He pumped his legs as hard as he could. His calves and thighs were already screaming in pain when he’d reached his own house, having ridden from the ferry as quickly as he could. It had been more than twenty years since Joe had spent any time on a bicycle. Once he got his driver’s license, the two-wheeler stayed in the back of his parents’ garage. He’d never been a recreational cyclist, although had he been, Garrett Island was heaven. Thousands of tourists came every summer with bicycles strapped to the roof of their cars, or rented them from numerous outlets throughout the island.
It took him ten minutes to reach the street where Sandra Montrose lived with Archie and Katie. He cut right across the front lawn, hopping off the bike steps from the house. He rang the bell, and when no one answered within ten seconds, he banged on the front door.
“Katie?” he shouted. “Archie? Anybody home?”
It was possible, he thought, they were hiding upstairs, or in the basement, and had not heard him. He tried the door, found it unlocked, and stepped into the front hall. Joe called their names a second time, loud enough to be heard anywhere in the house. He went through the first floor, out the rear door, and conducted a quick inspection of the separate garage. Satisfied that the kids were not here, he went back into the house.
He wished he had better news to give Sandra. But just because the kids weren’t here, it didn’t mean they’d come to any harm. They could be at a neighbor’s house. Maybe they were at the home of one of Archie’s friends.
Joe stood at the bottom of the stairs for several seconds before deciding to head up to the second floor. He walked down the hall to Sandra’s room, stood in the doorway, his gaze settling on the bed. He was, of course, no stranger to it. They had slept together here half a dozen times. And they’d had more than one rendezvous on the Cape. But they’d never been intimate in his own home. Wasn’t exactly easy, when you still lived with your mother. It wasn’t that his mother would have disapproved. She wasn’t a rigid moralist — thou shalt not screw your brains out before marriage — but did you really want to come down to breakfast in the morning and face her when she’d had to listen to the sounds of lovemaking the night before?
Once he had his mother settled into a first-class seniors’ facility, would he and Sandra live here? Would he move her and her kids to his place? Or maybe they’d sell both properties and start off with something new.
This would be after they went public with their relationship, of course. Once they’d told Archie and Katie. Joe wanted to get to know them better. The only real contact he’d had with the kids was the night he came here to break the news about the death of their father, not counting the time he’d had to bring Archie home when he scaled the mast of that ship.
He hoped the memory of delivering bad news wouldn’t be something the kids would hold against him. They’d have to move past that. He’d win them over. Take them, along with Sandra, for a day at the beach. Dinner at one of Garrett’s posh resort hotels. (Joe knew all the hotel managers, so he could get a break on the bill, maybe even wangle a freebie.) An overnighter to Boston, maybe. Faneuil Hall Marketplace, lunch at Cheers. Joe knew they’d grow to love him. Not as much as their own father, of course. That was totally understandable. And he’d leave any disciplining issues to their mother. He could foresee all kinds of problems if he tried to assume a fatherly role too soon.
Better to hang back. See how things worked out.
And given that Katie was already sixteen, she might not even be around that much longer. She was a bright kid. Joe was betting she and her mother were already talking about colleges. That’d mean, before long, it’d just be Sandra and Archie, who no doubt was in need of a good, strong father figure.
Joe knew he was born to play that role.
He wouldn’t just be gaining a wife when Sandra married him. He’d be gaining an entire family. Just like that.
He could tell Sandra hadn’t totally made up her mind yet. He needed to bring her around. But that was coming. She would love him. He was sure of that. And after all the shit that had gone down here on the island today, people would be wanting to pull together.
Family would become more important than ever.
Joe took one last, long look at the bedroom. The white bedspread. The pale blue wallpaper with narrow vertical stripes in a darker shade of blue. It all looked nice enough. He could live with this. Besides, decorating was never really his thing. Didn’t much matter to him what pattern the wallpaper was, what kind of lamps Sandra picked, what color the sheets were. But he’d have to do something about that picture on the bedside table, the one of Sandra with her late husband. The times he’d been here, in that bed, he’d been careful not to glance over at it. Didn’t make sense, he knew, being jealous — or even fearful — of a dead man, but that was how he felt. One time, he’d started to lose his erection, seeing Adam Montrose’s smile, a twinkle in his eye, as if he was looking right at Joe, saying, One day, when you get to heaven, I am going to pound the ever-lovin’ shit out of you.
It wasn’t like he could fold the picture down, or flip it around to face the wall. Not at this stage of their relationship. But when they’d made it official, he’d broach the subject. Suggest she move the picture to the kitchen or the living room. Or tuck it away in a drawer. A reasonable request, he figured.
It was time to go.
Sandra wanted him at the community center. She had high hopes he could get into Lisa Carver’s computer.
He didn’t like his chances.
Joe descended the stairs so quickly he nearly stumbled when he got to the bottom. Good thing his mother wasn’t here to see that. She never passed up a chance to tell him how clumsy he was on his feet.
Joe could have called Sandra and told her Archie and Katie were not at the house, but bad news was best delivered in person. He exited the house, hopped back on the bike, and started pedaling.
Thirty-Three
Lisa Carver’s phone hadn’t been out of Sandra’s hand for a second. She kept willing it to ring with news that Joe had found her kids safe and sound. If only she still had her own phone, that Gracie hadn’t run off with it. The kids might have called it dozens of times, were as worried about her as she was about them.
Not that the phone in her hand wasn’t ringing.
Word had spread far beyond the island that something had gone horribly wrong with the Arrival presentation. People close enough to Lisa to have her personal cell phone number were calling, one after another, hoping that the news of her passing was wrong. In the past half hour, Sandra had taken calls from several other titans of industry — one of them, she was pretty sure, was Richard Branson, but she hadn’t stayed on the call long enough to confirm it — as well as celebrities and politicians.
“I’m not Lisa Carver,” she’d been saying. “Ms. Carver — I’m sorry to be the one to tell you — is dead. I have to go.” God forgive me, she thought, if I just told a mother or sister or brother to basically fuck off.
Sandra emerged briefly from the community center to survey the damage. There was little left of the fire truck but charred, black metal. The ambulance was on its side, surrounded by several Arrivals that had essentially destroyed themselves in the attack. What had become of the paramedics? The surviving firefighters?
When she went back inside, Sandra had to deal with a different group of predators: journalists. They had questions and expected Sandra to provide answers. She’d been in the administrative office with Albert Ruskin, trying to figure out a way to get into Carver’s laptop, when several reporters started banging on the door.