Stephen L. Carter Read online

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  PROLOGUE

  PART I MAXIMIZING UTILITY

  CHAPTER 1 SHORTCUT

  CHAPTER 2 THE TERRIERS

  CHAPTER 3 KEPLER

  CHAPTER 4 MARY

  CHAPTER 5 THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY

  CHAPTER 6 INVENTORY RISK

  CHAPTER 7 TRICKY TONY

  CHAPTER 8 MAIN STREET

  CHAPTER 9 SURFACE TENSION

  CHAPTER 10 A WALK ON THE BEACH

  CHAPTER 11 PRIVATE DINNER

  CHAPTER 12 AN ALMOST NORMAL DAY

  CHAPTER 13 MOTHER AND DAUGHTER AND FRIEND

  CHAPTER 14 A SURPRISE GUEST

  CHAPTER 15 THE SECRETARY

  CHAPTER 16 THE OCCASIONAL STUDENT

  CHAPTER 17 THE DEBT

  CHAPTER 18 THE ORIGINAL THINKER

  CHAPTER 19 A DISTURBING COMPLAINT

  CHAPTER 20 AN EVENING VISIT

  CHAPTER 21 THE ANSWER

  PART II SUPPLYING DEMAND

  CHAPTER 22 SEMI-PRECIOUS

  CHAPTER 23 MIRROR, MIRROR

  CHAPTER 24 THE HORSEMEN

  CHAPTER 25 THE FLUTTERING

  CHAPTER 26 PERSONA GRATA

  CHAPTER 27 AGAIN THE COMYNS MIRROR

  CHAPTER 28 DEFYING GRAVITAS

  CHAPTER 29 THE INVESTOR

  CHAPTER 30 AGAIN OLD LANDING

  CHAPTER 31 FRIENDLY ADVICE

  CHAPTER 32 DENNISON

  CHAPTER 33 ’TIS THE SEASON

  CHAPTER 34 THE LOOKING-GLASS WORLD

  CHAPTER 35 A FRIENDLY CONVERSATION

  CHAPTER 36 HUEBNER

  CHAPTER 37 TWO MEETINGS

  CHAPTER 38 AGAIN MAIN STREET

  CHAPTER 39 COMMON PRAYER

  PART III CLEARING THE MARKET

  CHAPTER 40 AGAIN BOSTON

  CHAPTER 41 DARK MATTER

  CHAPTER 42 ANOTHER WALK ON THE BEACH

  CHAPTER 43 A SMALL REQUEST

  CHAPTER 44 THE NEST

  CHAPTER 45 MISS TERRY’S TALE

  CHAPTER 46 TWO MORE MEETINGS

  CHAPTER 47 SUGAR HILL

  CHAPTER 48 SAFETY IN NUMBERS

  CHAPTER 49 AGAIN THE COMYNS MIRROR

  CHAPTER 50 HOUSE OF TOYS

  CHAPTER 51 MONA

  CHAPTER 52 THE EMPYREALS

  CHAPTER 53 ARRIVAL

  CHAPTER 54 AGAIN HOBBY HILL

  CHAPTER 55 IMPERFECT INFORMATION

  CHAPTER 56 AGAIN NORPORT

  CHAPTER 57 AGAIN THE LIBRARIAN

  CHAPTER 58 AUTOMATIC LEVELING

  CHAPTER 59 FEBRUARY 1973

  CHAPTER 60 COMPARATIVE AUTHORITY

  CHAPTER 61 DEPARTURES

  CHAPTER 62 THE DUEL

  CHAPTER 63 THE SCIENCE QUIZ

  CHAPTER 64 THE HEART OF WHITENESS

  CHAPTER 65 THE ALL-PAY AUCTION

  CHAPTER 66 …THEN BEGGARS WOULD RIDE

  CHAPTER 67 THE ILLUSIVE CALM

  CHAPTER 68 WINNER’S CURSE

  EPILOGUE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY STEPHEN L. CARTER

  COPYRIGHT

  For Annette Windom

  Why does everybody pick on the economists? They’ve correctly predicted thirteen of the past five recessions!

  —Familiar campus joke

  PROLOGUE

  THE LANDING IN SUMMER

  RUMORS CHASE THE DEAD LIKE FLIES, and we follow them with our prim noses. None of us are gossips, but we love listening to those who are. So, if you happened to pass through the village of Tyler’s Landing in the first few weeks after the investigations finally ended and the last reporters left for home, and you stopped at Cookie’s Place on Main Street to buy some chocolate-covered raisins, specialty of the house, you’d have had the chance to listen to chubby Vera Brightwood telling you whose fault it was and whose fault it wasn’t and whose fault it could never be.

  As far as Vera is concerned, the whole mess started not when that colored professor got himself killed in November, but on an unexpectedly sultry winter night nine months earlier—call it February—when pretty Vanessa Carlyle, sixteen going on fifty if you believe what they say, set fire to her father’s midnight-blue Mercedes on the Town Green. Yes, that’s right, she says, that Carlyle, the very same, the one whose mail, according to Joe Vaux down at the post office, arrives addressed to “The Honorable,” if you can believe the airs those people give themselves these days. You smile and listen, enjoying a New England summer’s brightness through the wide front window of the shop. The word Vera Brightwood brings to mind is garrulous. For Vera, one lament flows smoothly into another, and soon she is assuring you that she has nothing against the Carlyles, even though she has been telling folks for the last six years, and tells you too, that the town should never have let them build that gigantic house on the Patterson lot. Which leads her back to the fire. Okay, so she has a few of the details wrong. For instance, Vanessa never actually spoke to the professor that night, that’s been proved conclusively, even if both of them, as Vera reminds you, happen to be colored. But that’s just her way. Stories are like sweets for Vera: you have to make them fancier than the ones available next door or you lose your customers. Her time-tested technique involves fluffing up a minor detail here, folding in a richer grade of rumor there, and—voilà!—a delicacy worth every embellishment. She might not always be right, but she is never dull.

  Anyway, no harm in listening, right?

  Cookie’s Place is the Landing’s version of the Café de la Régence in Paris, and what they used to say of the second is often true of the first: sooner or later, everybody who is anybody stops by. Not just the three thousand people in the village proper, but somehow half the population of the state has heard of Cookie’s. Word is that Woody Allen filmed the interiors for some movie in the shop a long time ago, but Vera isn’t saying, so it probably isn’t true. Although it should be. The countertops are polished white marble shot through with jagged green highlights. The bright red Coca-Cola sign is half a century old. The single room seems to go on forever, but it’s really no more than twenty by thirty, the rest just a trick of the mirrors. The candies all sit in glass cases and jars: peppermint sticks in different colors, lollipops with long red swirls, a hundred varieties of jelly beans, truffles, buttons, straws, butterscotch, little mailboxes and Statues of Liberty and Ford Model T cars that dispense mints, hard candies in rolls and hard candies on sticks and hard candies shaped like animals, eight flavors of fudge, and all the chocolate the addict could wish, including an elegant diet-busting concoction, all Vera’s own, called cranberry chocolate.

  Something new is always baking. The luscious aromas drive you half mad, just the way they are supposed to. Whether you like candy or not, you begin to salivate as the desire for sinful pleasure snares you, and before you know it you are ordering everything in the shop. Vera, atrociously plump, cheeks puffy and pink, white-gray hair drawn neatly into twin buns, measures a pound of chocolate-covered raisins by eye as she talks your ear off, explaining in her husky smoker’s voice the problem with the Carlyle house. And you listen to the story because you really do want those raisins.

  Vera talks about the house. She has good, solid reasons why they should never have let the Carlyles build it. Like they should have left the meadow alone, so kids could play softball. Like the house breaks up the view from the road down into the valley. And it’s too big and too ostentatious anyway, that house, all those sharp angles and glass walls that catch the sun, so when you drive by the place seems to wink at you, especially if you happen to be staring at it, which Vera, who has lived on the other side of the reservoir long enough to oppose every house built for m
iles around, does a lot more often than she likes to admit. Oh, Vera is in a dither, and beneath that delicate porcelain skin something glows warm with fury.

  Certain that the woman is crazy, you begin to inch toward the door, the chocolate-covered raisins in your clutches, but Vera stops you with a word.

  So what about the car? she asks, and you remember what she said about the girl—what was her name?—Vanessa. Do you want to hear about the car? asks Vera.

  Sure, you say.

  Vera is happy to tell you, but, first, maybe you want some fudge with that? Another specialty of Cookie’s is the butter-rum fudge, with or without walnuts. Tying your bright-green box with her trademark green ribbon—no cellophane tapes for Vera; no, sir!—she says, oh, by the way, she must have forgotten to mention that while the car was burning, pretty Vanessa tried to open one of her veins with an X-Acto knife.

  And when you have heard Vera out, maybe you’re still not sure what to think, except that you are swooning with sympathy for Vanessa, to say nothing of her parents, her sister, and her two brothers. Vera talks so hard she leaves you dizzy, but you finally see it as though you were there, because Vera Brightwood has that gift, she always has, she can bring a story to life: the shiny blue Mercedes, brand-new, leased three months earlier, just two thousand miles on the clock, a roaring pyre in the concrete driveway of the red brick town hall as winter dusk falls, and, off to the side, this long, skinny brown girl, intricately woven braids obscuring half her winsome face, sits calmly on a slatted bench and struggles with the knife, sawing away at skin that refuses to break.

  Poor kid, Vera finishes, a tear in her good eye.

  You are inclined to agree.

  And you know, Vera adds, sotto voce, as she tries to get you to buy some Jelly Bellys to go with your raisins, even with all the university folks buying up the land because they’ve decided that converting farmhouses is smart, there are only five colored families in town.

  Surprised, you ask if the town keeps track of these things.

  She asks what things you mean.

  You frame your objection carefully. The number of African-American families living here, you explain. Do you actually keep track?

  Some of us do, Vera tells you.

  Why?

  Vera leans close to whisper, her breath cloying as though she is fermenting inside, yellowy gaze lifting to the door just in case one of those liberals should come in. Money, she says. We keep track because of money. Nothing against the coloreds, mind, but real estate has been pretty flat around here lately, and I’ve never heard of a place yet where having colored neighbors makes values go up. You show me one and I’ll be for that open-housing thing. Oh, and they should have sent Vanessa to jail after she burned the car: Vera is tired of the way they always coddle the coloreds.

  Appalled, you try to speak up, but Vera refuses to feel guilty. She says you have it all wrong, she has nothing against the coloreds and she never did, even back when they were burning everything in sight until LBJ, rest his soul, called the National Guard to make them stop: she’s upset about the stupid house. Pinheads, she hisses, but it isn’t clear just who she is talking about.

  You decide it’s time to go.

  You leave Vera behind, and now you’re dizzy in the brilliant summer sunlight, her tirade still ringing in your head, and all you know is that you want to leave the Landing as far behind as you can. You find your car, you blink till your eyes clear, you roar out of town, who cares about the speed limit, that woman is crazy. You figure there is a cop hiding behind a billboard somewhere, but you decide to take your chances, because Vera’s story has left you feeling unsettled and reckless. And maybe you get away with it, because the town police are not on edge the way they were back a few months ago. It’s almost as quiet now as it was last November, a frozen interregnum, when Vanessa’s arson was in the past and the killings were in the future, before time twisted around and history marched into the Landing, demanding vengeance; the second week of November, when everybody in the cheery white village of Tyler’s Landing was feeling safe.

  Last time for a while.

  PART I

  MAXIMIZING UTILITY

  Utility Function—In economics, a measure of a consumer’s preferences expressed by the amount of satisfaction he or she receives from consumption of a set of desired goods or services. Economic theory assumes that people make rational efforts to maximize their utility. Sometimes one person’s utility is dependent on another’s.

  CHAPTER 1

  SHORTCUT

  (I)

  ON FRIDAY THE CAT DISAPPEARED, the White House phoned, and Jeannie’s fever—said the sitter when Julia called from the echoing marble lobby of Lombard Hall, where she and her husband were fêting shadowy alumni, one or two facing indictment, whose only virtue was piles of money—hit 103. After that, things got worser faster, as her grandmother used to say, although Granny Vee’s Harlem locutions, shaped to the rhythm of an era when the race possessed a stylish sense of humor about itself, would not have gone over well in the Landing, and Julia Carlyle had long schooled herself to avoid them.

  The cat was the smallest problem, even if later it turned out to be a portent. Rainbow Coalition, the children’s smelly feline mutt, had vanished before and usually came back, but now and then stayed away and was dutifully replaced by another dreadful creature of the same name. The White House was another matter. Lemaster’s college roommate, now residing in the Oval Office, telephoned at least once a month, usually to shoot the breeze, a thing it had never before occurred to Julia that Presidents of the United States did. As to Jeannie, well, the child was a solid eight years into a feverish childhood, the youngest of four, and her mother knew by now not to rush home at each spike of the thermometer. Tylenol and cool compresses had so far defeated every virus that had dared attack her child and would stymie this one, too. Julia gave the sitter her marching orders and returned to the endless dinner in time for Lemaster’s closing jokes. It was eleven minutes before ten on the second Friday in November in the year of our Lord 2003. Outside Lombard Hall, the snow had arrived early, two inches on the ground and more expected. As the police later would reconstruct the night’s events, Professor Kellen Zant was already dead and on the way to town in his car.

  (II)

  AFTER. Big cushy flakes still falling. Julia and Lemaster were barreling along Four Mile Road in their Cadillac Escalade with all the extras, color regulation black, as befitted their role as the most celebrated couple in African America’s lonely Harbor County outpost. That, at least, was how Julia saw them, even after the family’s move six years ago out into what clever Lemaster called “the heart of whiteness.” For most of their marriage they had lived in Elm Harbor, largest city in the county and home of the university her husband now led. By now they should have moved back, but the drafty old mansion the school set aside for its president was undergoing renovation, a firm condition Lemaster had placed on his acceptance of the post. The trustees had worried about how it would look to spend so much on a residence at a time when funds to fix the classrooms were difficult to raise, but Lemaster, as always with his public, had been at once reasonable and adamant. “People value you more,” he had explained to his wife, “if it costs more to get you than they expected.”

  “Or they hate you for it,” Julia had objected, but Lemaster stood his ground; for, within the family, he was a typical West Indian male, and therefore merely adamant.

  They drove. Huge flakes swirled toward the windshield, the soft, chunky variety that signals to any New Englander that the storm is moving slowly and the eye is yet to come. Julia sulked against the dark leather, steaming with embarrassment, having called two of the alums by each other’s names, and having referred half the night to a wife named Carlotta as Charlotte, who then encouraged her, in that rich Yankee way, not to worry about it, dear, it’s a common mistake. Lemaster, who had never forgotten a name in his life, charmed everybody into smiling, but as anyone who has tried to raise money from the wea
lthy knows, a tiny sliver of offense can cut a potential gift by half or more, and in this crowd, half might mean eight figures.

  Julia said, “Vanessa’s not setting fires any more.” Vanessa, a high-school senior, being the second of their four children. The first and the third—their two boys—were both away at school.

  Her husband said, “Thank you for tonight.”

  “Did you hear what I said?”

  “I did, my love.” The words rapid and skeptical, rich with that teasing, not-quite-British lilt. “Did you hear what I said?” Turning lightly but swiftly to avoid a darting animal. “I know you hate these things. I promise to burden you with as few as possible.”

  “Oh, Lemmie, come on. I was awful. You’ll raise more money if you leave me behind.”

  “Wrong, Jules. Cameron Knowland told me he so enjoyed your company that he’s upping his pledge by five million.”

  Julia in one of her moods, reassurance the last thing she craved. A blizzard was odd for November. She wondered what it portended. Clever wind whipped the snow into concentric circles of whiteness in the headlights, creating the illusion that the massive car was being drawn downward into a funnel. Four Mile Road was not the quickest route home from the city, but the Carlyles were planning a detour to the multiplex to pick up their second child, out for the first time in a while with her boyfriend, “That Casey,” as Lemaster called him. The GPS screen on the dashboard showed them well off the road, meaning the computer had never heard of Four Mile, which did not, officially, exist. But Lemaster would not forsake a beloved shortcut, even in a storm, and unmapped country lanes were his favorite.

  “Cameron Knowland,” Julia said distinctly, “is a pig.” Her husband waited. “I’m glad the SEC people are after him. I hope he goes to jail.”

  “It isn’t Cameron, Jules, it’s his company.” Lemaster’s favorite tone of light, donnish correction, which she had once, long ago, loved. “The most that would be imposed is a civil fine.”

  “All I know is, he kept looking down my dress.”