A Penny for the Hangman (22 page)

Brick was just thinking this when a tall, white-haired older man in a jean jacket with a shoulder bag strode past him from the parking lot and went down to stand alongside the
Turnabout
. He called to it, and the boatman arrived on deck from the cabin, holding an umbrella. The man said something, and Gabby stepped onto the dock.

Brick opened his own umbrella and inched down onto the dock, appearing to take a great interest in the big yachts nearby. He knew Gabby to say hello to, and he didn’t want the boatman spotting him. Now he could hear the two men huddled under the other umbrella on the dock a few yards away.

“I got your name from the office up there,” the tall cowboy said, pointing toward the buildings.

There was a flash of lightning, followed by a roll of thunder. By the time Brick could hear them again, the boatman was saying something about money. Then he pointed up at the sky and said, “No good for fishing, and it won’t be smooth sailing.”

“No matter,” the cowboy said. “I have to get over there as soon as possible, and they told me you go there all the time. I’ll give you six hundred.”

Gabby looked at the man as though he was sizing him up, and then he did something odd. He suddenly leaned forward, peering through the gloom into the old cowboy’s face. He studied him for a long moment, and then he slowly nodded, took a step back, and said, “Fine. I’ll take you there, Mr. Brown. Untie us and come aboard.”

The man, Mr. Brown, handed Gabby his shoulder bag and got busy with the ropes. Then he stepped into the boat, and Gabby steered slowly out into the dark, rainy harbor.

Brick watched them go, then glanced at his watch: 8:20 p.m. He trotted back to his post, deciding that the night fishing expedition wasn’t important enough to phone in. He’d tell Cousin Josh—
Lieutenant Faison
—about it tomorrow.

The Discs

J
ANUARY 1, 2008

Happy New Year! Too bad I don’t have my dear family to celebrate with me, but I guess that’s my own fault. Ha! Very quiet here, but we can see occasional fireworks above Tortola. No Champagne party for me in my dinner jacket, clinking glasses with a beautiful woman. Not this year, but soon. One year, two months, twelve days, if all goes as planned…

The light from the candles and the chandelier cast the room in the same soft glow as the night before. The curtains at the glass doors to the sundeck were drawn, but now and then they were lit up by flashes of lightning. The rain provided a kind of background music, punctuated by percussive riffs of thunder.

Karen’s father sat at the head of the table, and she was in her place on his right. Mrs. Graves—who seemed even more agitated than usual tonight—had just set down their salads and left them alone. Karen waited a while, enjoying the Dom Pérignon and the food with him in companionable silence, before finally springing her first question.

“Did you love her?”

He didn’t pretend not to know whom she meant. “Yes.”

“And she loved you?”

He thought about this a moment, sipping his Champagne before delivering a careful reply. “She said she did.”

“Then she did,” Karen said. “In all my life I never knew her to tell a lie.”

He smiled and reached to place his hand briefly over hers. “You’re like her in so many ways.”

This pleased her. “How long were the two of you—um—tog
ether?”

“Not long. I arrived in New York in mid-April, and the judge’s decision was announced in the beginning of June. That first dinner was, let’s see, about two weeks after I got there, the first week of May. We had dinner the next night, and the next. I took her to see a Broadway musical, and she took me to her favorite place in New York—”

“The Cloisters,” Karen said, and he nodded. “What was the musical?”

“
Cats
. My first and last Broadway show, on my first and last trip to New York.”

Karen lowered her wineglass, remembering. “It was always her favorite. She took me to see it when I was little. She used to play the cast album all the time, so I know the entire score by heart. Now I understand her obsession with it….”

He smiled. “That was a wonderful evening.”

Something he’d just said registered with her, and she struggled to make sense of it. Was it possible…?

“That was the only time you were ever in New York?” she asked him.

“Yes. It took Robert Colson six weeks to get my petition against the publisher before the judge, but in that time some enterprising journalist found my name on the docket. They lay in wait for me on the day of the summary judgment. Mr. Colson and I went to the courthouse, and every reporter in New York was on the front steps. Lights and cameras everywhere, everyone shouting my name. Colson grabbed my arm and barged through them. After the announcement, he slipped me out a back way, but the damage was done. They were at the law firm, and they found out what hotel I was in. Colson stashed me in a Schrafft’s on Madison while one of his clerks went to the hotel and collected my things, and your mother called the airline and got me on the next plane out. I only had a few minutes to say goodbye to her, in that coffee shop. Then I hurried to catch the plane before the press could storm the airport.”

Karen had seen the news footage and photos of the incident on the courthouse steps, and a pale, blurry face shying from the cameras. She hadn’t noticed that the unidentified lawyer hustling him into the building was Mr. Colson. And she’d certainly never imagined that the notorious killer in the photos had any connection to her mother, or to her. Now she studied his face. “And that was the last time you ever saw her?”

“Yes. I spoke with Grace on the phone several times after that, but I never saw her again.”

“So, you’re not The Watcher,” Karen whispered.

Her father stared at her, leaning forward, a question forming on his lips, when Mrs. Graves arrived with the main course and white wine to replace the Champagne. By the time she’d cleared the salad plates and placed the Dover sole and potatoes
au gratin
before them, the tension between them had relaxed. When Mrs. Graves left, Karen changed the subject.

“I think it’s time you told me the truth,” she said, and she smiled at him. “The truth behind the lies. I’ve figured it out, of course, but I want to hear it from you.”

A sudden flash of light from beyond the curtains, an answering crash of thunder. He lowered his gaze to his plate, his face suffused with color. Karen couldn’t tell if his distress was embarrassment or anger, or some combination of the two. When he finally spoke, he continued to stare down at the fish, unwilling—or unable—to confront her.

“How did you figure it out?” he asked.

“My mother was a secretive woman. She never spoke of you. But I loved her with all my heart, and there’s one thing I know for sure about her: She could never, ever fall in love with a murderer. It simply wasn’t possible. If she’d thought for one moment that you’d actually killed anyone, she never would have accepted your dinner invitation. Rodney Harper killed your father.”

At last he looked up at her, and there were tears in his eyes.

“What a remarkable young woman you are, Karen,” he said. Then he smiled, took a long sip of wine, and reached for his silverware.

The Discs

M
ARCH 15, 2008

Great news! They’re making a movie about us! It’s in the
Daily News
.
Bad Boys
—clever title. They’re releasing it on the anniversary! And she works for an entertainment magazine….

Molly kept a little notepad and a pencil on the kitchen counter near the sink, for writing down grocery items as they occurred to her. She stood in the kitchen, filling the filter basket with after-dinner coffee, glancing furtively over at the paper. Her husband was in their room next door, watching a
World Wide Wrestling
DVD, laughing at the antics of the warriors as he sipped his third beer. Now and then he yelled at the screen, making fun of the wrestlers.

I shouldn’t be here, she thought as she filled the coffeemaker with water and switched it on. I should be back in the States, in a pretty house in Athens Place. A lawn of bright green grass and a white picket fence. Roses and geraniums…

The cups and saucers were on the silver tray, and she added the creamer and sugar bowl. Silver tongs for the sugar cubes; Mr. Huxley always insisted on that. He’d been brought up that way, she supposed. Handwritten notes to go with gifts, like the dress he’d instructed Molly to put in the girl’s room while she slept, the dress the girl was wearing now. A note and a red rose. He’d signed the note with a single letter:
W
.

She looked at the cups and saucers on the tray. Delicate white china—Spod
e—with gold rims and a single, elegant gold letter painted on each item:
H
.

She didn’t understand any of this. She didn’t know where Carl sometimes disappeared to, like last night when he’d taken that young man down to meet Gabby’s boat and hadn’t returned for two hours. She’d been asleep, but he woke her when he came into their bedroom a few minutes after midnight and went into the bathroom to take a shower.

She hadn’t heard the boat. The
Turnabout
made a distant but distinct noise when it came into the cove, but she hadn’t heard it last night. This morning she’d found Carl’s shirt from yesterday in the hamper with a stain on one sleeve that looked like dried blood. Carl didn’t have a scratch on him, not anywhere. This worried her most of all.

No dessert tonight, Mr. Huxley had instructed, but a plate of Danish butter cookies with the coffee. To help Karen Tyler sleep, he’d said. He and Carl had laughed when he said this, then whispered together, and she’d heard the girl’s name mentioned again. Her husband had said, “Don’t worry, she’s not going anywhere,” and Mr. Huxley had said, “I know.” Then they’d laughed some more.

A crack of thunder from outside set her on edge, but she quickly recovered. She arranged the cookies on a doily-covered plate and glanced over at the notepad. When everything was ready, she picked up the pencil, forming sentences in her mind. She was just about to write them when her husband came into the kitchen. He shambled over to the refrigerator for another beer, and she immediately wrote
coffee, bread, sugar cubes
.

“We need more beer,” Carl muttered, and she wrote
beer
. He glanced at the notepad as he passed her on his way back into their room. “And Fritos.” She wrote
Fritos
.

As soon as he was gone, she tore off the top page and set it aside. Another long roll of thunder. With a glance over at their bedroom door and a long, deep breath, Molly Graves leaned forward with the pencil and did the bravest thing she’d ever done in her life.

The Discs

J
UNE 27, 2008

I have it all worked out. When this movie opens, every reporter in the universe will be ready to sell their mother to get their hands on me. Well, both of us, of course, but I don’t think they’ll be able to find him, clever as they are. And I know a certain young lady journalist who is about to be very, very lucky….

Karen chose an armchair instead of the couch this time. She was feeling tired again. All she seemed to do on this island was sleep. The chair would prevent her from stretching out, as she might do on the couch, and she didn’t want to nod off in the middle of her father’s story. She watched as he lowered himself onto the couch and set down his cane. She listened to the rain and the distant clinking of china as Mrs. Graves cleared the dining room table.

“I wish that phone was working,” Karen said. She’d checked it again as they’d come across the front hall, but there was no dial tone.

He smiled. “My dear, with this storm, we’re lucky we still have lights. And I wouldn’t want to make Gabby come over in this weather; a boat is not a safe place to be on a night like this. Will your young man be terribly worried?”

Karen thought about it. “Probably not. He’s writing a new novel, and we have a lot of friends who are always up for dinner and movies and so forth. When you live in New York, there isn’t much time to miss people who aren’t around. I’ll go back to St. Thomas tomorrow and call Jim from there.”