The Winner, page 20
And all the times lying on her breast in the dark above the gentle tide of her rib cage, her fingers combing his hair, sometimes clenching the roots as if she didn’t want to let him go, and he didn’t want her to, either, just wanted to be tethered to her for as long as he could before she left.
It wasn’t just about lust or money. He’d loved her, too. A sick love, a fucked-up love between two damaged people, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t real.
“Don’t you think so?” she asked.
“Don’t I think what?”
“That Olivia’s re-creating the power dynamic of her relationship with her sister with me?”
“Yeah, for sure,” he said.
He walked barefoot to the kitchenette for a glass. When Emily wasn’t looking, he dropped it hard on the linoleum section of the floor. It shattered.
“Careful!” she said from his bed. “There’s pieces everywhere.”
Conor took a step and intentionally landed on a jagged shard. He swore as it lacerated the sole of his foot.
“Baby!” she said. “You okay?”
His foot was bleeding. He didn’t let Emily see it yet. The wound was deep enough that it would leave a scar for at least a little while—hopefully weeks.
“I’m okay. I should put on flip-flops before I clean this up.”
He walked around the area where Catherine’s body had been and stepped several times over and around the bloody spots before continuing to the door, leaving a trail of crimson blots.
“You’re tracking blood,” Emily warned him, putting on her own sandals and retrieving paper towels from the kitchenette.
“Shit,” he said, examining his foot for show. “Can you deal with the glass? I’ll get to the blood after I cover up this cut.”
After he bandaged himself, he brought the cleaning spray over to the mess. When Emily’s attention was diverted, he smeared his blood all over Catherine’s. Much more of his was present than hers. He rubbed it hard into the wood and spread it around into a wide oval, then lacquered it with more fresh blood from a paper towel and left it untouched.
“I can’t get all the stains out,” he said after a few minutes of purposely ineffectual cleaning. “I’ve got to tell John. I hope he doesn’t charge me for this.”
He texted several photos to John of the bloodstains and the glass, apologizing and offering to pay for a professional cleaner and the broken glass. John said not to worry; you could barely see the stains in the dark wood, and it was just a measly glass.
“If you promise you won’t tell anyone, you want to hear some juicy Cutters gossip?” Emily asked as she swept glass. “So that burglary at the Bakers’ house—you know who it was? I’ll give you a hint. You were talking to him at John Price’s party.”
When Conor still didn’t answer, his heartbeat in sync with the up-tempo song from his laptop, she said, “At the raw bar.”
Charlie had finally been apprehended. Something else to worry about. But if Emily was acting like it was a secret, that meant he hadn’t ratted out Conor yet. Maybe he could get away with pretending he didn’t know him. Or he could tell the truth that he’d met him at that bar in town, but lie that he hadn’t given him the gate code or invited him onto the neck, and therefore he wasn’t responsible for anything he’d done. Except he’d already told Lawrence it was law school friends.
This was small potatoes compared with what else he was hiding, but if he were discovered to be untruthful regarding the burglary, it would hurt his credibility otherwise.
“How’d they know it was him?”
“His dad was rooting through his drawers, thinking he was hiding drugs, and he found some diamond earrings, and they turned out to be Margie Baker’s.”
Conor was confused. “But . . . how would he know they were Margie Baker’s?”
“He obviously put two and two together and figured out they were the earrings that were stolen.”
“But how would his dad ever know that?”
“Anytime there’s any wrongdoing on the neck, Lawrence makes it his business to know everything about it,” she said.
It took Conor a moment to adjust to this information, to the relief that he had nothing to do with it, and to the unexpected, even traitorous, guilt he felt over his threatening accusation of Charlie.
“It was . . . your cousin? Bobby Nuke?”
“Yeah. Wait, who’d you think I was talking about?”
“No one,” he said. “I just can’t believe it. How’d you find out?”
“I saw him on the road a couple hours ago, and he told me. He and a friend from off the neck snuck into the Bakers’ to raid the liquor cabinet, and they got drunk and found jewelry and made a really dumb mistake.”
“And he’s the one who wrote ‘BLM’ on their walls? Why would he do that?”
“You know that Black Lives Matter sign on the Newcombs’ house?” Emily said.
“That’s Lawrence Newcomb’s house?”
Emily nodded. “So, the Bakers made some disapproving comment about it at an association meeting because they think people shouldn’t put up political signs on the neck. Even though they’ve got that obnoxiously huge American flag on their porch, which is like a step away from a MAGA hat. Bobby heard about what they said, and that’s what motivated him to break in in the first place, to take their liquor, and once they got drunk he took the jewelry and vandalized the place.”
All that sleep he’d lost, thinking he was to blame and Lawrence Newcomb was going to expel him from the neck, and it was the lead investigator’s son the whole time, with what could even be considered a reverse hate crime of sorts.
“So his dad knows the full story?”
“As of last night, yeah.”
“What’s he going to do to Bobby?”
“He made him give the earrings back to Margie Baker and apologize, obviously. Bobby wasn’t going to pawn them or anything, but he was afraid if he returned them he’d get caught. And they’re reimbursing them for painting over the graffiti.”
Off Conor’s appalled expression she said, “The whole thing’s crazy, right? You promised you wouldn’t tell anyone.”
“That’s it?” he asked. “Nothing else?”
“I mean, she’s not pressing charges or anything. She’s known him since he was a baby, and he was really remorseful.”
“But they’re not telling anyone else on the neck?”
“No. Bobby swore me to secrecy. He’s not even telling the other cousins.”
Conor snorted.
“What?”
“His dad had no problems grilling me when it happened, acting like the sheriff of the neck and more or less accusing me of doing it because I’d had some law school friends over that night to swim,” he said. “Then when it turns out to be his son, he sweeps it under the rug.”
“Yeah, but Bobby’s never going to do anything like this again. He was actually crying today when he told me about it. He’s a sweet kid and there’s no way he would’ve done it if he wasn’t drunk. It was a really dumb mistake, just a one-time thing. They’re all completely mortified.”
Conor paced the room, his blooming outrage supplanting his self-incriminating thoughts. The egregious hypocrisy and double standards and lack of accountability and tribalism. The rich granting pardons to their own, wiping the slate clean with crocodile tears and an apology. Lawrence was probably even the one paying for the paint job.
“If I had been the one to do it, I wouldn’t get a second chance like that,” he said.
“Well, yeah, of course.”
“Why ‘of course’?”
“Because you . . . aren’t from here. I mean, they don’t know you. They wouldn’t be inclined to forgive you.”
“Good to know where I stand,” he said.
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Would you defend me? If I made a ‘dumb mistake’ like that?”
“You’re a twenty-five-year-old lawyer,” she said. “You’d never do it in the first place. Bobby’s a twenty-year-old idiot who went into someone’s house looking for alcohol and made a bad decision while he was drunk. It wasn’t premeditated or anything. It’s the kind of thing guys used to do all the time around here. My dad told me he did shit like this all the time when he was a teenager.”
“So it’s just part of life here,” Conor said. “Rich boys will be boys, breaking into houses for alcohol, and sometimes they get a little tipsy and make a dumb mistake and steal diamond earrings and vandalize the place and don’t confess until they get caught, and then all of a sudden they cry and show remorse. I wouldn’t know, because when I was twenty I was working my ass off to get into law school and practicing tennis three hours a day so I wouldn’t lose my scholarship.”
Emily didn’t have a response.
“You know, you talk about how everyone else here is a product of this culture,” he said. “But when it comes down to it, you’re from here, too.”
Chapter 22
He slept poorly again. The fight with Emily hadn’t helped, and every time he stirred awake he was bombarded with images and sounds of Catherine in the ocean. Also the worries, springing out like water from a punctured balloon, that he must have overlooked something in his cover-up. The most carefully planned murders were often discovered, and everything he’d done had been improvised and hastily acted on. There were a thousand ways he could be caught, through sloppiness or ignorance or simply bad luck. A thousand ways he would be caught.
What he’d done was all in self-defense of one kind or another. Maybe he could confess to just that, self-defense: he’d killed her, yes, but accidentally, with the stringing machine, and only after she’d attacked him in a drunken rage, irrationally jealous that he was in a relationship with her daughter. Understandably frightened that no one would believe him, he’d carried her corpse into the ocean.
After his lesson with Suzanne Estabrook, he asked if he could borrow her phone for a minute to look up an address, as he’d left his at home. In a private browser, he searched for Massachusetts sentencing guidelines for voluntary manslaughter. Three to twenty years in state prison plus victim restitution. And no one would believe it was just voluntary manslaughter after what he’d done not to be caught.
So he would have to remain not caught.
HE RETURNED TO CATHERINE’S HOUSE IN THE AFTERNOON. SHE HAD A few more texts from friends, all of which he reasoned he could ignore or like. He took the phone out for its daily walk, again scoping out the water for Catherine’s body.
At home later, his mother FaceTimed him from the living room couch. “I haven’t heard from you in a while,” she said.
“I’ve been busy,” he said. “Studying and preparing for this interview.”
“Just working? You’re not having any fun?”
He wouldn’t be in this position if she’d found another job, if she’d made more money, if she’d remarried someone to help with the bills, if she didn’t have health problems. Maybe even if she’d just been fucking open about the fact that her husband had killed himself and she hadn’t made Conor keep it a secret all these years.
“I’ve been seeing a girl here.” He’d decided a while ago that he wouldn’t tell her about Emily until the summer ended and he was certain he’d be with her.
“I thought that might be the case,” she said with a smile. For the past three years she’d lobbied, with decreasing subtlety, for Conor to reduce his workload and find a girlfriend.
She asked about her. After rattling off Emily’s qualities—her intelligence, sensitivity, sense of humor—he added, “Her family’s got a place here.”
“I figured.”
“I mean, she . . . comes from money. A lot. Even compared to the people here.”
His mother paused. “Is she a good person?”
“Yes, of course.”
“And she makes you happy?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s all that matters, Conor.”
“I know that, Mom,” he said defensively.
His mother got up with a grunt from the couch. He’d never thought much about their décor before, but, seeing it on his phone’s screen, he was aware, for the first time, of the place’s shabbiness. No, that was the wrong word; if anything, the furniture in Catherine’s house and Emily’s cottage was shabby to the untrained eye—frayed ends of rugs, sun-faded sofa cushions, cracked benches. But his eye had been trained over the summer and could now tell that their stuff was generations old, bought with old money, built to last decades, centuries, and that they disdained the shiny new crap destined for landfills that new money purchased. His mother’s belongings weren’t dirt cheap or falling apart. It was that they were trying to look fancy but weren’t nearly up to snuff—faux materials, shoddily crafted, mass-manufactured in a country with no labor laws. In their failed ambitions, déclassé.
The place got awful light, too, and had low ceilings he could easily touch. He’d never been that bothered by it, but now that he was used to the cinematic sunsets and wide-open spaces of Cutters, it looked like a prison.
With raspier breaths than should have been necessary, his mother toddled into the kitchen and took a jar of olives out of the cupboard. “Have you met her parents?”
“They’re divorced,” he said. “Her dad doesn’t come here anymore.”
“What about her mother?”
“She’s here.”
“What’s she like?
He scratched his nose. “I’ve only met her briefly a couple times.”
She struggled to open the jar and wheezed as she labored.
“You all right, Mom?”
She nodded and ran the jar under hot water. She looked significantly older than she had when he’d left—heavier, less mobile. Someday she’d need a cane, then a walker, then a wheelchair. He wouldn’t be able to attend to her at that point, so they’d have to hire an aide, assuming they could afford one. Maybe she’d qualify for Medicaid the next year, though that would augur poorly for her employment status. Until that happened or she found a full-time job, they would need to pay for overpriced, subpar insurance, skipping doctors’ appointments because of the punitive copays and deductibles.
Not that many years from now, from diabetes or Covid or something else, his mother was going to die alone in that coffin of an apartment.
It was deeply unfair—no, unjust—the more he thought about it, as she attempted to open the olive jar in their harshly lit, laminate-countertop kitchen. His mom—a woman who had been given little, worked hard for decades without much to show for it, raised a boy mostly by herself, and uncomplainingly shouldered setbacks that would embitter or demoralize most people—should be the kind of person who inherited millions of dollars, not someone whose poor health was either going to bankrupt her or lead to her early demise.
He had to get her out of there. She deserved a longer life, a better life, the kind every person on Cutters, young and old, took for granted. A life he couldn’t provide for her even on a lawyer’s salary.
“HOW’S YOUR FOOT?” EMILY ASKED WHEN HE CAME OVER. THEY’D EVENTUALLY patched things up a little after their argument over Bobby, but their interactions the rest of the night had been stilted. It had exposed a chasm between them that they’d both always known was there but had mostly managed to bridge, or at least detour around.
“Still a little tender,” he said.
She handed him a beer and pointed to his bandage. “And your scrape?”
“It’s okay.”
“You know it heals better if you expose it to the air overnight.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t want to risk any infection.”
“So,” she said as they settled onto her couch, “I’m really sorry again about what I said last night, about Bobby. I’ve been thinking about it more, and for the record, if you did somehow do something dumb like he did—which you wouldn’t, but for the sake of argument, if you did—I’d absolutely be on your side.”
“You don’t have to apologize,” he said. “I got worked up over nothing.”
“No, you had a point. I’m from here, as much as I try to deny it. An insider. And you’re an outsider. But—and I know this sounds corny . . .” She looked embarrassed. “I only want to be an insider with you. Not with anyone else. Even Olivia. You’ve kind of become it for me.”
He’d been a fool all along to think anything mattered but Emily. He should have known better than to chase the erotic magnetism of Catherine. Beauty fades, as Richard said, and sex fades even faster. This was lasting: being an insider with someone else, the two of you becoming it for each other.
“Me, too,” he said, embracing her.
But he couldn’t allow her to get too far inside now. No matter how intimate he got with anyone, with Emily—assuming they managed to remain together after what he’d done—this stayed secret forever. It was a kind of solitary confinement in lieu of criminal punishment, a loneliness he’d have forever.
Were Bobby in his position, Lawrence Newcomb would help him wriggle out of the consequences. Conor’s dad wasn’t even around to be useless. He had to fend for himself, as he’d always done.
He could do it. All of it, now and in the future. He was used to lonely secrecy.
“I think I saw your mom out on your pier late the other night, through the window,” he said, laying the groundwork for the drowning. “Does she ever go there at night?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Well, I saw someone coming back from there. I assumed it was her.”
“People sometimes use our pier, even though they’re not supposed to. Could’ve been anyone.”
Before they went to bed, she asked if he could fix a nail protruding from a wall in the back room that she’d snagged her shirt on earlier.
“You have a hammer?”
“No,” she said. “There’s a tool kit in my mom’s house. I could ask her to leave it out for me tomorrow.”
“Don’t bother,” he said. “I’ll figure something out.”
The nail was popping out half an inch from the wood, likely caused by the permanent moisture in the air. Conor went outside and found a flat stone from the nearby woods.
