Tips for Living(16)

Rain pelted the roof of the blind as I continued to scan, hands shaking from the cold and jiggling the opera glasses so that everything blurred. I should leave immediately. Since that May night, I promised myself I’d never play Peeping Tom again. What more could I actually learn out here? I should hike out and drive home right now, or head for a bar. Instead I wrapped the army blanket around my shoulders more tightly and tried to steady my hands as I examined the scene.

Not even this ugly weather could diminish the grandeur of the house and property. The operatic great room’s glass walls shot up to the treetops, offering dramatic, one-hundred-eighty-degree views of the secluded woods and cove. The other walls were constructed of large stones and trimmed with honey-colored timber that blended in naturally with the landscape. At the far wall, I could see a hallway that led to the rest of the house. The place was so large, there must be rooms and rooms and rooms back there. A separate three-car garage was situated to the left. A slice of another glass-and-wood building was visible on the right behind the main structure, past the pool. Hugh’s studio, I surmised. It was built to take advantage of the views as well.

A tall, bald man in a brown tweed sports coat and a tie gestured animatedly in the center of the great room while talking on his cell. He must be the lead county homicide detective. Around him, figures wearing hooded white jumpsuits and blue plastic gloves crawled on the floor marking, measuring and putting random items in Ziploc bags. I knew this to be forensics procedure, but it looked like performance art.

As I panned back to the fireplace, a white light suddenly exploded in my eyes. I dropped the glasses and blinked at the orange balloons floating on my retinas. They faded quickly, but bursts of light continued to strobe across the choppy waters. Camera flashes. The police were taking pictures of the crime scene.

I picked up the glasses and peered through them again just in time to catch the bright red of an ambulance rolling up the drive. Who needed an ambulance? The news hadn’t mentioned any other victims who’d survived. And if there were survivors, why were the EMTs arriving so late? It took a moment before I grasped that the ambulance must have come at the county coroner’s request. To cart Hugh and Helene away for autopsies. I shuddered at the thought.

With a little maneuvering, the vehicle turned and backed up to the house, revealing a Pequod Volunteer Ambulance insignia on the side. The driver’s door opened and an unmistakable head of thick, snowy hair appeared. Grace’s husband, Mac, had gone gray at twenty-five. “He thinks of emergency calls as a vacation,” Grace had said when Mac first signed on for the ambulance team. After leaving his job on Wall Street to move to Pequod, he began day-trading from home. Mac has attention deficit disorder, and like many people with the affliction, he gets calm and laser focused in high-stress situations. That’s why he’s drawn to trading and EMT work.

Mac climbed out of the ambulance and drew his hood up against the rain. Another man came around from the passenger side to join him. Al Rudinsky. I knew Al volunteered with the ambulance corps, but I don’t think I’d ever seen him out of his bright blue Tidy Pool coveralls. Like Mac, he wore jeans and a red crew windbreaker.

A third man in the same outfit clambered out of the double doors in the back. I was surprised to see Kelly’s husband, Stokes. When had Stokes joined the ambulance corps? I wouldn’t have expected him to give up his bowling time.

“He’s dreamed of running an alley ever since his first bowling party at ten,” Kelly told me the morning I interviewed the couple for my piece on Van Winkle Lanes’ reopening. “He’s a maniac about bowling,” she said of her athletic but baby-faced husband, who barely said a word. “He practices every day. At least three hours. Even when he isn’t competing.” I remember thinking that could explain his freakishly overdeveloped right arm.

Now Stokes was using his considerable upper-body strength to unload gurneys. The front door of the house opened and the tweedy detective appeared, giving the men a thumbs-up. Mac pushed the first gurney in alone while Stokes and Al waited, hunched over the second. When Mac was fully inside, the other two shoved their gurney across the threshold. But Stokes let go. He allowed Al to continue wheeling the equipment into the house while he stood in the rain like a statue. Why had Stokes stopped? Was he afraid of what he would see inside?

I tried to keep the violent images at bay by picturing Hugh at work in his old studio. I knew that scene so well, I could create it easily in my mind. Hugh wearing jeans and a faded blue plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Three buttons open at the top, soft brown chest hair peeking out. Paint stains on his calloused hands. The boyish nape of his neck as he looked down at his palette to mix more paint. I could almost smell the turpentine. I suddenly missed being in the studio with him, posing for his paintings and sketches while he played Bach CDs on his ancient, paint-splattered boom box. I missed being his muse. I missed his making tea for us when we took breaks. He’d show me the new work, excited. When had I made him claustrophobic? He never told me he felt like that. I had to learn it from a critic’s review of a painting I never saw.

Stokes finally moved. He reached inside his windbreaker pocket, pulled out a pack of American Spirits and went to stand under an eave at the side of the house. Stokes smoked? That was odd. With Kelly such a health-conscious type, not to mention pregnant, she couldn’t approve. Maybe she didn’t know? I watched him light the cigarette, toss the match and take a long draw, as if it were the deepest breath he’d taken in years. As he exhaled, something caught his attention and his head jerked to the left. I followed his sight line.