Further Lane (28 page)

Royal was again vibrant, even playful, relieved to have told his story to someone.

“That's for me to know and a reporter like you to find out. Go home now while you still can. We can discuss this after the storm. When the hurricane has passed and if by any chance we're all still alive…”

I started to get up but Alix was having none of it.

“But that simply isn't good enough, Mr. Warrender. I've been dispatched here specifically to reclaim a manuscript Random House has paid royally for.”

“… and which I have and for now, at least, am going to hang onto.”

“Rubbish!” Alix said firmly. “Even Communist China is at last coming around to recognizing the protection of an individual's rights to intellectual property. North Korea is said to have been considering similar concessions. Can a future chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank do less?”

“Can and will.” Warrender seemed to be enjoying this, rallying swiftly back and forth across an argumentative net with a beautiful young woman. Some of the color was back in his face.

“And when I report to Mr. Harry Evans the gist of what you've just told us. Do you believe he'll simply write off a substantial investment in advance royalties to say nothing of the millions a book like this could conceivably earn, and not consult with eminent counsel?”

Warrender looked up at me.

“Beecher, will you please take her home before I suffer another cardiac and expire right here on the spot?”

I had my own need for the disk and my own argument to make. That all I had to do was to phone Tom Knowles and inform him the great Royal Warrender was an admitted burglar. But with the rain slashing against windows and the wind rising to a screech, I thought we'd better put it all off for tonight. After all, he hadn't flatly refused; said he was going to hang onto the damned thing “for now.” Besides, if he hadn't destroyed or erased Hannah's story already, was he likely to do so now? Especially as there was nothing in there damaging to him.

“Okay, Alix. We'll talk again to Mr. Warrender after the storm. When he's slept on it and is feeling better.”

“But…”

My God, she was stubborn. I was liking her better all the time.

I took her arm and as we started to go, Warrender had one more request. “Lady Alix, would you be so kind as to go back into the kitchen and turn off the stove. We never did have that coffee and I shouldn't like to burn the house down before giving our hurricane its turn at bat.”

“Of course, Mr. Warrender,” she said as if there'd never been an argument. “What a goose I am.”

Alix and I battled our way through the rain and wind to the Blazer and drove home, dodging a falling tree at one point, and driving up on the shoulder to avoid others already down. Other than talking about the storm and the usual conversation, two things were bothering her.

“What two things?”

“How you knew precisely how many characters were on Hannah's laptop when you've been claiming you hadn't the foggiest where the manuscript is?” She sounded pretty sore about it.

“Police sources. They examined the computer and found stuff had been erased. I had no idea what the manuscript said or where it was, just that at one time it comprised 180,000 characters.”

“Oh, all right.” She was grudging but she seemed to be accepting my story.

“And the other thing?” I asked.

“You know, of course, Beecher, what Mr. Warrender told us.”

“Sure, that he stole the manuscript and was relieved to learn that despite everything Hannah hadn't trashed him and that you and I could go to hell.”

“No, I mean besides that. He was telling us that Claire Cutting is his child.”

It was some night. And it was only starting.

THIRTY

The pond came out of its banks and there must be a thousand trees down …

I still don't know how either of us got to sleep at all but we did. The last thing I remember was the gatehouse shaking as if whatever held it to the foundations had come loose, the very timbers creaking and groaning, sheets of water whipping against and over the windows. Just what kind of beating would mere glass take before imploding inward on us, I wondered. Was the surf by now well up in among the dunes and headed this way, which old shade trees were already down and which would fall next, and did my father's great old house still stand?

It was after four when Alix woke me.

“Look, Beecher, up there. Stars! You can see them as the clouds race past.”

She was right. How bright with promise they were against the night. The hurricane was dying. Or nearly so. By five I gave up trying to sleep and got up. Off to the east, just south of Montauk, a full sun came up at dawn in a rapidly clearing sky scrubbed clean by the storm. The gray ocean still boiled in fury but here at the house the wind had dropped off to mere gale force, what seemed by contrast a preternatural calm. The house stood though you could not say that for many of the great trees. There was no power but the portable radio in the kitchen filled us in. The hurricane had skirted the East End of Long Island before roaring across Martha's Vineyard and the Cape and was northeast of us now, intent on battering Maine and the Canadian Maritimes. All up and down the eastern seacoast there was enormous damage but only two dozen dead. We were fortunate, the experts said. We got lucky this time.

Alix was attempting yet again to brew coffee. And not greatly successful at it.

“The electricity's off, darling.”

“Oh. I thought you might have dry cell batteries or something else terribly clever.”

For once in the morning, she was dressed. We'd both gone to bed that way, right down to sneakers and topsiders just in case we'd had to get out during the night with broken glass underfoot. I was starting to realize I preferred her naked when, as if she read minds, she began to strip. “What?” I started to ask, when she cut me off. “I hope the shower works. I'm grungy.” She was just about naked when there was a honk outside. Jesse Maine in his pickup.

“The roads is hell, Beecher. I drove a good bit of the way along the beach. You oughta see Georgica. The pond came out of its banks and there must be a thousand big trees down. That Mr. Perelman will be raising hell and suing somebody, you can be damned sure.”

Alix had dashed away when Jesse came into the kitchen and would shortly return in that tie silk robe of hers.

Jesse looked at her in that way of his, open and frankly lascivious, saying, “My, my,” admiringly and with the worldliness of a man who'd had four wives, and I remembered what he'd told me earlier, how I ought to consider tying in with this girl.

He was right, I suspected, but not wanting anyone—even Jesse who'd been well and truly married and understood the drill—living my life for me, I just grunted and went about checking out the gatehouse. One broken window in the bathroom had let in some rainwater but it was already drying on the tiles. My dad's house lost some shingles and one of the chimneys. But except for some fine old trees down and broken limbs everywhere, that was it. We'd been lucky, as the experts said, damned lucky. Unlike Ron Perelman, I wasn't in the mood to sue anyone. Especially not with Alix Dumaven here. I recruited Jesse to the cause and we began calling on houses along Further Lane. Maybe someone was worse off than we and we might help.

Some houses were shuttered, locked, and empty. Those folks had gotten out and I didn't worry about them. If they had damage, it wasn't going to go away. Miz Phoebe was still at her station. The maid came to the door.

“I hope this is important because she ain't in a mood for trivialities. I never heard her curse so.”

Principal among Phoebe's plaints, that day the Sally Jessy show was scheduled to have on yet another of the O.J. trial lawyers, latest one out with his own book about those farcical legal follies.

“I never miss one with Dershowitz. Or that Darden fellow. Or Shapiro. I can take Marcia Clark or leave her. But the others, I love to hear 'em lie. And now they say we won't have television until maybe tomorrow. If the cable's buried underground, why can't I have my talk shows?” She was also concerned we might be confronted right here in East Hampton by looters. “Just mind you, what happened in Los Angeles when they acquitted those cops of beating up that poor man. Though why anyone would go into a store and come out carrying a refrigerator, I hardly know.…”

Like Mr. Perelman, she was in a mood to sue someone.

We went past Claire's house, stopping at the head of the drive so as not to give her an excuse to chase us off again. The house looked okay and except for all the trees down, so did the property. Hannah sure would have been sore about what the wind had done to her roses along the fence, though. After that, we moved on to Warrender's, Jesse in his pickup and Alix and me in the blazer. We had to leave the cars on Further Lane and walk to his house, there were so many fallen trees, and big ones, lying across Royal's long gravel drive. Once again no one came to the door at my knock and I shoved it open.

We found Warrender lying facedown in the great parlor that looked out through rows of picture windows onto the beach and surf and the endless Atlantic beyond.

Alix, who for obscure reasons seemed to understand such things, moved without an instant's delay to kneel by him with her face close to his and then with her ear upon his chest. Whatever it was she heard or didn't hear, she set to immediately with a vigorous and apparently competent mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. After a few moments, she looked up, face flushed and breathing hard but marginally pleased. “He's alive,” she said. But that was about the extent of it. There was no power in the house and the phone, when we tried it, was dead. Jesse went out to the pickup for his cell phone and got through to Southampton Hospital. No, they couldn't send an ambulance, not with the injuries they were handling locally. If we could get him there the E.R. was operating on a generator. No, they couldn't send a chopper. They were all out of choppers on other chores and errands and bringing in casualties. Lingering winds from the tail of the storm, in any event, made flying chancy.

Is there another hospital? Alix asked. When I said no, Jesse contradicted me. “There's Mattituck. On the North Fork. Riverhead's miles west of that but bigger. If we can get up to Three Mile Harbor and borrow a boat, we can get him over there to one of them in a lot less time than driving along the beach to Southampton.”

His own boat was at the reservation twelve miles away and I had nothing but a canoe in the garage, and this was hardly canoeing weather, not with a heart attack victim to be transported, and who knew what we were going to find at the marina. But it seemed worth a try so we carried Royal outside and lay him down on a blanket in the bed of Jesse's pickup and covered him with another. “I'll ride in there with him,” Alix said.

“The hell you will—” I began.

“Just shut up, Beecher. I've trained at Saint Godolph's as a nurses' aide. Let's go, Jesse.”

“Yes, ma'am, Your Ladyship,” Jesse said, laughing out loud despite everything, a lot like he used to laugh at me when we played ball.

Out the Three Mile Harbor Road you got an idea of what the hurricane did to the back country. It was some mess. Trees mostly and telephone poles and power lines. They don't bury them up there the way they do on Further Lane, you know. At the marina boats, some of them big ones, forty-six-foot Bertrams and such, were tossed about and smashed like things in a children's toy box. The first lugubrious sailors were there before us, observing the damage, with a few of them angry and mystified that their boats, apparently so snugly secured only twenty-four hours earlier, had entirely vanished. The small harbor was covered with floating debris that had once been a grand little pleasure boat fleet.

“Hey,” Jesse called, “here's one looks okay.”

Alix was still up there in the pickup with Warrender. “He's breathing,” she reported, “and that's all I can say.” I joined Jesse on one of the spindly docks that somehow had ridden out the storm and at the end of which a white fishing boat, a twenty-foot Shamrock, was still securely tethered.

“Richard Ryan's,” Jesse said. “That Richard, he's a man knows how to secure a boat, he does.”

He was on board and already tinkering with the inboard engine, trying to figure out the best way to hot-wire it.

“Maybe you ought to call Richard on your cell phone first,” I offered.

“Time is of the goddamned essence, Beech,” he replied, and kept right on tinkering until the engine coughed a few times and began to hum. Jesse was awfully good with machinery, handy with almost anything, but he kept getting in trouble. Hot-wiring someone else's boat was not looked upon at Three Mile Harbor as a very neighborly act but, as Jesse said, Royal Warrender didn't have the luxury of time.

There was a stiff chop but nothing worse, and with Jesse up forward warning of wreckage ahead in the water, I helmed Richard's boat while Alix cradled Warrender's head in her lap and sort of cooed to him soothingly where he lay on the blanketed deck. I don't believe Royal heard a bit of it but she had an awfully nice lap and she was really fine at cooing as well. When we got past the breakwater and swung west into Gardiners Bay, a much bigger body of water, it was more open and we got real waves now and some pretty good swells. Too big a sea, Jesse and I agreed, to make our way straight across Peconic Bay, not with this small a boat and with Warrender so bad. So we altered course to swing due west, skirting the shore, and making our way to Southampton by water rather than by road. At least the wind was going down fast and we made good time passing Shelter Island to starboard. There were choppers up now buzzing overhead and the sun beat down strong out of a cloudless sky. When it was still blowing it was as if the hurricane was going to last forever; now that it was over, you wondered at how quickly it had gone.