Breeding Ground (18 page)

“Yep. And then let's take our only daughter out to dinner some place nice.”

“How 'bout the Lafayette?”

“Sure.” Booker stayed and watched Alice for a minute, then walked back to his own office and started on the correspondence he needed to finish before three.

Tyler Babcock had parked as close as he could get to the salt marsh, leaving his car on the edge of the dirt track that angled off the back road that ran from North Falmouth south to Woods Hole.

It was a beautiful day, even for Cape Cod. Summer tourists hadn't swarmed yet, clogging the roads and beaches. The sky was endless – a soft, pale milky blue. The sun hid, and then dazzled, on and off, as wispy white clouds trailed by.

As he walked through woods, in deep worn ruts, across dusty patches and muddier hollows, toward the Little Sippewissett Salt Marsh, his canvas pack lying warm against his back, he began to think it might work. After he'd dealt with Alice Spencer Franklin the only way she deserved.

Then he could start over. He could live on land that touched water. And watch horseshoe crabs and eat salicornia. And follow the terns that lined up patiently to fish killifish out of the channels. He could live by the tides, according to the tides, with the salt smells and the sand dunes, and find some peace on earth.

He stepped out of the woods onto marshland, lying flat and green as far as he could see, with channels snaking through it. Brackish channels that worked like veins pumping new blood to the ocean – the swimmers and crawlers that populated the sea that were born there in the marsh.

Tyler looked down into the first shallow channel, three feet wide with new grass bending over it, watching flickering minnows and tiny blue crabs scuttling on the bottom. He walked across on an old weathered board set there as a bridge, and followed the length of another ditch till it flowed into the main channel that emptied into the bay.

He watched the phragmites shift in the wind up and down the dunes, the new green reeds, barely a foot tall, in between the eight-foot skeletons topped with drooping dried plumes from last summer, that were breaking now in sharp pointed angles like dry tan bones.

It was almost low tide, and he waded through another channel, hardly noticing the marshy reek of iodine and rotting marsh grass, and climbed the high dune that kept him from the beach that was broad now and buff-colored and soft beside the dune, but hard and rippled in ribs of wet sand below the high tide waterline.

He let the west wind sideswipe his face and blow his hair around him, longer now than it'd ever been, hanging past his collar, stinging his eyes before he closed them to listen to the splash of water, sluicing up across the wide beach, falling back in a rhythmic wash that made the world feel clean.

He walked then, for almost an hour, the only human on the whole beach, watching a small motorboat off and on, a hundred yards out in Buzzards Bay, just two men that he could see, fishing alone for their families.

There was a concept. Family. The best and worst. Healing and wounding. The harbor that traps your heart.

He walked back the way he'd come, to where he'd crossed the mouth of the main channel, and set his backpack on a strip of soft sand.

He sat where he often did on a large driftwood log and took out what he'd bought the day before and fitted carefully in his backpack. It had been a purchase he'd been planning for years. Approaching and avoiding, and giving up too long.

First he took out the lidded plastic water glasses he'd filled before he'd left (one for drinking, one for rinsing brushes); then the fourteen-by-eighteen-inch block of textured paper, and the square metal plate with shallow indentions; the two-layer box of very good watercolors he'd had to go to Boston to buy; then paper towels, and small sponges, and three drawing pencils, plus twelve high-quality bristled brushes held with a rubber band.

He began to draw the sweep of the land, from where he sat to the left, where reeds pierced the dunes close by, and salicornia clutched the surface with small succulent legs around toothpick-sized holes left behind by ghost spiders hiding from the sun.

He didn't know what their real name was, the tiny transparent spiders, waiting now to come out at dusk, when they'd crawl up invisibly, in incalculable numbers, making the beach breathe – making it look as though it did, as though the sand itself was rippling. They could seem threatening when an army-sized horde began to crawl all over you, with ranks and regiments surrounding you, moving toward you too.

But he'd watched them for hours when he was young without telling anyone. Keeping it a miniature world that couldn't be touched, or changed, or trivialized, with words or looks or indifference.

He worked for almost three hours with reeds and water and marsh and salicornia, lost completely in getting it right, getting back to what he'd loved his whole life. He let the water take the paint where it would, with the same wash of waves and waterfalls and clouds streaming by, of wet sand running into rivulets – except where he wanted a color to stain, or stop, or flow into another, in ways that came from something inside him he'd never understood, but trusted.

Or had once. Before he'd died. And turned into someone else.

He slid the scalpel underneath the finished painting, the top sheet on the thick block of paper, and cut it away on all four sides, then laid it on the beach, held down with shells at the corners, with the others he'd already painted.

He'd drawn a horizon line and a waterline parallel – when a woman's voice behind him made his hand freeze in midair.

“I thought you'd be here.”

Tyler didn't answer and didn't look around. He left the pad on his knees and stared across the beach toward the dark green sea.

“I assumed you wouldn't stay at Daddy's house. That you'd ask Wally what you could rent. And, of course, I found I was right.” She laughed when she said it, but Tyler didn't act as though he'd heard her.

“And
if
you came to the Cape, I knew you'd come here eventually. All I'd have to do was look for your car by the trail. Your hair's even longer than mine.”

Tyler didn't begin to react.

She walked around the driftwood log and stood stiffly in front of him, sprayed blond hair unmoved by the wind, khaki pants and white silk shirt still perfectly pressed, new boat shoes speckled with sand, mouth as red as her nail polish, eyes unreadable behind very dark glasses in wide white frames. “Aren't you going to say hello? After I've come all this way?”

“I told you not to look for me.” Tyler said it quietly, staring down the beach toward the solitary shingled house more than a mile away on the top of a straight-sided cliff.

“What about me! Tyler! Look at me. Please!”

“My entire
life
has revolved around you.
House
.
Job
. My daughter's—”

“She was my daughter too!”

Tyler didn't say another word.

She waited for half a minute before she tried again. “You aren't being fair. When you left Harvard, you
wanted
to work for Daddy.”

“No. I didn't.
You
wanted me to work for ‘Daddy.' There's no reason to talk about this. I told you in Boston I won't be coming back.”

“You don't know what you're doing! They're holding your place at the firm until—”

“I will never work as a broker again. Do you understand me? I am not coming back, Sandy. That life is over.”

“It's because of Jenny. You're not seeing things clearly, and you need professional help.” Her diamond rings were flashing in the sun as she reached out to touch him.

Tyler stood up, threw his pad in the sand, and grabbed her upper arms. “I am going to say this one more time. I was meant to be a painter and I—”

“Oh, please! And how would you make a living? Even you said you'd never be good enough. That your girlfriend Alice was better. Her mother too, without doubt. You knew that all those years ago when her mother gave you lessons.”

“I was eighteen when I quit. I didn't pursue it as a man.”

“That's beside the point. You
like
the good things in life, like I do!”

“Good things!” He pulled her even closer up against him, then threw her glasses in the sand. “Look me in the eye, Sandy. One last time. I hate the life I've lived! Do you hear me? I will
not
live that way again! Jenny's death made me look at myself, and I am now going to make a new world without the pressures I've given into… buckled under might be a better description… throughout most of my past.”

“And all I was, was one of the pressures?”

He didn't say anything, but he let her go and watched as she picked up her glasses.

She didn't put them on but moved them from hand to hand while she stared down at the beach. “If I'd known you were that unhappy, maybe we could've changed things. But you never said once. I never understood!”

“I said. You didn't listen. And finally, you're right, I gave up. This wasn't your fault. I let myself get pushed.”

“I don't understand toward what? You liked going to Tuscany, and buying art, and not having to scrimp and save. Other than giving up painting, I thought you were—”

“Remember the Beacon Hill house? And the partnership in the brokerage? It was easier than domestic warfare, and I could keep telling myself I gave in for Jenny. But it was
me
being the patsy. Taking the easy way out. Not putting my painting on the line because I was afraid I couldn't make it as a fulltime artist. But now, once I finish with Alice, I'll go away and start again with nobody else's expectations waking me up at night.”

“Tyler…” She was staring at him, the long hair, clean but unkempt, the two-week beard, the old jeans and T-shirt, the lined face, suntanned and dry-looking, the tired brown eyes.

“What?”

“What are you going to do to Alice?”

“That's not your business.”

“Tell me you're not going to hurt her.”

Tyler didn't answer.

Sandy stared down the length of the beach, then looked straight at Tyler. “Alice's father didn't murder Jenny.”

“Don't!” He stepped toward her, fast this time.

But she didn't move back. “Don't you remember how your father used to talk about how hard it can be for any doctor to diagnosis appendicitis? And that peritonitis is very often the—”

“Walk away, Sandy! Now. We aren't going to talk about this again!”

He was shaking, a foot away from her, his hands clenched by his thighs. The horror and hostility contorting his face made her start toward the high dune between the beach and the marsh. “If you change your mind about us, I'll be willing to talk again. As long as it's one day soon.”

“There's nothing else to talk about. I've explained my position more than once.”

“But one year from today, if you see things the same way, have the decency to send me an address where my lawyer can forward the papers.” Sandy had slid her glasses on and was halfway up the dune.

“You know who my lawyer is. Send the papers now.”

“You know what I think?” She was twenty feet away, at the top of the dune, when she stopped and turned around.

Tyler didn't answer.

And she watched him again before she spoke. “I don't think you ever stopped loving Alice, and now you've come up with an excuse to hate her instead. You're jealous of Booker, and the life they've had together, and you want to make her hurt because you've been miserable, and you have to blame someone else.”

“I'm the one who broke the engagement!”

“It's why you did that makes the difference.”

“GO!”

“Don't forget what I've said.”

Excerpt From Jo Grant's Journal:

…I loved the way Mom used to say, “Make a light,” from having been raised without electricity. And the sound of her singing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” in a low mellow voice while she washed the dishes.

I always thought I was tough and self-sufficient. Always working as long as I can remember. The motor court. The horses. Paying my way through college and all that. But maybe I was fooling myself. I'm not feeling so easy about knowing how to get myself going again now.

I'm still sad, and mad sometimes too – but I watched the sun come up this morning, and it made me stand with my toes in cool grass and grin just like I used to…

Friday, April 27, 1962

A
lan Munro met Jo at her house at four-thirty that morning, and ate breakfast with her while Toss was getting ready to go.

She described her talk with Grace Willoughby. And he told her he'd been able to track Tara's husband, Dwayne Kruse, through people he knew who'd been in the army and were still tangentially attached. She asked what that meant, and he laughed and said he might tell her someday, once he knew her better.

He also told her he'd talked to Kruse, who was out of the army now and working at the G.E. jet engine plant in Evendale, just north of Cincinnati. He'd arranged to meet him the next day, late morning, in Cincinnati, when they'd both have the day off. Alan asked if Jo would want to talk about what he'd learned after that, maybe Saturday night or Sunday, either one.

Jo said, “Sure. And how would you like a lesson on Sam?”

Then Toss was ready, and he got himself in his truck with a lot more help than he wanted from Alan, before Jo drove him to Keeneland with Alan following behind.

They went in the west gate, past a gatekeeper Toss had known for years, and parked at the backside of the track near the diner, where people were coming and going the whole time Toss was getting out.

He rolled his own wheelchair and talked to at least half the people they passed on their way up to the track – the people you see when it's not a race day, doing the everyday behind-the-scenes work that gets Thoroughbreds ready to race.