The Mermaid Collector Read Online Free PDF Page B

blaming Frank Hammond. The truth was that for Tom there was a partnership in their guilt, his and Frank’s, that in their own ways, they had both been to blame for the accident, so it had never been a question of guilt. What had angered Tom, what still did and probably always would, was that Frank had not served any penance for his crime, while Tom’s life had been forever dismantled for his part. And worse, Tom’s receipt and spending of Frank’s blood money only served to further exonerate the man. But what choice had Tom had? Their parents, one a recently laid-off teacher, the other an out-of-work secretary, had fallen behind on their life insurance premiums in the months after their father’s dismissal, leaving the boys with nothing but debt. Pills and physical therapists cost money, as did the cigarettes and alcohol Dean administered liberally when he decided the painkillers weren’t working fast enough or lasting long enough.
    But Frank had never known of Tom’s complicity in that frigid evening’s events, and that alone had, on many occasions, given Tom moments of great peace. Just to know that Frank Hammond believed himself solely responsiblefor the death of their parents, the death of Dean’s Olympic dreams, sustained Tom on nights he would surely have stepped out on a busy street and been run over rather than face another night of looping if-onlys.
If only he’d never pushed Dean to take him to the party. If only their father had never answered the phone. If only Tom had asked Dean to look behind them.
Then maybe it would have been another car pushed off the side of the road, somebody else’s parents thrown into an embankment, somebody else’s lives shattered.
    They were partners in crime, he and Frank, unwitting but bound forever.
    And now Tom was here, in this empty house on an equally barren lot that resembled the deck of a great ship.
    At least that was how it seemed to Tom as he rounded the last bend in the dirt road to the Point and the property came into view.
    He pulled the Volvo in front of a vinyl-sided garage and climbed out to be greeted with a choppy breeze, sour with the tide. He was just glad to be on firm ground, to be there at last, even if it was like landing at the end of the world, he thought, looking gravely around the land. Still, he couldn’t think of a more fitting place to see the end of his twisted partnership with Frank Hammond.
    The keeper’s house stood a ways beyond the edge of the driveway, settled in a sloping field, a modest clapboard building with a gambrel roof, its white paint aged to gray like old linen. Beyond it, far down the Point, he could see the shape of the lighthouse. Tom pushed through the windand crossed the stretch of overgrown grass toward the house, climbed the front stairs to the narrow covered porch, and jiggled the key in the lock until the door gave way. A breeze followed him inside the house, stirring up the staleness of the damp room like a broom. There wasn’t much to see—just a table with turned legs and two chairs in one corner; a doorway leading to a kitchen; white plaster walls, yellowed like old paper; bare wood floors rubbed dull in places; a few windows with views of the sea, framed by lace curtains heavy with dust.
    You really went all out for us, didn’t you, Frank?
    Tom moved to the center of the room, taking it all in—the yawning cracks, the water stains like dripped coffee across the plaster ceiling. He crossed to the fireplace, dragged his fingers along the edge of the painted mantel, rolls of dust falling over the side. He made his way to the windows, parting the curtains to look through the milky glass, and there he saw the tower in full. It stood at the end of a weathered footbridge, rising up from its granite base to the top of the lantern room. It had to be thirty feet high, Tom guessed, though it looked smaller than he’d imagined it, or maybe it was simply dwarfed without a beam. Frank had written that the coast guard