The Last Refuge (4 page)

Amanda was a little shy of forty and well organized. Her hair always looked freshly combed, though obviously unpermed and secretly on the brink of rebellion. Her olivy skin tone saved her from a genuine need for makeup, though she used some anyway. She had a set of green eyes with the hypnotic quality
that came from an excess of color and contrast. I rarely saw her up from her desk, but when she moved it was quick and young. It made me think of tennis shorts. Though I rarely saw them speak to each other, her marriage to Roy seemed to enclose her like a crystalline display case.

“Mr. Acquillo, your free-checking status is in dire jeopardy,” she said to me without looking up from her computer screen.

“I didn’t know I had any status to jeopardize.”

“Yes sir.” She tapped at her keyboard, having pulled up my accounts when she saw me walking across the parking lot. “Maintaining a minimum balance in the CheckPlus account affords you unlimited free checking.”

“So the bank covers all my checks.”

“Just the checks themselves, at a dime a pop. Not bad if you think about it.” She looked at me out of the tops of her eyes, waiting for me to make her decision official, which I always did.

“I can get it back up to the minimum. I got a check here.”

“I’m sure you’re getting great service on your investment account, but don’t forget we can handle that for you here as well.”

She began to type in the deposit information while I wrote out a check against the tattered remains of a money market account left over from my marriage.

My ex-wife used to try to manage my money. She was insulted when I wouldn’t let her. She saw it as an affront to her intelligence. It wasn’t, I just had a poor kid’s fear of losing everything if it drifted too far from
my immediate grasp. I stopped feeling that way long after this particular incision had been opened up in our relationship. Nowadays, I’d be more than happy to let her manage anything she wanted—she was naturally better at most of those things than me, even though she never got a chance to exercise her talents—but that’s just another of the lamentable ironies that entangle my life.

Roy came out of his office and pretended not to see me so he didn’t have to re-live my rejection. Amanda looked up at him neutrally as he passed by. She muttered something about picking up extra food for dinner, as if seeing him jarred a guilty conscience. I took Roy to be a guy who would care about the incidentals.

“Everything is as you’ve requested,” said Amanda as she swiveled the computer screen around so I could see. “The deposit will take a day to clear, then you’ll be okay as long as you don’t let things slip past the minimum.”

“I’ll be alert.”

She swiveled the monitor back around to wrap up the transaction. I vaguely remembered that, like her husband, she was a local, born and bred.

“Did you know Regina Broadhurst?” I asked out of the blue, enough to surprise myself as much as her.

She looked at me blankly, but nodded. “Yes I did, as a matter of fact. She just died.”

“Yeah, I know. I found her myself.”

Her shoulders dropped in sympathy. “I’m so sorry.”

“That’s okay. It’s just that I got myself into a situation where I have to talk to her nephew, who’s
supposed to be her only next of kin. You know if there’s anybody else?”

“I know very little about her. I heard of her death from the people at the Senior Center. She was a friend of my mother’s. That is, they knew each other. I don’t know if I’d say they were really friends. I think they worked together years ago.”

“Regina was sort of a hard drink.”

“She wasn’t very pleasant. Are you handling her affairs?”

“I didn’t mean to. I’m just the next-door neighbor. I don’t know, I got myself stuck with this, like I said. Just thought you might know about the nephew, Jimmy Maddox, since you’ve been out here all along.”

“Not really all along. I was away for quite a while. Like you,” she said, and then suddenly looked embarrassed, as if caught with stolen knowledge of my personal life.

“My mother, on the other hand,” she said quickly to cover the moment, “would have known, I’m sure. Only she’s gone, too. They spent time together at the Senior Center.”

“Sorry. What was her name?”

“It was only about a year ago. Julia. Julia Anselma.”

“Italiana. Va bene.”

“Battiston isn’t really as pretty, is it?” she said, this time embarrassed that she’d shared a private little bit of her own.

“No,” I admitted, “it isn’t.”

She scanned the room as if awakened to the intimate drift of the conversation. She sat up straight and tapped a few times on the computer keyboard, covering her tracks.

I got up to leave.

“If you want to know more about Regina,” she said without looking up, “you probably should stop over at the Senior Center. It’s quite a tradition with local people. They’ll probably know a lot more.”

“I’ll do that. Thanks for the information. Regards to Roy.”

She smiled a twisted little smile and nodded, looking a little unbalanced. I didn’t want to disturb her, but I seemed to be doing it anyway. So I smiled back, gently I hoped, not wanting her to be afraid of me or regretful that we’d talked. It only made her look more intently at her monitor.

The sharper angle of the autumn sun was rinsing away the remainder of summer’s color. Still, it was clear and the air did little to interfere with the light that shot down Main Street, careening off the worn Mercedes and Rolls Royces of the year-round rich, and the service vans and dented pickups that reclaimed the village off-season. I bought some flavored coffee and a croissant at the coffee place on the corner before driving back up to North Sea—avoiding eye contact with the tradesmen more embarrassed than me to be seen in a Summer People hangout.

In the mailbox was a bundle of death certificates and a letter naming me administrator of Regina Broadhurst’s estate, pursuant to a hearing by the Surrogate’s Court, which the Town attorney, Mel Goodfellow, circled in pen and noted was
pro forma
, so I didn’t have to show up. I was surprised and mildly impressed with Sullivan’s prompt action. He must have really wanted this thing off his back.

When I opened the door to let Eddie out the phone was ringing. I pushed the receiver into my ear with my shoulder so I could use both hands to dump a tray of ice into the ice bucket. It was Amanda Battiston.

“I’m sorry if I was short with you.”

“You weren’t short.”

“Roy gets really annoyed with me when I talk about my mother.”

“We were talking about Regina Broadhurst.”

“I said they were friends, but mother really didn’t like her. She called her That Woman.”

“Regina had that affect on people.”

“I know.”

“I’m sorry if I got you in trouble with Roy.”

“He doesn’t know you’re not an Aff-1.”

“Aff-1?”

“Top affluent account. Minimum seven-figure net worth.”

“Definitely not Afff-1.”

“He doesn’t like it when locals do well. But he likes their business.”

“I could ease his mind.”

“No. That’s all right. I just didn’t want you to think I was rude.”

“Some time maybe we could get a cup of coffee and talk about your mother and Regina. When you’re not worried about Roy looking over your shoulder.”

“I couldn’t do that.”

“I understand. Anything else you can tell me, just give me a call. You obviously got my number.”

“It’s on your account information. I hope you don’t mind.”

One of the few things I appreciated about Abby, my ex-wife, was she never felt the need to apologize for anything. She was often wrong, but rarely in doubt. It seemed like a habit with most women to get you to say that something that was clearly all right was, in fact, all right.

“Figure out a time when you can have that cup of coffee and you can make it up to me.”

“I suppose that would only be fair.”

“Okay,” I said, “call me when you can.”

“Okay.”

Eddie barked at me from the side door to let him in. I scratched his ears and gave him a large dog biscuit, the consummate joy of his life. He waited while I gathered up the ice bucket, a glass, a bottle of vodka and a pack of cigarettes, so the two of us could enjoy our favorite consumables out on the porch together. The Little Peconic was calm, a gray mineral mass flecked with scintillations. The far shore, a gray-green hump trimmed with huge sandy cliffs, hid partially in the coming mist. The pink
grandiflora
hydrangea at the edge of the lawn had finally succumbed to brown, and would stay that way until the spring buds pushed them off like organic litter. I built my first drink of the day and listened to the noisy complaint of seabirds and insect life, hard against an approaching winter and reluctant to pack it in. It felt like more than the season was priming for change. But unlike the life around me, I’d wait for it in silence, void of anticipation, reluctant only to rush the inevitable.

I first made love to Abby on a moldy pool table in the attic of a half-abandoned fraternity house on the Charles River. It was a time when fraternities were out of political favor, so the declining membership had consolidated down on the lower floors, leaving a large garret to the dust and rats and me. I was on a government scholarship to MIT. Abby was at Boston University. She lived in an apartment next door. At the time, sex was about all we had in common, though we rarely had time to notice. That would come later. We kept at it straight through my college career, which ended the year it started. It took ten years of night school to get my degree. I loved to learn, I just had trouble with authority. And money.

But that first night I wanted to live for a million years. Naked and wet, mostly drunk and seething with sexual insanity, we stood wrapped in the pool table cover and watched the lights of Cambridge fracture and reform on the surface of the river.

The walls of the attic room were lined with books. It was furnished with cracked and scuffed red leather chesterfields and a ratty, oversized oriental rug. I felt like a barbarian squatting between the marble pillars of fallen Rome. And incidentally, screwing one of its princesses.

Her full name was Abigail Adams Albright, which accurately reflected her family’s tirelessly vigilant social pretense. I think she might have been a brilliant woman if she’d given herself the chance. If she hadn’t been born just a few years too early into a family that was already a hundred years out of date. I admit with shame that I was awed by her family’s self-prepossession, by
the way they slouched comfortably within a social order presumably anointed by God. I married her partly because I thought old family poise and bone structure was something you could suck up through exposure, like sunshine.

Abby was a pretty girl when I met her, in a big-skulled, big-blond kind of way. As she aged, her skin and overall shape held up remarkably well, but her expression grew tight across her face until it formed a kind of mask that I used to think I could reach over and peel off her face.

I lived in that attic for two years after dropping out of school. Abby went on to graduate. I’ve actually forgotten what her degree was in. Maybe I never knew. I worked at whatever I could parlay into something I could parlay into a job in industrial design. That’s what I wanted to be—an industrial designer. I didn’t know what that was, but it seemed to fit. That I succeeded eventually means something, but I can’t tell what. I often wonder about it when I’m sitting on the porch looking out on the Peconic, when the bay water begins to look like the murky Charles and the buoys grow into the implacable towers of MIT.

Before I went to bed I woke up Sullivan. It was later than I’d realized. He was unhappy, but tried to hide it. I heard some feminine snarling in the background. Muffled but edgy. Sullivan spoke louder to cover it up.

“No, we didn’t do an autopsy on Regina Broadhurst. Old ladies croak. It’s standard procedure. They get old, they croak. Boom. I think an autopsy report would say, ‘one old lady, deader ’n shit.’ End of story.”

I nodded with understanding, even though he couldn’t see me.

“Did you see anything on her head when you pulled her out of the tub? You know, like a bruise or blood where it hit?”

“I don’t do the pulling. That’s the county coroner. You’ll have to ask her. Or the paramedics. I don’t even think the coroner got involved.”

“No other bruises or marks that you remember?”

“Jesus, you think I study week-old cadavers? I don’t even like to think about it. Yech. I’m sorry. I appreciate your help, but I gotta get some sleep. You oughta go to bed yourself.”

“Sorry. I didn’t realize how late it was.”

“That’s okay.”

“Just one thing.”

He sighed.

“Where’s her body?”

“Coolin’ at the coroner’s. Which is also standard procedure until some family member tells us what to do with it, or it gets past some statutory time limit. I don’t know what happens then.”

“The family could order an autopsy.”

“If the family turns up they get the body. It’s up to them from there. This is usually what happens. You want to know more about it, I’ll have to ask around.”