The plane touched down in Plumper Sound in the late afternoon and taxied in to the marina. Harris found himself on the familiar quay, hefting his backpack as he had so many times before, heading up the road that wound around the cove to the place where it all began.
When he got to the B&B, Harris realized he hadn’t even considered the possibility that the place might have been sold. But the leaf-strewn driveway and overgrown orchard told a different story. And approaching the front door he felt a penetrating familiarity, like nothing had changed for the ritual sustained at that dining room table he could see through the glass, at that porch railing there, where his hand had rested during Purma’s judgment.
Harris, cheer up. I predict you end up with a minivan and lots of money.
The path to the studio was overgrown, but Harris picked his way down through the orchard. At the door he pulled on work gloves and punched through the glass pane above the knob. Harris inside, and sitting now in the shadows at the back of the room to wait. He could see where the ferry would come in, the slice of road where Murch would shortly appear. He closed his eyes and dozed, jolting awake when the ferry thrummed into view, growing in Harris’s binoculars until it reached the wharf, disgorging cars, among them a single black Mercedes.
Harris watched as Murch’s car pulled onto the road at a confident speed. Murch charged up, filled with his plan. And there was a tight and lean feeling gripping Harris too just then, in his gut and his groin. Bring it on.
Five minutes later Murch was in the drive. Tires on gravel. Parking brake. Door slam. Murch took in the view and Harris imagined the same memories spilling: Shanny, Roen, Purma and her Pall Malls. But he didn’t come directly down through the orchard. He went to the big house first, knocking tentatively, then louder. Then trying keys and entering. And staying for over an hour as the shadows stretched. Searching, Harris concluded from the glint of his flashlight beamed into the corners of rooms, floor by floor until it winked from the windows of the basement.
There followed silence, during which Harris imagined Murch taking a seat, running the numbers, wondering if Roen had lied or if Jimmy had long ago collected the money or if there was some other explanation entirely.
Murch looking up slowly, eyes drifting down the orchard.
The house lights went out. Harris heard the front door slam again, long strides coming down through the grass. Harris’s heart was pounding in his chest. And there was Murch, looming outside the glass, his light on the door handle, on the broken glass, but not finding Harris who surged forward and flung open the door, beaming his own flashlight directly into Murch’s eyes.
Complete surprise, achieved. A spectacular moment. Murch’s arm rose in slow motion, his flashlight pirouetting into space. His mouth was open and contorted, no sound coming out. And all this while stumbling rearward toward the low porch rail which upended him into the long grass below.
Harris might have laughed had Murch not been up so quickly. Out of the grass and vaulting the stairs, arms flailing. Harris was no fighter and had the injuries to prove it. But he kept away and finally landed a slapping punch to Murch’s nose that made him bleed.
“Stop,” Harris said. “Murch. Fuck.”
And Murch did stop, hands to his face, blood coming through, breathing in and out in ragged gasps. “You fucking prick,” he said. “You motherfucking cock-sucking prick. What are you doing here?”
“I’m not the one who lifted those keys.”
“We were supposed to take something, moron.”
“And come right here?”
Murch raised himself to his full height, face twisted, lips quivering. “Go fuck yourself! You came right here too!”
“Roen dying got me thinking,” Harris said. “I wanted to say goodbye.”
“Fucking liar.”
Long pause. Then Murch pushed past Harris and went into the studio, grabbed a chair, and sat. Harris followed him slowly, did the same. And they sat for several minutes in the darkness, nothing but the sound of slowing breath.
“That last night here,” Murch said, finally. “Shanny talking about lawyers. And Roen went off about a dealer hiding money somewhere.”
“So you looked.”
“You didn’t?”
“Not in the house,” Harris said.
Murch looked up sharply.
It took them five minutes, less. Crawling around on hands and knees. A recessed brass handle under the corner of a faded Persian carpet. An old key on a guitar-shaped fob. The door swung up to reveal a ladder down to a cellar just high enough to stand. Concrete walls. Evidence of industry. A low wooden bench with tools, a vacuum packer and bags. Felt markers and a logbook with entries. A slim brown briefcase with gold latches. Plastic storage tubs, neatly stacked.
“Holy shit,” Murch said, after climbing down first. Harris sat on the ladder’s lowest rung and watched him haul down a tub, which thumped hollow as it hit the ground. Empty. And the next one too. The next. Twelve in all. Not a single shrink-wrapped dollar to be found.
Harris slumped on the ladder, shoulders rounded, face slack. Murch was sweating from his labors, lips in a frustrated snarl, eyes flitting around the room and finding the briefcase. Locked. But he did not hesitate. He smashed the latches open with a hammer taken from among the tools. He flung it open on the bench. Inside: a pouch of weed, a wad of bills tied with an elastic band, a pistol which Murch took in his hand, opening and closing his fingers around the grip, eyes narrow.
“Roen, Roen,” he whispered, leveling the pistol, then pivoting slowly until it pointed at Harris’s chest.
There was a long pause during which Harris felt his pulse hammering in his ears.
“That summer,” Murch said, at last. “Ask me if I fucked Shanny.”
“Murch,” Harris replied, sweat beading on his forehead and falling into his eyes.
“Ask me!”
“All right!” Harris said. “All right. Goddamn. Did you fuck Shanny?”
The moment stretched. Murch’s arm was trembling. “Nah,” he eventually said. “Roen did.”
Then he lowered his arm and laughed. And Harris tried to join him but couldn’t, thinking only of Roen’s body on that bed, blood spatters, cold dead and laughing.
The bills were hundreds. Counted and divided, barely two grand each.
6
They didn’t talk on the ferry the next morning. Murch disappeared into the Seawest Lounge without a word. At the terminal on arrival, Harris didn’t join him on the car deck, just walked off and bussed into town. Same strewn apartment. Same brewing storm clouds. At his computer, he looked at those last paragraphs he’d typed, what seemed like months before.
You know it’s real when it ends in blood.
Sacred violence.
Fifteen years and a gun leveled across an empty cellar. The two droogies invoked the third. And that had always been an unstable arrangement.
Harris held off until three p.m. before having a beer. He made it to five o’clock before heading over to Chianti’s, measuring his mood and finding that despite all that had happened, he was feeling pretty good, a rare flame flickering within. Harris felt the onset of writing. And it cheered him. So he’d fucked up his marriage and was neither rich nor famous. But he was still a writer. World’s most coveted jobs... Up there with porn star. So he had no memento from Roen’s apartment. But he had a story. And the bar door opened just then, someone entering at that exact and auspicious moment.