“Hello, Pierre.”
“Mr. Montero, we have a problem.” Pierre Ting’s voice sounded distant and manufactured. Ting was in the construction business himself; he brokered scaffolding. He’d provided scaffolding for the Statue of Liberty, the Bank of Hong Kong, the Arc de Triomphe. He could be calling from anywhere.
“What kind of problem?” Raoul said.
“My name in the newspaper connected with some woman’s disappearance? And today I’m looking at ruined walls in the living room. They tell me your son did this damage. What’s going on, Mr. Montero?”
“You’re here?” Raoul said. The beauty of working for the Tings was that they had never shown up to check on his work. Not once all summer. Raoul had Micky snap photos with a digital camera and they sent pictures of their progress to Ting’s e-mail address.
“I flew in last night,” Ting said. He sounded a thousand miles away. “And I’ve been bombarded with dismaying news since I arrived.”
“Okay. I’ll be right there. Give me five-”
“Don’t bother,” Ting said. “I’m replacing you. You’re fired.”
“Wait a second,” Raoul said. “Pierre, please.” There was silence on the other end. What should Raoul say? He was a grown man who had spent the night in his truck. Raoul fidgeted with the spare change he kept in the console, then the keys to the Doyle house that they’d finished in May, then the bottle of Advil, the contents of which Raoul would empty into his mouth as soon as he got off the phone. “Pierre, you can’t fire me. We have a contract.”
“I’m breaking the contract. I’ll pay what I owe you for the work you’ve done so far, but no more. I’m hiring someone else.” Raoul could hear Ting’s footsteps against the wooden floors of the empty house. He wondered if anyone from his crew was there listening. He wondered who had called Ting to alert him in die first place. Micky, presumably.
“You won’t be able to find anyone else,” Raoul said, hoping this was true. “Besides, Pierre, that house is my design. Those are my plans. No one else will know how to execute them.”
Ting laughed. “Ha! We’ll see.”
Raoul nearly wept at the thought of his cathedral being built by a crew of hackers, dope smokers, these guys who flew over from Hyanms each morning with no regard for the architectural integrity of Nantucket. “Please don’t do this, Pierre.”
“Are you going to fight me?” Ting asked.
“No,” Raoul said. He didn’t want to fight anyone else. He shut off the phone and stared at the front of the house, which caught an orange glow from the rising sun. What waited for him inside? Nothing anymore. A wife who cheated on him, the job of a lifetime ruined. He began then to understand how Theo must feel-the most important things in his life gone, washed away, irretrievable.
Theo
He didn’t manage to make it back to school until Friday, and by then it was too late. Sara Poncheau, summer cab driver and best friend of Gillian Bergey, told everyone that she had seen Theo at Antoinette Riley’s house. This was the story as Theo finally heard it: Ms. Riley had been a frequent fare for Sara, a huge tipper, and Sara wondered about her. A beautiful black woman with a ton of cash living back in the woods off Polpis; it was intriguing. Then, on Friday afternoon, she saw Theo standing in the doorway of Ms. Riley’s house; she saw Mm grab her arm like he owned her or something. Sara assumed they were sleeping together. Which she reported to Gillian Bergey ASAP-and then two days later it hit the newspaper that the woman, Ms. Riley, wasmissing and Theo’s mother was somehow involved. Covering up for Theo, maybe. Theo confessed to two counts of vandalism, which meant Theo probably killed the woman, probably hacked her to bits with an axe and buried her body parts in the woods. And his mother took the blame. Everyone knew Theo’s parents spoiled him-his own Jeep, for starters, and spending money from his father who made all kinds of sick cash building huge houses for Chinese people. Yes, Theo was guilty of murder. Why else would anybody miss the first three days of senior year? That was insane, social suicide, and so there had to be a good reason.
Theo heard this from Aaron, just after first period, calculus-where the teacher, Mr. Eviasco, had started on derivatives and Theo stared helplessly at the numbers on the blackboard, unable to concentrate. As soon as the bell rang, dismissing them, Aaron yanked Theo into an empty classroom and told him the rumors that were going around.
“Man, is this the woman we saw at the Islander? And at the game? Your mom’s friend?”
“Shut up, Aaron. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“I’m asking because I care about you, man. There’s some serious shit going around. Perpetuated by Gillian and those bitches. They’re saying you killed her, man.”
Theo looked into the empty classroom at the rows of desks. He felt so alien here, like an impostor at his own high school. He didn’t belong anymore.
Aaron ran a hand across the top of his spiky black hair. His neck started to splotch the way it sometimes did when he stood at home plate on a full count; he was nervous. “Man, is it true? Did you kill her?”
Theo grabbed the front of Aaron’s T-shirt and pressed his lips against Aaron’s ear. “Get one thing straight,” he whispered. “That woman is not dead.”
…
By lunchtime, Theo sensed the other kids moving away when he walked through the halls. Mrs. Waverly, his English teacher, giggled nervously when she called his name for attendance-and she had been his teacher since sophomore year. She liked him. But she squeaked when she said his name, as if noticing for the first time that he had three arms or something. They all thought he’d killed Antoinette. Or that his mother had killed her.
Because he was a senior, he had off-property lunch privileges, and Theo watched the other kids in his class fly out the doors when the bell rang. The guys from the baseball team-Aaron and Brett among them-stripped off their shirts. Theo heard them say they were going to Surfside Beach to eat at the snack bar. They didn’t ask Theo to join them, although Theo figured he would still be welcome- for a price. He’d have to throw them a bone, a lie or something about Antoinette, his mother, the vandalism. He wasn’t up to it.
Grief flooded Theo as he sat in the lunchroom, alone, with the egg salad sandwich that his mother had packed for him despite everything. His sister Jennifer sat at a table of ninth-grade girls, but even she wouldn’t make eye contact with him. Last year her friends had all been gaga over him; now they thought he was a psycho. Theo’s vision blurred and the tables of other kids decked out in their new clothes melted into a horrible stew. His old life decomposing.
He couldn’t eat. He shoved his sandwich back into the brown paper bag and left the cafeteria. He walked out to the parking lot, climbed into the Jeep, and drove away.
He ended up at Antoinette’s house. The police car was gone, but the yellow tape remained. Theo took down the pieces of tape over the front door and let himself in. The place was pretty much as Theo had left it-Antoinette’s books all over the floor with the wine bottles, the sofa cushions, the broken candles. Theo picked up a wine bottle and wandered through the house holding it like a club. A cocktail napkin was secured to the refrigerator with a magnet-in blue ink it said, L, Cape Air, noon Sat. Theo stared at the napkin-her daughter, he realized after a minute. Lindsey. Had Antoinette really meant to pick up Lindsey, or was this just a decoy? When Antoinette’s body didn’t turn up in the coast guard search, his suspicions were confirmed: Antoinette had been planning to disappear during Night Swimmers for a long time. But that napkin. It bothered Theo. He folded it carefully and put it into his jeans pocket.