We all know—at least, Joy and I do—that a nose in a book doesn’t necessarily mean reading. But that isn’t the issue now. The issue is the phone call I just received. “Would he have gone to Jack’s?”
“He could have,” she allows, and my mind sees a shrug, like it’s no big thing dropping in on a neighbor. “I mean, I don’t lock him in when I leave the house. Can you imagine if I did that and there was a fire and he couldn’t get out? I’d never forgive myself. The poor guy has gone through so much. He’s earned the right to a little dementia, you know?”
Dementia versus Alzheimer’s—Anne and I are on opposite sides, but I’m not touching that now either. “Have you heard him talk about what happened that night?”That nightwas a euphemism for what the rest of Rhode Island called the Aldiss-MacKay affair.
“No,” she insists. “I told you. He doesn’t talk much.”
“You said he goes off on rants. What about?”
“Old cases.” She brightens. “It’s amazing what he remembers, Mal. He can’t tell me who came to see him yesterday, but those old cases? He’s a gold mine of legal history.”
Tom Aldiss had once been a respected judge on the Rhode Island Superior Court. He resigned from the bench six years ago—“resigned” being the word Anne uses, though given his mental decline in the years since, I suspect he was forced out. At seventy-four now, he is often confused. I see him when he and Anne come to New York for the theater, but I don’t go to Rhode Island, and he no longer travels well.
“He remembers everything,” Anne is saying, “lawyers’ names, defendants’ names, charges, findings. When he rants, it’s in that tone, like he’s wearing his robes up there on the bench and is charging thejury on a critical case.” Wistful now, she adds, “He was the best judge. These cases haunt him.”
The case of the disappearance of Elizabeth MacKay haunts us all.
Hearing that thought, Anne says, “No, Mallory, he doesn’t talk about Elizabeth. With all the ranting, he does not. That’s why I have trouble believing Jack.” Her voice lifts. “Dad comes to the shop a lot now, did I tell you?”
Anne owns a breakfast place in the square that is the heart of Bay Bluff.Sunny Side Up,she calls it, apropos of her approach to life, and although I’ve never been there myself, to hear her tell, it’s the place to be.
“I’m glad,” I say. “For a while there, he wasn’t getting out much.”
“He walks down from the house, and, okay, sometimes he winds up at the Clam Shack or the bookstore, but they always point him back to me.” She laughs. “Once he came down in his pajamas, it was cute, really. When Joe—you know, from the jeans place, well, actually you don’t know because it opened after you left, but trust me, Joe is God’s gift to tourism because he carries things tourists don’t know they need until they need them—when Joe saw him on the sidewalk in his pajamas, he pulled him inside and dressed him in a shirt and shorts so he was lookingpret-ty spiffy when he got to my place.”
She seems amused. I am appalled. The Tom Aldiss we’d grown up with was a formal man who would never have left the house in his pajamas. He didn’t even come down to breakfastat homein his pajamas.
“He has a favorite table,” Anne cruises on, “and he heads straight there. I mean, it used to be a problem if it was already taken, but by now pretty much everyone knows that it’s his, so they leave it open.” Half to herself, she says, “That could be dicey with summer people. Maybe I should put a RESERVEDsign there. But the shop isn’t big, and he doesn’t come every day, so I hate to waste the space.” She returns to me. “He loves the new girl I hired—did I tell you about her? She’sbeen in town maybe a month, but it’s like she’s been here forever. Dad gets all quiet when he sees her. If someone else has taken his table, she calms him down, sets him up at the counter, and brings his coffee and his bacon and eggs and cinnamon toast. He doesn’t take his eyes off her.”
“What about his hands?”
“What?”
“Sexual harassment.”
“Right,”Joy whispers. Her school is big on discussing that.
“Christ, Mallory,” Anne cries. “She’s barely twenty. He doesn’t touch her.”
“God, I hope not. He was a judge. People know him. They remember that night.”
“Youremember that night,” my sister argues. “It’s all you have to measure life here by, but those of us who live here have moved on. No one talks about it. Trust me, there’s plenty else to discuss.”
For me, as well. “Annie, about tonight. Do you think Jack was telling the truth?”
She grunts. “Who knows. The guy has a major chip on his shoulder when it comes to our family, like we personally ruined his life or something.”
“If Dad did have a gun that night—”
“No, Mallory. He didn’t. If Dad stands for anything, it’s the truth.”
“Right.” I roll my eyes. “The whole truth and nothing but.”
“You and Margo can make fun of those words, but he lived and breathed them. If he said he didn’t have a gun that night, he didn’t have a gun. Jack has it in for us, is all. Okay, okay, his life changed that night. But so did ours.”
“He lost his mother.”
“Our parents broke up.”
