The Last Refuge (25 page)

She put both hands on my chest and gently pushed herself away. That’s when I heard sounds upstairs, and the raspy wet croak of an old man clearing his throat. She gripped my arm, then went upstairs to see her father. I let myself out.

I drove directly to a picnic table in the park behind Town hall and opened Rosaline’s envelope. I put the list
of names and addresses she’d prepared on top of the stack of papers. Then I got out Jackie Swaitkowski’s map, unrolled it and held down the corners with a mug and three stones I picked off the ground.

Next to the map I put an extended plot plan I’d picked up from Bonny Martinez at the Town tax collector’s office. It showed the borders and street addresses of every taxable piece of property in North Sea owned by Bay Side Holdings. They were all contiguous. Lombard’s records carried the same plot designation as Jackie’s map, so I could easily cross-reference between the three documents.

My fourth data point was a telephone directory I’d dug out of the trunk of the Grand Prix.

First I matched up the Oak Point street addresses on the tax map with Lombard’s records, which corresponded to the highlighted sweep of territory that started with Regina, curved around Oak Point following the waterline of the cove, washed across the WB grounds and over to the next peninsula, where it also followed the water about three-quarters of the way up the coast. Regina’s house, 18 Oak Point, was labeled number thirty-three. Next was lot thirty-five, Herbert and Louise Radowitz at 16 Oak Point, who’d rented for about ten years, followed by John and Martha Glenheimmer. Then Edward and Sherry Feldman, then Eric Fitzsimmons, and so on. I was a little disturbed to realize that Regina Broadhurst was the only name I recognized on my own street.

I checked all the names in the phone book. Only Ed and Sherry were still in their Bay Side house. The others were somewhere else in town or gone completely.

At least half the houses in the highlighted area on Oak Point weren’t on Lombard’s list. I wondered if the same held true on the other side of WB. That section was part of a much bigger area called Jacob’s Neck. That neighborhood was unfamiliar, so it took a little longer for me to get all the paperwork organized.

The first number was lot fifty-two, Gary and Elizabeth Richardson. Then fifty-four, Mary Fletcher. Then John and Judy Eiklestrum. Then Wallace and Dolores Weeds. That stopped me. I knew the name, and the house. I was now oriented with a mental picture of the neighborhood.

Wally Weeds was known to my father. I hadn’t thought of the name in years, but I could hear it now, spoken in my father’s voice. I also knew he’d been dead for a long time. I could almost remember the exact day it happened. The day my best friend Billy Weeds woke up somewhere in the woods of Connecticut and found his father shot in the face with his own shotgun.

As with Oak Point, most of the highlighted properties weren’t on Lombard’s list. There were only two more after the Weeds place. Number seventy-three, George and Janice Fitzhenry, and at the end of the line, the house opposite Regina’s, the last house at the extreme end of the Bay Side sweep.

Lot number seventy-eight. Julia Anselma.

I decided to spend the rest of that day cracking golf balls across the yard so Eddie could shag them out of
the flower garden and off the pebble beach. My father’s three-quarter Harmon Killibrew bat was ideally suited to the purpose. Eddie probably had a little retriever in him, since he liked to retrieve. But he often got distracted mid-run and peeled off to track down heretofore undetected evidence of who-knows-what. This gave me the chance to sit down in one of my two exhausted redwood lawn chairs and look at the Little Peconic over an Absolut on the rocks. I didn’t have a strict rule about drinking during the day, just a general guideline—no hard liquor before noon. I had all the material I’d gathered up pertaining to Regina’s estate organized and waiting for me on the table on the screened-in porch. The urge to start in on it again had thus far eluded me. So I drank instead. And brooded.

Eddie would always complete the cycle, no matter how long the detour, running back without apology, the golf ball hidden in his mouth.

I’d just hauled myself out of the lawn chair so I could smack the ball out toward the bay when I noticed a sailboat coming in close to shore. Boats of any kind were far less common on the bay in October, even though it was an ideal month for sailing. The air was cool, but there was almost always a breeze, either a prevailing south-southwesterly or a seasonal northwesterly, clean and dry, riding down from Canada. It was a decent-sized sloop, probably around forty-three feet. I thought it was going to tack when I saw the sails fluttering in the wind, but then I saw the big head sail disappear into a roll. Though it’s hard to judge distances across open water, I thought his depth might have been about fourteen feet, judging from the boat’s
proximity to the green buoy that marked the entrance to the cove bordering Regina’s property. After the jib was rolled as tight as a joint, the mainsail fell to the boom. The wind was mostly out of the west, so the boat’s beam drew parallel to the shore. It looked like some type of fast cruising boat, with lots of sharp angles, but also a lot of equipment hanging off the transom and mounted to the mast.

I saw a lone figure dressed in white run out to the bow to drop an anchor mounted off the base of the bowsprit. The boat swung gently at the end of the anchor until settling nose to the wind. A few minutes later an inflatable dinghy busted out of the cockpit and dropped overboard right off the back of the boat.

The guy in white descended a swim ladder into the dinghy with a small outboard on his shoulder, which he mounted at the transom, and soon after he was heading across the bay directly toward shore.

Eddie was also looking out at the dinghy motoring in our direction. I tucked the bat under my arm and went out to the beach to help whoever it was make a dry landing. Eddie stood and waited with me at the edge of the water.

The dinghy slowed as it approached, and you could hear the revs from the outboard rise and fall as the operator tried to calibrate the proper speed for hitting the beach. By now it was close enough that I could see his face.

“Hi, Burt.”

“Grab the bow and give a good pull, would you?” he said as the inflatable nosed into the beach and he
killed the outboard, nimbly tipping the prop up out of the water. I dragged it up on shore.

We shook hands.

“Expecting pirates?” he asked, pointing to the bat.

“Just shaggin’ balls with Eddie. Though you never know.”

“Well, I’m unarmed. And thirsty.”

I led him up to the cottage and sat him down in a lawn chair. I went in to put together drinks, leaving Eddie to pester him into hitting out another ball.

“I called ahead but no one answered,” said Burton. “You know they’ve developed answering machines.”

“I got a phone. That’s as far as I go.”

By now it was beginning to cool off. The sky had mostly cleared up and the westerly that Burton had fought all the way from his mooring in Sag Harbor had picked up a few knots. I got us both sweatshirts so we could stay outside and watch the sunset. Burton told me he’d designed his boat mostly himself, with a little help from Sparkman and Stephens, who’d produced designs for several generations of Lewises. I knew just enough about sailing to follow his story, having crewed for friends of Abby she’d acquired during childhood summers in Marblehead. I had to transfer my own childhood experiences on the Peconic in busted-up, clinker-built dories and cat boats to the graceful Herreshoffs and Hinkleys the poshes in Massachusetts raced off the coast. I learned a lot, but I didn’t like the people. Though I sure loved their boats.

As the red ball of a sun burned it’s way into the horizon, lighting up the bottoms of the few remaining clouds in electric shades of pink and yellow, I
caught Burton up on what I’d learned about Bay Side Holdings.

“Mr. Lombard is an astute man,” said Burton, when I was finished.

“A captive.”

“A wholly-owned subsidiary of Willard and Bollard, Incorporated.”

“Willard and Bollard.”

Burton had been holding the Harmon Killebrew bat. He used it to point over my shoulder at the clump of woods across the entrance to the cove next to Regina’s house.

“WB,” I said.

“The manufacturing arm. Bay Side was set up to manage the real estate owned by the company. The buildings and the land it sat on. Great tax advantages, then and now, if you do it right.”

As far as I was concerned, the old WB factory was as old as the Peconic itself. It had always been just there, invisible from land or sea, accessible only to the people who used to work there every day, whose numbers steadily dwindled until the gates closed and the rust and sumac took over. I never knew what the initials WB stood for.

“Son of a bitch.”

Burton reached under his sweatshirt and pulled out a folded sheet of paper.

“An e-mail, courtesy of our research department.”

He started to read.

“‘If you go all the way back to the original owners of the site, you’re in the nineteenth century, when they held a sizable chunk of North Sea, including
farms and woodlands. Willard Wakeman and Carl Bollard bought the place in 1908, and ran a fairly successful business for the next thirty-four years. They specialized in sporting goods—camping gear, volleyballs, quoits, whatever people played in those days.’”

He looked at me.

“No Rollerblades or windsurfing, I’d imagine.”

“Rafts,” I said. “My father always said they made rafts for the war.”

“Right. Rafts and rubberized tents for the Pacific. If you notice, everything they manufactured was at least partly rubber, or some kind of synthetic material that was tough and waterproof. Perfect for rafts.”

He read the rest of the e-mail, skipping ahead since I’d scooped part of the report.

“‘From its peak in about 1896, the WB landhold was reduced through normal attrition, and as an important capitalization tool for the core manufacturing business, leaving the last important segment—the peninsula adjacent to Oak Point—with its access to the Little Peconic and, subsequently, to Greenport and on to the sea. In order to preserve free use of the two inlets on either side, they retained all the shore property. Plus a few large tracts across Noyack Road, which were sold off in the 1960s.

“‘WB was strictly manufacturing, working to specs from brand marketers, or in the case of the war effort, government contractors. Postwar they continued with the same mix of products, but sales apparently declined steadily until 1976 when they closed down the shop permanently. Since private companies have minimal reporting requirements, this information has
been derived from various secondary sources, including Dunn and Bradstreet, and should not be regarded as definitive, but rather directional.’ We’re going deeper into some other databases that take a little longer, but I thought this might give you a start.”

“So Bay Side Holdings is all that’s left of WB.”

“Bay Side Holdings is WB, since there’s nothing related to the corporate entity
but
real estate. All of it right here, by the way.”

“So who owns Bay Side Holdings?”

“That’s the interesting part,” said Burton, handing me the e-mail printout, “we have no idea.”

“Really.”

“Not that we won’t find out, but it won’t be automatic.”

“For you guys?” I had a mental image of Burton’s big building down there on the Street.

“For anybody. It’s in a trust.”

“Really.”

“For which there’s no public record. Bay Side is a privately held C corp, chartered under the laws of New York State, all of whose assets are held by the eponymously named Bay Side Trust.”

“And we’re not allowed to know who owns what?”

“By ‘we,’ if you mean the general public, yes and no. The creators of a trust have no obligation to publish the names of the beneficiaries as a matter of course, but they can be compelled to do so under certain civil actions. Beneficiaries have to be named in the trust document itself, which in certain circumstances will end up in the public record. But there’s no legal requirement to do so just because. Ninety-nine
percent of the time, these are all tightly controlled, personal things that have little effect on anyone beyond the principals, unless there’s a contested estate, or a tax dispute, or a legal claim. That’s the next place we’re going to look.”