The Summer House (32 page)

Death had not come; instead, Michael had. He told Liz they had left Florida for New Jersey when he’d telephoned Hugh to see if there was news. Hugh’s wife said he was out making ready for the storm, but that as far as she knew Danny had not surfaced. So Michael diverted the charter to Logan, then caught a Lear down to the island and prayed they could still land.

They could; they did; and his shadowing agents even managed to secure a vehicle, a canvas-topped Jeep.

“BeBe’s been taken in for questioning in a murder,” Liz repeated flatly. “The way she lives—the way she’s always lived—sooner or later something like this was bound to happen.” She listened to her words as if they were being spoken by someone else. She wondered why Michael was putting his arm around her, and then she remembered that he did not yet know about her and Josh.

“They have to know she has nothing to do with it,” Michael was saying.

Liz shrugged. “Who knows.”

Michael sighed. “Well,
I
know your sister better than
that. As soon as this storm is over I’ll get Buzz Rangely on it.”

Nodding mechanically, it took Liz a moment to remember that Buzz Rangely was a lawyer.
Oh, great
, she thought. Once the lawyers were involved, everything would be known. Every dirty little piece of their dirty little lives.

“Right now, the priority is to find Danny,” Michael, in-charge Michael, continued. “Where is he, Liz? Why is he still gone?”

The flames in the fireplace licked one another as if trying to soothe each other’s pain.

Before Liz could respond, footsteps sounded on the stairs. It was Evelyn and Roger. “If you’ve come to the Vineyard for a little sun, I’m afraid your timing is off,” Liz said. She turned back to the fireplace and asked, “Where are Mags and Greg?” Please, God, she prayed, don’t let them be here, too.

“We left them in Boston,” Michael said. “They’ve gone to the house. I didn’t think …”

“Thought I’d help board up the place,” Roger said. “This could be a doozie. They almost wouldn’t let us land.”

A doozie.
Yes
, Liz thought,
Roger would call a hurricane a “doozie
.” Perhaps he had inherited that word through DNA from Mother. Is that how DNA worked? Did Danny now say things that Josh always said? Did he react more like Josh than the rest of the family? Would he fit in better with Josh and his family? Would he want to be Jewish?

“Liz,” Michael said after Roger and Evelyn left the room. “Where is Danny?” he repeated. “What happened?”

She studied the burning logs. “I want to go home,” she said. “I want to go back to Boston.”

Michael hugged her. “We can’t go home, honey. We have to find Danny.”

Tears drizzled down her cheeks. She wanted to break down into sobs, despite the fact that Michael would hold her and calm her and tell her everything would be all right when he didn’t have a clue how wrong things were. She wanted to do it all, but suddenly she was so tired, so very, very tired.

“Hugh is combing the island for Danny,” Michael said. “If he’s still here, he’ll find him.” He nudged her. “Come on, honey, I’m going to take you into the bedroom. You’re going to lie down and rest. I should give Roger a hand.”

The thought of a presidential candidate nailing plywood across windows seemed somehow out of sync. She wondered if Josh was outside, boarding up his place, too. She wondered if … 
Oh God
, Liz thought. Could Danny have gone to Josh’s? Could he be there now? And if he was, what was he doing? The media was there. The media was everywhere.

She jumped up from the sofa. “I’ve got to go out.”

“What?” Michael stood, steadying her with his arm.

“I’ve got to go out. Keith has the car keys …” She headed for the kitchen.

Michael grabbed her arm and stopped her. “Liz, what are you doing?”

“I think I know where Danny is.” She wrenched her arm from his hand. “I’ve got to go.” She marched into the kitchen, where Keith was on the phone, talking to God only knew who.

“Give me the car keys,” she demanded. “Now.”

Michael was right behind her. “It’s okay, Liz. We rented a Jeep at the airport. I’ll drive you.”

She shook her head. “No. This is something I have to do alone.”

Evelyn peered out the window as Liz backed down the driveway and wondered what the hell was going on. She hated not knowing things. She hated being shut out like she didn’t matter, just because she wasn’t an Adams by birth, just because she had ended up with Roger when she should have had Daniel. She hated being shut out because she’d not had any children, no heirs to the throne, unlike Liz.

She hated anyone knowing when she had made a mistake. Especially BeBe.

On the other hand, she thought with a small smile, sometimes things really did work out for the best.

She turned from the window and wondered what would happen when the media learned what was really going on behind the Barton/Adams closed doors.

Liz studied the trees that blew and bent before her, and the rain that pelted in the headlights. And then she saw it: the long, unmarked driveway where a signpost with an arrow reading “Miller” once stood, back before the name meant anything, back when it had been safe to have your name on a signpost because no one cared who you were.

She turned down the driveway and slowed the vehicle to traverse the ruts and the potholes and the other deterrents that provided a natural “No Trespassers” caution.

Liz had never seen the house from this side, only from the ocean side when she had walked along the beach so many times, spying, pretending to just happen to be strolling by, to just happen to be digging for clams right there in his front yard. As she rounded a final curve, the
house stood before her, looked back at her, reflected in the headlights. It was big and gray and not unlike her family’s house.

Only this house was all boarded up, without a sign of life.

Chapter 29

“Sit down, Michael,” Liz said after she had returned to the house. It was after ten, and there had as yet been no word from Danny. But on the ride back to the house, Liz had finally slipped back into her mind, into her body, and into what was left of her spirit. She had slipped back into herself because she had decided what must have happened to Danny, and she felt that at least he was safe.

Josh would take care of Danny. She felt as certain of that as she did that Danny had gone to Josh’s house, that they had left the Vineyard together. She had not figured out what had happened to the van: that would come later, once the pieces had all been revealed.

And revealed, she knew they would be. Which was why she also knew that the time had finally come to make things right. Because despite everything else that she had done wrong, there was one thing that Liz could do right: she could tell Michael the truth before he learned it somewhere else, some other way, like on the evening news.

She’d brought him into their room—her room, actually, the room where she’d slept each summer, where
she’d stared out at the stars and dreamed so many dreams, where she’d learned to go against her father’s wishes by sneaking out to Josh. The room with the window where sand pebbles had grazed so many times, sands of time, grains of her heart.

Michael sat on the edge of the bed. It was a queen-size bed, with a headboard made of white birch logs, put there after they were married, replacing the twin wrought-iron bed that Liz had during her childhood. The rocking chair that had once been in there was also gone—the tiny space with the window dormer left no room for both the big bed and the chair, so Liz now was compelled to sit beside her husband, when she would rather have been further away. Los Angeles, perhaps. Or London.

She reached down to the chenille bedspread and pulled at the threads, the way she’d done when she was a kid, the way her kids had done. “I think I know where Danny is,” she said, quietly, so no one but she and Michael and maybe God could hear.

“You came back alone from your secretive mission,” Michael said with an edge to his voice that Liz did not recognize. “So he must not have been where you thought.”

Liz sighed and closed her eyes. “It wasn’t as much ‘where’ as ‘with whom.’ ” She opened her eyes, looked at her husband, and spoke as clearly as possible. “I think I know who Danny is with.”

Michael’s eyebrows elevated as if to say,
So? Get on with it!
But he sat patiently beside her, in a politician’s neutral pose, awaiting her next words.

“I think he’s with Josh Miller,” she said, more abruptly than she had planned.

His expression turned to a frown. “Miller? Why?”

Liz could not even force a half smile, not even for Michael, her husband, her mate—if not of soul, then at least her husband of years of loyalty, the builder of their
family, with Liz so visibly by his side. Michael, her husband, the father of two of her three wonderful children. But she could not even force a half smile for him now, despite the fact that he was about to feel so much pain, pain that he did not deserve. She cleared her throat.

“Michael, remember when we were kids? That summer Daniel died?”

His frown deepened. “Of course I do.” A hint of impatience crept into his voice. “What does that have to do with Danny?”

She took a deep breath, but part of it got caught somewhere in her throat. “I knew Josh Miller then,” she said. “Did you know that?”

“He lived down the beach. Why wouldn’t you?”

“Because Father wouldn’t allow it. It was the one time in my life I disobeyed him.”

She let her words have time to float in the air, then sink into Michael’s mind.

“We were lovers, Michael.” There, she had said it. The dreaded word that the media would use. The word that would destroy all that they’d worked for, all that they’d had, all that Will Adams had built.

Lovers
.

Michael loosened the collar of his shirt. He took a small breath. She started to put her hand over his, but stopped. She did not deserve to comfort him when she was the one causing the pain.

He stood and went to the window, ducking so he would not bang his head on the dormer, staring mechanically at what was no longer the outside, but the back of a sheet of plywood, affixed over the glass to ward off the storm.

“Michael?” she asked.

He shook his head. “You were only … what? Seventeen when Daniel was killed?”

She closed her eyes, wondering why now, at forty-four, she was so ashamed of what they’d done as young lovers, before they’d hurt anyone, before they’d known that they would. “Sixteen,” she said. “I was sixteen.”

Michael laughed. “Jesus. I guess I’d just assumed you were a virgin when we married.”

She nodded. “It’s what I wanted you to assume. I didn’t lie, but I didn’t tell you the truth, either.”

Her husband ran his hand through his light brown hair, lighter now by the strands of gray that the media predicted would be white by the time he was out of office, if, of course, he was elected.

Liz pushed her thoughts from the future and tried to focus on the past. “Josh and I … we were young.”

“Who knows, Liz?” he interrupted in a whisper, then suddenly turned to look her in the eye. “Who knows about this?”

“BeBe knows. That’s all. Only my sister.” She did not tell him about Roger and Evelyn or about the night that they’d caught them. The fact that she and Josh had been seen having sex seemed so insignificant in light of the outcome.

Michael returned to the bed. “What about Miller? Is he going to use this against us?”

The “us” that Michael referred to, Liz knew, once again, was not him and her alone, but him and her and the entire political party. “I don’t think so,” Liz said. “Please, Michael, sit down.”

He sat.

She took another breath.

“I loved him, Michael. It probably was puppy love, but I loved him, or thought I did. But he was off-limits. His father … my father … well, do you have any idea how that fuels the fires of teenagers?”

Michael did not answer. He simply looked at Liz, perhaps able to understand what she was saying, perhaps
not. No matter what, she knew she must continue. For Michael’s sake. For Danny’s sake. Wherever he was.