Beach Wedding(27)

It was four hundred pages, old onionskin-like paper covered in single-spaced imperfect type.

“This is Kelsey’s only novel, and everyone—every publisher in New York—has been looking for it ever since he died. They call it the missing Kelsey manuscript. Don’t you see? This is it! I found it. I’m telling you.”

“Slow down, slow down,” Viv said.

“Okay,” I said. “You remember that scandalous short story he wrote about all of his famous friends?”

She nodded. “The one Oprah interviewed him about?”

“Exactly. Well, that was just chapter one. They’ve been looking for this—the rest of it—for the last ten years. It’s a tell-all about these socialites. How everyone is sleeping with everyone else and viciously backstabbing and gossiping. Folks are going to go bananas!

“They’ve been scouring the weeds since Kelsey died. And here it is, right here in your husband’s hands!”

“For real?” Viv said, finally looking at it.

“For really real,” I insisted. “But that’s not it. That doesn’t even matter. Get this, Viv. With the manuscript are these notes. Notes for a new book.”

I took a deep breath as I fished the last three pages out from the bottom of the stack and showed her.

“Look! Kelsey was going to write another true-crime book called the Sutton Slay about Noah Sutton’s murder!”

“Get out!” she said, peering at the sheets.

“Yes,” I said as I pointed. “Here’s the outline. See, it’s Dad’s old case. All the witnesses, all the players involved. There’s even supposed to be a chapter about my dad! Kelsey was going to dredge up the whole thing again.”

“Wow. That’s crazy. How far did he get?” Viv said.

“I’m not sure. He must have still been working on it when he died. All I have is this handwritten outline—he always wrote his outlines longhand. And see, at the bottom here he wrote, ‘Must bring files out from New York.’ There are files!”

“That’s amazing, Terry. That’s so crazy. I knew your dad’s case was a big deal, but wow.”

I stared at the manuscript in my hands.

“What do you think I should do with this, Viv? This novel is sheer publishing gold. Maybe I should...”

Angelina came in like a sleepwalker then, trailing Skippy, her cheese doodle–colored stuffed monkey.

“Mommy, are we going swimming now?” she said.

“Maybe you should get dressed at the speed of light,” my wife said, bringing Angelina back toward her bedroom, “and we’ll talk about it.”



37

They say that the journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step.

And mine was almost a real doozy.

“Watch it, chump,” said some mean-looking young jackass on a grungy messenger bike as he almost hit me going the wrong way down Seventh Avenue in NYC’s Greenwich Village.

“Thanks,” I mumbled at the dope’s back as he wove through the Ubers and taxis. “You have yourself a real nice day, too.”

It was a little before eleven o’clock in the morning, and I’d just emerged from the steep Number One train subway stairs into the hot muggy gray rain that was drizzling down on lower Manhattan.

I went for the cover of an empty phone kiosk and stood there breathing in the dirty smell of rain off the city sidewalk, trying to catch my bearings.

I needed to catch them.

Because all of a sudden, things seemed to be heading in a brand-new direction.

As part of the Rourke reunion festivities, Tom had arranged to take everyone into NYC for a day trip. The over-the-top extravaganza consisted of a trip to the zoo, then lunch at Serendipity, and then a Central Park buggy ride to the Disney play Frozen in Times Square.

But from my all my internet searching about Xavier Kelsey for the past two days, I realized that there was something else in NYC.

Or, more precisely, someone else. Someone farther to the south down here in Greenwich Village.

Which was why I’d just left everybody at the zoo beneath its famous animal clock with promises to catch up with them at the theater. Needless to say, by the look on Tom’s face, I’d be lucky if anyone would be talking to me by then.

I stared out at the grittiness of downtown as it began to rain harder. To the south down Seventh Avenue, above the taxis and water towers, stood the gray-blue-spired prism of the Freedom Tower.

Staring up at it, I remembered coming down here with my buddies in high school back in the era when there were still two towers. We’d sneak beers on the LIRR and come down to the bright city lights looking for what teenage boys everywhere have looked for on lazy summer weekends since the dawn of time. To fulfill some vague urgent summer fever dream of girls and bars and concerts and fights and fireworks and adventure.

And here I was now, more than twenty years later, not for pleasure but for business.

Unfinished business, I thought, thinking about my father as I hefted my backpack and came out of the kiosk and started walking east down West Fourth Street through the rain.

Two minutes later, I slowed as I turned onto a leafy section of Waverly Place, a block from Washington Square Park. The address I’d gotten off the internet turned out to be a redbrick town house behind freshly painted black wrought iron. I saw there were bunches of flowers all down its stoop and pressing up against the gate.