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Throwing her arms in the air, Hocus said in exasperation, “You know me, Pam. I sniff out a mess before it happens, and this is going to be a mess.”
“Ugh. Why do I not want this right now? I want peace.” She looked at Hocus, who had calmed down and was looking out over the water. “Is Dan involved?” Pam asked in a whisper.
Hocus looked over at Pam in concern. “Your Dan? No. They might look at him because he dated her, but he didn’t have anything to do with her whereabouts now.”
“There is a God.”
“Yes,” Hocus replied, chuckling. “One less thing to worry about.”
“I’m tired of this weather already, and it’s not even Halloween.”
“Well, you’d better get used to it because I heard we’re in for a doozy this winter. And I can already feel it in my bones.”
“Oh, please don’t tell me that,” Pam cried. “I’m ready to move to Florida.”
“No, you’re not. You’d hate it down there. It’s nice weather all the time. No trees changing color, no snow.”
“I’d try it for a season. We should do it, Hocus.”
“It’s ridiculous. You’d die without Ryan,” she said, glancing at Pam out of the corner of her eye. “Eat up your grilled cheese before it gets cold.”
When Hocus left the room, Pam turned to the window again, watching the waves crashing on the beach as the tide came in faster. It was coming up closer to the house than it ever had before. Dan had told her it was due to the ice caps melting and the ocean level rising. The thought of her house being swamped by giant waves petrified her.
Pam ignored the lunch, remembering the mess she’d left downstairs. Sneaking out of the den, she heard Hocus’s voice echoing through the hallway as she talked to the gardener out in the garage.
Back down in the bedroom, Pam left Lisa’s box out for Ryan and stacked the others back in the closet. The candy box sat like a sentinel, waiting. Something foreboding emanated from it, a warning of sorts telling her that she needed to cease and desist, stop with the digging around, let sleeping dogs lie.
The name Elizabeth Harrow suddenly zipped into her brain. Why on earth would she think of that lowlife?
There was unfinished business with Elizabeth Harrow. She remembered that Friday night years ago when Jack had come home, apologetic that instead of adhering to their comforting routine, he was asking Pam to accompany him to a fundraiser for Senator Harrow at their modest home in Babylon.
“It’s not even on a canal,” Jack had said, a sneer evident in his voice in the pitch-black of the car.
“Not everyone lives the life we live,” Pam had replied in her sweet, musical voice. “Thanks to you, we have the best.”
He had grabbed her hand and given it a squeeze, pulling her in for a kiss over the center console before he climbed out of the car.
That night, in the Harrows’ overheated living room, Pam had gotten a peculiar vibe from Harrow’s wife, and over the years, it had escalated until she was sure Jack had been intimate with her. It made Pam sick.
In addition to having Jack in common with Pam, Elizabeth Harrow had also lost a child. Ginger had taken her own life. Brent had been murdered. The only people on the planet who knew what it was like to lose a child were other grieving parents. And Pam felt responsible.
She’d opened the can of worms when she found that baby’s skeleton in Laura’s beach shack attic. Ginger hadn’t been able to cope with the pain. No one really believed she’d killed her own baby. But she had been the scapegoat. And probably knowing the humiliation that would arise from the discovery, she hadn’t been able to face it, especially with her husband, the Manhattan district attorney Andrew Roman, watching over her.
Pam wondered if Elizabeth knew he was now married to Sandra Benson, mother of Pam’s grandson, Brent, living there on the beach, and Sandra was expecting Andrew Roman’s baby.
The candy box shimmered like a living thing, waiting. Pam stared at it. She knew what she was going to do. She was going to call Elizabeth Harrow to offer severely belated condolences. It was preferable to opening the box.
Grabbing the dusty box, she wrapped it in a clean towel from the bathroom and ran up the steps to the main part of the house with it cradled in her arms.
In her lavish bedroom, she straightened up what she’d already done that day, smoothing the coverlet and dusting the nightstand, neatening the folds of the drapery and then entering the closet to place the candy box on a high shelf for another time.
She washed her hands, patting them dry with a towel. Picking up her brush, she smoothed her hair over her ears, stalling before making the call that should have been made months ago.
Eyes closed, she tried to remember Elizabeth Harrow as she had been years ago when Jack was alive. There had been no discernable attraction between them, not like what she had seen when Jack talked to young women friends of their children. Ginger Harrow, for instance. She had suspected that Ginger was a threat, so when talk had finally reached her ears that Jack had been involved with Ginger at the same time she was involved with Brent, it had been yet another confirmation of Pam’s intuition.
In front of the bedroom window, facing the sea, were two chairs, called easy chairs back in the day, and when she’d bought them, she’d imagined sitting there with Jack in the evening with glasses of wine. But he hadn’t cared for that, preferring to sit on the veranda or the terrace, or even the den to look at the vista.
So the chairs didn’t have much positive memory value of Jack, except for one incident. Giggling, she remembered a naked Jack sitting with his bare bottom on the expensive Italian silk fabric, and when she’d admonished him, he’d grabbed his scrotum and sort of bounced it on the chair.
