that was it, a strict pecking order, everything had to pass through Mary Calder, President of the LVIS. She was leaning forward in her chair, one elbow on the desk, the fingers of her right hand tugging at her sandy locks. In her other hand she held a phone receiver pressed to her ear.
‘Yes, yes, I understand,’ she said irritably. ‘But the fair is only three weeks off and you still haven’t committed.’
The LVIS annual summer fair, hence all the activity, thought Hollis, relieved that they didn’t always function at such a shaming pace.
Mary glanced up at him (on reading his thoughts? He wouldn’t put it past her). Her pale blue eyes registered his presence and she smiled. This threw Hollis. She had never smiled at him. In fact, she had only ever scowled at him in the past, usually when she was berating him for the mortal danger posed to village residents by speeding motorists, as if somehow he were personally to blame.
In fairness to Mary, accidents were an increasingly common occurrence, and it was little more than a year since one young resident had indeed lost her life, her coltish body shattered by a motor car, the impact so violent that she’d been thrown twenty feet through the air into the hedge beyond the verge.
The incident had occurred a few weeks before his arrival in East Hampton, but he could still see the photo in the file – Lizzie Jencks hanging there in the hawthorn like some grisly scarecrow. The driver had stopped, scarring the surface of the dirt-grade road, only to drive on, his identity destined to remain a mystery, as would the reason a fifteen-year-old girl was out walking a country road in the dead of night.
Mary rounded off the telephone conversation, the tone of her voice making it patently clear to the person on the other end of the line that their life wouldn’t be worth living should they let her down. She hung up and made her way across the room towards Hollis.
He knew her to be in her mid-thirties, almost five years older than he, but she displayed fewer visible signs of encroaching middle age. She was tall, slender, healthy-looking to a fault, her tanned and freckled face, devoid of make-up, witness to an active life spent outdoors. He had often seen her striding out along the wooded lanes north of town, sinewy calves protruding from clumpy hiking boots, a small canvas knapsack on her back.
‘You must think me a dreadful harpy.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Always complaining, always after something. You only ever see me at my worst.’
‘I’ll take your word for it,’ he said with a wry smile.
Christ, thought Hollis, I’m flirting with her, stop flirting with her.
Mary cocked her head slightly, eyes narrowing, taking his measure. Hollis squirmed under her gaze; he had been way too familiar.
‘Oh, you don’t need to do that,’ she said. ‘Ask around, you’ll see I’m not such a terrible old hag.’ Hollis’ brain was racing too fast to fathom the implications of the last comment, so he searched for a way to move the conversation on.
‘Can I have a word alone?’
‘Yes, you may,’ replied Mary, stressing the ‘may’ to correct his grammar. She paused before continuing. ‘Damn,’ she said, ‘you’ll never believe me now.’
Hollis watched her closely as she flipped through the photographs of the dead girl and knew immediately that he had just gotten a positive identification. They were standing in the shaded garden at the back of the building. A small fountain played nearby, humidifying the air around them. A climbing rose, loosely wired to a trellis, strained under the weight of its flowers. Birds chirped merrily and the wind lapped at the leaves of a tall birch tree. It was a tranquil spot, quite at odds with the expression on Mary’s face.
Hollis was intrigued. From her very first glance she had clearly recognized the girl, but she insisted on viewing all four photographs, taking her time as she did so. When she was finished, she handed them back.
‘Lillian Wallace. Her family has a house on Further Lane.’ Only now did she look Hollis in the eye.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
Mary accompanied him around the side of the building to the street. She folded her arms across her midriff as if chilled by the eighty-five-degree heat. ‘She loved the ocean. I sometimes saw her there, down at the beach, in the evening when I was walking the dog. She liked to swim there.’
Strange, somehow she didn’t seem like a woman who owned a dog. What would it be? Something devoted and fiercely loyal – a retriever, maybe, or a labrador.
‘She was a good swimmer?’ he asked.
‘Not good enough, it seems.’
‘I appreciate it,’ he said, holding up the envelope. Mary watched him leave.
‘I was sorry to hear about your wife,’ she called after him. Turning back, he groped for something to say. In the end he simply nodded then carried on his way.
Returning to the patrol car, he found a note from Abel on the driver’s seat: Dinner tonight, 7:30. Don’t worry – I’m cooking!
Hollis smiled, fired the engine and pulled away.
The length of the yew hedge that flanked the entrance gates of the Wallace property on Further Lane gave some indication of the scale of the plot, close on a hundred yards wide, while the height of the hedge concealed all else from prying eyes. The white wooden gates, discreet but imposing, were open and Hollis guided the patrol car through them, slowing only to read the name painted in neat black capitals on a board – Oceanview – proof that wealth and imagination didn’t always make for natural bedfellows. All the properties on Further Lane gave directly on to the ocean at the rear.
He always found it strange when he entered the colony, this narrow belt of oceanfront the wealthy had claimed as their own. A mile to the south of Main Street, it was in East Hampton, but not of it. There were no stores, no filling stations, no bars or boarding houses. In fact, there was almost no trade whatsoever, nothing that might remind the residents of how they had amassed their fortunes. There were simply stretches of half-glimpsed residential grandeur, hedged and fenced, pegged out and parceled off.
Hollis had heard that some purchasers would happily pay too much for a house, inflating the value of surrounding real estate, thereby ensuring that the diminishing number of vacant plots would only ever be occupied by those of their kind. Maybe it was just rumor, but he somehow doubted it. There was a chilling simplicity to both the logic and the formula.
All you needed was the money, and for those with less than others there were alternatives – the roads once, twice, three times removed from the waterfront avenues that fronted the ocean and skirted the shores of Georgica Pond.
On the map, Georgica Pond always reminded him of a startled marsupial settled on its haunches, its upturned snout, pointed ears, forelegs and tail formed by the larger creeks and coves which ran into the main body of water. At over a mile and a half in length from top to toe, ‘pond’ was something of a misnomer. It extended from the highway to the ocean, effectively demarcating East Hampton from Wainscott and the other communities further west.
Once open to the sea, a vicious hurricane had ripped through the area in 1938, and in a few brief hours scooped up thousands of tons of sand from the ocean bed, plugging the broad tidal gut as nonchalantly
