“Those are all possibilities you’d be looking at. I’m not stupid, or did you forget?”
Weir looked off toward the horizon, one panel of gray set atop another. “You know about Blodgett’s special beat, patrolling the bay for dumpers?”
“Of course I do. Virginia goes out with him sometimes.”
“So did Ann.”
“Funny the things you learn when you stick around home.”
Weir ignored the sucker punch. To Becky, nothing was a sucker punch. He told her about his tail of Blodgett, the forty minutes on the water, the blown head gasket, and the buddy from Cheverton Sewer & Septic.
“You sure?” she asked.
“No, I dreamed it.”
Becky considered. “Dale Blodgett, Cheverton Sewer and Cantrell Development,” she said. “Interesting, isn’t it?”
“It raises the question of Blodgett and Dennison.”
Becky glanced at Weir and nodded. “Some of the stuff he’s pulled... hard to imagine him playing both sides.”
“Dennison could sit still for a lot, with an ear inside Virginia and you.”
Becky shook the hair from her face. “You’ve got that right.”
“How tight are you with him?”
“I’ve always kept my distance. Something about him. Virginia likes him a lot, though.”
“Not like her to read someone wrong.”
“No one’s perfect, Jim.”
“Mom and Ann were with him the night he saw the dumpers. Blodgett told me the boat looked just like this one.”
Becky studied him, open-faced. “And?”
Jim studied her closely. Becky betrayed no emotion he could recognize.
Then she throttled Sea Urchin all the way back and cranked the wheel to starboard. The engine whined, the bow rose, and the little boat threw up a rooster tail of spray that arced and flattened in the wind. She hit the swells hard, riding high and fast. Becky’s expression was one of controlled fury.
She had to scream over the engine and the thumping of Sea Urchin on the water, and the blasting rush of wind. “Do you believe that story? Do you trust Blodgett?”
Weir had to think about it while the spray swirled against his face and the boat charged west. “I’m afraid to!”
“That’s right — you’re goddamned afraid! That’s why you need to get to Dave Smith at Cheverton!”
“I’m not even licensed as a PI!”
“You don’t need no stinking license! I never thought I’d have to plead with you to find out who killed—”
“Shut up, Becky! Just shut up for once in your goddamned life!”
Becky cranked the boat hard to port, cutting a wide angle south, then cinched her into a tighter and tighter pattern, a dizzying concentric rush until Sea Urchin came to rest in a roiling sea of white water and exhaust.
Weir’s ribs ached from the force. When he looked over at Becky, he saw the tears running across the sides of her temples. She cut the engine and buried her face in her hands. “I hate it, Jim,” she said. “I hate what happened and I hate the way I feel and I hate it you don’t trust me and I’m just so goddamned afraid.”
He hesitated a moment, running his hand over her head. “Trade seats,” he said. “I’ll steer.”
They swapped places and Jim took the wheel. Becky huddled inside the worn coat, turning up the collar. Her feet, covered only in nylons, were pushed together for warmth, toes curling against the cool, clean bridge.
“I thought five drinks would keep me warm,” she said.
“Here.” He put an arm around her and brought her close. She nudged up next to him, kind of hunkering into the curve of his ribs, the old position. They used to tease each other about how well they fit. Her hair blew against his cheek. “You’re as bad as I am, holding it all inside.”
“I almost was a Weir, once.”
Jim was still amazed at Becky’s ability to frame him as the perpetrator of their demise, when it suited her. Certainly they had argued about it enough. But the whole topic, to Jim, had been rounded smooth by too much talk, like a stone by water. Yet at the center of it, there was still something jagged and inaccessible. Jim could never figure whether identifying this final truth was really what they needed, or if it was just another mystery best left unsolved. He had long suspected that in certain matters, the truth was overrated. Some things were more important. If he had carried away one bit of treasure from the whole dismal escapade in the Mexican jail, it was that, in order to go on, he had to forgive.
“I know we’ve talked it to death,” he said, “but I forgive you, Becky.” He realized it sounded a little ecclesiastical.
“Well, if it’s any consolation, while you were rotting in jail, I was rotting in freedom. I missed you.”
Jim felt tidal stirrings inside: anger on the ebb, love on the flood. “Maybe we could just forget it all and start again. Fresh.”
She pressed in closer to him but said nothing. Becky the lawyer, he thought, was an unlikely party to such a glib treaty. There was always the fine print. “You should have written to me.”
“I was trying to get over you.”
“And you’re telling me it didn’t work?”
“It was a miserable failure.”
She rested her feet on the deck now, toes still curled under in the nervous way that Becky had. Jim looked at them, fixed on the idea that they were probably the only feet in the world besides his own he could identify without the rest of the body attached. Did this count for something? The boat was clunking in the swells, adrift and at rest.
“I thought about leaving when you did,” she said. “For a while, it seemed you were right just to get out and find something more. I’d always been happy to be in Newport. But with you gone, I looked around and thought, Well, it’s a nice little town, but so what?”
“Don’t tell the voters that.”
“No. After a month or so, it passed. I mean, if you stay involved, it answers a lot of questions for you. Now I’m thirty-seven, I’ve realized that you can’t do everything. For every thing you decide to do, there’s something else you decide to leave undone.”
“Amen to that.”
“I’m changing inside, Jim. I’m getting to want a family. I want to settle in, raise ’em up, all that stuff I didn’t want before.”
“I hope you do all that. The world could use some little versions of you.”
She paused then. “You interested in that kind of thing?”
“Yes, I am.”
“All of you or part of you, Jim? The usual ambivalent mix?”
“Part, I guess, to tell the truth.”
“Which part?”
“The part that’s here right now.”
“But not the one that likes being away, that wants to be diving for somebody’s gold?”
Jim thought it through. “It’s not being away, though I like that. It’s not the diving, really, even though I love it. It’s not even someone else’s gold, although the idea of a few hundred grand in the bank sits rather well with me. It’s dumber than all that. Simpler. It’s... owning my time.”
“Oh, Christ, not that again. We’re all just borrowing, anyway.”
“The illusion of owning my time, then.”
“But couldn’t you have the illusion anywhere? In a nice town with a good girl, maybe a little boy to teach about diving and boats? Trade that for an illusion? You’re a romantic and that’s good. But the real romance is taking a stand, kicking ass to make it work. You gotta admit one thing, Weir — I was never in your face for long. You had a pretty long leash, about as long as one can reasonably get.”