The Lies They Tell(8)
“Why not?” His voice dropped to a whisper as he looked skyward. “You think the club’s got drones up there?”
“No-o-o, I think if those guys recognize us from the dining room and run to mommy and daddy about it, we’re screwed.”
“Oh, come on. They loved it.” He brushed at some drops of beer he’d spilled on the console. “That’s why they come up here to the land of the lost, right? Rich people get off on local color. We fulfill some salt-of-the-earth delusion they have. They seriously think we sit around the woodstove eating whale blubber and singing sea chanteys all winter long.” When she finally smiled, he reached over and ruffled her hair. “Relax. Nobody’s getting fired.”
They continued out of downtown to where the woods deepened, toward Millionaires’ Row, the local nickname for Cove Road, which was reserved for the summer getaways of the ultrarich. The Spencer mansion was first and oldest, a Georgian colonial with three smaller guesthouses arranged on the lawn below like a tiny village. The grandfather, Frederick Spencer, now lived in Tenney’s Harbor year-round, where he was rarely seen anywhere but the club, although his name was ubiquitous in town: the Spencer Wing on the public library, the Frederick L. Spencer athletic track at the high school.
“Flag’s out. Brats must be in town.” Reese nodded to the guesthouses below, where a bright nautical flag hung outside one of the cottages, an eccentric Spencer custom that meant family was visiting. Pearl remembered Bridges, considered telling Reese about being hit on by a Spencer. Better not. If she talked about Bridges, then she might talk about Tristan, and she wasn’t ready to do that yet. Reese glanced at her. “Did your dad ever work down there?”
“No. Spencers go through some guy from Winter Harbor.” Dad was just one of many caretakers on MDI who maintained these grandiose homes, most of which were occupied for only a few weeks or months a year.
Each driveway was marked by a single, understated sign bearing the family name. Wooten. Montgomery-Hines. Mertz. Langstrom. She’d been this way many times, first as a kid, accompanying Dad on his duties—clearing snow, checking locks, making sure all the furnaces were maintaining a steady sixty degrees so the water pipes didn’t freeze—and now, since December, on solitary drive-bys, defying the empty, winterized homes with her presence. They could shun Dad, but they didn’t own Tenney’s Harbor.
All the little sounds Reese usually made to fill silence—finger tapping, humming—grew quiet. He must’ve figured out their destination by now: 168 Cove Road, the long, winding driveway marked with a carved granite block reading Garrison.
They didn’t speak as she urged the car up the crushed rock drive. The gatehouse was first to emerge from the darkness, a small brick structure with a window, an intercom system, and the controls to open the sixteen-foot steel gate beside it. The modern fencing contrasted with the home itself, set far back from the gate, another two-and-a-half-story colonial worthy of a Down East double-page spread. Instead, it had appeared in Time, accompanying the article “Study in Flames: The Slaying of Millionaire David Garrison,” which Pearl had pored over until she’d memorized entire paragraphs like a catechism. Dad was mentioned in that article. How he’d been filling in as night watchman for the regular guy, who had an off-season job he couldn’t leave at the Garrisons’ last-minute notice, yet someone had gotten into the house anyway. Someone who still hadn’t been caught.
She and Reese sat there, thinking their own thoughts in the face of the house, a puzzle box waiting for someone to figure out the first move. There was a new caretaker now: the crime scene tape had been removed, the burnt rubble hauled away from the yard, the grass mowed. A tarp had been laid over the hole in the roof, and David and Sloane’s ruined window was covered with a sheet of particleboard. Pearl recalled the diagram from the Time article, detailing the killer’s route through the sleeping second floor, the path of the accelerant.
“Why do you think he stayed?” Her voice sounded far off. It wasn’t necessary to name Tristan.
Reese shifted. “No clue. Seems like he’d get out of here and never look back. I would.” He hesitated. “They’re not buried in town, right?”
“No. Connecticut.” Tenney’s Harbor had been stunned when news got out that Tristan had rented one of the new homes in the development over on Narragansett Way, had been seen driving his father’s Bentley, playing alone in the club racquetball courts. Why, after everything, wasn’t one of the richest young men in the country going back to his life? To Yale, or the family home in Greenwich? Why stay in a Maine tourist town where he had no one, where people either turned their backs on him or gawked as if he were the equivalent of a wreck on the highway?
“Dad thinks it’s his fault.” Now her voice sounded thinner than ever. “I know it.” She took a breath. “He wasn’t drinking that night. He swore to me.”
Reese was silent nearly ten seconds, a new record. Then she felt his hand close on the nape of her neck, a gentle pressure.
They sat together until a scraping sound made them both turn wide-eyed on the night. It was the tarp, a loose corner shifting in the breeze. Reese swore and sat back. “Let’s go. Too many freakin’ ghosts out here.”
She took him home, watched until his silhouette moved past the carriage house’s second-floor window shade. When she got to her house, Dad was gone. He hadn’t washed the dishes.