He was silent a few seconds. "I’m at the end of my rope," he said finally. "You’ve got to come through here, doc. I’m counting on you."
I closed my eyes, imagining how terrifying it would feel to be sixteen years old, all alone, facing life in prison. "I’m just asking you to meet me halfway. You get the money when I get to see you."
"That’s it. Your final answer?"
"That’s it."
"Then you’re as much to blame for what happens as anyone else," he said bitterly.
"To blame — for what?"
"Read about it in the papers." He hung up.
"Billy!" I yelled into the receiver. I dialed *69, trying to be reconnected, but got the standard computer message telling me the callback feature wouldn’t work. I slammed the receiver down. The phone crashed to the floor.
The end of my rope
. I stared at the phone cord looped around one leg of the table. I could almost hear the call I had gotten years before from Anne Sacon, a social worker with the Department of Youth Services, after Billy Fisk had been found hanging from a noose in his parents’ garage. Days earlier Fisk had reached out to me for what proved to be the last time, telling me how unhappy he was at home and asking whether he could come live with me. It hadn’t seemed even remotely possible at the time. Patients don’t move in with their psychiatrists, after all. But had I known how close he was to the edge, I would have agreed.
Was history repeating itself? Was God testing me to see whether I had learned to go all the way out on a limb for someone about to fall?
I flicked through the handful of numbers that had registered on my message machine. They were all in the 508 area code, which included Cape Cod and Nantucket. The only number I recognized was North Anderson’s. I figured the others belonged to Billy, that he had run closer to home, rather than further away.
I listened to North’s message. No emergency, but he wanted me to call him. I dialed his number at work. His secretary put me through.
"Billy’s come up for air," I told him.
"How so?" he asked.
"He called me for a loan."
"I hope he’s looking to buy a one-way airplane ticket to Russia instead of a stolen gun," he said. "I wouldn’t give him any dough."
"He wanted the money dropped off so a buddy could run it to him. I told him no deal."
"Good. The last thing I want to do is tail sixteen-year-olds across two states — or two continents," Anderson said. "He’ll circle back to you."
"He got pretty threatening at the end," I admitted. "He told me to watch the papers."
"All the more reason to keep him running on empty. Without a full wallet, he’ll turn up sooner."
That made me feel better about my decision to withhold the cash, but not a whole lot better. "I got your message on my machine," I said. "What’s up?"
"Nothing urgent. I just wanted you to know I’m starting to feel some political pressure from good old Darwin. We must be getting to him."
"What sort of political pressure?" I asked him.
"I serve at the pleasure of the mayor," Anderson said. "And the mayor serves all kinds of masters, including Darwin Bishop. He called to let me know he isn’t pleased I have you on board. He doesn’t see why we need a forensic psychiatrist involved in the case when there’s an identified lead suspect and a clear path to prosecution once that suspect is apprehended."
"Translation: Leave the billionaire alone and close the case down," I said.
"You speak Nantucket very well."
"So what does that mean for us, in the short term," I asked.
"It doesn’t mean anything, short or long term, until they fire me, run me off the island, and set up a blockade to keep me away."
I had relied on North Anderson’s loyalty before, but I didn’t want to take it for granted. "You could cut me loose, and I could keep working on my own time," I said.
"Wow," he said. "You’ve come a long way. You didn’t even want this gig, let alone wanting it pro bono."
"Things change," I said.
"Not everything," Anderson said. "If they want to shake you off the case, they’ll have to get me off the case. And that’s not happening."
"Understood." I let myself linger a couple seconds on the good feeling that Anderson’s camaraderie inspired in me. "I got my own message from Darwin Bishop today," I said. "He had me followed when I took Julia to lunch. Some gorilla in one of his Range Rovers was parked outside the restaurant."
Anderson was silent for a bit. "I think you ought to come down here for a few days," he said.
"You want to watch my back for me?"
"Why not? You’ve watched mine enough."
I had already started to feel myself being pulled back to the island, especially since Billy’s calls seemed to place him a lot closer to Nantucket than Chelsea. "Any chance I could interview Darwin Bishop once more?"
"I can try and set it up," Anderson said. "He’s already having you followed. He might actually like the chance to check in face-to-face."
"I’ll take a ferry over tonight, provided they have space. If you get me that interview, I’ll have a pretty full dance card. I’m attending Brooke Bishop’s funeral tomorrow."
"At Julia’s invitation?" he said.
"Yes."
There was a longer silence this time. "Look, we go back a long way, right?"
I knew where he was headed. "You don’t have to say it."
"I’m just going to tell you the way it is: You can’t touch her."
"I haven’t," I said.
"You haven’t and you
won’t?
"
I hesitated.
"Listen to me," Anderson said. "Whether you mess around with married women is your own business. I’m not about to give you any lectures on morality."
"Good."
"You can’t touch her because it contaminates the case. You can’t see clearly from the inside of anything, if you know what I mean."
I know exactly what he meant. Crossing personal boundaries in professional relationships is always ill-advised. As a psychiatrist, it’s especially unethical. But my attraction to Julia was blurring all those lines. I didn’t feel I could honestly make any promises or predictions about where my relationship with her was headed. "You’re right," was all I told Anderson.
"And..."
"And I’ll try to be on that ferry I mentioned."
"You’re playing with fire, Frank."
"I hear you."
He let out a heavy sigh. "Call me when you hit the island."
"Will do."
I packed light, but then realized I was traveling a little too light, given the special attention Darwin Bishop was paying me. I walked over to the bed, reached down to the bed frame, and grabbed my Browning Baby pistol. I tucked it in my front pocket. It had been a long time since I’d needed to carry, but it was that time again.
I walked to the kitchen next. I looked up at the double doors of the cabinet over the refrigerator. I hadn’t opened those doors form more than two years. But I hadn’t emptied the cabinet, either. A collection of single malt scotches stood inside, waiting for a moment like this one, when some sort of trouble in the world would become my trouble again. There was a flask in the cabinet, too — a well-worn, sterling silver one with ‘FGC’ engraved, front and center,
Frank Galvin Clevenger
. I was never one for monograms, but Galvin had been my father’s first name, and it had seemed fitting that I include the ‘G’ on a vessel that contained the spore of the illness we shared.
I reached up and opened the doors. I took down the flask and a bottle of twenty-year-old Glenlivet. I twisted the cap off each. Then, in a ritual that had sometimes reminded me of a transfusion, sometimes of a bloodletting, I poured a thin stream of scotch from bottle to flask, listening to the familiar song of the liquid splashing into the hollow vessel. It was a deep, throaty tune at first and something more shrill toward the end. I remembered it with dread and — more ominous for me — nostalgia.
I put the bottle back in the cabinet and the flask in my back pocket. And I walked out of the loft that way, on a journey that would take me, in equal measure, into my future and into my past.
* * *
I planned to take the 7:00
P.M.
ferry out of Hyannis and leave my truck in the lot there. But when the clerk at Steamship Authority told me a car reservation had opened up (something of a miracle in June), I happily paid the $202 and drove aboard.
North Anderson had reached me on my cell phone and offered me the guestroom at his house, but I had passed, not wanting to impose on him or his wife, Tina. Playing hostess, with no notice, when you’re six months pregnant can’t be much fun. I also preferred having my own base to work from. I gave Anderson my ETA and found a vacancy at the Breakers, part of the White Elephant hotel complex on Easton Street, which runs along the north side of Nantucket Harbor.
I napped for about an hour in my truck, then woke up and stepped onto the deck to get some air. It wasn’t quite sixty degrees, chilly for late June. I stood near the stern, breathing in the mist and watching the ship’s white cotton wake. I wondered whether Billy had made the same trip earlier. I imagined him laying low and stealing onto the island unseen or unrecognized, a cruel irony for a boy whose identity — including his biological parents, his native land, his first language, and his name — had already been stripped from him. Now survival required burying the rest of himself, at least temporarily. If that felt too much like dying, he might decide to make it official. Strangely, suicide is sometimes a person’s way of taking control — the soul’s last-ditch effort to free itself from overwhelming earthly influences.
I thought back to my first psychotherapy session with Dr. James. I’d been talking five or ten minutes about a nurse I was romancing. She wanted a commitment, I didn’t feel ready to make one, and that seemed to mean I was going to lose her. Looking back on it, the whole affair was hopeless; I was nowhere near ready for a real relationship.
James stopped me midsentence. "We don’t have a lot of time together," he said. "We shouldn’t waste it talking about some conquest of yours. May I ask you a specific question, so we can begin, in earnest?"
I stopped jawing and nodded my head.
"When was the first time," he said, "that you thought of killing yourself?"
I sat there, stunned, looking at the gnomish, eighty-one-year-old man seated across from me, wearing a seersucker suit and two silver and turquoise cuff bracelets. "When was the first time I thought of
killing
myself?" I echoed.
He looked at his watch. Then he winked at me and smiled warmly, even lovingly. "C’mon, Frank," he said. "Give it up. What have you got to lose?"
And I did. Just like that. Such were the man’s gifts. I told him that the first time I thought of ending it all was when I was nine years old. I had taken a beating from my father, and I had gone upstairs to my room and thrown a pair of jeans, my baseball glove, and a favorite model airplane into a duffel bag. Then I had walked downstairs, stopping in the tiny foyer outside the kitchen. A short staircase led to the front door.
My father saw me and walked out of the kitchen. "Going somewhere?" he asked.
I summoned all the nerve I could and stared up at him. "Good-bye," I said.
"What do you think you’re doing?" he said.
"Don’t look for me," I said, shaking with fear. "I’m not coming back." Translation: Tell me you’re sorry, and that you want me to stay, and that everything will be different if I do.
He laughed at me. "So, go," he said. "You want to be a big shot? You don’t want to live here? Take off." He walked back into the kitchen.
I glanced at my mother, cooking dinner. All the years she had stood idly by as my father meted out his brutality could have been overshadowed if she had had enough courage to come to me at that moment. But she didn’t make a move, didn’t say a word.
In truth, I had nowhere to go. I was nine. I had never felt as helpless. I dropped my suitcase, ran to my room, and started to cry. And I came up with a plan to wait until my parents were asleep, then use my father’s belt as a noose to hang myself from a hook on the bathroom door.
Thinking about two things had kept me on the planet. The first was my best friend, Anthony, who sat behind me in homeroom and had an uncanny ability to finish my sentences. The second was my two-year-old turtle, Seymour, who surely would perish if left alone with my mother and father.
I wiped the mist from my face and took a deep breath of Atlantic air. The night seemed chillier than before. I reached into my pocket and took out my flask. I unscrewed the cap, brought the metal to my lips, and swallowed a mouthful.
By the time the ferry reached Nantucket Sound, with Martha’s Vineyard off to my right and the lighthouse at Cape Pogue just visible on Chappaquiddick Island, I had downed about a third of the scotch. More went as we slipped between the jetties that protect the channel into Nantucket Harbor. And once we had powered past Brant Point light, headed toward the wharf, the flask was empty. I held it up to the moonlight and focused on the monogram engraved in the sterling, pregnant with my father’s ‘G’ in its center. I rubbed it a few times with my thumb, picturing him standing outside the kitchen, telling me to leave if I wanted to. Then I tossed it into the waves.
* * *
I checked into the Breakers, walked over to my suite. Fresh flowers and a bottle of Merlot had been left for me, courtesy of the management. Fortunately, I was already feeling guilty about my drinking. I put the bottle in the hallway, just outside my door.
I hadn’t been in the room for fifteen minutes when North Anderson called from the lobby. He said he wanted to talk. I told him I’d be right down.
We walked over to the hotel’s Brant Point Grill for a late dinner. From our table we had a sweeping view of the harbor and a good view of the rest of the dining room. Both of them were a little too pretty and made me uneasy. Looking at the tanned, well-dressed, bejeweled patrons, I wondered how the community was coping with a murderer at large. "Has the local paper covered the Bishop case?" I asked Anderson.