A Bookmarked Death (3 page)

“A job doing what?” Surely not as his research assistant.

“I don’t know. My father’s always had a lot of people working for him.”

Why would an academic need a whole staff? But then I remembered his wealth and his archeological digs, He would need managers and people to do the legwork.

“The last I heard Will was in New York, in Spanish Harlem. He broke my father’s heart.”

It sounded as if Elisa had come down on the side of the Crosleys. I didn’t let myself think about Ethan’s heart. “Did Will know about the Southampton house?”

“Of course. Why wouldn’t he? We used to spend summers there. But if you’re suggesting that Will set the fire—I can’t imagine that. How would he even know they were out there so early?”

Would that have been so hard for him to find out? Just because they were estranged didn’t mean he wasn’t still emotionally involved, especially if they had rejected him. If he had gone looking for the Crosleys in Rhode Island and learned they were not there, wouldn’t it be logical to think next of their vacation homes in Barbados and Southampton?

I felt certain, based on nothing, that Will was involved. I imagined a young man banging on the Southampton house door, confronting the Crosleys, and demanding what he thought was financially due him. He could even have still had a key. If they had turned him away or threatened to call the police, he might have waited until later and set the fire in revenge. No, if he was there for money he could have gone back inside and taken what was valuable. Perhaps he had come out to the island with a gang from Spanish Harlem.

“Are you and Will close?”

“I think so. He was two years younger, but we were together a lot, our family was always traveling. But he says he hates them—he’ll probably be glad that they’re gone!” It was a wail as she was ambushed once more by the reality of what had happened.

I made soothing sounds until she could talk again. “Did your father keep a lot of artifacts around the house? Houses, I mean?”

“You think somebody wanted to break in and steal them? But why burn up my parents and the house afterward?” She was about to cry.

“I know. It doesn’t make sense,” I agreed quickly.

“Listen, I’m fading. I think I need a nap.”

“Of course you do, you’re exhausted.” I hesitated. “Do you have anything you can take?”

“You mean like sleeping pills? No, I’ll be fine.” She sounded as if being fine was not a happy prospect. “My friends are here and I have stuff to finish up. I’ll be okay.”

“What are you going to do after graduation?” It was tactless, but I had to know.

“I’ll made plans to stay on in the dorm for a while. They use it for summer session. Where else am I going to go? Unless Hannah wants to do something.”

“You could always stay with us.”

“Umm.”

“Anyway, I’ll talk to you tomorrow, Elisa.”

“Okay. And thanks for calling me Elisa. That’s who I am now.”

“I know.”

She hung up before I could tell her I loved her.

Chapter Four

T
HAT
NIGH
T
I could not fall asleep. I was haunted by images of Ethan and Sheila engulfed in fire, the horror they must have felt when they realized there was no escape. I saw the flames eating away the bedclothes as they cowered together and hoped that Elisa was not seeing the same images. But I did not even know where they had died. The newspaper, usually so obliging with details, had not said where their bodies had been found, whether they had collapsed on the stairs from smoke inhalation or been trapped in their bedroom. Why, if you were that wealthy, wouldn’t you have had the most sophisticated smoke alarms possible?

Something else was keeping me awake. I had promised Elisa that I would try to find out who set the fire. But lying in the dark my promise felt like what my father called vainglorious—making myself seem more important than I was, promising something I could not deliver. Was I so desperate for her to love me? The other times I had helped the police it was because I had been caught up in what was happening around me, privy to the kind of information that the authorities were not. I had known the people and what I thought they were capable of doing. This time I would be approaching the situation cold.

Just as I was finally drifting off to sleep, a noise from outside my window jerked me back to consciousness. A car door closing. Not slamming, just clicking shut. If my bedroom hadn’t been at the front of the house and the window open, the neighborhood silent as a photograph, I would have missed it. I glanced at the small travel clock on my nightstand and saw it was just after 2 a.m. Perhaps my next-door neighbors were returning late from their cabin upstate. Yet in the next moment I heard the unmistakable sound of my driveway gravel being crunched underfoot.

The idea that someone had come to set fire to
my
house grabbed and shook me like a toy in my cat’s mouth. Someone with a grudge against archeologists? Someone who had been after Ethan for stealing antiquities and was blaming Colin too? I pushed out of bed at that and raced to the window. The streetlight opposite shed a reassuring light over the still neighborhood. There were no cars in my driveway or parked in front of my house.

Raccoons. It had to be raccoons. Or deer, though they didn’t usually arrive in cars and generally came later to feast on the hostas and day lilies. But that didn’t mean they weren’t searching for food all year round. The car door and driveway noises were probably from somewhere up the street. I stood frozen at the window for several minutes. But when nothing seemed to move and I did not smell smoke, I went back to my bed and lay down.

Not that I could go back to sleep. My cats, Raj and Miss T, sensed my restlessness and kept bumping against me, trolling for attention. Raj, my tiny male Siamese, thrust his damp nose against my cheek, making me jump. During this next bout of wakefulness, I realized that at the least I needed to drive out to Southampton and see the house for myself. I needed to get a visceral feeling of what had happened.

It was probably important to be out there at the same hour as the fire had occurred. I lay there for a moment feeling the weight of both cats sleeping on my back and mourned my lost night’s sleep. Then I brought the clock close enough to read and saw that it was not even 4 a.m. No matter. I shook off the cats and pushed myself up.

I decided not to take the time to make coffee myself—I would pick up a large cup at Qwikjava—but I could not get away without feeding the animals. I made sure there was enough dry food in their dish for them to snack on during the day, then opened the back door. It was chilly enough to make me duck back inside for a jacket. The days when it would be mild enough to walk outside in a sweatshirt weren’t here yet.

T
HE
BENEFIT
OF
heading east on Long Island on a Monday morning was that traffic was light and mostly industrial. Contractors were setting up shop at the beautiful estates, trucks were bringing supplies to resorts and restaurants, refrigerated vans stuffed with fish were headed in the other direction, toward the city. The store windows I passed were gray as faded flannel, but the nurseries were alive with deliveries of azaleas in bloom and flats of red and orange impatiens.

I always forget how large Southampton is until I am actually there. Besides the village itself, which formerly had an art museum and still had a multitude of restaurants and galleries on Jobs Lane, there was a large and modern library where I attended book sales. There was the Shinnecock Indian Reservation, the Shinnecock Golf Club where the U.S. Open was sometimes held, and a college campus. It was not the kind of chummy village where everyone knew everyone else. Everyone did know where South Main Street was, though. It arrowed straight from the expensive shops down to the Atlantic Ocean.

In the increasing daylight, I drove slowly past mansions behind hedges, straining to see any that had been destroyed by fire. When I finally arrived, I saw the swaths of yellow caution tape first, stretched inelegantly across the driveway and tied around matching stone urns. I stopped the van and looked up at the house. I told myself that I might be any resident pausing to see what had happened. No one had to know that I was personally involved.

Yet even after seeing the photograph on the
Newsday
Web site, the reality shocked me. Despite the charred foundations, the beams that reached like black bones into the sky, the house was huge, an estate. It must have been beautiful once, a 1920s Southampton mansion that no expense had been spared in building. It was probably beyond repair, yet the center section remained. I wondered how that had happened. Had some kind of Molotov cocktail, some kind of firebomb, been tossed through an upstairs window?

Part of me wanted to just drive away, to let the police investigate in peace. Yet I was already out here . . . I put the van in gear and drove down the street until I came to a house whose windows were still shuttered, then pulled into the driveway far enough so I couldn’t be seen from the street. When I slipped out of the van I did not slam the door shut for fear of alerting anyone, and something about that reminded me of the sound I had heard in the night.

I walked back to the yellow caution tape. It was meant to keep gawkers off the property, but I reminded myself that I had a reason for being here. Still I looked up and down the sidewalk. No one was out walking and there were no headlights on the road. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to find, only that I needed to be here.

I ducked under the garland of plastic ribbon and started up the driveway, keeping on the grassy verge as much as I could to avoid crunching on pebbles. The smell of burning and cinders began to choke me. I stopped and stared at the shrubs beside the house, dusted in white ash as if from a freak blizzard. Chunks of debris lay on the ground as if a demolition crew had tossed them out of the windows.

I looked up. The windows on the second floor were blackened and as finely cracked as if they had been spiderwebbed for Halloween. I didn’t want to be there; Ethan and Sheila were dead, there was no changing that. The acrid odor scalded my throat like frat party whiskey, my sneakers were muddy from the ground where the grass ended. I was too intimidated to go deeper into the yard. I felt a sense of trespass at being at the place where Ethan and Sheila had died. It was as if I had an unfair advantage seeing their vulnerability without their wanting me to.

At the back of the driveway, beyond the house, was a building untouched by the fire, an enchanting miniature cottage. A guesthouse? Perhaps just a giant toolshed. I moved toward it, relieved and charmed, curious as to what was inside.

“You! Stop! Police! Stop right there!”

The voice was rude in the fresh new air, as harsh as if shouting obscenities over a baby’s crib.

I froze, my heart spiraling like a shot bird dropping to earth. When it came to rest, I whirled around, blinking at the flashlight beam that had me trapped. Shielding my eyes I could make out a young officer in khaki, with buzz-cut hair. Beyond him, at the end of the driveway, his sedan was flashing red and blue lights. A Southampton Town cop, not Suffolk County police. For some reason that calmed me a little.

Perhaps he was just passing by.

Yet he was staring at me, appalled, as if he had caught me holding a stolen television. “Didn’t you see the yellow tape?”

“Yes, but—”

“What are you
doing
here?” It was not a rhetorical question. I had nothing in my hands, no camera that I was taking photos with. It was too early in the morning for casual sightseers.

There was nothing to do but tell the truth. “Their daughter”—I gestured at the house—“is my daughter’s best friend. She’s up in Boston and I promised I would look around and tell her how bad the fire was. She’s already hysterical about losing her parents.”

I saw him trying to process that. “But you can’t just walk around here. You’re disturbing a crime scene!”

“CSI hasn’t been here already?”

He squinted at me. “I’ll need to see some ID.”

Damn.
But I pulled out my wallet and showed him my driver’s license, then watched as he looked from the photo to my face and back to the photo. He returned it to me without writing anything down. The last thing I wanted was to be associated with the fire in any way. What if the police came to interview me to find out what my interest was? What if . . . “I only wanted to let my daughter’s friend know how bad it was,” I pleaded. I looked grimly up at the charred ruin. “It’s worse than I thought.”

“They never had a chance,” he pronounced solemnly.

“How did the fire department even know about it? It’s so far back from the street and not a lot of people are out for the season yet.” It was not information I was entitled to know but I could see he needed to talk about the fire, the way people did after a trauma.

“They think that whoever set the fires threw something through the back porch window when they were leaving to trigger the burglar alarm. Either that or it just went off from the heat. We got here first, then called the fire department. But it was too late.”

“The paper said there was another fire around here recently?”

He moved closer to me, as if telling me a secret. “We think we know who’s responsible. It’s just a matter of proving it.” Then he straightened up formally. “You need to leave. Now.”

“Okay. Sure.”

He walked me back to the sidewalk. I turned in the opposite direction, toward town, as the whirling lights of his squad car splashed over me. Once he had driven away, I turned back to retrieve my van. Though I had planned to park on the street and watch for activity in the other houses, I knew I couldn’t do that now.

S
TARTING
THE
ENGINE
, I made a U-turn, and drove slowly back up to Montauk Highway. I remembered seeing a convenience store and found it easily. Time for breakfast. It was still not even 6 a.m. but I was feeling weak from lack of sleep.

I was at the counter paying for my coffee and corn muffin when I realized something I should have thought of immediately. “Are you open all night?” I asked the young black clerk in the red-and-white smock. She was pretty, with small, neat braids sprouting from her head.

“Uh-huh.” She twisted around to look at the clock behind her. “Just one more hour for me.”

“Are you busy, say around three or four?”

“In the morning? Naw. That’s when I get my work done.” She jerked a shoulder at the textbooks on a stool behind her. “Nothing happens before five. It’s always the same guys anyway, fishermen heading out, delivery guys starting up.”

“Were you here last night? Saturday night, I mean. Around one or two, say?”

“Ye-ss.” She stared at me, less sleepy now.

“Did anyone come in you didn’t know? Some young guys?”

This was beyond casual conversation. With my tangled hair and navy jacket, my face innocent of makeup, I did not look like anyone official. Unless I was some kind of undercover cop.

“No kids. A couple with two little girls who should have been in bed. Two older guys came in for coffee. No,” she corrected herself, “one large coffee, one beer.”

“Did they look like they were staying out here?”

She shrugged. “Could have been. One was dark, really good-looking, you know? Like that old-time movie star.”

Old-time? Douglas Fairbanks? Clark Gable?

“Omar Sharif I think his name is? I bet he used to be a knockout.”

Used to be?
“What was the other one like?”

“Younger. Geeky.” She gave a laugh. “They weren’t a
couple
or anything.”

Three men in fishermen’s vests, not yet shaved, came in and looked us over. “Hey, Steph,” one called. “Wanna bait my hook?”

She rolled her eyes at him, then laughed. “What passes for humor out here. Are you looking for someone special?”

“Not really.” I couldn’t think of any excuse to give her, so I didn’t. “Enjoy your morning off.”

There was no reason why Will Crosley would have stopped at the 7–Eleven, especially if he did not want to be seen. She had described the handsome man as dark, but also referred to him as older. Will couldn’t be any more than nineteen or twenty. Besides, if the fire was the work of a local arsonist, there was no reason to suspect him of being out here at all.