Compulsion (19 page)

I had time before I needed to be at Brooke’s funeral.  I felt like I should use it to get my thoughts clear on what I had learned about the Bishop family.  I downed a sandwich and two coffees at the ‘Sconset Café, then drove out to the Sankaty Head Lighthouse, opposite the Sankaty Head Gold Club.  The light, perched on sandy cliffs, is visible from twenty-nine miles out at sea.  It was built in 1850 to help sailors navigate the treacherous Nantucket shoals, a beautiful but shallow graveyard of ships.

I parked near the lighthouse and walked a quarter mile into the tall grass that surrounds it.  The sun was warm and bright, and the ocean stretched endlessly before me.  There are those who insist it is impossible to walk the bluffs from the center of Siasconset to the lighthouse and arrive with a single negative thought in mind.  Maybe I should have taken that route, because my mind was full of them.

The list of suspects in Brooke’s murder was getting longer, not shorter; it now included every person in the Bishop house the night she was killed.

Certainly, Darwin Bishop headed the list.  He was the only one with a history of domestic assault, a history that stretched back decades and reached all the way to the raw welts on Billy Bishop’s back.  He was the only one who had threatened me or tried to shake me off the case.  It was he, so far as I could tell, who had not wanted the twins.  He may have been enraged by their intrusion on his plans for a fresh start with a new love — Claire Buckley.

But then there was Billy.  Anyone with a history of firesetting, torturing animals, destruction of property, theft, and, yes, bedwetting had the pedigree of a true psychopath.  Add to that the pent-up rage reflected in his self-abuse — biting himself, cutting himself, and pulling out his hair — and the prescription for disaster was complete.

My mind moved on to Claire Buckley.  How draining was it for her, after all, to serve as a glorified baby-sitter when being the lady of the household seemed within reach?  After traveling the world with Darwin Bishop, sharing luxury suites and rare bottles of wine, how did she feel when Julia announced she was pregnant again — and with twins?  Had Darwin told her that leaving his wife would have to be put off?  Beneath the care and concern Claire had shown the infants, did she look upon them with bitterness, as living embodiments of her billionaire lover’s continuing bond with his beautiful, supposedly estranged wife?

I thought back to Claire’s revelation that Julia’s ambivalence about having had the twins, including Julia’s statement that she ‘wished they were dead.’  Had Claire truly given me that data reluctantly?  Or had she scripted the disclosure in order to distract me from her own motives?  How could I be certain that Julia had made the statement at all?

That brought me to Julia herself.  Would I take her more seriously as a suspect if I wasn’t moved by her?  I had to admit that Julia’s postpartum depression, complete with feelings of estrangement from Brooke and Tess, increased the risk of her harming them.  But it didn’t increase that risk dramatically.  The vast, vast majority of women with postpartum depression, after all, never strike out at their infants.

Finally, Garret himself had begun to worry me.  Growing up with Darwin Bishop had seemingly sapped him of any hope for a real future.  I wondered whether his prison camp mentality might lead him to put other family members ‘out of their misery.’  Could he have killed Brooke, I wondered, in order to free her?

I shook my head.  Darwin Bishop had vowed that neither the police nor the District Attorney would be able to prove Billy’s guilt because anyone at home the night Brooke was killed could be the murderer.  It almost felt as though the family was actively organizing to make Bishop’s case, choreographing a dizzying dance to keep me off balance.

There was another way to think about the maze of possibilities.  It was true that every member of the family had had the opportunity to kill Brooke.  But each might also have had part of the motive.  The family’s collective psyche, working largely unconsciously, might have silently spurred one of its members to act on behalf of the group.  Maybe that was the dynamic making it so difficult to settle on a lead suspect.

Some students of the Kennedy assassination, for example, discount the theory that an organized conspiracy existed to do in the president.  Instead, they say, a convergence of interests from many different venues — including, but not limited to, the military, the CIA, and the Mafia — worked silently and almost magically to place the president in jeopardy.  According to this vision, Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, but as the culmination of those myriad dark forces, in the same way that a great and popular leader can express and achieve goals that represent the culmination of our collective hope and courage.

That vision of how Brooke had come to die bothered me more than any other.  Because the same forces that would have emboldened her killer still existed.  And, most likely, their next target would be Tess Bishop.

I took out my mobile phone and dialed North Anderson.  His office patched me through to his cruiser.  I asked him whether he had made any progress getting Tess off the Bishop estate.

"No go," he said.  "I talked personally with Sam Middleton, the executive director of the Department of Social Services.  He told me what I guess I already knew:  Regardless of the statistics, kids aren’t yanked out of a home just because there’s been a murder, especially when somebody has been charged with that murder.  You didn’t see JonBenet’s brother placed in any foster home after she was killed."

"That’s just DSS policy Middleton is parroting," I said.  "Isn’t there a creative way around it?"

"I tried Leslie Grove, the medical director of Nantucket Family Services.  She could file a ‘child at risk’ petition with DSS, but says she won’t go near it without evidence that Tess has been directly threatened."

"Then I guess Julia is the only one who can make the difference," I said.  "I’ll see if I can get a minute with her at the funeral.  Her mother’s coming in with her from the Vineyard.  Maybe they could go back together, with the baby."

"Sounds like you’re comfortable the baby would be safe with them," Anderson said.

In my heart, I was comfortable with that.  But I knew Anderson was still concerned I had lost perspective where Julia was concerned.  "We don’t have a way to isolate Tess from the entire family," I said.  "The next best thing is to keep her away from as many family members as possible.  For my money, that should include Darwin Bishop."

"Fair enough," Anderson said.  "Hell, if it made anyone feel any better, the kid could stay with Tina and me."

"Thanks," I said.  "I’ll make the offer.  I wouldn’t hold my breath, though."

"Did you get to talk with Garret?" he asked.

"For five minutes.  He goes on the list.  He said Brooke was better off dead than living with Darwin.  I didn’t like the sound of that."

"Any more good news?" he said sarcastically.

"Absolutely," I said.  I needed to let Anderson know we should at least touch base with the baby nurse Julia had fired.  "When I spoke with Claire, she mentioned a private duty nurse Julia had hired to care for the twins.  Kristen Collier, from Duxbury.  Julia argued with her and fired her about a week after Brooke and Tess were born.  I guess it’s worth talking to her.  She still might have a key to the place.  I’d just like to know she was somewhere other than Nantucket when Brooke died."

"Will do," he said.

"I think that about covers it, then," I said.  "I’ll talk to you later, after the funeral."

"At my place?" he asked pointedly.  "Sacrificing your room deposit?"

"Sure," I said, mostly to avoid arguing.  "Your place it is."  I hung up.

I looked out at the Atlantic, then turned and took in the whole panorama at Sankaty Head.  The cliffs seemed literally to dissolve into beach, then beach into sea.  Birds dove out of the sky to skin the cresting waves.  It was a scene of awesome beauty, and the thought occurred to me that I had once lingered in such places myself, having lived with my girlfriend Kathy in Marblehead, another yachting town that had spawned a guidebook for tourists.  The quiet danger in such places, I had learned, is that the combination of their wealth and physical beauty keeps pain from surfacing, forcing it to cut its own repressed geography of underground dark rivers.  Thus, one can easily believe all is well, that the terrain of life ahead promises solid footing, when it is actually ripe to give way.

I walked to my truck.  As I reached it, I noticed one of Darwin Bishop’s white Range Rovers parked about fifty yards away, closer to the road.  I waved.  Then I climbed in and headed back toward town, to watch a Nantucket family of fortune bid farewell to an infant daughter.

*            *            *

Darwin Bishop’s colleagues turned out in numbers to pay their respects.  A line a quarter-mile long stretched from the door of St. Mary’s Our Lady of Hope down Federal Street, onto cobblestoned Main.  I waited  in that line over an hour, behind a group of men talking about the competitive nature of the oil business and in front of another group planning a trip to India to recruit software engineers.  Granted, Brooke hadn’t been their daughter, and people will do their best to distance themselves from tragedy, but something about the tone of the conversations felt especially removed, as if we might have been in line to attend a convention or watch a movie.  After about thirty minutes, the banter really started to bother me.  At the 45-minute mark I couldn’t help interrupting a particularly energized, bow-tied fellow, about forty, with thick, sandy hair, who had been jawing about the ‘fucking SEC.’  I touched his arm gently, noticing the fine cotton of his pinstriped shirt.  Sea Island cotton, they call it.  "Excuse me," I said.

He looked at me, a little put out to be interrupted.  "Yes?" he said, with a synthetic amiability.

"Is it true that the little girl’s windpipe had been blocked off?" I said.

"What?"

I noticed that his friends were still talking about the markets.  "It’s what I heard, but I wasn’t sure.  I’m not from the island.  I’m a friend of Julia’s from way back.  I heard her baby was — essentially — strangled."

"I guess that’s right," he said tightly.

"I was just thinking how terrible that would be," I went on, "not being able to breathe.  Suffocating."

"Then don’t think about it."  He let that linger a beat, then turned away.

I listened to hear whether my little intervention would resonate for a while, keeping Mr. Bow Tie quiet, if nothing else.  But he was right back in the fray, arguing that SEC rules were vague and unevenly applied.  He got pretty heated about it.

Dozens of limousines were lined up closer to the church steps.  Whispers had it that they had transported some of the most powerful guests, including Senator Drew Anscombe and famed financier Christopher Burch of Links Securities.  Assistant Secretary of State William Rust and Russian ambassador Nikolai Tartokovsky had supposedly been fast-tracked to the family’s side aboard Darwin Bishop’s Gulfstream jet.

The atmosphere inside the teak doors of the weathered gray church was far more solemn.  A marble statue of Mary, hands down, palms open, stood near the entrance.  A stained-glass window of gold, ruby, emerald, and sapphire panes, depicting her in the same posture, glowed behind the altar.  Between the two lay a tiny casket covered by a white pall, emblazoned with a deep red cross.

A
tiny casket
is a non sequitur, a wrenching failure of all God’s magnificent intentions.

Julia will bury her baby come morning, I thought to myself. 
She will put her baby in the ground and leave her there
.  My throat tightened as I pictured Julia walking away from the burial plot, pictured Brooke curled into a ball, shivering.  I shook that image out of my head, but it lodged like a fistful of earth in my throat.

All the pews were full.  I stood to one side of the hall.  Looking around the room, I saw not only Anscombe and Burch but a host of luminaries, from newscasters to rock stars.

The priest, a surprisingly young man with wavy black hair and tanned skin, offered the opening prayer:

To You, Oh Lord, we humbly entrust this child, so precious in your sight.  Take Brooke into your arms and welcome her into Paradise, where there will be no sorrow, no weeping nor pain, but the fullness of peace and joy with your son and the Holy Spirit for ever and ever.

My eyes looked up at Mary, another mother who lost her child to murder.  I wondered whether that connection, or anything that could be said inside these four walls, or anything that could be said anywhere ever, would provide real solace for Julia.

Darwin Bishop was the next to offer a prayer.  My jaw tightened as I watched him climb the stairs to the altar.  He gripped each side of the lectern and slowly took stock of the room, much as he might at a corporate gathering.  His eyes were dry.  "Wisdom 3:1-7," he said.  In an unwavering voice, he read:

But the souls of the just are in the hands of God and no torment shall touch them.

They seemed in the view of the foolish to be dead and their passing away was thought an affliction and their going forth from us utter destruction.

But they are in peace.

Brooke had died, horribly.  It was Bishop who seemed at peace.  I felt my blood pressure rising as he went on:

Chastised a little they shall be greatly blessed because God tried them and found them worthy of himself.

As gold in the furnace, he proved them, he took them to himself.

In time of their visitation they shall shine and shall dart about as sparks.