City on Fire (Danny Ryan, #1)(25)

One rainy morning that wasn’t a beach day, Pam asked her mother if they could go shopping.

Not for books—for clothes.

Janet Davies was ecstatic—she finally had a daughter.

They went shopping, first in Watch Hill, then over in Newport, later on Fifth Avenue. Davies complained about the credit card bills but was secretly pleased, happy for both his wife and daughter.

It would be easier now.

It wasn’t.

What had been a mother’s pity became a mother’s jealousy.

As Pam transformed into a young woman of exceptional loveliness, friends, family, even people sitting at tables next to theirs in restaurants started to remark on Pam’s beauty and charm. The swan began to see the wrinkles in her own elegant neck and compare them unfavorably to her cygnet’s alabaster skin.

The mother withdrew.

Not physically, Janet was always there physically, but she removed herself emotionally. Had she been asked, she would have denied it indignantly. She probably didn’t realize it herself—mirrors reveal so little—but she left her daughter to undergo and try to comprehend the unanticipated metamorphosis.

Pam learned the wrong lesson: that if she was suddenly, for the first time in her life, valued for her beauty, her beauty was her only value.

So when the best-looking boy at Hotchkiss spotted her at a mixer and moved in fast, Pam was as defenseless as an orphaned fawn and found herself in a Farmington motel room looking over his shoulder at a cheap painting of a sailboat.

The funny thing was, Trey Sherburne actually fell in love with her.

What eighteen-year-old man-boy wouldn’t have?

Robert Spencer Sherburne III wasn’t as much a predator as he was a romantic, and in the morning he wanted to drive to New Hampshire, where for some reason he thought he could marry a sixteen-year-old girl he didn’t yet know was pregnant.

Pam was ready to go, she was in love.

They didn’t make it to New Hampshire; they didn’t even make it to the parking lot. Pam’s two brothers, acting on tips from friends, tracked them to the motel in the morning, beat the shit out of Trey, and hauled their sister back to Greenwich to face the collective family shame.

At first Dad wanted to prosecute Trey for statutory rape, but Mom wanted to spare her daughter the public disgrace (“our names in the newspapers, darling”). The Davieses and the Sherburnes worked it out as their families had been doing since the freaking Mayflower—quietly and discreetly. The Davieses didn’t press rape charges against Trey, the Sherburnes didn’t have the brothers charged with aggravated assault, Trey did a gap year on a service project in Tanzania, and Pam went off to New Mexico for a discreet abortion.

Pam came back to finish Miss Porter’s, then went to Trinity College, where she majored in business administration with a minor in classics and sorority parties. If she ever thought of Trey or their unborn child, it was neither deeply nor for long; she had learned from her mother the fine art of burying a warm heart under a glacial field of ice.

After college, she got a job with a high-end real estate firm in Westport and did very well, spending weekends at the family house in Watch Hill.

Watch Hill is either New England money so old it needs a walker to circulate, or “new” New York money, meaning the families have owned homes there for less than two hundred years. Westerly is a granite quarry town settled by Italian immigrant stonemasons who made beautiful churches and big Sunday dinners.

In Watch Hill, money works for people, and in Westerly, people work for money. If people in Watch Hill go to Westerly, it’s usually for pizza, but Pam went slumming there one night at a local bar, where Paulie Moretti started flirting with her because why not take a shot?

Pam flirted back because, well . . .

. . . other than an actual Black guy or a Puerto Rican, who could she date that would piss her parents off more than an Italian? Even a Jewish guy would have been preferable, and sleeping with Paulie Moretti was Pam’s revolt against her utter WASPishness.

Not that she ever brought him home to meet Mom and Dad—that would have been a total disaster. Her revolt was secret, satisfying only to herself, a fling, an adventure before settling down with Donald or Roger or Tad or whoever.

So when Paulie invited her to a clambake not in Watch Hill but in the more blue-collar reaches of Goshen, she was glad to go, because by this time she had figured out that he was actually in the Mafia, which added a frisson of danger.

Then Liam Murphy grabbed her breast, then Paulie showed what a Mafia guy is really like, then she went to the hospital to apologize and . . .

. . . there was the Irish version of Trey.

The best-looking boy in the mob.

Charming.

Hurt.

Vulnerable.

She felt the ice melting.

Next thing she knew, she was in a Las Vegas wedding chapel marrying Liam Murphy, without the least idea of the ramifications.

Now, tucked away in a crappy “safe house” ten miles from anything, with a husband who a lot of people want to kill and who responds to it by drinking half the day and all night, she’s starting to learn.





Twelve


The prison sits off Route 95, Rhode Island’s central thoroughfare, like a constant reminder of what can happen to you if you slip on the banana peel. You can’t go from Warwick to Cranston to Providence without seeing it, and maybe that’s the idea.