Nate frowned, shoulders hunched, squinting as he imagined this. “How’s your mother holding up?”
“As well as anyone could-you know how she is. But his death was a shock, his will a humiliation, his funeral an ordeal. My father took way more from her than money and her parents’ home.”
Nate cocked his head. “Never liked him much, did you?”
“I did. Then I stopped.”
“And never came back, not even to see your mother.”
“Oh, I saw her. Just not on this island. I work overseas, and it’s a long way from there to here.”
Nate turned, gazing at the flattened rock that covered much of the promontory’s surface. For a time he seemed lost in thought. Then he asked abruptly, “What’s on your mind, Adam?”
“My father’s death. I’m having trouble sorting out how he died and what his last few months were like. I’m hoping you can help me.”
In profile, Nate squinted. “About his state of mind, can’t tell you much. He pretty much went to ground.”
Beneath this reticence, Adam sensed, lay something more uncomfortable. Adopting a casual tone, he inquired, “When was the last time you saw him?”
Lips compressed, Nate faced him. “I’m not supposed to talk about that. Police business, they say, and no one else’s.”
Silent, Adam locked into his eyes. Turning away, Nate said, “Spooky how much you favor him.” Then he added slowly, “Guess there’s no harm in telling you what I already told that sergeant from the mainland. God knows it’s been keeping me up nights. Whatever else, Ben was your father.”
“He was that,” Adam agreed softly. “Whatever else.”
Nate folded his arms, gazing at the promontory. “I was walking along this trail,” he began. “Ben was standing here, not near the edge at all. That’s another reason the idea of him falling by accident bothers me so much-”
Ben was gazing at the sun as it declined, Nate recalled, his large frame so still that Nate feared that he might startle him. Then he said, “Hello, Ben.”
When at last Ben turned, Nate was taken aback. Before this he had always imagined his neighbor looking near invulnerable, even in his sleep. But this new Ben, thinner and older, seemed weary and unspeakably sad. Somberly, he said, “I can’t imagine not looking at this, Nate. Can you?”
He spoke these words with utter sincerity, Nate thought, an undertone of yearning. Uncomfortable, Nate decided to make a joke of it. “Our sunsets aren’t going anywhere just yet. It’ll be a few hundred years before global warming swamps us all.”
Ben’s smile was but a movement of lips. “That’s good, then. I’m pretty sure I won’t live that long.”
“Me neither,” Nate said amiably. “Enjoy the night, my friend.”
As was his habit, Nate walked another thirty minutes before turning back, the sea on one side, the edge of the woods on the other. By that time the sun had vanished, the trail so dark that Nate followed it by memory. As he neared the promontory, he thought he heard a thin cry. Like a bird or wild animal, he thought, except that its odd, tremulous note evoked human fear or laughter. It seemed less to stop than fade away, as though whatever species it came from had taken flight.
Nate stopped in his tracks, hair rising on the back of his neck. Then he began walking again. Rounding the bend, he saw a shadow on the promontory, caught by moonlight for a few swift seconds before it vanished into the shelter of the trees. All Nate knew was that it was human, either man or woman, though he shivered as if he had seen an apparition.
“I thought it might be Ben,” Nate said slowly. “I didn’t know he’d fallen, or that I was the last person to see him alive. Unless I was the second.”
Adam’s skin felt cold. “You must have heard him falling.”
In the fading twilight, Nate stared down at the rocks. “God, I hope not. But maybe so. Only thing I know for sure is I’ll hear that sound until I die.”
And so would he, Adam realized, if only in his imagining. “Makes me wish I’d stayed with him,” Nate went on, “not let Ben watch that sunset by himself. But it felt like what he wanted.” He paused, then added in a musing tone, “If it weren’t for your father, I wouldn’t have been there at all. Or standing here with you.”
“How do you mean?”
Nate faced him again. “When my youngest boy got to college, I had two ahead of him and a girl behind. So I put my place on the market. Hated to do it-my family had lived there since the 1850s, one son passing it to the next. But what choice did I have?” He shook his head in wonder. “Next thing I knew, Ben had set up a fund to cover my kids’ educations. I couldn’t accept it, I told him. ‘What else is money for?’ he answered. ‘I know how my own family struggled, lobstering like yours, and what it meant for me to go away to Yale. I’m doing this as much for me as them.’”
Stunned, Adam absorbed this. “I never knew that.”
“Neither of us talked about it-me out of pride, Ben out of kindness.” A film of tears shone in the old man’s eyes, and he placed a hand on Adam’s shoulder. “He wasn’t all bad, far from it. Maybe now you can hang on to that.”
After Nate left, Adam climbed down the stairway to the beach.
Ten years ago, he had descended this same stairway at night, Jenny waiting for him below. Knowing this, the climb downward had not bothered him. Now it did. The distance was too far to fall.
A thin cry in the night. Adam had heard men cry out, dying in pain or fear, the final darkness enveloping them. This must be what Nathan Wright had heard.
Now Adam heard only the echo of waves dying on rock and sand. Reaching the bottom, he rested a hand on the stone that had broken his father’s fall. If he could have chosen this man’s last moments, he wondered, would he have wished for this? He had no answer. It was one thing to have the right, another to have the heart.
He glanced around him, wondering if the white button from his father’s shirt was camouflaged by fragments of rock and shell. No way of telling now. He climbed the stairs again, its worn wood rough on his hand, wondering if Ben’s antagonist had come for him in this same way. But tonight he could imagine many things. Nearing the top, he half-expected a dark figure awaiting him on the promontory, his father or his killer.
There was no one, of course. Taking a small flashlight from his pocket, he studied the dirt near the promontory. Before the night Ben died here, rain had fallen, as it had today. In the soft dirt Adam found the partial imprints of Nate’s heavy boots, then his own walking shoes, as distinct from each other as the soles themselves. Nate and Ben must have left their prints here on the night his father died. And so, Adam believed now, had Teddy.
Somber, he considered his own footprint in the light. His weight had pushed up the dirt at its edge, half-exposing a buried pebble. No, he realized, not a pebble. Its edge was too round.
With thumb and forefinger, he removed his father’s button from the dirt.
Why, he wondered, had the police not found this? Mallory was hardly careless; neither, he felt sure, was the crime lab. What must have happened, Adam posited, was that his father’s murderer had ripped it from his shirt before one of them had stomped it beneath the muddy surface of the clay.
Pensive, he inspected the button, weighing his choices. Maybe he lost it in the fall, Mallory had said. If so, we’d expect to find it on the beach. But if we found it up here, it might suggest he lost it in a struggle. Problem is, we can’t find it at all. It leaves you wondering.
Adam no longer wondered.
For a moment, he considered throwing it into the darkness, replicating the trajectory of his father’s fall. A new thought stopped him-there might be fingerprints on this button, maybe damning to his brother, maybe not. Whatever the truth, Adam could not allow it to be found. Not until he knew more, or, perhaps, ever.
Adam put it in his pocket.
He knelt there for a time, considering the places Ben’s killer could have come from-the beach, the trail, or his mother and Teddy’s home. All directions remained possible except the one in which Nathan Wright had continued walking. But the murderer could easily have followed in Nate’s path, until he or she found Benjamin Blaine on the promontory, watching his last sunset.