A Bookmarked Death Read Online Free PDF Page A

No matter. I shook off the cats and pushed myself up.
    I decided not to take the time to make coffee myself—I would pick up a large cup at Qwikjava—but I could not get away without feeding the animals. I made sure there was enough dry food in their dish for them to snack on during the day, then opened the back door. It was chilly enough to make me duck back inside for a jacket. The days when it would be mild enough to walk outside in a sweatshirt weren’t here yet.
    T HE BENEFIT OF heading east on Long Island on a Monday morning was that traffic was light and mostly industrial. Contractors were setting up shop at the beautiful estates, trucks were bringing supplies to resorts and restaurants, refrigerated vans stuffed with fish were headed in the other direction, toward the city. The store windows I passed were gray as faded flannel, but the nurseries were alive with deliveries of azaleas in bloom and flats of red and orange impatiens.
    I always forget how large Southampton is until I am actually there. Besides the village itself, which formerly had an art museum and still had a multitude of restaurants and galleries on Jobs Lane, there was a large and modern library where I attended book sales. There was the Shinnecock Indian Reservation, the Shinnecock Golf Club where the U.S. Open was sometimes held, and a college campus. It was not the kind of chummy village where everyone knew everyone else. Everyone did know where South Main Street was, though. It arrowed straight from the expensive shops down to the Atlantic Ocean.
    In the increasing daylight, I drove slowly past mansions behind hedges, straining to see any that had been destroyed by fire. When I finally arrived, I saw the swaths of yellow caution tape first, stretched inelegantly across the driveway and tied around matching stone urns. I stopped the van and looked up at the house. I told myself that I might be any resident pausing to see what had happened. No one had to know that I was personally involved.
    Yet even after seeing the photograph on the Newsday Web site, the reality shocked me. Despite the charred foundations, the beams that reached like black bones into the sky, the house was huge, an estate. It must have been beautiful once, a 1920s Southampton mansion that no expense had been spared in building. It was probably beyond repair, yet the center section remained. I wondered how that had happened. Had some kind of Molotov cocktail, some kind of firebomb, been tossed through an upstairs window?
    Part of me wanted to just drive away, to let the police investigate in peace. Yet I was already out here . . . I put the van in gear and drove down the street until I came to a house whose windows were still shuttered, then pulled into the driveway far enough so I couldn’t be seen from the street. When I slipped out of the van I did not slam the door shut for fear of alerting anyone, and something about that reminded me of the sound I had heard in the night.
    I walked back to the yellow caution tape. It was meant to keep gawkers off the property, but I reminded myself that I had a reason for being here. Still I looked up and down the sidewalk. No one was out walking and there were no headlights on the road. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to find, only that I needed to be here.
    I ducked under the garland of plastic ribbon and started up the driveway, keeping on the grassy verge as much as I could to avoid crunching on pebbles. The smell of burning and cinders began to choke me. I stopped and stared at the shrubs beside the house, dusted in white ash as if from a freak blizzard. Chunks of debris lay on the ground as if a demolition crew had tossed them out of the windows.
    I looked up. The windows on the second floor were blackened and as finely cracked as if they had been spiderwebbed for Halloween. I didn’t want to be there; Ethan and Sheila were dead, there was no changing that. The acrid odor scalded my throat like frat party whiskey, my sneakers were