It was still raining when he went to bed. The pines stood dripping behind the guesthouse, dark and immense. Glittering strings ran from the unguttered octagonal eaves. He opened the door and slid the suitcase out from under the bed, half expecting, as he always did, the things inside to have rearranged themselves, so bristlingly volatile had they become in his imagination. They lay exactly as he had left them. Still, that was something to look forward to: getting rid of this junk. It made him nervous having it there. Several times he’d been on the verge of taking it out; bringing it to the town landfill with the rest of the household garbage. But the thought of some dogged detective or beady-eyed municipal worker spotting something had held him back. Better to dump it all in the city.
It came to him as he lay in bed that he should put the knife in Charlie’s safe.
The idea filled him with a strange delight. He pictured the knife lying there, where the Tiffany bracelet had lain at the beginning of the summer. There was something apt and satisfying about the image. It was where Charlie himself would have put it, he decided, if he really had killed Grollier: stashed it there till he came up with a foolproof spot to get rid of it once and for all. Or no, perhaps he’d want to keep it there: hold on to it as some sort of perverse souvenir; the next best thing to the actual scalp of his wife’s lover…
He imagined Detective Fernandez turning up in Cobble Hill after an anonymous tipoff, armed with a warrant; Charlie’s disdainful grin as he showed him the safe and keyed in the date of his mother’s death; the look turning to bewilderment as the steel door opened… That would be a sight to behold! But of course I’d be long gone by then, Matthew remembered… That seemed to be an indispensable element in the idea taking shape in him; the sense of himself radically elsewhere, under a hot blue sky in some place well out of reach of Detective Fernandez and the East Deerfield Sheriff’s Department. Because Charlie, knowing Charlie, would surely wriggle out of it one way or another, and sooner or later the trail would resume its original course and destination.
Not that you could physically disappear anymore. That option, such a primordial human yearning, had gone the way of those off-the-grid backwaters that had once made it possible. But you could still vanish by becoming someone else. There’d been endless talk about that when his father ran off. People had suggested he might have found his way to Belize or somewhere in Southeast Asia; acquired a false passport through one of the document-forging operations in Port Loyola or Bangkok, and started life afresh in some tropical hideaway.
Why not follow in his father’s footsteps? The idea had a certain inexorable logic about it, after all, or at least a certain fateful appeal. And it wasn’t as if he hadn’t thought about it before. It had been present in his mind intermittently throughout his adult life; a fantasy of familial reconvergence that had often comforted him in times of stress.
Of course, there was the little matter of money to consider. His father had had the equivalent of well over a million dollars with him when he disappeared, whereas Matthew, when he last checked, had a little under five grand. The disparity made him smile in the darkness of his room. What a failure he was, compared to his old man! How petty and unambitious the field of his own endeavors!
It was only at this juncture in these drifting nocturnal ruminations that what might have been obvious from the start, had he been more willing to accept the role of vengeful malcontent that life seemed so eager to confer upon him, became apparent. Not that the timing of it altered its complexion in any fundamental way; he was aware of that. But it meant something to him that the idea hadn’t been premeditated.
The money would come from Charlie’s safe.
The knife would go in and the money would come out.
It was so simple, and so obvious, that the registering of it felt almost irrelevant; as if it had been arranged long ago by providence, and had always been going to happen, whether or not he knew it in advance.
He saw, in his mind’s eye, the blocks of cash in the shadows behind the Cipro bottles, stacked in towers of different heights like their own little Financial District. A million and a half dollars: Wasn’t that what Charlie had told him?
He remembered how disappointed Charlie had seemed by his reaction to the sight of all that “moolah.” He’d seemed to want Matthew to be impressed, and so Matthew had obligingly pretended to be. But in the peculiar mood that had risen in him now-a sort of euphoric clairvoyance-it occurred to him that perhaps Charlie had wanted something else too: that he’d wanted him not just to be impressed by the money, but to take it.
Was that possible? Was that, at some half-conscious level, why Charlie forgot the bracelet in the first place and had Matthew go back and open the safe and see what it contained? Had he been offering me the money? Matthew wondered. Hoping I’d scoop it up and disappear out of his life once and for all? Was Matthew’s failure to do so the real reason why Charlie was sending him back to the house now?
Absurd! And yet there was something persuasive about the notion; an insidious plausibility that seemed to require him to weigh it seriously in his mind.
Because Charlie owed him; there was no doubt about that. And Charlie knew it too. He surely remembered as well as Matthew those words he’d spoken as they crossed the schoolyard to the headmaster’s office a quarter century ago. Or even if he’d forgotten the words themselves, he couldn’t have forgotten the intent behind them. Because he’d certainly given every indication of regretting that intent. Even of wanting forgiveness for it. God knows he’d been eager enough to fork over the little loans Matthew had been compelled to ask for at moments of desperation over the years; often throwing in a few hundred dollars extra as if to convey his awareness that it was he, Charlie, who was getting the real relief from these transactions, the real easing of burdens… And judging from his behavior these past few weeks, he’d have been happy, more than happy, to make one last act of contrition in order to secure the permanent disappearance of his problematic cousin.
A million and a half dollars. It wouldn’t seriously harm Charlie, but it was a decent sum. Not excessive, considering the fact that, in addition to everything else, Matthew had also done Charlie the favor (he hadn’t seen it in quite this way before, but it was indisputable now that he thought of it) of eliminating his wife’s lover. But certainly an acceptable sum. A person could surely get whatever it took to start life afresh, with a million and a half bucks, and still have plenty left over. It wasn’t as if he intended to be idle. He’d go somewhere quiet, low-key. Buy a place with a little land. Find some locals to go into business with. Plant gardens and orchards with them; raise chickens and goats. He’d always liked the idea of a communal enterprise; the company of some like-minded people to nourish the spirit and soften the drudgery of work. He’d accepted too unprotestingly the isolating conditions of work in London and then New York; the ethos of every man for himself. His new life would be more openhearted, more spacious and purposeful, than the mere getting-by he’d settled for in the past. He’d always known there was something narrow and aimless, something wearyingly selfish, in the way he’d gone about things in the past. An absence of thought for anything beyond the limits of his own immediate wants and needs. It was never the life he would have chosen, but choice had never seemed a very serious component in his existence. You just grabbed what you could from the few things that presented themselves. Even when he’d gone in with those others-an entertainment lawyer, a couple who invested in artisanal food start-ups, a former City Hall official who knew how to oil the wheels of the city’s permit bureacracy-on that farm-to-table project, they’d each been in it purely for their own private gain. It was just business; only ever just business, which was perhaps why it hadn’t excited him in the end, even though he’d made a little money out of it.