“It’s perfectly fine, Tal.” Dolly rested a small hand on the trooper’s sleeve. “Niles no longer has any use for them.”
“Fair enough, Dolly,” Bliss said gently. “If you say so.”
“How are you feeling?” Mitch asked her. Her eyes seemed a bit unfocused. He suspected she was on tranks.
“I shall be fine, Mitch,” Dolly replied. “It was the not knowing- where Niles was, what he was doing. Now that I do know, now that I have some sense of closure, I can begin to…” She broke off, her voice choking with emotion. “I don’t need to tell you the rest, do I, Mitch? You know what it feels like to lose the one you love.”
“Yes, I do,” Mitch said quietly, feeling the trooper’s steely eyes on him. Bliss didn’t seem to like her talking to him so intimately.
“And I did love him,” Dolly added, her voice soaring with defiance.
“Of course, you did,” Bitsy clucked, putting a protective arm around her.
“Everyone assumes I didn’t,” she said bitterly. “Because they didn’t approve. They thought he wasn’t good enough for me. They thought I was a fool. But Niles Seymour talked to me. Niles Seymour listened to me. He made me feel wanted and desired.”
Clearly, all of this was pointed directly at Bud, whose lips immediately tightened. After a brief, awkward silence, the lawyer elected to bail-got back in his Ranger Rover and eased down the driveway toward his own house.
“Poor Tuck, though,” Dolly lamented sadly. “He knew so little joy in his life. And now…”
Bitsy steered her inside. Bliss followed with the groceries.
Mitch deposited the dead man’s clubs back in the barn and strolled home, where he found a hand-lettered invitation taped to his front door:
Jamie Devers and Evan Havenhurst present
A Supper Cruise
A sophisticated comedy in three acts starring Mr. Mitch Berger
Location: The B.S. pier Time: 6:00 this evening
Boating shoes are a must
A reply is not-you wouldn’t dare turn us down!
Well, well. First a lunch invite from Bud. Now this. I am suddenly a very popular fellow on this island, Mitch reflected. What now? What did they want? Maybe they didn’t want anything. Maybe they were just being nice.
There was, of course, only one way to find out.
He cranked up the old Studey and went riding, high and bouncy, over to Old Saybrook for a pair of boating shoes at Nathan’s Country Store, a narrow, old-fashioned general store on Main Street that had worn wooden floorboards and a genuine penny candy counter. It was Barry, the bearded storekeeper, who explained to Mitch why the white-soled Topsiders were a must-ordinary shoes left stubborn black marks on the surface of the deck. This was not something that had ever occurred to Mitch, who also bought himself a pair of green rubber wading boots so he could slog farther out into the tide pools.
Mitch did something else while he was in Old Saybrook. He cruised out past the elegant North Cove waterfront mansions toward Fenwick, the very exclusive colony of shingled summer cottages where Katharine Hepburn was living out her last days. Here, in the shadow of the Old Saybrook lighthouse, Mitch found the Saybrook Point Inn, where Torry Mordarski had spent one night and paid cash. And where Bud Havenhurst and Red Peck had seen her and Niles Seymour breakfasting together. It was a spanking-new, ultra-posh resort hotel with docking facilities for boaters, a restaurant and a health spa. The grounds were immaculate. The brass plates on the lobby doors were polished to a sheen. A community events calendar out front notified passersby of the Lion’s Club breakfast later that week. And discreetly advertised Our famous Sunday brunch-A Shoreline Tradition. The parking lot was crowded with luxury imports and sport utility vehicles from New York, Rhode Island and Massachusetts. As Mitch idled there, a well-tailored executive with a briefcase came out and climbed into a fancy black Lexus. Four terribly proper old ladies emerged a moment later, somewhat tittery from a long, liquid lunch. A bellhop brought out someone’s bags, eyeballing Mitch’s dilapidated truck with snooty disapproval.
Mitch moved on, seriously puzzled. It didn’t figure. This was no hideaway. This was no place for a middle-aged married man to stash a young babe. It was a hub of community activity. High profile. High traffic. High class. Why on earth had Seymour brought Torry here? Had the man wanted to be seen with her? Why?
There was still no sign of Baby Spice when he got back. Her litter box had not been used. Her food did not appear to have been touched. It wasn’t until Mitch fetched a sweatshirt out of his dresser that he finally found her-curled up in there among his clean socks, fast asleep. How she got in there he could not imagine-the drawer was only open a crack. She stirred and squeaked hello at him. He picked her up and put her down on the bed. She had a good deal of light brown mixed in with the gray. And her tummy was almost completely white. Big ears, like a bat. And sharp little teeth and claws, he quickly found out.
Mitch stretched out on the bed with her so they could get acquainted. She immediately scampered up onto his chest, exceedingly perky and playful. She pad-padded around, tumbled off, climbed back up, rolled over onto her back with her paws up, daring him to pet her soft white belly. He began wiggling his hand around under the covers. She pounced on it, yowling, and chased it around the bed. As Mitch lay there, playing with her, he began toying idly with a name. Possibly something with a Western bent to commemorate this book. He ran through his favorites. It was not very fruitful. There were no significant women characters to be had in The Magnificent Seven, for example. In fact, there was a paucity of female names, period. Until he got around to My Darling Clementine, John Ford’s 1946 epic about Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. One of the best, in Mitch’s opinion. Brilliant black-and-white photography by Joseph P. MacDonald. Clementine Carter, played by Cathy Downs, was Henry Fonda’s lady love, the nurse who came out from Boston in search of her wayward fiance, Doc Holliday. Clemmie, Doc called her. Clemmie. She was curled up in the crook of Mitch’s neck now, purring like a small motorboat as he petted her. In fact, she was asleep again. She seemed to have two speeds-on and off. She seemed to have a tranquilizing effect, too. Because Mitch soon discovered that his eyes were heavy and his limbs somewhat numb.
Soon, the two of them were out cold together.
There was no sign of Evan and Jamie at the dock when Mitch made his way down there in his new shoes promptly at six. After hanging around a few minutes, he moseyed up to their stone cottage next to the lighthouse. A minivan was parked outside, crammed with furniture. Evan’s Porsche was there, too. The cottage’s front door was wide open. Mitch found the two of them in the kitchen frantically flinging food and drinks into a pair of ice chests.
“Don’t mind us, Mitch, we’re always late,” apologized Evan, who seemed terribly flustered.
The stone cottage was very damp and cold inside. It was also very crowded with antiques. There seemed to be three too many of everything-rocking chairs, weather vanes, end tables, cupboards. Mitch found it almost impossible to fight his way through all of it.
“We’re compulsive buyers,” Jamie explained. “When we run out of space we take things to our store and sell them.”
“I think,” Mitch grunted, squeezing his way around a parson’s bench, “that it may be time.”
Over the fireplace were a number of framed photos of the two of them with their late dachsund, Bobo. The dog’s collar and tags were displayed there. The dog’s bowl was displayed there. And Bobo was displayed there. On the mantel in an ornate silver urn with her name engraved on it. They’d had her cremated.
“Give us ten more minutes,” Evan said to Mitch pleadingly. “Why don’t you check out the view from the lighthouse? The key’s just inside the front door.”
“We have to keep it locked,” Jamie said, “or the acne-encrusted indigenous youth sneak out here at low tide and fornicate up there.”