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Augie lives in a brick garden apartment on Oak Street in a development that might aptly be called Divorced Dads Mews. He moved in “temporarily” eight years ago, leaving Audrey, Diana’s mother, the house where they had raised their only child. A few months later, Audrey sold the house without first informing Augie.
Audrey did that, she once told me, for Augie’s sake more than hers.
When Augie answers the door, I can see his golf clubs in the foyer behind him.
“So how was Hilton Head?” I ask.
“Nice.”
I point behind him. “You brought your clubs?”
“Wow, you’re quite the detective.”
“I don’t like to brag.”
“I brought them,” Augie says. “But I didn’t play.”
That makes me smile. “So it went well with . . . ?”
“Yvonne.”
“Yvonne,” I repeat, arching an eyebrow. “Great name.”
He moves away so as to let me in and says, “I don’t think it’s going to work out between us.”
My heart sinks. I’ve never met Yvonne, but for some reason I picture her as this confident woman with a big, throaty laugh, an easy way, fun, grateful, who liked to thread her arm through Augie’s as they walked the beach near their hotel. I feel a loss for someone I never met.
I look at him. He shrugs.
“There’ll be another,” he says.
“Plenty more fish in the sea,” I agree.
You’d expect the apartment interior to be on the generic-read-dumpy side, but it’s not. Augie loves going to local art fairs and buying paintings. He rotates them, never keeping them in the same spot for more than a month or two. The oak bookshelves with glass fronts are jammed with books. Augie is the most voracious reader I know. He’s divided the books into two simple categories—fiction and nonfiction—but he hasn’t alphabetized them by author or anything like that.
I take a seat.
“You off duty?” Augie asks.
“I am. You?”
“Same.”
Augie is still captain of the Westbridge Police Department. He retires in a year. I became a cop because of what happened to you, Leo, but I’m not sure it would have happened without Augie’s guidance. I sit in the same plush chair I always take when I’m here. He uses the trophy from the high school state championship football team—the one I played on, the one he coached—as a bookend. Other than that there is nothing personal in this room—no photographs, no certificates, no awards, nothing like that.
He hands me a bottle of wine. It’s Chateau Haut-Bailly 2009. Retails for about two hundred dollars.
“Nice,” I say.
“Open it.”
“You should save it for a special occasion.”
Augie takes the bottle from my hand and jams the corkscrew into the top. “Is that what your father would tell us?”
I smile. “No.”
My great-grandfather, Dad often told us, saved his best wines for special occasions. He was killed when the Nazis invaded Paris. The Nazis ended up drinking his wine. Lesson: You never wait. When I was growing up, we used only the good plates. We used the best linens. We drank out of Waterford crystal. When my father died, his wine cellar was nearly empty.
“Your dad used fancier words,” Augie tells me. “I prefer a line from Groucho Marx.”
“That being?”
“‘I shall drink no wine before its time. Okay, it’s time.’”
Augie pours the wine into one glass, then the other. He hands one to me. We clink glasses. I twirl the wine a bit and smell. Nothing too showy.
I get a gorgeous nose of blackberry, plum, crème de cassis, and—go with me on this—lead pencil shavings. I take a sip—succulent, ripe fruit, fresh, lively, you get the deal. The finish lasts a solid minute. Spectacular.
Augie waits for my reaction. My nod tells all. We both look to the spot where Dad would be sitting if he were with us. The longing vibrates deep in my chest. He would have loved this moment. He’d have savored both this wine and this company.
Dad was the pure definition of what the French label joie de vivre, which roughly translated means “exuberant enjoyment of life.” I’m not sure about that definition. My own experience is that the French love to feel. They take in the full experience of great loves and great tragedies without backing down or crouching into some sort of defensive stance. If life is going to punch them in the face, they stick their chins out and savor the moment. That is living life to the fullest.
Dad was like that.
And that’s why I would be a great disappointment to him, Leo.
So maybe in the important things, I’m not a Francophile at all.
“So what’s on your mind, Nap?”
I start with Rex’s murder and then hit him with Maura’s fingerprints. Augie drinks his wine with a little too much care. I finish the story.
I wait. He waits. Cops know how to wait.
Finally, I say, “So what do you make of it?”
Augie rises from his seat. “Not my case. Ergo not my job to make something out of it. But at least you know now.”
“Know what?”
“Something about Maura.”
“Not much,” I say.
“No, not much.”
I say nothing, take a sip.
“Let me take a wild guess,” Augie says to me. “Somehow you think this murder has something to do with Diana and Leo.”
“I don’t know if I’m willing to go that far yet,” I say.
Augie sighs. “What have you got?”
“Rex knew Leo.”
“He probably knew Diana too. You were all in the same class, right? It’s not that big a town.”
“There’s more to it.”
I reach into my bag and pull out the yearbook. Augie takes it from my hand.
“Pink Post-it notes?”
“Ellie,” I say.
“Should have known. So why are you showing me this?”
As I explain about the pins and the Conspiracy Club, an amused smile comes to his lips. When I finish he says, “So what’s your theory, Nap?”
I say nothing. His smile grows.
“Do you think that this Conspiracy Club uncovered a great big scary secret about a secret military base?” he asks. He starts waving his fingers around like he’s casting a spell. “A secret so terrible that, what, Diana and Leo had to be silenced? Is that how your theory goes, Nap?”
I take another sip of wine. He starts to pace, flipping to the pages marked off with the Post-it notes.
“And now, fifteen years later, Rex for some odd reason needs to be silenced too. Odd he didn’t have to be silenced back then, but whatever. Suddenly, secret agents are dispatched to take him out.”
Augie stops and stares at me.
“Are you enjoying this?” I ask.
“A little, I guess.”
He opens up to another page with a pink Post-it note. “Beth Lashley. Is she dead too?”
“No, I don’t think so. I haven’t found anything on her yet.”
Augie frantically flips to another page. “Oh, and Hank Stroud. Well, we know he’s still in town. Not all there, I admit, but the bogeymen haven’t taken him out yet.”
He flips the page once again, but this time he freezes. The room is silent now. I look at his eyes and I wonder whether coming here was wise. I can’t see the exact page he’s looking at, but I can tell that it’s a page toward the back. So I know. His expression doesn’t change, but everything else does. Pain creases his face. There is a small shake in his hand now. I want to say something comforting, but I know that this is one of the moments when words would be like an appendix—superfluous or harmful.
So I shut up.
I wait as Augie stares at the photograph of his seventeen-year-old daughter, who never came home that night. When he finally speaks again, it’s like something heavy is sitting on his chest.
“They were just kids, Nap.”