The Castaways

THE CHIEF

H e summoned them to the Begonia because he didn’t know where else to go. And because he hadn’t yet decided whether he should tell them about the tox report or keep it a secret. If they went to the Begonia, it could be passed off as simply the three of them meeting for beers. Since the evening after Greg and Tess’s funeral, they had done nothing as a group. Nothing—it was odd, and the unexpected thing was, the Chief missed it. He missed gathering, he missed drinking cold beer out on the Drakes’ deck, he missed being invited to swim in Addison’s pool, he missed Delilah’s cooking (she had a knack for always knowing what he was craving), he missed sitting on the beach in a semicircle, talking about boats and listening to the Sox game on the last transistor radio in America, which he had bought on eBay. Delilah called the house once to invite them and the twins over for a barbecue, but Andrea had said no. When the Chief asked why, Andrea said, I don’t care if I ever go over there again.

So along with Greg and Tess, something else had died.

The Chief got to the Begonia first, and Faith greeted him at the door. He kissed her rouged cheek. She said, “How you doin’?” in a way that seemed to be asking more than the obvious, and he said, “Oh, Jesus, Faith. As well as can be expected, I guess.”

Faith said, “We sure do miss him.”

He could do a little detective work here; the Begonia had been Greg’s “third place,” after home and the school. If Greg had been talking to someone who sold drugs, Faith might know about it. But it was imperative to keep things under wraps, and Faith, while a decent woman, was Nantucket’s answer to a daily newspaper. If it was happening, she would tell you about it.

He asked to be seated at the back table, the one that was shielded by half-walls. Everyone called it the Mafia Table. Normally the Chief liked to sit at the bar where he could see the TV and lend an air of neighborhood security to the establishment, but tonight he needed the Mafia Table.

He said to Faith, “I’m meeting Add and Jeffrey.”

She nodded, set down menus, and said, “Please know that Thom and I are thinking of you. And we’re thinking of Andrea.”

The Chief said, “Appreciate that.”

Faith lingered a second and the Chief panicked. He did not want to get involved in a conversation. He picked up his menu even though he always ordered the bleu burger, and Faith reluctantly wandered away.

He took a deep breath. Beer, onion rings, exhaust from the stove. The Sox were on TV and the jukebox was playing Tom Petty. He was in the Scarlet Begonia. He was okay, despite the fact that the tox report was eating at him like a tapeworm, despite the fact that Andrea was certifiably nuts and needed a padded room on a quiet farm in central Pennsylvania. Andrea thought about nothing other than Tess: Tess drowning in Nantucket Sound, Tess almost drowning in Boston Harbor as a child, Tess miscarrying once, losing the second baby in a fall, miscarrying again, Tess suffering through the weeks of Greg’s inquisition, Tess withdrawing from Andrea right after Christmas. This last thing seemed to be the corn kernel stuck in Andrea’s back molar: for the six months prior to Tess’s death, Tess had been distant and strange. Andrea had felt her pulling away. It would have been imperceptible to anyone other than Andrea, but Andrea had sensed that something was wrong. Tess didn’t confide in Andrea, she went two and three days without checking in, and, worst of all, she had stopped going to mass with Andrea on Saturday evenings, which was the one hour of the week that they reserved not only for the Lord but for each other.

Andrea was so consumed with her interior life that she didn’t always notice what was going on around her. The twins had their own set of complicated needs—food, clothing, a chauffeur service, enriching ways to pass the time indoors and outdoors, athletic and educational, for all of their waking hours. Andrea could barely meet the minimum requirements: drop off, pick up, breakfast, lunch, dinner, bath, bedtime. If there were to be outings, if there was to be fun, it had to be provided by Eric, Kacy, or the Chief. Eric and Kacy had jobs and friends. The Chief had a police force to run and an island to keep safe. They did what they could, but it was clear the twins were unhappy. Not only devastated by the tragic loss of both their parents, but bored and uninspired by their new life in the Kapenash house. On Sundays, when the Chief was in charge, he asked the twins what they wanted to do and they invariably said they wanted to play with Drew and Barney; they wanted to go to Auntie Dee’s house. And though that would have been killing two birds with one stone—he would be making the kids happy and resurrecting some of his lost social life (his mouth watered at the thought of grilled corn, cherry tomatoes stuffed with guacamole, the wickedly spicy tuna tartare that Delilah made in the summer)—he could not in good conscience take the kids over there. Andrea would unhinge. This happened more and more frequently—the guitar smashing had been the worst, followed by dumping a platter of perfectly grilled rib-eye steaks into her perennial bed, followed by throwing her cell phone into the ocean. The kids were terrified of Andrea. One morning Finn ate his Cheerios without milk because he was afraid to ask for some.

Chloe had a bad case of the night terrors. She woke up calling for her mom, and Andrea lay there with her eyes open but made no move to deal with it, so the Chief would walk Chloe back to bed, find her doll, and try to make a convincing whispered argument that everything was going to be okay. The poor kid was craving her mother, a woman with peppy energy and feminine warmth, and what she got was her gruff uncle who had a big, scary job and carried a gun.

In a brave moment, the Chief had told Andrea that the best way to honor Tess now was to concentrate on caring for the children.

Andrea had basically spit on him for that. She said, “I am caring for them, Ed.”

But she wasn’t. She was too caught up in her grief. It was backward, upside down, inside out.

Here at the Begonia, the Chief stroked the scarred tabletop. Addison was next to arrive, and he must have stopped at the bar, because he was carrying a drink. The Chief stood, they shook hands, Addison sat down opposite, and the Chief felt nervous suddenly, like he was on a blind date. He and Addison had been friends for eons. It was true that he and Addison did not have a whole heck of a lot in common; Addison was slippery like a fish. Impossible to grasp. He had had a fancy education, he’d lived and worked in other countries, he had a daughter who lived in California like a character in one of those Teen Disney shows that Chloe wanted to watch but Andrea prohibited. Addison was a businessman; he was Nantucket’s real estate magnate. He did deals where he made so much money it felt illegal. He made connections, he culled favors, he lived in a six-thousand-square-foot house with his fragile wife.

The Chief had always respected the way Addison fretted over Phoebe. Especially now that the Chief had his own wife to worry about.

The Chief and Addison had once been lost in the woods together. They had rented a canoe during their group trip to Saranac Lake, paddled around the wrong bend (the Chief had chosen incorrectly; he’d insisted, despite Addison’s protests), and ended up in East Who-the-fuck-knows. They had no map (two big strong men, no need for a map), half a bottle of Evian, and no food except for breath mints. They each had a cell phone, but no god-damn reception. They were out on the lake for hours, and when they were supposed to meet the hotel pickup truck at the end point, they were lost. They decided to pull onto land and carry the canoe and look for a road. Hitch a ride back to the refuge of their elegant resort, the Point, where everyone else was getting ready for dinner and most likely starting to worry.

They pulled off into thick, almost impenetrable woods. They considered getting back into the canoe, but that felt like regressing. They battled through the brush while holding the canoe over their heads. The Chief had worked with guys who had been to Vietnam; he’d heard stories just like everyone else about the dense jungle, the bugs, the snakes, the booby traps. What the Chief and Addison were dealing with now was, of course, not warfare, but the conditions weren’t much more favorable. The mosquitoes were thick and whining; there were thorns everywhere, and mud. Addison was, ridiculously, wearing Ferragamo loafers. The canoe hindered them tremendously; at one point they were tempted just to ditch it, but it belonged to the resort, it was a beautiful wooden canoe and had probably cost thousands of dollars. It was growing dark, they couldn’t see, the mosquitoes were like motherfucking tigers, the Chief was dying of thirst. He was so thirsty he would gladly have drunk lake water, despite whatever kind of gut-rotting dysentery it would give him, but by now, he estimated, they were at least a quarter-mile inland.

They were both tired; they decided to rest. They had been paddling all day in the sun; the resort had packed them an excellent picnic lunch, which they had devoured six hours earlier. They sat on top of the overturned canoe and swatted at mosquitoes and caught their breath and surveyed their surroundings. Woods and more woods. The Chief was trying not to panic. He was a policeman; he had heard countless stories just like this—man out enjoying nature for the day—that ended in tragedy.

They had to keep going. They had to ditch the canoe; it was too cumbersome. Addison said that he would pay for it. The Chief said they could argue about that later, once they found some god-damn civilization that included a hot shower, clean sheets, and a cold beer. Once it was just the two of them, minus the albatross of the canoe, they moved much faster. They ran in places. They had decided to move in only one direction, toward the sunset, west, which was, theoretically, the direction in which the resort was located. But west went on forever.

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.

He cleared his throat. “I asked you both here for a reason.”

Pause. Jeffrey and Addison leaned forward over the Mafia Table. The waitress again looked afraid to approach, but she had the extra mayonnaise for the Chief’s burger and she wanted to get Jeffrey’s drink order. Stella draft. Okay. She fled.

The Chief said, “The ME ran a toxicology report on the bodies. They had both been drinking. And Tess was high on something.” The Chief paused. “The opiate most commonly found in heroin.”

“Heroin?” Jeffrey said.

“Did either of you know about Greg or Tess mixed up with heroin? Or any other kind of street drug?”

“No,” Addison said. “Well, Greg smoked weed. We all knew that. And he did cocaine back in his Velociraptor days.”

The Chief looked at Addison and remembered his Ferragamo loafers iced with mud; a three-hundred-dollar pair of shoes had gone into the hotel trash without a second thought. The bill for the abandoned canoe had come in at a whopping forty-two hundred dollars, and Addison had paid it. (The Chief had always felt crummy about that, but Addison had the money and he’d convinced the Chief that it had been his idea to orphan the canoe. That was the robber in him; he’d saved the Chief two thousand dollars but stolen his dignity.) The Chief also remembered Addison toking up with Deep Purple and Scrawny Sideburns and how envious he’d felt. The lost-in-the-woods story with Addison was the Chief’s best story, but right this second the Chief didn’t find it amusing at all. Five phone calls to Tess on the day she died. Addison was hiding something.

“I just thought you both should know,” the Chief said. “The accident can’t be taken at face value. Something else was going on.”

“Well…” Jeffrey said.

Pause. The waitress dropped off his Stella.

“Anything else I can get you?” she asked.

“No,” they all said at once.

She scooted away.

“Well, what?” the Chief said. Something was coming. The Chief had heard hundreds of people bear witness, leak secrets, confess. The human need to spill the beans, to tell, could not be underestimated. Even Jeffrey, the judge, had this urge. He was about to share privileged information. But what the Chief had learned over the years was that his thirst to find out led him to be burdened with information he would have been better off not knowing.

“When I spoke to April Peck at the funeral,” Jeffrey said, “she told me she’d been with Greg the night before he died.”

Suddenly the Chief felt full. He pushed his plate away. He exhaled, burped beer and horseradish, felt nauseous. April Peck.

Yes, he thought.

Beautiful women were dangerous. But beautiful girls were even more dangerous, because they weren’t seasoned; they didn’t know that beauty was a weapon and so they flung it around carelessly. April Peck had been after Greg; she had been hunting him on the night of October 23. Of this, the Chief was convinced. He believed that April had gone into Greg’s classroom on purpose, wearing a wet T-shirt without a bra; he believed that she had only been pretending to be upset; she needed an excuse for physical contact. The Chief believed that she had forced herself on Greg. The part the Chief had a harder time with was Greg’s response to that. Had he resisted from the get-go? Or had he succumbed to what would have been as irresistible as a bowl full of juicy berries with whipped cream on top? Had he accidentally grazed a nipple? Had his skin heated up when April put her mouth on his neck? Had he responded, for even just a second? Of course he had.

In his seventeen years as police chief, Ed Kapenash had pressed the boundaries of his authority only once. That was on October 27, when he met clandestinely with school superintendent Dr. Richard Flanders at the station. The Chief and Flanders had gone over the details of both Greg’s account of what happened and April’s account. They came up with the following conclusion: April probably did initiate; Greg probably did, in some way, respond. (What man wouldn’t respond to April Peck? Both men agreed it would take someone very strong—the pope, for example.) The important thing was that Greg had not capitulated, he had not crossed the line; he had not slept with the girl. Flanders said he would continue with the inquiry—he had to, for protocol’s sake—but he assured the Chief that unless any new information was revealed, Greg would keep his job. Flanders shook the Chief’s hand, looked him in the eye; they were men, they understood each other and they believed they understood Greg. The Chief was able to go home to Andrea and say he’d taken care of the problem.

But Greg had the temperament of a spoiled child. His whole life he had gotten whatever he wanted. He had gotten a taste of April Peck; it was not surprising to learn that he’d wanted more.

Greg was a robber.

There were two incidents that the Chief had chosen to overlook. The first was this: On the night of February 2, a domestic disturbance call had come into the station. It was a mother-daughter situation; the mother had stolen the daughter’s car keys in order to keep her at home. The daughter was threatening to stab the mother; she had pulled a kitchen knife. The mother called the police. A squad car was sent to 999 Polpis Road, where they found Donna and April Peck in a messy catfight—hair-pulling, face-scratching, a strap ripped on an expensive camisole top (April’s). There was a knife on the counter—a five-inch serrated sandwich knife—but no one had been cut or stabbed. There was screaming and name-calling, even after Walker and Dickson, the officers, separated the two women. Walker was a ten-year veteran, a deer hunter and early-morning fisherman; he lived alone and had neither the time nor the patience for hysterical women, even though April was, in his words, “one of the hottest chicks I have ever laid eyes on.” Dickson, on the other hand, was the Chief’s secret weapon. Dickson was too smart to be a policeman; the Chief had him marked for a detective in the near future. Dickson had an incredible memory. So he recalled for the Chief, later, word for word, what the women had said.

She put me under house arrest! I’m eighteen years old!

She’s going to see HIM!

Him who, ma’am?

The teacher!

I am not!

Don’t lie to me, April. I’ve checked your phone.

You don’t know what you’re talking about. The cancer has gone to your brain.

How dare you, young lady!

Dickson had it all written down in his report. They had concluded that as April was eighteen, she was free to leave the premises. The car in question was registered in April’s name. It was hers, she could use it.

Do you have a safe place to go? Dickson asked her.

Yes, she said.

And the mother had said, She’s going to meet the teacher .

Dickson had tried to hold the Chief’s gaze after reporting this last bit, but the Chief would have none of it. Hearsay. Who knew which teacher she was talking about, or if it even was a teacher? It could have been Casey, the phys ed teacher, who had his own issues with April Peck. The Chief didn’t want to speculate and he didn’t want Dickson speculating.

But deep down, he knew. Of course he knew. And he thought, Jesus, Greg! And he thought about calling Greg up or surprising him at the Begonia and saying, What the fuck are you doing? But the Chief backed away from that particular ledge because it was hearsay and the anguish of the first accusation had just healed and who was the Chief to pull the scab off?

On the night of April 18, it was Dickson again, out cruising the tough Nantucket streets alone. It was the first night of spring break; many islanders were away on vacation. It was two-thirty in the morning, and Dickson came across two vehicles parked at the end of Hummock Pond Road, facing Cisco Beach. He pulled up, because there was no good reason for two cars to be parked at the beach in the middle of the night. Dickson was hoping for a drug deal, something he could really bust (it had been a dull winter). He touched his gun, though he’d been told in training that he had no prayer of ever using it. As Dickson was remembering this, there was movement. A figure moving from one car to the other. The car on the left, a silver 4Runner, plates Q22 DR9, backed up, turned around, and tore out of there in what Dickson would call a classic getaway. He climbed out of his car and poked his flashlight into the dark window of the other car.

And there she was. April Peck.

She looked at him. He indicated that she should roll down the window. She did, but only a crack.

He said, “What are you doing out here in the middle of the night, Miss Peck?”

And she said, “Looking at the ocean. Is that a crime?”

The plates had been Greg’s. Dickson took this information to the Chief in the morning. The Chief said, “Well, the girl is right, there was no crime in her sitting there. Were you thinking of issuing a parking violation?”

Dickson said, “I just thought you should know.”

Dickson walked out, and the Chief was left breathless. He picked up the phone, then dropped it. Greg and Tess had taken the kids to the Children’s Museum in Boston. They had wanted to do Disney for spring break, but because of the roof replacement, there wasn’t enough money. They would go next year, they said.

The Chief vowed that when Greg got back, he would talk to him. He would say, If you don’t stop this, I will tell Tess. I will tell Flanders. You will lose your wife, your kids, and your job. He would say, Stop this now. It isn’t worth it.

But the Chief had not spoken up, and it was a source of private shame. By the time Greg and Tess had gotten back from Boston, the incident seemed diminished, the urgency had passed. The Chief chose to believe that Dickson was bored and trying to drum up scandal.

“April Peck,” the Chief said. The name itself conjured a vision of all that a good man was meant to avoid but could not.

Jeffrey nodded.

Addison said, “It’s clear what happened.” His neck was growing red from the collar up. He looked like he was going to boil. But his mopiness had disappeared, which made the Chief glad. “If there was heroin in Tess’s blood, then Greg drugged her. He drugged her and dumped her off the boat.”

“No,” the Chief said.

“No,” Jeffrey said.

“No?” Addison said. He jumped up and bumped the table. “How can you possibly believe otherwise? Isn’t it obvious? Greg was trying to get rid of her so he could be with April!”

“Hey, now,” the Chief said. “Respect.”

Addison sat back down and put his head in his hands.

Five phone calls to Tess on the fateful morning. Had something been going on between Tess and Addison? Impossible. But Addison was a robber. Then there was Greg and April Peck. The Chief had lifted a rock and found bugs. Why was he surprised?

Addison said, “He killed her.”

“He died, too.”

“It went awry.”

Was this possible? The Chief was losing his grip. April Peck, the tox report, Andrea crumbling at home. And he had eaten too much.

Jeffrey stood up. “I have to get back home.” The man was Jesus Christ.

Addison said, “You think I’m right, don’t you, Jeffrey? I mean, you’re the one who just said he was still seeing April.”

Jeffrey grimaced. “I can’t say what happened on that boat, Add, and neither can you. The important thing here is the kids. Those kids have to believe it was an accident.”

“But we don’t have to believe that, do we?” Addison asked.

The Chief said, “I’ve got the bill.”

Addison said, “No one’s with me?”

“I’m sorry I brought it up,” the Chief said. And he was.

“Me, too,” Jeffrey said. “Truth be told, I just don’t have the focus for a murder mystery here.”

Addison stared at them both balefully. He said, “I’m leaving, too.”

They all shook hands. Did the Chief need to remind them not to talk about this?

“So, for the kids’ sake…”

Addison held up his palms.

Jeffrey said, “Not a word. Obviously.”

Addison and Jeffrey weaved their way between the tables and out of the restaurant. Faith trailed them and kissed them both before they left. The waitress reappeared and cleared their glasses and the Chief’s plate. She said, “Can I interest you in dessert?”

The Chief said, “Yes.” And he ordered the mud pie.