I’d kind of hoped he’d spill the beans right off the bat. It hurt to have him staring right at me while being deceitful. I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, but the letters were too convincing.
“Jimmy Novak used to be in a relationship with a woman named Alice Williams, and in 1988, Alice Williams had a baby girl who she named Amelia, after Jimmy’s mother.”
The color in his cheeks drained away again, and the cup in his hands wobbled, splashing coffee on the table as he sat forward to set it down. He rubbed both hands over his knees as he stared down at the floor for a minute. Then he looked back up at me.
“Where would you hear such a thing?” The pain in his voice shot straight through my heart.
“Alice wrote you letters,” I said softly, and pulled the banded stack of envelopes from my bag. “Shari and I are the only two people on the island who know about these. We haven’t told anyone, and I want to give them to you, but first, please tell me the truth. Who are you, and what did you do?”
He stared at the letters like a desert wanderer desperate for a glass of cool water. Longingly, and with disbelief. Maybe it was cruel of me to make him wait, but if I was to keep his secret, if I was to become complicit in his deception, then I had to know exactly what he’d done.
“I’m going to need something stronger than coffee,” he said after a pause. He stood up slowly, as if all his bones suddenly ached, and he walked into the kitchen to pull a dusty bottle of whiskey from a tall cupboard. “You want some?” he asked. It was only about two o’clock in the afternoon, but he was right. This conversation called for something other than coffee.
“Sure, but put some water in mine. I’m not much of a whiskey drinker.” Judging from the dust on the bottle, neither was he. He got a couple of glasses, added some ice, then filled his glass nearly to the brim. Mine had a healthy shot, too, but he topped it off from the faucet. I watched him as he moved, wondering what could possibly be going on inside his head. I hoped he’d tell me.
He came back to the sofa and handed me my glass, then he sat in his chair, fast and clumsily, as if all the strength had suddenly left his legs. His head turned as he gazed out the window. Then he started talking, slowly, carefully, as if pulling fragile old keepsakes out of a box.
“I guess I ought to start at the beginning.”
I leaned forward, breathless.
“Remember how I told you I’d grown up dirt-poor in a rough part of Philadelphia?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that part was true enough. All the stuff I’ve shared about my childhood was true, and my mother did pass away when I was twenty. My sister took off with a boyfriend, and my stepfather was only interested in his two best pals, Jack Daniel’s and Johnnie Walker. He didn’t much care what happened to me. I guess I didn’t care that much, either.”
He took a slow sip from his glass, his hand still not entirely steady.
“So, when my buddy Mick suggested we head down to Florida, maybe hit Daytona Beach, get a tan, it sounded pretty good to me. At the time, we had about sixty bucks between the two of us, and no hotel reservations, but we just figured we’d drive down there, sleep on the beach or in the car.” He got lost in a memory for a second before coming back to me.
“For some reason, not sure why, we ended up going all the way to Miami, and after a few days we found a beach full of kids our age willing to share their weed and their beer. That’s about as elaborate as our plan was. Then I spotted Alice Williams. She was a beautiful girl. The love of my life, honestly. Honey-colored hair, big blue eyes, and the tiniest bikini I’d ever seen.” He offered up a wistful smile, but it wasn’t for me. It was for Alice.
I took a sip of the drink and let him continue, thoroughly fascinated.
“There was a bonfire that night, and she sat next to me. Somebody had a guitar, so we all sang. She had the voice of an angel, and she could