guilty. I couldn’t send him off empty-handed. I . . . I had to give him something.’
‘I see.’
‘Maybe I was just tired.’
During the pause that follows, he hears Margaret circling like a 747 in a holding pattern. ‘Nenna . . .’
‘Look, I know it was a mistake but I ended up saying a lot of things that we don’t talk about to somebody who doesn’t know us, and that’s really bad. About that Saturday night, and Lucy coming down on the beach so late, after you’d given up on her and gotten . . .’
‘Don’t.’
‘. . . so drunk. I just thought you should know. In case he comes your way? To ask? The thing is, he . . .’ In a heartbeat, her tone veers from dark to festive. ‘Oh, Steffy, look at you! Bobby, Steffy’s here, I have to go.’
‘Thanks for the heads up.’
‘Just so you know.’
‘Just so I know.’
Nenna covers the mouthpiece while she and the girl confer. Then she says in that bright, artificial, Fort Jude way, ‘Right then. Take care, Bobby. Lovely to talk.’
‘Wait. I need to know what you told him.’ What he really needs to know is how much Nenna knows.
But his friend is caught up in her daughter’s rhythms now. Like a girl she says, ‘Later, OK?’ Giggling, she delivers a punchline dug up from the deep past when they were so young that it was still funny, ‘See you in church.’
39
Dan
Confused by the scene he played with Mrs McCall after the fire, too wired to sleep, Dan lurched into the lobby of the Flordana. He ran his credit card in the crap business center and starred their houses on the grainy printout of the Internet map.
Done. Sleep.
When he emerges, the town is preternaturally quiet. Jazzed on caffeine and carbs from the machines, with no Fort Judeans around badgering him with guilty secrets, he comes out into the sunlight feeling, well, what passes for happy in this weird time.
He has a plan. This one looks rock-solid: grill the peripheral witnesses, one, two, three, building questions on answers, fact-checking as he goes. Nail them at home before he grills the prime suspect, who, although the northerner hunting his father can’t know it, is still snoring on stinking satin sheets in a house suffering a steep descent from shiny high tech into deep slobbery.
It’s a curse, having an orderly mind, but how is he supposed to know? OK, he’ll start with Carter Bellinger’s dad, in hopes. It was, after all, his Jeep. But there’s more. There is always more. He knows from what the McCall woman said that his mother suffered. He still doesn’t know exactly how, or why. First he will identify the bastard and confront him. Then he will . . . OK. This is the thing. Does he not look more like Bellinger in that Polaroid than Kalen, with his leering, gorilla grin? Squint and he can almost see himself in Bellinger’s face. Nose to nose with George Chapin Bellinger, LLD, he’ll can him: face, body mass, stance. Soul, which is what rules Chaplin out. If there’s anything in the configuration; if, counter to expectations, Bellinger’s the guy, he can forget the other two – forget Kalen! – and put his heart to rest.
Otherwise, it’s on to Coleman and Von Harten, solid Fort Jude business types with houses on the same block in Coral Shores, because he needs to triangulate. If it really is Kalen, then he’ll damn well go in there armed with facts. Sick of hints, slippery truths and polite evasions and sick to death of Fort Jude, Florida, Dan’s given up on that heartwarming ‘Father!’ ‘Son!’ moment. He won’t even hit the guy. He just needs to know, so he can walk away. He thinks: Closure. Damn that orderly mind.
Leaving the Flordana, he’s too preoccupied to notice the car keeping pace as he heads down Central Avenue and around the corner to the hotel garage. He’s trying out lines.
‘You don’t know me, but . . .’
‘I think we have something in common.’
‘You remember Lucy, right? Lucy Carteret?
‘Um. Hello.’
Lame, but better than, ‘Are you him?’
Fuck, Bellinger’s house is sealed up tighter than an entomologist’s catching jar. It’s a vintage Spanish stucco with a contemporary add-on doubling its size. They keep the king-sized yard beautifully groomed, like women of a certain age. The ancient Royal palms in front look like fat cigars with Sideshow Bob fright wigs bobbing at the tops. The long porch overlooks the water between here and