"My heavens. I can see why." I thought of the detectives flying to Swansea and showing up at Evan's door, of the stake-out at Will's house last night, of the pints of adrenaline all of us had secreted. It was enough to make me mad, but I stopped myself. What I had to admit was that my anger was about how we felt, we grown-ups. To Vicki, it was something entirely different. To her, it was about getting our attention; it was a cri de coeur, blood-curdling in its way.
"My dad wants to talk to you."
Before he said hello, I heard him tell Vicki to go downstairs with the other kids. "I'll be down soon. Sophy?"
"What a story," I said.
"I think she has a great future as a novelist or a mastermind criminal. An honorary member of the Lavender Hill Mob. My parents would have shipped me off to boarding school for that. They shipped me off for less than that."
It occurred to me that Vicki's disappearance, for which I had quietly been blamed, had turned out to be something of a practical joke. I was no longer the villainous girlfriend whose silence had led the child into realms of unspeakable danger. I was nice again. Trustworthy again. Kind to small children again. Maybe he would care for me again. But I didn't know in what way I could care for him. That woman I'd been three days ago, the funny one who pretended to be Dorothy and Toto, the sexy one who pretended not to care that her lover's only term of endearment for her was Ducks-that woman had lost her voice. Daniel was speaking now to someone else.
"How are you managing?" he said. "I know it's been absolute hell for you. And I know this business with Vicki was the last thing you needed. Have you found out anything about Will's death? Have you settled on a date for the funeral?"
I gestured to Henderson that I needed some privacy, and he scurried off the bed, carrying his shoes and an armful of the Times to the connecting room. Yet once he closed the door behind him, I didn't know what to say to Daniel, except to re-count some of what I had discovered. It was not nothing, and it took a while to cover the territory, but it was hardly intimate. I could have been telling the story to anyone.
He listened patiently, asked questions, and was in every way attentive, considerate, well-mannered. He said finally, "When do you think you'll be home?" but the very idea of home was haunted, and I didn't know what to answer. My home wasn't here on the island. But was it there, on the outskirts of his life, in the suburbs of his affections?
"Maybe the end of the week," I said casually. "I should be finished with what I need to do here. If I can figure out what that is."
"The children will be happy to see you. And I shall, too."
"That's all?"
"I can't think of anything else. Can you?" When I didn't reply, he added, "If you want to talk between now and then, ring me. I'll be here."
Clearly he hadn't understood my question, and I wasn't up to saying, I mean, that's all you feel? All you're willing to say? To offer? I wasn't about to write the script for him. The other day, when he'd called me "darling," that was an accident, a slip, something I wasn't likely to hear again soon. "And I'll be here," I said.
"Good enough."
"Not quite."
"Sorry?"
"Nothing," I said, and I'm sure I hung up with him in a state of mild befuddlement. But it would pass and he would slide back to the state of profound befuddlement in which he ordinarily resided.
Within a minute, the phone rang again, and I let it go for four or five rings before answering. There was no one I wanted to speak to except Will. The last phone call he'd made was at ten o'clock four Wednesday nights before. I figured now that he'd gone out afterward to Millie's Place and spent the rest of the night with Crystal. And died after she left. But died how? A heart attack? A seizure? A handful of pills?
The phone call was from someone who had never called me on Sunday: the Eighth Deadly Sin. "How did you find me here?"
"You left a number on your answering machine."
"Are you serious?" I had no recollection of doing so, but with his prompting I remembered that late last night, I called my machine in New York and changed the message moments before falling asleep on Will's couch.
"I'm in my car on the L.I.E., heading back to the city," the Eighth Deadly said, "and I've got a book I want you to ghost. I just had brunch with her at the Maidstone Arms. Are you ready for this?"
"Ready as I'll ever be."
"The nanny who takes care of Bill and Melinda Gates's kids wants to quit and write a book. Tell the whole story. She's been on vacation in East Hampton for the last week."
"Don't people like that sign a contract that says they'll never write a book or sell the story to the National Enquirer?"
"Obviously there'll be a few details to work out. I put in a call to our lawyer. In the meantime, this woman has a story you wouldn't believe."
"You'd be surprised what I'd believe these days."
"You having a good time up there? Everyone talking about Evan Lambert and the Harvard girl who schtupped the wife and then him? That's a helluva story, but I'm not sure how long its legs are."
I hadn't said in my answering machine message why I'd gone to Swansea; I'd just given the phone number of the motel. But I still hoped for something closer to a condolence call than this.
"You're the first writer I thought of when I heard the nanny pitch her story."
"Why's that?"
"You're used to rubbing elbows with the celebrity genius types up on Swansea. I wouldn't think of you for Andre Agassi's life story, you know? Can you have lunch with me in the next few days?"
I told him then that I couldn't, and why, and I know the phone call was longer than he'd intended it to be, but by the end, I had an idea for a book of my own, though I wasn't ready to discuss it with the Eighth Deadly. Henderson came back to my room and remarked on the change in my demeanor-"You're almost smiling"-even before I began to explain.
When I finished, he said, matter-of-factly, as if he were my lawyer, "So you'll write both. You'll negotiate a two-book contract and be set for years. First you'll deliver the nanny, which will be a walk in the park, and then you'll write your story, which won't be. Isn't that what you're thinking?"
But I wasn't yet thinking that clearly, and I didn't want to be. I wanted to lie back on the chenille bedspread and not make any decisions. I'd been running for hours, for days, chasing phantoms, leads, lost dogs, my history, my hysteria, which derives from the Greek word for womb, and my husband, whose death might turn out to be another riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, but whose life was a more ordinary mix of contradictions, good intentions, bold gestures, compromises, and mistakes that it was too late to do anything about. When I used to compare him with Evan, there had been so many ways he came up short: Evans ambition, Evan's confidence, Evan's authority in the world, never mind the moral center, or amoral center, at the heart of it. Say what you will about Evan, he never stops believing in what he does, and succeeds in convincing a lot of other people-jurors and judges, for starters-that he's right. Will's authority was more hit-or-miss; and in the decades he was a spy and a CIA functionary, the line on the graph that mapped the conjunction of his convictions and those of the CIA split off sharply around 1968 and never met up again. But when he was at the helm of a sailboat, even the dinky runabout he could barely afford to keep running and moored, he was magnificent-as fine and sure of himself as Evan was when the NYPD showed up at his house and he improvised from start to finish. Will could do that on the water. He could do it in five or six languages in countries where he was not at all sure the United States ought to be mucking about. But closer to home-and at home-he often seemed lost, unmoored. He watched a lot of videos, ogled expensive sailboats on the Internet, got in touch with other sailors who needed crew to deliver yachts to Ibiza or Corfu, and occasionally went with them and came back feeling good about himself for three or four weeks.