The Gun Runner's Daughter (7 page)

“Okay, Dee, nice work. We’re announcing the day after Labor Day. September six, eight A.M., we’ll brief for a press conference at ten. Okay?”

Agreeing, Dee felt suddenly exhausted. Over the weekend he could call Shauna at home. The press conference would take place without him.

This was his first weekend off. There was only one place to go. At the Yale Club he booked a ticket to the little airport on the Vineyard.

In his room he packed slowly, thoughtfully. Then he lifted his bag and with sudden energy made his way out of the club.

Perhaps he was an optimist. Somewhere, in the furthest frequencies of his mood’s spectrum, he felt that if he went up to the island, if he found and talked to Alley, something would
change.

It might be, he knew, an illusion. If so, it was a necessary one, because it was his only one, and therefore he simply could not afford to give it up.

Labor Day Weekend, 1994.
Martha’s Vineyard.

1.

Beyond the porch of the Up Island General Store, late-summer traffic crawled down-island, Volvos, Cherokees, Land Cruisers, Suburbans, orderly and slow, like a well-rehearsed
coastal evacuation under the slow strobe of clouds and sun. The Clintons were on-island this week and the summer traffic, always heavy, now had to negotiate a series of mobile security
installations going up at all major intersections. Coming through the store’s screen door with her mail, Allison watched the line of traffic go into a cloud shadow, then looked automatically
to the parking lot. The short man was there, again, sitting in his rented Jeep.

This was certainly the most cunning of the journalists who’d tried to interview her in the two weeks she’d been on the island: Emily Harden from the
New Yorker
, Charles
Sennott from the
Boston Globe
, Douglas Frantz from the
Los Angeles Times—
Stein had informed her each time a paper made a bid to talk to her. How he had known, Alley was not
sure: it would not surprise her to learn that Falcon employees were keeping some kind of eye on her. As for the man, he had not yet approached her, but followed her wherever she was going in his
little rented Jeep. At first it had amused her. Now it no longer seemed funny. He sat at the wheel of his Jeep in khakis, penny loafers, a white cotton shirt, well shaped, noticeably short. His
hair was brown, not recently cut. She had not seen his face.

Squinting as the sun came out again, she watched him while behind her passed the sweep of bare feet on wood, vacationers coming in and out of this social center of this tiny corner of a tiny
universe. She heard a woman say that the dry spell was ending, a man drawl something in a Bucks County accent, and then, whispered, the words “Ron Rosenthal’s daughter.” As if on
cue, now, the small man looked up and showed her an even-featured, rather delicate face. For a moment they watched each other. Then she impassively gave him the finger, turning her right hand up
from waist level. He smiled suddenly, and she turned away.

In three short steps she was lightly off the porch, swinging a leg over her bicycle seat, clipping a foot into a pedal. In the corner of her eye she saw the Jeep moving, but no car could catch a
bike in this traffic. A push and she was coasting while she felt for the other pedal. When it clipped she looked up for a break in the traffic, poised to accelerate.

That was when she saw the other man who had been watching her, across the road, from an open red sports car—nearly liquid red in the blaze of sun.

Only a second passed as she held his eyes before she had passed onto the road.

It felt, however, to Allison a much longer time, as if she were moving in slow motion, her progress checked by the weight of the August sun.

And only after perhaps ten minutes, when she had braked, banked, and in a cloud of dust pumped off onto the dirt road to Ocean View Farm, past a sign announcing to the island a single word,
“Private,” did she pronounce to herself her emotion, in a long, drawn-out obscenity.

Having some damn journalist follow her around was one thing. But even with all that had happened to her this summer, that she should today, of all days, for the first time in ten years, see Dee
Dennis, that was venturing into the realm of the unreal.

2.

How bizarre, how
unheimlich
—the word, from a long-ago class with Paul De Man, surfaced slowly in her memory—it had been, the sight of his face. At the memory
of it a sense of comfort, of childhood, swept through her, sweet and familiar. When had she last even thought of him? It had been ten years, easy, since she’d seen him, and that was another
life. She’d heard of him a few times: he’d won some prize at Harvard, and turned down a Connecticut clerkship to go work on those doomed prosecutions for Walsh. His family was a big
presence on the island, even though only his aunt was actually in residence; the Dennises pronounced
aunt
with an English accent, and had once farmed much of Chilmark. It had been ten years,
though, since she and he last spoke, easy.

Alone in the living room of Ocean View, watching a single swan glide across the pond in the falling afternoon light—unnerved by the wind, darting its head sideways at imagined
perils—Allison let that feeling of familiarity again pass through her belly.

And in the middle of that feeling, like the cold wind from the ocean that chilled you only out of the sun’s heat, a sudden shadow: the knowledge that everything had changed.

In her drying sweaty clothes she shivered, as if in a chill wind blown through the living room. The wind rattled a window and the house responded with a cavernous silence, echoing, in its very
timbers, that sense of change.

God, she had had a happy life. In this room, she felt that very intensely. Then Pauly had died. Briefly, she felt a cold, pitiless resentment against him, as if he were still her annoying,
clinging little brother. Then, equally familiar, missing flooded her being.

Heavily, Allison sat at the dining room table, drinking water from a bottle, wiping her mouth against the warm, salty surface of her arm after each sip. Then, with a sigh, she pulled the mail
from her saddlebag, and turned her attention to the letters.

Clearly this table had not been used for dining in some time. Central on it was a PowerBook computer; radiating around were neat piles of paper, documents, and correspondence.
The books pertaining to Ocean View’s finances were here, as Allison had retrieved them from the real estate agent. And finally, visible on the table, the urgent business before her: the
ongoing inventory of Ocean View’s contents.

At first, when she’d arrived, she’d refused to consider what the end of the summer would bring. The house was as familiar as anything in her life. The familiarity, she found, could
not be poisoned by the events that surrounded her presence here; it was too home, too dear. Nor did it frighten her to be alone here. She had always liked being alone at Ocean View.

Bob Stein had followed up on her outburst with a terse, entirely formal letter repeating his legal advice that the house should be inventoried against its inevitable seizure in the fall. This
she had thrown away.

Nonetheless, in the days that followed, she quickly found she could not ignore the business of Ocean View. Mail arrived: notices from the government, a mimeographed sheet titled “Preparing
Your House for Federal Escrow,” letters from tenants. In time, she’d found herself spending a couple of hours each morning working on it, and at last came to feel that Stein’s
advice had been correct. Something could change: the house could be seized and, as a result of litigation, or a plea bargain, returned. No matter how unlikely that event, if it happened, she would
want to hold the federal government liable for every missing piece of dust. After a few days’ thought she wrote a short letter of apology to Bob Stein, and began inventorying the house in an
Excel spreadsheet on the PowerBook.

Equally urgent, she had quickly found, was the paperwork generated by Ocean View Farm with its fifteen rentals: outstanding bills, repairs, fees, taxes. All of this work had fallen to her: the
real estate agent who had handled Ronald Rosenthal’s work for the past twenty-five years had, this summer, declined to be any longer involved with it—but not until, Allison had noticed,
the commissions on the current summer’s rentals were calculated.

Most of the regular renters had understood without being told that they’d best look elsewhere for their next season’s summer rental. To her surprise, however, several tenants seemed
not to have heard of her father’s arrest and upcoming trial, or if they had, had not realized that it might affect their regular summer rentals, and had sent in their checks for the following
season as if nothing in the world were wrong.

And Allison, contemplating those checks, had been surprised by the thought that had come to her.

In today’s mail the Newmans, from Michigan, had sent in a deposit of $5,000 pending lease from their landlord. The check was made out to Rosenthal Equities. The Hugheses, with a Chicago
address, had enclosed a check for the same amount. The Petersons had decided to pass this year; they would be taking a less expensive, if less spectacular, house in Edgartown, but the Mitchels from
Los Angeles enclosed their fully executed lease with their first payment of $18,500, which, with their original deposit of $5,000, constituted half the payment on the full-season rental of one of
the most splendid ocean-side properties for rent on the island.

Nearly $30,000 in today’s mail alone. She placed the checks neatly in a pile next to the computer. So far, receivables on the 1995 rental season were at $180,000. Real estate, God. She
shook her head, momentarily unaware of the absurdity of her emotion. So that was why her father had gotten into land speculation so quickly.

She should, she knew, contact these people. Return their checks, explain that there were no longer any Ocean View rentals.

She should. For if she did not, she would cause them, and the federal government, an enormous amount of trouble when, next summer, these renters demanded their properties.

Which is why, today, she did what she had done for the past two weeks, each afternoon, with the rental checks that arrived in the mail.

From a Chemical Bank envelope, she took out a pile of canceled checks and leafed through them. Then she chose one and placed it before her, facedown, showing her father’s endorsement on
the back. Finished, she lined up all the rental checks, also facedown, and finally put a blank sheet of paper over them.

When all was ready, staring at her father’s signature, on this blank sheet she copied his scrawled name, perhaps twenty times, with the thick Mont Blanc marker he habitually used. Then she
raised her writing hand, removed the paper, and, working quickly and neatly, endorsed each check. This finished, she rested for a moment, studying her work. And finally, she filled out a deposit
slip, not to Rosenthal Equities from the big business ledger, but to her own account in New York from her little checkbook. Then she tore off the deposit slip, and stuffed everything into an
envelope for Chemical Bank.

Let the federal accountants sort that one out when next summer rolled around. Her father would be, at the least, amused to have embezzlement added to the charges he did not intend to face. And
by then, she was sure, she’d have found a way to tie up the money so tightly that it would take the government’s accountants months to sort it all out.

She stood now and stretched, feeling—as after each of her forgeries—satisfied. That she had no real intention of keeping the money seemed to remove the risk. Five o’clock on
the wall clock. Time enough to shower, dress, and drive down-island to the Oyster Bar. She crossed to the liquor cabinet, under a small, beautiful still life of wine bottles and flowers, poured a
bourbon, and carried it onto the porch.

The wind had come up, with a faint hint of cold, perhaps of an approaching storm. She lay on her stomach and, chin in hands, looked out at the surf. On a lone rock in the water cormorants
gathered, oily black birds coming in to land for the winter; on shore a herd of huddled gulls watched them sleepily. When she was a child, she thought, the gull had been a beautiful bird of flight
rather than the ill-mooded, cheeky beast that sidled up to picnickers on the beach and settled around garbage cans in town. Perhaps the cormorant would be as common and as little mysterious as the
gull had it, too, learned to live on human waste rather than relying on the dwindling inshore fish population.

And once again not exactly a memory, more a sensation, of Dee Dennis passed across her mind.

As if her consciousness were a cormorant, floating on the surface of the sea before, unexpectedly, plunging underwater, out of sight, and emerging with a tiny, struggling, wriggling piece of
hope.

3.

And while she thought that, Dee Dennis stood at the lead-glass window of the Wright House in Menemsha, staring across the manicured lawn that sloped to the harbor under lowering
clouds: the dry spell, it appeared, was coming to its end. Far out, a ketch-rigged yacht, a reef in, heeled heavily in the blow, reaching for harbor. Seen through the window, a vast silence seemed
to play over the scene, over the sloping lawn to the water and through the low-ceilinged rooms of Sarah Wright’s house in which ticked, tocked, a massive seagoing Breguet, a family
heirloom.