Beach Wedding(58)

I guess she had her reasons. I had been gone all night long.

“I don’t even know what the hell you’re doing, Terry,” she said as I left.

Closing the door softly behind me, I didn’t have time to tell her that I was truly wondering about all of it myself.

“You look...bad,” Tom said in angry greeting as I piled into the plush rear of his Cadillac Escalade with Finn and Mickey and Nick.

“Do I? That’s funny because I feel just terrific,” I said, attempting to lighten things up.

Attempt failed, I thought as I took in Tom’s pissed-off-looking glare in the rearview.

I didn’t blame him for being upset. My treating his seven-figure wedding as an afterthought must have looked as if I didn’t give a shit, I realized. And what really sucked was that I couldn’t even tell him that nothing was further from the truth.

Not yet, anyway.

As we pulled out onto Meadow Lane and passed the sandy spot where my dad had first told me about Noah Sutton’s murder all those years ago, I kept wondering just how it was that I was going to tell my brothers the truth. That Dad hadn’t died in an accident. That he had been murdered.

“Well, you’re here,” Tom said in the dead silence as we got onto the Montauk Highway.

“For you, brother,” I said as I remembered the sound the heavy magnet had made when it connected with Tapley’s skull, “I wouldn’t have missed it for all the world.”

Twenty minutes later, the sun had just come up as we got out of the car and stepped onto the circular drive of the storied Maiden Rock Country Club in East Hampton.

In the elite East Hamptons, the joke was country club golf wasn’t a sport, it was a blood sport. A blue blood sport.

How Tom had gotten us into Maiden Rock was mind-boggling. It wasn’t even the palm greasing so much as connecting with the right connected person. Some people said it was easier to get a round in at Augusta or Pebble Beach.

“Gentlemen, if you would like, there are fresh Bloody Marys in the lounge,” the white-shirted clubhouse manager said, ushering us in.

As the others went off to partake, I quickly headed downstairs for the locker room.

I’d been in some nice bathrooms before. Especially back at Sandhill Point, where luxury seemed an obsession. But this one was on another level.

What looked like half a quarry of glowing Alpine white Italian marble slabbed the floors and walls and sink countertops and even the ceiling.

Not only that, on the polished countertops and in little zinc glass niches along the walls of this imported limestone cavern were the most immaculately folded white fluffy towels that I had ever seen in my life. Between them, bowling pin pyramids of spring water bottles were lined at precise intervals like regiments of soldiers at attention.

With all of it softly bathed in the expensive high-drama lighting usually only saved up for Hollywood premieres, it looked more like the main showroom at a Fifth Avenue jewelry store than a locker room bathroom, I thought.

I was washing my hands with one of the exquisitely perfumed hand soaps when the door to the locker room opened.

And into the restroom of the gods walked one of the gods himself. At least in his own mind.

It was Henry Sutton.

The “ye high lord and chancellor” of East Hampton blue-blood society saw me, too, almost immediately, and the door closed with a loud click as he stopped in his tracks with his Locust Valley lock jaw agape.

I could tell right away by the panicked look in his eyes that he knew exactly who I was, too.

Which was pretty ironic.

Because how would he know who I was? Unlike himself, my face never appeared in any society pages.

I squealed off the water and slowly turned as the billionaire’s perfect tan seemed to quickly drain from his handsome face.

“Wh-what do you want?” he stammered. “Who...who let you in here?”

I slowly dried off with one of the fluffy towels as I squinted at him. At his shiny golf clothes, at his still slightly frosted male-model hair. He hadn’t changed much since I’d seen him at the trial more than twenty years before.

Luckily, I had changed. I was bigger than I was at eighteen. Bigger than Henry now, by two inches and much wider. I had easily twenty pounds on him. I looked at Henry’s small girlish hands, his buffed nails. Mine were a bit bigger, the knuckles scraped and scarred from fighting drug dealers on dirty concrete.

When I gauged his expression, it was hard to tell what he was looking more like.

Scared to death.

Or guilty.

I’d shocked the crap out of him. That was for sure. He looked like someone had just tased him.

I knew fear when I smelled it. I could tell right away that he seemed to think I was there to ambush him, to kick his pretty-boy ass for what his family had done to mine.

As I stood there staring at him five feet away, still reeling with exhaustion and craziness from my life-and-death waltz with Tapley on Fire Island, I was definitely tempted to fulfill his incorrect assessment.

I still hadn’t put all the pieces together yet about what had exactly happened with my dad, but this son of a bitch was eyeball deep in it all. I could see it in his face.

And even if I was just being paranoid, smashing in his exfoliated face just for the heck of it seemed fair game to me. Because he had destroyed so many of my family’s hopes and dreams all those years ago, hadn’t he?