Fall from Grace (25 page)

Adam kissed her forehead, felt cold skin and damp tendrils of hair. “Now you’re like me,” he said gently. “But it’s like I promised at Waskosims, Jen. I’ll never let anything happen to you.”

In late afternoon, they spotted Menemsha Harbor. Though warmed by the sun, Jenny still leaned against him. “I’ve never talked to anyone about my writing,” she said. “At least not like I do with you.”

“Do you know why?”

She hesitated. “I’m afraid of rejection. Both of my stories and of me. Sometimes I’m too scared to show them to anyone, especially someone I know.”

A new idea struck him, a way to encourage her. “Suppose my dad wanted to read one of your stories, Jen. Could he?”

She stared at him in wonder. “Do you think he would?”

“I could always ask.” Still watching the current, Adam considered how much this might appeal to Ben’s idea of himself. “He just might give you feedback, and he knows damn near everyone in publishing. Maybe you should come to dinner.” Pausing, he smiled at another thought. “Actually, you’ll be a welcome distraction for us all. Given that we’re close to the last boat race, and I’ve nearly caught him in the standings, Dad’s a little short with me right now.”

The wheels of the plane touched down, jolting Adam back to the present.

Eighteen

In the next three days, Adam met with his superiors, transferred money to Jason Lew through two separate bank accounts, and returned to the Vineyard. On the day following, Lew called him to report. “I got by with it,” Lew said. “I don’t think the security guys suspected me. If you’re feeling reckless, you can find out if my technical gifts survive.”

That evening, at twilight, Adam told Clarice he was going fly-fishing and drove to Dogfish Bar.

Several men were already there, spread like sentries along the surf. Spotting Matthew Thomson, Adam stopped to chat, then took his place among the others. For several hours he tried to clear his mind of tensions, focused on his casting. Only as the rest began drifting away did Adam’s thoughts turn from the water.

Shortly after midnight, he found himself alone.

Edgier now, he made himself remain for one more hour. Then he returned to the dirt patch where he had parked his truck, changed into jeans and a dark sweater, and made the forty-minute drive to Edgartown.

He parked on a residential lane two blocks from Main Street. The town was dark and quiet, the last of the drunken college kids cleared from the sidewalks. Sliding out of the truck, he walked near the shade trees lining the road.

Headlights pierced the darkness, coming toward him. Swiftly, he slipped behind the cover of a privacy hedge, kneeling on the lawn of a darkened house. Peering through its branches, he saw that the lights belonged to a patrol car from the Edgartown police. This much he had expected; what he could not know was whether the cop at the wheel would continue on his rounds.

Standing, Adam looked in both directions, then continued past more white frame houses in a circuitous route toward Main Street. Then he veered again, quietly but quickly crossing a yard before concealing himself behind a tree next to the courthouse.

Its parking lot was empty, the rear entrance lit by a single spotlight. Putting on his father’s old ski mask and gloves, he took Lew’s device from his pocket. It was no larger than a car fob, with a simple switch that would disarm the security system. Unless the device was defective—in which case arrest was the least of Adam’s worries.

He paused, envisioning the challenge ahead. A sheriff’s deputy would monitor the surveillance screen in the room near the main entrance, watching images sent by cameras in the hallway and just above the rear door. Assuming that the shriek alarm did not go off when he opened the door, any one of the cameras could reveal his presence inside the courthouse, bringing a swarm of cops and deputies. His choice was to back out or trust in Lew’s skill.

For a moment, recalling the young man he had been, Adam was paralyzed by disbelief. But since then he had learned to ignore boundaries and to mold events to his purposes. Stepping from behind the tree, he felt the coldness come over him, his heartbeat lowering, his breathing becoming deep and even. His footsteps as he crossed the parking lot were silent.

Nerveless, he pushed the button.

The first test would be the door.

Adam inhaled. The door had unlocked; so far, Lew’s bypass had worked.

Slowly, Adam edged inside. Dim light illuminated the hallway. A camera aimed down at him from the ceiling, meant to reveal his presence at once. But if the device functioned properly, the monitor would show the empty space that had existed a moment before Adam filled it. No one inside seemed to stir.

With painful slowness, Adam crept down the hallway toward the stairs to the second floor. As he reached them, he glanced into the security room and saw the broad back of a sheriff’s deputy gazing at a TV monitor, watching the door through which Adam had entered. The intruder was safely inside.

Catlike, he started up the stairs. He willed himself not to look back at the deputy who, simply by turning, would catch him. Reaching the top, he turned a corner, out of sight once more.

The second floor was quiet and still. If he got in and out without being seen, Lew had promised, no one would ever know he had been there. But Adam had more complex plans. Reaching the door of George Hanley’s office, also wired to the system, he turned the knob.

Once again, Lew’s device had disarmed the lock. Slipping inside, Adam softly closed the door.

Through the window Main Street appeared dark and silent. Using his penlight, Adam scanned the surface of Hanley’s desk.

Nothing of interest. Kneeling, he slid open the top drawer of a battered metal cabinet, then another, reading the captions on manila folders. Only in the bottom drawer did he find the file labeled BENJAMIN BLAINE.

Taking it out, he sat at Hanley’s desk.

The sensation was strange. But for the next few minutes, Adam guessed, he was safe. The danger would come when he tried to leave.

Methodically, he spread the contents of the file in front of him. Hanley’s handwritten notes, suggesting areas of inquiry. The crime scene report. Typed notes of the initial interviews with his mother, brother, and uncle—as well as Carla Pacelli, Jenny Leigh, Nathan Wright, and Adam himself. And, near the bottom of the file, the pathologist’s report.

For the next half hour, he systematically photographed each page, blocking out all thought of detection. He had no time to read. But once he escaped, and studied them, he would know almost as much as George Hanley and Sean Mallory—and, unlike them, would know that. Especially advantaged would be Teddy’s lawyer in Boston, who would receive them in the mail from an anonymous benefactor, and who, himself innocent of the theft, would have no ethical duty to return them.

Finishing, Adam reassembled the file and placed it in a different drawer. This last was for Bobby Towle—Hanley would know that someone had rifled his office, but not who, creating a universe of suspects who might have sold out to the Enquirer. A gift of conscience from an old friend.

Opening the door, Adam left it ajar.

At the top of the stairs, he stopped abruptly. The deputy was padding down the hallway, perhaps sensing that something was wrong. If he glanced up, Adam was caught.

Utterly still, Adam watched him. The man disappeared, the only sound the quiet echo of his footsteps.

Adam stayed where he was.

Moments crawled by while the deputy inspected the first floor. At last, Adam heard more footsteps, and prayed that the deputy would not come upstairs. Back toward Adam, the man plodded to his station and sat before a monitor Adam knew to be disabled.

With agonizing care, Adam walked down the stairs. With each step the distance between him and the deputy lessened. As Adam reached the bottom of the steps, it narrowed to ten feet.

Head propped on his arm, the deputy gazed at the frozen screen.

Turning down the hallway, Adam passed beneath more cameras, still unseen. A few last steps, swifter now, took him to the entrance.

Slowly opening the door, Adam reentered the night.

As he stepped onto the asphalt, headlights sliced the darkness. In an instant Adam grasped that the patrol car was arriving. As its lights caught Adam, the driver hit the brakes.

Whirling, Adam sprinted down Main Street, footsteps pounding cement. In one corner of his mind he gauged the time it would take the patrolman to swing back into the alley toward the street, picking him up again.

Suddenly, he swerved, cutting back through the lawn of the Old Whaling Church and then a stand of trees bordering a neighbor’s backyard. Behind him he heard brakes squealing, a door opening, the footsteps of the cop scurrying from his car.

Adam had little more time to run; in minutes more police would converge, on foot or in patrol cars. Nor could he drive away. His last hope was to hide.

Bent at the waist, he crossed another yard, heading for his truck.

It was parked in a line of cars along the crowded lane. As headlights entered the lane, Adam reached his truck, sliding to his stomach at the rear. Clawing asphalt, he pulled himself beneath it, invisible to anyone who did not think to look.

He heard the patrol car pass, then his pursuer, still on foot, reaching the lane near Adam’s truck. Listening to the man’s labored breathing, Adam imagined him looking about, mystified by the absence of sound, the sudden disappearance of his quarry.

Move on, Adam implored him.

Another car passed without stopping, and then the man’s footsteps sounded again, fading as he moved away.

Adam removed his mask and gloves. Damp face pressed against the asphalt, he glanced at his watch.

Three twenty. Two hours until dawn. Head resting on curled arms, Adam waited.

First light came as a silver space between the tires of his truck. Sliding out, Adam looked around him, and saw nothing but the still of early morning.

He climbed into his truck, started the motor, and drove out of town at a slow but steady pace. Glancing in the mirror, he saw that no one followed. As had been his plan, he headed back toward Dogfish Bar.

The beach was empty, the only sign of human existence the footprints left by fishermen. Satisfied, he changed into his fishing gear and drove to a restaurant overlooking the Gay Head cliffs. He ordered breakfast amid the tourists and tradesmen, a nocturnal angler as determined as his father, refueling after hours of solitary fishing. He made a point of joking with the waitress.

On the way home, he tossed the garbage bag filled with his clothes in a pile of refuse at the Chilmark dump, and dropped Lew’s device in its incinerator. Parking at his mother’s, he saw Clarice drinking coffee on the porch. “You look terrible,” she observed.

Adam fingered his dark stubble. “The price of watching the sun come up. All that’s left when you catch no fish.”

“Get some sleep,” his mother suggested with a smile. “You’re not twenty anymore.”

Climbing the stairs, Adam closed himself in a room that still held the artifacts of his youth. For a moment, he contemplated Jenny’s photograph. Then he downloaded the images he had taken into his computer, reviewing the documents he would provide to Teddy’s lawyer.

The process took two hours, more disturbing by the minute as the mosaic of evidence began forming in his mind. He found no reference to the insurance policy obliquely mentioned by Bobby Towle. But the witness statements conformed to what he knew: the Blaines, Jenny, and Carla Pacelli all denied knowing about the will, and his mother and Teddy’s central assertion—which, in his brother’s case, Adam no longer believed—was that neither had seen his father once he left the house. Far more lethal were the crime scene and pathology reports. He was not surprised that someone besides his father—no doubt Teddy—had left distinctive boot prints at the promontory. But there had been drag marks in the mud as well, mud on the heels of the dead man’s boots, suggesting that someone had dragged him, perhaps struggling, through the wet earth near the point from which he fell. Worse yet, there were circumferential bruises on Ben’s wrists, no doubt heightened by his regime of chemotherapy, appearing to confirm that a murderer had grasped him by both arms. It was plain that the police and prosecutor believed, as Adam did now, that someone had thrown Benjamin Blaine off the promontory.

Suppose you find out that your father was murdered by a member of your family.

Adam felt a coldness on his skin. His next task was to print these pages, mail them to Teddy’s lawyer, then erase the images from his camera and computer before getting rid of both. But he paused to absorb what he and the authorities now further believed in common—that Teddy had killed their father. The job Benjamin Blaine had left him was not just to execute a will, but to save a guilty man, his brother.

Part Three

The Executor

One

Four nights later, Adam again met Amanda Ferris beneath the promontory.

On the surface, little had happened since the break-in. Whatever inquiry Hanley and the police had launched—an exhaustive one, Adam was certain—they had suppressed any news of the incident itself. The previous day Teddy had flown to Boston to buy art supplies; only Adam knew enough to guess he had been summoned by his lawyer. No one had questioned Adam about anything: with the security cameras disabled, all Sean Mallory had was a faceless man, swift and resourceful enough to vanish, thereby eliminating a host of potential suspects while creating a dead end. Unless someone checked his bank accounts, Bobby Towle was in the clear.