Nantucket Nights (18 page)

“She’s dead,” a voice said. Luke walked into the kitchen behind Jennifer. Cassidy B. followed him. “Aunt Antoinette is dead.”

“Luke? What makes you say that?” Kayla asked.

“She just is. I know it.” His voice was calm and serious. “Aunt Antoinette drowned.”

Cassidy B. started to cry. Jennifer said, “Mom, what happened up there, exactly?”

Luke said, “I’m telling you…” Suddenly, all three of them were making a commotion—until the sliding glass door opened and Theo walked in. Or a boy who resembled Theo, except this boy was bloodless, lifeless. He’d lost his tan, it seemed, overnight; his hair had lost its color. When Theo stepped into the kitchen, the other kids got quiet. They were still afraid of him.

“Mom?” he said. “Tin going to bed.”

“Okay,” Kayla said.

His brother and sisters cleared the way for him, and he headed past them toward the stairs.

“The poor kid,” Val whispered.

Money, Kayla thought. It couldn’t mend a broken heart. Theo’s or hers.

The phone rang. Jennifer ran to answer it, and in her very adult voice, she said, “May I tell her who’s calling?” A beat passed and she handed Kayla the phone, mouthing,
The police.

“Kayla?” It was Paul Henry. “Can you and Valerie come down to the station, please? We have some questions for you.”

“Have you found her?” Kayla asked.

“No,” he said. “We checked at the airport and the Steamship first thing this morning. No one saw Ms. Riley leaving the island.”

“Well, then, what kind of questions do you have?” Kayla said. “Can’t you ask them over the phone? My family …” Jennifer, Cassidy B. and Luke were huddled together like orphaned immigrants, all three of them staring at her with Raoul’s wide brown eyes. “My family needs me at home right now.”

“And we need you at the station,” Paul said. “I suggest you and Valerie cooperate. It’ll be easier for all involved.”

Kayla’s eyelids drooped; she was exhausted. She wasn’t sure she could make herself get back in the car and drive into town to the police station, but what choice did she have?

Kayla hung up and turned to the table. “They want us to answer more questions,” she said to Val. “Let’s go.

Let’s get this over with.”

When they got in the car, Kayla said, “You’d better tell me what’s going on.”

“I don’t
know
what’s going on.”

“You know plenty,” Kayla said. “You know much more than you told me last night.”

“John is angry,” Val said.

“About Jacob?”

“Yes, about Jacob.” She fluttered her hand in such a way that made Kayla notice she had removed her huge diamond ring and her wedding band. “I’m leaving him. I told him this morning. He said if I left, he’d go to the police, and I guess he has.” Val twisted her gold chains so fiercely, Kayla was amazed they didn’t break.

“I saw John at the airport,” Kayla said. “About half an hour ago.”

“What was he doing at the airport?” Val said. “God, let’s hope he was leaving.”

“The question is, what was I doing at the airport? The
answer is, I was dropping off Lindsey Allerton, Antoinette’s daughter.”

“That’s right. Raoul told us you spent the day with the daughter. What’s she like?”

“She’s like Antoinette.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning … ” Kayla looked out the window at a young blond woman pushing a jog stroller. Kayla saw the same woman jogging with her baby every single day and every single day the woman made Kayla feel fat and unmotivated. “Meaning she’s thin, beautiful, and articulate. She’s as confused as the rest of us.”

“I bet,” Val said.

Kayla took a deep breath and looked at her friend. “So you’ve known about Theo and Antoinette since last week. You knew about the baby. And you didn’t tell me.”

“It was told to me under the strictest confidence, Kayla. Not only as Antoinette’s friend, but as her lawyer. Please don’t get sensitive about it.”

“If I didn’t get sensitive about this, I’d be cold-blooded.”

“Antoinette was dead set against your knowing about Theo or the baby. She said she was going to break it off with Theo before school started, she was going to get an abortion and hope the whole thing blew over.”

“How considerate of her,” Kayla said. “Breaking it off before school began so that Theo could have a normal senior year. I mean, what was she
thinking?”

“It was about sex,” Val said.

“That doesn’t make me feel any better,” Kayla said. She wasn’t ready to imagine one of her children as a lover—and yet now she was forced to. “Why did Antoinette let herself get pregnant?”

“Yeah,” Val said. “You’d think she’d know better.”

“Did she disappear on purpose?” Kayla asked. “Did she pull a Houdini?”

“I don’t know, Kayla,” Val said.

“Why did she want a new will? Do you think she was planning on killing herself? Think back, Val, think back to the beginning. That first Night Swimmers. She was suicidal then.”

“She told me she wanted to protect her assets. Which, with her daughter showing up, wasn’t a bad idea. Obviously, if I knew more than that, I would tell you.”

“Obviously you’ve kept a lot from me already,” Kayla said. “And now we have your husband after us.”

“John’s also angry because I advised Antoinette to pull her money.”

“What do you mean “pull her money’?”

“Pull it out of his account. His care. I suggested that she transfer her assets to another broker. Now John wants to make it look like I killed her for her money because I’m the only one who knows where she put it. Except he has no evidence. And nobody likes him, especially not the guys at the police station.”

The streets were crowded, and Kayla sat at the corner of India and Centre waiting for traffic to pass. “Where did Antoinette put her money?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Val, please.”

“Abroad somewhere. That’s really all I can say.”

“Abroad, like Switzerland?”

“Oh, God,” Val said, lurching forward. “There’s his car.”

Kayla looked where Val was pointing. John Gluckstem’s black Jaguar cruised by with Lindsey Allerton in the passenger seat. Of course.

“Shit,” Kayla said. “Do you know who that is in his car, Val? That’s Antoinette’s daughter.”

“Where?”

“In the front seat of his fucking car!” Kayla said. Fear passed through her like a cold wind. “He must have convinced her to go to the police after all. Shit. She knows about Theo because she was with me when I found him at Great Point and he said some things. So you can bet John knows now about Theo and the baby. Let’s ditch Paul Henry, Val. Let’s catch the fast boat to Hyannis and have dinner at Chili’s instead.”

Val craned her neck. “I want to see the daughter! Follow them, Kayla. There they go. They’re taking a right onto Federal.”

“I’m serious, Val. Maybe we should leave the island.”

“I can’t believe I missed her,” Val said.

Kayla turned onto Chestnut Street. Miraculously, there was a parking spot across from the police station.

“What do you think they told the police?” Kayla said. “Do you think they told them everything?”

“I guess we’ll find out,” Val said.

Kayla had lived on Nantucket for nearly twenty years, and she was still discovering things. For example, the police station had a holding cell and an interrogation room. She’d heard about the holding cell years ago—one of Raoul’s drunk friends spent the night there—but she’d forgotten about its existence. The interrogation room was a complete surprise to her. After Kayla and Val walked into the station and announced their arrival to the officer sitting behind glass, Paul Henry materialized from behind a heavy door.

“We’re going to question you one at a time,” Paul Henry said. “Valerie, why not you first? Follow me to the interrogation room.”

Kayla watched Val step through the door and disappear down a dark hallway.

“You can have a seat, ma’am,” the officer behind glass said to Kayla.

There was a metal couch with mustard yellow vinyl cushions and a small table that had three magazines on it:
Reader’s Digest.
Kayla came into the police station exactly once a year to get a beach sticker for her car, and never once had she noticed how ugly it was.

Kayla plopped onto the sofa and leaned her head back against the wall. At least it was air-conditioned. She closed her eyes, opened them, pitched forward and scanned the front of the
Reader’s Digests.
Then she leaned back again. She searched through her purse for her Ativan, but she couldn’t find them. In the car. She considered going out and looking for them—she liked the calm they brought her, and if she was going to sit in the interrogation room, she wanted to be calm. But then her fingers found the keys to Theo’s Jeep, and next, the sandwich bag that held the pregnancy test. Kayla dropped her purse, closed her eyes. She was exhausted.

She woke up drooling. The officer behind glass paid her no attention; he was typing, and when a voice broke the static of the police scanner, he held his head alert but still, like a cat stalking a bird, and when the call proved to be uninteresting, he resumed his typing. Kayla checked the clock: Val had been in there forty minutes. Paul Henry must have been giving her a hard time. Antoinette disappearing was a bad development for Val—with a new will and a soon-to-be ex-husband out to nail her. Who knew what the police would think?

Kayla tapped on the glass of the reception window. The same cat-and-bird reaction; the typing stopped.

“Yes?”

“How long do you think they’ll be?” she asked. “I have a husband and four children at home waiting for me to feed them.”

The officer scowled. Kayla thought of Officer Johnny Love, a kid not much older than Theo, playing policeman. She longed for him.

“I have no idea, ma’am.”

“May I please use your—” Her question was cut off when the heavy door opened and out came Val, Paul Henry, and the offensive detective. Val was staring resolutely at the floor, her arms crossed in front of her.

“Are you okay?” Kayla said. “What happened in there?”

“We’re ready for you, Kayla,” Paul Henry said.

“I’m not sure I’m ready for you,” she responded.

Val raised her eyes. “You might want to get a lawyer.”

“You are my lawyer.”

“Not anymore.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Val headed for the door. “I’ll see you later, Kayla,” she said.

Kayla trailed Paul Henry down the dim hallway past the holding cell, which looked like any jail cell—bars, cot, sink—and a couple of offices with desks and filing cabinets. And then, the interrogation room. A sign on the door said PRIVATE. Inside was a wooden table, four folding chairs, a water cooler, and perhaps to remind them that they
were
on Nantucket Island, one of the most charming locations in all the world, there was a poster of a Beetle Cat with a green sail breezing around Brant Point lighthouse. Kayla was thinking of Val. She felt bruised somehow by what Val had said. Val wasn’t her lawyer anymore? Why not? And Val had left the station. How was she getting home? Taxi? Kayla wasn’t even sure where Val considered home. Now that Val had left John, was she living with Jacob? Kayla wanted to run out onto the street after her friend, but there was little hope of that now that she was in the interrogation room. Kayla wondered if the door was locked.

Detective Simpson sat at the table with a yellow legal pad that was covered with scribblings. “Sit down,” he said. Paul Henry paced around by Kayla’s right, in the area near the door, as though waiting for a chance to escape. She couldn’t blame him.

“We’ve taken three statements so far,” the detective said. “One from Valerie Gluckstern, one from John Gluckstern and one from Lindsey Allerton, birth daughter of Antoinette Riley.”

Kayla shook her head. “John Gluckstern and Lindsey Allerton have nothing to do with this. I don’t see how statements from them would have any relevance.”

“They have relevance,” the detective said. “Because what we’re interested in here is motive.”

“Motive?” Kayla said. “What’s that supposed to mean?” She had known Paul Henry for years, and his idiosyncrasies—his crew cut, his cardigans, his quiet intensity—were accepted by all Nantucketers. He and Raoul were in Rotary together; he gave school assemblies on common-sense safety. Kayla didn’t exactly like him, but she cared about him. This new guy, the detective, was a stranger, and his arrogance pissed Kayla off. He was just a kid they imported from the mainland and gave a title: detective. Now here he was throwing around words like
motive.
“I don’t feel like playing games. My children are at home waiting for dinner. Why don’t you tell me what you know and I’ll tell you what I know and then I’ll go home and you two can get back to the business of finding Antoinette?”

The detective sniffed. “Your children are at home?”

“Yes.”

“Your son Theo. He’s at home?”

Kayla paused. So they knew. Okay, what did she expect? They knew about the affair, and maybe they thought he was the one who ransacked Antoinette’s cottage.

“He was at home when I left.”

The detective flipped a sheet on his yellow pad. Kayla saw him write her name and underline it. Then he looked at her with an annoyingly casual expression, as though he was surprised to find her sitting there.

“And you’re aware, I assume, that your son Theo was having a sexual relationship with Ms. Riley.”

Kayla nodded.

“And you’re aware that Ms. Riley is pregnant by your son?”

Kayla glanced at Paul Henry, her mind swirling with the furious tornado of the Nantucket rumor mill and how it damaged lives. Theo would be starting his senior year in three days, and every single kid would know.

“Can you prove she was pregnant by my son?” she said. “I mean, if she’s missing …”

“We know you found a positive pregnancy test in Antoinette’s house last night,” Paul Henry said.

“What are you talking about?”

“You didn’t find a pregnancy test in Ms. Riley’s house last night?” the detective asked.

“No.”

“Kayla,” Paul Henry said. “We know you took it. The woman’s daughter told us you showed her the pregnancy test.”

“You removed a positive pregnancy test from Ms. Riley’s house last night,” the detective said. “Even after we ordered you not to touch anything.”