Whiskey Beach

Chapter Twenty-seven

A GOOD DAY, ABRA THOUGHT WHEN THEY SAID GOOD-BYE to Hester. She reached for Eli’s hand to say exactly that as they walked to the car. Then spotted Wolfe leaning against his across the street.

“What is he doing?” she demanded. “Why? Does he think you’re going to suddenly walk over there and confess all?”

“He’s letting me know he’s there.” Eli got behind the wheel, calmly started the engine. “A little psychological warfare, and surprisingly effective. It got to the point last winter where I rarely left the house because if I went for a damn haircut, I couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t walk in and take the chair next to me.”

“That’s harassment.”

“Technically, and yeah, we could’ve filed charges, but at that point he’d have gotten a slap. Wouldn’t really change anything, and the truth is I was too damn tired to bother. It got easier to just stay put.”

“You put yourself under house arrest.”

He hadn’t thought of it that way, not at the time. But she wasn’t wrong. Just as he’d thought, in some corner of his mind, of his move to Whiskey Beach as a self-imposed exile.

Those days were finished.

“I didn’t have anywhere to go,” he told her. “Friends eased away or just vanished. My law firm let me go.”

“What about that ‘innocent until proven guilty’ tack?”

“That’s the law, but it doesn’t hold much weight with important clients, reputations and billable hours.”

“They should’ve stuck by you, Eli, even if only out of principle.”

“They had other associates, partners, clients, staff to consider. Initially they called it a leave of absence, but I was done, and we all knew it. Anyway, it gave me the time and the reason to write, to try to focus on that.”

“Don’t turn it into them doing you a favor.” Her voice snipped, sharp as scissors. “You did yourself the favor. You did the positive.”

“I grabbed a lifeline with writing, and it’s more positive than letting go. When they didn’t come to arrest me, and believe me that was something I waited for every day, it gave me the chance to go to Bluff House.”

A kind of purging, Abra thought. A hulling out that had left him tired and tense and, to her mind, entirely too willing to accept the hand dealt him.

“And now?” she asked.

“Now, the lifeline’s not enough. I can’t just hold in place, wait for the fall. I’m going to fight back. I’m going to find the answers. When I have them, I’m going to stuff them down Wolfe’s throat.”

“I love you.”

He glanced at her with a smile, but it faded into a look of wary surprise when he saw her eyes. “Abra—”

“Uh-uh, better watch the road.” At her gesture, he tapped the brakes before he rear-ended a hatchback.

“Terrible timing,” she continued. “Not romantic, not convenient, but I believe in expressing feelings, especially the positive ones. Love’s the most positive feeling there is. I like feeling it, and I wasn’t sure I would. We’ve got such crap behind us, Eli, and we can’t help that some of it’s still sticking to the bottom of our shoes. Maybe it helps make us who we are. But the bad thing is it makes us hesitate to trust again, reach out again, take those risks again.”

Amazing, she thought, just amazing that saying the words out loud made her feel stronger, freer. “I don’t expect you to take those risks just because I did, but you should feel good, and you should feel lucky that a smart, self-aware, interesting woman loves you.”

He navigated the tricky traffic to squeeze his way onto 95 North. “I do feel lucky,” he told her. And panicked.

“Then that’s enough. We need better tunes,” she decided, and began to search and scan his satellite radio.

That’s it? he thought. I love you, let’s change the channel? How the hell was a man supposed to keep up with a woman like that? She was a lot harder to negotiate than Boston traffic, and even more unpredictable.

As the miles passed, he tried to think of something else, but his thoughts kept circling back to it like fingers seeking out a nagging itch. Eventually he’d have to respond, somehow. They’d have to deal with the . . . issue. And how the hell was he supposed to think clearly, rationally, about love and all it implied when he had so much else to deal with, to work through, to resolve?

“We need a plan,” Abra said, and tossed him straight back into panic mode. “God, your face.” She couldn’t stop the laugh. “It’s a study of barely restrained male terror. I don’t mean an Abra-loves-Eli plan, so relax. I mean a Justin-Suskind-risked-sneaking-up-to-the-third-floor-of-Bluff-House-and-why plan. We need to systematically go through what’s up there.”

“I’ve started doing that a couple hours a day, every day, and I’ve barely made a dent. Have you seen how much is up there?”

“That’s why I said systematically. We stick with the stance he’s after the dowry. We expand that by the reasonable assumption he has information, right or wrong, that caused him to dig in that area of the basement. And we can further expand that by logical speculation. He was looking for more information, another lead, something that confirms—to his mind—the location.”

Eli imagined there were a lot of invisible or missing dots, but all in all it wasn’t a bad way to connect what they had.

“For all we know he found what he was after.”

“Maybe, but he’s come back to the house since then. He still thinks the house is the key.”

“Things weren’t jumbled up.” Eli thought it through. “I don’t know what kind of order things had in the trunks, the chests and storage boxes, the drawers in all that furniture up there, so they could have been searched through prior to the police. But if he did, he was careful about it. Then the cops went through it, and now it’s pretty jumbled up.”

“How could he know someone wouldn’t go up there, and before he found what he wanted. He didn’t want anyone to know he had access to the house. We wouldn’t have known if we hadn’t been wandering around the basement in the dark.”

“We were wandering around the basement because he cut the power. That’s a big clue to a B-and-E.”

“Okay, that’s a good point. But would you have searched down there? If you’d come home, called the police, it’s really unlikely you’d have gone down to the basement, looking for signs the intruder had been down there. Or if you did, it’s not likely you’d have gone beyond the wine cellar.”

“Okay. He took a calculated risk.”

“Because he wants and needs the access, and maybe, if we do that systematic search, we’ll find out more about why. We have to wait for him to come back before we can try the ambush agenda,” she reminded him. “We might as well do something active until. More active,” she amended. “I know you’ve been researching and cross-referencing, and plotting out theories and connections, and the trip today gave us new information to process. But I like the idea of actually getting my hands into things.”

“We can take a deeper look.”

“And spending some time up there might give you more ideas about how to use that space. I’m going to pick you up a paint fan.”

“You are?”

“Colors inspire.”

“No,” he said after a moment, “I can’t keep up.”

“With what?”

“You.” Relief when he finally cruised through the village tempered with frustration. Love to radio stations, systematic searches to ambushes to paint fans. “How many directions can you go in at one time?”

“I can think in a lot of directions, especially if I consider them important, relevant or interesting. Love’s important, and certainly on a different level I think music on a drive’s important. Searching on the third floor and refining any plan to, hopefully, catch Suskind inside the house are absolutely relevant, and paint colors are interesting—and eventually both important and relevant.”

“I surrender,” he said as he pulled up and parked at Bluff House.

“Good choice.” Abra got out of the car, spread her arms, turned a circle. “I love the way it smells here, the way the air feels. I want to take a run on the beach and just fill myself with it.”

He couldn’t take his eyes off her, couldn’t block the lure of her. “You matter to me, Abra.”

“I know it.”

“You matter more than anyone has.”

She lowered her arms. “I hope so.”

“But—”

“Stop.” She hauled her bag out of the car, shook back her hair. “You don’t have to qualify it. I’m not looking for you to balance the scales. Take the gift, Eli. If I gave it too soon or wrapped it the wrong way, it can’t be helped. It’s still a gift.” She started for the door, and from inside, Barbie sent out a fury of barks.

“Your alarm’s going off. I’ll change and take her with me for that run.”

He got out his keys. “I could use a run, too.”

“Perfect.”

She said no more about it, and instead plowed straight on with the new agenda. They unpacked trunks, with Abra diligently inventorying the contents on a laptop.

They weren’t experts, she’d stated, but an organized itemization might help with Hester’s hope for a museum. So they separated, studied, cataloged and replaced with Eli culling out the household ledgers, account books and journals.

He paged through them, making his own notes, outlining his own theory.

She had to work, and so did he, but he adjusted his own schedule to include what he thought of as mining-the-past time. He added to his stack of household ledgers with meticulous recordings of purchases of fowl, beef, eggs, butter and various vegetables from a local farmer named Henry Tribbet.

Eli decided Farmer Tribbet was an ancestor of his drinking pal Stoney. He amused himself imagining Stoney wearing a farmer’s straw hat and overalls when Barbie let out a warning woof, then dashed out, barking.

He rose from the temporary work space of card table and folding chair, started out. A moment after the barking stopped, Abra called up.

“It’s just me. Don’t come down if you’re busy.”

“I’m on three,” he called back.

“Oh. I’ve got a few things to put away, then I’ll be up.”

It sounded good, he admitted. To hear her voice break through the silence of the house, to know she’d come upstairs to join him, work with him, bring up bits and pieces of her day and the people in it.

Whenever he tried to imagine his days without her in them he remembered the dark cloud of time, his self-imposed house arrest where everything had been dull, colorless, heavy.

He’d never go back there, he’d pushed too far into the light to ever go back. But he often thought the brightest light was now Abra.

A short time later, he heard her coming up at a jog. He watched for her.

She wore knee-length jeans and a red T-shirt that claimed: Yoga Girls Are Twisted.

“Hi, I had a massage cancel, so—” She stopped on her way to the table where he sat, anticipating her hello kiss. “Oh my God!”

“What?” He sprang up, ready to defend against anything from a spider to a homicidal phantom.

“That dress!” She all but leaped on the dress he’d left draped over the trunk he was cataloging.

She snatched it up as his heart gratefully descended from his throat, and rushed to the mirror she’d already undraped. As he’d seen her do with ball gowns, cocktail dresses, suits and whatever else caught her fancy, she held up the boldly coral twenties-style dress with its low waist and knee-length fringed skirt.

She turned right and left so the fringes lifted and twirled.

“Long, long pearls, masses of them, a matching cloche hat and a mile-long silver cigarette holder.” Still holding it, she spun around. “Imagine where this dress has been! Dancing the Charleston at some fabulous party or some wild speakeasy. Riding in a Model T, drinking bathtub gin and bootleg whiskey.”

She spun again. “The woman who wore this, she was daring, even a little reckless, and absolutely sure of herself.”

“It suits you.”

“Thanks, because it’s fabulous. You know with what we’ve found and cataloged already, you could have a fashion museum right up here.”

“I’ll take the option of a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.”

Men would be men, she supposed, and she had no desire to change that status.

“Okay, not here, but you definitely have enough for a fantastic display in Hester’s museum. One day.”

Unlike Eli, she carefully folded the dress with tissue. “I checked the telescope before I came up. He’s still a no-show.”

“He’ll be back.”

“I know it, but I hate waiting.” Belatedly, she walked over to kiss him. “Why aren’t you writing? It’s early for you to stop for the day.”

“I finished the first draft, so I’m taking a break, letting it cook a little.”

“You finished it.” She threw her arms around his neck, shook her hips. “That’s fantastic! Why aren’t we celebrating?”

“A first draft isn’t a book.”

“Of course it is, it’s just a book waiting for refinement. How do you feel about it?”

“Like it needs refinement, but pretty good. The end went quicker than I’d expected. Once I really saw it, it moved.”

“We’re absolutely celebrating. I’m going to make something amazing for dinner, and put a bottle of champagne from the butler’s pantry on ice.”

Thrilled for him, she dropped onto his lap. “I’m so proud of you.”

“You haven’t read it yet. Just one scene.”

“It doesn’t matter. You finished it. How many pages?”

“Right now? Five hundred and forty-three.”

“You wrote five hundred and forty-three pages, and you did that through a personal nightmare, you did that during a major transition in your life, through continuing conflict and stress and upheaval. If you’re not proud of yourself you’re either annoyingly modest or stupid. Which is it?”

She lifted him, he realized. She just lifted him.

“I guess I’d better say I’m proud of myself.”

“Much better.” She kissed him noisily, then wrapped her arms around his neck again. “By this time next year, your book will be published or on its way to publication. Your name’s going to be cleared, and you’ll have all the answers to all the questions hanging over you and Bluff House.”

“I like your optimism.”

“Not optimism alone. I did a tarot reading.”

“Oh, well then. Let’s spend my staggering advance on a trip to Belize.”

“I’ll take it.” She leaned back. “Optimism and a tarot reading equal a very powerful force, Mr. Mired in Reality, especially when you add effort and sweat. Why Belize?”

“No clue. It was the first thing to pop into my mind.”

“Often the first things are the best things. Anything interesting today?”

“Nothing that pertains to the dowry.”

“Well, we still have plenty to go through. I’ll start on another trunk.”

She worked alongside him, then decided to change gears, abandon the trunk and work her way through an old chest of drawers.

It was amazing what people kept, she thought. Old table runners, faded pieces of embroidery or needlepoint, children’s drawings on paper so dry she feared it would break and crumble in her hands. She found a collection of records she thought might be from the same era as the gorgeous coral dress. Amused, she uncovered a gramophone, wound it up, and set the record to play.

She grinned over at Eli as the scratchy, tinny music filled the room. She did some jazz hands, a quick shimmy, and had him grinning back.

“You ought to put the dress on.”

She winked at him. “Maybe later.”

She danced back to the chest of drawers, opened the next drawer.

She made piles. So much unused or partially used fabric, she noted, arranging them in neat piles. Someone had used the chest of drawers for sewing at one time, she thought, storing silks and brocades, fine wools and satins. Surely some lovely dresses had come from this, and others simply planned and never realized.

When she reached the bottom drawer, it stuck halfway open. After a couple of tugs, she lifted out scraps of fabric, and an envelope of pins, an old pincushion fashioned to resemble a ripe, red tomato, a tin box of various threads.

“Oh, patterns! From the thirties and forties.” Carefully, she lifted them out. “Shirtwaists and evening gowns. Oh God, just look at this sundress!”

“You go ahead.”

She barely spared him a glance. “They’re wonderful. This whole project has made me wonder why I never tried vintage clothing before. I wonder if I can make this sundress.”

“Make a dress?” He flicked her a glance. “I thought that’s what stores were for.”

“In that yellow silk with the little violets, maybe. I’ve never sewn a dress, but I’d love to try it.”

“Be my guest.”

“I could even try on that old sewing machine we found up here. Just to keep it all vintage.” Imagining it, she stacked the patterns, turned back to the empty drawer.

“It’s stuck,” she muttered. “Maybe something’s caught . . .”

Angling herself, she reached in, searched the bottom of the drawer above for a blockage, then the sides, then the back. “I guess it’s just jammed or warped or . . .”

Then her fingers trailed over what felt like a curve of metal.

“Something’s back here in the corner,” she told Eli. “In both corners,” she discovered.

“I’ll look in a minute.”

“I can’t see why it’s hanging up the drawer. It’s just—”

Impatient, she pushed at the corners, and the drawer slid out, nearly into her lap.

Eli glanced up again at her surprised “Oh!”

“Are you okay?”

“Yes, just bumped my knees a little. It’s like a compartment, Eli. A secret compartment in the back of this drawer.”

“Yeah, I’ve found a few of those in desks, and one in an old buffet.”

“But did you find anything in them like this?”

She held up a wooden box, deeply carved with a stylized, looping L.

“Not so far.” Intrigued now, he stopped his inventory when she brought the box to the table. “It’s locked.”

“Maybe the key’s in the collection we’ve been compiling, more of which I found in the hidden drawer in the old buffet.”

She glanced over at the jar they were using to store keys found during the third-floor rummage. Then just pulled a pin out of her hair.

“Let’s try this first.”

He had to laugh. “Seriously? You’re going to pick the lock with a hairpin?”

“It’s the classic way, isn’t it? And how complicated can it be?” She bent the pin, slid it in, turned, wiggled, turned. Since she seemed determined to open the box, Eli started to get up for the jar. Then heard the quiet click.

“You’ve done this before?”

“Not since I was thirteen and lost the key to my diary. But some skills stay with you.”

She lifted the lid, found a cache of letters.

They’d come across letters before, most of them as long and winding as the distance between Whiskey Beach and Boston, or New York. Some from soldiers gone to war, she thought, or daughters married and settled far away.

She hoped for love letters as she’d yet to find any.

“The paper looks old,” she said as she carefully took them out. “Written with a quill, I think, and— Yes, here’s a date. June 5, 1821. Written to Edwin Landon.”

“That would have been Violeta’s brother.” Eli pushed his own work aside, shifted to look. “He’d have been in his sixties. He died in . . .” He scoured his mind for the family history he’d pored over. “I think 1830 something, early in that decade anyway. Who’s it from?”

“James J. Fitzgerald, of Cambridge.”

Eli noted it down. “Can you read it?”

“I think so. ‘Sir, I regret the unfortunate circumstances and tenor of our meeting last winter. It was not my intention to intrude upon your privacy or your goodwill. While you made your opinions and decision most . . . most abundantly clear at that time, I feel it imperative I write to you now on behalf’—no—‘behest of my mother and your sister, Violeta Landon Fitzgerald.’”

Abra stopped, eyes huge as they met Eli’s.

“Eli!”

“Keep reading.” He rose to go study the letter over her shoulder. “There’s no record in the family history of her marrying or having children. Keep reading,” he repeated.

“‘As I communicated to you in January, your sister is most grievously ill. Our situation continues to be difficult with the debts incurred at my father’s death two years past. My employment as a clerk for Andrew Grandon, Esquire, brings me an honest wage, and with it I have well supported my wife and family. I am now, of course, seeing to my mother’s needs in addition to attempting to reconcile the debts.

“‘I do not and would not presume to approach you for financial aid on my own behalf, but must again do so in your sister’s name. As her health continues grave, the doctors urge us to remove her from the city and to the shore, where they believe the sea air would be most beneficial. I fear she will not live to see another winter should the current situation continue.

“‘It is your sister’s most heartfelt wish to return to Whiskey Beach, to return to the home where she was born and which holds so many memories for her.

“‘I appeal to you, sir, not as an uncle. You have my word I will never ask for consideration for myself due to that familial connection. I appeal to you as a brother whose only sister’s wish is to come home.’”

Mindful of its fragility, Abra set the letter aside. “Oh, Eli.”

“She left. Wait, let me think.” He straightened, began to wander the room. “There’s no record of her marriage, any children, of her death—not in family records, anyway—and I’ve never heard of this Fitzgerald connection.”

“Her father had records destroyed, didn’t he?”

“That’s what’s been passed down, yeah. She ran off, and he not only cut her off, he basically eliminated all records.”

“He must have been a small, ugly man.”

“Tall, dark and handsome in his portraits,” Eli corrected, “but you mean inside. And you’re probably right. So Violeta left here, estranged from the family, and went to Boston or Cambridge and they disowned her. At some point she married, had children—at least this son. Was Fitzgerald the survivor of the Calypso? An Irish name, not a Spanish one.”

“He could’ve been impressed. Is that the term? Or just as likely she met and married him after she left home. Was there really never any attempt to reconcile, until this? Until she was dying?”

“I don’t know. Some of the stories speculate she ran away with a lover, most just speculate she ran off after her lover was killed by her brother. During this research, I’ve come across a couple of speculations she was shipped off because she was pregnant, and then disowned because she wouldn’t fall in line. Basically, they erased her, so there are no family records or mentions of her after the late 1770s. Now that we have this, we can do a search for James J. Fitzgerald, Cambridge, and work back from there.”

“Eli, the next letter, it’s written in September of the same year. Another plea. She’s worse, and the debts are mounting up. He says his mother’s too weak to hold a pen and write herself. He writes her words for her. Oh, it breaks my heart. ‘Brother, let there be forgiveness. I do not wish to meet God with this enmity between us. I beseech you, with the love we once shared so joyfully, to allow me to come home to die. To allow my son to know my brother, the brother I cherished, and who cherished me before that horrible day. I have asked God to forgive me for my sins and for yours. Can you not forgive me, Edwin, as I forgive you? Forgive me and bring me home.’”

She wiped tears from her cheeks. “But he didn’t, did he? The third letter, the last. It’s dated January sixth. ‘Violeta Landon Fitzgerald departed this world on this day at the hour of six. She suffered greatly in the last months of her time on this earth. This suffering, sir, is on your hands. May God forgive you for I shall not.

“‘On her deathbed, she related to me all that occurred in those last days of August in the year 1774. She confessed her sins to me, the sins of a young girl, and yours, sir. She suffered and died wishing for the home of her birth and her blood, and for the embrace of family refused her. I will not forget nor will any of my blood. You have your riches and hold them dearer than her life. You will not see her again, nor meet with her in Heaven. For your actions you are damned, as are all the Landons who spring from you.’”

She set the last letter with the others. “I agree with him.”

“By all accounts Edwin Landon and his father were hard men, uncompromising.”

“I’d say these letters bear that out.”

“And more. We don’t know if Edwin responded, or what he wrote if he did, but it’s clear both he and Violeta ‘sinned’ in August of 1774. Five months after the Calypso wrecked on Whiskey Beach. We need to search for information on James Fitzgerald. We need a date of birth.”

“You think she was pregnant when she left, or was disowned.”

“I think that’s the kind of sin men like Roger and Edwin Landon would condemn. And I think, given the times, their rise in society, in status, in business, a daughter pregnant with the child of someone less, someone outside the law? Untenable.”

He walked back to her, studied the letter again, the signature. “James would have been a common name, a popular one. Sons are often named for fathers.”

“You think her lover, the seaman from the Calypso, was James Fitzgerald?”

“No. I think her lover was Nathanial James Broome, and he survived the wreck of his ship, along with Esmeralda’s Dowry.”

“Broome’s middle name was James?”

“Yeah. Whoever Fitzgerald was, I’m betting she was pregnant when she married him.”

“Broome might have run off with her, changed his name.”

Eli ran a hand down her hair absently, remembering how she’d given the doomed schoolteacher and long-ago Landon a happy ending.

“I don’t think so. The man was a pirate, fairly notorious. I don’t see him settling down quietly in Cambridge, raising a son who becomes a clerk. And he’d never have let the Landons have the dowry. Edwin killed him, that’s how I see it. Killed him, took the dowry, tossed his sister out.”

“For money? At the bottom of it, they cast her out, erased her, for money?”

“She took for a lover a known brigand. A killer, a thief, a man who would certainly have been hanged if caught. The Landons are accumulating wealth, social prestige and some political power. Now their daughter, whom they’d have married to the son of another wealthy family, is ruined. They may be ruined as well if it becomes known that they harbored or had knowledge of a wanted man being harbored. She, the situation, her condition needed to be dealt with.”

“Dealt with? Dealt with?”

“I’m not agreeing with what was done, I’m outlining their position and probable actions.”

“Lawyer Landon. No, he wouldn’t be one of my favorite people.”

“Lawyer Landon’s just stating their case, the case of men of that era, that mind-set. Daughters were property, Abra. It wasn’t right, but it’s history. Now instead of being an asset, she was a liability.”

“I don’t think I can listen to this.”

“Get a grip on yourself,” he suggested when she pushed to her feet. “I’m talking about the late eighteenth century.”

“You sound like you’re okay with it.”

“It’s history, and the only way I can try to get a clear picture is to think logically and not emotionally.”

“I like emotion better.”

“You’re good at it.” So, they’d use that, too, he decided. Both emotion and logic. “Okay, what does your emotion tell you happened?”

“That Roger Landon was a selfish, unfeeling bastard, and his son, Edwin, a heartless son of a bitch. They had no right to throw away a life the way they threw away Violeta’s. And it’s not just history. It’s people.”

“Abra, you realize we’re arguing about someone who died nearly two hundred years ago?”

“And your point?”

He rubbed his hands over his face. “Why don’t we say this? We’ve reached the same basic conclusion. Part of that conclusion is Roger and Edwin Landon were coldhearted, hard-minded, opportunistic bastards.”

“That’s a little better.” Her eyes narrowed. “Opportunistic. You really believe, not only the dowry existed, not only that it came ashore with Broome, but that Edwin killed Broome and stole the dowry.”

“Well, it was already stolen property, but yeah. I think he found it, took it.”

“Then where the hell is it?”

“Working on that. But all this is moot if the basic premise is wrong. I need to start tracing Violeta’s son.”

“How?”

“I can do it myself, which would take time because it’s not my field, but there are plenty of tools, some good genealogy sites. Or I can save time and contact someone whose field it is. I know a guy. We were friendly once.”

She understood—someone who’d turned his back on Eli. And, she realized, however logical his argument, he understood what Violeta had gone through. He knew what it was to be cast aside, condemned, ignored.

“Are you sure you want to do that?”

“I thought about doing it weeks ago, but I put it off. Because— No, I don’t really want to do it. But I’ll try to take a page out of Violeta’s book. When the chips are down, it’s better to forgive.”

She moved to him, took his face in her hands. “You’re going to get that celebration after all. In fact, I’m going to go down and start on that. We should put those letters somewhere safe.”

“I’ll take care of it.”

“Eli, why do you think Edwin kept the letters?”

“I don’t know, except Landons tend to keep things. The chest of drawers may have been his, and putting them in that hidden niche might have been his way of keeping them but not seeing them.”

“Out of sight, out of mind, like Violeta.” Abra nodded. “What a sad man he must have been.”

Sad? Eli thought when she left. He doubted it. He thought Edwin Landon would have been a self-satisfied son of a bitch. No family tree grew without a few bent branches, he supposed.

He used his laptop to search for the contact number for an old friend, then took out his phone. Forgiveness, he discovered, didn’t come easy. But expediency did. Maybe forgiveness would follow, and if not, he’d still have answers.