The Murder House

  “Nobody claiming rape, nobody claiming paternity,” I say. “So we don’t know anything.”

  “We know one thing.” Noah takes the papers and flips through each of them to a particular page.

  He hands them to me. Each of these lawsuits has a sheet attached to the front of it, with the names of the attorneys representing the plaintiff and defendant.

  “We know the name of Holden’s lawyer,” Noah says.

  77

  THE WAITER opens the bottle of wine and hands the cork to Justin, who defers to me. The waiter pours an inch of Pinot into my glass and I swirl it, sniff it, taste it, and nod my approval.

  “Cheers,” says Justin, looking very nice in a white shirt with an open collar, and a blue sport coat. We clink our glasses.

  It’s a nice place near the intersection of Main Street and the turnpike—not very far, really, from Justin’s own restaurant, Tasty’s. But this is more than a slight step up from his diner—dark oak and caramel leather, dim lighting, people dressed as formally as it gets in the Hamptons.

  “What made you change your mind?” he asks me.

  I shrug. “My friend told me I should have dinner with you.”

  That, and I’ve gone about seventy-two hours straight obsessing about the case. A little battery recharging may be in order.

  “Well, I’m glad.” He takes a drink of the wine. “Hey, this is good.”

  “It is good.” If I saw the price correctly on the menu, this bottle was over two hundred dollars, a 2011 Pinot from the Russian River Valley. All I know about wine is what I learned from Matty, who would always line up the year it was bottled with the vintage and location to find the “perfect” bottle to pair with our meal.

  “I gotta say, I don’t know anything about wine,” says Justin. “I’m the kind of guy who picks based on the label.” He laughs at himself.

  “Me too.”

  An awkward silence follows. He seems a little nervous. Not so adept at small talk, that’s for sure. But that part, I like. I’ve had enough of the smooth talkers.

  Still, with two people who aren’t good at chatter, there is a palpable sense of relief when the appetizers arrive—chilled zucchini soup for me, burrata with peaches for him.

  “So what brought you to the Hamptons?” he asks.

  I stop on that one. “I thought everyone knew about that,” I say.

  “Well, I remember the trial,” he says. “Some trouble you had with the NYPD. But I always figure, there’s two sides to every story. I mean, if you want.”

  An initial buzz is kicking in from the wine, maybe loosening me up a little.

  “I was working undercover,” I say. “Going after meth dealers. High up on the chain. I got close to the top guy.”

  “How’d you do that? Get close to him.” He settles his elbows on the table.

  “I slept with him,” I say. “I became his girlfriend.”

  “Wow.” He leans back. “Wow.”

  “Yeah, it was pretty intense. Only way to do it, though. These guys are wired tight. They don’t trust anybody. But when it comes to sex, they don’t use their brains so much.”

  “That’s—that’s pretty—wow.”

  “So anyway,” I say, “I came to find out that some of the people helping the boss were cops. There was a whole ring set up. The cops were running protection for the dealers. So I sent that information back to headquarters. I reported it. I made a big mistake, though.”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t report it to IAD. Internal Affairs.”

  “Who’d you report it to?”

  “My boss, my lieutenant.”

  “Why was that a mistake?”

  I gesture with my wineglass, take a sip. “Two days later, totally out of the blue, three cops are suddenly claiming that I skimmed off the top of a drug raid before I went undercover.”

  “Skimmed off the…”

  “They said I stole money and drugs from drug dealers. That I arrested them and only turned in some of the money and some of the drugs—kept the rest for myself.”

  “That kind of thing happens?”

  “It happens if you’re a dirty cop,” I say. “The drug dealers aren’t going to complain, right? If you’re busted, would you rather be busted with a thousand grams of cocaine and a hundred thousand dollars, or with ten grams and ten thousand bucks? Either way, you’re not getting any of it back. But you get a lesser sentence this way. It’s a pretty classic shakedown. If you’re a dirty cop.”

  He nods slowly.

  “Which I am not,” I say. “I touched a nerve in the department, I told the wrong person, and they wanted to silence me. So they trumped up these charges and gave me a choice—resign or go to prison.”

  We don’t speak for a while. I drain my first glass of the Pinot. Easy, Murphy. Don’t let the emotions bubble to the surface.

  “Do you regret it?” he asks.

  I let out air. “Do I regret not staying and fighting for my job? Every single day.”

  “But it was three cops against one,” he says.

  I nod. “That’s what Lang said. He said I couldn’t beat those odds. He said, ‘Get out while you still have your badge, come work for me.’ So I did.”

  “Well, I’m glad you did. Hope you like it here.”

  I shrug. “I won’t be here much longer,” I say. “I’m just staying until I figure out who killed my uncle.”

  His smile loses a few degrees of wattage. It seems he might have had some ideas about me. I figured I should let him know, up front, that I’m not in his long-term plans.

  For the main course, I have scallops with sweet corn and shishito peppers. They are absolutely delicious—but really no better than the ones at Tasty’s.

  “They get their seafood from the same place we do,” Justin says.

  “Really? You guys and this restaurant?”

  “Yeah,” he says, cocking his head, surprised at my surprise.

  I put down my fork. “Your food is as good as this place’s,” I say. “But you can’t be operating Tasty’s at a profit with the prices you’re charging.”

  “Who said I was operating at a profit?” He smiles and takes the last sip of his wine. He calls over the waiter and orders a second bottle.

  “Okay, so what’s your angle?” I ask. “This whole man-of-the-people thing about not raising prices for ten years.”

  “Angle? Why does there have to be an angle?”

  I look him over. Good looks, private schools growing up, an expensive dinner tonight, a restaurant that loses money…

  “I’m no saint,” he says. “We come close to breaking even some years. It’s…fun to have a place where everyone comes and enjoys themselves. It’s fun for me, too.”

  “There’s gotta be something wrong with you,” I say. “Are you sure you’re not a serial killer or something?”

  “I never said I wasn’t.” He smiles and wipes his mouth with his napkin. “You’ve been a cop too long, Jenna. You only see bad people. There are lots of good people in the world, too.”

  Maybe he’s right. Maybe not everyone in this world has an angle. Maybe I’ve been so closed off in the cocoon of crime and punishment that I’ve lost sight of some things. Maybe losing my badge is a good thing.

  Maybe there’s hope for me yet.

  78

  “I’LL WALK you to the door,” Justin says, pulling his Jaguar up to the curb. It’s a nice ride, this car.

  Nice dinner. Nice car. Nice guy.

  “This was fun,” he says as he steps up onto the porch.

  My cell phone vibrates in my purse.

  I stand at my door, fishing for my keys.

  “So listen.” Justin claps his hands together. “I had a great time. I had a…great time. It was a…”

  “Great time?” I rise up on my toes and kiss him softly on the lips. He responds, but awkwardly, his hand touching my arm, unsure whether he should open his mouth.

  Shy and clumsy.

  “It was fun for me,
too,” I say as we draw back. His face has lost a bit of color.

  Very shy.

  “Call me,” I say.

  He nods, then cocks his head. “Why would I call you?”

  I draw back. “Oh, I mean, if you want to…have dinner again.”

  “We already had dinner. Why would we do it again?”

  I stare at him, at a loss for words.

  “Gotcha.” He breaks into laughter. “You should see the look on your face.”

  Score one for him. He did get me. A little corny…but he got me.

  “I will call you, Jenna. For sure.”

  He pauses, like he’s thinking about another kiss, but he steps off the porch and heads to his car, whistling. I don’t know very many people who whistle. I don’t know anybody who whistles.

  Snap assessment: nice guy, but not a lot of sparks.

  Then again, that’s always been my problem. I look for chemistry right away and if I don’t feel it, I walk. Maybe that can develop over time. Maybe if I just let someone in…someone really nice…

  Someone without an angle…

  Justin drives away with a brief toot of his horn.

  Yeah, I don’t know…maybe…

  I walk inside my tornado of an apartment and fish my cell phone out of my purse.

  The call was from Lauren Ricketts. I punch her up and she answers on the second ring.

  “Murphy,” she says.

  “Ricketts. What’s up?”

  Suddenly my enjoyable Saturday night with Justin is over, and I’m slipping back into the darkness, the quagmire, slogging through evidence and driving myself crazy.

  “I finished going through criminal complaints and missing-persons reports,” she says. “I went back to the eighties and got through the mid-nineties.”

  “And?” I say, my heartbeat kicking up. “Did you find any criminal complaints?”

  “No. Nobody ever filed a criminal charge against Holden the Sixth.”

  “Shit.” I really thought that was promising. “And what about unsolveds or missing-persons bulletins?”

  “No unsolveds that look interesting, not from that time period.”

  “And no missing-persons reports that looked interesting?”

  “Just one from 1994,” she says. “I guess it would go under the category of interesting. I wish you’d prepared me for it.”

  “Prepared you for what?” I ask. “Who was the missing person?”

  A pause on the other end of the line.

  “You don’t know?” she asks.

  “Ricketts, just freakin’ tell me,” I say. “Who went missing?”

  Another pause. As if she’s debating. As if she’s thrown for a loss. And then, finally, she speaks.

  She says, “You did, Murphy. You were the missing person.”

  79

  SUNDAY NIGHT, 7 p.m. The sun almost completely fallen now, a blanket of darkness, the air mild and pleasant.

  April Fools’ Day, which feels appropriate. I was a fool ever to have returned to this place.

  I pull my car into Uncle Langdon’s driveway just as Aunt Chloe is locking the house up. Some final boxes to remove, some papers to sign, before the sale of the house goes through this month.

  “I was so glad you called,” she says. “We could grab a quick bite…”

  She has a big smile on her face, until she gets a look at mine.

  I stop short in front of her, no hug, no nothing.

  “What happened to me here in 1994?” I ask. “When I was eight years old.”

  Her face falls. Her mouth works, but no words come out.

  “I asked Lang why my family stopped coming to the Hamptons when I was a kid,” I say. “He never told me. ‘A story for another time,’ he said. And then I asked you, and you said, ‘If you don’t know, I don’t know.’ Whatever that cryptic bullshit is supposed to mean.”

  “It means just what I said.” Chloe looks me over. “I don’t know what happened. Nobody knows. Apparently, not even you.”

  “I saw a missing-persons report, Chloe. From July of 1994. It ended seven hours after it began.”

  Chloe slowly nods. “That’s right. ‘Seven hours of hell,’ your mother called it. You went missing. You were playing down the street, just right down this street. And then you were gone. Nobody could find you.” She places a hand at the base of her throat. “It still gives me a sickening feeling when I remember it. We looked everywhere. Lang had the entire Southampton Town Police Department searching for you. Your mother and I searched for you. Your father and Ryan searched for you. Everyone searched for you.”

  “And then?”

  “And then…we found you.” Her eyes shine with brimming tears. “Seven hours later. We found you on the beach. You were just…sitting there, looking peacefully out at the ocean.”

  I roll my hand impatiently, like I want her to continue.

  “I don’t know what else to tell you,” she says. “You wouldn’t tell us anything. Lang said you were in shock. We took you to the hospital and they checked you out. Nobody had…done anything…or hurt you—”

  “No evidence of any assault,” I say, “sexual or otherwise.”

  “No, nothing like that,” she says. “Just this.”

  She takes my hand, turns it over, palm up, and traces the small scar on my hand, about an inch long.

  “You had that cut on your hand.”

  “That’s how I got that cut?” I look at Chloe. “Mom always said I got it chopping a tomato when I was little.”

  Chloe nods. “Sometimes we tell our children little white lies to protect them,” she says. “Anyway, your family left the island that day and never came back to the Hamptons. They asked you about it for a while afterward. Days, weeks. But you wouldn’t talk about it. Or couldn’t. And then…life went on. Finally, they just dropped it. The nightmare with a happy ending.”

  I don’t remember any of this. Or at least, I thought I didn’t remember.

  “I was at the beach the whole time?”

  Chloe looks at me like she’s unsure of the answer.

  “For God’s sake, Chloe, speak.”

  She breathes out. “No. That’s the thing. The spot where they found you—I had personally looked there with your mother. It was one of the first places we checked. I’m sure of it. You weren’t there at first.”

  “So I wasn’t at the beach, and then seven hours later, I was.”

  She nods.

  “But you don’t know where I was for those seven hours.”

  She shakes her head, her expression grim. “Seven hours of hell.”

  I look over her shoulder at Lang’s house, now empty, soon to be sold to a young couple with a baby. A new life in a new town. New memories, new dreams.

  “Get in the car,” I say.

  “Jenna—”

  “Get in the car, Chloe.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re going to show me.”

  The drive doesn’t take long. She directs me, but I’m beyond being surprised at this point. There are any number of roads that lead to the sweeping beach, but I know which one before she says it.

  I drive down Ocean Drive and park in the parking lot and make her get out and walk onto the beach until she shows me the exact spot where I was found.

  “Right here,” she says. “I’ll never forget the sound your mother made when she saw you sitting here.”

  Those nightmares—they aren’t random spooky dreams. They aren’t some glimpse into the future. They aren’t telepathic visions of other victims’ experiences.

  They’re my memories. Repressed memories.

  I look out over the ocean, then turn my back to it, looking north.

  Looking at the second house from the end, looming over the coastline. The house at 7 Ocean Drive. The Gothic facade, the spears aimed at the sky.

  The memories, the flashbacks are at their most intense when I’m inside that house. Paralyzing panic attacks, every time I set foot inside that mansion.

  Tha
t’s where I was for seven hours, when I was a little girl.

  I was inside the Murder House.

  80

  MY CAR bumps violently over the rough road, sending my head banging against the roof. I stop on the shoulder, not wanting to pull into his driveway—not wanting to announce myself in advance.

  I remember you now, he said to me when I accosted him at the cemetery.

  I find his driveway, walk up to the front porch, and reach the door.

  “Open up, Aiden!” Pounding the door so hard that my knuckles start to bleed.

  Nothing.

  You shouldn’t have come back, he said to me when he caught me looking into his basement.

  My chest heaving, my emotions skittering about, I move to the window closest to the front door and look inside.

  The window is open, a screen letting in fresh air. I lean in, kick the screen off, push it into the house, and get one leg and my body through the window.

  Just as Aiden is rushing past me, panic on his face.

  He cries out in surprise and tries to avoid me, but I grab hold of his arm, getting a poor grip, enough to spin him slightly before he wrests his arm free. I’m off balance, my back leg just coming through the open window, and I fall to the floor as he continues to run.

  “What did you do to me?” I shout as I get to my feet and race after him.

  He reaches a door—looks like a bedroom door—and opens it and closes it quickly. I reach it a moment later, just as I hear the click of the dead bolt.

  I pound on the door.

  “What did you do to me? What did you do to me when I was a little girl?”

  Punching the door like it’s his face, the blood from my knuckles smeared across the white wood.

  I rear back and give the door a kick. An interior door, not as substantial as an outside door. And it’s been a while, but once upon a time when I was training, I had a pretty good kick.

  I kick at the doorknob and the adjacent wood. After three furious blows, it splinters, and then my foot breaks through. I reach inside and unlock the dead bolt and the button on the knob.

  He could have anything inside there. He could have the shotgun. He could have a knife. Nothing I’ve done so far is smart, fueled as I am by insatiable rage—but I charge through, anyway.