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She stood up and grabbed a towel.
“I didn’t hear you come in,” she said, wrapping herself in the terry-cloth robe.
He just stood there watching her, his expression difficult to read. She could tell he had something to say, something important from the look of things, but she wasn’t ready to talk.
“Give me a minute, will you?” Zee said, and Michael turned and walked out of the bathroom.
She went to the bedroom and grabbed a pair of socks, so her feet wouldn’t leave more prints on the wood floors. She put on a sweatshirt and jeans.
She found him in the kitchen. He was eating a piece of salmon. She recognized the O Ya box.
“What’s all this?” she asked him.
“I’ve been calling you. You didn’t answer either phone.”
“Sorry,” she said. “Sorry” seemed to be the word that started most of her sentences these days.
“The wedding planner quit,” Michael said. “But she’s charging us six thousand dollars for her time.” He held out the tray to her. “I figure these are worth about half a grand apiece.”
She shook her head. She wasn’t hungry. She felt a little sick.
“For that price she should have sent the sake, too,” he said.
She walked over and hugged him, holding on for longer than she wanted. He didn’t return the embrace. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll pick up the expense.”
“It’s not about the expense,” he said. She could see him considering before he continued. “I have to ask you an important question,” he finally said.
“What question?”
“Do you not want to get married?”
His question caught her off guard. “Why would you even ask me that?”
“Come on, Zee.”
A long silence followed. The truth was, she didn’t know. She didn’t know if she didn’t want to get married at all, or if she just hated the process. The big wedding was clearly something he wanted. She could count only about five people she would even invite.
“Maybe I just don’t like the wedding planner.” She knew that much was true, though it was all she seemed to know. She felt suddenly foolish for the snow day and guilty that she’d made him feel bad.
“Well, you’ve solved that problem, I’d say.”
“Oh, come on,” she said. She reached into the box they’d sent over and pulled out a piece of sushi. She would take a bite, and then she would tell Michael how much she liked it and that she thought they’d found the perfect food for the wedding. “It’s really good,” she said. “Great, actually.” She didn’t have to lie.
The phone rang. Zee didn’t move to answer it.
She could follow his thought process. Michael was a game theorist and as famous as Mattei in his own right. He was paid to predict what groups of people would do. As a result, Michael always seemed to know what she would do before she did it, even when (as was so often the case these days) she had no idea herself.
Don’t answer the phone, she thought.
She didn’t say it. It would have been stupid. And it would have been futile. As she stood there with him, she felt as if she were the one who was the game theorist. She knew exactly what he would do.
Michael picked up the phone on the fifth ring. “Yes?” he said into the receiver. Zee could tell that it was Mattei. Then, so she continued to feel his earlier reprimand, he went on, “No, evidently Zee does not answer her cell.” He listened to Mattei for a moment, and then, at her direction, he walked over to the TV and flipped it on. “What channel?” he asked. Then he handed the phone to Zee.
Zee kept her eyes on the television as Michael changed the channels, settling on the local news, Channel Five.
“What’s going on?” Zee said to Mattei.
On the screen several cars were pulled over on the top level of the Tobin Bridge. An SUV with its driver’s door opened sat next to the leftmost guardrail. Police were trying to contain the crowds who were leaning over the side, pointing. The TV camera panned across the blackening water, but aside from a few pleasure boats nothing seemed unusual. The camera cut back to the newscaster, a blonde in a blue top. Pointing the microphone at the toll collector, she asked, “Did you know she was going to jump when she pulled over?”
The toll taker shook her head. “I thought she was opening the door because she had dropped her money.”
Another eyewitness leaned into the microphone, vying for camera time. “She didn’t jump, she dove.”
The newscaster held the microphone out to a man who stood off to the side, staring over the railing. “I am told that you witnessed the whole thing,” she said to him.
He didn’t say anything but just stared at the newscaster.
Zee recognized shock when she saw it and hoped one of the medical personnel would treat him for it.
The woman poked the microphone closer. “What did you see?”
As if suddenly realizing where he was, the man pulled himself together. With a look of disgust and anger, he pushed the microphone away. “Stop,” he said.
Zee felt dizzy. She held on to the couch arm to steady herself. A faint beeping sound was still audible from the SUV’s driver’s-side door, near where the key had been left in the ignition. It was weak and failing, but no one had thought to put a stop to it.
Zee recognized the car.
“Her husband left a message on the ser vice,” Mattei said to Zee.
Michael stared at Zee, still not understanding what was happening.
“Who was it?” he finally asked.
“My three-o’clock,” Zee said.
Chapter 3 (#ulink_2a240fd4-4178-5c11-ba39-d4e723659e0c)
Zee took the tunnel to the North Shore instead of the bridge. The old Volvo she’d gotten in grad school barely passed inspection every year, and though she seldom drove in town, she couldn’t seem to give it up. The alignment was so bad that she had to keep both hands firmly on the wheel to stay in her lane as she drove.
Zee hated tunnels—the darkness, the damp, the dripping from overhead, where she imagined the weight of water already pushing through the cracks, finding any weak spot and working its way through. She wasn’t alone. Since the Big Dig tunnel ceiling collapse a couple of years back, most Bostonians were skittish about tunnels.
“Water always seeks its own level,” Zee said aloud, though she was alone in the car and the sound of her own voice seemed wrong. The thought was wrong, too. It only made her more tense. Think of something else, she told herself. She wished she had taken the bridge. At the same time, she wondered if she would ever be able to take the bridge again.
Both Mattei and Michael had told Zee not to go to Lilly’s funeral.
“Why would you do that?” Mattei asked.
“Because she was my patient,” Zee said. “Because I’m a human being.”
“I hope you don’t have any delusions that the family will welcome you,” Mattei said.
“I’m going,” Zee said.
Zee had planned to stop to see her father before the funeral, but she was running late. These days she didn’t drive enough to know how bad the traffic would be this time of day. The Big Dig might officially be over, but traffic was still a mess. She had planned to go directly to Salem and surprise Finch with a visit. She was worried about him. Lately she had only seen him in Boston when he came in for his doctor’s appointments. He seemed frail and weak. And she couldn’t help but feel that he was hiding something from her. So today she planned to drop in unannounced to see for herself. But it was too late to go to Salem now. She’d have to see Finch after Lilly’s funeral.
She altered her route, electing to take the coast road directly to Marblehead, winding along the golden crescent of beach that stretches from Lynn through Swampscott to the town line. At the last minute, she decided to take a shorter route through downtown Lynn, not counting on road construction. It was summer. Road crews were everywhere, the required extra-shift cops sleepily directing traffic.
Zee hadn’t been on this road for a long time. Mostly the streets were as she remembered them. Roast-beef and pizza places lined every block. Popping up next to them were bodegas, nail salons, and the occasional package store. The businesses were essentially the same. But the ethnicity had changed. Small groceries sat next to each other, their signs in Spanish, Korean, Arabic, Russian. Lynn had always had a diverse population. These days there were more than forty languages spoken in the Lynn schools. Zee forgot who had told her that. Probably it had been her Uncle Mickey.
Her mother’s people, including Uncle Mickey, were from Lynn, though they were originally Derry Irish. They had come over from Ireland to become factory workers at a company on Eastern Avenue that made shoe boxes.
They were all IRA, or at least the two brothers had been, Uncle Mickey and his brother Liam, who died in an explosion in Ireland. Zee remembered her mother telling her that their emigration had been sudden. Maureen’s reluctance to say more about it left Zee wondering about the details. It was out of character for Maureen to hold back any details when she was telling a story. Whatever it was that had happened, the family had no longer been safe in Ireland. They’d had to leave the country overnight, taking only what they could carry.
Maureen had told her all this in such a matter-of-fact tone that Zee had never quite believed the story.
“Make no mistake,” her mother had said many times. “We are, every one of us, capable of murder. Given the right circumstances, it is within each of us to take a life.”
Zee never knew whether by “every one of us” her mother had meant all of humanity or simply all of the Doherty clan. She had often thought about asking that question, but she never did. In the end she decided she really didn’t want to know.
Their house had been on Eastern Avenue, near the factory but farther down the street, closer to the beach. Zee doubted if she could find the place now. It was so long ago that her grandmother had died. Her mother died only a few years later, just after Zee turned thirteen. Besides Zee, Mickey was the only Doherty left.
The factory where they’d once worked had long since closed. A sign on the front of the building read king’s beach apartments. It was directly across from Monte’s Restaurant, where she used to go for pizza with her father and Uncle Mickey in their pirate days.
When her grandmother died, Uncle Mickey had moved to Salem. He wanted to be closer to his sister, he said. Mickey could pilot a boat with the best of skippers, but he had never learned to drive a car. Though it was only a town away, Lynn was too far from what was left of his family, he said. And he didn’t like riding the bus. Though Maureen had killed herself just a few years after he made the move to Salem, Mickey stayed on. He had grown to love the Witch City. He was both a born entrepreneur and a natural salesman. He had a bit of the old clichéd blarney in him as well. When Salem reinvented itself, Mickey was right there to take advantage of the opportunity. He now ran a witch shop on Pickering Wharf, several haunted houses, and a pirate museum. He had done well. People in Salem fondly referred to Mickey Doherty as “The Pirate King.”
Lynn, Lynn, City of Sin. Zee recited the old poem in her head. A sign on a Salvation Army building read city of him. People were always trying to find a new image for Lynn. Zee liked it the way it was. It seemed to her a real place where real people led real lives.
She could smell Lynn Beach from here, fetid and heavy. At the Swampscott town line, she noticed a little shop with a woman in the window seated at a sewing machine. Outside the store hung a sign, hand-lettered, with penmanship that slanted downward as it progressed: MALE/FEMALE ALTERATIONS.
City of Sin. There was a reason she felt so right here, Zee thought. As sins go, Zee had committed her share. She felt guilty about a lot of things, not the least of which was the question that Lilly had asked shortly before her death. Lilly’s question reminded Zee so much of Maureen that she hadn’t shared it with Mattei. It was the thing that in retrospect should have tipped her off about Lilly, but instead it hit her in a much more personal way, as if someone had punched her in the stomach.
The last time she’d seen Lilly Braedon, Zee had been trying so hard to rationalize the risky behavior Lilly had been engaging in that she found herself unprepared for the question. Just as the session was ending and Lilly was walking out the door, she turned back to Zee and asked, “Don’t you believe at all in true love?”
Chapter 4 (#ulink_c229166d-6fa1-589f-aeba-258c9432a1e6)
When Lilly’s husband had first brought her to Mattei, Lilly had been heavily dosed on Klonopin. Her anxiety had become so debilitating that the internist her husband had been taking her to had first prescribed Xanax and then, when that failed, increasing doses of the branded clonazepam. Lilly could barely speak. She couldn’t drive. The pupils of her eyes looked like tiny pinpoints. But she was no longer anxious. She was zombie calm.
It turned out that Lilly hadn’t driven for the better part of a year, which had been inconvenient at best with a husband and two young children to care for. Instead of taking the kids to the yacht club to swim, Lilly had started walking them down to Gashouse Beach, which she said she preferred. But the kids missed their friends and the swimming lessons they had signed up for, and Lilly had such a bad feeling about the ocean—a terror that it would take her children, that the surf would send a rogue wave or that some remnants of red tide would seep through their skin to infect them—that she didn’t even let them wade in the water at the beach. Instead they were allowed only to sit on the rocky shore, playing in what little sand they could find, building castles, and slathered with so much 45 SPF that the blowing sand began to coat their pale bodies, making them look like sugar cookies.
By August, Lilly’s husband had taken pity on her and hired a nanny. That was when the real trouble started.
Lilly willingly surrendered her SUV to the nanny, happy to be free of it, preferring to walk around town. She had Peapod deliver groceries. And then she paced.
At first she confined her pacing to the house. She went up and down stairs. She circled from the foyer to the kitchen, through the sunporch to the dining room and library. She climbed all three flights of stairs, avoiding the basement but pacing the rough, unfinished floor of the attic, feet tapping a rhythmic heel-toe, heel-toe. She slept little, pacing the house at night until the nanny complained that she thought the old place might be haunted, because she could hear someone walking above her ceiling.
The next day, when the nanny took the children to their lessons, Lilly’s feet took her outside, through the labyrinth of Marblehead streets, past the fading window boxes where the vinca and blue scaevola struggled against the August drought. On the day when the drought finally broke, she ducked into the Spirit of ’76 Bookstore to get out of the rain, but the place was too quiet for her and she imagined that everyone could hear the squishing sound her sneakers made as she walked on the carpet, so she went back outside. But it was pouring, thundering and very windy. She stood under the awning and watched as a black plastic garbage can caught wind and rolled down the two-lane street, hitting a standing group of planters like a bowling ball, leaving a seven-ten split. She stayed under the awning until she noticed people looking at her, and then she crossed the street and entered the Rip Tide, someplace she’d never been to in her life.
It was three-thirty. The construction workers who weren’t already finished for the day were finally called off the job because of the rain, and the bar was filling up. Lilly walked to the far end and took one of the high stools, one she could wind her feet around to still their movement.
“What can I get you?” the bartender asked.
Lilly didn’t drink. She had no idea.
“Do you have any kind of food?” she asked the man. She was aware that she was the only woman in the place. She could feel all eyes on her.
“They have great steak tips,” a man two stools down offered. “Lunch is over. The kitchen doesn’t open until five,” the bartender said.
“Oh, come on, the lady looks like she could use a good steak.”
She knew they were looking at her, but she had no idea how she must appear. Wet-T-shirt contest was the first thing she thought, but she was too skinny for wet tees to matter much. Her collarbones felt sharp and jutting.
The bartender muttered and went to the back to cook. “You owe me one,” he said, not to Lilly but to the man who’d procured the steak tips for her.
The man dragged his bar stool over to hers.
His name was Adam, he told her. He lived above one of the shops on Pleasant Street, just a few houses down on the left. He did finish carpentry for a local contractor, the same one her husband had recently hired to do some work on their house.
Lilly ate the steak tips. She ate the salad that came with them, too. She even ate the garnish, something pickled and sour, though she couldn’t name what it was.
She had gone to his house, she later told Zee, because he’d offered her a dry T-shirt and a ride home.
They’d done it that first afternoon, she said, not in the bedroom but right there on the green couch in the corner, the wind whipping the aluminum sign against the side of the building, hailstones the size of golf balls crashing hard against the windows, denting the cars in the bank parking lot across the street.
“I felt safe for the first time in years,” Lilly told Zee.
Zee thought Lilly’s description sounded anything but safe, yet she knew it was an important statement. “What about it made you feel safe?”
“The couch, for one thing. It was this deep-cushioned thing, kind of a dark green velvet. Like a forest or something.”
“Forest green?”
“Yes, and the light from the window.”
“You said it was stormy.”
“It was. Maybe it wasn’t the light—it was the sound of the hail against the window. It was also what was outside. The car sounds and the shops. The bookstore and a ballet school. You could hear the music from the school, and I was picturing the little girls doing their barre exercises.”
“Even in the storm, you could hear so well?” Zee asked.
“Yes,” Lilly said. “I could hear the music. It was as if real life was happening right outside the window—all around us, really—and we were part of it somehow. I’ve never felt that way before. Safe and warm,” she said.
He had given her a ride home in his red truck. She made him drop her off down the hill from where she lived, near Grace Oliver Beach, by the little house that had once been a penny-candy store. “Can I see you again?” he asked, taking her hand. He was so sweet that he made her want to cry. She told him no. He told her he thought he loved her.
They made love every afternoon all summer, sometimes at his place, sometimes in the truck if they could find a secluded spot to park. She was always home by five. Lilly thought it was important that Zee know this.
“I’m always home in time to cook dinner,” she explained.
What Lilly actually cooked were huge guilt feasts. The more she fooled around, the better she cooked. She pureed vegetables, adding odd flavorings like strawberry and peanut butter, anything the kids would actually eat. She went organic at the farmers’ market. She even dug up the backyard at midnight to put in a vegetable garden. She never finished it, which caused a huge issue with their landscape designer. The Guatemalan yard workers seemed to have less of a problem with it. They just mowed around the pit as if they believed that it really would become something beautiful one day, and they never filled it in as their boss had suggested. One of them even found a packet of seeds in the shed and planted a few rows of what looked at first like carrots but later revealed itself to be yarrow.
