The wind that had been screaming off the ocean when I arrived had died. The night was impossibly still.
The first shot sounded like a firecracker.
The second sounded like communion.
We waited, but nothing replaced the gunshots but silence and the distant lapping of tired waves.
I opened Angie’s door and she climbed in, reached across, and pushed mine open as I came around.
We backed out and turned around, drove past the lighted fountain and the oak sentries, around the short minilawn with the frozen birdbath.
As the white gravel sucked under my grille, Angie produced a boxy remote control she’d taken from the house and pressed a button, and the great cast-iron gates with the family crest and the letters TS in the center parted like arms bidding us welcome or farewell, both gestures often seeming the same, depending on your perspective.
EPILOGUE
We didn’t hear what had happened until we got back from Maine.
The night we left Trevor’s we drove straight up the coast to Cape Elizabeth and checked into a small bungalow overlooking the ocean at a hotel that was surprised to see just about anyone up there before the spring thaw.
We didn’t read newspapers or watch TV or do much of anything except put up the Do Not Disturb sign and order room service and lie in bed in the morning and watch the late winter whitecaps churn in the Atlantic.
Desiree had shot her father in the stomach, and he’d fired a round through her chest. They lay there facing each other on the parquet floor as the blood leaked from their bodies and the surf lapped at the foundation of the home they’d shared for twenty-three years.
Police were said to be baffled by both the dead valet in the garden and evidence that both father and daughter had been bound to chairs before they killed each other. The limo driver who dropped Trevor back at the house that night was questioned and released, and police could find no evidence that anyone but the victims had been in the house that night.
Also during the week we were gone, Richie Colgan’s series on Grief Release and the Church of Truth and Revelation began to appear. The Church immediately filed suit against the Tribune and Richie, but no judge would impose an injunction on the story, and by the end of the week, Grief Release had temporarily closed its doors in several locations across New England and the Midwest.
No matter how hard he tried, though, Richie never discovered who the faces and power behind P. F. Nicholson Kett were, and Kett himself could not be found.
But we didn’t know any of that in Cape Elizabeth.
We knew only each other and the sounds of our voices and the taste of champagne and the warmth of our flesh.
We talked about nothing of any import, and it was the best conversation I’d had in a long time. We looked at each other for long periods of charged, erotic silence, and often broke out laughing at the same time.
In the trunk of my car one day, I found a book of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The book had been a gift from an FBI agent with whom I’d worked last year on the Gerry Glynn case. Special Agent Bolton had given it to me while I was locked in the throes of depression. He told me it would provide comfort. I didn’t believe him back then, and I tossed it in my trunk. In Maine, though, while Angie showered or slept, I read most of the poems, and though I’d never been a big fan of poetry, I took a liking to Shakespeare’s words, the sensuous flow of his language. He certainly seemed to know an awful lot more than I did—about love, loss, human nature, everything really.
Sometimes at night, we’d bundle up in the clothes we’d bought in Portland the day after we arrived, and let ourselves out through the back door of our bungalow onto the lawn. We’d huddle together against the cold and work our way down to the beach, sit on a rock overlooking the dark sea, and take as full a measure as possible of the beauty laid out before us under a pitch-black sky.
The ornament of beauty, Shakespeare wrote, is suspect.
And he was right.
But beauty itself, unadorned and unaffected, is sacred, I think, worthy of our awe and our loyalty.
Those nights by the sea, I’d take Angie’s hand in mine and raise it to my lips. I’d kiss it. And sometimes as the sea raged and the darkness in the sky deepened, I’d feel awe. I’d feel humbled.
I’d feel perfect.