“Lifeis.And we failed.”
“Okay, but haven’t we grown?”
“Have we?” I ask. On one hand, we’ve both grown tremendously. I’m a professional photographer with a high-functioning daughter, and Jack is a doctor of veterinary medicine with a successful practice. On the other hand, we’re hung up on the same unanswered questions.
“I have,” he insists.
And I think of Robert Frost.Freedom lies in being bold,he wrote. Maybe the only path to freedom from the past is being bold. “Prove it. What are you going to do about the police?”
“Talk with them.”
“And say what?” I ask.
“That Lily Ackerman is new to the whole situation, that she doesn’t know anything more than any of us and is asking the same questions we all asked twenty years ago. That you’re in town to introduce your daughter to Bay Bluff. That your father was a fine judge, but his memory isn’t what it was. That talking with him is pointless and smearing him now would be a disgrace. I’ll say that I’m the one who’s most affected by my mother’s disappearance, and that I’ve accepted the fact that she fell off that boat and drowned. I’ll remind them that I looked for years, that I worked with two different investigators, but that there’s nothing more. I’ll tell them that they’d be wasting their time and taxpayers’ money to reopen the case.”
He’s covered it all. But then, I never doubted Jack’s quickness. “Will they listen?”
“Of course they will.” He slants me a smile. “I take care of their pets. We’re talking”—he squints, tallies—“five dogs, three cats, two horses, six guinea pigs, and a tortoise, all that in a small department.” His grin is smug. “They adore me.”
“And you’d use that relationship to get what you want?” I ask,trying not to succumb to that grin, though it makes my insides curl. Jack is a contradiction of arrogance and vulnerability that I always found appealing. This hasn’t changed.
“Of course I will,” he insists. “It’s the way the world works.”
“So,” I test, “you don’t want me to call Paul Schuster tomorrow?”
“Oh, I do,” he says, like there’s no contradiction here. “I do my part, you do yours. It’s about covering all the bases. It’s about us being in control. The more we learn, the more we have. I’m tired of questions, Mallory.”
“Maybe the police asking would get it out.”
“And hurt you all over again? I made that mistake twenty years ago. Not making it now.”
Of all the things he has said about us, this touches me most deeply. I’m fighting the reasons why as I walk back across the sand, so I’m too distracted to notice Anne, who sits at the top of the stairs, blending into the night with her purple tee and shorts and her tousled dark hair with its burgundy streak. Since she doesn’t call out, I don’t see her until I’m straightening with my flip-flops in hand.
Factoring in time for an expression of surprise, I have about twenty seconds to decide what to say.
Chapter 16
What to say?
If I tell Anne that Lily is digging into the past, she may fire the girl, which I don’t want. Lily needs the job. And we need whatever information she unearths. So no to that.
If I tell her about Ronald Doe, I’ll have to get into the whole thing about Elizabeth’s estate, in which case Anne may jump to the worst conclusion and go to the police herself. So no to that, too.
I can tell her some of what Jack and I discussed, and what I say will be true. But it won’t be the whole truth. Then again, does that matter? We were raised on the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but. Looking at our lives now, though, with everyone either hiding something, looking the other way, or simply forgetting, that mantra is a joke.
Anne begged me not to side with Jack, and I’m not doing that. He and I will check things out, then share with the others. The danger, of course, is that Anne learns what I’ve hidden first, in whichcase the fragile détente she and I found earlier this evening may break.
What to do?
“So?” she asks when I’m far enough up the stairs that she doesn’t have to shout over the sound of the surf. “What did Jack say?”
“The PI is quitting.” I climb the last few steps and sit beside her on the dry planks. “He says he likes Lily too much.”
“But he’s sticking around?”
“I guess.”
“Will he be trouble?”
