Before the Fall(67)
“What’s this?”
“Just tell me—does she make it?”
“Does who make what?”
“Hermione. A troll escaped, a giant—and she’s—can you—just read it and tell me she’s okay.”
And her mother, who knew her well enough not to push, would stop whatever she was doing and sit, reading as many pages as it took to get the answer. Then she would hand the book back, her thumb marking a new spot.
“Start here,” she’d say. “She didn’t have to fight it. She just yelled at it that it was in the girls’ bathroom and should go away.”
They had a giggle about that, yelling at a troll, and then Rachel went back outside to read.
*
It started with the nanny. They didn’t realize it, though, at the time. Her name was Francesca Butler, but everyone called her Frankie. This was when the family summered on Long Island, at Montauk Point, before private planes and helicopters, when they would just pile in the car and drive out on a Friday night, battling the shifting bulge, like the LIE was just a giant anaconda that had swallowed a traffic jam, the clot of snarled cars shifting downward in surges.
Her brother wasn’t even an idea yet. It was just David and Maggie and toddler Rachel, sleeping in her car seat. The news channel was six years old and already a profit-and controversy-generating machine, but her father liked to say, I’m just a figurehead. A general in a back room. Nobody knows me from Adam.
The kidnapping would change that.
That was the summer of the Montauk Monster, which washed up on shore on July 12, 2008. A local woman, Jenna Hewitt, and three of her friends were walking on Ditch Plains Beach and found the creature.
“We were looking for a place to sit,” she was later quoted saying, “when we saw some people looking at something…We didn’t know what it was…We joked that maybe it was something from Plum Island.”
Described by some as a “rodent-like creature with a dinosaur beak,” the monster was about the size of a small dog and mostly hairless. The body was stocky and the limbs slender. It had two front paws with elongated, pale claws. Its tail was slim and approximately equal in length to the head and neck combined. It was short-faced, wearing an expression of agony or dismay; the postorbital part of the skull appeared long and stout. It had no teeth visible in the upper jaw, instead showing what could be described as a hooked beak of bone. The lower jaw contained a large pointed canine and four post-canines with tall, conical cusps.
Was it a raccoon, as some suggested, that had decomposed in the ocean? A sea turtle whose shell had been removed? A dog?
For weeks, photos of the bloated, distended corpse appeared in tabloids and online. Speculation increased that it was something cooked up in a lab at the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, a mile or so offshore. The Real Island of Dr. Moreau, they started calling it. But eventually, as with all things, a lack of answers led to a lack of interest, and the world moved on.
But when David and Maggie arrived in Montauk that weekend, monster fever was full-blown. Roadside T-shirt kiosks had sprung up. For five dollars you could see the spot where the monster was found, now just an anonymous patch of sand.
The Batemans were renting a house on Tuthill Road. It was a two-story white clapboard across the road from a small lagoon. Mostly secluded, the house was directly parallel to a stalled modern remodel, sheet plastic flapping over a gaping wound to the living room. In years prior, Rachel’s family had rented a house farther north, on Pinetree Drive, but that one had sold to a hedge-fund billionaire in January.
Their new clapboard home (Maggie would stay out there with Rachel through Labor Day weekend, and David would drive out on Fridays and take off the last week of August) was cozy and quaint. It had a large farmhouse kitchen and a sloped and creaky porch. The bedrooms were on the second floor, Mom and Dad facing the ocean. Rachel’s room (complete with a Victorian-era crib) faced the lagoon. They brought Frankie (the nanny) with them, a third pair of hands, as Maggie liked to say. Frankie sat in the back of the Audi with Rachel, engaged in a road-trip-long game of pick up Rachel’s pacifier, wipe it off, and hand it back. Frankie was a night-school nursing student at Fordham who helped take care of Rachel three days a week. She was twenty-two, an émigré from the wilds of Michigan who moved to New York with a boyfriend after college, only to have him leave her for the bass player in a Japanese surf-punk band.
Maggie liked her, because spending time with Frankie made her feel young, something that being with David in his world—populated entirely by people like David, in their forties, and some even in their fifties and sixties—did not. Maggie had just turned twenty-nine. She and Frankie were seven years apart. The only difference between them, really, was that Maggie had married a millionaire.
“You got lucky,” Frankie used to tell her.
“He’s nice,” Maggie would say.
“So even luckier,” Frankie would say and smile. Among her friends there was a lot of talk about landing a rich man. They used to put on short skirts and tall boots and go to bottle-service clubs, hoping to land a Wall Street up-and-comer with a full head of hair and a dick of steel. But Frankie wasn’t really like that. She had a softer edge, having been raised with goats and chickens. Maggie never worried that Frankie was out to steal her husband away. It would be absurd, after all, to trade in your twenty-nine-year-old trophy wife for a twenty-two-year-old, like a cliché on steroids. And yet, she supposed, stranger things had happened.