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left her office. She was saying something as I walked away, but I couldn’t make it out, either because she spoke too softly or I just didn’t want to hear.

C HAPTER T HREE
    I went back to my shop and finished the drawer boxes for Frank’s built-ins. The work was a good distraction from the troubling images of Alfie Aldergreen that kept bubbling up in my mind. I tried not to think about how frightened he must have been. Had he gone to his death thinking the dark forces of eternal evil had finally caught up with him? Or did he know the truth?
    Amanda phoned earlier to tell me she was sleeping in that evening, not having fully recovered from the night before. Though I only had a passing familiarity with hangovers, a dubious blessing, I offered my sympathy and best wishes for sunnier times tomorrow.
    “Well put,” she said. “My head has been experiencing inclement weather all day.”
    After knocking around a few golf balls for Eddie, I cleaned off in the outdoor shower and climbed into fresh clothes. I left Eddie to guard the two houses, though the only threats he usually focused on were seabirds and colorful, inflated toys blown in from the Little Peconic Bay.
    I drove into the Village in my ’67 Pontiac Grand Prix, a car I’d inherited along with the cottage from my dead parents. My father bought the car only a few months before he was killed. It was a surprising purchase for a guy without a drop of sporting blood in his body. Until then, he’d driven nothing more stirring than shabby, overpowered pickups, which his mechanic’s skills kept running well past their life expectancies. After I discovered the preposterous vehicle in a shed at the back of the property, it took some engineering skill to get it pounded into legal shape. In hindsight the project might have saved my life, as it substituted industry for the resolute self-destruction that steered my life at the time.
    The car had no reason to exist in the early twenty-first century, but it was my car and would have to do. And given its scale and latent ballistic force, other vehicles, both domestic and imported—and even sturdy pickups—instinctively gave it wide berth. Well advised, since none would survive a one-on-one altercation.
    My goal was the big bar and restaurant on Main Street in Southampton. Jackie had told me she and her boyfriend, Harry Goodlander, would be there. I liked the place well enough. The food was overpriced, but the front of the restaurant opened up onto the street, letting in sea breezes and the aimless chatter of passersby. And I liked the bartender, an unreconstructed Brit who called himself Geordie. I was the only one in town who knew why.
    I parked in a remote spot, hoping to save the Grand Prix injury from the swinging doors of neighboring cars. Rescuing the old Pontiac from appropriate death (more than once) had instilled in me unwarranted, but deeply paternal, feelings.
    Jackie and Harry were already there. Geordie was engaged with a swarm of wait staff at the service end of the bar, but the hostess, another regular friend of mine, saw me working through the crowd and made sure my usual Absolut on the rocks was waiting for me when I got to my seat.
    “Bon appétit,” I said to Jackie before taking my first sip.
    “That’s for food. You’re having a drink.”
    “Always splitting hairs.”
    “Learn to say ‘Cheers.’ Geordie will appreciate it.”
    Harry reached across Jackie with a hand the size of a catcher’s mitt. I shook it as well as I could. The guy was around seven feet tall—lean, wide across the shoulders and stronger than a front-end loader. He lacked athletic grace, but that was a fine point to anyone stupid enough to challenge him.
    “Hi, Harry,” I said. “How’s the logistics dodge?”
    Harry shipped things around the world for a living.
    “In constant motion. How’s custom cabinetry?”
    “Static, but pays the bills.”
    “Sorry about Alfie,” he said. “He was a good friend of