The Castaways (28 page)

To keep from getting discouraged, Addison told the Chief stories of the wild days when he was married to the stick-thin, chain-smoking socialite Mary Rose Garth, who loved seeking out scandal the way other women loved chocolate, and then he told the real story of why he got kicked out of Princeton the week before he graduated. (The Chief swore never to divulge the details.) These were fantastic stories, they passed the time, and the Chief tried to come up with his own stories, but he had never been married to a woman who liked to bring another woman home to bed or throw last year’s couture on the library fire, and so what he realized in the woods was that although he was a police chief, his life had been pretty dull.

They noticed the woods starting to thin out. Then they hit a road. “A road! A motherfucking road!” They’d hit the jackpot: all roads led to somewhere.

But maybe not this one. It was a dirt road, and half an hour later, not a single vehicle had driven past. Addison tried his phone and got a cell signal. While he was dialing the hotel—all he would be able to tell everyone was that they were alive—the Chief saw headlights, and along came an honest-to-God VW bus with two hippies inside smoking a doobie as if they had arrived straight out of 1967. Addison and the Chief gratefully climbed into the green haze of the backseat.

There were two men sitting up front, if kids in their twenties with wispy beards and remnants of acne could be called men. They were listening to John Hiatt on the radio, and the Chief said happily upon settling in his seat, “Love the music!”

“Where we dropping you?” the driver asked. He was wearing a purple T-shirt and a pair of John Lennon sunglasses with purple tinted lenses.

“The Point,” Addison said with obnoxious authority, as though they were in Manhattan and this was their cab.

“Whoa-ho!” the passenger up front said. He was the one actually holding the joint, and after hearing the name of their hotel, he inhaled again and while holding his smoke said, “Sweet place.”

The Point was sweet—it was the finest place the Chief and Andrea had ever stayed at, with its rustic luxury, every detail attended to, including the temperature at which the red wine was served and the type of pillow each guest preferred. The Point was a resort for the rich. The Chief understood that Cheech and Chong here would now mistake him and Addison for wealthy men, and while this bothered him and he yearned to set the record straight, he really just wanted to get back.

“Can you take us there?” he asked.

“No prob,” the driver said. He looked at his companion and said, “Want to offer our friends a taste?”

The passenger, who looked like he was trying to grow in muttonchop sideburns, passed the joint back over the seat. Addison took it without hesitation.

“I haven’t smoked in twenty years,” he said. “But I have just been lost in the wilderness and experienced what I can most accurately describe as fear for my life, and a little spliff feels like exactly what I need right now.”

“Amen,” the passenger said.

Addison inhaled deeply with his eyes closed, held the smoke, and then let the stream go. “Smooth as silk,” he said. The Chief looked upon Addison not with shock or disgust, but rather with envy. He wanted to smoke, to have a looseness enter his stiff and sore muscles—but he just couldn’t.

“No, thanks,” said the Chief.

“Come on!” the passenger said.

“Can’t, really. Random drug testing at work.” The random drug testing among Nantucket’s police officers had been the Chief’s idea.

“Bummer!” the driver said. “What’s your line of work?”

“He’s a police chief,” Addison said.

There was a pause. One beat, then two. The song changed to Paul McCartney and Wings singing “Band on the Run.” The Chief wanted to deck Addison. What if these potheads got unnecessarily paranoid and decided to dump them? They would be only half a mile closer to home.

But instead the passenger, Master Scrawny Sideburns, burst out laughing. It was a giggly and girlish sound. And this set the driver laughing. Then, in a drug-induced delayed reaction, Addison laughed. He laughed so hard he held his stomach.

“Police chief,” he said. “Heeheeheeheeheehee.”

The driver could barely keep the van on the road. His tiny glasses slipped down his nose. He hunched over the steering wheel. Hahahahahahaha.

It took several minutes for them to collect their wits, but when they did, Master Scrawny Sideburns said, “Well, there, Mr. PO-lice Chief, would you like a beer?”

The Chief said, “Yes. Please.”

And that was now the Chief’s own best story.

Addison looked worse sitting across the table at the Begonia than he had after being lost in the woods for three hours and enduring what had ended up being a forty-five-minute drive back to the secure luxury of the Point. Then he had been mussed and torn and mud-caked and mosquito-bitten and sunburned and stoned out of his mind, and now, although his shirt was pressed and his hair tidy, he looked bloated and pale and tragically sad. He looked, the Chief thought, like a bald male version of Andrea. There had been a guy in the force in Swampscott who had lost his partner in a botched arrest, and as a sign of his grief he had tattooed half his face. The grief of the people close to the Chief was just as clear and indelible as Sergeant Cutone’s tattoo. And as with the sergeant, the Chief could barely stand to look at Addison. He had to avert his eyes.

In this part of the restaurant there were only two tables seated, and the Chief did not recognize the people. Tourists. The TV set was too far away to see the score of the Sox game. A waitress approached with a Budweiser for the Chief and another drink for Addison, even though he already had a healthy drink in front of him. She set the drinks down and said, “Would you like to place an order?”

Addison shook his head. “Nothing for me.”

The Chief was starving. Andrea had fed the twins microwaved hot dogs on some stale-looking buns, along with a couple of slices of pale watermelon, and although the Chief liked kid food—chicken nuggets, mac and cheese—nothing about the twins’ meal had appealed to him or to them. To be polite, he should wait for Jeffrey before he ordered, but etiquette was not the Chief’s strong suit and everyone knew it.

“Bleu burger well done, please. Fries. Coleslaw with extra horseradish. And start me with something… the jalapeno poppers.”

“Will do,” the waitress said.

“Jesus, Ed,” Addison said.

“I know,” the Chief said. “It’s a one-way ticket on the Heart-burn Express.”

Addison swilled the rest of his drink as if it were water and jostled the ice.

“Jesus yourself,” the Chief said.

“Yeah,” Addison said. “Phoebe thinks I have a problem.”

“Do you?”

“Have a problem?” He laughed joylessly. “I have a few.”

“I’m going to be honest with you,” the Chief said. “You don’t look that great.”

“Am I supposed to look great? It hasn’t even been a month. Can you believe it? It’s only been twenty-six days, but it’s like our whole reality has changed.”

“You’re taking it hard?”

“Is there another way to take it?” Addison’s eyes welled with tears. The Chief had seen it all during his seventeen years on the force, but one of his least favorite things was watching a grown man cry. He thought about all the phone calls between Tess and Addison on the day before Tess died. Five phone calls from Addison to Tess on the final morning. He had been trying to reach her. But why? Along with the tox report and what to do about Andrea, this was one of the things the Chief turned over incessantly in his mind. There had to be an explanation. Should he ask?

Among the four men, Greg and Addison had been the closest friends. They were the outgoing, party-all-the-time type who attended bachelor parties and took golf weekends, who went fishing and sailing and played bocce on the beach, clinking beer bottles after a good lie and offering high fives. When Addison got Celtics tickets or front row to see Jimmy Buffett, he always took Greg. Greg was his little buddy, his much younger fraternity brother; Addison told a joke and Greg was the first to laugh. That, perhaps, was the reason Addison looked like a jigsaw puzzle with a couple of pieces missing. He’d lost his sidekick, his Sundance Kid.

The Chief said, “Andrea’s a mess. What about Phoebe?”

“Phoebe?” Addison said. He sucked down the first third of his second drink and said, “The strange thing is that Phoebe is just fine. She’s actually better than she’s been in a long time. I’m sure everyone thought Phoebe would collapse, this would be the last straw, but she’s great. She’s exercising, eating, smiling.”

“Mmmm,” the Chief said. He had seen Phoebe on the Fourth and had noticed how luminous she looked. “And how goes it with the estate?”

“The estate?” Addison looked perplexed. “Oh, fine. We’re going to list the house at seven-fifty.”

The Chief nodded. There were forty or fifty follow-up questions to ask about the house and the furnishings and the personal effects, the business of the deaths, the selling off and cleaning up of two full lives, but the Chief wanted to ask about the phone calls. Who knew when he would get another chance? He was a policeman; he had to know. He would be direct, no funny business, no innuendo.

“I noticed there were a bunch of calls from you to Tess on the morning she died. Five, to be exact.”

Addison stared. The eye contact was reassuring, because what did a liar do? He dropped his eyes to his drink.

“Was something going on?” the Chief asked.

“Going on?”

“Happening? Was she thinking of selling the house or renting a place for her college roommate or…” He was giving Addison a chance to lie here, and put his mind at ease, at least temporarily. “Why so many phone calls?”

Addison shrugged; his stare did not relent. “We were friends.”

“Well, obviously,” the Chief said. “We were all friends. But why were you trying to reach her? Five phone calls in half an hour. What for?”

“What for?”

“Yeah.”

Addison hunched his shoulders. “What are you asking me, Ed?”

“I’m asking what you wanted to talk to her about. If you saw half a dozen calls from me to Tess, you would want to know what was going on, wouldn’t you? You would want to know what we were talking about.”

“I would figure it was your business. I wouldn’t interrogate you.”

“That’s not what I’m doing.”

“It sure as hell sounds like it.”

“Okay, well, while I’m at it, I have another question.”

Addison held eye contact. “What would that be?”

“In the bag of the items the Coast Guard recovered was Tess’s phone.”

“You have the phone. You just said you checked it.”

“It went missing the day she died. That night. And you were at the Drake house. Did you take Tess’s cell phone? Do you have it?”

Addison’s nostrils flared, ever so slightly. “No.”

“I need you to tell me the truth. The phone could have clues still on it. I didn’t look at her text messages, for example.”

“Why not?”

“I didn’t have time. I was dealing with Andrea.” The Chief paused. “Do you have the phone, Addison? Just tell me.”

“No.”

“Okay,” the Chief said. He was sure now that Addison did have the phone, but what could he do? Get a search warrant? Turn the phone into evidence? Let the whole island know that Tess’s and Greg’s deaths were, maybe, more than an accident?

“If you find the phone…” the Chief said. “If for some reason Phoebe has it, or it turns up…”

“You’ll be the first to know,” Addison said.

The waitress approached timidly with the jalapeno poppers. She looked nervous. It was the Mafia Table replete with men speaking in angry whispers. The Chief waved her in. Food, yes, hurry, put the plate down, the Chief was starving. He ate when he was nervous or stressed out, and he was both things in extremis right now. He popped a popper right away, then regretted it. The popper was filled with molten lava that branded his tongue with a sizzling hiss. He gasped and nearly spit the glowing coal into his napkin, but both the waitress and Addison were watching him. If Addison could bluff, so could he. Thumbs up! Delicious!

“Another beer,” he whispered. “Please.”

“And a drink for me,” Addison said.

Just like that, the moment was past, the topic was kaput, and to revisit the question of the cell phone or the reason for Addison’s phone calls would seem aggressive. The Chief would not be able to uncover anything. Addison, despite his diminished appearance, was cunning—that Ivy League education meant something, as did the charm, the business acumen, the money, the languages, the connections. Addison was as slippery as a fish, but he would not get caught like a fish. There were two types of men, cops and robbers, and Addison… well, the Chief hated to say it, but he was a robber. The kind who stole a man’s money and his property. Greg had been a robber, too, the kind who stole a woman’s heart. The Chief was a cop through and through, but that didn’t mean he would prevail. Going head to head with Addison, he almost certainly would not.

“Want a popper?” the Chief asked, secretly wishing Addison would end up with a sore, dry spot on his tongue like the Chief now had.

“God, no,” Addison said.

And they both chuckled.

Jeffrey said, “Sorry I’m late.”

He had not left Delilah at home at night since Greg and Tess had died, he said, because he was worried about her. Crackerjack Delilah, the bat out of hell, Joan Jett meets Julia Child, a woman formidable in a dozen different ways—and she was a mess now.

“I can only stay for one beer,” Jeffrey said.

Jeffrey was a cop also, the Chief thought. He was a cop’s cop, incorruptible.

“I’m sorry to hear about Delilah,” the Chief said. “I miss her cooking.”

“I miss her cooking, too,” Jeffrey said.

“Have a burger,” the Chief said, nodding at his own plate, half demolished.

“I can’t stay that long,” Jeffrey said. The man was a Supreme Court justice.

“Right,” the Chief said. He had to put aside his feeding trough—the extra horseradish in the coleslaw had his mouth buzzing in a way that made him want to shovel in more and more food—and deal with the unpleasant business of the evening. Or he could just forget about it. He had a
choice
here—he could open up the Pandora’s box that was the tox report—or he could let it go.