Nantucket Sawbuck (5 page)

I found him lying on the floor under a desk, taking apart a hard-drive tower. “I can't fix this thing and I can't afford a new one. Time to fire someone I guess. What the hell, they're all useless anyway. I just made coffee. Grab yourself a cup.”

I poured myself some and took a sip. Perfect as usual. “Congratulations on the prizes,” I said.
The Shoals
had just won various awards from the New England Newspaper Association: best editorial content, best single editorial, best political coverage and a few others.

David shook his head. “Thanks anyway, but they don't mean much. My category is newspapers with circulation under five thousand. You can imagine what the competition at that level. It's not the Olympics, Chief. More like the Special Olympics.”

I had to laugh. “Hey, it was still front page news in your paper last week.”

David poured himself more coffee. “I'm shameless. What can I say?” He took a sip. “So you pulled Lomax over tonight.”

“I ought to confiscate that scanner.”

“It's legal, Chief.”

“I know.”

“So was it a DUI?”

“It was his wife. She was speeding.” I put the mug down on a paper-strewn desk. “How did you know it was them? I never mentioned the name.”

“You called in the license number.”

I shook my head. “You're obsessed.”

“And you arrested the two boys tonight, also. I heard you telling Barnaby Toll to get a pair of cells ready. Quite an evening for the Lomax clan.”

“It's pathetic. All the money in the world …”

“Money is like gout—or syphilis. The eating and the sex are fun, but too much of them make you sick and the disease is fatal if it goes untreated.” He took another swallow. “Kathleen's all right though. The daughter? At least so far. She worked for me summers when she was at college. That's how her dad found out about Nantucket in the first place. Yeah. I guess it's my fault. She's a hard worker, smart and funny. She was cleaning up the mess around here one night—paper plates and takeout coffee cups and frozen burritos. She said, ‘I don't want to come to work tomorrow in the middle of yesterday.' That stuck with me. I guess there's one kid in every fucked up family who turns out okay. Though with Preston Lomax for your father…I don't know. It seems like a miracle.”

“You have to ease up on that guy, David. Seriously.”

“Actually, no. It's just the opposite, Chief. I should be much tougher on him. Your problem is, you deal with stupid people and violent people and greedy people all the time and so that's all you ever look for. You don't expect to see evil and you don't recognize it when it's right in front of you. That's how Hitler came to power. No one could quite believe it.”

“So Lomax is Hitler?”

“Give him an army and a political agenda and yeah. But all he cares about is money. Smart guys know taking over the world is more than trouble than it's worth. A leveraged buy-out is so much easier.”

“Well, until he commits an actual crime, you'll have to settle for the occasional speeding ticket.”

“Fully prosecute all minor infractions. Sounds like a philosophy of life.”

“Well, until I can single-handedly correct the moral balance of the universe, it'll have to do.”

He shrugged. “Fair enough.”

We finished our coffee and I left. Driving home, I saw a car with its lights out. I flashed my high beams at them and their headlights came on. It reminded me of a trick the street gangs were playing for a while in Los Angeles, just before I left the city. They would drive dark, and if some helpful person flashed their lights, they'd shoot him.

It was good to be away from that madness, the constant expectation of random violence like a cut high tension wire, snaking along the street, vomiting sparks. I was finally starting to relax. When I got home I paused for a moment on the doorstep, listening to the breathing silence of the tiny island, thirty miles out at sea.

The overture was over.

The show was about to start.

Chapter Four

Poor Relations

Nathan Parrish was rich and he looked it. He was smart and he knew it. He was smug and he didn't care. He enjoyed annoying people. At the moment he was annoying his wife, who was sitting as far to the other side of the front seat as she possibly could. She had been lovely once, but after four kids she was starting to let her looks go. Nathan loved to needle her and she invariably provided him with opportunities. Today she seemed to be lobbing them his way.

“I think Sally Trusdale looks fabulous these days,” she offered, as they turned off the Milestone Road onto a dirt track that twisted through dense brush toward the center of the island. “She's lost so much weight.”

Nathan laughed. “You kill me, you really do. Women. You all rag on the beauties. You know: Kate Moss is too thin, Cristy Turlington is so
gangly,
Cindy Crawford is losing her looks—”

“Well, she is.”

“Right. And she could lose more looks than most women ever had and still have plenty to spare. And both of us know it. But you talk about someone like Sally Trusdale who could have financed a Third World country with what she's spent on fad diets and plastic surgery, and she still looks like a pig eating pizza, and you say, ‘Ohhh, she's looking so
good
these days.' And I've finally figured out why.”

“I can't wait to hear.”

“You don't like the setup. You hate the fact that the beautiful ones get it all and the dogs get dog food. You try to even it up with comments like that bullshit about Sally. As if your opinion could make everything more democratic and fair. So just stuff a sock in it, Honey. Because it doesn't work, all right? No matter what you say and how nice you are, ugly is ugly and doesn't make it. Gorgeous is gorgeous and everyone knows.” He stamped on the brakes. “We're here.”

Nathan climbed out into the frigid air. Carla stayed inside. He pulled the map out of his pocket, along with the antique deed and the Indian quitclaim, as he climbed to the top of the rise. He could see the car below him, its exhaust snapped away by the wind. He could see the ocean on all sides and the spires of town in the distance. The map rattled in the gusty wind. Just there, about fifty yards away southwest, that would be one border. No bogs, no wetlands, no problems. Just forty sweet acres of prime Nantucket real estate. Right now it was conservation land, purchased through the Land Bank. But he had the documents to prove that the old geezer who sold it to the conservation foundation hadn't really owned it. The title had been clouded even then, but old man Bradford was threatening to sell it to someone else, so everyone had moved fast and hoped no one would look too closely into the history of the parcel.

Unfortunately for them, that was what Nathan Parrish did for a living. He poked into things and he looked very closely at what he found. In this case he had found the last living relative of the original Indian owners, and documented the connections. Then he offered the man a hundred thousand dollars. The day before, the poor bastard hadn't even known he owned property. The guy had been contemplating bankruptcy. So he had taken the hundred thousand in cash and left Nathan with his notarized quitclaim and a deed that five lawyers had assured him would stand up to any attack in the Boston land court. It had taken two years and about ten times what he had paid for the actual property in time spent and legal fees and deals he had turned down to do it. But so what? He owned a piece of the rock. Forty acres of it, to be exact.

And he was going to bring a much-needed taste of the mainland here. As soon as jcpenney and K-Mart signed their leases he would be ready to start construction on his greatest project ever—the Moorlands Mall. Thirty great stores under one roof, with two acres of free parking. The idea of paving over all these deer-tick infested brambles and stunted pine trees made his heart light. They ought to pave this whole island. Why not? After all, Manhattan was just dirt and bushes once, too.

He knew what his sister would say. He was “raping the island.”

Well, maybe that was the approach to use with the HDC and the Board of Selectmen, once he had them under his thumb completely, give them the advice they used to give women about actual rape. When it becomes inevitable, just lie back and enjoy it.

He barked a laugh into the wind. He couldn't wait to see their overstuffed, pink proper New England faces when he told them that! He was still laughing about it when he got back to the car. Carla asked why he was laughing and he told her, but she didn't think it was funny.

Typical woman, he thought. No sense of humor at all.

***

At that moment Nathan's sister, Cindy Henderson, was sitting behind the counter of the Adnan Mevlana boutique on Centre Street, listening to rich women in fur coats who complained about the prices, thinking all the time,
I hate my life, I hate my life, I hate my life
. It was a chant, a mantra, the focus of her meditation as she studied her mistakes.

Coming to Nantucket was the primary one. She had been a fool to imagine that her day-to-day life as an adult would relate in any way to the idyllic haven where she had spent her summers as a child. Her parents had been rich, so she had been rich. She had taken it for granted. But the big house on Cliff Road had been sold long ago. Her parents vacationed in Mexico now. And Cindy was in a different world. Her husband, Mike, liked to imagine they were middle-class, but it was hard to maintain that notion when the official poverty line income on the island was forty-two thousand dollars, and a painting contractor barely survived from customer to customer, never knowing where the next job was coming from.

They would have lost their house months ago if not for the Lomax job. She stepped away from the counter to straighten some sweaters left in disarray by the last group of ladies. She was sick of thinking about Mr. Lomax, sick of thinking about Mike's work, sick of her customers, sick of her job, sick of the wet cold weather and the northeast wind. Most of all, she was sick of thinking about what she had discovered this morning.

She felt as if there was no one on Earth she could bear to see right now—any human contact would chafe against her like wool on a rash.

Then Police Chief Henry Kennis walked in.

Chief Kennis was tall and good looking, too good looking for his small town job. He still wore some residue of his years in California on his face. It was attractively weather-beaten, as if he had done a lot of smiling into the desert wind. He had never adjusted to his height; he moved with the lingering awkwardness of an adolescent. Cindy could easily imagine every woman in life, from his mother to his ex-wife Miranda, constantly badgering him to stand up straight. But Cindy found his slouch endearing. She was glad to see him, even today.

“Hi, Cindy,” he said. “Feeling all right?”

“Now I am. How are the kids?”

“Well, it's Christmas, so they're happy. They've finally figured out that I'm Santa. We're done with all that ‘Hey, you use the same wrapping paper as Santa Claus' stuff. They busted me last year and now the pressure's off.”

“Bruno Bettelheim says it's a huge part of growing up—solving that mystery.”

“Yeah? Well, they're growing up fast, then.”

“They take after their dad.”

“There aren't too many mysteries to solve around here, Cindy. That's what I like about it.”

Henry was a small town cop, a single dad, and an unpublished poet. It seemed like a bleak existence to Cindy, but the chief was happy. One day the winter before, when the flu had decimated the police force, Henry was directing traffic around some road construction. She was first in line as the traffic cleared in the other direction, fretting about her bills and a new cold sore on her lip. Henry was standing in the windy sleet, whistling a Scott Joplin piano rag. She had rolled down her window and called out to him, “My dad says people who whistle just got money.”

“Not me.”

“Why are you so happy, then?”

“Look up. Check out the sky,” he said.

“The sky makes you happy?”

“Have you looked at it?”

“I don't understand.”

“The sky, Cindy. It's right up there—you can't miss it.”

So she had craned her neck out the car window, and stared up into a dramatic panorama of storm clouds rimmed with sun and pierced by great shafts of light in the east and those same clouds, torn to rags by the wind and revealing the blue sky behind them, in the west.

She realized that she never actually looked at the sky in the course of a normal day, not this way. She'd check for rain clouds if she were heading to the beach. But that was all.

“It's like…art,” she said.

“And it's free. Grab a peek while you can. It'll be different in an hour.”

“But…what about gray days? Or when it's just plain blue?”

There was a note of disappointment in the chief's voice: “It's never just plain blue, Cindy.”

Then it was her turn to drive and he waved her through.

She had looked at the sky a lot since then, but she still didn't understand.

“I think I'd like some furry slippers for Fiona to wear around the house in the mornings,” Chief Kennis was saying now. “She's always in her sock feet and those floors are cold.”

Two more women came into the store while she was rummaging for the slippers. This was the busy season, but the Mevlana people would never let her hire an assistant. She glanced up at the new arrivals. “Hello,” she said.

The taller one, with the knee length steel-gray down parka, the fake blonde hair, and the tight expensive face that must have been a cruel mockery of her original features, just stared at Cindy.

“Don't you mean—‘Can I help you?'”

Cindy controlled the urge to slap the woman. “No, actually. You're on your own.”

She bagged the slippers. Henry paid for them and left. The women started grazing through the bins of sweaters and the racks of dresses.

The chief was a comforting presence, but she always felt inadequate around him. There was some central current of life and he was drifting along with it. Cindy couldn't find it with infrared satellite photography and a navigational chart. He was content, but she needed things, the things she'd given up when she came here—her music, her painting, her master's thesis—all the things she didn't have the time or the energy for now. She had occasionally consoled herself thinking it can't get any worse, but things could always get worse. As her dad used to say, “You can't win them all. But you actually can lose them all.”

***

This morning's news had confirmed that. She had taken the test twice, two days in a row, first thing in the morning, according to the instructions. She had seen the double blue line both times. There was no doubt anymore. Between the condoms, the birth control pills, the IUD, and the spermicidal creams, it should have been physically impossible. But after years of discarded scratch tickets and losing lottery numbers, she and Mike had finally beat the odds.

“I'm pregnant,” she said to herself for the twentieth time that day.

And then she started crying in front of two ladies from Short Hills with matching mink coats and American Express Gold Cards.