were really there. In a way it was the best week they’d ever had. Their emotions ran from rapture to delirium and back again; the despair of being apart was in their past. Guilt had been suspended, as had fear. Their first thoughts were not of being careful—twice, Lock had to keep Claire from embracing him in front of the twenty-paned window (the private detective, stupidly, haunted him). Their first thoughts were only of each other.
Gavin took advantage of the week Lock was away to steal, steal, steal, steal, steal. He skimmed off every check that came into the office, including a check for fifty thousand dollars from a prestigious women’s shoe company in New York, which Isabelle French had enlisted to underwrite the gala. (He kept a thousand dollars for himself.) He had nearly ten thousand dollars in cash stowed away in the utensil drawer of his parents’ kitchen. Gavin found taking money while Lock was gone almost too easy; he was able to cover his tracks, then double-check and triple-check that they were covered. It lacked the risk of skimming funds right under Lock’s nose. It was almost more quickening to pilfer money from petty cash for his lunch (which he also did each day Lock was on vacation). Gavin was happy to see Lock return, not only because it put the fun back into his game, but because Gavin had missed his employer. Lock was a truly wonderful man—this had come into clearer focus after Lock had gone away. Gavin felt bad about deceiving him, but this guilt only added extra oomph to Gavin’s treachery.
He fantasized all the time about getting caught. He had a favorite scenario in which he invited Lock and Daphne to his parents’ house for dinner, and in an attempt to locate a serving fork or an extra dessert spoon, one of them opened the utensil drawer and discovered the money. And they said, Where did you get all this money?
Though they knew there could only be one place.
I am a thief. Gavin thought this all the time now. He had come around from considering it “skimming.” Skimming was back when his cache was merely hundreds, but now that it was about to top five figures, it qualified as stealing. He was a thief. And clearly his mind had been ruined (as his mother had always feared) by movies and TV, because his self-image took on a more and more glamorous sheen. Instead of seeing himself as a rotten, dishonest brat who was freeloading off his parents and now taking important funds from little kids whose lives were infinitely more difficult than his had ever been, he put himself in a category with Brad Pitt in Ocean’s Eleven, someone who disarmed elaborate security systems, cracked codes, slipped on velvet gloves.
There were fissures, however, cracks in his resolve, through which his panic escaped. He could not get caught! It wasn’t that he had much to lose—the nitty-gritty facts were that if he got caught, he would have to move out of his parents’ house, and he would lose his job and his three or four friends. But all of that was going into the rubbish bin, anyway. Once he had enough money (how much was enough? A hundred thousand? Could he actually take a hundred thousand and not get caught?), he was leaving. He was off to an island in Southeast Asia so remote it didn’t even have a name (at least not one pronounceable to native speakers of English). It was important to Gavin, however, that he leave on his own terms—in glory, as it were. The people of Nantucket would learn he was a thief, but by then it would be too late. He would have vanished, never to be heard from again; he would have gotten away with it. It was imperative that Gavin get away with it—unlike the debacle at Kapp and Lehigh, where he’d had his hand slapped like a little boy, where his “crime” had been categorized as naive and juvenile. It was important that he succeed in this one thing.
And, too, he was having fun. If he got caught, the fun would come to an abrupt halt.
One night, the week after Lock returned, Gavin experienced unprecedented panic. He was at dinner with Rosemary Pinkle, the recently widowed woman Gavin had befriended at the Episcopal church; they were both fans of the evensong service, and their friendship had grown to encompass monthly dinners out. These dinners sustained Gavin’s