The Orphans of Race Point: A Novel (25 page)

“Hello?” Hallie repeated, resting her hand protectively against her abdomen. “Who the hell is in my house?”

Chapter 24

T
he only answer was a slow
but determined creak of the stairs. Hallie was looking around the attic, searching for hiding places when she spotted the life-size painting propped in the corner. Wolf, who’d always considered it a failure, had faced it toward the wall. The intruder paused on the second-floor landing. Hallie held herself taut, thinking that he—and she was sure it was a
he
by the weight of his footsteps—must have been lured to the house by the paintings, which had been advertised in the paper.

She scanned the room, wishing her father or Wolf had kept a gun. She imagined herself bursting forth to defend Wolf’s work, the impassioned swirls and furious dashes of color that would be all her daughter would ever know of her paternal grandfather. But there was no gun, and if there had been, Hallie wouldn’t have known how to use it.

She was startled when the narrow door to the attic staircase opened and the visitor continued to climb to the top floor. The only exit was by the roof, and even the rusted iron ladder that Gus had ascended the first time they kissed was long gone. Heart banging against her ribs, she slipped behind the painting and made herself as still and small as possible.

The intruder strode to the middle of the room and then pulled a string, casting the chaotic space into sharp relief with a hundred-watt bulb. Hallie waited for his next move, but there was none. No movement. No words. Not even the clearing of a throat. The only sound Hallie heard was the low whisper of her unwanted visitor’s breathing. What kind of burglar broke into a house and made his way up three flights of stairs, only to stop dead in the middle of the attic?

Hallie’s first thought was that it might be the annoying Lunes Oliveira, come back to torment her one more time. Or maybe it was one of the thwarted early birds, returning to take revenge on a seller who had denied them the pleasure of sifting through her father’s things. Both possibilities infuriated her so much that they banished her fear.

She poked her head cautiously out from behind the painting and found herself staring directly into a familiar pair of gray eyes darkened by indignation.

“
Sam?
What the hell?” she said, clutching her chest as she stepped forward. “You just about scared me to death. Why didn’t you answer?” She attempted a relieved laugh but was cut short by her husband’s implacable stillness.

“You
should
be scared,” he said, indicating the door he had entered with the flat of his hand. “Jesus, Hallie. Anyone could have walked in and cornered you up here. I can’t believe you didn’t even lock the door.”

“What are you doing on the Cape?” Hallie shot back guiltily. “Don’t you have an eight-o’clock class in the morning?”

Sam continued to glare at her. “You know exactly what I’m doing here. I called you at least fifty times today—and that was before you turned off the phone.”

“So you drove all the way . . . Oh, God, I’m sorry. I’m
so
sorry. There’s no excuse, but coming home was a lot harder than I expected,” Hallie said. “I just . . . I needed some time to process—”

“And you couldn’t have picked up the phone? Am I such an insensitive prick that you couldn’t talk to me about it?”

“Of course not, but—”

“But
shit.
If you didn’t want to talk to me directly, you could have at least left a message. Let me know you were safe.”

“I thought of that, but it felt like the coward’s way out,” Hallie said weakly.

“And not responding to my calls at all—that’s your idea of courage?”

Hallie sunk down onto one of her mother’s old boxes. “I was trying to figure out how I was going to explain what I’d done. I canceled the estate sale this morning, Sam.”

“That’s the least of what you did.”

“You know about the house! But how—?”

“I called the attorney this afternoon.”

“And he told you? Isn’t there such a thing as client confidentiality anymore?”

“I’m your husband, Hallie. Or did you forget that once you crossed the town line? Williams assumed I knew.”

“I know we agreed to sell the house, Sam. But when I saw that crowd swoop in to pick Nick’s bones this morning, I just couldn’t go through with it. I know it’s crazy, but this place, his outdated medical books, the mug he drank his coffee from—they’re all I have left of him.”

Sam turned off the light, allowing the moon to outline them as he pulled up a box beside her. “Not true,” he said more gently. He placed his broad flat palm over her chest and kept it there. “Not true.”

Hallie covered his hand with her own. “I’m sorry,” she repeated.

“I know you are.” Sam smiled for the first time since he’d arrived. “And I’m sorry, too. I didn’t realize how much I scared you when I came in till I saw your face. I was just so pissed, so goddamn frantic . . .”

Hallie nodded. “I love you.” She leaned forward to hug him, and as she did, she saw a rectangle of dusky sky. Apparently she’d left the door leading to the roof unlatched and it had swung open.

“The wind must have blown that door open,” she said. “Maybe before you leave, you can nail it shut.”

H
allie met the only man who’d
interested her in years in the most unlikely of circumstances: at the reading of a will. Wolf’s will, to be exact. It was two months after Nick had taken the grim hike out to the painter’s shack and discovered his body that Nick and Hallie were summoned to the office of an attorney named Warren Kennett.

When she received the letter informing her that she had been named a beneficiary, Hallie was a first-year medical resident living in Boston’s Mission Hill. She traced Wolf’s real name with her fingers as she recited it out loud several times to her roommate, Abby.

“John Samson Maddox. I thought I knew him so well. I even used to tell people he was my uncle, and I never even knew his name,” Hallie said, thinking of the hours she’d spent watching him work, thrilled as the vibrant splashes of color that at first seemed arbitrary and unrelated gradually recreated what she and Gus called the beach at the end of the world.

The attorney’s office was a room of mahogany and glass, with Persian rugs and traditional paintings on the walls. Hallie’s first thought was how much Wolf would have hated it.

Warren Kennett shook Nick’s hand, and nodded toward Hallie in a way she thought condescending. Though she only had two hours off from the hospital, she was wearing a short black skirt and an oversized sweater borrowed from the more fashionable Abby, with her own favorite plum-colored boots. She’d even taken the trouble to blow her hair straight. Now she wished she had shown up in her scrubs.

It was only then that she noticed the man who was already there. He rose politely.

“Sam Maddox,” he said, extending his hand before Kennett had a chance to introduce him. “Your friend Wolf’s son.”

“
Wolf’s
son?
” Hallie and Nick blurted out simultaneously.

“But Wolf didn’t . . . I mean he
couldn’t
have—” Hallie stammered. “He didn’t even believe in
involvements.
” But as she spoke, she thought of the vague rumors she and Nick had never believed.

“
Hallie!
” her father muttered under his breath. She wasn’t sure if he was correcting her for her bluntness or the inappropriate length of her stare.

Hallie blushed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . . it’s just—well, all these years—”

“No need to apologize,” the son said graciously. “I’m well aware of my father’s aversion to human relationships. I hadn’t seen him since I was five.”

If that troubled him, he gave no sign of it. Hallie immediately decided that the man couldn’t possibly be related to Wolf. He was as self-contained and formal as Wolf was gruff and awkward. Even physically they were opposites. Wolf was tall and gaunt, while his son met her gaze levelly. Everything about him suggested solidity, from his body type to the equanimity of his expression.

Hallie couldn’t help but notice, however, that he had his father’s eyes. The same shade of gray, the same laser-like focus. She wondered if he was trying to escape her stare when he positioned his seat slightly behind them—where he could observe their reactions, but they were not privy to his.

“I don’t mean to rush things,” he said. “But I have some business to take care of while I’m in the city. Do you think we could get started?”

Hallie cast a furtive glance backward, trying to figure out if his voice was calm or just cold.

The will was simple and straightforward. All of Wolf’s financial assets, which included a boring complexity of accounts and stocks, annuities and trusts, went to his son.

“To my friend, Dr. Nicolao Costa of Provincetown, I bequeath the grandfathered lease to dune shack number 11 at Race Point, as well as all of my paintings and sketches, currently located in his home and at the shack.

Nick lowered his head, and Hallie could see that he was moved—not by the gift of the paintings, or even the coveted lease to the shack, but by the fact that Wolf referred to him as his friend. The doctor had only been hoping for access to the dune shack. But for years, he had been telling everyone in Provincetown that someday the paintings that hung throughout his house would be famous. Now he could help make that happen.

Hallie and Nick had almost forgotten the man sitting behind them when Sam cleared his throat and rose. He checked the time on his cell phone, apparently unimpressed by what was to Hallie a mind-boggling inheritance. “Excuse me, but if I’m done here, Warren, I’m going to take off.”

“Dr. Costa. Hallie. Nice to meet Wolf’s friends,” Sam added. And then with a polite nod of his head, he was gone.

Nick was obviously ready to leave, too, but Kennett returned to his desk and to the will. “I know you need to get back to the office, Dr. Costa, but there’s one more item to be discussed.” He looked pointedly at Hallie for the first time. “John’s bequest to you, Hallie.”

“But my father got the paintings and the shack,” she said. “What else did Wolf have?”

The lawyer chuckled softly to himself. “If you were listening a moment ago, you’d know that John Maddox had a great deal more than the lease on a barely livable shack and a few paintings of unknown value.”

Hallie waited, expecting Kennett to say that Wolf had willed her his old paint brushes or the marble tablets that she’d watched with fascination as he mixed his colors. But instead, the lawyer returned to the formal language of the document. “To Hallett Costa of Provincetown, Massachusetts, I bequeath the painting entitled
Hallie at Race Point
, which is currently being stored in the back of Georgie’s store.”

For the third time in an hour, they were shocked into silence. It was Nick who spoke first. “That’s not possible. Wolf never painted anything but seascapes,” he said firmly. “And he certainly never painted my daughter.”

“And why would he hide it in the back of Georgie’s?” Hallie added. “Why not show it to us?”

Again, Kennett smiled. “It seems our friend Wolf kept secrets from all of us, doesn’t it?”

While the attorney explained the legalities of transferring the lease, and taking formal ownership of the paintings, Hallie wandered toward the window. She was startled when she spotted Sam Maddox on the other side of the street. He stopped to buy a paper from a vendor and then slipped inside a little French café where Hallie herself sometimes picked up a coffee.
So much for his urgent appointment
, she thought, wondering if he was more like his father than she’d first imagined.

H
allie wished there was time for
her and Nick to have lunch, but he had to leave immediately to make afternoon office hours. The only communication they’d had about their morning was through their eyes, and the
abraço
Nick gave her outside the law office. “You need to come home,” he said before he disappeared. And then he looked back, reflecting the events of the day. “Soon.”

The long ride back to Provincetown was probably just what he needed, Hallie thought—a chance to ponder it all, probably out loud, in the privacy of his truck. She would have liked to do the same, but she was due at the hospital in an hour. Fortunately, she only had to cross the park and trudge up Beacon Hill—an invigorating twenty-minute walk. She changed into the scrubs and clogs she’d brought with her in a restroom in the building, pulling her hair back in its usual ponytail and removing the slash of plum-colored lipstick that matched her boots. Looking in the bathroom mirror, she felt as if she’d reclaimed herself.

However, when she hit the street, she turned impulsively toward the café into which Wolf’s son had disappeared with his newspaper. Hallie told herself she wanted to offer him the opportunity to see the paintings. But maybe she just wanted to catch him in his lie.

Sam Maddox was so engrossed in his newspaper that he didn’t notice Hallie as she ordered her coffee and an almond croissant.

“The Arts section?” Hallie asked, turning her head sideways to see what he was reading. “I thought you were more of a business type, what with all your important appointments.”

Wolf’s son laughed softly, regarding her with the same deep attention he’s shown in the lawyer’s office. “Actually, I’m not particularly business or art oriented. I’m working on a doctorate in philosophy.”

“It seems I guessed wrong.”

Sam continued to smile. “Me, too. I thought you were the glamorous girl in black I just met across the street. That was quite a transformation.”

“The glamour was borrowed from my roommate,” she admitted. “This is the real me.” When she dropped the heavy bag that contained what he called her transformation, her coffee sloshed over the top of her cup and splashed on his newspaper. She blotted it with napkins and apologized.

Sam gestured at the ornate iron chairs across from him. “Please. Join me,” he said. Since she already had, it was hard to tell if he was being polite or sarcastic.

Sliding into the set, Hallie got right to the point. “I came here because your father left me a painting, and I really think that you should have it. I’m not sure what his early work was like, but the Race Point series is pretty remarkable.”