Mark Mills - Amagansett

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

Conrad checked his watch. Ten o’clock. Time to make himself scarce.

He allowed his eyes to adjust to the darkness outside, then headed for the beach. He walked west along the shore, the sky dirty with stars. He searched for distraction, but it was hard to find. The night, after all, had been theirs, the only time when they could roam freely, without fear of being seen together.

They had never discussed the need for discretion, it was a given from the first, the way things had to be. The world wasn’t ready for them yet. The secrecy wasn’t without its satisfactions, though. It added a spice to their encounters, an edge of illicitness.

At Lillian’s suggestion they had sometimes met openly in public, as customers in a general store or as moviegoers obliged to sit next to each other. On these occasions they rarely spoke, except to apologize as they brushed past each other, or to exchange pleasantries about the weather under the unsuspecting gaze of a counter clerk. One time, Lillian had ‘dropped’ her purse while paying for some goods, obliging Conrad to crouch at her feet and gather up the scattered coins. And she had made no attempt to deny him the lingering view up her linen skirt of her nakedness beneath.

The anticipation that went with these encounters was maddening, too maddening on one occasion, and they’d been unable to wait till later, Conrad’s hand delving beneath Lillian’s jacket, strategically folded on her lap, during a night sequence in The Imperfect Lady, the auditorium of Edwards Theater cast into welcome gloom. And with the giant faces of Ray Milland and Teresa Wright looking down on them from the screen, he had brought her to a rippling climax—bearing out her claim that she could reach her peak in total silence, a skill acquired in the dormitories of New England boarding schools, she maintained, where the slightest gasp in the drowsy darkness would attract howls of ridicule.

There was another side to the clandestine nature of their affair that they both welcomed. There was never a wasted moment, no time-consuming introductions to each other’s friends, no social gatherings where both were present yet not together. It seemed that they had somehow managed to distill a year, more, into a few brief months. They were never lost for things to talk about, arguing for argument’s sake about books and ideas, trading stories about their lives. She told him about her dream of becoming a theater actress, and how it had slipped away from her with the onset of war and the death of her mother, her ally. She said she had moved up to East Hampton for the winter to recover from the split with her fiancé—one part of the truth, he now suspected; her claim that Penrose had left her for another woman probably a lie.

They felt no compulsion to remain indoors once darkness had descended. Sometimes they would swim in her pool, then make their way across the sandhills to the beach, where they’d cook up whatever fish he’d brought with him that evening over a driftwood fire. Other times, when she visited him, they would strike out on foot, heading north over Montauk Highway, crossing the railroad, disturbing the snakes warming themselves on the tracks in the cool night air. Napeague was his world, and he shared it with her as they wandered. He pointed out the spot where he and Billy used to gather coal from beside the tracks during the early years of the Depression, big bituminous lumps tossed from the tender by sympathetic railroad men. He drew her attention to the best cranberry bogs and to the osprey nests, platforms of sticks and bone and rope and other debris, perched precariously atop the telegraph poles. They strolled the skirts of the salt meadows, and they pulled blue-claw crabs from the channels with scoop nets.

By flashlight, they foraged for Indian artefacts in the soft sand just back from the beach on Gardiner’s Bay, unearthing shards of broken pottery and arrowheads discarded many centuries before. And though he never took her there, not wishing to tempt the fates, he told her about the whale skeleton buried beneath the straggle of bearberry bushes.

On windless nights they would take the cat-boat out and go firelighting for fluke. Sometimes they made love in the cockpit, rocking on the gentle swell. One time, the sounds of some event at the Devon Yacht Club had drifted across the water towards them—a Cole Porter number carried on the night breeze—and it struck Conrad that Lillian had chosen to be with him, lying in his arms, rather than consorting with her own kind. And though this puzzled him, he never questioned her motives, he never doubted her desires.

But that had all changed since her death.

He now saw himself as a figure in a bigger picture, the full and proper dimensions of which she’d chosen to keep from him. She had been party to a crime, a killing; and just as her move to East Hampton for the dead winter months could now be seen as part of an instinctual penance, some need to atone, so too could her relationship with him.

He was her link to the place, to Lizzie Jencks—a tool, perhaps, in the purging of her own guilt. Could he safely assume she would have struck up a relationship with him under normal circumstances? It was unlikely.

Worst of all, though—and it was this that had robbed him of all but the most fitful sleep for the past week—was the creeping realization that he might actually have been responsible for her death. She had changed, he had witnessed the change, just as she had watched him recover his footing in the world. But had he unwittingly given her the strength to act, to make a stand, to jeopardize the conspiracy of silence surrounding Lizzie Jencks’ death?

It was a question he would never know the answer to, never shrug off, and that realization gnawed at him, the corrosive acid of doubt.

His one satisfaction was that those responsible for her murder were now experiencing a torment of their own, inflicted by him. And though they might suspect they hadn’t seen the back of him, they had no idea just how far he was willing to go.

A few unforeseen developments aside, his plan was on course, moving ahead, narrowing down to the fine point. The policeman, Hollis, had taken the bait, and seemed intent on keeping it to himself. That was good, essential even. Whether he had judged Manfred Wallace correctly remained to be seen. He’d know soon enough.

He glanced at his watch, calculating the hours left to kill. He wasn’t tired, the prospect of the looming conflict sharpening his mind, blowing away the clouds of light-headed exhaustion.

He veered away from the water’s edge, up over the frontal dune into Beachampton, the grid of cheap new summer homes that lay beyond. The development was spreading at an alarming rate. Skeletal structures loomed around him, the building stock destined to flesh out their timber frames heaped up in piles. A bulldozer stood abandoned at the end of the narrow swathe it had punched through the dunes to the east—a new road yet to be named—reshaping in a few hours a landscape sculpted over centuries by the wind and the ocean.

Had the bulldozer completed its task, or were its instructions to keep right on going? If so, it should be showing up at his place somewhere towards the end of the week, huffing and puffing and coughing black smoke, its current course destined to take it right through the middle of the barn, ever onwards across Napeague, little shingle-clad homes mushrooming in its wake, all the way to Montauk Point.

If it was a vision of the future, then thankfully it was a future he wouldn’t live long enough to witness.

He kicked the Beachampton sand from his heels, heading west on Bluff Road past the big houses with their commanding views over the Glades towards the ocean. Nearing the Kemps’ house, he glanced up at the roof, fearful that Rollo might be watching from the ‘widow’s walk’—the little scuttlehole beside the chimney from which the women of the house once scanned the ocean for their husbands’ safe return. It could only be accessed via Rollo’s attic bedroom, and Rollo had always spent an inordinate amount of time peering down on the world from his crow’s nest, as he liked to think of it. Fortunately, he wasn’t there, and Conrad turned in to the leafy, tenebrous cool of Miankoma Lane.

The doctor from Manhattan and his family were in residence. The landing light was on and there was a car parked in back of the house near the barn. He noticed that they’d removed the old hitching-post that had always stood out front. The wooden go-kart lying abandoned near the front porch had been Conrad’s, hammered together from fish crates around the time of his tenth birthday; and while he felt a slight pang of possessiveness on seeing it there, he was pleased it was being used.

He trod lightly up the driveway, round to the back of the house. The barn was as good a place as any to hole up for the night. Maybe he was being too cautious, but he somehow doubted it. They would have to take action against him. And soon.

He noted, a little sadly, that the garden had changed almost beyond recognition. There was a carpet of lawn where the fruit and vegetable patches had once stood—their stepmother’s pride and joy, where she’d spent so many of her waking hours, growing pole beans and peas, carrots and cabbages, cucumbers, marrows and beets. She planted pumpkins around the small stand of corn so that the sticky vines would deter the raccoons, she built strawberry frames sheathed in condemned Promised Land bunker net, and her back grew strong from hauling up buckets of water from the well.

As young boys they’d never understood her obsession with cultivation. Only later, when they realized she was unable to bear children, did her endless planting and tending and reaping make any sense.

If she was upset by the barrenness she carried inside her, she never allowed it to interfere with her devotions to them. They, on the other hand, were less than fair in their dealings with her, certainly at the beginning, their young minds unable to grasp the idea—sprung on them one evening by their father—that their teacher was to become their mother. Miss Elliott, with her long wavy hair and her sticks of chalk and her constant talk of Regents exams and passing grades and the Palmer Method of handwriting? It just didn’t make any sense.

Miss Elliott was a ‘peach’, an upstater, who boarded with a local family during school terms. She wasn’t around a whole lot, and their father, it seemed to them, did nothing but fish from dawn till dark. How had they even met? The critical encounter, it soon emerged, had taken place at a dance held at Miankoma Hall by the Ladies’ Society of Busy Workers. They knew their father was good on his feet, they’d seen him dance in the barroom at Valentin Aguirre’s in New York, surprisingly nimble for such a big man, proudly presenting the steps of their region to the other Basques—the kaskarotak, the volontak and the maskerada. And now it seemed he had won Miss Elliott’s heart with his glides and his shuffles, his spins and his leaps.

Their housekeeper, Miss Smarden, promptly resigned in disgust—the first and only sign that she’d been carrying a torch all of her own for their father. They’d become so accustomed to the strict regime at home that they thought Miss Elliott must be joking when she insisted they invite their friends round to the house whenever they wanted. She rigged a rope from the tulip tree out back and the grass beneath was soon worn away to dirt by small feet. She accompanied them on the great spring and fall cattle drives along the ocean beach to and from the sweeping pastures of Montauk. On winter weekends she drove them to watch the gaff-rigged ice-boats rattling across Mecox Bay at improbable speeds, and she took them by ferry across Long Island Sound to the amusement park in New London. It was all too good to be true, and they suspected that it was just a ploy to win their hearts and impress their father, that it wouldn’t last.

She proved them wrong over and over again. With time they learned to return her hugs and other displays of affection, and they marveled at her ability to treat them no differently from the other kids once they’d crossed the threshold of the little white schoolhouse each morning. She drove them hard, Antton less than some because of his difficulties, Conrad far harder than most, slipping him extra books to read after school. She did this, she said, because she believed he had a gift.

To Conrad’s mind it was a thankless gift if it kept him from the new fishing shanty their father had built at the bottom end of Atlantic Avenue. Raised a few feet above the shifting sands on locust posts, it was little more than a long wooden box with a shingle roof and a pot-bellied stove. But to Conrad and Antton it was a palace, a place of wonderment, a symbol of their father’s advancement in the world.

Together with Billy, they would hurry there as soon as they’d wolfed down their supper, Maude shouting after them that exertion on a full stomach was a sure way to an early grave. If they were lucky they’d arrive breathless before the dory had come ashore, and they’d watch it negotiate the thundering surf, their father and Sam bent at the oars, moving in unison. In summer their father and Sam hauled seine and set bluefish nets way out beyond the bar, two or three miles offshore, and they would help lug the fish from the boat to the shanty, threading beach grass through the gills, their fingers too tender still for the sharp plates. They learned to dress and pack the catch, their clothes crusted with scales, the boards of the shanty slick with gurry beneath their feet. The big treat was to be taken a little way out beyond the surf—squeezed in together in the bow, white knuckles on the gunwales—and go drop-lining for fluke.

Held back in school, Antton was fifteen years old when Conrad joined him in the eighth grade. At the end of the school year Antton failed his Regents for the second time, but with his sixteenth birthday falling in August, he had seen through his obligations to the law. The same week that Conrad started at East Hampton High School, Antton joined their father on the beach, set-netting for the last of the bluefish. Times were tough—the fish had been down all season—and they worked long hours, longer still when the cod appeared around Thanksgiving.

On those gray winter mornings Conrad would wake to the sound of an icy nor’wester rattling the windows and he would know that his father and Antton were already on the ocean, setting trawls way out beyond the bar: well over a thousand fathoms of line carefully coiled down in the tubs the evening before, hundreds upon hundreds of hooks baited with steamer clams. And while they fought their way back to the beach, bucking the offshore blow, the cod in the bilges already stiffened out solid from the cold, he would breakfast with Maude in the warm glow of the stove. This was where she wished him to be—he could sense it—far from the sea’s toss and the wind’s kick, talking of other matters, of his studies, of his new friends and of books.

He helped out down at the shanty whenever he could, but he felt foolish and alone. Elevated to the rank of surfman, Antton was eager to drive home his superior knowledge and expertise. Their father, sensing Conrad’s frustration, told him to be patient; in a couple of years he too would be part of the crew.