So Kate did when he returned late the next morning. “Why would you rather play roulette than stay at the hotel with us?”
Her father chuckled. “Wait till you’re older. You’ll see James Bond movies and get it.” Then, just as the rest of the family was heading to Èze for lunch, he went to bed to sleep through the day.
One late night during school vacation,Dr. Nowas on TV, and Kate made Lulu stay over and watch it with her. James was playing baccarat at a casino. He wore a dinner jacket and looked handsome, just like her father. Kate tried to imagine what her father had been trying to say, but to her, hanging out in a casino seemed boring.
Living in Connecticut, temptation was close for him—Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun casinos were not far from Black Hall. But instead of just being away from dinner till dawn, he had started not coming home for days at a time. One day he came home just before she left for school. He hugged her, and she smelled perfume. She was only fifteen at the time, but she knew right then that he was having an affair.
She wanted to tell Beth, but Kate took her position as older sister seriously and had to protect her. She watched her mother, to see how she reacted. For the longest time, her mother seemed fine. But once in a while, her father would talk on the phone in a low voice, then leave the house. Kate would see her mother hitting redial after her father left.
Kate figured her mother must have smelled the perfume too.
Walking down Pequot Avenue, Kate had intended to keep going to the lighthouse. But when she stopped to sit on the wall outside Monte Cristo Cottage, she realized this was where she had wanted to come all along. She needed to visit this house, to feel Eugene O’Neill’s spirit and bring back a moment in her life when she had sat with Beth and Mathilda in the theater, when a certain truth about her father had clicked in her mind.
Her phone rang again. This time she answered without even looking at the screen.
“You didn’t even text me back. You couldn’t bring yourself to tell me,” Kate said.
“You have no idea how much I wanted to,” Lulu said.
“But Beth made you promise not to?”
“No, she never said that. I can’t even figure it out, why I didn’t. At first I thought that, yes—that if she’d wanted you to know, she’d have told you herself.”
“Am I that terrible?” she asked. “That judgmental?”
Lulu studiously avoided answering the question. “Kate, I want to see you. We need to talk in person.”
Kate’s jaw was so tight she could barely speak.
“Where is Jed Hilliard now?” she finally asked.
“I don’t know.”
“If you had to guess.”
“Kate, we weren’t friends. I only met him once—accidentally.”
“Where?”
“On the Block Island Ferry. It was late last winter; the boat was practically empty. I had a few days off and was heading out to clear my head. I spotted Beth standing on deck—I was in the cabin; it was so cold. I remember there was ice on the lines, and it was starting to snow. I was so surprised to see her there at all—I started to go outside, when a guy walked up to her, handed her a cup of something hot—coffee, I guess. I tried to hang back, but she saw me, so I couldn’t avoid going over to talk. She introduced him as an artist friend, said they were going to go to Mohegan Bluffs to take photos of the cliffs in the snow so they could paint the scene later.”
“Maybe they were just friends.”
“I saw him kiss her when he handed her the cup,” Lulu said. “It was a real kiss.”
Kate stared out at the water, picturing her sister on the ferry, kissing a stranger. So Scotty had been wrong—they were more than just friends. And the baby? Could he have been Jed’s? She closed her eyes and tried to imagine how Beth must have felt. It must have been exciting. She must have been happy. Kate kept the small fat key in her pocket, and her hand closed around it now.
“Whose baby was it?” Kate asked.
“Where are you?” Lulu asked.
“New London.”
“At home?”
“On Pequot.”
“Stay there,” Lulu said. “I’m coming to get you.”
