Nantucket Grand by Steven Axelrod Read Free Book Online Page A

The only limit to working for Dave Carmichael would be the line between what I wanted and what I was able to achieve. I’d been pacing in circles in a tiny closed room and Dave knocked the walls down. Turns out the room had been sitting in some vast alpine meadow that stretched away to the high peaks in every direction. All I had to do was step out into the coarse grass and start walking.
    But it was impossible.
    I couldn’t leave the kids, and Miranda would never let me take them. The silence on the line said everything, but I still had to fit the words to it. Speak the syllables, make the truth manifest, make it real. The wonder and the glory of language. “Sorry,” I said. “Maybe when the kids are grown.”
    â€œI’ll be governor when your kids are grown and you’ll be too old to keep up.”
    â€œYou’re probably right, at least about me.”
    â€œThanks for the vote of confidence, buddy.”
    â€œJust kidding. But seriously—”
    â€œYou could commute.”
    â€œNot really.”
    â€œGive them that quality time!”
    â€œKids don’t care about quality. Just quantity.”
    He was quiet for a second or two. Then: “At least think about it, will you?”
    â€œI will.”
    â€œI mean, seriously consider this.”
    â€œI will.”
    â€œAll right, family man. Go and get some sleep.”
    I couldn’t sleep that night. I went into the kids’ room and watched them for a while, Carrie wrapped like a little burrito, Tim with the covers thrashed off after the exertions of some dream. I pulled the comforter up over him, eased his right leg back onto the bed, thinking; “If a body catch a body coming through the rye,” just like Holden Caulfield.
    You and me, Holden. You and me.

Chapter Five
    The Burning House
    As it turned out, I had more homegrown crime to investigate, anyway.
    I was out in the moors the next Monday afternoon, poking around for some additional scrap of evidence in the Todd Macy shooting, when I saw the column of smoke. This wasn’t the lazy curl from a chimney with someone inside, sipping tea next to a cozy hearth. This was thick and toxic, a pulsing black column like a million ants swarming a tree trunk, a spreading noiseless stain on the clear blue sky.
    I took off, crashing through the bracken, hearing the distant sirens as I ran. By the time I had cleared the last tangle of wild grapevines, I knew I’d been out there before. This was Andrew Thayer’s house—Debbie Garrison’s uncle. My kids had attended a birthday party at the cottage last summer. The big fireplace in the living room had made me nervous—all that resinous raw pine timber, all those canvas slipcovers on the old wood furniture. One errant spark…the place had struck me as a fire hazard all the way back in August, but of course that was fire season where I came from, and the big stone hearth was cold with disuse. No one was going be roasting any marshmallows in there until…well, until now. The thought of my kids in there struck a nerve. This was all edging a little too close to home.
    The place was empty that day, fortunately. And there were five witnesses to the fire. That fact alone was slightly odd—the cottage sat out in the middle of nowhere, near the pout ponds, and the chances of anyone seeing the blaze were nil, especially so late in the year, during that gray, dismal patch between Thanksgiving and Christmas. But pyromaniacs linger at the scene of the crime—that’s the rule. The fire lights them up and they love to watch it.
    That made everyone on the scene a suspect.
    If they had plausible alternative reasons to be out in the moors that day—as I did—we needed to find out quickly. Eliminate the innocent , that was what Chuck Obremski, my mentor in the LAPD, always used to say. That’s the quickest way to find the guilty.
    As the fire trucks parked and watered the