Wipers thumping unevenly. Tires whooshing on wet pavement. Rain beating on the hood. I drove in a kind of trance. How many road trips had Hugh and I taken in all kinds of weather? Navigating a deluge in England or Ireland on the wrong side of the road. Crawling through fog along the northern Oregon coast. Winding through Zion National Park in the heat with a broken air conditioner. Plowing through snowdrifts on the way upstate to the weekend house. We were good traveling companions, Hugh and I. “Who’ll be our trip master for the first fifty miles?” he would ask before we started out, sorting through the CDs we’d tossed into a travel bag. “Sinatra? David Byrne? Patsy Cline? You pick.”
Avoiding the roadblock was easy. I drove south on Old Route 20 wishing I’d bought that coffee. I had to keep the window open despite the rain to distract from the dull ache in my head. Passing Van Winkle Lanes and continuing beyond a stretch of undeveloped woodlands, I made sure no one was behind me before turning right at the two tall white pillars and cedar-shingled guardhouse that marked the entrance to the exclusive Dune Golf Club.
The Dune course closes the first day of November, so no one was there to stop me. No one had a list without my name on it that would prove I hadn’t paid the $18,000 yearly fee. Dune members are primarily older, wealthy, conservative types. Most summer here and winter in Palm Beach. The public course is on the other side of town. Near the dump. Someday I’d do a story on the Dune Club’s unwritten membership policies.
My mother would have loved a Dune membership. As much as her older sister embraced her Russian-Jewish ancestry, my mother denied hers, changing her maiden name from Sasha Levervitch to Sally Leer. “Sally Leer, my tush!” I heard Lada erupt during one of their fights. “You always wanted to fit in with the Waspy crowd. You pretend you have relatives who came over on the Mayflower instead of the cargo hold of a fishtunkina fishing boat.”
The road continued to wind through the golf course’s rolling, now-soggy brown lawns. I checked my rearview mirror. Still no one. I let out my breath and filled my lungs with salty sea air. The sea is never very far from any place in Pequod. A forest of pines and scrub oak at the edge of the course blocked the water from view at the club.
The sprawling clubhouse, another cedar-shingled affair, sat high on a hill at the top of the road’s final curve. The grand-pillared, two-story building with the wraparound porch overlooked fairways, a lake, sandpits and greens. Half-frozen red geraniums still bloomed in the window boxes, but the windows were shuttered. The club was deserted, just as I’d hoped. The parking lot behind the clubhouse butted up against the forest and I headed for it, nervously checking my mirror again.
Grace and I used to hike in this forest until we were put off by a gruesome accident—a hunter’s arrow ripped into a hiker’s leg. The Dune Club owners posted No Trespassing signs after that. I heard there were a few bold hunters who continued to show up when the club closed for the season, but I prayed they wouldn’t be around.
Steering into the lot, I breathed more easily. Empty. No pickup trucks or maintenance workers’ vans in sight. I parked at the edge nearest the woods, and when I turned off the engine, I could hear the howl of wind in the trees. Reaching over and opening the glove compartment, I rummaged through the detritus inside: sunglasses missing a lens, local maps, the car’s manual and a miniature flashlight. Also, one small cellophane bag containing four chocolate-covered espresso beans likely purchased during another caffeine emergency. I popped them in my mouth.
I hadn’t removed Aunt Lada’s opera glasses since the last spying mission. Buried deep down in the well of the compartment, they had lenses capable of magnifying four times at a distance of three thousand feet—enough to see a performer’s facial expressions from the top tier at Carnegie Hall. My great-grandfather Lev had left them to her. He was a “pacher” (Yiddish for clapper) at the City Opera in New York. Lev told Immigrant Services he was a cantor student back in the shtetl and a serious lover of music who knew all about opera. So, they got him a job at the opera house. Janitorial mostly, but one of his tasks was to use his knowledge during the performance to start applause at the right moments.
“He never left a diva in the lurch,” Aunt Lada said.
Lada never let me down, either. She was always there to comfort. When my mother and father began fighting incessantly, I even ran off to stay with her in her East Village walk-up. She never married or had kids, and after both my parents were gone, with my father an only child and both sets of grandparents dead, Lada and I were all each other had left. The gold opera glasses were her most treasured possession, and she’d passed them on as a wedding present. I felt guilty as I pulled them out. Here I was, divorced and treating them like junk.
I stuck the glasses in my coat pocket, closed the window and stepped outside shivering. The rain had let up, but the cold, wet wind snuck up my sleeves. My face and fingers felt raw. I checked behind me again. No one there. I looked left. All clear. Then right. A sharp caw ripped the air at my back. I whipped around and saw a seagull open its claws. A clam plummeted to the asphalt. The big gray-and-white bird swooped down to the bits of cracked shell and pink slime and glared at me, daring me to approach its treasure.
“It’s all yours,” I said, trembling.
Pulling my collar high under my chin, I started across the waterlogged grass for the woods and picked up the muddy hunting trail in a few yards. I slogged ahead, still trying to absorb the fact that Hugh was dead. I thought of the time he almost died and how intensely scary that was. He went into cardiac arrest during routine hernia surgery. I wasn’t his wife yet, so the hospital called his next of kin. Hugh’s brother flew up from Virginia to take charge. Tobias Walker was a born-again Christian and a real challenge for Hugh. “A fanatic,” Hugh called him. He’d chafed at finding Tobias by his side when he woke up.
The rain was coming down hard again, slashing through the pines as I trudged along. The oaks that replaced them closer to the shore offered little protection. The storm had stripped off most of their leaves. Icy water ran down my hair, dripped beneath my coat collar and trickled down my neck. I picked up my pace, kicking through the dead leaves and skirting sinkholes of mud. Freezing, I shoved my hands in my pockets. Two fingers worried the leather strap of Lada’s opera glasses.