Beach Wedding(26)

“You’ve got to be kidding. Xavier Kelsey used to write here? No! In this horrible hot basement? Not even at a real desk?”

Oscar clapped his hands as he let out a loud laugh.

“Yes, can you imagine?” he said. “Out of all this wonderful estate—all its unparalleled rooms and gardens and views—he chooses this dump and a rickety folding table.”

“How?” I said. “Why?”

Oscar shrugged his bony shoulders.

“Beats me. Everybody thought Kelsey wrote in his suite. I think I even read that once in a magazine article. What a load. We all knew better. I saw him myself one morning in ’79 right after I got out of the Navy. I came down to fix a leak, and he was sitting right there at that card table, his cigarette sticking out sideways from the corner of his mouth and banging away on one of those old black Royal typewriters.”

Oscar shook his head, remembering.

“Rat-a-tat-tat! The volume of it. It sounded like a Thompson machine gun. And did I mention that he was in his underwear?”

“No!”

“Yes,” Oscar said, punching at his leg as he shook with laughter. “No shirt and in his skivvies, sitting on that metal folding chair. It was a sight. I guess all writers are supposed to be kind of nuts.”

He pointed up at a coat hanger that hung from one of the pipes.

“See. That’s the hanger he used. He’d come down here at six every morning, dressed in a nice button-down shirt and Bermuda shorts. And I guess he would then, um, get comfortable and write all morning. Then when he came back up at noon for lunch, he was dressed again pretty as you please. Go figure.”

“That’s something,” I said. “It sounds like Kelsey was quite the oddball.”

“Oh, no,” Oscar said. “Aside from this quirk, he seemed perfectly sane. Charming. Mannerly. Remembered everybody’s name, always had a joke when he came to the garden, a real gentleman. Though he did like his cocktails.”

I smiled as I remembered meeting Kelsey at the steak house awaiting the verdict in Hailey Sutton’s trial more than twenty years ago.

“The Mackenzies were very fond of him,” Oscar said.

“He must have left them out of his infamous tell-all short story,” I said.

“Say again?” Oscar said, turning toward me.

“Amazing, Oscar! A famous writer working right here. This house couldn’t get more special,” I said quickly.

I realized Oscar must have known nothing about the highly publicized scandal Kelsey had been involved in at the end of his writing career. Over a decade ago he had switched gears from true crime and written a very thinly veiled piece of fiction in the New Yorker revealing a lot of extremely embarrassing gossip and secrets about his very real and very powerful acquaintances from the Upper East Side and the Hamptons. He’d lost a lot of friends over it.

“So true,” Oscar said, smiling.

An electronic ditty suddenly went off loudly in the little room.

“That’s my timer for the irrigation system,” Oscar said as he took out his phone. “I need to check one of the heads that’s gone screwy. Well, that’s about it, Mr. Rourke. I hope you enjoyed the tour.”

“Oh, it was great, Oscar, really. Thanks so much. Do you mind if I poke around a little down here? I’d love to check out the photos and stuff some more.”

“Sure thing,” Oscar said. “Like I’ve said to others, you can even sit in Kelsey’s chair if you’d like, but please keep your clothes on.”

“Will do,” I said.



36

When Viv suddenly opened the door of our suite’s huge walk-in closet, I was on the floor in midyawn beneath the empty hangers with my laptop. Her puzzled gaze focused on the three items on the hardwood beside me: my phone, a lamp I had brought in, and a stacked ream of old yellow-edged paper.

“There you are,” Viv said, yawning herself.

I groaned as I saw that the sun was just coming up beyond the sliding glass doors behind her.

Uh-oh, I thought.

“What time is it? And what are you doing? When did you wake up?”

“Well, to be perfectly honest, I haven’t been to sleep,” I said sheepishly.

“What!” Viv said. “You’ve been up all night? Terry! How could you? I told you we were getting out early to go to that water park with all the kids today. We have to leave in like half an hour. You’re going to be a zombie!”

“Don’t worry, Viv. I’ll do a coffee IV drip,” I said, yawning again as I stood. “It doesn’t matter. Because you’re not going to frigging believe this.”

“Believe what?” she said.

I knelt and picked up the fat stack of paper I’d found in the pool-house basement the day before.

“Look!” I said, holding up the manuscript.

“‘Untitled by Xavier Kelsey,’” Viv read aloud. “What is that?”

“They’re looking for this,” I said.

“Who’s looking for what?” she said.

About an hour after Oscar had left, I’d found the manuscript in the storage room where Kelsey wrote. Inside a trunk were stacks of enormous leather-bound accounting ledgers belonging to the Mackenzies. I’d gone through two and was taking out a third when I saw a fat envelope sandwiched in the middle of it.