Then the machine's electronic voice took over and told us she had called on Saturday at ten twenty-seven A.M. Four hours ago.
"Your husband was sick?" Henderson said.
"Maybe Daniel told her that to explain why I'd left the city in such a hurry. She asked me a few times if I'd ever been married, so she knew there was a husband in my past."
When the phone rang an instant later, both of us sprang back from it, as if it were a sleeping turtle that had suddenly started snapping. I lifted the receiver and said nothing for two or three seconds, hoping to locate the geography in the silence. But there was only stillness and then a woman's voice. "Is this where I can reach Will?"
It was.
"Do you have his new number?"
"He doesn't have a new number. He's dead. This is his wife. Who's calling?"
No answer.
"Is there something I can help you-"
"I'm so sorry. No, never mind," and she hung up, as if wanting to bolt from the news. Was it Crystal again? It didn't sound like the woman on the tape. No, this new woman was older, more businesslike. I remembered the personal ad he'd started to answer on his laptop. There may have been another that he had answered.
"Who was it?" Henderson asked.
"She didn't say."
"They turn up, these mystery callers, after people die, if you're lucky. My friend Claudia was married for ten years, and when her husband died, she didn't discover one surprising thing about him. No one from his past showed up. He hadn't scribbled a revealing line in any of his files or books; hadn't even saved a love letter. She was terribly disappointed."
"No danger of that with Will. I think we're due for a few more surprises."
The next one arrived later that afternoon. Henderson had gone back to the Lighthouse Motel to take a nap and found a telegram for me. He called and read it over the phone.
SHOCKING NEWS. MY SINCEREST CONDOLENCES TO YOU
AND WILL'S CHILDREN. HE WILL BE MISSED.
ARTHUR GLASS. US EMBASSY. MANILA. THE PHILIPPINES
Will had never mentioned an Arthur Glass but had referred to an "Arty" he'd known in Vietnam. Nothing strange about the missing last naine: Welcome to the CIA, where name recognition costs people their lives. Maybe Arthur Glass was Arty and maybe he wasn't. The mystery was how he had learned of Will's death when none of the obituaries had yet come out; how he knew my name and that I was staying at the Lighthouse Motel. The most obvious scenario, I told Henderson, was that someone at the Swansea Sentinel knew Glass and ran Will's name by him when confronted with the obituary I had sent there. If Will were alive, he would have spun out two or three other possibilities, reluctant spy though he was.
But Will was dead, and he did not speak to me that day or that night, though I sat in his kitchen, beneath the room where he had died. Nor did I hear from any of the other voices that sometimes take up residence in my head. I can only think these rooms were so silent because the people who did speak to me had such urgent statements to make that there was no room for anything softer, gentler, more imaginative. And the house-you're probably wondering what it was like for me to be in this house that had been mine until a few months before. I had stage fright, which is to say that most of my terror disappeared once I got there and walked through the first floor, showing Henderson around. Before long, I even got used to the changes Will had made since my departure, removing all signs of me, taking down photographs and posters we had bought together, placing my favorite coffee mugs in the back of the kitchen cabinets, and a stack of my gardening books on the floor of the front hall closet, behind his winter boots. Once Henderson left, I looked through some of those books as if they were old yearbooks, scrapbooks, souvenirs of past lives. I kept to the first floor, and when I passed the staircase, I tried not to look at it. When the phone rang, I jumped. And when Henderson returned at seven o'clock that evening with a bag of groceries to cook me dinner, I cried, because I knew it meant that Will was dead, because that is what happens when someone dies: your friends come to your house with food.
There were five phone calls. One was from Daniel, asking if Vicki had called again. One was from the detective in New York, asking the same question. One was from Susanna, telling me they had met with Father Kelly at our Lady of Perpetual Something or Other, and Will's funeral would be Monday afternoon at one o'clock. If I would like to say a few words or read a poem, they could schedule that into the program, but I had to let them know by Sunday noon. I did not ask what would happen if I let them know Sunday at sunset, because I was afraid that my anger at being reduced to a slot on the schedule would flare and combust. Susanna asked whether the little girl had called again and I needed a place to stay for the night, and her consideration skimmed away the top layer of my anger. I said I didn't think so but would let her know.
But it was the last phone call, at nine o'clock, as Henderson and I were eating dinner, that I least expected. It was Evan, saying he needed a favor. Urgently. Could he come by in fifteen minutes and explain?
Of course I said yes.
11. The Chicken Coop
THERE WAS a chatty article in the Times about the recent celebrity auction on Swansea, held the third Saturday of every August. It raises money for the social service agency where year-rounders go for drug and alcohol counseling, domestic violence awareness classes, and assistance in applying for welfare and food stamps. Once the summer people leave, scores of shops, restaurants, and hotels shut down for eight or nine months, which earns Swansea the unexpected distinction of being the poorest community in the state; hence the need for an agency so at odds with the island's affluent image.
According to the Times, the auction raised $150,000, with star-struck summer people paying thousands of dollars for an afternoon sail with a certain movie star, a kayak-and-lunch trip with a famous nature writer, a private ballet lesson with a Russian whose gnarled, arthritic feet have been photographed by Richard Avedon-and lunch at "21" with Evan Lambert, which went for $11,500. The Times reporter got someone who would not speak for attribution to say that the scandal Evan and his wife were involved in earlier in the summer may even have increased Evan's auction value. It certainly did not hurt it.
I'd had a taste of Evan and Mavis's troubles the night he removed me from the Winstons' clambake. The story behind the strife was about to become extremely public soon after Evan called me the night I kept vigil at Will's house, hoping Vicki would phone again. Though Evan's and my fortunes were closely linked during those few days, though he was a major player in my life that weekend, I had only a minor and very private role in the dramas that were about to be played out.
Henderson and I were eating the classic island dinner he'd prepared for me when Evan called: grilled swordfish, local corn on the cob, and roasted baby potatoes brushed with olive oil and rosemary, the first full meal I had eaten in three days. It seemed too splendid for the circumstances, but Henderson explained that that was the point: to be reminded that there were also miracles in the world, swordfish and fresh corn on the cob chief among them. The food and its preparation took my mind off images of Will on the floor upstairs, scenarios of what could have happened to him. If he had had a heart attack, was it as he slept, and could it have propelled him off the bed and onto the floor, where Ben found him? Or had he been felled as he crossed the room on his way to the toilet? I could ask Ben which way his body lay, but I shuddered at the thought. A prurient question, ghoulish and irrelevant, something the National Enquirer would want to know. And if I asked, Ben might tell me the truth, and the truth might be that he had found Will sprawled on his stomach, arm groping futilely for the phone on the bedside table.