Golden Girl(35)

Amy wishes she’d been there to hear it; she has always been slightly obsessed with Savannah. Savannah Hamilton has that elusive thing known as class; it’s visible from every angle. It’s her hair, her clothes, her manner of speaking, her graciousness, her taste, her effortlessness in the world. Why has she never married? Amy asked JP this once and he said, “Her standards are too high.” She dated Michael DelRay, a bigwig at JPMorgan, for a while, Amy knew, but broke up with him because he was too mercenary. Savannah is a do-gooder. She took her family money and started a nonprofit that feeds and educates children in places like Niger and Bangladesh. Even if Amy wanted to hate her, she couldn’t.

“So did you get into a fight at the funeral?” Amy asks.

“The reception.”

“You got into a fistfight at the Field and Oar Club?” Amy is titillated by the mere thought. The club intimidates her. JP always talked about how Vivi used to flout the club rules, so every time Amy sets foot in the place she feels the stifling need to behave. Amy doesn’t belong there any more than Vivi did. Amy hails from Potter, Alabama. People know Montgomery and Mobile, but no one has ever heard of Potter. It’s as country as catfish.

“I did.”

“Did they throw you out?”

“They did.”

“Who’d you fight with?”

Dennis brings his second beer to his mouth and drains half in one swallow. “Who do you think?”

Amy stares at the puddle of pink wine left in her lipstick-smudged glass. “JP?”

“Yep.”

Amy takes stock of her surroundings. Lorna’s in deep conversation with the sailor; Amy can easily leave her here if she wants to go home and tend to JP. If there’s blood on Dennis’s knuckles, what must JP’s face look like? “Is he badly hurt?”

“He might have a shiner,” Dennis says. “I hit him twice. He didn’t really fight back.”

No, he wouldn’t, Amy thinks. JP doesn’t like confrontation. If he has a problem, he throws money at it.

She should probably go home and tend to his wounds.

But…she doesn’t want to.

“I had a lot of pent-up anger toward the guy,” Dennis says. “Though I feel bad about hitting him now.” He eyes Amy’s glass. “What if I bought you an apology drink for ruining your boyfriend’s face?”

“I wouldn’t say no,” Amy says.





The Chief




The national average of hit-and-run homicides that end in convictions is under 50 percent, but that doesn’t make the Chief feel any better. Nor does the fact that his wife, Andrea, spent an hour on Thursday watching the virtual memorial service for Vivian Howe, then spent another hour (or more) on the Vivian Howe Memorial Facebook page reading through the comments from her readers.

“They want the Nantucket Police to figure out who did it,” Andrea says. “They want justice. I felt shady—there I was on the page, posing as a normal, everyday reader, which I am, except that I’m also married to the Nantucket chief of police.”

“I’m doing the best I can,” Ed says.

But the truth is, he’s getting nowhere with this investigation.

The tire tracks were no help. The pattern had been compromised by Cruz’s footprints, the arrival of the ambulance, and the footprints of the paramedics.

Lisa Hitt found Vivian Howe’s blood on Cruz DeSantis’s car. On the door handle. Likely, Cruz had Vivi’s blood on his hands when he climbed into his Jeep after the ambulance took her to the hospital. The luminol turned up nothing on the bumper or grille, which was a relief, though frankly, the Chief would have felt better if the car were completely clean. He doesn’t want the statement “Vivian Howe’s blood was on Cruz DeSantis’s Jeep” to get out into the community without context. Already, Falco’s report of seeing the kid run a stop sign and speed down Surfside is everywhere. Finn told the Chief he’d heard people talking about it on the beach at Cisco.

“They’re all saying Cruz hit her,” Finn said.

“There’s no evidence of that,” the Chief said. “People talk. We might as well call this Rumor Island.”

The only member of Vivian Howe’s family who has called Ed is Rip Bonham, her son-in-law. The Chief knows Rip and his father, Chas, and his sister, Pamela Bonham Bridgeman, because the department works with the Bonhams’ insurance company on regular traffic accidents. Rip’s phone call was gentle, just asking if the police had any leads.

The next steps would be examining Vivi’s clothes for flecks of paint from the Jeep and looking for fibers from those clothes on Cruz’s bumper. Every contact leaves a trace.

Here is where the investigation hit a major snafu. Vivi’s clothes are missing. The ME says he followed protocol—he cut the clothes off the deceased, bagged them, and had them delivered to the police station, where they would be processed and sent to Lisa Hitt on the Cape. But the clothes never made it to the station, according to Alexis Lopresti, who was working the processing desk. The Chief went back to the ME—the guy was new, replacing longtime ME Dr. Fields—to ask who exactly he’d sent to deliver the clothes, and the ME admitted he wasn’t sure. He’d handed them off and assumed they would be dealt with.

“Well, where are they, then?” the Chief said. He was about to blow his stack, but the last thing he needed was an ME with a grudge against him. “Never mind—they must be at the station.”