Mark Mills - Amagansett

A room had been reserved for him at a guesthouse on Buells Lane. He drove to it, but only out of curiosity. He disliked anyone knowing where he was, and that included his employers. He knew for a fact that this caution had saved his life on at least one occasion.

He stopped at a grocery store on Main Street, bought a few provisions, and, after quizzing the clerk, found himself at the Sea Spray Inn, right on the ocean. It was a large, sprawling establishment with wide sun porches, set just back from the beach. Better still, one of the inn’s small cottages strung out along the dune beyond the main building had come free due to a cancellation. He took it. It offered the privacy to come and go freely at all hours.

He unpacked his clothes and slid the empty suitcase beneath the bed. It would take an expert eye to detect the false bottom with its small cache of weaponry. He poured himself a glass of milk, checked that all the doors and windows were locked, then he tore open the brown envelope he’d pulled from beneath the sedan’s passenger seat.

He smoked two cigarettes while he read the contents, committing the information to memory. There was no fireplace in the cottage, or he would have burned the papers there and then. As it was, he shredded them and flushed the mulch down the toilet.

He changed into some shorts and a sleeveless shirt and strolled on to the beach, pleased to note that there were others as white and pasty as himself spread out along the shore. He headed east, the sun at his back, sticking to the packed sand at the water’s edge where children frolicked, leaping the waves and body-surfing.

By his calculation it wasn’t even a mile to the spot where he had put the girl’s body in the sea, and he was curious to see what the place looked like in daylight.

Twenty-Eight

Hollis had little choice but to wait for the change of shift at eight o’clock. Past case files were located in a cabinet right beside Bob Hartwell’s desk in the squad room and there was no way he could justify rifling through them, certainly not for records of an incident predating his arrival in East Hampton. He was skating on thin ice—Milligan had almost caught him out twice—and while he trusted Hartwell, now was not the time to be taking risks.

At a quarter of eight he suggested that Hartwell head home a bit early.

‘You sure, Tom?’

‘Say hi to Lisa and the kids.’

As soon as Hartwell was gone, Hollis moved fast. Stringer had a tendency to show up early for work. Locating the files was easy, figuring how to get them to his car unnoticed was another matter. It would require two runs. The first went without a hitch. Hollis had dumped the second batch of files on Hartwell’s desk, and was arranging the cabinet to conceal the gaps when he heard footsteps on the stairs.

He intercepted Stringer at the door of the squad room.

‘Do me a favor, will you, and get me a pack of cigarettes?’

‘Luckys, right?’

‘You don’t miss much, do you?’

Stringer beamed.

‘That’s good,’ said Hollis. But not so good that Stringer didn’t ask himself why in the hell Hollis couldn’t pick up his own cigarettes seeing as he was going off work.

He opted for the kitchen table, sweeping the clutter on to the floor. He spread out the files around a notepad, set up an ashtray to his right, along with a bowl of ice, a glass and a bottle of Gordon’s. Then he launched in.

He had arrived in East Hampton almost a month after the incident, just as Milligan’s investigation was petering out. Eager to contribute, Hollis had suggested that he call in a favor from an acquaintance who worked in the Motor Vehicle Homicide Squad back in the city, maybe get the guy to come up for a week.

It was his first mistake. The first of many.

Milligan shot the proposal down. Clearly, the last thing he wanted was some jumped-up city fellow telling him how things should be done—or, more to the point, exposing the gross procedural errors he’d already committed. When Hollis then gingerly brought up the possibility of sending a sample of the black paint chips recovered at the scene to the Broome Street crime lab for analysis under their spectroscope, Milligan actually laughed. He dismissed the new technology—which he’d evidently never heard of—as a passing fad. Hollis had quietly sent the sample anyway, not that there’d ever been a suspect vehicle to check against the lab’s spectrogram.

The case, dead for over a year, was now very much alive again, and this time Hollis was in charge, no Milligan to keep him at bay. He quickly reacquainted himself with the sequence of events, scanning the reports, the Chief’s clipped and unfeeling prose. The body was first sighted a little after seven in the morning by a potato farmer from Wainscott heading east on Town Lane for a spot of Sunday fishing off Barnes Landing.

She lay in the hedgerow on the north side of the road, fifty yards west of the junction with Indian Wells Highway. Hollis had never actually visited the spot, but he could picture it. Almost three miles in length, Town Lane ran parallel to Montauk Highway, about half a mile to the north of it, cutting through open countryside, farming land studded with pastures. It was a straight road, a fast road; he had often found himself unwittingly pushing the throttle to the floor when driving it.

By the time Chief Milligan had arrived on the scene, Lizzie Jencks’ parents, whose homestead lay a little to the west on Town Lane, were already present amongst the gathered. The scene was photographed, the body then removed by the Medical Examiner.

Examination of the road surface suggested that the vehicle had been traveling west on Town Lane at considerable speed, the autopsy subsequently setting the time of death at somewhere between midnight and three o’clock in the morning. The parents were unable to explain why their daughter had been out walking in the dead of night, and no one else had come forward with an explanation for her nocturnal ramble. It was this that had stuck in Hollis’ craw at the time, and it was still there.

He poured some more gin into the glass, then began to peruse the statements, looking for a name: Manfred Wallace.

He quickly ascertained that Manfred Wallace had never been questioned over the hit-and-run. Justin Penrose, on the other hand, had been, though not as a possible suspect. It was in his statement that Manfred Wallace’s name was buried away, along with that of his sister, Lillian. The document was Bob Hartwell’s follow-up report on the movements of all those who’d attended a dinner dance at the Devon Yacht Club on the night in question. According to the club’s secretary, Manfred and Lillian had left the event early in the evening to join Mr Penrose at his house. The departure of two members well before the time of the incident would have marked the end of that particular investigative trail for most police officers; but Hartwell had made the effort to visit Penrose at his house and ask him when exactly the Wallaces had moved on from his place. Hollis silently praised him for his thoroughness, while struggling with the questions thrown up by the report.

The Devon Yacht Club connection with the hit-and-run was tenuous at best. Town Lane was far from being the most direct route back to the summer colony in East Hampton from the club. More importantly, if Manfred and Lillian Wallace were already back in East Hampton just after nine o’clock, what the hell were they doing heading west on Town Lane some three or four hours later?

The answer was staring him in the face, it just took him a while, and a couple of slugs of gin, to see it for what it was.

Penrose’s given address was Water’s Edge—a house name displaying as little imagination as that of the Wallaces’ place: Oceanview. Or so he’d assumed. Maybe it wasn’t a house after all.

He went to the hallway and picked up the phone.

‘Operator.’

‘Olive, it’s Tom Hollis.’

Olive Hibbel worked the board most evenings over at the telephone exchange on Main Street.

‘I’m looking for a local number,’ said Hollis. ‘Penrose, maybe Justin, maybe not.’

‘We’ve only one Penrose in East Hampton—Everett.’

Probably the father; must be a family home.

‘Any way I could get the address?’

‘Hold on,’ she said. ‘Number 2 Water’s Edge.’

Not a house, but a road. And not a road he’d ever heard of in the summer colony, though private tracks were constantly being opened up for new residences.

‘Where is that, do you know?’

‘It’s near Springs, just off Old Stone Highway.’

He felt his heart leap, the pieces falling into place, his eyes already searching the framed map on the wall across the corridor.

‘Thanks, Olive,’ he said absently, then hung up.

The map laid bare the events of the evening in connecting lines, some straight as an arrow, others twisting and coiling, but all leading to and emanating from that dusty stretch of Town Lane west of the junction with Indian Wells Highway.

Manfred and Lillian Wallace hadn’t headed back into East Hampton on leaving the Devon Yacht Club, because the Penroses’ house lay directly to the north, on the western shore of Gardiner’s Bay. And if driving from Water’s Edge to East Hampton, then Town Lane was a likely route to take, especially if you felt like picking up a head of steam.

Hartwell had abandoned the trail after Justin Penrose’s assertion that Manfred and Lillian Wallace had visited him for no more than an hour, leaving well before the time of the accident. And that had been that, just another of the many blind alleys Hartwell would have wandered down at the time.

Or maybe Hartwell hadn’t bought the story. His keen observation of Hollis and Penrose at the funeral suggested that he recalled his meeting with Penrose the year before. Maybe he’d had his suspicions at the time. But what could he do? Challenge the word of a respectable member of the community, of larger society?

The wealthy had closed ranks. Penrose had been called on to serve up an alibi. But just how far had his sense of duty, loyalty and friendship carried him? Was he also privy to the conspiracy to silence Lillian Wallace? For that would explain away the remaining anomalies in the story: Lillian’s split from Penrose, her uncharacteristic move to East Hampton for the winter months.

Her guilt had gotten the better of her, destroying her relationship with Penrose, driving her back to the scene of the crime, jeopardizing the fragile edifice of the shared lie.

Hollis checked himself; he was speculating now. And all based on one name uttered by a fisherman whose motives remained far from clear.

The phone rang, shrill and loud in the confined space of the hallway, startling him.

‘Hello.’

‘Tom?’

Oh Christ, thought Hollis.

‘Mary.’

‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘Your hostess for this evening.’

Supper with Mary. How could he have forgotten?

‘I’m sorry, I’m working.’

‘At home?’

‘It’s true,’ he said pathetically, and was rightly rewarded with a silence on the other end of the line. ‘I should have called.’

‘Why didn’t you?’

What could he tell her? Not the truth—that the invitation had completely slipped his mind.

‘I was about to. I was literally just walking to the phone when you called.’

‘Having literally just walked away from it a minute ago, I suppose.’

‘Huh?’

‘I called. Your line was engaged.’

The phone call to Olive at the telephone exchange.

‘Look, Mary—’

‘It’s okay, I think I understand.’

‘No, you don’t.’

‘Just tell me, are you going to come over or not?’

‘I can’t.’

‘Okay,’ she said, then hung up.

Hollis made to call her back then realized he didn’t know her number. The directory wasn’t in the drawer of the table in the hallway. When he finally located it on the floor of the larder and dialed her number, there was no reply.

He fought the urge to jump in the car and head on over. There was a lot more to be done on the case files before he could satisfy himself he hadn’t missed anything.

Five minutes later, the doorbell rang.

He leapt into action. The first thing he concealed was the bottle of gin. He was gathering together the files for removal to the larder when Mary’s face appeared at the back door.

He froze, caught in the act. Dumping the files back on the table, he went to the door and threw the latch.

‘I didn’t mean to surprise you,’ she said, ‘but I thought we should talk. Face to face.’

He stepped aside, allowing her to enter, resigning himself to her reaction. It wasn’t just the mess, it was the grime—the thin film of grease thrown up by his inexpert cracks at cooking, and to which the dust had then adhered.

‘I’ve let things go a bit.’

‘I’ll say you have.’

She picked her way around the clutter on the floor. He cursed himself as she reached for the glass on the table and took a sip.

‘Neat?’ she asked.

‘It helps me think.’

‘My husband used to say it helped him sleep.’

His shame gave way to indignation. She had no right to come snooping on him.

Mary glanced at the files on the table. ‘I’m relieved,’ she said. ‘I thought maybe you were lying.’

‘I wouldn’t do that.’

‘What then? You were so absorbed you forgot all about our date?’

Hollis hesitated. ‘That’s pretty much the size of it, I’m afraid.’

Mary glanced back at the files. ‘First Lillian Wallace, now Lizzie Jencks?’

He could see what was coming and he wished it wasn’t.

‘I said there might come a time when I’d ask what you’re up to. Now’s that time, Tom.’

He hesitated. ‘I can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I don’t know for sure, not yet.’

‘Enough to sneak a bunch of papers home.’

‘I didn’t sneak them home.’

‘Come on,’ said Mary. ‘Why are you doing this?’

‘Doing what?’

‘This cloak-and-dagger stuff. I thought the whole idea was to leave this kind of thing behind you. Isn’t that what you said? A quieter life?’

‘It’s probably nothing.’

‘A drowning and a hit-and-run?’ She paused. ‘Are they connected?’

‘Mary,’ sighed Hollis.

Now she was hurt, stung by his refusal to trust her. And he realized then that he’d seen that look before, in Lydia’s eyes, the first time he’d shut her out, laying the foundations of the wall.

‘Okay,’ said Mary.

She headed for the door.

‘Mary…’

‘No, Tom,’ she said as the door swung shut behind her.

For a moment he thought he might run after her and tell her all, but a sterner voice in his head questioned the wisdom of doing so. With the investigation so precariously poised, what good could possibly come from confiding in a person he cared for, but who, when it came to it, he hardly knew?

Besides, there was a lot to be done, much to be thought through, not least of all: how best to obtain samples of paintwork from all the vehicles at the Wallace residence.

Twenty-Nine