Aftershock & Others (31 page)

Right now he wasn’t certain of what he could be certain of.

Morley found himself wide
awake at three a.m. He’d felt ridiculous stowing the footstool in a closet, but had to admit he felt safer with it tucked away behind a closed door two floors below. That name—
Anna
—was keeping him awake. He’d sifted through his memories, from boyhood to the present, and could not come up with a single Anna. The word was a palindrome, so reversing the order was futile; the only workable anagram was also worthless—he’d never known a “Nana” either.

So why had the sight of those letters set alarm bells ringing?

Not only was it driving him crazy, it was making him thirsty.

Morley reached for the bottle of Evian he kept on the night table—empty. Damn. He got out of bed in the dark and headed for the first floor. Enough light filtered through the windows from the city outside to allow him a faint view of where he was going, but as he neared the top of the stairs, he felt a growing unease in his gut. He slowed, then stopped. He didn’t understand. He hadn’t heard a noise, but he could feel the wiry hairs at the back of his neck rise in warning. Something not right here. He reached out, found the wall switch, and flicked it.

The footstool sat at the top of the stairway.

Morley’s knees threatened to give way and he had to lean against the wall to keep them from crumbling. If he hadn’t turned on the light he surely would have tripped over it and tumbled down the steps, very likely to his death.

“That footstool! Where did
you get it?”

After a couple of seconds’ pause, Danzer’s voice came back over the line. “What? Who is this?”

Morley rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t slept all night. After kicking the footstool down the hallway and locking it in a spare bedroom, he’d sat up the rest of the night with the room key clutched in his fist. As soon as ten a.m. rolled around—the time when Danzer opened his damn store—he’d started dialing.

“It’s Bill Morley. Where did you buy that footstool?”

“At a regional woodworker’s expo on Cape Cod.”

“From whom? I need a name!”

“Why?”

“I just do! Are you going to tell me or not?”

“Hold your horses, will you? Let me look it up.” Papers shuffled, then: “Here it is…Charles Ansbach. ‘Custom and Original Woodwork.’”

“Charles? I thought it was supposed to be ‘Anna.’”

Danzer laughed. “Oh, you mean because of the name in the grain. Who knows? Maybe this Anna works for him. Maybe she bought his business. Maybe—”

“Never mind! Where can I find this Charles Ansbach?”

“His address is Twelve Spinnaker Lane, Nantucket.”

“Nantucket?” Morley felt his palm begin to sweat where it clutched the receiver in a sudden death grip. “Did you say Nantucket?”

“That’s what’s written here on his invoice.”

Morley hung up the phone without saying good-bye and sat there trembling.

Nantucket…of all places, why did it have to be Nantucket? He’d buried his first wife, Julie, there. And he’d sworn he’d never set foot on that damn island again.

But now he must break that vow. He had to go back. How else could he find out who Anna was? And he must learn that. He doubted he would sleep a wink until he did.

At least he hadn’t
had to take the ferry. No matter how badly he wanted to track down this Anna person, nothing in the world could make him ride that ferry again.

After jetting in from LaGuardia, Morley stepped into one of the beat-up station wagons that passed for taxis on Nantucket and gave the overweight woman behind the wheel the address.

“Goin’ to Charlie Ansbach’s place, ay? You know him?”

“We’ve never met. Actually, I’m more interested in someone named Anna who works for him.”

“Anna?” the woman said as they pulled away from the tiny airport. “Don’t know of any Anna workin’ for Charlie. Tell the truth, don’t know of any Anna connected to Charlie at all.”

That didn’t bode well. Nantucket was less than fifteen miles long and barely four across at its widest point. The islanders were an insular group who weathered long, isolated off-seasons together; as a result they tended to know each other like kin, and were always into each other’s business.

As the taxi took him toward town along Old South Road, Morley marveled at the changes since his last look in the seventies. Decades and an extended bull market had transformed the island. New construction was everywhere. Even now, in post-season October, with the oaks and maples turning gold and orange, new houses were going up. Nantucket ordinances allow little variation in architecture—clapboard or cedar shakes or else—but the newer buildings were identifiable by their unweathered siding.

Nantucket had always been an old-money island, a summer hideaway for the very wealthy from New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts—Old Money attached to names that never made the papers. The Kennedys, the Carly Simons and James Taylors, the Spike Lees and other spotlight-hungry sorts preferred Martha’s Vineyard. Morley remembered walking through town here in the summer when the island’s population explodes, when the streets would be thick with tourists fresh off the ferry for the day. They’d stroll Main Street or the docks in their pristine, designer leisure wear, ogling all the yachts. Salted among them would be these middle-aged men in faded jerseys and torn shorts stained with fish blood, who drove around in rusty Wagoneers and rumbling Country Squires. Deck hands? No, these were the owners of the yachts, who lived in the big houses up on Cliff Road and on the bluffs overlooking Brant Point. The more Old Money they had, the closer to homeless they looked.

“Seems to be houses everywhere,” Morley said. “Whatever happened to the conservancy?”

“Alive and well,” the driver replied. “It’s got forty-eight percent of the land now, and more coming in. If nothing else, it’ll guarantee that at least half of the island will remain in its natural state, God bless ’em.”

Morley didn’t offer an amen. The conservancy had been part of all his troubles here.

The cab skirted the north end of town and hooked up with Madaket Road. More new houses. If only he’d held on to the land longer after Julie’s death, think what it might be worth now.

He shook his head. No looking back. He’d sold off the land piece by piece over the years, and made a handsome profit. Prudent investing had qua drupled the original yield. He had no complaints on that score.

He noticed groups of grouselike birds here and there along the shoulder of the road, and asked the driver about them.

“Guinea hens. Cousins to the turkey, only dumber. We imported a bunch of them a few years ago and they’re multiplying like crazy.”

“For hunting?”

“No. For ticks. We’re hoping they’ll eat up the deer ticks. Lymes disease, you know.”

Morley was tempted to tell her that it was
Lyme
disease—no terminal s-but decided against it.

Spinnaker Lane was a pair of sandy ruts through the dense thicket of bay-berry and beach plum south of Eel Point Road. Number twelve turned out to be a well-weathered Cape Cod with a large work shed out back.

“Wait for me,” Morley told the driver.

He heard the whine of an electric saw from the shed so he headed that way. He found an angular man with wild salty hair leaning over a table saw, skinning the bark off a log. A kiln sat in the far corner. The man looked up at Morley’s approach, squinting his blue eyes through the smoke from the cigarette dangling at the corner of his mouth.

“Charles Ansbach?”

“That’s me.” His face was as weathered as the siding on his shed. “What’s up?”

Morley decided to cut to the chase. These islanders would talk your head off about nothing if you gave them half the chance.

“I’m looking for Anna.”

“Anna who?”

“She works for you.”

“Sorry, mister. No Anna working for me, now or ever.”

“Oh, no?” Morley said, feeling a flush of anger. He was in no mood for games. “Then why is she working her name into the grain of your furniture?”

Ansbach’s blue eyes widened, then he grinned. “So, you spotted that too, ay?”

“Where is she?”

“Told you: Ain’t no Anna.”

“Then
you’re
doing it?”

“Ain’t me, either. It’s in the grain. Damnedest thing I ever seen.” He glanced down and blew sawdust off the log he’d been working on. He pointed to a spot. “Here’s more of it, right here.”

Morley stepped closer and leaned over the table. The grain was less prominent in the unstained wood, but his gut began to crawl as he picked out the letters of “ANNA” fitted among the wavy lines.

“It’s uncanny,” he whispered.

“More than uncanny, mister. It’s all through every piece of wood I got from that tree. Downright spooky, if you ask me.”

“What tree?”

“From the old Lange place. When I heard they was taking down one of the big maples there, I went to see it. When I spotted the grain I realized it was a curly maple. You don’t see many curly maples, and I never seen one like this—magnificent grain. I bought the whole tree. Kept some for myself and sold the rest to a coupla custom wood workers on the mainland. Got a good price for it too. But I never…”

Ansbach’s voice faded into the growing roar that filled Morley’s ears. The strength seemed to have deserted his legs and he slumped against the table.

Ansbach’s voice cut through the roar. “Hey, mister, you all right?”

All right? No, he was not all right—he was
far
from all right. All right for him was somewhere out near Alpha Centauri. But he nodded and forced himself to straighten and stagger away.

“What’s wrong, mister?” Ansbach called after him but Morley didn’t reply, didn’t wave good-bye. He sagged into the rear seat of the taxi and sat there trying to catch his breath.

“You look like you just seen a ghost!” the driver said.

“Do you know the old Lange place?” Morley gasped.

“Course. Ain’t been a Lange there for a long time, though.”

“Take me there.”

My tree! My tree! Morley thought. Have they cut it down?

Perhaps not. Perhaps it had been another tree. He couldn’t remember any other maples on the house property, and yet it must have been another tree, not
his
tree. Because if they’d cut down his tree they would have removed the stump. And in doing so they inevitably would have found Julie’s bones.

The taxi pulled off
Cliff Road and stopped in front of the Lange place. The house itself looked pretty much the same, but Morley barely recognized its surroundings. Once the only dwelling on a fifty-two-acre parcel between Cliff and Madaket Roads, it now stood surrounded by houses. Morley’s doing. He’d sold them the land.

Panic gripped him as he searched the roof line and saw no maple branches peeking over from the backyard. He told the driver to wait again and hurried around the north corner of the house, passing a silver Mercedes SUV on the way. He caught his breath when he reached the rear. His maple was gone, and in its place sat…a picnic table.

As he staggered toward it, he noticed the table’s base—a tree stump. His tree was gone but they hadn’t pulled the stump!

Morley dropped into a chair by the table and almost wept with relief.

“Can I help you?”

Morley looked up and saw a mid-thirties yuppie type walking his way across the lawn. His expression was wary, verging on hostile. With good reason: Who was this stranger in his yard?

Morley rose from the chair and composed himself. “Sorry for intruding,” he said. “I used to live here. I planted this tree back in the seventies.”

The man’s expression immediately softened. “No kidding? Are you Lange?”

“No. It was the Lange place before I moved in, and remained the Lange place while I was living here. It will always be known as the Lange place.”

“So I’ve gathered.”

“What happened to my tree?”

“It got damaged in that nor’easter last fall. Big branch tore off and stripped a lot of bark. I had a tree surgeon patch it up but by last spring it was obvious the tree was doomed. So I had it taken down. But I left the stump. Put it to pretty good use, don’t you think?”

“Excellent use,” Morley said with heartfelt sincerity. Bless you, sir.

“The center is drilled to hold an umbrella in season.”

“How clever. It’s a wonderful addition to the yard. Don’t ever change it.”

Morley suffered through a little more small talk before he could extract himself. He rode back to the airport in silent exhaustion. When he finally reached his first-class seat for the return to LaGuardia, he ordered a double Macallan on the rocks and settled back to try to sort out what the hell was going on. But when he glanced out his window and saw the Nantucket ferry chugging out of the harbor far below, the events of the most nerve-wracking and potentially catastrophic twenty-four hours of his life engulfed him in a screaming rush…

The trouble with Julie
Lange was that she was a rich girl who didn’t know how to play the part. She didn’t appreciate the finer things money could buy. She was just as happy with something from the JCPenney’s catalog as a one-of-a-kind designer piece. She had no desire for the style of life and level of comfort to which her new husband desperately wished to become accustomed.

But young Bill Morley hadn’t realized this when he started courting her in the big-haired, long-sideburned, bell-bottomed late sixties and early seventies. All he knew was that she was pretty, bright, fun, and rich. And when they eventually married, he was ecstatic to learn that her father was giving them the Nantucket family summer house and adjacent acreage as a wedding present.

That was the good news. The bad news was that Julie wanted to live there year round. Bill had said he wanted to write, hadn’t he? Nantucket would be the perfect place, especially in the winter when there were no distractions.

No distractions…a magnificent understatement. The damn island was virtually deserted in the winter. Bill contracted island fever early on and was a raw nerve by the time spring rolled around. He begged Julie to sell the place and move to the mainland.