Mark Mills - Amagansett

He hung up, pleased to silence the unmistakable note of pity creeping into Ed’s voice.

How much more saddened would his old colleague from the crime lab have been if he’d seen the whole pathetic picture behind the favor he’d just performed: Hollis creeping through the grounds of the Wallaces’ house in the dead of night, heart pounding, ears straining for the sounds of detection as he scraped away with the chisel, dropping the flakes of paint into the envelopes. Four motor cars, four envelopes dispatched express to the Broome Street crime lab for comparison with the sample taken at the time of the hit-and-run.

Ed had fired up his spectroscope, the two electrodes blazing white over the sample dish, the prisms seizing the light, breaking it up and firing it down the ten-foot tunnel on to the photographic negative.

The machine had spoken. It had all been a waste of time.

A match would have offered the breakthrough piece of evidence—the only piece of hard evidence so far—and a firm base on which to build a case.

He should have seen it coming. Only a fool wouldn’t have got rid of the incriminating vehicle by now. Odds were it was long gone, scrapped and melted down, a small price to pay for a man of wealth.

He had wanted it too much. Even Ed had detected the desperation in him. He could see him now, sitting back in his chair and thinking: poor old Tom Hollis, put out to pasture but still trying to make amends.

He felt a sudden urge to call Mary, but he resisted it. Thoughts of her had been clogging his head for the past two days, rushing in unbidden, demanding to be heard—the curve of her spine as she bent over the bathtub to test the temperature of the water; the way she dropped her lower lip when she sulked; her throaty little chuckle…and the unmistakable look of hurt in her eyes when he’d reneged on his promise to her, refusing to let her in on his findings.

It had seemed like a reasonable thing to do at the time, gripped by the thrill of the chase, but he had broken the trust between them and done irreparable damage. He knew that, because he’d heard it in her voice when he’d called that morning.

She was polite, gracious—he had even made her laugh—but the delicate flutter of intimacy was gone from her voice. She had withdrawn that particular favor. With the summer fair only two days off, she ended the conversation on the pretext that there was some emergency to be dealt with. It had been an unconvincing excuse.

And now even the little scenario of reconciliation he’d constructed in his mind had evaporated: a positive match on the motor car, the news breaking through the community as the case unfolded, Mary understanding his need for discretion at such a critical stage of the investigation…

Christ, he was pathetic.

As if she gave a damn about any of that.

Besides, there was no match, there was no nothing, nothing concrete.

He picked up the phone and called the Basque.

No reply.

Things were slipping away fast. He could afford to start taking some risks.

The little homestead leaked poverty from every cracked plank of the barn’s cladding, every dried and curling shingle, every fissure in the parched earth of the pasture beyond the low saltbox house, where two skeletal ponies lurked mistrustfully in the shade of a tree.

Beside the barn, a truck had lost its battle with rust and had been cannibalized for parts. Nearby, the blades of an artesian well groaned in the light breeze.

And yet there were signs of a proud hand at work. The yard was almost devoid of clutter, and what there was was well ordered, heaped up neatly against the buildings—reclaimed lumber and bricks waiting for some future purpose, and a small mound of old iron barrel-hoops, whose prospects of reincarnation seemed considerably slimmer.

The narrow border that fronted the house was a blaze of color, and there were more flowers planted out in pots around the steps leading to the front door.

A woman appeared from the house. Her hands were dusty with flour, only a shade paler than her skin. Her long copper-colored hair was tied back off her face, a few wavy strands curling free.

She waited for Hollis to approach, wiping her hands on her apron.

‘Mrs Jencks?’

‘Yes?’

‘Deputy Chief Hollis.’

‘Yes?’

‘Pansies,’ he said.

She glanced down at the pots. ‘Violets. The leaf of a pansy widens to the tip.’ She looked up with her wide brown eyes. ‘An easy slip to make,’ she added graciously.

Hollis abandoned all further plans of ingratiating himself with her.

‘You’re the new policeman.’

‘Not so new any more. It’s been a year now.’

‘A year don’t count for a whole load ‘round these parts.’

‘No, I guess not.’

She pushed a stray strand of hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘What’s he gone done now?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Eli.’

She meant her husband, he knew that from the file.

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Well, not that I know of.’

Her narrow lips curled into a soft smile, and he saw that she must once have been a beautiful woman.

‘Could I have a glass of water?’ asked Hollis.

If he could only work his way indoors, she’d find it harder to rid herself of him.

‘There’s elder water,’ she said, heading inside. ‘That’s the tree with the little white flowers.’ There was no mistaking the dose of irony in her voice.

She poured him a glass then returned to kneading her dough at the kitchen table. The drink was cool, refreshing.

‘Where is your husband, as a matter of interest?’

‘Digging a hole.’ She allowed the ambiguity to linger a moment. ‘Swimming pool for some city folk over on Egypt Lane. All this water and still they want more. Eli used to fish some, but the fear got him since Lizzie…’ The words died on her lips.

‘Did he ever fish with Conrad Labarde?’

She looked up. ‘You know Conrad?’

‘A little. I see him from time to time.’

‘He’s a good one, always was, even as a boy, running all over being fresh with the older folk, him and his friends, always laughing.’

It was hard to picture, and she could see he was struggling.

‘You known him late,’ she said. ‘He’s changed some since them days. Couldn’t see the Devil lying in hide for him back then.’

‘You mean, his brother?’

‘Near broke him when Antton drowned. That and the war, then losing his pa…I don’t know, you got to wonder what a man done to deserve it. Takes a heap off me just thinking about it sometimes. I don’t like to say it, but it’s the truth.’

‘He seems to be holding up okay.’

‘The moment he leaves that house of his, you’ll know.’

‘How’s that?’

‘His brother drowned off the beach there. He went and built that place right at the spot.’

Hollis hardly had time to ponder her words before she laid the dough aside and said, ‘But you’re not come here to talk about Conrad.’

‘No.’

‘Then it’s Lizzie.’

He’d worked out his line of approach on the drive over, though having got to know Sarah Jencks a little he wasn’t so sure she’d buy it.

‘It’s routine to revisit unsolved cases after a year or so,’ he said. ‘You’d be surprised how often it throws up something. I just wanted to talk through some stuff.’

‘What…stuff?’ she said with that look of hers.

Okay, so she’d smelled a rat, but she hadn’t shut him out.

‘You said at the time, you and your husband—I’m going off the files here—you said then that you had no idea what Lizzie was doing out at that time of night.’

He watched her reaction closely. It revealed nothing.

‘That’s right.’

‘You weren’t aware of it happening before, her going out like that?’

‘She was a poor sleeper, even as a wee one. Nothing to be done about it.’

He noted that she hadn’t answered the question.

‘So it’s quite possible it wasn’t the first time.’

‘I suppose.’

He took a sip from the glass. ‘And your son—Adam, right?—did he share a room with Lizzie?’

She stiffened slightly. ‘Not by then.’

‘So I guess he didn’t know either, about her wanderings?’

‘Isn’t that in those files of yours?’ she said tersely.

‘As it happens, Adam wasn’t asked to give a statement at the time.’

It had been one of Milligan’s many oversights.

‘Then I guess he had nothing to add.’

Hollis took another sip from the glass. ‘Can I speak to him anyway? Like I say, you never know.’

This time she shifted uncomfortably.

‘He’s not here.’

‘I can come back later.’

‘Won’t do much good,’ she said. ‘He’s in Carolina. Least he was, last we heard…working the croaker boats.’

He didn’t know what a croaker was, but he got the general impression.

‘How long’s he been gone?’

‘Put it this way, the croaker’s a winter fish down them parts.’

There was much more he wanted to ask, like why had Adam gone south so soon after his sister’s death? And why hadn’t he been in touch? There seemed to be bad feeling between son and parents, bad enough to silence Sarah Jencks and set her kneading her dough again for want of anything better to do with her hands.

He decided to back off, see if she followed.

‘That was great,’ he said, placing the glass on the table. ‘And thanks for your time.’

Her eyes came up suddenly, as if she were about to say something. Maybe she wanted to, but she didn’t, not until she’d seen him outside into the sunlight.

‘You’ll not catch the one who done it.’

‘Don’t be so sure.’

‘I’m not. I want to believe you will.’

‘There’s a good chance, Mrs Jencks.’

He tried to reach out to her with his eyes, to let her know he knew she was holding back, that she could trust him.

‘If I think of anything,’ she said, ‘I’ll be sure to give Chief Milligan a call.’

It was a moment before he realized he’d been had. She’d seen him tense up.

‘Or maybe I won’t bother the Chief,’ she added, holding him in her dark eyes.

‘He’s got a lot going on right now,’ said Hollis, nodding.

Thirty-One

Passing through East Hampton, Conrad stopped briefly to withdraw some money from the bank. For a moment he thought he had spotted the tail, but the man in question climbed into a car and drove west on Main Street.

It wasn’t until he was a couple of miles north of town that he picked up the black sedan in the rear-view mirror, hanging well back. He didn’t slow or accelerate in order to confirm his suspicions. To have done so would have meant jeopardizing everything.

He entered the outskirts of Sag Harbor, turning into Union Street. He noted that the Whaler’s Church was still in need of a coat of paint. As long as he’d known it, there had always been a pleasing air of shabbiness about Sag Harbor. Unable to sustain the glories of its whaling heyday, the town wore its past proudly, though a little uneasily. The streets were peppered with grand residences built in any number of styles—Federalist, Georgian, Italianate and Greek Revival. Some verged on the ostentatious, and most had fallen into a state of disrepair. Their sills were rotting, their roofs patched, their paintwork flaking, their gardens neglected.

The merchants, whaling captains and shipbuilders who had first thrown up these temples to their own prosperity were long gone, their families forced to sell to the manufacturers who had washed in on the back of the tide before it finally turned for good. The factories, foundries and potteries had closed, and Sag Harbor had slipped into gracious decline.

Like some dowager princess fallen on hard times, the evening gown may have been a little frayed around the edges, but the jewels were real. No other South Fork town could boast a Main Street to match, with its imposing brick edifices, its mansions, and its stores with their generous plate-glass windows.

It was here, on Main Street, that Conrad parked the car, just up from the Municipal Building. A group of young men was gathered on the sidewalk, loafing—a favorite Sag Harbor pastime, and one which lent the town its unique whiff of torpor.

The black sedan had not followed Conrad into Union Street, but it now appeared at the foot of Main Street, down near the waterfront, where the masts of the ships had once bristled.

It turned, crawling slowly towards him.

Conrad crossed the street in front of it, fighting not to turn and stare.

There was no need.

He caught the profile of the driver reflected in the window of the haberdasher’s beside the narrow office building he was heading for.

Under usual circumstances it took Walter J. Scarlett exactly six and a half minutes to walk from his office to his house, a little less the other way, what with the gradient. Today, he made the journey in well under six minutes; but then he had known it was going to be an unusual day from the moment he first showed up for work.

His secretary of a year’s standing, Elsie, was sitting at her desk devoid of lipstick for the first time ever. He hadn’t commented on this detail at the time, fearing that he might be flattering himself. By noon, it was clear that he wasn’t. He was too much of a gentleman to make the first move, but not so much of one that he hadn’t reciprocated when her lips, untainted by any incriminating color, had sought out his while he was helping her with some filing.

By two o’clock he had squeezed both her breasts, though not at the same time, and attempted to slide his hand up her skirt.

A run of afternoon appointments put paid to any more shenanigans, and as Elsie prepared to leave for the day he feared she was already suffering from terminal regret.

She hadn’t been. And now he was running ten minutes late, or a little under, he noted, as he pushed open the front door of his house.

They were seated at the table, waiting patiently, a supper of cold cuts spread out before them.

‘Daddy, you’re sweating,’ piped up his son.

‘I didn’t want to be late.’

‘But you are late,’ said his wife.

‘I meant any later,’ he replied sweetly, pecking her on the cheek, ruffling the children’s hair, then taking his place at the head of the table.

He had barely finished saying Grace when there was a knock at the door. His wife went to answer it. From where he was seated he had no view of the entrance hall, but he could hear the exchange with the gentleman.

‘Is Mr Scarlett in?’

‘What’s it regarding?’

‘It’s a private matter.’

‘We’re having supper, I’m afraid—’

That was as far as she got. He heard a scuffle, a little yelp, and then the man appeared in the dining room, steering Walter’s wife by the elbow. Walter pushed back his chair and got to his feet.

‘Sit the hell down,’ snapped the man. ‘You too,’ he added, forcing Walter’s wife towards her chair.