Until about four years ago, the estrangement hadn’t bothered her. She was too busy, and too happy, raising children to let her mind linger on alternatives long past. But when her last child started school, she found herself adrift, and she began to dwell on memories of how her mother had lived her life once her children had begun to detach from her: shopping excursions (fun because there was enough money to buy all but the most outrageously expensive items), long lunches with friends, tennis, cocktail parties, weekend trips. What had once seemed shallow and tedious now loomed in memory like paradise.
At first she tried to reestablish bonds with friends she hadn’t seen in ten years, but all commonality of interest and experience had long since vanished. Ellen talked gaily about the community, about local politics, about her job as a volunteer at the Southampton Hospital — all subjects about which her old friends, many of whom had been coming to Amity every summer for more than thirty years, knew little and cared less. They talked about New York politics, about art galleries and painters and writers they knew. Most conversations ended with feeble reminiscences and speculations about where old friends were now. Always there were pledges about calling each other and getting together again.
Once in a while she would try to make new friends among the summer people she hadn’t known, but the associations were forced and brief. They might have endured if Ellen had been less self-conscious about her house, about her husband’s job and how poorly it paid. She made sure that everyone she met knew she had started her Amity life on an entirely different plane. She was aware of what she was doing, and she hated herself for it, because in fact she loved her husband deeply, adored her children, and — for most of the year — was quite content with her lot… By now, she had largely given up active forays into the summer community, but the resentments and the longings lingered. She was unhappy, and she took out most of her unhappiness on her husband, a fact that both of them understood but only he could tolerate. She wished she could go into suspended animation for that quarter of every year.
Brody rolled over toward Ellen, raising himself up on one elbow and resting his head on his hand. With his other hand he flicked away a strand of hair that was tickling Ellen’s nose and making it twitch. He still had an erection from the remnants of his last dream, and he debated rousing her for a quick bit of sex. He knew she was a slow waker and her early morning moods were more cantankerous than romantic. Still, it would be fun. There had not been much sex in the Brody house-hold recently. There seldom was, when Ellen was in her summer moods.
Just then, Ellen’s mouth fell open and she began to snore. Brody felt himself turn off as quickly as if someone had poured ice water on his loins. He got up and went into the bathroom.
It was nearly 6.30 when Brody turned onto Old Mill Road. The sun was well up. It had lost its daybreak red and was turning from orange to bright yellow. The sky was cloudless.
Theoretically, there was a statutory right-of-way between each house, to permit public access to the beach, which could be privately owned only to the mean-high-water mark. But the rights-of-way between most houses were filled with garages or privet hedges. From the road there was no view of the beach. All Brody could see was the tops of the dunes. So every hundred yards or so he had to stop the squad car and walk up a driveway to reach a point from which he could survey the beach.
There was no sign of a body. All he saw on the broad, white expanse was a few pieces of driftwood, a can or two, and a yard-wide belt of seaweed and kelp pushed ashore by the southerly breeze. There was practically no surf, so if a body was floating on the surface it would have been visible. If there is a floater out there, Brody thought, it’s floating beneath the surface and I’ll never see it till it washes up.
By seven o’clock Brody had covered the whole beach along Old Mill and Scotch roads. The only thing he had seen that struck him as even remotely odd was a paper plate on which sat three scalloped orange rinds — a sign that the summer’s beach picnics were going to be more elegant than ever.
He drove back along Scotch Road, turned north toward town on Bayberry Lane, and arrived at the station house at 7.10.
Hendricks was finishing up his paper work when Brody walked in, and he looked disappointed that Brody wasn’t dragging a corpse behind him. “No luck, Chief?” he said.
“That depends on what you mean by luck, Leonard. If you mean did I find a body and if I didn’t isn’t it too bad, the answer to both questions is no. Is Kimble in yet?”
“No.”
“Well, I hope he isn’t asleep. That’d look just dandy, having him snoring away in a cop car when people start to do their shopping.”
“He’ll be here by eight,” said Hendricks. “He always is.”
Brody poured himself a cup of coffee, walked into his office, and began to flip through the morning papers — the early edition of the New York Daily News and the local paper, the Amity Leader, which came out weekly in the winter and daily in the summer.
Kimble arrived a little before eight, looking, aptly enough, as if he had been sleeping in his uniform, and he had a cup of coffee with Hendricks while they waited for the day shift to appear. Hendricks’ replacement came in at eight sharp, and Hendricks was putting on his leather flight jacket and getting ready to leave when Brody came out of his office.
“I’m going out to see Foote, Leonard,” Brody said. “You want to come along? You don’t have to, but I thought you might want to follow up on your… floater.” Brody smiled.
“Sure, I guess so,” said Hendricks. “I got nothing else going today, so I can sleep all afternoon.”
They drove out in Brody’s car. As they pulled into Foote’s driveway, Hendricks said, “What do you bet they’re all asleep? I remember last summer a woman called at one in the morning and asked if I could come out as early as possible the next morning because she thought some of her jewelry was missing. I offered to go right then, but she said no, she was going to bed. Anyway, I showed up at ten o’clock the next morning and she threw me out. ‘I didn’t mean this early,’ she says.”
“We’ll see,” said Brody. “If they’re really worried about this dame, they’ll be awake.”
The door opened almost before Brody had finished knocking. “We’ve been waiting to hear from you,” said a young man. “I’m Tom Cassidy. Did you find her?”
“I’m Chief Brody. This is Officer Hendricks. No, Mr. Cassidy, we didn’t find her. Can we come in?”
“Oh sure, sure. I’m sorry. Go on in the riving room. I’ll get the Footes.”
It took less than five minutes for Brody to learn everything he felt he needed to know. Then, as much to seem thorough as from any hope of learning anything useful, he asked to see the missing woman’s clothes. He was shown into the bedroom, and he looked through the clothing on the bed.
“She didn’t have a bathing suit with her?”
“No,” said Cassidy. “It’s in the top drawer over there. I looked.”
Brody paused for a moment, taking care with his words, then said, “Mr. Cassidy, I don’t mean to sound flip or anything, but has this Miss Watkins got a habit of doing strange things? I mean, like taking off in the middle of the night… or walking around naked?”
“Not that I know of,” said Cassidy. “But I really don’t know her too well.”