The House on Buzzards Bay E-Book

Dwyer Murphy

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 357

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'This elegant, eerie mystery brings a shudder to the spine' Daily Mail When a group of old college friends reunites for a summer vacation at a beach house in coastal Massachusetts, a sudden disappearance and the arrival of a seductive stranger threaten to unearth the darkest secrets of their relationships. 'A masterful psychological thriller...It's a devilish twist on the traditional locked-room mystery' Publishers Weekly Starred Review 'A delicious, brooding heart-stopper of a book' Tea Obreht, author of The Tiger's Wife As they hurtle into midlife, Jim and his closest college friends get together to rekindle the bonds of their friendship in his family's beautiful, generations-old vacation home along Buzzards Bay. But what begins as a restorative seaside escape takes a darker turn when Bruce, an aloof but successful writer, disappears from the house without a trace. Meanwhile, a series of mysterious break-ins besets the town, which is the site of an old Spiritualist campground turned idyllic fishing village. After a series of uncanny disturbances at the house, Jim can't help but feel that someone — or something — is watching them. And with the arrival of a strange, seductive guest at their home, the group begins to question the very nature of their experiences — along with their already precarious ties with one other. In The House on Buzzards Bay, Dwyer Murphy returns with a chilling, atmospheric page-turner that explores the bonds of friendship, the growing accumulation of life's responsibilities, and whether our youthful dreams can endure the complexities of adulthood.

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Praise for The House on Buzzards Bay

‘A classic New England literary mystery pitched somewhere between The Secret History, If We Were Villains, and L’Avventura, with all of Dwyer’s economy and wit. I loved it’ Adrian McKinty, New York Times bestselling author of The Island

‘A delicious, brooding heart-stopper of a book’ Téa Obreht, New York Times bestselling author of Inland

Praise for The Stolen Coast

‘A twisty, enthralling heist yarn… [Murphy] deftly conjures a universe of hucksters and operators that’s sodden with atmosphere, crisscrossed with shadows (literal and moral) and loaded with the threat of a double cross any time… Through it all, Murphy’s language is precise and evocative, with nary a word set wrong… smart and satisfying’ The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice

‘Fabulous characters and dialogue so sharp, you’re going to be cutting your fingers whipping through the pages’ Brad Thor, The TODAY Show, Best Beach Read of 2023

‘A shifty, sleepy Massachusetts harbor town becomes the front for an epic and unpredictable jewelry heist in this noir page-turner. Oceans,who?’ Harper’s Bazaar

‘Atmospheric and transportive, fans of classic hard-boiled noir will want to put The Stolen Coast on the top of their to-be-read list’ Parade

‘[A] stylish New England noirish thriller’The Washington Post

‘Dwyer Murphy’s The Stolen Coast reads like coming upon a favorite Robert Mitchum movie late at night and getting swept up in its aura of creeping danger and looming, romantic regret’ Megan Abbott, New York Times bestselling author of The Turnout

‘I loved the dark, twisty world that Dwyer Murphy conjures in The Stolen Coast, which is as smart and stylish a crime novel as any fan of noir and basketball (or mussels and jewelry heists, for that matter) could ever want’ Jess Walter, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beautiful Ruins

‘This is a terrific, atmospheric crime novel by a writer with a deep love and appreciation of the form’ Ace Atkins, New York Times bestselling author of Robert B. Parker’s Bye Bye Baby and The Heathens

‘[A] terrific heist novel. The author nails all aspects of the genre, from the intriguing characters to the complicated plan, the twists and turns and reversals, and a lean, mean writing style’ Booklist

Praise for An Honest Living

‘Murphy’s hard-boiled rendering of the city is nothing short of exquisite’ The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice

‘Murphy’s engrossing debut is a book made for summer reading. It’s a smart, leisurely read, richly layered with movie references and philosophical reflections’ Minneapolis Star-Tribune

‘[Murphy] knows not just where the bodies are buried but how readers want them to be discovered’ Boston Globe

‘An Honest Living is a novel about ambition and obsession, shadow and light, smoke and mirrors – a shimmering, often surprising, exploration of how fact and fiction reflect one another until the boundaries disappear’ BookTrib

For Carolina and Eloisa

1

I’ve been friendly with the same group of people for roughly twenty years. It began during college and continued in New York, and together we survived the usual city plights of unemploy-ment, railroad apartments, income disparities, bad relationships, and good marriages. My wife was the last to join us. I was nearly thirty when we met. By that time the friendships had long since calcified, and it was fortunate she got along with the others so well as she did. We were married in City Hall on a damp October morning and afterward held a reception at Callan’s Tavern on East Sixth Street, in a back room built around a wood stove and what appeared to be a disused pulpit. Valentina’s family was in Venezuela, and except for her sister they were unable to attend.

One by one my college friends, who were also my New York friends, the closest people in my life at that time and for some years after, climbed the wooden stairs very solemnly like a clan of Bay Colony ministers and gave their respective toasts, each finding something genuine and personal to say about my new wife. In the years that followed, Valentina forged her own bonds and shared memories and secrets with the others. When the twins were born, she was the one who suggested we make Rami the godfather. It seemed to me such an old-fashioned and touching gesture, and I worked hard to find a priest who would take us, two lapsed Catholics and their Muslim friend.

I don’t mention any of this because I think it a great distinction to remain acquainted with the people assigned to your freshman-year housing. I only mean to impress that we were a unit and thought of ourselves that way and relied on one another to perform certain rituals and courtesies normally reserved for blood. When I was twenty-five and still in the throes of New York, I inherited a large house on the southeastern coast of Massachusetts, on Buzzards Bay. It had been built several generations prior by an ancestor with a penchant for gables and would have passed to my mother and father had they been alive. The town where it was built, Patuxet, was a small place. I knew it well, having spent summers there looked after by aunts while my parents were abroad. It seemed to me an eccentric and slightly disreputable thing, owning a beach house at such a young age, but it cost relatively little to maintain, and I couldn’t imagine selling.

After six months of ownership and three blustery spring visits, when the bay was engorged and the locals all seemed to hurry about in sealskin, I came up with the plan that would later coalesce under the fairly ridiculous name of the Nanumett Sand and Swim Club, or the NSSC. I was just out of law school then and intoxicated with the idea of property and contractual obligations. I drew up the paperwork myself. The NSSC was a New York style co-op, except that the property held in common was a long stretch of Nanumett Beach, carved out from the plot I inherited, 137 Hazel Drive. I distributed four shares, one each to my friends, for a grand total of eighty dollars, and kept the fifth for myself. With the unanimous consent of all stakeholders, a sixth share was issued to Valentina after we were married. Annual fees were seventy-five dollars, the collection of which was habitually waived, with proceeds strictly limited to beach upkeep and the purchase of towels and communal sundries. I suppose you could call it a ploy. At an age when it seemed less far-fetched to travel somewhere interesting in the summers, I wanted to improve my odds of having company on vacations and long weekends away.

As our twenties turned over and the demands of work and family drew us in new directions and away from New York, those beach summits kept us bound. It seemed a mercy, having people around who remembered how you’d been before the edges were smoothed. The house was large enough to fit the six of us and many more, but soon our schedules began to intersect less frequently. Rami went off to work for a series of trade commissions and moved for a time to Europe. His vacations were irregular. He would breeze in one evening unannounced and stay for an indeterminate number of days. Shannon and Maya tended to visit in August, but more and more we were a stopover on the way to Martha’s Vineyard, where Maya’s family rented a house.

Bruce was the first to abandon the effort altogether. He had never been very fond of the beach, though he accepted his share in the NSSC graciously and had the certificate framed in oak. Even on those evenings when the sun seemed to melt into the trees and our neighbors lingered on porches and brought chairs and drinks to the high ground over the beach to enjoy those obscure, evanescent moments, we would have to drag him out from whatever task he’d set upon in the house, usually a repair of some kind, though he wasn’t especially handy and the constant disassembly and reconstruction of piping, garbage disposals, and light sockets never brought him anything but despair. He had been raised in Pennsylvania, in the hill country west of Gettysburg. The coast meant nothing to him. When he was young, he had gone to the Chesapeake for a week with his family, and he seemed to glean everything he needed to know of the Eastern Seaboard from those nights in his grandparents’ bungalow eating boiled crab and stews.

As for Valentina and me, we took our summers seriously, more so after the twins were old enough to share the sentiment. The rest of the year we were a foursome of disparate tastes and inclinations, but in summer we all knelt before the same icons and said the old prayers to barefoot days and cool nights that sent you looking for a sweatshirt.

Valentina was on the law school faculty and tended to have July and August free. Occasionally her research assistants would come to stay, and we would do our best to show them a good and only slightly corrupting time. Rami might call ahead from Geneva or Istanbul, wherever he was stationed, and ask which students she had hired and what they looked like and whether they were interested in prematurely graying Arab men. Nothing much ever came of it. If it had, he would have told Valentina, and weeks or months down the line she would have mentioned it to me in passing as though surely I knew. They had an air of worldly conspiracy between them, always, and it gave the parochial New Englander in me no end of quiet, contrary satisfaction.

We tended to plan our first weekends in the house carefully and to dedicate the opening days to logistics, all the little chores required by life on the coast. There were errands to run, towels and sheets to inspect for moth damage, poison ivy to pull from between patches of grass, and then the house itself to look after: shingles to be nailed down, gutters that were inevitably clogged with leaves, and the water tanks, which were connected to a spring-fed well but managed to stink of eggs for two days after our arrival. I hadn’t expected to relish those chores but over the years had come to. It wasn’t the pride of ownership – I had no illusions there. The house was mine by chance.

That year we headed up the last weekend in June. The drive from New Haven kept to the coast. Once we passed New Bedford the land began to slope downward toward the lower sea basin. It felt as if the car could be shifted into neutral and we would reach our destination by fate. Normally Valentina would have dozed beside me, as the twins did in the back. Instead, we were discussing plans for the holiday and proposing little touches that ought to be added to the house to make things comfortable.

It was going to be the first time in several years that our friends, all the members of the NSSC, would come together under one roof. It was an unexpected moment. Until two nights before, we’d had no inkling that Rami would be back in the States so soon or that the house Maya’s family normally rented on the Vineyard had been swiped out from under them. The chance that they would all three be coming for the same weeks in July was almost too abstract to consider, though not so long before, when we were all still living in the city, it would have been nearly unthinkable for an entire summer to pass without somebody getting hold of a car and hauling the others north for at least a week.

Bruce was going to join us too. He had called just that morning, surprising me. He hadn’t been to the house in years. I waited until we were exiting the highway to mention it to Valentina. We talked it over and decided he would sleep in what we called the garden room. There was no garden but there were doors that opened to a yard, and he wouldn’t have to look at the beach through his windows. There was an air conditioner, too, a window unit. It would cost me at least a morning to get it installed.

‘How did he sound?’ Valentina asked.

‘Like himself. Like he was looking forward to seeing us.’

It was a lie, but a small one.

‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘He must get lonely like anybody else.’

The drive out to the house from the village center followed a dirt road that hugged the bank of a saltwater pond connected by inlet to the bay. The inlet spilled over like a great river delta into the marshes and attracted ospreys, which would circle overhead as you navigated the path’s fissures. The salt in the air roused the twins, and we lowered our windows and let the din of the birds and the dust of the old road fill the interior. Soon a house appeared: our house, the silhouette of its roof peeking gamely over the pines. From the road it looked nondescript. Flourishes had been saved for what my family stubbornly called the front side, where there were gables, turrets, arches, and a roof that sloped sharply and curled back on itself like a Gothic cathedral. It was meant to make an impression on boats, and in fact we had a reputation as a useful landmark for lost sailors wandering toward the harbor’s marina.

The sight of the house always quickened my pulse, but this year something was different. Valentina noticed it first: One of the screen doors was swinging open. The winter boards had been taken off in April and screens put in earlier that week by George, a reliably distant cousin whom we asked to look in on the place in the offseason. He was an old and worried man, and I couldn’t believe he’d done anything so careless as leaving a door off its hook. I coasted into the driveway, which was made of seashells, and put the car in park but kept the engine running. The sound of the shells crunching under the tires ran a chill down my spine.

I asked Valentina to stay with the twins while I went inside. She hesitated, not because she believed I was overreacting but because she should be the one to go in. My eyes were never very sharp, and she had a near-perfect memory for people and spaces. In any case I went in and saw what had happened. The pantry was ransacked and trash strewn about. A hallway mirror was broken. A case of liquor we had stored the previous Labor Day was gone. There had been a break-in. Someone had been in our home.

I went outside, more startled than I cared to be, and explained the situation.

Valentina wasn’t so concerned. She thought it must have been teenagers.

‘You’ve broken into your share of cottages,’ she said. ‘You must have.’

‘Not recently.’

‘Come on, Jim. What else is there to do in these towns? The springs are so gray.’

She was thinking of other towns: springs in Caracas, a riot of greens.

‘They play bog hockey until April,’ I said, ‘then start swimming when the ice breaks.’

She said if we didn’t find condoms, she’d be shocked. We made a quick appraisal and decided not to call the police. There was hardly any real damage, only the mirror, a torn curtain, and the leg of a chair that looked as though it had been kicked out from under someone who had been seated there. For all I knew, it snapped under its own weight in winter. The wood got waterlogged and behaved strangely in the freeze.

‘All in all, a pleasant trespass,’ Valentina said. ‘Fair enough. It happens.’

The twins were still groggy from the ride and, after unpacking and checking on a few beach toys they had left behind the summer before, went to an early bed. They shared a room upstairs. In another year or two, we would make a new arrangement, but for now they could keep each other company and dream up stories for the sounds they heard in the night. The house made plenty of them. In winter it was worse, but in summer there was an unsteadiness to the structure, and big as it was, I sometimes found myself thinking of the old skeleton foundations you would see along the beaches in Falmouth, where hurricanes had come through and picked up houses whole and dropped them down ten, twenty yards away. Patuxet had been flooded but never felled.

I told Valentina I would stay up a while longer. She was tired from the ride and wanted to put herself to sleep making lists of what we had to do and buy the next day. Order had a reliable, sedative effect on her. Soon after, I found myself outside, empty-handed at first, then with a drink from a bottle that had been hidden under the sink. The drink made me listless, and I went inside for something else, something I couldn’t decide on, then without thinking the matter through, I took a harpoon off the wall. It was an heirloom, passed down from a supposed captain several branches out on the family tree. How exactly it ended up in our house, or why I went to retrieve it that night, I couldn’t say. It had been mounted somewhat haphazardly above a bookshelf in the living room. For as long as I could remember it had been there, and on many occasions I had thought about taking it down but had never done so until then. The barbs were dulled from time, but the weight alone could have knocked a man down. It was crazy to have the thing around the house. Crazy to display it. Crazy to go halfway around the world hunting whales the size of houses. The madness peeled back like an onion skin.

Around two in the morning I was still outside, rocking quietly on the eastern porch. Above me was the twins’ room. I had the harpoon lying across my lap. I was thinking about whaling ships and the women left behind for years on end. Supposedly they paced those balcony walks and waited for husbands to return, but I didn’t believe it. I was thinking, too, of the people who had been in my house and had walked my floors.

At a certain hour, you could almost see them, their eyes over the marshland, waiting. Waiting for what? For us to leave, it seemed: taunting us with their endless patience.

By morning things were less gloomy. There were no eyes in the tall grasses. I put the harpoon back on the wall and told myself I would soon store it in the far corner of the shed. The sun rose over the harbor, and it seemed a small miracle to have a porch that wrapped three sides of a house and showed the sun any place you cared to view it.

Valentina woke before the twins and came outside with a cup of coffee and the lists she’d made. Our day was planned out and the next one too: a full weekend, conceived in ink.

‘Do you think we should get an alarm?’ she asked. ‘For the house. Or maybe a dog?’

I told her we’d be fine and mentioned the harpoon. I had meant it to be funny, but she simply nodded and crossed the item off one of her lists. She was the only adult I knew who wrote in cursive. It was a florid, lovely script that always made me feel a little uneasy.

2

Rami was the next to arrive and had his choice of rooms. The house had three furnished stories, though hardly any of us ventured to the top floor, which trapped the heat and smelled faintly of an ill-advised wood stain treatment applied in the years before my tenure. He was fresh off a round of negotiations in Budapest and full of stories that flattered the listener by presuming at least passing acquaintance with the customs and quirks of Central Europe as seen through the refractive glass of international bureaucracy.

The first night we steamed lobsters. After dinner he helped the twins put on a play, a loose adaptation of Hamlet’s Mousetrap, that petered out after the king’s poisoning. He told us he had something important to discuss, but it could wait, and it did.

‘Tonight is for the players,’ he said, meaning the twins, who were already jockeying for his favor. He always had a keen sense of the occasion and what was called for. It baffled me sometimes that he should carry on doggedly, year after year, showing up in our little backwater when he had the whole world at his disposal. He had been raised in diplomatic circles. His career was the family trade. Maybe travel had lost all its appeal.

We had all, in fact, studied to be diplomats, but Rami was the only one who pursued it professionally. I found that rather odd, too, but then there was the matter of his family and upbringing to recall, and I was glad, anyway, that his and Valentina’s careers occasionally intersected and that they always seemed to have a great deal to discuss.

After the kids were asleep, Valentina asked him to give us the R-rated version of Budapest, the commission, everything he had been up to since we had seen him last.

‘Budapest,’ he said, ‘is a convent. And not the sort you hope for.’

Valentina was dubious, but he only shook his head and seemed to be remembering something, another story he was holding in reserve, perhaps, one he would let unfurl another night. Over his right eyebrow, I thought I saw a scar, though it was hard to be sure of anything in the low light of the living room. We used very old bulbs that never seemed to die. I couldn’t remember the last time I had changed one.

Shannon and Maya arrived later in the week. Maya’s family was part of a prosperous community of African American burghers who summered on the islands. I got the feeling both were glad to be relieved of the usual demands that went along with the summit. There was also the matter of a strange incident, if you could call it that, which had recently unfolded around them, and in which Maya for a time had featured. She was an art teacher, primarily, with a growing reputation for portraits. She would receive commissions now and again and had begun exhibiting around the city. Earlier in the year, a young man – an aspiring artist, apparently – began turning up at various shows and events she was expected to attend. He never spoke to anyone but would place himself in conspicuous, unavoidable spots, holding very still, in unnatural positions, for hours on end. Maya decided he was posing for a portrait, or in some fashion proposing himself as one of her subjects. She didn’t like the young man. She thought she recognized him but couldn’t say for sure and didn’t know where from.

For three months, he kept turning up places where she would be, going through the same routine. Then, suddenly, he was gone. A few weeks later, word went around that he was suspected of having killed his roommate. When they arrested him, the walls of the apartment – in both bedrooms and in the shared living space – were plastered floor to ceiling with Polaroids. The photographs were of Maya’s work and of the work of another artist she knew; a sculptor who sometimes taught classes. The other artist, the sculptor, said he had never seen the young man or the roommate at any of his shows and couldn’t imagine how the Polaroids were made. Some portion of the work photographed was unfinished. Other pieces were finished but had never been displayed. The young man died two weeks after the arrest: an overdose, they were told.

The whole affair had disturbed Maya quite deeply, as could be expected. She hadn’t been back to the city in over a month, though normally she drove down, for work or to see friends, at least once a week. I supposed, given what I knew of the story and of Maya’s possibly recognizing the man, it may have also contributed to her decision not to go to the Vineyard that summer. Shannon liked it fine out there, but for Maya it meant a stream of obligations and old acquaintances. Also, she felt that her parents’ friends were laughing at her for marrying a white woman. They would never come out and say it, not to her, and not to her parents, but she was sure they were thinking among themselves it was regrettable and amusing. It was a very cloistered community, apparently. In any case, they had chosen to come to us when the family’s usual house fell through. The plan, they said, was to stay for at least three weeks, possibly a month.

They unpacked in the same room where they had stayed the previous year, though then only for a night, on their way to catch a ferry in Woods Hole. I was glad they seemed to feel some possession over the space, or at least had pleasant enough memories of it to want to stay there again. The bathroom next door had two sinks and three mirrors placed at somewhat odd angles in relation to one another, so that sitting on the toilet you had a clear view of the back of your head, as well as a framed sketch of unknown provenance that hung on the wall above, depicting a child using a trainer potty while examining family portraits. The caption read, ‘Les affaires sont les affaires.’

Shannon said it was the reason they wanted to stay there, near that bathroom: because of the art. I found a nightlight on the ledge and plugged it into the socket below the sketch. With the light cast upward, diffuse across the wall, it looked rather like a shrine.

Shannon said, ‘It’s so lovely, James. Make one for me like that when I go.’

Nobody called me James but her, and she only ever did it to tease me.

‘You don’t think Maya will mind?’ I asked.

She looked at me uncomprehendingly. ‘Because of the portraits? In the sketch?’

‘I just didn’t know if they would remind her of… work. Or other things.’

‘No, James. I don’t think she’ll even notice. Not the way you’re thinking.’

I was glad to have them under our roof. Glad to be together again.

‘Should we set her up a workspace?’ I asked. ‘She could use the attic. Or I could see about clearing out one of the sheds if she’d like to walk to work. I always thought that would be nice, walking a few steps every morning, across a lawn, into your office.’

Shannon said no, we shouldn’t bother. ‘She’s not going to work at all. If she does, I’m under strict orders to break her pencils. Burn her sketch pads. Take a knife to her canvases. Whatever’s required. She’s going to drink and stare at the sea and not think.’

‘She deserves at least that.’

‘She doesn’t, but we’ll give it to her anyway. What’s a few weeks, unearned?’

Smiling, she kissed my cheek and wished me good night. She was quite tall. I didn’t have to stoop for her to kiss me. She had been raised in Wisconsin, on a dairy farm. I met her family once and they were, all of them, six feet – the men and the women, the young and the old – or on their way past that mark. They were an exuberant bunch and always seemed to be organizing themselves to go elsewhere, to another house, where some cousin or aunt or uncle of great stature would soon be rustled up.

3

By Saturday, the house had taken on a new air of purpose, as though we were all engaged in some kind of agreeable business venture, like putting out a small newspaper. There were meals to prepare, dishes to clean, laundry to be done. The floors had gained a fine veneer of beach sand. Shannon was five months pregnant, and Maya was in the habit of worrying about her footing and of walking a step ahead whenever she ventured downstairs in anything but the full light of midday. They had been trying for quite a while, I gathered, and felt they may not have many more opportunities. I would sometimes notice Valentina watching them from across a room, Shannon in particular, and wonder whether she felt any envy toward them or only sympathy or some other emotion forever hidden from view. The twins were seven, and after a somewhat harrowing labor we had never discussed the possibility of having more. They were good, if slightly overmanaged, children. The plan that summer was to let them go as near to feral as possible.

It seemed a safe place to try. Patuxet was a remote, sea-dampened hamlet of nine thousand year-round residents, plus the summer crowds. On the village green was a memorial commemorating dead from the Revolutionary and Civil Wars and across the street, by the stairs to the beach, a lengthier plaque listing fishermen lost at sea. The families who summered there tended to rent the same cottages and bungalows their parents had rented. There were a few inns along the bluffs to draw in weekend crowds. Main Street was painted every April, and by September the salt had done its work again.

We were waiting only on Bruce and, it seemed to me, anticipating his arrival with a certain high-strung excitement that bordered on trepidation. At school and in the years we spent living more or less as a group afterward, he could be a harsh judge of other people’s pastimes and seemed always to be watching in your idlest moments. He had also, in intervening years, become somewhat famous. To my knowledge none of us had spent more than a few successive days with him since his first book was published. It was quickly made into a movie and afterward he undertook a series: widely read novels following the exploits of a philosophy professor who traveled the world and saved it from grave conspiracies, in between meals. The books made him rich, and a new one was released in hardcover every June. I had seen the latest just days before he called, as I was passing the windows of a bookstore not far from the campus gates in New Haven.

Rami and I went to pick him up at the town pier on an overcast Tuesday morning. The ferry sounded through the fog, and as it sidled up to the pilings the sun broke through and the passengers on the top deck were shielding their eyes as they looked at the widening sky and the town beneath it. The boat made the trip twice daily from Woods Hole to New Bedford and back, with a brief stop in Patuxet for no particular reason except it had always been that way. Only three passengers were disembarking. Bruce carried an overnight bag and seemed unsure of his footing on the gangplank. Rami waved and made a whistle to get his attention from the Jeep where we were waiting. We had parked just outside the pier on a small bluff where you could see the whole of the village center. We agreed that he looked good and younger than he had any right to.

‘Remind me why he’s on the ferry,’ Rami said.

‘He went by fast boat to Woods Hole.’

‘From New York?’

‘Long Island somewhere. Said he wanted the fresh air and time to think.’

‘Time to think. That doesn’t sound too promising.’

We got out and fumbled a little awkwardly over the hellos. I wished he had more luggage so that I might have taken something off his hands, but there was only the overnight bag, which he threw into the backseat and climbed in after. It seemed like something he had seen in a movie. Rami asked after the boat trip and Bruce merely shrugged and said it was smooth enough, but he hadn’t expected it would take so long.

It was a six-hour trip, by my estimate, an hour longer than if he’d come by train. He was the last of us still living in Manhattan. He had a duplex with a key to Gramercy Park. Shannon and Maya had gone farther into Brooklyn, then eventually moved to Hudson.

During the drive back to the house, Bruce spread himself out across the back bench and dangled his legs over the sideboard. He was ready to relax, it seemed. The fog had burned off and the sun was singeing his nose. June had been hotter than the coast was used to. It hardly ever got above eighty, and when it did the breeze off the bay made it feel more tolerable, or pleasant even. I kept in low gears along the salt pond and did some lurching around potholes. I was used to driving an automatic the rest of the year, while the Jeep lived in a garage. The kids called it a beach wagon. We were rough on it, and it needed repairs every spring from a cousin who ran a body shop on Agawam Highway. I thought of it less like a car than as a boat, with all the upkeep that implied.

‘I could give you some lessons,’ Bruce said from the backseat. ‘We’ll do hill starts.’

I told him to watch out for seagull droppings. We were all of us smiling.

‘Guano is good luck,’ he said. ‘I thought you believed in the local lore.’

‘We had a break-in,’ I said. ‘They’d tell me that’s good luck too.’

‘Maybe it is.’

Rami had his seat reclined to ease the flow of conversation between us. We had the top down, and in fact there were seagulls circling overhead, riding the breeze up and down.

An osprey came over from the marsh, and its presence quickly cleared out the pack.

‘Were they armed?’ Bruce asked.

‘They were gone. It happened before we got down. Teenagers, Valentina thinks.’

‘Bruce will solve it,’ Rami said. ‘He’s a master of detection. I read it in Le Monde.’

To this, Bruce said nothing. It was a proud, boastful kind of silence. I was glad for him.

There was, admittedly, a strange rivalry lingering between us whose exact origins and parameters eluded me whenever I got around to thinking about them. Physically, we were somewhat alike and in college had spent a lot of time in the gym playing basketball and on the track timing each other’s miles to no particular purpose or consequence. Bruce was more graceful than I was, but I suppose if put to it you would say I tried harder. I think it bothered him that he didn’t have much dog in him. When we first met, I had a fairly thick accent and he believed I must have grown up somewhere near the characters in Good Will Hunting, a movie that was popular then. He seemed to feel wounded, or deceived, when he learned that I wasn’t from the city at all, that I had grown up in different parts of New England, none of them very tough or traumatized.

Our habit for a long time was one of quiet, determined competition with occasional score settlings. When we were first in the city, after school, I wrote a short story that was somewhat improbably published in a large magazine. It was a coming-of-age story about a man and woman from the same town in Massachusetts living in New York. For a long while I wasn’t sure any of my friends had actually read it, or whether I might have wanted them to. It seemed a slightly affected thing to have done, and soon enough I went to law school.

Years later, nearly a decade in fact, when Bruce’s first book came out, I noticed his main character, the philosophy professor who was originally from Massachusetts, had written in his youth what he referred to always and deprecatingly as a bildungsroman, which was treated savagely by the few critics who bothered to review it. Somehow or another that failure set the professor on his course, and he mentioned it often, as a kind of cautionary tale. It seemed to me a pretty funny joke. I would have told Bruce I thought so, but he never brought it up and for some reason I couldn’t be the one to do it.

I meant it when I told him it was good to see him, that I was happy he’d come. He hadn’t any brothers, either, and I felt we had always strived to fill that role for each other.

There was a genuinely warm welcome for him at the house. Afterward, he spent a great deal of time unpacking in the room we’d shown him to, the garden room. He had looked at it for a moment like he might ask to change. He could have stayed upstairs, but I doubted he would like it any better. In the end, he simply nodded skeptically a few times and said it was good of us to invite him. We hadn’t invited him – it wouldn’t have occurred to Valentina or to me – but the others were within earshot and perhaps he wanted them to hear. He seemed jumpy to me, though it might have only been the boat journey.

We spent the rest of the afternoon swimming and lying around the beach. I thought several times about going back up to the house to invite Bruce, but then I’d done that already and he had declined politely enough that I felt a little sorry about the intrusion.

Before dinner we poured drinks and met on the lawn. Rami was the last to come in from the beach and said he didn’t think he would shower; he would just let the salt do its work and see how things turned out. His hair was beginning to thin. In the dying sun, you could see the crystals of dried salt in the gray around his temples. It gave him a rather distinguished air, I thought. He seemed pleased with himself and almost drunk.

He wanted to know where the kids were so that they might finish their play, the play that supposedly he had worked very hard to produce and had to pull a lot of strings with the unions in order to open on time. He was doing his best impression of a New Yorker. For a diplomat, he was terrible at accents. They all came out sounding Russian.

‘They’re somewhere,’ I said. ‘A cousin’s, probably. I don’t know.’

‘You do know,’ he said, still in accent. ‘Jim, you must. Ve must all sink of ze children.’

Sitting around the dinner table, which we had set up on the porch, I felt very glad about how things had turned out and also a little nervous that they should continue this way, and it seemed to me that the others – not only Valentina but also Rami, Shannon, and Maya – were feeling something of the same, and that we were all making an effort to put Bruce at his ease. It’s often that way with staggered arrivals and group vacations. The ones who come before feel a certain obligation toward the stragglers. And then in our case there was the matter of Bruce’s estrangement, which nobody at that table would have called as such, but it was the truth. He had pulled away from us over the years. Maybe he would have said it was all of us who had abandoned him. We had left the city, after all.

We were eating swordfish that I’d picked up that morning, which Valentina had grilled with olive oil and lemon. There was a simple salad beside it and on ice, in a cooler next to the table, several bottles of a Portuguese green wine that was ubiquitous in the local shops, whether or not they had a liquor license. It tasted a little sickening when warm but when served excessively cold had a distinctive, numbing flavor, almost like anise.

As the sun went down, I was feeling the effects of the green wine and the vanities of home and thinking that Patuxet might not be a very large or distinguished town, but it held its own against any of the most beautiful places I had visited. A little foolishly I was hoping someone else at the table might be feeling the same and would save me from having to say it. Mostly we were just catching up on old acquaintances and memories.

‘I’d like to make a toast,’ Bruce said.

We had already finished three bottles and it was rather late for toasts, but he had pushed back from the table and was slumped down in his seat, a somewhat slack pose that boded well for our efforts to loosen him up. I was curious about what he had to say.

‘To never changing,’ he said. ‘To keeping things just as they are and never swerving.’

There was a baffling pause and a question in the air as to whether he was finished.

‘May we live in museums of generations past,’ he said. ‘Next year in Jerusalem.’

After another uncertain pause, Rami asked which Jerusalem he meant.

Bruce looked genuinely surprised at being questioned. His glass was near his lips.

‘Mine,’ he said. ‘Yours. Our own private Jerusalems.’

Following a long, rather bemused silence, during which we mulled over his meaning, Maya proposed we play a card game. Nobody was quite ready to leave the table just yet. The kids were home by then. They were upstairs, pretending to be asleep, discussing their own memories, their Jerusalems. Another bottle of wine materialized.

I went up to the pantry, where we kept the decks of cards and a coffee tin that was full of pennies. When I got back to the table, they had decided on playing blush, a nonsense game taught to me by my aunts, which I had passed down to our group. It involved licking the back of a card, affixing it to your forehead, then betting blind against the others for the high hand. You had to be well along in the evening to play a game like that. If you were and everyone approached it with a sense of lightness, it could be fun.