The Mermaid Collector (4 page)

“Figures.” Buzz glanced to the window, a thought sparking. “Your brother waiting in the car?”

Tom pocketed the collection of keys. “He’s not here yet,” he said, his voice unnecessarily firm, as if he were trying to reassure himself more than Buzz Patterson. “He’ll be here soon.”

“Well, in case you’re wondering”—Buzz smoothed his beard—“I’m the only one in town who knows what happened. Why you’re here, I mean. How Frank knew you.”

“He didn’t know us,” Tom clarified sharply. “He didn’t know anything about us.”

“Of course not,” Buzz said quietly with regret. “I didn’t mean it that way. Hell, don’t pay any attention to me, son. I say all the wrong things all the time. My sister, Joan, used to say that I was like a garbage disposal in reverse, that I spit all the crap back out. Frank always thought that was funny. He used to try to mend things between me and
Joannie. Didn’t do much good. She and I never really saw eye to eye. Fought like cats and dogs from the time we were kids. You close to your brother, Tom?”

A loaded question if ever there was one, Tom thought, musing on his answer as he glanced to the window. “I try to be,” he said.

Had
to be, was more like it. Not a day went by that Tom didn’t wish his younger brother could have been outfitted with one of those bracelets they put on criminals to monitor their whereabouts. What Tom wouldn’t have given for such a device over the years when Dean would disappear for weeks at a time on one of his drinking binges, leaving Tom to scour the city for his whereabouts, only to have his younger brother, strung out and delirious, resurface without warning, promising not to vanish again.

“Frank said you’re a teacher. High school.”

“That’s right,” said Tom.

“Think you might try to find something around here?”

“That’s my intention, yes.”

“Wish you luck. It’s been a bad few years. Cutbacks and all that. Might have to travel to find something.”

“I’ll do what I have to do.”

When they were back outside, Tom tugged his cell phone out of his pocket, frowning down at the small screen.

“It’s real hit-or-miss with those things around here,” Buzz said. “And you might as well use it for a paperweight when you get down to the Point. You’d probably have more luck with a pair of cups and a string.”

Tess emerged from the woodshop just then. Tom watched her cross the driveway, watched her skip up her steps, locking eyes with him for a deliberate moment before she slipped inside her cottage.

“Doesn’t she make you nervous doing that?” Tom asked, staring at the watermelon door she’d closed behind her, a dried wreath tacked to it now crooked.

“Doing what?”

“Using those sharp tools without proper shoes. She could really hurt herself.”

Buzz sighed. “It’s not her toes I worry about,” he said. “For the record, she doesn’t know about you and your brother. I didn’t see the point. You’re here now, and I’ll leave all that up to you. Who you want knowing, who you don’t.”

“My brother doesn’t know,” Tom said, “and I want it to stay that way.”

“He doesn’t know what? About me?”

“About any of it,” Tom said evenly. “Dean doesn’t know who Frank is, who he
was
. To
us
. My brother hates any kind of charity. He sees it as pity. He wouldn’t have understood why I took the money at all, let alone as long as I did.”

Buzz frowned. “This is a small place, son. If you didn’t want him knowing, then maybe you should have stayed where you were.”

“That wasn’t possible. My brother has a hard time saying no to things that aren’t good for him.” Tom glanced around. “I’m hoping he could learn how to in a place like this.”

“Frank said he struggles with alcohol.”

“Frank had no idea what my brother struggles with. No idea whatsoever.”

Tom began back to his car. Buzz followed.

“Now, you sure you don’t want me to go down there with you?” Buzz asked. “CMP got your power on, but old houses can be finicky. Some are tough to warm up to. Old pipes, old wires. You never know what kind of dust you’ll kick up when you flick a switch. It’s been a while since anyone’s really lived in that house, you know.”

“Thank you, but I’ll be fine, Mr. Patterson.”

“Oh Jesus, call me Buzz. Everybody does.”

Tom tugged open the driver’s door and climbed in, yanked his seat belt across his chest, and snapped it locked.

Buzz glanced into the car’s backseat, seeing only a duffel bag and a few boxes of books. “If you need anything,” he said, “anything at all, you come right back, okay? Day or night. I promised Frank I’d look out for you.”

Tom turned on the engine.

Buzz leaned down. “For what it’s worth, he was sorry as hell for what happened, you know. He never forgave himself.”

Unmoved, Tom considered Buzz with narrowed eyes, saying only, “Thank you for the keys,” then pulling away.

TOM HAD ALMOST TOSSED FRANK’S
first letter, not intentionally, of course (though he did often wonder later what might have transpired differently if he had). It was just
that there had been so many sympathy cards in the weeks following the accident that Tom had had to pile them in a milk crate at the bottom of the stairs. When Dean had finally come home from the hospital and taken one look at the teeming collection, Tom had whisked the whole cancelled lot into the hall closet.

It was only timing that had prevented Frank’s letter from landing in that milk crate graveyard. By the time the tidy brown envelope had arrived among their mail, almost four months had passed since that frozen winter night. Even as Tom had opened the envelope, even as he’d unfolded the stiff typed pages and the ten one-hundred-dollar bills had spilled into his lap, so new and crisp he’d nearly cut his thumbs counting them, he’d known it wasn’t any ordinary condolence note.

His first thought was that it had been a joke, someone’s sick attempt at humor, but that was too unimaginable. Who would joke about being responsible for causing a car to swerve off a snowy road and fleeing the scene, knowing there were people injured—dying—inside? Who in his right mind would find amusement in crafting such a horrible story of culpability—and punctuate it with a thousand dollars in cash?

The letter promised more monthly offerings of the same amount, but Tom had doubted it. For that reason, he’d put the money away and not so much as touched it for almost a week, too unsure of what to do with it. After all, there was no return address, no name, just an initial,
F
,
which might not have even been accurate, and gave no indication of gender. The debate within Tom was dizzying. His first thought had been to burn the bills, to waste them, to give them no purpose whatsoever, and by doing so, he would rob this murderous benefactor of his or her attempt at restitution.

But then Dean’s pain pills had run dangerously low, and so Tom had untucked that envelope from his sock drawer and pulled out one of the stiff hundred-dollar bills. He’d taken the long way to the pharmacy, thinking that with the extra time he might still have a chance to change his mind, but he hadn’t. Laying down that money had filled him with a clammy feeling that had spread across his skin like a chill. And there had been that suspicious look in the pharmacist’s eyes as he’d rung up the prescription. Had Tom stolen the money? Was it counterfeit? How did an eighteen-year-old who’d previously paid for two months’ worth of meds in dimes and quarters now arrive with a hundred-dollar bill?

When Tom pocketed the change and left with the package, he knew there would be no going back. Like a junkie who thought he could use once and not get hooked, so Tom would make himself and Dean addicts to this blood money—assuming more money came, which Tom remained certain wouldn’t be the case. Until the following month, almost to the day, a second envelope, a second payment, arrived. And so the schedule began, and with it, the guilt. Dean could never know.

It would be several more months before their benefactor would identify himself as male, years before he’d sign his first name, which was Frank. And only in the year before his death would Frank resort to sending checks, and with them, the last name and address Tom had been denied for so long.

But of course, it had never been about blaming Frank Hammond. The truth was that for Tom there was a partnership in their guilt, his and Frank’s, that in their own ways, they had both been to blame for the accident, so it had never been a question of guilt. What had angered Tom, what still did and probably always would, was that Frank had not served any penance for his crime, while Tom’s life had been forever dismantled for his part. And worse, Tom’s receipt and spending of Frank’s blood money only served to further exonerate the man. But what choice had Tom had? Their parents, one a recently laid-off teacher, the other an out-of-work secretary, had fallen behind on their life insurance premiums in the months after their father’s dismissal, leaving the boys with nothing but debt. Pills and physical therapists cost money, as did the cigarettes and alcohol Dean administered liberally when he decided the painkillers weren’t working fast enough or lasting long enough.

But Frank had never known of Tom’s complicity in that frigid evening’s events, and that alone had, on many occasions, given Tom moments of great peace. Just to know that Frank Hammond believed himself solely responsible
for the death of their parents, the death of Dean’s Olympic dreams, sustained Tom on nights he would surely have stepped out on a busy street and been run over rather than face another night of looping if-onlys.
If only he’d never pushed Dean to take him to the party. If only their father had never answered the phone. If only Tom had asked Dean to look behind them.
Then maybe it would have been another car pushed off the side of the road, somebody else’s parents thrown into an embankment, somebody else’s lives shattered.

They were partners in crime, he and Frank, unwitting but bound forever.

And now Tom was here, in this empty house on an equally barren lot that resembled the deck of a great ship.

At least that was how it seemed to Tom as he rounded the last bend in the dirt road to the Point and the property came into view.

He pulled the Volvo in front of a vinyl-sided garage and climbed out to be greeted with a choppy breeze, sour with the tide. He was just glad to be on firm ground, to be there at last, even if it was like landing at the end of the world, he thought, looking gravely around the land. Still, he couldn’t think of a more fitting place to see the end of his twisted partnership with Frank Hammond.

The keeper’s house stood a ways beyond the edge of the driveway, settled in a sloping field, a modest clapboard building with a gambrel roof, its white paint aged to gray like old linen. Beyond it, far down the Point, he could see the shape of the lighthouse. Tom pushed through the wind
and crossed the stretch of overgrown grass toward the house, climbed the front stairs to the narrow covered porch, and jiggled the key in the lock until the door gave way. A breeze followed him inside the house, stirring up the staleness of the damp room like a broom. There wasn’t much to see—just a table with turned legs and two chairs in one corner; a doorway leading to a kitchen; white plaster walls, yellowed like old paper; bare wood floors rubbed dull in places; a few windows with views of the sea, framed by lace curtains heavy with dust.

You really went all out for us, didn’t you, Frank?

Tom moved to the center of the room, taking it all in—the yawning cracks, the water stains like dripped coffee across the plaster ceiling. He crossed to the fireplace, dragged his fingers along the edge of the painted mantel, rolls of dust falling over the side. He made his way to the windows, parting the curtains to look through the milky glass, and there he saw the tower in full. It stood at the end of a weathered footbridge, rising up from its granite base to the top of the lantern room. It had to be thirty feet high, Tom guessed, though it looked smaller than he’d imagined it, or maybe it was simply dwarfed without a beam. Frank had written that the coast guard had decommissioned it in the thirties and built a new one up the road in Port Chester.

What a long walk it must have been for a keeper, Tom thought. The keeper would have trudged through that barren stretch of grass twice a day, sometimes more, the wind, or maybe snow, needling his skin. Tom had read of
lighthouse keepers as a boy after visiting a tower on the banks of Lake Michigan. He’d been awed at the great weight of responsibility they undertook, their mission as both tenders and rescuers, seeing nature at her most treacherous and trying to intercede—and always under the sweep of that lamp.

What man didn’t wish for a guiding light on the horizon of his life, a flash to signal danger or safety? Living next to a lighthouse that had no beam seemed ironic to him.

Tom let the curtain drop and turned for the stairs. The second floor was divided into four small rooms, each stifling with the warm smell of mildew and trapped tide. He moved to one window, pushed the curtains down their rusted pressure rod, and tugged up the sash, letting in a cool breeze that smelled of rain and seaweed. There wasn’t much up here, either. Each room had only a single bed and a small dresser topped with a sturdy lamp, its pleated shade as yellowed as the walls.

Returning downstairs, he came into the kitchen and flipped a wall switch, bathing the stark room in a flat greenish light that flickered a moment, then stilled. It was just as bleak, with a range, a woodstove, an old refrigerator, countertops in speckled linoleum. The tap coughed and sputtered, running brown, then clear. Relief coursed through him.

He unpacked the car of his bag and his two boxes of treasured books. Then he opened a can of chicken soup and brought it to a gentle boil on the stove, drinking it from
a mug at a table with a broken-off corner that he just knew he’d spend the next however many months catching his sleeve on.

He looked around at their new home, their new life.

Their one last chance after so many last chances.

LYDIA HARRIS HAD ALWAYS BEEN
terrified of the water. For as long as she could remember, the very smell of salt filled her with fear.