Later Read online

  “Those billable hours are a bitch,” Mom said one night when she and Liz Dutton were well into their second bottle of wine. Liz laughed because it wasn’t her forty thousand. Mom laughed because she was squiffed. I was the only one who didn’t see the humor in it, because it wasn’t just the lawyer’s bills. We were on the hook for Uncle Harry’s medical bills as well.

  Worst of all, the IRS came after Mom for back taxes Uncle Harry owed. He had been putting off that other uncle—Sam—so he could dump more money into the Mackenzie Fund. Which left Regis Thomas.

  The jewel in our crown.

  7

  Now check this out.

  It’s the fall of 2009. Obama is president, and the economy is slowly getting better. For us, not so much. I’m in the third grade, and Ms. Pierce has me doing a fractions problem on the board because I’m good at shit like that. I mean I was doing percentages when I was seven—literary agent’s kid, remember. The kids behind me are restless because it’s that funny little stretch of school between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The problem is as easy as soft butter on toast, and I’m just finishing when Mr. Hernandez, the assistant principal, sticks his head in. He and Ms. Pierce have a brief murmured conversation, and then Ms. Pierce asks me to step out into the hall.

  My mother is waiting out there, and she’s as pale as a glass of milk. Skim milk. My first thought is that Uncle Harry, who now has a steel plate in his skull to protect his useless brain, has died. Which in a gruesome way would actually be good, because it would cut down on expenses. But when I ask, she says Uncle Harry—by then living in a third-rate care home in Piscataway (he kept moving further west, like some fucked-up brain-dead pioneer)—is fine.

  Mom hustles me down the hall and out the door before I can ask any more questions. Parked at the yellow curb where parents drop off their kids and pick them up in the afternoon is a Ford sedan with a bubble light on the dash. Standing beside it in a blue parka with NYPD on the breast is Liz Dutton.

  Mom is rushing me toward the car, but I dig in my heels and make her stop. “What is it?” I ask. “Tell me!” I’m not crying, but the tears are close. There’s been a lot of bad news since we found out about the Mackenzie Fund, and I don’t think I can stand any more, but I get some. Regis Thomas is dead.

  The jewel just fell out of our crown.

  8

  I have to stop here and tell you about Regis Thomas. My mother used to say that most writers are as weird as turds that glow in the dark, and Mr. Thomas was a case in point.

  The Roanoke Saga—that’s what he called it—consisted of nine books when he died, each one as thick as a brick. “Old Regis always serves up a heaping helping,” Mom said once. When I was eight, I snitched a copy of the first one, Death Swamp of Roanoke, off one of the office shelves and read it. No problem there. I was as good at reading as I was at math and seeing dead folks (it’s not bragging if it’s true). Plus Death Swamp wasn’t exactly Finnegans Wake.

  I’m not saying it was badly written, don’t get that idea; the man could tell a tale. There was plenty of adventure, lots of scary scenes (especially in the Death Swamp), a search for buried treasure, and a big hot helping of good old S-E-X. I learned more about the true meaning of sixty-nine in that book than a kid of eight should probably know. I learned something else as well, although I only made a conscious connection later. It was about all those nights Mom’s friend Liz stayed over.

  I’d say there was a sex scene every fifty pages or so in Death Swamp, including one in a tree while hungry alligators crawled around beneath. We’re talking Fifty Shades of Roanoke. In my early teens Regis Thomas taught me to jack off, and if that’s too much information, deal with it.

  The books really were a saga, in that they told one continuing story with a cast of continuing characters. They were strong men with fair hair and laughing eyes, untrustworthy men with shifty eyes, noble Indians (who in later books became noble Native Americans), and gorgeous women with firm, high breasts. Everyone—the good, the bad, the firm-breasted—was randy all the time.

  The heart of the series, what kept the readers coming back (other than the duels, murders, and sex, that is) was the titanic secret that had caused all the Roanoke settlers to disappear. Had it been the fault of George Threadgill, the chief villain? Were the settlers dead? Was there really an ancient city beneath Roanoke full of ancient wisdom? What did Martin Betancourt mean when he said “Time is the key” before expiring? What did that cryptic word croatoan, found carved on a palisade of the abandoned community, really mean? Millions of readers slavered to know the answers to those questions. To anyone far in the future finding that hard to believe, I’d simply tell you to hunt up something by Judith Krantz or Harold Robbins. Millions of people read their stuff, too.

  Regis Thomas’s characters were classic projection. Or maybe I mean wish fulfillment. He was a little wizened dude whose author photo was routinely altered to make his face look a little less like a lady’s leather purse. He didn’t come to New York City because he couldn’t. The guy who wrote about fearless men hacking their way through pestilent swamps, fighting duels, and having athletic sex under the stars was an agoraphobe bachelor who lived alone. He was also incredibly paranoid (so said my mother) about his work. No one saw it until it was done, and after the first two volumes were such rip-roaring successes, staying at the top of the bestseller lists for months, that included a copyeditor. He insisted that they be published as he wrote them, word for golden word.

  He wasn’t a book-a-year author (that literary agent’s El Dorado), but he was dependable; a book with of Roanoke in the title would appear every two or three years. The first four came during Uncle Harry’s tenure, the next five in Mom’s. That included Ghost Maiden of Roanoke, which Thomas announced was the penultimate volume. The last book in the series, he promised, would answer all the questions his loyal readers had been asking ever since those first expeditions into the Death Swamp. It would also be the longest book in the series, maybe seven hundred pages. (Which would allow the publisher to tack an extra buck or two onto the purchase price.) And once Roanoke and all its mysteries were put to rest, he had confided to my mother on one of her visits to his upstate New York compound, he intended to begin a multi-volume series focused on the Mary Celeste.

  It all sounded good until he dropped dead at his desk with only thirty or so pages of his magnum opus completed. He had been paid a cool three million in advance, but with no book, the advance would have to be paid back, including our share. Only our share was either gone or spoken for. This, as you may have guessed, was where I came in.

  Okay, back to the story.

  9

  As we approached the unmarked police car (I knew what it was, I’d seen it lots of times, parked in front of our building with the sign reading POLICE OFFICER ON CALL on the dash), Liz held open the side of her parka to show me her empty shoulder holster. This was a kind of joke between us. No guns around my son, that was Mom’s hard and fast rule. Liz always showed me the empty holster when she was wearing it, and I’d seen it plenty of times on the coffee table in our living room. Also on the night table on the side of the bed my mother didn’t use, and by the age of nine, I had a pretty good idea of what that meant. Death Swamp of Roanoke included some steamy stuff going on between Laura Good-hugh and Purity Betancourt, the widow of Martin Betancourt (pure she wasn’t).

  “What’s she doing here?” I asked Mom when we got to the car. Liz was right there, so I guess it was an impolite thing to say, if not downright rude, but I had just been jerked out of class and been told before we even got outside that our meal ticket had been revoked.

  “Get in, Champ,” Liz said. She always called me Champ. “Time’s a-wasting.”

  “I don’t want to. We’re having fish sticks for lunch.”

  “Nope,” Liz said, “we’re having Whoppers and fries. I’m buying.”

  “Get in,” my mother said. “Please, Jamie.”

  So I got in the back. There were a couple of Taco B
ell wrappers on the floor and a smell that might have been microwave popcorn. There was also another smell, one I associated with our visits to Uncle Harry in his various care homes, but at least there was no metal grill between the back and the front, like I’d seen on some of the police shows Mom watched (she was partial to The Wire).

  Mom got in front and Liz pulled out, pausing at the first red light to turn on the dashboard flasher. It went blip-blip-blip, and even without any siren, cars moved out of her way and we were on the FDR lickety-split.

  My mother turned around and looked at me from between the seats with an expression that scared me. She looked desperate. “Could he be at his house, Jamie? I’m sure they’ve taken his body away to the morgue or the funeral parlor, but could he still be there?”

  The answer to that was I didn’t know, but I didn’t say that or anything else at first. I was too amazed. And hurt. Maybe even mad, I don’t remember for sure about that, but the amazement and hurt I remember very well. She had told me never to tell anybody about seeing dead people, and I never had, but then she did. She told Liz. That was why Liz was here, and would soon be using her blipping dashboard light to shift traffic out of our way on the Sprain Brook Parkway.

  At last I said, “How long has she known?”

  I saw Liz wink at me in the rearview mirror, the kind of wink that said we’ve got a secret. I didn’t like it. It was Mom and me who were supposed to have the secret.

  Mom reached over the seat and grasped me by the wrist.

  Her hand was cold. “Never mind that, Jamie, just tell me if he could still be there.”

  “Yeah, I guess. If that’s where he died.”

  Mom let go of me and told Liz to go faster, but Liz shook her head.

  “Not a good idea. We might pick up a police escort, and they’d want to know what the big deal was. Am I supposed to tell them we need to talk to a dead guy before he disappears?” I could tell by the way she said it that she didn’t believe a word of what Mom had told her, she was just humoring her. Joshing her along. That was okay with me. As for Mom, I don’t think she cared what Liz thought, as long as she got us to Croton-on-Hudson.

  “As fast as you can, then.”

  “Roger that, Tee-Tee.” I never liked her calling Mom that, it’s what some kids in my class called having to go to the bathroom, but Mom didn’t seem to mind. On that day she wouldn’t have cared if Liz called her Bonnie Boobsalot. Probably wouldn’t even have noticed.

  “Some people can keep secrets and some people can’t,” I said. I couldn’t help myself. So I guess I was mad.

  “Stop it,” my mother said. “I can’t afford to have you sulking.”

  “I’m not sulking,” I said sulkily.

  I knew she and Liz were tight, but she and I were supposed to be even tighter. She could have at least asked me what I thought about the idea before spilling our greatest secret some night when she and Liz were in bed after climbing what Regis Thomas called “the ladder of passion.”

  “I can see you’re upset, and you can be pissed off at me later, but right now I need you, kiddo.” It was like she had forgotten Liz was there, but I could see Liz’s eyes in the rearview mirror and knew she was listening to every word.

  “Okay.” She was scaring me a little. “Chill, Mom.”

  She ran her hand through her hair and gave her bangs a yank for good measure. “This is so unfair. Everything that’s happened to us…that’s still happening…is so fucking fucked up!” She ruffled my hair. “You didn’t hear that.”

  “Yes I did,” I said. Because I was still mad, but she was right. Remember what I said about being in a Dickens novel, only with swears? You know why people read books like that? Because they’re so happy that fucked-up shit isn’t happening to them.

  “I’ve been juggling bills for two years now and never dropped a single one. Sometimes I had to let the little ones go to pay the big ones, sometimes I let the big ones go to pay a bunch of little ones, but the lights stayed on and we never missed a meal. Right?”

  “Yeah yeah yeah,” I said, thinking it might raise a smile. It didn’t.

  “But now…” She gave her bangs another yank, leaving them all clumpy. “Now half a dozen things have come due at once, with goddam Infernal Revenue leading the pack. I’m drowning in a sea of red ink and I was expecting Regis to save me. Then the son of a bitch dies! At the age of fifty-nine! Who dies at fifty-nine if they’re not a hundred pounds overweight or using drugs?”

  “People with cancer?” I said.

  Mom gave a watery snort and yanked her poor bangs.

  “Easy, Tee,” Liz murmured. She laid her palm against the side of Mom’s neck, but I don’t think Mom felt it.

  “The book could save us. The book, the whole book, and nothing but the book.” She gave a wild laugh that scared me even more. “I know he only had a couple of chapters done, but nobody else knows it, because he didn’t talk to anybody but my brother before Harry got sick and now me. He didn’t outline or keep notes, Jamie, because he said it straitjacketed the creative process. Also because he didn’t have to. He always knew where he was going.”

  She took my wrist again and squeezed so hard she left bruises. I saw them later that night.

  “He still might know.”

  10

  We did the drive-thru at the Tarrytown Burger King, and I got a Whopper, as promised. Also a chocolate shake. Mom didn’t want to stop, but Liz insisted. “He’s a growing boy, Tee. He needs chow even if you don’t.”

  I liked her for that, and there were other things I liked her for, but there were also things I didn’t like. Big things. I’ll get to that, I’ll have to, but for now let’s just say my feelings about Elizabeth Dutton, Detective 2nd Grade, NYPD, were complicated.

  She said one other thing before we got to Croton-on-Hudson, and I need to mention it. She was just making conversation, but it turned out to be important later (I know, that word again). Liz said Thumper had finally killed someone.

  The man who called himself Thumper had been on the local news every now and then over the last few years, especially on NY1, which Mom watched most nights while she was making supper (and sometimes while we were eating, if it had been an interesting news day). Thumper’s “reign of terror”—thanks, NY1—had actually been going on even before I was born, and he was sort of an urban legend. You know, like Slender Man or The Hook, only with explosives.

  “Who?” I said. “Who did he kill?”

  “How long until we get there?” Mom asked. She had no interest in Thumper; she had her own fish to fry.

  “A guy who made the mistake of trying to use one of Manhattan’s few remaining phone booths,” Liz said, ignoring my mother. “Bomb Squad thinks it went off the second he lifted the receiver. Two sticks of dynamite—”

  “Do we have to talk about this?” Mom asked. “And why is every goddam light red?”

  “Two sticks of dynamite taped under the little ledge where people can put their change,” Liz went on, undeterred. “Thumper’s a resourceful SOB, got to give him that. They’re going to crank up another task force—this will be the third since 1996—and I’m going to try for it. I was on the last one, so I’ve got a shot, and I can use the OT.”

  “Light’s green,” Mom said. “Go.”

  Liz went.

  11

  I was still eating a few last French fries (cold by then, but I didn’t mind) when we turned onto a little dead-end street called Cobblestone Lane. There might have been cobblestones on it once, but now it was just smooth tar. The house at the end of it was Cobblestone Cottage. It was a big stone house with fancy carved shutters and moss on the roof. You heard me, moss. Crazy, right? There was a gate, but it was open. There were signs on the gateposts, which were the same gray stone as the house. One said DO NOT TRESPASS, WE ARE TIRED OF HIDING THE BODIES. The other showed a snarling German Shepherd and said BEWARE ATTACK DOG.

  Liz stopped and looked at my mother, eyebrows raised.

  “The only body
Regis ever buried was his pet parakeet, Francis,” Mom said. “Named after Francis Drake, the explorer. And he never had a dog.”

  “Allergies,” I said from the back seat.

  Liz drove up to the house, stopped, and turned off the blippy dashboard light. “Garage doors are shut and I see no cars. Who’s here?”

  “Nobody,” Mom said. “The housekeeper found him. Mrs. Quayle. Davina. She and a part-time gardener were the whole staff. Nice woman. She called me right after she called for an ambulance. Ambulance made me wonder if she was sure he was really dead, and she said she was, because she worked in a nursing home before coming to work for Regis, but he still had to go to the hospital first. I told her to go home as soon as the body was removed. She was pretty freaked out. She asked about Frank Wilcox, he’s Regis’s business manager, and I said I’d get in touch with him. In time I will, but the last time I spoke to Regis, he told me Frank and his wife were in Greece.”

  “Press?” Liz asked. “He was a bestselling writer.”

  “Jesus-God, I don’t know.” Mom looked around wildly, as if expecting to see reporters hiding in the bushes. “I don’t see any.”

  “They may not even know yet,” Liz said. “If they do, if they heard it on a scanner, they’ll go after the cops and EMTs first. The body’s not here so the story’s not here. We’ve got some time, so calm down.”

  “I’m staring bankruptcy in the face, I’ve got a brother who may live in a home for the next thirty years, and a boy who might like to go to college someday, so don’t tell me to calm down. Jamie, do you see him? You know what he looks like, right? Tell me you see him.”

  “I know what he looks like, but I don’t see him,” I said.