R
ex’s tail thumped against the floor when Danny returned home. He was curled up at Lucy’s feet as she sat on the couch working. He didn’t even try to get up.
“That didn’t take long,” Lucy said. “I hope you didn’t scare him off.”
“Scare who off?”
“Art Whatever. Your friend the wannabe writer.”
It took Danny a moment. His nerves were still vibrating like a plucked string. “Oh, right. No, he just wanted to know some basic stuff, you know—how to get an agent, all that. The usual.”
“What kind of book does he want to write?”
Lying to her was bad enough, but now having to elaborate on the lie was even worse. “I don’t even think I could tell you. He didn’t have a very clear idea himself. Hold on, let me say hi to Abby.” He’d noticed her backpack on the floor.
Abby was sitting on her bed, MacBook in her lap, tapping away.
“Hey, Boogie, how was school?”
“Hey, Daddy,” she said without looking up. “It was all right.”
“How was precalc?”
“It was great. I won the Nobel Prize for calculus.”
“Yeah? Do you have to go to Oslo or Stockholm for that one? I always forget.”
She shook her head distractedly, done with the game.
“Am I interrupting your homework?”
“Yeah, but it’s fine.”
“Writing a research paper about Facebook?” He could see enough of the screen to recognize the Facebook logo.
“Did you want something, Daddy?”
“How’s Jenna?”
“Fine.”
“You planning on going over there tomorrow?”
She looked up. “I don’t know, why?”
“Because I’d love to be looped in on your social plans.”
“Ha ha ha. Is this about how I’m spending too much time over there? I mean, I was home for dinner and you weren’t, so I’m just saying.”
“Someone’s being a little oversensitive.” He could see this starting to spin into an argument, so he tried to reel it back in. “They’re great, aren’t they? I can’t blame you for wanting to hang out with them.”
“I don’t ‘hang out’ with them, I hang with Jenna.”
“Chillax, baby.”
“‘Chillax’? What are you, like a bro now?”
“I meant it ironically. So what’s Esteban like?”
“Their driver? I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve ever talked to him. He’s a good driver, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
He was about to ask whether Esteban carried a gun, but then thought better of it.
“I’m sure he is. He doesn’t have to take you home all the time. I can pick you up, some days.”
“I thought you don’t like driving out to Weston, and losing your parking space.”
“I’m happy to pick you up. We need to spend more time together, you and me.”
She shrugged, went back to her tapping. “Whatever.”
“Anyway, I’ll be doing some research at Wellesley College, so it’s convenient.”
She nodded.
Somehow he had to get himself back inside the Galvins’ house. He couldn’t exactly invite himself over. There was no plausible reason for him to see the inside of Tom Galvin’s home office again any time soon.
Unless he could think of an excuse. A reason to come over again that didn’t sound contrived or bogus.
The right opportunity. He hoped it would come soon.
T
he next day, Abby texted him from school:
ok if I study with Jenna after school?
Instead of the usual, mild annoyance, he felt a strange sort of relief.
Home for supper?
he texted back.
Her answer came almost immediately:
Sure!
He texted back:
I’ll pick you up.
Her answer came half a minute later:
Thanks! But that’s ok, Esteban can drive me home.
He thought for a moment, then texted:
I’ll be out there anyway, remember?
Adults tended to text, Danny had noticed, like they were sending a telegram: short and terse. Kids, who had no idea what a telegram was, texted as if they were writing e-mail, conversational and slangy. Then again, Abby and her friends considered e-mail as archaic as writing on foolscap with a quill.
Her text came back:
ok?
Meaning: Okay, if you insist, though I don’t really get it. She’d forgotten that he’d told her he was doing research at Wellesley College. Or maybe she didn’t hear it the first time. It was like the old
Peanuts
animated cartoons, whenever a teacher or parent talked to Charlie Brown or his friends. You never heard actual words. You heard the
mwa mwa mwa mwa
of a trombone. Half the time, that was how Danny suspected his voice sounded to Abby.
He texted back,
Pick you up @ 6.
Thanks!
came her reply.
Then, at around five thirty, when he was about to leave for Weston, his iPhone made the tritone fanfare announcing the arrival of a new text. He glanced at the screen. It was from Abby:
OK if I stay for dinner?
Danny thought for a long moment. He could always say no, pick her up at six as planned. If he said yes, it wouldn’t be plausible that he’d still be in the area later on. She’d want to have the Galvins’ driver, Esteban, take her back to Boston.
The phone nagged a tritone reminder.
He decided not to reply. He’d learned how the mind of a sixteen-year-old worked. She’d assume the answer was yes unless she was told otherwise.
• • •
At just before six, he was standing in front of the Galvins’ castle door. He rang the bell. As he waited, another tritone text bleated. He didn’t look at it. He knew it had to be from Abby. Only Lucy or Abby ever texted him.
The door opened after a minute or so. Celina Galvin was wearing skinny jeans and a purple V-neck sweater. At her feet, the bat-faced hairless dogs scurried and scampered and yapped.
“Oh, Daniel, I’m so sorry! Abby didn’t tell you she’s having dinner with us?”
“Is that right?” A delicious smell wafted from the interior.
He knew exactly what she was going to say next. At some houses, you’d never hear the words. But Celina was Mexican, and Mexican hospitality is legendary.
“Can you stay for dinner?” she said. “Please?”
• • •
It was just four of them: Celina, Jenna, Abby, and Danny. Brendan was back at his dorm room at BC, and Ryan had returned to his apartment in Allston, where he lived with a girlfriend he still hadn’t brought around to meet the parents and probably never would. (“For me it’s fine,” Celina said. “He knows she’s not the right one, so why do I have to waste my time being nice to her?”)
They all sat at one end of the long farm table. The family cook, a stout gray-haired woman named Consuelo, ladled
sopa de frijoles
, black bean soup, into colorful ceramic bowls.
“Daddy, I’m sorry, I definitely texted you!” Abby said.
“Oh, when I was in the archives I put my phone on Do Not Disturb mode. Must have missed it. It’s no big deal. Anyway, I get to have another great dinner at the Galvins’.”
“Abby,” Celina said, “you know Esteban will take you home. Your father shouldn’t have to come all the way out here to pick you up.”
“Not a problem,” he said. “I was in the area anyway.” Before she could ask why, he said, “Is Tom still at work?”
“He has a client dinner in town. Oh, what kind of hostess am I? You are a big wine drinker, yes? Consuelo?
¿Podría obtener una buena botella de vino tinto para el caballero?
”
“I’m fine. I don’t have wine every night.”
A few minutes later, he asked to use their bathroom.
He hadn’t seen one off the kitchen, but there were a lot of rooms and a lot of doors and it was always possible a bathroom adjoined the kitchen. But he didn’t think so. “It’s just out there down the hall, on the right.” Celina waved at the corridor along which Galvin had taken him to his home office. “Oh, let me show you. People get lost sometimes. It’s very confusing, this crazy house.”
“Not at all,” he said firmly. He got up and pulled out his iPhone. “If I get lost, I’ll call for directions.”
• • •
The half bath was only twenty or thirty feet down the hall. Its door wasn’t visible from the end of the farm table, where everyone had been sitting. He passed it, went a little farther down the hall and then took a right. Another fifty feet or so and he’d reached Tom Galvin’s study.
The door was open.
The lights were off. The waning sun cast an amber light. Dust motes hung in the air.
The medal sat in its case near the edge of Galvin’s desk, the side that faced visitors. Danny wondered how many people came to visit him here. And who. Was it here that he did his cartel business?
If he did any.
He entered the room, braced for the spotlights overhead to go on, activated by motion. But it didn’t. The room remained shadowed. He didn’t want to risk putting the lights on.
He took out his iPhone, set the flash function on the camera to
ON
, and snapped a few quick pictures of Galvin’s desk and the area around it. With each shutter sound, a pale light danced and blinked.
Galvin’s medal was smaller than he remembered. He hoped the decoy in his pocket, the one he was supposed to swap it for, was the right size.
His heartbeat sounded thunderously loud.
He reached out a hand and grasped the edge of the medal with trembling fingers. It was cold, and thicker than he’d expected.
It wouldn’t come out of its case.
The blood rushed in his ears, so loud now that he could hear nothing else. Just the whoosh of blood and the rapid, accelerating tattoo of his heart. His fingers closed around the medal and grabbed it and tried to turn it, tried to pry it loose, but it was seated firmly. Too firmly. Was it somehow cemented down, not meant to be removed?
He felt a cold, unpleasant prickling at the back of his neck.
It came loose. Finally, it came out. The medal was thick and heavy and cold. He slipped it into the right breast pocket of his suit jacket.
From his left pocket he took the replacement, warm from his body heat, and noticeably lighter than the original.
The tremor in his fingers had become even more obvious.
Please, God
, he thought,
let it be the right size
.
He placed it over the round inset in the red velvet and saw that it was a fraction of an inch too big.
It didn’t fit in the case.
His heart raced wildly. He felt nauseated.
Now what? Give up? Put the original back in the case and tell the DEA agents they’d screwed up the measurements?
When would he ever have a chance like this again?
With both thumbs he pressed down hard on the fake medal, tried to seat it into the round inset, which refused to yield. He pushed harder—was he wrecking the delicate electronics of the listening device?—until it went down all the way, right into the inset, mashing it slightly.
But it was seated snugly. The red velvet around it puckered downward slightly, like the lines around an old man’s mouth.
The medal was slightly turned. The
D
in the Roman numerals at the medal’s outer edge,
MDCCCLXIII
, should have been centered on the midline, but it was off slightly so that the third
C
was at the centerpoint.
But he didn’t dare take it out and reposition it. There wasn’t time—with every second the chances that someone would catch him in here increased—and taking it out and mashing it down one more time might mangle the red velvet noticeably.
Then he realized that he hadn’t paid any attention to how the medal had been placed in there originally. Maybe it was turned one way or another. He had no recollection.
But would Galvin notice a tiny detail like that? It seemed unlikely.
He let out a long, silent breath. Backed away from the desk.
And heard the familiar raspy voice.
“Can you believe Grill 23 was closed tonight?” said Tom Galvin.
D
anny felt his entire body jolt. He let out an involuntary cry, a sort of strangled yip.
Galvin laughed. “Didn’t mean to startle you like that.”
“Hey. You had—I thought you had a dinner with a client.”
“The guy had his heart set on Grill 23—some friend of his said they serve the best steak in Boston—and I kept telling him, you know, Abe & Louie’s, you can’t go wrong there, I like their steaks even better, and you can’t go wrong with Capital Grille, either. But no, he says his wife won’t let him do red meat more than once a month, and he’s not wasting his monthly allotment on any steak except Grill 23’s. So we had a drink and rescheduled.”
“Well, since you’ve caught me skulking around your office, I might as well come out and ask.”
“Ask . . . ?” In the gloom, Galvin’s eyes were inscrutable.
“I wanted to surprise you. Those amazing cigars—what are they called again? I wanted to get you a box of them. Least I could do to thank you.”
Galvin switched the overhead lights on and took a few steps into the room. He gave a small, crooked smile. “They haven’t moved.” He gave a casual wave toward the overstuffed leather chairs in front of his desk. Danny glanced. On the end table next to one of them was the black lacquer box,
COHIBA BEHIKE
in gold letters on its lid. The gold glittered in the overhead spotlight. “I appreciate the thought, but you don’t really want to spend half the money I lent you on
cigars
, now do you? That box cost close to twenty thousand bucks, Danny boy. It was a gift—I wouldn’t spend that kind of money on
cigars
. Come on.”
“O-o-oh, I see. No, I don’t think so.” He chuckled.
“Appreciate the thought, though. I hope you’re staying for dinner.”
Danny couldn’t decide if he was pleased or dismayed at how smoothly he’d just lied. Maybe both.
But that strange feeling was quickly overwhelmed by a low hum of anxiety. He was certain Galvin knew he was lying.
“Y
ou left the lights on,” Abby said.
As he put the key in the lock, he noticed the spill of light under his apartment door.
Then he remembered. Yesterday, Lucy had offered to pick up sushi for the three of them—California roll and such for Abby, no raw fish—for dinner tonight.
“Oh, shit.”
Lucy was on her laptop at the dining table. Arrayed around her were clear plastic trays with decorative green plastic blades of grass and rows of sliced sushi rolls. The remains of a glass of white wine.
“I’m guessing you guys already ate.”
“I screwed up. My bad, Lucy. I’m sorry.”
She didn’t look angry or even particularly annoyed. She smiled as if secretly amused, shook her head. Maybe a little annoyed. “There’s plenty left. But it won’t be any good tomorrow. Unagi, Abby? It’s cooked.”
“I’m good,” she said. “Daddy, you didn’t tell her you were at Wellesley College?”
“Why Wellesley?” Lucy asked.
“Yeah, there’s an archive there . . .” His voice trailed off. Another lie.
“The Jay Gould archive,” Abby announced.
Thanks, kid
, he thought.
You basically have no idea what I do for a living and suddenly you’re doing the play-by-play color commentary?
“There’s a Jay Gould archive at Wellesley?” Lucy said. “You’re kidding. That I never would have expected. The letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Jay Gould, together under one roof. Who knew?”
“It’s just the letters between Gould and one of his wives,” Danny said, and added hastily, “How was your day?”
“It was fine,” Lucy said distantly, but the way she furrowed her brow made Danny’s stomach do a little flip. She knew him too well.
• • •
With both his daughter and his girlfriend at home, there wasn’t much privacy. He waited until Abby had gone into her room and Lucy was in the shower, then he sat down at his desk in the living room, loaded a program the DEA agents had given him called Adium, and signed on to the [email protected] account.
He composed a text to [email protected] Just three words:
device in place.
He stared at it for a few seconds.
A window opened: OTR
FINGERPRINT VERIFIC
ATION
. The encryption “fingerprint” for the DEA agents. A box of gobbledygook popped up on his Gmail page. Fortunately, he didn’t have to know what the hell he was doing to make it work. He assumed it meant that his text messages to them were automatically encrypted, and theirs back. He clicked
ACCEPT
.
E
NCRYPT
ED CHAT INITIATED
. In other words, the text had gone through successfully.
Then he remembered about the pictures. He e-mailed to himself the photos he’d taken of Galvin’s desk. Saved them to his computer’s desktop. Then sent them to [email protected]
And he was done.
The DEA boys would get the evidence they needed to arrest Tom Galvin. They’d arrest Celina’s husband, Jenna and Ryan and Brendan’s father.
He didn’t want to think about that, though. It came down to a very simple choice: Galvin’s family or his. That wasn’t exactly a difficult decision, was it?
Not that he cared about what might happen to Galvin. He hardly knew the guy. Even the man’s wife and kids—he didn’t know them, either. If Galvin were truly involved in criminal activity, he deserved to go to prison.
He signed off.
• • •
But he hated lying to the two women in his life.
He hadn’t lied to Abby since Sarah’s death. And then he’d had no choice. Sarah had insisted.
Sarah had wanted Abby to go to Camp Pocapawmet, on Cape Cod, that last summer, just as she’d gone every summer since she was eleven. And he’d gone along with it, but he’d said,
You don’t want her around for . . .
Tearfully, Sarah had shot back,
This is not the way I want her to remember her mommy. I don’t want her to remember me as a sick, dying woman. I want her to enjoy being a kid. A couple of weeks of just being a kid. Carefree and happy. Because when I go, everything will change for her.
But he didn’t want to lie to her.
Call it protection. Call it protecting her childhood. I don’t want a shadow to fall over that girl until it really has to
.
So he’d lied, of course. Mommy had an infection in her lungs. She had to spend a little while in the hospital, and then she’d get better.
Meanwhile, Sarah went through round after brutal round of chemotherapy. Anthracycline and taxane. The chemo had to come before surgery. But it was stage-four cancer. The cancer had spread to the lymph nodes. The prognosis was poor.
There wasn’t even time for surgery. It all happened too fast.
And when everything turned for the worse at the beginning of August, when it had become clear that Sarah had days left, not weeks or months, Danny had picked Abby up at camp and told her Mommy was sick.
Abby lay in the hospital bed next to her mother, her arms around her mother’s belly as Sarah slept, the machines wheezing and beeping, both of them crying. For two days.
Danny knew that Sarah waited to die until Abby had gone home for the night. Danny knew she couldn’t bear to depart this earth in the embrace of her child.
So Abby’d had four worry-free weeks at camp before the shadow fell over her life.
At the time it felt like the right thing to do.
• • •
Danny loathed being trapped in this pointless lie about Jay Gould: one more lie he’d have to keep track of. But he decided not to speak of it again unless and until it came up.
Which of course it did, later that evening, as they lay in bed. Danny was rereading—well, reskimming, actually—an old book by Gustavus Myers called
History of the Great American Fortunes
, and Lucy was working on her laptop.
“He was married only once,” she said.
“Huh? Who?”
“Jay Gould. You said ‘one of his wives,’ but he married once, to Helen Day Miller, who died like three years before he did.” Wikipedia’s page for Jay Gould was open on her computer screen. She gave him a sidelong glance.
Why had he told her such an idiotic, sloppy lie? It was just the first thing that had sprung to his mind. He hadn’t given it a thought. “What made you look that up?”
“I remember when you first started working on the book, I read something about him, I was wondering why he was considered such an evil jerk, and I noticed he only married once. Not six times or something, which you’d expect. These days, anyway. And I thought, well, I guess the times were different then. Or maybe he was a good husband at least.”
“Did I say ‘one of’ his wives’? Long day. I misspoke.”
She flipped the laptop closed. “No, you didn’t, Danny. There aren’t
any
Jay Gould archives at Wellesley and—”
“Sweetie, listen. I told Abby I was doing work out there because I wanted to take her home myself. That’s all. I’m not comfortable with her being driven around by a chauffeur.”
“So why not just tell her that?”
“Obviously, I should have. I didn’t feel like setting off another argument.”
“God forbid you should get into an argument with someone.”
He shrugged. If you don’t want to be psychoanalyzed, don’t date a shrink. Lucy understood, long before he did, that he had a problem with anger. His problem was something that he never thought could possibly be considered a problem: He never gave in to anger. He felt it, sure, plenty of times. But he prided himself on his ability to suppress it. When an argument began, he’d always de-escalate. Holding anger in this way required great self-control, but he’d taught himself that self-control since childhood.
He’d learned by example. For years he’d thought that his father, Bud, had a short fuse.
But putting it that way, so bland and benign, made it sound normal. Bud Goodman in fact had no fuse. He was one of those chemical compounds, like liquid nitroglycerin or mercury fulminate, that would explode on impact. Danny had learned how to avoid the triggers that would set his father off, and there were many of them. Disobedience was one. Dishonesty. A raised voice.
Bud, who was a great carpenter, a fine craftsman, was constantly losing subcontractors. He’d tell them off, or just go after them in a hot flash of anger, until they quit. He lost plenty of clients that way, too. One lumberyard in Wellfleet refused to do business with him because he once tore into the yard manager, though Bud insisted that they were selling him short lots.
If you listened only to Bud Goodman’s side, his subs were a capricious and moody bunch, every last one of them. Danny learned quickly that there was always another side of the story, usually involving a Bud Goodman tantrum that ended in a mushroom cloud of rage.
Even when Sarah moved out, he didn’t understand that maybe he’d gone too far in the opposite direction. “For God’s sake, what’s wrong with you?” Sarah had snapped one day. “Do you not care what happens to us? Do you not even give a shit?”
“Come on,” he replied, making her point. “Let’s talk this through reasonably. No need to shout.”
Lucy once told him about a psychologist and marriage therapist named John Gottman who had identified what he called the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. These were the four most destructive behavior patterns that, if exhibited by a spouse, spelled doom for the marriage. This psychologist claimed that within the first three minutes of observing a couple, he could tell with ninety-four percent accuracy whether they would be divorced in the next five or six years. One of the most destructive of the Four Horsemen was “stonewalling”—tuning out, evading, avoiding conflict.
Didn’t all men do that?
No, Lucy had insisted.
• • •
“Well,” he replied, “I’m not the angry sort. Sorry about that, but I’m just not.”
“What are you not telling me?” she asked.
“Lucy, come on, you’re making a whole lot out of nothing.”
“Are you still worried Abby spends too much time at the Galvins’?”
He shrugged. “Not especially. I mean, I wish she spent more time with her other friends. Given how volatile friendships between girls this age can be.”
“So you’re no longer worried about her head being turned by their wealth?”
“Their kids seem to have a good set of values. . . .”
They’re good people
, he almost said.
Nice family
. But he caught himself.
He didn’t know what to think about the Galvins.
• • •
“Maybe I’m not as concerned about them as I used to be,” he said.
He slipped out of bed—dressed in an old pair of gym shorts and a Bruce Springsteen T-shirt (Tunnel of Love Express Tour, 1988, purchased at the concert at the Worcester Centrum)—and went out to the kitchen to grab a glass of tap water.
Abby was still awake—no surprise; she was a night owl—and was standing against the refrigerator, spooning Ben & Jerry’s Red Velvet Cake ice cream out of the container. She held out the spoon. “Want some?”
“No, thanks.” He gave her a quick hug. “I love you, Boogie.”
“I love you, Daddy.”
He took a water glass from the cabinet over the sink, held it under the faucet, and lifted the handle.
“That ice cream won’t keep you up?”
She shook her head.
“Don’t forget to take Lactaid.”
“I know.” She paused. “Hey, um . . . you didn’t go to BC, did you?”
“Boston College? I went to Columbia. You know that. But BC’s an excellent college.” Was she actually thinking about which colleges she might go to? This was a historic moment.
“I know, I thought . . . I mean . . .” She hesitated a beat. “So why do you have a Boston College medal? I don’t get that. Did they give that to you or something?”
He froze. He watched the water brim over before he remembered to pull down the lever to shut off the flow.
He’d left his jeans on the floor outside the bathroom, setting, as always, a lousy example for his daughter. But why was she going through his pockets?
“Did I drop that thing somewhere?” he asked.
“My pen died, so I wanted to borrow one of yours and I didn’t want to knock on your bedroom door, you know, and
disturb
you guys.” An artful roll of the eyes. “So how come you have it?”
He shook his head vaguely. He was too weary to concoct a plausible lie and didn’t want to come off as defensive or angry and provoke her suspicion. “It’s a long story,” he said. “Boring and complicated. Now, come on, isn’t it your bedtime?”
“What?” she protested.
“And, Boogie—let’s not poke around in each other’s things, okay?”