When the Tide Comes Back In

Chapter 3 Arden Hills

Arden Hills was forty miles north of the harbor, past the outlet mall and the last of the suburbs, in a town where the streetlights were further apart and the driveways had more cars than the houses had bedrooms. The aunt's address that Whit found was a duplex on Merwin Street, second floor, with a broken screen door and a plastic tricycle on the landing.

I went on a Thursday afternoon. I'd told myself I was just going to look, to see the house, to see what kind of place it was. That's what I told Whit. I parked across the street and sat in my car for twenty minutes, watching the front door, like a woman in a movie about her own life.

At four thirty, a boy came out.

He was tall, thin, with Marcus's shoulders and a stranger's face. He had a backpack and a basketball, and he was wearing a red hoodie with the hood down, and he stopped at the bottom of the stairs to tie his shoe, and in the sideways afternoon light he looked so much like his father that my hands went cold on the steering wheel.

I got out of the car before I could stop myself. "Daniel?"

He looked up. Not startled. Wary. He'd grown up with a mother who died and a father he saw twice a year; he knew what it meant when a stranger said his name in front of his house.

"Who are you," he said. Not a question.

"My name is Celia. I was married to your father."

He stood up slowly. He was taller than me, but he still looked like a boy. "You're his wife."

"I was."

"He's dead."

"Yes."

"He told me about you." He shifted his weight. "Not much. He said you didn't know."

"That's right."

"So you found out."

"I found out."

He looked at the car behind me, at my coat, at my hands, and I watched him do the math, the way you do when you've been raised on the wrong side of the equation. "You want something," he said.

"No."

"Everybody wants something."

"I want to know if you're okay."

He laughed, short and sharp. "I'm fine."

"Okay."

"You came all the way out here to ask me that?"

"I came out here to see you. I don't know why. That's the truth." I put my hands in my pockets. "I found out eight days ago. I've been sitting with it. I thought if I saw the house, I'd understand something. I don't."

"You don't have to do this," he said. "The money comes anyway. The lawyer sends it. I never asked him for it."

"I know."

"So you don't have to."

"I know." I looked at the duplex, at the plastic tricycle, at the c***k in the second step. "Can I ask you one thing?"

"Sure."

"Did he know you? I mean, did he actually know you. Or did he just send money."

Daniel was quiet. A car went by behind me, and the shadow of the fire escape slid across his face. When he answered, his voice was different. Softer. Younger.

"He used to call me on Sundays," he said. "When I was little. He'd ask what I was reading. He never came to anything. Not one game. But he called." He shrugged. "That's more than most."

"Okay," I said. "Thank you."

"You're not going to try to take the money back?"

"No."

"Why not?"

I thought about it. Really thought, standing on the sidewalk in front of a duplex in Arden Hills, with a boy who had his father's shoulders watching me like I was the thing that could ruin him.

"Because it was never mine," I said. "And because somebody has to be honest in this family. It might as well be the person who doesn't want anything."

He looked at me for a long moment. Then he nodded, once, the same nod Whit had given me. Maybe it was a thing people did when they decided to trust you against their better judgment. Maybe it was just Thursday.

"Okay," he said. "Bye, Celia."

"Bye, Daniel."

I drove home with the radio off. Somewhere around exit 12, I realized I hadn't asked him about the two hundred and forty thousand. I'd had a chance and I hadn't taken it, because standing in front of a boy who'd lost his mother and now his father, the accounting felt like the smallest thing in the world.

Which was exactly how Diana had probably counted on me feeling.

That night I pulled the bank statements out of the folder and sat at my kitchen table with a cup of coffee and a legal pad. I went line by line, like I used to, back when I was twenty-three and the firm had me reconcile accounts for six months because they wanted to see if I'd quit.

The payments to Daniel were clean. Nine hundred a month, like clockwork, from the foundation to a custodial account at a bank in Arden Hills. I could trace them. That meant someone had wanted them traceable. Marcus, maybe. Diana, maybe. Somebody who knew that if it ever came out, they'd want the story to look like the one they'd tell.

The two hundred and forty thousand was different. It had gone out in eleven transfers over fourteen months, all to a corporate account at a bank downtown, all coded as "program development." The account belonged to a company called Harborlight Consulting, which had no website, no directory listing, and no name I recognized on its registration.

I looked at the last transfer. It was dated three weeks before Marcus died. It was for fifty thousand dollars.

I sat back and drank my coffee, which had gone cold. Then I opened my laptop and typed the company's registered address into the state's business database. It came back in twelve seconds.

The registered agent for Harborlight Consulting was Diana Ashford.

I closed the laptop. My hands were shaking again. I let them.