The match ended just five minutes later-6-2, 6-4, 6-1. Garret scored match point, moving in for a weak lob, posturing to slam the ball down the right baseline, making his opponent back up to defend against his power, then tapping the ball ever so gently, so that it dropped just over the net.
As applause filled the air, Garret simply turned and walked off the court-no fist raised in triumph, no nod to the crowd, no handshake at the net.
I tried to get his attention when he was about halfway to the clubhouse. "Garret," I called out, from a few steps behind him. He didn't stop. I quickened my pace until I was walking beside him. He kept staring straight ahead. "Garret," I said, a little louder.
He turned to me, a blank expression on his face. "What?" he said, without any hint that he remembered we had met.
"I'm Frank Clevenger," I said. "I met you with your mother at the house. I was with Officer Anderson."
He kept walking.
"The psychiatrist," I prodded him.
"I know who you are," he said, without breaking pace.
"I'd like to talk with you for a minute," I said.
"I don't need to," he said. He picked up his pace. "I'm getting through it."
It dawned on me that he might think Julia had sent me to help him with his feelings about the murder. "No one knows that I've come here," I said. "Your father and mother didn't send me. I came because I need information."
"Such as?" he said.
I didn't think I had the luxury of being subtle. "I want you to tell me what you can about your father."
That stopped him. He turned to me. "My father," he said, with palpably fragile patience.
"Yes," I said.
"What do you need to know about him?" he asked.
I had the feeling I would get more, rather than less, information from Garret if he knew I suspected his father of involvement in Brooke's death. Maybe he'd relish the chance to get out from under Bishop's thumb. "I'm not comfortable with the party line that Billy killed your sister," I said. "I'm looking at other possibilities."
He looked at me doubtfully. "Isn't Win the one paying you?" he asked.
I remembered that Billy had asked me the same question. I also noted that Garret called his father by his first name. No terms of endearment anywhere in sight. "No," I said. "I work for the police."
"They usually work for Win, too."
Garret's statement gave me a moment's pause about whether North Anderson had always kept himself at arm's length from the Bishop family. But the doubt didn't last more than that moment. Anderson and I had been through hell and back together. "Nobody investigating this case is on your dad's payroll," I said. "That may be a problem for him."
He glanced at the ground, then back at me, sizing me up. "Okay," he said. "So, talk."
"Do you think Billy killed your sister?" I said.
"No," he said.
"What do you think happened?"
"I think she was born dead."
"Excuse me?"
"Stillborn," he said.
I shrugged. "I don't get it."
"Not just Brooke. Her and Tess."
"What do you mean?" I said.
"I mean we're all walking dead people in that house," Garret said. "Only one person matters. Darwin Harris Bishop."
"He made you play in the tournament today," I said. "Claire told me that."
"Claire," he repeated with scorn. He shook his head. "You don't get it," he said.
"Get what?"
"It's not this tournament. It's not tennis. It's everything. What I wear. Who my friends are. What I study. What I think. What I feel."
In some ways, Garret's complaint sounded like one that most seventeen-year-olds would have about their fathers or mothers. And that probably explained why I responded with an unfortunate cliché. "You don't have your own life," I said.
"Right on," he said. "I'm going through a phase."
"I'm sorry," I said immediately. "I didn't mean it that way."
Garret looked at the ground again, kicked the sand, and chuckled to himself.
"I really do want to know what it's like in that house," I said.
He looked back at me. His lip curled. "It's like being eaten from the inside out, until there's nothing left of you," he said. "Dad's kind of like Jeffrey Dahmer. Only he doesn't have to pour acid in your head to turn you into a zombie. He does it in other ways."
Garret clearly thought of his father as psychologically fatal to him, but I wanted to know if he had any direct physical evidence that would link him to Brooke's murder. "Did you see anything the night Brooke died?" I asked. "Do you think your father…?"
He looked away. "You still aren't getting the point," he said.
"I want to," I said. "Give me another shot at it."
"There's only air in our family for Win. The rest of us have been struggling to breathe our whole lives. So it doesn't matter if he suffocated Brooke." He looked at me more intensely. "It really doesn't. In a way, it's better. Less painful. Quicker."
Garret was speaking the language of learned helplessness, the mindset that takes over in prisoners who, seeing no chance of escape, stop struggling to achieve it. "You still might be able to help Billy," I reminded him. "I know you two aren't close, but he could spend his life behind bars."
"He'll have more freedom there," Garret said. "And I doubt the guards would beat him as badly."
I heard that loud and clear. Julia, Billy, and Garret all seemed to disagree with Darwin Bishop's claim that the wounds on Billy's back were self-inflicted. "If Billy is innocent, and you can prove it," I said, "then you must have seen something the night Brooke died."
"And if I step out on a limb and testify against Win, and Win goes free," Garret said, "then what do I do?"
I didn't have a good answer to that question. In the seconds I took to try to think of one, Garret started to walk away. "Where are you going?" I called to him.
He turned back toward me, but didn't stop moving. "Think about it," he said. "None of us can get away from Win. Billy still doesn't understand that. Otherwise, he'd head right back to the hospital." He turned, broke into a jog, and headed to the clubhouse.
I climbed into my truck and checked my home machine for a message from Billy, but he hadn't left one.
I had time before I needed to be at Brooke's funeral. I felt like I should use it to get my thoughts clear on what I had learned about the Bishop family. I downed a sandwich and two coffees at the 'Sconset Café then drove out to the Sankaty Head Lighthouse, opposite the Sankaty Head Golf Club. The light, perched on sandy cliffs, is visible from twenty-nine miles at sea. It was built in 1850 to help sailors navigate the treacherous Nantucket shoals, a beautiful but shallow graveyard of ships.
I parked near the lighthouse and walked a quarter mile into the tall grass that surrounds it. The sun was warm and bright, and the ocean stretched endlessly before me. There are those who insist it is impossible to walk the bluffs from the center of Siasconset to the lighthouse and arrive with a single negative thought in mind. Maybe I should have taken that route, because my mind was full of them.
The list of suspects in Brooke's murder was getting longer, not shorter; it now included every person in the Bishop house the night she was killed.
Certainly, Darwin Bishop headed the list. He was the only one with a history of domestic assault, a history that stretched back decades and reached all the way to the raw welts on Billy Bishop's back. He was the only one who had threatened me or tried to shake me off the case. It was he, so far as I could tell, who had not wanted the twins. He may have been enraged by their intrusion on his plans for a fresh start with a new love-Claire Buckley.
But then there was Billy. Anyone with a history of fire-setting, torturing animals, destruction of property, theft, and, yes, bedwetting had the pedigree of a true psychopath. Add to that the pent-up rage reflected in his self-abuse-biting himself, cutting himself, and pulling out his hair-and the prescription for disaster was complete.