The Last September: A Novel

Daniel looked up at me, a tense sort of preaction expression tightening his features. “Where did you find this?” he said.

Ladd stood and took it from Daniel’s hands. I didn’t want to look at him as he read what Eli had written, so I kept my eyes on Daniel as I explained about the book. I could see, peripherally, that Ladd had finished. He dropped his hands to his sides, his grip crumpling the edges of the letter. I suppressed the urge to snatch it back from him. Despite its salutation, the letter didn’t belong to me anymore. Unlike the postcard Ladd had written to me, this letter now belonged to the State of Massachusetts. Evidence.

NONE OF THE LETTERS Emily Dickinson received survived, not a single one. Her sister burned them shortly after her death. It was a common enough practice, in those days, burning the correspondence of the deceased. So it is our good fortune to have so many of the letters Dickinson wrote. The day Charlie died I was reading from a book of those letters, half a correspondence: Open Me Carefully, the ones she wrote to Sue.

Two weeks ago, the Richard Sewall book where Eli hid my letter would not have been at the top of my stack when he walked into my study. I was working almost exclusively with the letters. The biography would have been on the shelf beside the table. I remembered what happened very clearly. Sarah took a step, I pushed the book aside. I didn’t deposit it on top of a pile of other books. I recalled the motion exactly—closing the book and then sliding it across the table before standing and walking over to embrace my family, the clock ticking. Late morning. Charlie with less than twelve hours to live.

How and when had Eli delivered the letter? Had he arrived at the house and gone upstairs while Charlie puttered in the kitchen? Had he sat down and written to me, with my own pen, then pulled out the fat biography and tucked it into its pages? Unlikely that he could have written it any time in the hours after Charlie died. Eli had been covered in blood. There was no residue of blood on the letter, or anywhere upstairs.

My fingerprints, Daniel’s, Ladd’s. All sullying the letter now. The detective dropped it into a zip-top plastic bag, frowning.

“Maybe he came back,” Ladd said. “Maybe he’s somewhere close.”

I imagined Eli living in the scrub oak woods, perhaps in the dunes by Crowes Pasture, or somewhere beneath the bluff, in a cave, like the bank swallows. Or maybe he was camping out in one of the hundreds of homes, abandoned till next summer. How many empty houses, September on Cape Cod? Even if they could search all of them, Eli would only need to move from one to the other, making his way from Saturday Cove to Provincetown and all the way back to Sandwich. He could live all winter that way.

As the detective left, I stayed in my chair, imagining Eli walking up the rickety beach stairs to his house, walking across the lawn, unseen. Making his way upstairs, he might have let his hand rest on the railing. Then in my study—his old childhood room, summers, though according to Charlie he’d rarely used it, the two brothers instead staying together—he would have sat down at the desk, flipped through my yellow notepad for an unused sheet, taken the pen that had rolled from my fingers, and written to me. There was no question that Eli had written the letter in the house. The page was from my yellow pad—faint indents were visible, of notes I’d jotted on the page above it. He used one of my pens. Reaching for the Sewall book, the fattest choice, inserting the letter, and then sliding it back onto the shelf.