he said, and moved on down the bar, adjusting mixers, dropping dirty glasses into the washer, putting fresh fruit slices in the bin.

I was too young to know where to go from there. So I let it drop and spent the next hour looking into the mouth of the beer glass. I didn’t know how to think anymore. I couldn’t make myself leave, but I wanted to leap off the stool and run the whole way back to Boston. I wanted to find Abby and drag her out of her class and take off all her clothes and lie in bed with her. I wanted to slink back to my dad’s old apartment and curl up on the sofa with the TV on. I wanted and I didn’t.

The runaway contrapositions must have found their way into my right hand, because when I put the glass up to my lips it shook so hard the beer splattered down the front of my shirt.

“Hey, you okay?”

“Yeah, sorry. Tired is all.”

He tossed me his soggy bar rag.

“Here.”

I thought I’d leave quietly after that. He was down at the other end of the bar working the tap. I put down twice as much money as I needed to, waved to him and got off the stool. When I reached down to pick up my bag, he called to me.

“Hey, kid.”

“Yeah.”

“You live around here?”

“No. Just seein’ a buddy.”

I held up the bag as proof. He nodded the way people do when they’re unconvinced.

“Hey, don’t push it. You don’t want to know.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

I started to leave.

“Kid.”

“Yeah.”

“There’s nuthin’ nobody can do.”

“I know that.”

He topped off the glass and set it up in front of a scraggly old woman who probably wasn’t all that old. I started to go again and he called me back again.

“Kid. Com’ere.”

I walked back and he met me at the end of the bar where it curved into the wall. He leaned over the bartop and lowered his voice, exaggerating his side-of-the-mouth style of speaking.

“It’s not like it sounds. Don’t listen to what people tell you. It’s always different, what’s really going on. You just don’t know that yet. Only now you do. So get the fuck outta here.”

The bright daylight outside the bar made me squint. My eyes adjusted by the time I reached the subway back to Grand Central. As I sat on the platform with my gym bag on my lap, a vast emptiness filled my mind. Knowing by not knowing. My first lesson in the Tao of murdered fathers.

The Senior Center was in a building located behind a Catholic church founded by Polish potato farmers. The roof was Spanish tile. The windows were very tall double-hungs open at the top for ventilation. There were a few shiny old cars in the parking lot and white-haired people going in and out the door. The mood was reflective. It was almost lunchtime.

The lobby had a reception desk like a hospital or a nursing home. A woman who was probably in her nineties was at the helm. Her hair was polar white and her weathered skin the color of fresh dough. Her wet blue eyes had seen it all, but not much of it had stuck.

“Yes?” Her head bobbed when she talked.

“Just looking around.”

“Oh, you’re too young,” she said.

“Thank you. I’m looking for a friend.”

“Lots of friends here,” she said in the unanswerable way some old people have.

“It’s a specific friend. Paul Hodges. Mind if I go in and see if he’s here?”

She waved her hand at the air and looked down, then abruptly looked back up again as if her head was being operated by remote control.

“Oh, I don’t know anybody’s names. Go on in there and see if he’s here.”

I had a thought and tried it out on her.

“Do you have a list of people who normally come in here?”

She looked at me and moved her mouth around, chewing on the idea.

“I don’t know.”

I got the feeling she didn’t know how to think about the question.

“Do people have to sign up to come here, or do they just come in when they feel like it?”

“Oh, whenever. I don’t think there’s a list,” she looked around the empty desk area in front of her, searching for explanations. “Do you think we should?”

“No, I’m just wondering who comes here. Just curious.”

She tried to understand me, but the necessary circuitry had been disconnected. She looked upset.

“I’m sorry to bother you. I’m just curious. This looks like a nice place.”

She lit up, relieved to be back on familiar ground.

“Oh yes, it’s very nice. Would you like lunch? Here’s our activity schedule for October.” She dug a slim blue pamphlet out of a drawer. She slapped it down on the countertop and patted it like the head of a grandchild.

“Lots to do. Lots to do.”

I folded it once and stuck it in my back pocket.

“Thanks.”

She nodded and looked back down at her desktop full of nothing. I went inside. It was a big open room with circular tables set up around the periphery. Women who looked as old as the people at the tables were moving around with trays of food. I spotted Hodges at a table by himself with a steaming plate of hot turkey sandwich. His back was to the wall and his eyes fixed on his meal.

“You’re right. It looks good.”

He frowned.

“They won’t serve you. You gotta have a Senior Card.”

“That’s okay, Mr. Hodges. Already ate.”

I sat down a few seats away. His frown got a little deeper.

“Go ahead,” I said to him, “eat.”

“I’m going to. This is my lunch.”

“Go ahead.”

He did, reluctantly. Old manners die hard. At the surrounding tables elderly people lingered over their coffee or tea and were joined by people who looked to be volunteers. I felt like an interloper in an entirely alien place. Tolerated, but not really welcome.

Hodges got me a cup of coffee to go with his. I told him I’d found Jimmy Maddox. He seemed a little interested. Then we talked about fishing for a while before I asked him if anyone in the room had hung out with Regina Broadhurst. He squinted his big frog eyes and looked around the room, but shook his head.

“Not that I can remember.”

A big woman, late forties, with a huge head of jetblack beauty parlor hair and a blunt hatchet of a nose, strode toward us. She wore some sort of undefinable casual clothes and a red knit sweater that clung to her body like chain mail. Behind her plastic-rimmed glasses her eyes were sharp and on the move. She looked like an overfed predatory bird.

“Hello.”

Her hand thrust forward to shake mine. It reminded me of a karate chop.

“Hello,” I said back, taking her hand.

“I’m Barbara Filmore. The executive director.”

“She runs the place,” said Hodges, helping me out.

“Sam Acquillo. I’m with him.” I nodded toward Hodges. She kept her eyes on me.

“I understand you were trying to get a list of our clients,” she said, neither as a question nor a statement. By then I’d forgotten that I had.

“No ma’am, not exactly. Just trying to look up a few old friends.”

“Like me,” said Hodges.

“We don’t keep those sorts of records. Are you connected with the state?”

Only someone from Social Services would call a bunch of old geezers clients.

“No ma’am. I’m just looking for old friends of my mother. She passed away recently.”

“I’m sorry.” She didn’t move much, and stood very close to where I was sitting. I got the vague feeling that she’d tackle me if I tried to make a run for it. “Who are you looking for?”

“Regina Broadhurst and Julia Anselma. Know ’em?”

Her face was immobile.

“They’ve passed away as well. Very recently, in fact. I’m sorry to have to tell you. What was your name, again?”

“Sam. I guess you should expect it. They weren’t kids.”

“They hadn’t been well.”

“Really.”

I slid my chair away from the table. Her head turned to follow me, but the rest of her stayed in place. She took off her glasses and stuck the tip of a temple in her mouth. She slid her weight over to her right leg as if to relax her posture, but I noticed her move even closer to where I was sitting. At that distance I could see she’d had some kind of facelift. They wiped off the character lines around her eyes and pulled back the skin at her throat. It helped explain the hawkish mask.

“Anybody here know those two? Julia and Regina?”

“I’ll ask.” She didn’t look like she would. “Is there anything else? We’re about to rearrange the tables for this evening’s activities. We’ll be asking everyone to let our volunteers get to work.”

“They’re clearin’ us out,” said Hodges, still in a helpful mood.

Miss Filmore smiled mechanically but didn’t look over at Hodges.

“Okay, I guess we’ll let you go,” I said, standing up. “Just have a question.”

She might have arched an eyebrow if she’d had enough skin left around her eyes to do it. Instead she put her glasses back on and cocked her head.

“Yes?”

“Do you ever ask family, or anybody, about clients who, you know, pass away?”

“We don’t like to discuss it. For obvious reasons.”

“They just don’t show up for bingo one night,” said Hodges.

“I wouldn’t characterize it that way,” said Miss Filmore, without looking at Hodges. “We simply feel that dwelling on mortality is not a constructive pursuit for people of maturity. We stress life and looking forward.”

I looked over at Hodges and he shrugged. Give a man a square meal once in a while and I guess you can stress anything you want. He stood up to leave with me.

“Why do you ask?” she asked me.

“It’s a long story.”

“Certainly.” She said the word the way you’d drop a heavy bag on the floor.

We moved around her and would have left right then, but she wasn’t quite ready to have us dismissed.

“You’re welcome to visit anytime you’d like. But please check in with us occasionally. My office is just inside the front entrance.”

“Certainly.”

We walked out together, and Miss Filmore escorted us all the way to the front door. She wanted to shake hands again.

“It’s wonderful to have people show some interest in the elderly,” she said by way of seeing us off. “They have so much to offer, but tend to get lost in the shuffle.”

“Yeah, so I’ve noticed.”

Hodges climbed into a rusty Ford Econoline after looking over the Grand Prix. As I drove off, I looked back at the Senior Center and saw Barbara Filmore still standing at the door, a trained professional, alert to threats and poised to seize opportunity.

Amanda’s car was in my driveway when I got home. I didn’t see it at first because it was raining hard and silver Audis aren’t normally parked in front of my house. She was in the driver’s seat, her head back on the headrest. I thought she might be asleep, but she jumped out of the car when I pulled up and ran behind Eddie and me through the rain and into my kitchen.

The cottage filled up with the smell of wet dog. Amanda’s hair was all flattened out, which made it more obvious that she had a very pretty face. It was still strained, and there were dark semicircles under her eyes. She clutched her windbreaker close to her throat and shivered. I looked up at her from where I was drying off Eddie with an old beach towel.

“Sorry. I’ll turn up the heat.”

“That’s okay.”

Eddie sniffed at her knees and wagged his tail. She rumpled the top of his head.

“My, aren’t you a handsome boy. What’s your name?”

“Eddie Van Halen.”

She kept scratching his face.

“Are you a guitar player?”

“He gave it up. No money in it.”

I switched on the furnace, hoping there was some oil left. I only ran it once in a while to keep it from rusting up, or when I couldn’t keep the house above freezing with the woodstove in the living room. The radiators clanged into action.

She stood in the doorway between the kitchen and living room and watched me bunch up newspapers and toss kindling into the stove. I overstocked it with split red oak and opened up the dampers.

“You want some coffee?”

“You drink a lot of coffee.”

“Yeah, too much. Want some?”

“I drink too much coffee, too. Sure.”

I built a five-cup pot of freshly ground Cinnamon Hazelnut. The rain was trying to beat in the windows, but the house started to feel warm. From the kitchen, I could look through the living room and out to the screened-in porch. Beyond the porch the bay was all in a charcoal gray and white-tipped uproar. The nearest buoy, a green can, was rocking back and forth like a dweeble. The only thing in the room besides the stove was a pull-out couch. I sat on it after Amanda sank down next to the stove and took a sip of her coffee, holding the cup with both hands. Somehow while I was fussing with stoves and coffee she’d managed to brush back her hair and smooth out her face. She wore Reeboks, clean, faded Wranglers and a chambray shirt under her cotton windbreaker. The shirt was opened to just below the top curve of her breasts. Her chest had seen a lot of sun—it was very dark with freckles that were almost black.

“So,” I said, for openers.

“I’m sorry I’m bothering you again.”

“You mostly bother me when you say you’re sorry.”

Self-effacement can be hard work on the receiving end.

“You like your privacy. I’m making you uncomfortable.”

“I’m just not used to other people sitting in my living room.”

“I understand that. I’ve lived alone.”

“Where’s Roy?”

“He had to go to the City.” She looked up as if unsure I believed her. “HQ keeps a pretty tight rein, so he has to go in two or three times a month. I took off early. They’ll cover for me.”

“Does he know you’re here?”

She busied herself petting and cooing at Eddie. He didn’t discourage her.

“Of course not. That bothers you?”

“Not really. I’m just not much for company.”

“I’m sorry. I should go.”

“No, I mean, I’m not good company. Me. Obviously. You’re fine.”

“I still should go. You’re probably busy.”

She started to stand up. I waved her back down.

“Nah. Drink your coffee. I got nothing else to do.”

“When we talked about Regina Broadhurst it got me thinking about my mother again. Not that I ever stopped. It’s all I’ve done since she died. They’re all dying. Our parents. Yours, mine.”

“It’s been five years since my mother went. I don’t think about it much.”

Amanda leaned back against the wall and looked at me through frustrated, anxious eyes. Tears rushed up into her voice.

“She was just a sweet, wonderful old woman. She made dolls for charity for Chrissakes.”

The impossible tangle of her emotions created an attraction current that drew her legs back against her chest. She pulled them to her and rested her head on her knees.

“I’m an engineer, not a shrink. But it looks to me like it all happened too quick for you and you got what they call unresolved issues.”

A couple sessions of court-ordered therapy and I’m fucking Sigmund Freud.

“I know. They have grief counselors, but Roy was really unhappy about the idea. Doesn’t approve of it.”

“Can’t say he’s helping out too much here.”

“No, you can’t say that.”

Eddie found people down at his level irresistible. He tried to lick her face, from which she gently demurred. I told him to bug off, so he went out to the screened-in porch, a little put out.

“It’s none of my business, but since you’re here in my living room, I guess I can say you should talk to somebody about this and to hell with Roy. With all due respect.”

“Maybe I can just talk to you.”

“Now I know you need help.”

She smiled at me. “You want me to think you’re just an old burnout.”

It’s amazing how pretty women who like you and wear rough chambray shirts and smell like fresh expectations can say anything they want and get away with it.

“Too burned out to think straight, that’s for sure.”

Even though I couldn’t stop thinking about Regina floating in that bathtub. She had wicked bad arthritis. Could hardly bend down. She had an old tin-lined shower stall off the kitchen that she could just walk into. My old man used the tub in that bathroom to clean fish. In return he’d leave her a few in the freezer. When I went through the house I saw a bathrobe hanging in the broom closet, which was right near the shower stall, along with a bunch of beach towels. I realized, standing there looking down at Amanda, that Regina never sat on the beach. And never had any guests. Those were her bath towels. Thirty-year-old beach towels she was too cheap to replace.

“What are you saying?”

“I don’t know, Amanda. Old habits die hard. I spent most of my life solving engineering problems, which are like big, complicated puzzles. You have to noodle ’em out. Only here I can’t say there’s anything to noodle. I must be growing an imagination in my old age.”

“You’re not that old.”

Amanda smoothed the legs of her jeans down toward her ankles, pushing out the wrinkles and reinforcing the crease up her shins and over her knees. I thought of my daughter’s cat.

“I wish you could have met my mother. She was very strict, but she had a sense of humor.”

“I probably would’ve been a bit young for her.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

I felt bad when I saw the tears pooling up in her eyes. I find it hard to talk about death without being sarcastic. Grieving relatives usually don’t find it too funny. I went into the bathroom next to the kitchen and got a box of Kleenex. I was able to keep my mouth shut long enough for her to blow her nose and mop up her tears.

“I think I would have liked her, too,” I said.

“How come?” she said, with a sniff.

“I can tell. Probably loaded with charm. A lot of it rubbed off on you.”

“Does that mean you like me, too?”

“Yes. It does.”

“That’s so amazing.”

“Why?”

“Because I feel so unlikable.”

For a brief moment, her history poured in from some other dimension, flowed around the living room, then drained away through cracks in the floor and special portals in the wall. It caused a lapse.

“So what made you come back to Southampton?”

She looked at me as if concentrating on my face. Evaluating. She scrunched up her mouth and looked away.

“Something bad,” she said.

“Sorry.”

“What about you?”

“Same here. More or less.”

“I thought so,” she said. “Want to know?”

“Nah. Enough of that stuff, okay?”

“Okay. If you want.”

The gray-black rain clouds outside made it even darker in the knotty pine room. I opened the woodstove and threw in a few more logs. We were washed by fire light and smoky dry heat. She took off her windbreaker and pulled up her sleeves. She hadn’t moved out of the way when I was stoking the stove. Her presence was beginning to unbalance the stolid resignation that decorated the inside of my cottage. I looked down at her and caught a glimpse of a tanned breast held softly in a low-cut flowered bra. I went back to the kitchen to exchange my coffee for something stronger. Something with little blocks of ice in it.

The phone rang. It was Sullivan.

“They gave me a note from a guy named Jimmy Maddox. That’s her nephew?”

“Yeah. He’s letting me handle the funeral and settle the estate. First I want that cause of death.”

“When you get hold of a bone you sure do gnaw on it.”

“A lot of time has gone by. I’m not an expert on morbidity, but it’s got to affect an accurate read. Make sure it’s the full deal. Blood analysis, tissue trauma, stuff under fingernails.”

“That’s not an autopsy. That’s forensics.”

Amanda was standing there watching me. Holding the phone to my ear with my left shoulder, I held up the gin bottle and pointed to the tonic. She nodded. I poured and continued to talk to Sullivan.

“Okay. Do whatever.”

While I talked I watched Amanda busy herself around the kitchen. When she refilled the ice trays she leaned into the sink, bearing her weight on her right leg with her left tucked behind like a dancer.

“I’ll take care of it,” said Sullivan. “You just worry about gettin’ her in the ground. Call me with the name of the funeral home and we’ll send her over there when we’re done.”

“Okay, chief. By the way, who cleaned up her house?”

“I don’t know. Not us. Unless it was the paramedics.”

“Is that usually what they do?”

“No, that’s the family’s business.”

Amanda leaned into me when she reached across the kitchen table for the tonic. She poured for both of us and handed me the drink. She mouthed the word lime and I jerked my head toward the refrigerator.

“So you didn’t turn off the power.”

“I don’t think so. I’ll call the County Health people. The power’s out?”

“I just turned it back on.”

“Don’t forget to pay LIPA. You got the authority.”

“The cop,” I told Amanda when I hung up.

“The cop?”

“Joe Sullivan. Not really the meatball I thought he was.”

“He’s doing what you want?”

“I got Jimmy Maddox, Regina’s nephew, to sign an autopsy request. Sullivan’s going to get the county coroner to do it for me, which probably took a little pull on his part.”

“That poor woman has to be buried.”

“She doesn’t care,” I started going down one road, then quickly switched to another. “I’m just curious. Got a little itch to scratch. Can’t hurt anything at this point.”

Amanda smiled instead of apologizing, which was a step in the right direction.

“I’m sure. Cheers.”

She took a healthy pull on the gin and tonic. We looked around the inside of my barren little house for a while without saying anything.

“I’d better go,” she said, finally.

“Probably should.”

“I feel better.”

“It’s the proximity of the Little Peconic. Has that effect.”

“Couldn’t be the company.”

Eddie and I watched her get back in the windbreaker. He got a pat on the head before she left. I got a complicated little smile.

The rain grew louder and insinuated itself back into the mood of the room. I put on a sweatshirt and went back out to the screened-in porch so I could sit quietly with Eddie, drink my drink and watch the lousy weather do its best to upset the resolute tranquility of the Little Peconic Bay. After a time the world collapsed into a space defined solely by what I could see through the screens, and for the next few hours a tired, threadbare kind of peace took the place of the flat black anguish somebody had bolted down over my heart.

A heavy gray blanket of fog was lying all over the area when I got up the next morning. The automatic coffee pot was prompt and at the ready. A shower, a shave, a worn pair of jeans and a freshly washed shirt from out of the dryer. Things that make me feel a little less like an animal.

For almost thirty years work would get me out of bed in the morning. It would wake me up before dawn, with all the imperatives of the coming day rioting in the corridors of my nervous system. Sometimes I’d actually bolt upright in bed with a scream choked off in my throat. Usually the transition was slower and more tortured. I’d open my eyes and check the clock. I’d never go back to sleep. I never noticed what the weather was like outside. There was no outside; it was irrelevant. Abby was a blanketed mound on the right side of the bed. I’d be on my second cup of coffee at my desk about the time her alarm went off.

She’d tried a lot of different jobs. They all made her unhappy. Raising our daughter was her defined purpose, and she did the job very well. Our daughter was exquisite. The world loved her. She hated her father, so I didn’t know her very well. I didn’t even know why she hated me, though I could’ve probably figured it out easily enough.

We lived in a large contemporary house in the woods north of Stamford, Connecticut. I drove to work at an engineering center in White Plains, New York. In the early days I was on my dictation machine before I started the car. Later it was the car phone jacked into voice mail. Except for an hour or two at a boxing gym I found in New Rochelle, I worked all day and into the evening without a break, even for meals. I ate frozen bagels and prepared foods heated in a microwave in my office. I drank coffee until I could hear my heart rate fluttering in my ears. All day long I’d count my responsibilities in my head like an obsessive compulsive counting his fingers or the days of the week. Agonies and ambitions streamed through my office, afloat on a river of selfishness and sacrifice. From phone to fax to face I’d hurtle in a vertiginous sprint, breathless and jagged. With the help of one or two other people, I held a slender tether on a twisting angry chaos. Like a bull runner of Pamplona, I knew the beast could turn and gore me at any moment. But I saw no other way.

The building we worked in had a square jaw and was charged with purpose. Our ostensible mission was to give worldwide R&D and engineering support to the company’s manufacturing operations. For some of the employees the goal was to provide a staging area from which to launch elaborate corporate intrigues and sub rosa advancement schemes. I was a lot better at managing the engineering than the politics. Some felt this was my downfall, but that wasn’t really true. A little more political acumen, however, would have helped.

I steered the Grand Prix cautiously through the fog on the way down to the Village. I felt like I was in a submarine. The mist was cold—a winter harbinger. I flicked on the heater for the first time of the season. It smelled like burnt mold. I was glad I was still in a pretty good mood.

The Village municipal offices were on Main Street behind a colonnaded facade that guarded the occupants from the citizenry. The interior smelled like the lobby of an old hotel. The walls were decorated with aerial photos and geographical surveys hung like family portraits over waiting areas and brochure stands. Cops with creaking leather holsters and contractors angling for zoning breaks greeted each other as they passed in the halls. One of them pointed out the stairs that took you down to the Records Department.

A chest-high counter anchored the front of the room. A woman sat at a desk on the other side, looking at a computer screen through the bottom half of her bifocals. Her iron-gray hair was chiseled into a helmet that perched on top of her head. Ceiling-high metal racks, filled with oversized leather binders, stood a few feet from her desk and ran to the back of the room, the end point disappearing into darkness. She ignored me. I waited her out.

“Can we help you with something?”

“I need everything you’ve got on this property in North Sea.”

I slid a slip of paper with Regina Broadhurst’s address written on it across the top of the counter.

She hoisted her wide bottom off the chair and used its mass to propel her up to the counter. She wore a cotton print dress and blocky high-heeled shoes. A bead chain was clipped to the temples of her glasses so they could double as a necklace. She looked at the address and handed it back to me.

“North Sea is in the Town. You’ll have to ask them.”

“They sent me here.”

She looked at me like I was the agent of a hostile power.

“It’s an estate matter. I’m the administrator.” I showed her my credentials. “All I need is the title, deeds, maps, whatever you’ve got.”

“That’s all you need? It’s not in one place. It’ll take some time.”

I wondered what purpose she thought all those records had. Saving them for the Second Coming.

“How long?”

“Well, I don’t know. I haven’t begun to look.”

“Okay. When should I come back?”

“You’re not going to wait? What if I have questions?”

I held my ground.

“All you need to know is that I need copies of everything in this building relating to that address.”

She saw an opening.

“You’ll have to pay for copies.”

“That’s okay.”

“And that will add to the time. You can’t just look at the documents here?”

I looked at the sign on the wall over the counter. It said the Village of Southampton was pleased to promptly provide copies of official documents. Word hadn’t filtered down to the troops.

“They’re not the ones who have to do it,” she said, catching the drift.

“I’ll be happy to go through the files myself, if you’re too busy.”

“We have to do it for you. Can you imagine if people just came in here and went through everything?”

I saw hordes of Long Islanders rampaging through moldy real-estate records.

“Is there anyone else who can help me?”

She snatched the address back out of my hand. “I don’t know why the Town thought this information would be here. Unless it’s in the dated stacks.”

“I don’t know what those are, but I bet that’s where you’ll find what I’m looking for. Let’s see.”

She left me standing at the counter and went off into the tall stands of metal racks. She came back a half-hour later to tell me she needed the rest of the day to do all the copies. I said fine, I’ll be back in the morning. I left her in the glow of her weary indignation and went to the corner place to caffeinate what was left of my good mood.

The fog had risen above the rooftops. Underneath the light was shadowless and diffuse, deepening the color of the red municipal mums tucked around the base of an ancient Village shade tree. I sat on a teak park bench to drink my coffee. The bench had been donated in loving memory of Elizabeth McGill. I thought about the flow of property through successive generations of the dead and their donators. Maybe I should get a bench in honor of Regina Broadhurst. Something hard with a lot of sharp edges, too uncomfortable to spend much time on.

Except for the cottage, all my parents left me was fifty thousand dollars in unpaid nursing home expenses. My sister and I split it. She handed me a check before boarding her plane back to Wisconsin. She told me she was never coming back again. The relief in her voice was deep enough to float an ocean liner. A week later a quitclaim deed to her half of the cottage arrived in the mail—stuck like a bookmark between the pages of a standard King James Bible. I don’t remember the exact psalm that it marked, but it was all about forgiveness. Who in my family was supposed to be forgiving whom, and for what, God only knows.

Joe Sullivan glided by in his police cruiser. He saw me on the bench and pulled into one of the parking slots. I slid my ass over to clear him a spot.

“They’re doin’ it. The coroner,” he said, dropping into the bench. “The autopsy.”

“That’s good.”

“I know a couple people up there. Bunch of ghouls if you ask me. But we need ’em. doin’ me a favor.”

“That was good of you.”

“No biggie. I’ll let you know if there’s anything you should know about.”

I looked over at the side of his face. He was looking across the street at Harbor Trust, Roy and Amanda’s bank.

“Anything at all is what I’m hoping you’ll tell me.”

He looked back at me. Some of the old mix of duty and defiance was sketched across his face. Local guys often have that look. A vague sense of being one of the chosen, born to the South Fork, and yet one of the conquered, bound to the service of a powerful elite— an occupation force who had swept in from the west, taking possession of the land, plundering her gifts.

“We’ll keep you informed,” he said to me.

I felt my face warm despite the cloud cover.

“If there’s ever any reason to look into somebody’s death, you know, if there’s any questions that come up, who does it? I mean, who opens up the case, you?”

“Basically. If there’s any goddam reason to. I go over the situation with my boss, who’ll talk to the Chief, who’ll talk to the DA’s office. They officially tell us to go look a little more. And the day sergeant and administrative lieutenant usually get involved. Then if there’s what you’d call an actual investigation it gets assigned to one of our plainclothesmen.”

“So it’s your call provided three-quarters of the local judicial system say it’s all right, and your role is to hand everything over to other people to do the actual work.”

His rounded jowls turned the color of the Village mums. He slapped his thigh with an open hand as if to drain off the urge to turn it into a fist.

“You can really be a dick sometimes, Mr. Acquillo.”

Anger rose in my throat, but I choked it off. I shook myself like a wet retriever. Shedding heat. I stared at the ground until I knew my voice was level. Sullivan was trying not to breathe too hard. His hands were on his hips, pushing down on the holster belt. I noticed for the first time that he was chewing gum. Probably learned that from the Big Tough Cop Instruction Manual.

“I’m a dick most of the time. Don’t take it personally. It’s this thing with Regina Broadhurst. It’s bugging me.”

“Like how?”

“Are you going to take this seriously?”

He shook his head. Reminded me of a bull shaking off flies.

“I’m trying to.”

“Regina didn’t take baths. She couldn’t get in and out of the bathtub. She always used a walk-in shower.”

“Getting’ dotty. Got confused. Slipped and fell.”

“I knew her. She was clear as a bell. She’d lived with arthritis for a million years. She wouldn’t suddenly forget she had it.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“I don’t know. Maybe she didn’t fall.”

There, I said it. Right in front of God and local law enforcement.

“Oh, come on.”

“I found an industrial strength neoprene plug in the bathroom. It has a series of O-rings to force a tight seal. We had them in the chem lab at work. You’d need something like that to keep the tub full as long as possible. Any fan of long baths will tell you that ordinary bath stoppers are pretty leaky—the water usually runs out in a few hours.”

Sullivan let out a man-sized sigh and sat back on the park bench.

“Doesn’t mean shit. Won’t mean shit to the DA, much less to the Chief. I go to those people talking about a neighbor of a dead old lady who’s worryin’ about a bath plug, they throw me out on my can. We deal with enough crazy shit every day from people we actually have to pay attention to.”

It would be a mistake to underestimate the Southampton Town cops. They covered a big area, and not all of it what you’d expect to find out here. There were some tough little spots filled with hard-case locals and immigrant labor. And the Summer People themselves weren’t all affected fops. Others thought a little money, or the show of money, bought immunity. Especially during the season when the clubs were in full riot. Guys like Sullivan were serious and could handle stuff. But the trouble they knew would tend to come right at them, out in the open where they could see it plain and simple.

“I’m not really asking you to do anything. I’m just talking here.”

He looked relieved.

“Talking’s okay.”

“Not accusing anybody.”

“Accusations, not okay.”

“Doesn’t mean I can’t talk to you once in a while so somebody other than me knows what I’m thinking. Even if it’s nuts.”

“Like I said, talking’s okay.”

“Like getting an autopsy report. No big deal.”

He made a noise and stood up.

“Okay. Jesus, what a pain in the ass,” he said as he walked away, trying to maintain a little obstinacy, keeping the narrow, ill-fed portions of his mind in reserve. The cloud cover broke at about the same instant, and the sun tossed a few splashes of brilliance on the sidewalk to help light his path back to the cruiser.

I spent the late afternoon and evening at the Pequot. I thought it would help me think. Or, better yet, not think at all.

That’d been my plan, if you could call it that, when I moved into my parents’ house. I didn’t have anywhere else to go, or anything else to do. Or, rather, I didn’t want to do anything else. I was expected to find another job, which I probably could have done. Some type of job. I still had a good name in the industry. Outside the management of my own company. Abby had kept me somewhat involved in professional organizations, and in contact with people who could help my career, in her opinion. But I let those contacts lapse.

The divorce from Abby was a sleepwalk. My terms were so generous her lawyer really had nothing to do until I gutted our house, which got things a little livelier. If I’d tried to get work at that point, it might have been harder, but I still had a few friends around the business. They took it on themselves to try on my behalf, but I kept my head down until they went away. I started to really like wearing blue jeans and sweatshirts every day. And once I got to Southampton, all the old links just evaporated. I calculated how long I could live on whatever money was left after the carnage and figured if I kept down expenses I’d almost make it to early retirement age. Or, with a little luck, I’d be dead by then.

Now, four years into it and for the first time I didn’t like the mood I was working myself into. I was getting nervy. It was messing up my sleep, nagging at me in the middle of the night.

Dotty Hodges had the old place under control. She wore a tight T-shirt that rode up above her belly and matched her raven-black hair. Her jeans were cut like pedal pushers, and accentuated a clunky pair of yellow-stitched Doc Martens and blue and white horizontally striped socks.

I ordered the fish of the day without further inquiry and pulled out good old Tocqueville to give it another try. I had a rule not to quit a book after I started it, no matter how daunting it got.

The fish took a long time, but it was delivered by the chef.

“It’s the baked.”

“Great.”

“Bon appétit.”

He let me take a few bites of the fish before interrupting.

“That Miss Filmore’s a hard on, isn’t she?”

“I don’t think I made her happy.”

“It’s like her little empire. Likes to keep things under control.”

“Always been there?”

“Nah, I’ve been through a bunch of directors. Used to be all volunteer till the widow of a guy who’d cashed out his potato farm left money for a professional staff. It’s a good place, though, Sam. Don’t take a broad like Filmore too seriously.”

I got in a few more mouthfuls while he talked. Dotty brought him a beer and refilled my glass.

“Didn’t learn much,” I said.

“I called a few people I know from over there. They’ll ask around. Never know.”

“Thanks, Mr. Hodges,” I told him, pleased.

“Paul.”

“Paul.”

“You spooked her with that thing about recent deaths.”

“Didn’t mean to.”

“She thought you were Social Services heat.”

“Nope. Just nosy.”

He took some time out to drink his beer and let me finish my meal. Dotty swept up the plates the moment I put down my fork and recharged our drinks. It struck me she liked seeing her father talk to somebody. That it was me showed how out of touch with people Hodges probably was. Would’ve given my own daughter a good laugh.

“I did find out a few things, though” said Hodges. “I was hoping you’d come in so I could tell you.”

“Really.”

“Regina and Mrs. Anselma hated each other’s guts. It was like a blood feud, some thought, only way below the surface. You know, act all civil with each other, but the air’s filled with little invisible daggers.”

“That fits.”

“It fits with Broadhurst, but Mrs. Anselma wasn’t that way. A sweet lady, refined. You know, maybe a little higher class, but everybody liked her. Never had a bad word for nobody but Regina, who she’d stick it to whenever she got the chance.”

“Raised a daughter on her own.”

Hodges was warming to his subject.

“Yeah, well, that’s the other interesting thing. No dad in the picture. Ever. Back then this wasn’t something that went unnoticed. But Mrs. Anselma was such a class act nobody’d talk her down, though it sorta hung around her all the time.”

“Amanda. The daughter. Married Roy Battiston.”

“I knew most of the Battistons. Lowlifes.”

“You think?”

He raised his hand.

“Just an opinion. Shouldn’t say that kind of thing about people.” He glanced over at Dotty. “I just never liked them much. Used to be a passel of them livin’ year round in an old summer colony in Noyac. All the houses up on cinder blocks. Shacks is what they were.”

“Roy runs the local Harbor Trust.”

“No shit. Must’ve got the brains in the family.”

“Must’ve,” I agreed. “So you knew him.”

“Yeah, though mostly his family. I crewed with his uncle and grandfather out of Montauk. They were serious hard cases. Only worked off and on. Construction labor. Pumping gas. Cheating County Welfare. Kind of like me, without the style.”

“Amanda said Roy worked his way out of it.”

“Roy didn’t talk much. Big fat serious kid. Looked like a bed-wetter to me. But yeah, hard worker. Stuck to himself. Stayed clear of his grandfather’s backhand. Grandmother was no better. Big-time drunk. Had a huge rosy face—nose full of busted capillaries. Beautiful people.”

“Including his mother?”

“Oh yeah, Judy Battiston. Worked at the Anchorage for years. Another drinker. Anybody that could stand her could take her home. Ended up at the 7-Eleven. Pretty sad.”

Hodges waited a moment before adding, “Now they’re all dead.”

“Who?”

“The Battistons. The whole clan. Including his mother. Everybody but Roy.”

He had to leave after that to look after the other customers. I was able to concentrate on forgetting about everything but my vodka and Alexis de Tocqueville, who was having a great time boppin’ around the old U.S. I guess I could see some relevance to the country that’s here now, but a lot of it seemed alien. I wondered if he ever made it to the Hamptons. Would have found a bunch of hard-nosed Yankee farmers and a few beat-up Indians. And the Bonnikers crabbing like they still do over in Springs. Oceanfront was where you grazed cattle.

Hodges came back at the end of the night and settled in at my table like I’d invited him. The old bastard was growing on me a little, I had to admit.

Not that I was looking for a friend. I never had a lot of friends in the first place, and since moving to the cottage I’d kept to myself. Friends were another thing I wasn’t very good at. Probably why I got a dog.

When I was a kid my only friend enlisted in the Army to avoid going to jail for car theft. He and I used to borrow expensive convertibles from used-car lots and bomb around the South Fork like we were rich city kids. I did the hot wiring and he did the driving, so when the cops were chasing us he was the one who slowed down just enough to let me jump out of the car. I landed in a sandbank covered in wild roses and he sped away. They caught him trying to swim across Mecox Bay, the front end of the convertible nearly submerged in the stony bay beach.

The only hitch in the enlistment idea was he had a genuine phobia of guns. His father was a hunter and had decided the only way to cure his son’s fear was to take him deer hunting in Connecticut. The woods were full of deer, so there was ample opportunity to get the rifle stock up to his shoulder, but he couldn’t get his finger to pull the trigger. By the third try, the old man lost his temper. He started to yell. The kid yelled back. The old man yanked the rifle out of the kid’s hands and slammed the butt into his face. Inexplicably, the old man’s thumb had slipped into the trigger guard, so the cocked rifle went off right at the moment of impact. The recoil knocked the kid out, so he didn’t see the heavy deer shot blow his father’s face off. He only saw the results when he woke up a few hours later, half dead himself from a huge gash in his forehead.

The recruitment officer, having literally heard it all, promised the kid he could enlist as a medic, stationed in Germany, and would never have to carry a gun. Half the promise was kept. He was trained as a medic, and up until an hour before he boarded the transport he assumed he was going to get a chance to learn German.

He drank all the way to Saigon and watched a fire-fight light up the skies as they landed that night. Two days later, he was in the front seat of a jeep in a small convoy winding along a jungle road on the way to an ARVN firebase somewhere near the western border. They were behind a canvas-covered deuce and a half. Another jeep leading the convoy was the only other vehicle, since the road was supposed to be secure. That was why the machine gunner sitting behind the kid had his M-60 stowed at his feet, with the bandoleers safely packed in boxes in the back of the deuce. Not that he could have done anything about the sniper who shot him through the throat.

That night the kid slept with the machine gunner’s blood in his hair and an M-16, his regular issue Colt .45 and a half-dozen ammo bags full of clips snuggled up next to his body like a child’s stuffed animals.

He got plenty of opportunity to use it all, right up to the moment the Vietcong ripped him to pieces while he was trying to stuff a Huey full of wounded grunts. That was near the beginning of his second re-up. He was pretty badly strung out on heroin by then and had forgotten that there was a place called Long Island he could come home to.

My mother got me one of the last deferments you could get for having a dead father. I almost enlisted anyway, thinking I could wrangle school money out of the deal. She fought me on it. Said if I went in I’d never get my degree. Her interference bothered me at the time, since she’d never interfered with anything I’d ever done before. I tried to thank her later on, but she’d forgotten about Vietnam by then, along with everything else.

When I got home Eddie was passed out on my bed on the screened-in porch, snoring. I had to wake him up. Fearless watchdog. But he was glad to see me and glad to get outside.

I had a nightcap and watched Eddie under the moonlight, running the yard, securing the perimeter. It was bright and clear enough to light up the bay so you could see all the way across to Southold. Some lights were still lit over on Nassau Point and Hog’s Neck, full of guys on porches, staring back into the mysteries of the Little Peconic Bay.

In the morning I called my personal banker.

“Amanda Battiston.”

“Hi. It’s Sam. On official business.”

“Ready to open that investment account?”

“And plunge Wall Street into chaos?”

“I’m ready when you are.”

“I need everything you got on Regina’s account.”

“We have her account?”

“I got the checks to prove it. I want to cash one to pay her bills. Keep the lights on. I need to know how much she’s got. If there’re any other accounts. Savings, or one of your aggressively promoted investment accounts. Any account history as detailed as you can give me. I have one box of canceled checks, which I’m guessing goes back a few years. I haven’t found her checkbook, so current stuff is important. I need to know what obligations she’s got, premiums, taxes, that kind of thing. Do you take pictures of checks from other banks that are deposited?”

“I don’t think so. Theymight record the bank code. I can ask. This could take a little time.” There was a pause. “I’m trying to write it all down.”

“I appreciate it.”

“I’ll need an original death certificate and a copy of whatever says you’re the administrator of the estate.”

“I got that.”

“If there’s a safety-deposit box the Town attorney might have to be there when we open it up.”

“Okay. Whatever you got.”

“I don’t think I ever saw her in here.”

“I think Regina ran everything out of her mailbox. The flag was up all the time. Didn’t drive. Cabbed or took the Senior Center shuttle to the IGA, unless she could nag me into getting her groceries.”

“You’d do that?”

“Occasionally.”

“That’s sweet.”

“Nothing relating to Regina was sweet. Least of all me.”

“No safety-deposit. No investments, no savings account. Just one checking. Originally opened in 1987, which was the year Harbor Trust bought out East End Savings and Loan, so it could be a much older account.”

“That was fast.”

“We have computers.”

“How much she got?”

“If you’re planning to abscond to Mexico you won’t get far. Eight thousand, two hundred and sixty-seven.”

“Dollars?”

“Not pesos.”

“Deposits?”

“One thousand, fifty-two dollars and thirty-five cents deposited, let me see,” I heard the keyboard tap, “every month for the last twelve months, which is all I can pull up on this computer.”

“Social Security.”

“Looks from the balances like she basically washed it all out every month paying bills. Thirty-two, eighty-one, fifty-five. Here’s one back in May for two hundred and eighty-three. Nothing bigger than that.”

“What’s the number on the last check she wrote?”

“Six two oh four.”

I wrote it down.

“Nothing bigger than two hundred and eighty-three dollars?”

“No. I’m looking.”

“Like in January or June?”

“No.”

“No property taxes.”

“Wouldn’t tell me that, but I wouldn’t say so from the size of the checks.”

“Lived on about twelve thousand a year.”

“I’ve done it on less,” she said.

“Yeah, but not with Regina’s lavish lifestyle.”

“Which was financed by tax evasion?”

“She didn’t pay property taxes.”

“She must have paid it some other way.”

“No. Didn’t have to pay because she didn’t own the house.”

“A rental?”

“I’m not sure. Can you give me hard copies of all that stuff?”

“If I ask Roy.”

“I appreciate it.”

“He’s back in the City tomorrow.”

“Busy boy.”

“I’ve got the day off.”

“Me, too.”

There was another pause on the other end.

“I’m going to start my day off by walking on the beach. I usually park at Little Plains.”

“Must be pretty in the morning.”

“At nine in the morning the sun’s still fresh, but the mist is lifting. My favorite time.”

“I bet it’s possible you’ll be bringing along a stack of account records belonging to Regina Broadhurst.”

“Not my normal routine, but the chances are good.”

“Well, thanks for your help. Hope you have a good day tomorrow.”

“I’m guessing I will.”

Eddie was looking at me when I hung up the phone.

“What.”

He didn’t answer.

“I know. Stupid.”

When I went to bed it was unseasonably warm and humid. At 8:45 the next morning the air had switched back to clean and clear, with a steady offshore breeze blowing in cool dry Canadian air. I was sitting on the petrified remnants of an old wooden breakwater and looking out at the ocean. The wind was knocking the tops off the waves before they broke on shore, sending up a foamy spray that the sun lit into slivers of pale gray glass. The rim of my Yankees cap was pushed down low to keep the hat from blowing off my head. I was wearing clip-on sunglasses over my wire rims and had the collar of my jean jacket pulled up around my neck. The overall effect made me feel undercover. It was working with the seagulls flying overhead— none of them seemed to recognize me.

Behind me were low dunes covered in feathery dune grass that the wind combed into a green pompadour. Behind the dunes were shingle-style mansions spaced every three to four acres—mountainous houses dressed up with terraced balconies, octagonal windows and colonnaded porches. Mostly empty this time of year, they faced the ferocious sea and never blinked.

I watched her walk out on the beach from a path that led between the dunes. She stopped when she saw me and looked surprised, acting out the part. As she started walking again, the dry sand forced her hips to swing outside their normal arc. She wore a beat-up gold barn jacket, a white silk blouse, jeans and sunglasses. Her thick hair flared back from a hand-painted silk scarf tied around her head. I sat still and silent as I watched her approach. Still incognito.

She walked right up to me and stood there enriching the beauty of the beach.

“You.”

“Me,” I said back, still stumped for words.

“It’s nice, isn’t it?” She looked out at the ocean for confirmation.

In profile, lit by the sun’s glare off the sea, the lines that defined her cheek and jaw looked crisper than I’d remembered them. I realized those lines were usually hidden behind heavy reddish-brown waves of hair. The wind was now sweeping it back from her face, clearing the decks. I liked the symmetrical proportions. Her skin was even smoother and more richly tinted than I’d noticed under the fluorescent lights of the bank or in my dimly lit house. It began to dawn on me that Amanda Battiston was actually a very beautiful woman. I don’t why it took that long. Maybe she’d been shrouded within a translucent veil that prevented me from seeing what she really looked like. And now, under the autumn light, everything was revealed.

“What?”

“Very nice. The ocean.”

“You weren’t looking at the ocean.”

“Yes I was. Out of the corner of my eye. You can’t tell with my clip-on sunglasses.”

She smirked.

“They’re actually kind of cute. Your sunglasses.”

“Fifty-two-year-old ex-prizefighters can’t be cute. Puppies are cute.”

She looked skeptical.

“Prizefighter?”

“Well, sort of. Sounds more impressive than it is.”

“That’s why your nose is a little off to the side?”

“That’s why.”

“Ouch.”

“That’s what I said at the time.”

“I was never a prizefighter.”

“And not always a personal banker, I’m guessing.”

She still smiled, a little less firmly.

“No. I did some other things.”

“Me, too. I improved the fuel efficiency of your Audi Quattro and sired the only perfect female to ever trod the earth.”

“Next to me.”

“I’ll take that up with your father.”

“Can’t now. He’s been dead for a while.”

“So you can be the only other perfect female. By default.”

She sat down next to me on the old bulkhead.

“Finally, perfection. And still young enough to enjoy it.”

I felt her shoulder through the various layers of denim, suede and cotton that separated us. All my nerve endings must have traveled over there for the occasion.

“You’re right,” she said. “You’re not cute. Cute’s a demeaning term to apply to a fifty-two-year-old anything. You are, however, something that has been disturbing my sleep.”

“Medication’ll fix that.”

“I haven’t been entirely honest with you,” she said abruptly, like I always did when I was having a hard time getting to the point.

“You don’t have to be even partially honest with me. You don’t owe me anything.”

She was focusing on the soft straight line of the horizon. Probably helped keep her level.

“Look,” I said to her before she could speak again, “some people think, female people usually, that you can’t properly know someone unless you spill your guts all over the place and reveal every goddam thing you ever thought, felt or did.”

“I suppose that’s true.”

“Doesn’t have to be. Frankly, I think a keen sense of privacy, emotional atrophy and repression, especially as regards personal history, are highly underrated behaviors.”

A bright little laugh popped out of her.

“Where did they make you, anyway?”

“In the Bronx. I think people pile their past up in these big emotional landfills where they decompose and produce nothing but toxic emissions. Personally, I’m working at shooting all that stuff out into space. I don’t want it anymore. I don’t want mine, I don’t want yours.”

She looked toward me and pulled back—maybe to see me better through her sunglasses.

“You can’t forget your whole life. Why live it in the first place?”

“No reason I can think of.”

“Maybe you don’t want to.”

Now I got to laugh.

“Jesus, this is exactly the kind of shit I’m trying not to talk about.”

“You started it.”

“I did?”

“Because you thought I was going to say something. Maybe I wasn’t.”

I loved the way the waves were breaking under the offshore breeze. Tidy, well-organized curls. Good surfing waves, especially for Long Island.

“I like you, Amanda. But I’m really not what you’re looking for. Whatever that is. I tend to end in disappointment.”

I felt a subtle increase of pressure at the point where our two shoulders touched. Maybe a millionth of a psi. She was also looking intently at the ocean. The two of us, sitting there side by side. Nobody talked for a while.

“Okay,” she said, finally.

“Okay what?”

“Okay, I understand. Here.”

She stood up, brushed off her butt and pulled an overstuffed, sealed number ten envelope from the inside pocket of her barn jacket. She sort of tapped me on the forehead with it before she put it in my hand.

“Copies of her last twelve statements. That’s all I have. Anything older would be buried in old microfiche from the original bank, if it exists at all.”

She started walking back to the path through the dunes. I followed her, feeling a little off balance walking across the dry sand. Probably what she intended.

When I came up over the slot in the dunes I saw her Audi and the Grand Prix. Along with a big black BMW 740 IL sedan parked there looking invincible and overpriced. Apparently it came with a matching guy in a long black leather duster, black peg-legged pants and motorcycle boots. Even his hair was black as an oil slick. Only the half ton of gold wrapped around a meaty pinkie introduced a touch of color. Any other beach he’d look out of place, but this was Long Island. He was leaning against his car, staring at Amanda.

She acted like she didn’t notice him. I acted like I did, looking him straight in the eye to pull his attention away from her. When he finally looked, it was like eyeballing a black bear. Only less sentient.

I moved a little quicker so I could escort Amanda to her Audi. She probably thought I was being chivalrous holding her door—she had that awkward, shy smile back on her face.

When I went to get into the Grand Prix, the trained bear was leaning up against my driver’s side door. I took my hands out of the pockets of my jean jacket and approached him without hesitation. I wondered what kind of traction I’d get from the old Adidas Countries I had on my feet.

I stood there and waited for him to move. I didn’t say anything, and neither did he. Amanda was busy backing out of her space, and wasn’t noticing anything. After only a few seconds he shrugged, like we’d just wrapped up a long conversation, and moved out of the way. I waited until he was outside cold-cock range and climbed into my car. My hand shook a little when I put the key in the ignition. Adrenaline.

I made a wider than necessary arc when I backed out of my space so I could align the rear bumper of the Grand Prix with the BMW’s. I looked at the guy when I gave his car just the gentlest little tap, the armored-car-gauge chrome of the Grand Prix thumping wetly into the polymer composite that tucked around the ass of the BMW. He didn’t seem to mind. He just looked at me with a pair of eyes that would have cooled off a ski slope. They were pinched tight to the bridge of his nose, then angled off to the outside of his face. I couldn’t tell if they’d grown that way naturally or been mashed into place. Either way, they showed no affect. He just stood there and looked.

By this time, Amanda was long gone. A little red warning light went on somewhere way in the back of my head. But like we usually did with those things back in the plant control rooms, I ignored it, hoping it would shut itself off again.