“Jesus,” Tony said distractedly. “Marie, we don’t need this right now.”
His wife turned her head smartly toward him, but suddenly it was Tony who seemed the stronger of the two. Marie looked old and a little frightened.
Tony moved his hand out toward hers. It didn’t reach, but something passed between them.
Marie blinked, disengaged from the argument with Jane as if it had never happened.
“Bill,” Tony said, “we’ve got a situation. You’ve gathered that. You’re a bright guy. David Warner has been a, well, not a friend of ours, but an acquaintance, over a long period of time. Now he’s disappeared, or is dead, and we’re hearing disquieting things about a cellar under his house.”
“What kind of things?” I asked, aware that—wrongly, as it turned out—this was a house I’d thought I was going to help sell.
“It’s not relevant,” Tony said. “The key matter is that we’re running a little scared.”
“Join the club,” I said.
Tony smiled thinly. “I guess you’ve hit on it there.” He breathed out, rubbed his temples. “I’m going to tell you this because I’m done with it, and because I think you’re owed. It can’t go any further. Understand?”
“Tell me what?”
“It was just a game.”
CHAPTER FORTY
“Phil and I knew each other since we were kids,” Tony said. “We were born here when it was known for fruit and Ringling and squat else. Phil went to college up in Tallahassee. I traveled, tried a bunch of different things before I went into construction. Phil became one of those management guys, always moving on, trouble-shooting a company and then jumping onto the next thing. We kept in touch and would meet up every now and then and chew the fat. I came home before he did, started my business. Eventually Phil made enough money and headed back, too. Marie and I were getting initial development for The Breakers up and running. He helped put some of the financing in place, and he and Hazel decided that instead of getting some big house they’d buy into our resort. They bought three condos, and we started hanging out again. Peter Grant was an old friend, too, which is how he wound up handling sales. It tied together. We all made a lot of money. Then some night, I don’t even remember when, we . . . started playing again.”
“Playing what?” I asked.
“We’d had this thing we did in high school, with bits of paper, leaving clues around the place. Telling a kind of story. Like those Murder Mystery weekends, where you go to an old house and some actors put on a show, with a script that’s part worked out ahead of time, part improvised, and the guests try to figure out who killed Professor Whoever in the library with a wrench. When we were all back in town together, it just kind of started up again. Marie would plan some scenario, see if the others could work out what was happening.”
“It was just a dumb game,” Marie said again. She sounded defensive. “It would have stayed that way, too, except for that asshole Warner.”
“How does he fit into your group?” I said. “He’s much younger than you guys, surely.”
“He is,” Tony said. “He grew up here, too, but none of us knew him from before. He’d been out West for ten years, came back with a lot of money, and started to push his nose into the condo business. We were always going to run into each other. He’s not hard to get on with. At first. We introduced him around. He fit. And after a while we let him know about the game, and he was all about taking it to another level. It was him who had the idea of pulling the games off paper, changing it from being just a long bullshit session over bottles of wine into something that actually happened out in the world. He was the guy who made it real.”
“How can you make a game real?”
“By introducing real people. First time, we just messed with some guy a little—a nobody who worked in a restaurant we went to over in town. It’s closed now. It was arranged that some cash went missing in such a way it could only be this guy. He lost his job. We put some other temptations his way. He took them.”
He saw me staring at him. “Yeah, I know,” he muttered. “David came up with ideas and we went with them without thinking too hard about the implications for the person whose life was being modified. We got too wrapped up in the game, even back then, the first time.”
“Plus, you know,” Marie said, “it was fun.”
“Fun,” I said, staring at her.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m sure you’ve heard of fun. It’s what people can do when they don’t have to waste all their time worrying what everyone thinks of them.”
“It was just small, though,” Tony said hurriedly. “After the guy started to spin out of control we pulled the plug, smoothed everything over. It was Hazel who bailed first.”
“Always thought she was better than the rest of us,” Marie said acidly. “Had her moral high horse saddled up and ready to go.”
Tony held up his hand to head her off. “I found the guy a job in my company afterward, much better paid than he had been before. He worked for me for seven years before he moved upstate to be with his kids. We let him know what had happened. He actually helped us out on a couple of later games. There was no harm done.”
“Really?” I said. “Like there’s no harm done if people think you’ve sent racist e-mails, or if wives think you’ve ordered porn or taken photos of coworkers.”
“There’s . . . some harm done, I admit that.”
I walked to the window at the end of the room, looked down over the Circle. Every time I’d done that in the last five years, I’d been looking at it hungrily, as a place I wanted a piece of. Right now it just looked dry and hot, a mirage on a barren sand bar.
“How does Hunter fit into this?” I asked. I couldn’t fail to listen, but I didn’t want to spend the rest of the afternoon on what was becoming obvious.
“We were playing a game a year,” Tony said. “Each time someone would get their . . . well, they’d get stirred around. Hunter was just this guy on the fringes. He’d been in town about nine months. A handyman type, jack-of-all-trades. He did jobs for Peter on a few of the properties that Shore managed. Thing was . . . David had this old girlfriend. A woman he’d known when he was young, anyway. Did some waitressing, bar work. Smoked a lot of weed, drank too much—you know the type, the keys are full of them. I’d seen her around over the years, propping up this bar, serving behind that one, slumped over a table with a pitcher of beer—and I was real surprised when it turned out she and David had a connection. I was having a drink with him one time in Bradenton when she came in. The look she gave him was kind of . . . weird. But he went right up and said hi, and she was on the edge of the group after that.”
“Because you all wanted to fuck her,” Marie said.
“I did not want to fuck her,” Tony said mildly.
“This going to take much longer?” I asked. “See, my wife’s in the hospital. And I’m not enjoying being around you people.”
“Hunter and Katy met, somehow. David didn’t like it. He started to stir us up over it, did a little digging. Eventually it turns out Hunter’s not everything he appears. Ran with a bad crowd when he was back in Wyoming, was maybe involved in a few burglaries, including one where an old woman died. It was natural causes, apparently, but it happened under duress. He was never tried for it, and had straightened out his life since, but . . . he just seemed like a good target for modification. Or so David said. To get him out of town.”