She didn’t look angry or even particularly annoyed. She smiled as if secretly amused, shook her head. Maybe a little annoyed. “There’s plenty left. But it won’t be any good tomorrow. Unagi, Abby? It’s cooked.”
“I’m good,” she said. “Daddy, you didn’t tell her you were at Wellesley College?”
“Why Wellesley?” Lucy asked.
“Yeah, there’s an archive there…” His voice trailed off. Another lie.
“The Jay Gould archive,” Abby announced.
Thanks, kid, he thought. You basically have no idea what I do for a living and suddenly you’re doing the play-by-play color commentary?
“There’s a Jay Gould archive at Wellesley?” Lucy said. “You’re kidding. That I never would have expected. The letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Jay Gould, together under one roof. Who knew?”
“It’s just the letters between Gould and one of his wives,” Danny said, and added hastily, “How was your day?”
“It was fine,” Lucy said distantly, but the way she furrowed her brow made Danny’s stomach do a little flip. She knew him too well.
With both his daughter and his girlfriend at home, there wasn’t much privacy. He waited until Abby had gone into her room and Lucy was in the shower, then he sat down at his desk in the living room, loaded a program the DEA agents had given him called Adium, and signed on to the JayGould1836@gmail.com account.
He composed a text to AnonText007@gmail.com. Just three words: device in place. He stared at it for a few seconds.
A window opened: OTR FINGERPRINT VERIFICATION. The encryption “fingerprint” for the DEA agents. A box of gobbledygook popped up on his Gmail page. Fortunately, he didn’t have to know what the hell he was doing to make it work. He assumed it meant that his text messages to them were automatically encrypted, and theirs back. He clicked ACCEPT.
ENCRYPTED CHAT INITIATED. In other words, the text had gone through successfully.
Then he remembered about the pictures. He e-mailed to himself the photos he’d taken of Galvin’s desk. Saved them to his computer’s desktop. Then sent them to AnonText007@gmail.com.
And he was done.
The DEA boys would get the evidence they needed to arrest Tom Galvin. They’d arrest Celina’s husband, Jenna and Ryan and Brendan’s father.
He didn’t want to think about that, though. It came down to a very simple choice: Galvin’s family or his. That wasn’t exactly a difficult decision, was it?
Not that he cared about what might happen to Galvin. He hardly knew the guy. Even the man’s wife and kids-he didn’t know them, either. If Galvin were truly involved in criminal activity, he deserved to go to prison.
He signed off.
But he hated lying to the two women in his life.
He hadn’t lied to Abby since Sarah’s death. And then he’d had no choice. Sarah had insisted.
Sarah had wanted Abby to go to Camp Pocapawmet, on Cape Cod, that last summer, just as she’d gone every summer since she was eleven. And he’d gone along with it, but he’d said, You don’t want her around for…
Tearfully, Sarah had shot back, This is not the way I want her to remember her mommy. I don’t want her to remember me as a sick, dying woman. I want her to enjoy being a kid. A couple of weeks of just being a kid. Carefree and happy. Because when I go, everything will change for her.
But he didn’t want to lie to her.
Call it protection. Call it protecting her childhood. I don’t want a shadow to fall over that girl until it really has to.
So he’d lied, of course. Mommy had an infection in her lungs. She had to spend a little while in the hospital, and then she’d get better.
Meanwhile, Sarah went through round after brutal round of chemotherapy. Anthracycline and taxane. The chemo had to come before surgery. But it was stage-four cancer. The cancer had spread to the lymph nodes. The prognosis was poor.
There wasn’t even time for surgery. It all happened too fast.
And when everything turned for the worse at the beginning of August, when it had become clear that Sarah had days left, not weeks or months, Danny had picked Abby up at camp and told her Mommy was sick.
Abby lay in the hospital bed next to her mother, her arms around her mother’s belly as Sarah slept, the machines wheezing and beeping, both of them crying. For two days.
Danny knew that Sarah waited to die until Abby had gone home for the night. Danny knew she couldn’t bear to depart this earth in the embrace of her child.
So Abby’d had four worry-free weeks at camp before the shadow fell over her life.
At the time it felt like the right thing to do.
Danny loathed being trapped in this pointless lie about Jay Gould: one more lie he’d have to keep track of. But he decided not to speak of it again unless and until it came up.
Which of course it did, later that evening, as they lay in bed. Danny was rereading-well, reskimming, actually-an old book by Gustavus Myers called History of the Great American Fortunes, and Lucy was working on her laptop.
“He was married only once,” she said.
“Huh? Who?”
“Jay Gould. You said ‘one of his wives,’ but he married once, to Helen Day Miller, who died like three years before he did.” Wikipedia’s page for Jay Gould was open on her computer screen. She gave him a sidelong glance.
Why had he told her such an idiotic, sloppy lie? It was just the first thing that had sprung to his mind. He hadn’t given it a thought. “What made you look that up?”
“I remember when you first started working on the book, I read something about him, I was wondering why he was considered such an evil jerk, and I noticed he only married once. Not six times or something, which you’d expect. These days, anyway. And I thought, well, I guess the times were different then. Or maybe he was a good husband at least.”
“Did I say ‘one of’ his wives’? Long day. I misspoke.”
She flipped the laptop closed. “No, you didn’t, Danny. There aren’t any Jay Gould archives at Wellesley and-”
“Sweetie, listen. I told Abby I was doing work out there because I wanted to take her home myself. That’s all. I’m not comfortable with her being driven around by a chauffeur.”
“So why not just tell her that?”
“Obviously, I should have. I didn’t feel like setting off another argument.”
“God forbid you should get into an argument with someone.”
He shrugged. If you don’t want to be psychoanalyzed, don’t date a shrink. Lucy understood, long before he did, that he had a problem with anger. His problem was something that he never thought could possibly be considered a problem: He never gave in to anger. He felt it, sure, plenty of times. But he prided himself on his ability to suppress it. When an argument began, he’d always de-escalate. Holding anger in this way required great self-control, but he’d taught himself that self-control since childhood.
He’d learned by example. For years he’d thought that his father, Bud, had a short fuse.
But putting it that way, so bland and benign, made it sound normal. Bud Goodman in fact had no fuse. He was one of those chemical compounds, like liquid nitroglycerin or mercury fulminate, that would explode on impact. Danny had learned how to avoid the triggers that would set his father off, and there were many of them. Disobedience was one. Dishonesty. A raised voice.
Bud, who was a great carpenter, a fine craftsman, was constantly losing subcontractors. He’d tell them off, or just go after them in a hot flash of anger, until they quit. He lost plenty of clients that way, too. One lumberyard in Wellfleet refused to do business with him because he once tore into the yard manager, though Bud insisted that they were selling him short lots.