I couldn’t tell where he might be now.
I couldn’t tell if he’d kept in touch with Ethan Sinclare, or if he knew anything that might help me.
I couldn’t even tell if Verlin Snow was still alive.
? ? ?
IT CAME TO me when I stood to put the kettle on and warm the last piece of bacon quiche in the microwave.
Snow’s summerhouse. Nantucket.
Finding him turned out to be easy. On my laptop an address and a phone number for a V. R. Snow in Nantucket, Massachusetts, popped right up. When I dialed, no one answered. I speared a bite of quiche, chewed, and tried again. Let it ring seven times. Eight. Nine.
“Hello?” said a surprised-sounding voice, the way one would answer a phone that rarely rang.
“Hi, I’m calling from Washington. Trying to reach a Mr. Verlin Snow. Do I have the right number?”
A longish pause. “Yes,” said the voice, still surprised. A woman.
“This is Caroline Cashion. May I speak to him please?”
“But he can’t speak on the phone,” she said, now indignant, as if this were an obvious point that I had stubbornly been resisting. Her accent was Caribbean, possibly Jamaican.
“Um, you mean not right now? Might he be available later?”
“No. Mr. Snow’s not well. What did you say your name was?”
“Sorry. Let me back up. My name is Caroline. I was hoping to come see Mr. Snow”—I was surprised to hear my voice forming these words—“maybe tomorrow.”
“Oh, no, no, no” came the reply, now stern. “I wouldn’t think so. He doesn’t see visitors anymore.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “He’s an invalid. Do you not know? Cancer of the throat.”
I had done the math before I called. Verlin Snow would be eighty-seven years old. I dropped my voice to match hers. “Can he still hear well enough? He can understand questions? Yes? . . . Okay, tell him something for me. Tell him Caroline Cashion is on the phone. When I was a girl, my name was Caroline Smith. Tell him it’s regarding a lawyer from Atlanta, named Ethan Sinclare. About time they spent together in November 1979.”
The woman was gone a good five minutes. I could hear pipes running in the background, and the barking of a distant dog. When she came back on the line, she said simply, “He’ll see you. He’s best in the afternoons.”
? ? ?
THERE ARE NO direct flights from Washington to Nantucket, not in the off-season.
I would have to fly through Boston, connecting onto a ten-seat puddle jumper flown by Cape Air. Still, if I left early tomorrow, I could be on the island by 11:00 a.m., New England weather permitting. I reached up to finger the stitches on my neck as I clicked around travel websites. Dr. Gellert would kill me if he knew what I was contemplating. Beamer Beasley would, too, for a completely different set of reasons.
Booking flights on small planes—booking any travel at all—a mere seven days after emergency surgery was stupid, I had to admit. But as I hesitated, I noticed that I was holding the computer mouse in my right hand. I had not been able to do that for the past year. I’d made the switch back without even realizing it.
Something else felt different, too. I think I’ve mentioned that I’m not known for rash decisions, am not a taker of spur-of-the-moment trips. Yet here I sat, about to buy a ticket for a plane that left in eleven hours, to fly to an island that I’d never seen, to meet a stranger. I should have felt nervous, but instead, I felt invigorated. Sometime in the chaos of these last few weeks, I appeared to have developed a taste for recklessness.
I hovered my hand—my right hand—above the mouse. Then I swooped down and clicked on the box that said PURCHASE.
? ? ?
MY MOBILE BUZZED as I brushed my teeth before bed. I picked right up. One of my post-Will resolutions was to be more vigilant about answering my phone. Another was not to fall for any man who listened to country or wore boot-cut jeans. Also, never again to accept a date that involved baseball (although in fairness, I might have arrived at that particular fatwa even if Will Zartman had turned out to be a good guy).
“Everything okay? You safe?” It was Beamer Beasley.
“Yes.” I spat toothpaste into the sink. “Why?”
“Good. In for the night? Alarm on, doors locked?”
“Beamer. What’s going on?”
“Just checking. Just that I can’t, uh, at this exact moment, I can’t locate Ethan Sinclare.”
I laid the floss back beside the sink and plopped down on the edge of the bathtub. “What do you mean, you can’t locate him? I thought he was up at that lake. Lake Burton.”
“Well, that’s it. I drove up there yesterday, like I said I would. For a number of reasons, but frankly, the main one was I thought it might put your mind at ease. Figured I could talk to him, let him explain some of the . . . inconsistencies I know have been troubling you. But he wasn’t there. I talked to his wife—”
“Betsy.”
“That’s right. A nice lady.”
“So she was at the cabin?”
“Yes. Actually, cabin, my rear end,” snorted Beasley. “It’s not a cabin, it’s a compound they’ve got up there. Boathouse with room for two motorboats, a sailboat, a couple canoes, you name it. Plus a hundred yards of private shoreline, even a barn so Mrs. Sinclare can ride her horses. Anyway, she was real polite. But she said I’d missed him again. Mr. Sinclare had to drive back into town to take care of some business. She said he’d be at his office. But he never turned up at the law firm today, and nobody’s home at their house in Buckhead either. His cell phone’s turned off. If I were the worrying type, I’d be starting to worry that he’s avoiding me.”
I could think of half a dozen places where Ethan Sinclare might be, none of them necessarily sinister. His tennis club. A friend’s house. The movies. Maybe he had a woman on the side that Betsy didn’t know about. If Cheral was to be believed, he hadn’t been a stickler for fidelity thirty-five years ago; who knew if the leopard had changed its spots?