Mark Mills - Amagansett
Hollis had stalked the shoe’s owner for a few days until the opportunity presented itself for a word in private. When confronted with the evidence, the culprit pleaded high jinks. When Hollis informed him that a court of law would only accept a plea of ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’, he broke down in tears, right there in the changing rooms of a gentlemen’s outfitters on Newtown Lane.
Two hours later, Jacob Rosen answered his door to a blond, redeyed young man in a brand-new blazer who handed him an envelope. Inside was a banker’s draft to the order of five hundred dollars made payable to the Temple Adas Israel in Sag Harbor. The young man then asked for, and received, Jacob Rosen’s forgiveness. He politely declined the invitation to take tea and cake with the family.
To Hollis’ mind the debt was only part-paid. Almost a year on, he still kept the shoe in a box beneath his bed along with a photo of the incriminating article, taken in situ by Abel Cole in his official capacity as the Police Department’s photographer.
It was the first time the two men had met, but the signs of a fast friendship were there from the start. Hollis’ plan for an unofficial settlement of the matter had required Abel’s discretion and collusion. Indeed, it was Abel who suggested the outrageous sum of five hundred dollars by way of a penalty. He knew the family by reputation, knew the boy was good for the money but that it would pinch him hard enough to hurt. That very same week Abel Cole had added ‘And Bar Mitzvahs’ to the sign in his window.
Hollis entered the shop to find Abel photographing a sternfaced, middle-aged woman seated in a chair set against a mottled backdrop. A Persian cat lay curled on her lap, looking quite as unhappy and mistrustful as its owner. As ever, the sickly smell of darkroom chemicals hung heavy in the air.
Abel was stooped behind a tripod, peering through the viewfinder of his camera—a Graflex Speed Graphic. Hollis had seen hundreds, if not thousands, of the machines over the years—in front of precincts and courthouses, at crime scenes, bulbs popping on their side-mounted flashing units—but Abel’s was different, trimmed in olive drab, witness to his time as a wartime photographer in Europe.
‘She’s got beautiful eyes,’ said Abel.
There was no reaction from the woman.
‘And a fine, pert little nose.’
‘Yes, she has, hasn’t she?’ conceded the woman matter-of-factly.
Abel looked up. ‘I was talking to the cat.’
Despite herself, the woman broke into a smile. Abel tripped the front shutter.
‘Gotcha,’ he said.
‘Edith Harper,’ explained Abel as soon as the door had swung shut behind the woman. ‘Lost her only boy in the Pacific, but she was a sour-faced old trout long before.’
He took a pack of cigarettes from beneath the counter and offered one to Hollis. Six months back, Hollis would have glanced outside through the window to check no one was watching before accepting. He was way beyond that now.
Abel lit the cigarettes and pushed his long fringe out of his eyes. ‘Any luck?’ he asked.
‘No.’ After dropping off the film holders with Abel for developing, Hollis had returned to police headquarters to run a missing persons check through the neighboring force at Southampton, but had turned up nothing. ‘I was hoping you might know her.’
‘Seen her around,’ said Abel, reaching for a buff envelope on the counter. ‘Who could forget, face like that? But I don’t know her name. City girl. Drives a swanky roadster. Ten bucks says someone’ll know over at the coven.’
‘The coven?’
‘You know…the Ladies’ Vaginal Insertion Society.’
The Ladies’ Village Improvement Society was an organization of local women devoted to preserving and beautifying ‘the village’, as they insisted on calling it. They had first come together to campaign and raise funds for the regular watering down of Main Street when it was little more than a dusty track at the mercy of the brisk summer winds. But they soon expanded their activities to include a program for the sweeping of the sidewalks and crosswalks, the installation of oil lamps, and the pruning of the huge elms that flanked the thoroughfare.
And so it had continued, their self-proclaimed remit extending beyond the main artery of the town like a river bursting its banks, swamping all in its path. Fifty years on, there was almost no aspect of life within East Hampton that lay beyond the scrutiny of the LVIS.
Abel was right, it was as good a place as any to start. Their numbers swelled in the summer months with the influx of wealthy New York worthies. More than likely, one of them would recognize the dead girl.
‘Crying shame,’ said Abel, handing over the envelope. ‘Face like a Botticelli angel.’
‘Yeah,’ said Hollis, unsure what his friend was talking about.
He decided to leave the patrol car and walk down Main Street. Up ahead, two young girls pattered along behind a squat woman, their hair done in tight, stiff braids, faces scrubbed clean enough to shine.
Hollis wondered why he hadn’t shared the news of the girl’s earrings with Abel. It wasn’t professional discretion on his part; there was little the two men kept from each other. Maybe he was getting ahead of himself, maybe she had simply forgotten to remove the items before going swimming. He had done a similar thing himself a month back, ruining a perfectly good wristwatch in the process, a gift from his wife.
Yes, that was why he had hesitated, for fear of looking foolish when it proved to be a blind alley. And yet the tightening in his stomach told him otherwise.
The Ladies’ Village Improvement Society was based in the old Clinton Academy, beside the library on the north side of Main Street. The former school was now home to the East Hampton Historical Society, which, for a nominal sum, subleased the annex to the women.
Hollis paused before entering the old brick-and-wood building. From the apex of its gambrel roof rose a tall, pointed cupola, the bell it once housed for summoning the students long gone. The odor from an unruly clump of honeysuckle was almost unbearably sweet in the searing afternoon heat. Hollis wiped his brow before stepping into the shaded sanctuary of the covered porch.
The LVIS occupied two small, low offices at the rear of the building. They were a hive of activity, with women hurrying to and fro as if being blown by the black electric fans which adorned almost all the desks.
Hollis felt like a student entering the teachers’ common room, summoned there for some misdemeanor then deliberately ignored to stew in his guilt and the anticipation of his punishment. Maybe it was the early history of the building somehow exerting its presence; whatever, no one paid him a blind bit of notice.
‘Excuse me,’ he said to a woman in a floral cotton dress as she hurried by purposefully, a stack of papers under her arm. Without breaking her stride she nodded towards a desk in the corner of the room.
So that was it, a strict pecking order, everything had to pass through Mary Calder, President of the LVIS. She was leaning forward in her chair, one elbow on the desk, the fingers of her right hand tugging at her sandy locks. In her other hand she held a phone receiver pressed to her ear.
‘Yes, yes, I understand,’ she said irritably. ‘But the fair is only three weeks off and you still haven’t committed.’
The LVIS annual summer fair, hence all the activity, thought Hollis, relieved that they didn’t always function at such a shaming pace.
Mary glanced up at him (on reading his thoughts? He wouldn’t put it past her). Her pale blue eyes registered his presence and she smiled. This threw Hollis. She had never smiled at him. In fact, she had only ever scowled at him in the past, usually when she was berating him for the mortal danger posed to village residents by speeding motorists, as if somehow he were personally to blame.
In fairness to Mary, accidents were an increasingly common occurrence, and it was little more than a year since one young resident had indeed lost her life, her coltish body shattered by a motor car, the impact so violent that she’d been thrown twenty feet through the air into the hedge beyond the verge.
The incident had occurred a few weeks before his arrival in East Hampton, but he could still see the photo in the file—Lizzie Jencks hanging there in the hawthorn like some grisly scarecrow. The driver had stopped, scarring the surface of the dirt-grade road, only to drive on, his identity destined to remain a mystery, as would the reason a fifteen-year-old girl was out walking a country road in the dead of night.
Mary rounded off the telephone conversation, the tone of her voice making it patently clear to the person on the other end of the line that their life wouldn’t be worth living should they let her down. She hung up and made her way across the room towards Hollis.
He knew her to be in her mid-thirties, almost five years older than he, but she displayed fewer visible signs of encroaching middle age. She was tall, slender, healthy-looking to a fault, her tanned and freckled face, devoid of make-up, witness to an active life spent outdoors. He had often seen her striding out along the wooded lanes north of town, sinewy calves protruding from clumpy hiking boots, a small canvas knapsack on her back.
‘You must think me a dreadful harpy.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Always complaining, always after something. You only ever see me at my worst.’
‘I’ll take your word for it,’ he said with a wry smile.
Christ, thought Hollis, I’m flirting with her, stop flirting with her.
Mary cocked her head slightly, eyes narrowing, taking his measure. Hollis squirmed under her gaze; he had been way too familiar.
‘Oh, you don’t need to do that,’ she said. ‘Ask around, you’ll see I’m not such a terrible old hag.’ Hollis’ brain was racing too fast to fathom the implications of the last comment, so he searched for a way to move the conversation on.
‘Can I have a word alone?’
‘Yes, you may,’ replied Mary, stressing the ‘may’ to correct his grammar. She paused before continuing. ‘Damn,’ she said, ‘you’ll never believe me now.’
Hollis watched her closely as she flipped through the photographs of the dead girl and knew immediately that he had just gotten a positive identification. They were standing in the shaded garden at the back of the building. A small fountain played nearby, humidifying the air around them. A climbing rose, loosely wired to a trellis, strained under the weight of its flowers. Birds chirped merrily and the wind lapped at the leaves of a tall birch tree. It was a tranquil spot, quite at odds with the expression on Mary’s face.
Hollis was intrigued. From her very first glance she had clearly recognized the girl, but she insisted on viewing all four photographs, taking her time as she did so. When she was finished, she handed them back.
‘Lillian Wallace. Her family has a house on Further Lane.’ Only now did she look Hollis in the eye.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
Mary accompanied him around the side of the building to the street. She folded her arms across her midriff as if chilled by the eighty-five-degree heat. ‘She loved the ocean. I sometimes saw her there, down at the beach, in the evening when I was walking the dog. She liked to swim there.’
Strange, somehow she didn’t seem like a woman who owned a dog. What would it be? Something devoted and fiercely loyal—a retriever, maybe, or a labrador.
‘She was a good swimmer?’ he asked.
‘Not good enough, it seems.’
‘I appreciate it,’ he said, holding up the envelope. Mary watched him leave.
‘I was sorry to hear about your wife,’ she called after him. Turning back, he groped for something to say. In the end he simply nodded then carried on his way.
Returning to the patrol car, he found a note from Abel on the driver’s seat: Dinner tonight, 7:30. Don’t worry—I’m cooking!
Hollis smiled, fired the engine and pulled away.
The length of the yew hedge that flanked the entrance gates of the Wallace property on Further Lane gave some indication of the scale of the plot, close on a hundred yards wide, while the height of the hedge concealed all else from prying eyes. The white wooden gates, discreet but imposing, were open and Hollis guided the patrol car through them, slowing only to read the name painted in neat black capitals on a board—Oceanview—proof that wealth and imagination didn’t always make for natural bedfellows. All the properties on Further Lane gave directly on to the ocean at the rear.
He always found it strange when he entered the colony, this narrow belt of oceanfront the wealthy had claimed as their own. A mile to the south of Main Street, it was in East Hampton, but not of it. There were no stores, no filling stations, no bars or boarding houses. In fact, there was almost no trade whatsoever, nothing that might remind the residents of how they had amassed their fortunes. There were simply stretches of half-glimpsed residential grandeur, hedged and fenced, pegged out and parceled off.
Hollis had heard that some purchasers would happily pay too much for a house, inflating the value of surrounding real estate, thereby ensuring that the diminishing number of vacant plots would only ever be occupied by those of their kind. Maybe it was just rumor, but he somehow doubted it. There was a chilling simplicity to both the logic and the formula.
All you needed was the money, and for those with less than others there were alternatives—the roads once, twice, three times removed from the waterfront avenues that fronted the ocean and skirted the shores of Georgica Pond.
On the map, Georgica Pond always reminded him of a startled marsupial settled on its haunches, its upturned snout, pointed ears, forelegs and tail formed by the larger creeks and coves which ran into the main body of water. At over a mile and a half in length from top to toe, ‘pond’ was something of a misnomer. It extended from the highway to the ocean, effectively demarcating East Hampton from Wainscott and the other communities further west.
Once open to the sea, a vicious hurricane had ripped through the area in 1938, and in a few brief hours scooped up thousands of tons of sand from the ocean bed, plugging the broad tidal gut as nonchalantly as a man might stop a bottle with a cork.
The summer colony had borne the full brunt of that freakish storm, exposed as the houses were on the high dunes and sandy bluffs that fronted the ocean. Nowhere suffered more than the Maidstone Club. Dozens of its colorful beachside cabanas were reduced to matchwood within minutes and littered across the slope leading up to the clubhouse. Paradoxically, the devastating force of the hurricane ensured the colony’s survival. After all, was this not the very reason the wealthy had come here, to stare Nature in the face, to stand mute with wonder before Her? Besides, many of them had wisely over-insured their properties and duly snatched a tidy profit from the jaws of misfortune. The pioneering spirit rekindled and reinforced, an alarming number of industrialists, financiers, publishers, actors and artists had blown in on the back of that hurricane, despite the advent of war.
