Part 9 (1/2)

But that also was a topic for later. ”And we'll talk about what else to do about Carolyn and Sam,” she added. Thinking, Sure, right after I jump off a tall building and learn to fly.

Because what the h.e.l.l am I supposed to do when-On the porch she turned. He was nowhere in sight. ”Chip?”

Inside, the phone began ringing. ”Chip, d.a.m.n it ...”

The front door was unlocked. The kitchen shone spotlessly, smelling of soap and scouring powder. It meant her housekeeper-slash-stepmother, Bella Diamond, had been here recently.

But Bella wasn't here now. A mixing bowl and spoon stood on the kitchen counter. The dogs looked up sleepily from their beds.

”h.e.l.lo?” she called out. ”Is anyone home?”

The phone kept ringing. She dashed to answer, but as she did, it stopped.

The machine's red light winked at her, though, signaling that a call had come in earlier. She pressed the ”play” b.u.t.ton- ”I'm going to kill you!” a high, disguised voice promised cheerfully, followed by a giggle.

Click.

CHAPTER 4.

A MILLION DOLLARS.

Chip Hahn felt ashamed even to be thinking about it as he shoved his way through the shrubbery at the back of the Tiptree house. A million in cash ...

Wincing as the thorns on some kind of red-berried bushes scratched at his hands, he cringed inwardly even harder at the kind of greedy jerk he knew he was being.

It was even worse than last night, when he'd actually been thinking about doing something bad to Carolyn. Only this time, he wasn't stopping at thinking about doing a bad deed. This time ...

In his mind he recited again the coordinates Roger Dodd had written down, where he said he'd floated the money: 44.91 N, 67.02 W ... For once, Chip thought grimly, his good memory had come in handy.

And with any luck, maybe Roger Dodd's brother, Randy, hadn't gotten to the cash yet. Hurry ...

He pulled his trusty iPod from his s.h.i.+rt pocket and thumbed his playlist on without looking at it, Blondie's cla.s.sic ”Heart of Gla.s.s” with its pulsing ba.s.s and crystalline vocals urging him forward. The big white house behind him loomed over the expansive yard like an observation tower.

Next, he cut through a dormant rose garden put neatly to bed for the season, row upon row of low, perfectly s.p.a.ced bushes covered with burlap and tied with twine.

He darted between the bushes, careful not to disturb the loose mulch heaped around them. The house they belonged to was a low, white cape with two stone lions on the front steps, a wide center chimney, and a ma.s.sive copper beech in the front lawn.

A curtain twitched in an upstairs window of the cape. A burl as big as his head seemed to stare ominously at him from the beech tree's rough bark. Chip hustled across the frozen lawn to the sidewalk beyond, looked up and down it.

One way led into a warren of small streets, frost-browned yards with boats on rusty trailers, and dirt driveways containing older-model cars and trucks. The other way, downhill toward the water, lay a stretch of larger homes featuring Andersen windows, prepainted siding, and red-brick front walks.

He recognized them, or at least he understood instinctively the impulse they represented: Keep your things nice.

The ba.n.a.l phrase encompa.s.sed what he'd been taught from the time he was a very small child. Your house, your car, the parts that other people could see of your body ... It was a cla.s.s thing, he knew, this obsession with personal maintenance.

It said you deserved your wealth, that you had been born or had become the sort of person who was inclined to preserve and defend capital, and Chip knew that drill only too well. After all, he'd been rich himself once, and at a level that made the well-kept dwellings he was rus.h.i.+ng past look like the most abject poverty.

But deciding to be a writer instead of going to Yale Law and joining the family's generations-old firm as an a.s.sociate, wading in hip-deep, as his father had so delicately put it-Hahn & a.s.sociates was a global concern that hid its bloodl.u.s.t for courtroom victory, along with its dodgier clients (of whom there were many), beneath a stodgy exterior-had taken care of that. In the Old b.a.s.t.a.r.d's opinion, not wanting to be a lawyer in his firm was like wis.h.i.+ng you had horns and a forked tail. Or actually having them ...

Hurrying downhill toward the water that glittered at the foot of the street, Chip recalled the night he'd broken the news. The Old b.a.s.t.a.r.d had glared at him, all wattled and lizard-eyed, from the far end of the dining room table.

Between them, there had been about an acre of white linen covered with china, crystal, and silver. The meal had been roast beef, bloodily dripping. There was no one else in the room. A bell sat by the old man's right hand.

”Screw you,” the Old b.a.s.t.a.r.d had said, and, ignoring the bell, had thumped the table to demand more cabernet.

Chip had been only eighteen then, and had believed the Old b.a.s.t.a.r.d might change his mind. He hadn't, though, which mostly accounted for Chip's financial situation right now. People who refused to do what he wished, the Old b.a.s.t.a.r.d thought, deserved what they got.

Which of course had been nothing. At the corner in front of the long, low Motel East overlooking the bay, Chip made a beeline for the Volvo in the lot, grabbed his topcoat from the back seat, and pulled it on. Glancing around guiltily, though he wasn't sure why, he headed downtown, trying not to think about where Carolyn might be right now and what might be happening to her.

Serves her right, a mean little part of his brain said. But she didn't deserve this-whatever this was-and Chip couldn't go on pretending he felt that way for long.

Because even as the harsh thought died, the rest of his mind went on pondering what Sam Tiptree's mother had asked: Do you have feelings for her?

Of course not, he replied silently again. Or anyway, not the kind Sam's mother meant. But he didn't hate Carolyn the way he'd thought, either. Instead, in her sudden absence he felt as if something sharply painful had stopped hurting, and he missed it.

He felt ... confused. Which he wasn't a bit used to feeling. And thinking about Carolyn just made it worse. A lot worse, he thought. Painfully worse.

So don't. Think about the money.

He hurried on. Downtown in the old red-brick buildings some of the shops were open now: a hardware store, a pizza joint. An old, battered pickup truck went by-not the one he'd seen last night-hauling a load of firewood.

Late morning, and the day's business was going on all around him, as if he and Carolyn had never been here. As if somebody hadn't grabbed her.

But something might still be happening to her now, or might already have happened, that he didn't even dare imagine.

He stared at the s.p.a.ce in the lot where the Volvo had been last night, willing her back unharmed. Suddenly even her thieving of his idea didn't seem so bad.

It was just Carolyn, trying to make something of herself and not wanting to go on doing what she had been. Like me. She could have his precious book idea, he realized suddenly, plus the money from the ones they'd already written together.

Anything she wanted. If only she was okay. To his horror, his lip began trembling. A million, he thought, swallowing the lump in his throat.

But it just wouldn't work. A million dollars, ten million ... Who did he think he was kidding, anyway? He might fantasize about being the kind of guy who would steal it.

Fantasy, though, was as far as that idea would go. Because if money was all he wanted, there were easier ways to get it. Like for instance sucking up to the Old b.a.s.t.a.r.d.

So, what are you really doing, buddy boy? he asked himself. For that, though, he didn't have an answer, only a painful sense of urgency that made him want to writhe. Or run ... but not away from anything. Toward it, rather, whatever it was ...

The iPod finished Blondie, started on the Boss. ”Born in the U.S.A.” blared its anthem-like opening bars into Chip's earbuds. He'd accidentally pushed the oldies list, not what he'd wanted. But he didn't feel like fooling with it now, as from the parking lot he hurried along a path behind the old waterfront buildings overlooking the boat basin.

A riprap of pink granite boulders formed a low, slanting wall that continued down to the waves. Beyond, the breakwater was an L shape; inside were floating piers in a wooden maze, to which dozens of boats were secured by heavy lines.

Big, beat-up fis.h.i.+ng vessels with lobster traps stacked on their decks bobbed cheek-by-jowl with broad-beamed rowboats, oars s.h.i.+pped and gear stowed neatly. Scanning the marina for any sign that Carolyn had been here, he made his way past the boat ramp, past the shuttered hot dog stand where Sam's bicycle still leaned lonesomely, and beyond, out onto the wide concrete breakwater itself.

As soon as he left the protection of the buildings, the wind began biting at him again. And not just wind ...

You wanted her dead, a cruel voice in his mind tormented him. You thought about it, you wanted to ...