"Dave?"
"Crazy Crystal," he said softly, a little too knowingly. It was a tone that made me understand that I shouldn't ask more in front of his daughters; that Crystal was someone known to men on the island whose wives had left them. And then I didn't have to say anything, because we were at the top end of Cummington, at an intersection of three busy streets. A ferry had just come in, and traffic was stalled. Cars from faraway places were filled with children and golden retrievers and Boogie Boards and all the bright promise of summer on the island. "Henderson, it'll be quicker if we walk. It's only two blocks down Main."
I managed, in the next forty minutes, to place an ad in the paper for Henry, check into the Lighthouse Motel, which was miles from the nearest lighthouse, and get an old VW Bug from the Rent-A-Wreck office down between the shipyard and Swansea Bagels & Buns, and did it all without running into anyone I knew.
Ginny was on her way out the door when we arrived at the yellow gambrel on Ames Street, its freshly painted, sunny exterior a shiny Necco-wafer pale yellow, much too chipper for the hard business of grief. "I'm picking my mother up at the airport," she said after I introduced her to Henderson, "and we've got a meeting with Father Kelly in an hour about the funeral."
It was unclear whether they meant to invite me to this gathering, but before I had a chance to ask, another voice rang out from inside the house. "Sophy, is that you?"
The voice was identical with Ginny's, but when the door swung open, the woman on the other side was no one I knew. "I should have warned you," Susanna said, and she held open her arms for me. "It's harder to get rid of than a tattoo." This girl who had always been model-thin was now severely plump, buxom as the town tart in an old Western, wearing a blousy Indian wraparound top, loosely tied, that revealed the upper edge of a nursing bra. "Andy says there's more of me to love, but I-" the last words lost or abandoned somewhere in our embrace. She didn't cry, as Ginny had yesterday, but when we separated I saw that her gray-blue eyes, one of the only features she still shared with her twin, and the two of them with their father, were puffy and ringed with red. "Come see the baby. I just fed her." She took my arm, and we had not walked eight feet to the end of the foyer when her husband, Andy, with his mop of curly red hair and lumberjack build, appeared with a bundle swaddled in a flannel blanket with pink polka dots. He leaned down to kiss me, and the baby's sweet scent took me by surprise.
"Isn't she beautiful?" Susanna said. "Say hello to Sophy, little Rose."
There were too many feelings colliding in this room, all the ones you can imagine-the baby I never had, the role this baby had had in my decision to leave my marriage, Susanna's sadness that Will had never seen her-and another, private anguish that I could speak about to no one in the family. I knew that Will had had a raft of reasons for not liking Andy, not trusting him, and not the least was Andy's Svengalian hold on his daughter. Or so Will thought-that Susanna was there on the mountain without a telephone because Andy had brainwashed her, and because she was susceptible to being brainwashed on account of his own failings as a father. Will could go off about Andy: Andy's big ideas about being self-sufficient, living off the land, building a root cellar to store food for the winter, even starting a school for college kids to stay in the summer and learn concepts of interdependence, family farming, appropriate technology. It was, to Will, as if Susanna had sworn allegiance to Dr. Kevorkian.
"Do you want to hold her?" Andy said. He started to hand her to me, but he must have seen something on my face that looked like alarm. It was only an immense sadness. Sadness that Will had misread Andy and Susanna and that they had always felt his disapproval. Sadness that the edges of love are so jagged. Holding the baby would have taken Will's breath away. As Andy reached out to hand her to me, I could feel her about to take mine. "Next week she'll be five months old."
I know I said that Ginny had announced she was leaving to pick up her mother at the airport, so the scene in the foyer I am describing may have lasted only fifteen or twenty seconds, because the next thing I remember hearing was Ginny's voice, sounding as if it were right behind me. "Sophy, I forgot to tell you something." I turned and saw that Ginny had come back into the house, leaving the front door ajar. "I listened to the messages on Daddy's answering machine this morning. One of them was for you. A girl named Vicki."
"What?"
Henderson, who had been dutifully hanging back, and who was more or less unflappable, lurched toward Ginny so boldly, I was afraid he would grab her by the collar. "Today? She called today?"
"I think so. There were an awful lot of messages. I'm-"
"What did she say?" I handed the baby back to Andy in case I dropped her in astonishment.
"She was looking for you. She said she'd heard someone was sick. Something like that."
"Was she here? Did she say she'd call back?"
"I listened to twenty-three messages. I'm not sure."
"Did you erase it?"
"No."
"Did she sound scared?"
"Not particularly."
"Panicked?"
"I don't think so."
"Is the machine here?"
"It's at Daddy's."
"We need to listen to it. She's missing. The police are looking for her."
"Here, call her father," Henderson said, handing me his cell phone, not much bigger than the baby's foot, "and then call the police."
Both Daniel and the detective demanded that I go to the one place I did not want to go, Will's house, and plant myself there in case Vicki called again. In the meantime, the cop would put a tracer on the phone line, and Daniel would close his eyes and sleep for the first time in thirty-six hours.
I handed Henderson back his phone. "How do you think she got your number?" he asked.
"I must still be listed in the Swansea directory."
"What's going on?" Susanna said.
"A friend's child in New York took off. We had no idea what direction she went, but it's a relief that at least she knows I'm here."
"Could she be on the island?" Susanna said.
"That hadn't occurred to me," I said.
"Let's go," Henderson said.
"It's downstairs in the kitchen," Ginny said, about the answering machine, "not upstairs where he died."
Susanna must have seen the dread on my face. "It won't be that bad," she said, though she knew it would be, because she had fled from there that morning.
"Thank you, sweetie," I said.
"At least we'll know where to find you."
My reluctance to go back to the house should come as no surprise. What will surprise you, as it surprised Henderson and me, were some of the voices we heard on Will's answering machine as we waited for Vicki's message.
There was a call from a man named John Watts, who said he had just received Will's letter and was sorry Will did not want to talk to him, even off the record, about some of his experiences in the CIA for the book he was writing, but that if Will ever changed his mind, he should get in touch.
There were two calls from a friend who wanted to know if Will would sail with him in the Around the Island Race on the Fourth of July.
One of our neighbors down the street had invited Will to dinner on a Saturday night that passed a few weeks ago.
But one of the first calls on the tape, which meant that it came close to the day Will died, was from Crystal Sparrow. "Hi, Will, it's Crystal. I just wanted to say that I'm really sorry about what happened the other night. Maybe I'll see you around." Click.
And of course there was the call from Vicki, which we listened to, gaping at the machine, as if it had powers beyond making a record of her voice. "Hi, I'm looking for Sophy. This is, um, Vicki, and I, um, thought you might be there because your husband is very sick but I guess you're not. I hope it's not serious, like AIDS or a coma or anything. That's the main thing I wanted to say but I didn't want to bother you if you're like in a hospital or a nursing home."