“Any Gregorys?”

Mitch White stopped talking and went back to staring. After about ten seconds, he seemed to have a revelation. His forehead tilted back, his chin, what there was of it, lifted up. “No,” he said. “No, George. There was no evidence of any Gregory buying any golf club that we were able to find.”

His expression had lost the agitation, the sense of annoyance, he had shown before.

“So when Bill Telford goes around saying he’s handed in all this stuff, the only thing he’s really talking about is a picture of his daughter in a blue dress with a red belt, red sandals?”

“That’s right, George.” It was clear now: Mitch White thought I was putting him through some kind of exercise.

“What about a list of the people on the Gregorys’ boat in the Figawi race that year—did he give you that?”

“Oh, yes. He gave us the list.” He pumped his head in a show of assurance.

“What did you do with it?”

“It’s around somewhere.”

“Did you contact any of them? The people on the list, I mean?”

And just that quickly Mitch wasn’t sure about the rules of the exercise anymore. If I was asking these questions on behalf of his friends and mine, why didn’t I already know whether he had contacted them? He rolled his chair back from his desk, extended his legs out in front of him, put his elbows on the arms of the chair, and folded his hands about chest high as he stared that question at me.

I tried to look back as innocently as I could.

After maybe thirty seconds Mitch began speaking in measured terms. “Look, I’m sorry for Bill Telford and his family, I really am. I’m sorry for all the victims and their families on the Cape and Islands. I hope I can bring the perpetrators of their misery to justice. I hope I can do that every time. But I can’t go off on every wild-goose chase every one of them wants me to go on. Bill, he didn’t have much for us in the beginning. Didn’t understand how his daughter could be dressed like she was. Didn’t understand how she could have ended up in Osterville when she was walking into Hyannis. Gave us names and phone numbers of everyone she knew, told us all the places she might have liked to have gone. Even dug out old credit card receipts to show where she’d gone in the past. Police did the best they could and they came up with nothing. They searched for her bag, the clothes she was wearing when she left home, the weapon that was used. Nothing. Unfortunately, crime on the Cape didn’t stop with this murder and we’ve had to deal with other things, too. So, simple fact of the matter is, it became time to move on.”

It was unclear whether Mitch was trying to convince me or was rehearsing for someone else. Either way, I was listening dutifully. Seeing that, he opened his hands and flared them, an indication of hopelessness.

“We didn’t close the case, but we’re tapped out. Something comes up that’s viable, fine, we’ll look into it. We don’t like having a citizen’s murder go unsolved. It doesn’t look good for us; it doesn’t look good for the Cape in general.”

Mitch sat up straight, pulled his chair back to the desk so he could make sure that all our attention was focused on each other, that it was just him and me, talking in our private tunnel. “Bill wants to do his own investigation; we’re not going to stop him, as long as he doesn’t break the law himself. Okay, Bill, let us know if you come up with anything. Years go by. He’s out there. He’s in here. He’s over at the police station. He’s got nothing. At some point he comes up with this Gregory theory. Well, I’ll be damned! Good God Gertie! The Gregorys—what a concept! I mean, you know every bit as well as I do, George—”

Here, he paused.

“—the Gregorys are fair game wherever they go. It’s the downside of being who they are. So now we’ve got this poor old guy, can’t come up with anything else, so he fastens on them? Gets some poor clerk in a grocery store, nine years ago thought the world was going to be at her feet, now here she is, fifty pounds of brownies later, realizes she’s not going anywhere, least of all to a Gregory wedding, and suddenly she remembers something? You know what I’m saying?”

I didn’t tell him.

“Okay, well, let’s assume that her sudden restoration of memory is one hundred percent accurate. What have we got? Heidi Telford, young, beautiful, and maybe just becoming aware of her own sensuality, talks to a kid from a famous family, then a couple of hours later sneaks out of the house. Mr. Telford puts it all together and decides she had to be going to a party at the famous family compound. Teases the boys with her boobies hanging out—he’s not saying that, but you know that’s what he means, all that bra talk and stuff. They want the boobies, she doesn’t give them up, they hit her over the head with a golf club and kill her. You like that story, George? Like it in terms of buying it? Think anybody would? The Gregory boys can get any titties they want. They don’t have to go hitting people over the head. They’re done with some girl for whatever reason, they just call a cab, send her packing. Hell, the worst of them would just open the side gate, tell her to walk home.”

He laughed. A little heh, heh. It was a typical Mitch White laugh, with no real humor behind it. He thought this was the kind of thing guys thought was funny. When I didn’t laugh, he stopped.

“So you see, George,” he said, wiping his mouth uneasily, “I wasn’t going to inflict an investigation on them. Certainly not on the basis of what Telford came up with.”

I wondered if looking at Mitch White was like looking in a mirror. If that was what made me hate him as much as I did.

4

.

IWENT FOR A RIDE. I GOT MY BIKE OUT FOR THE FIRST TIME THAT spring, pumped up the tires, oiled the brakes and the Derailleur, and loaded it onto the rack on the back of my old Saab. I drove east on the Mid-Cape Highway to Exit 9A and turned south. In half a mile I was at the Rail Trail.

This time of year there were hardly any vehicles in the parking lot, and within minutes I had the bike off the rack, my helmet secured, my shoes locked into the pedals, and I was cruising the smooth pavement that covered what had once been a railroad corridor. This was not a hard ride. In fact, it would be difficult to find an easier one, but I could go twenty-two miles to Wellfleet, turn around and ride back, and feel I had a pretty good workout.

I cruised past river swamps, cranberry bogs, an abandoned lumber mill, ponds that would soon be teeming with swimmers and small sailboats. I rode faster and faster because there was virtually nobody else on the trail: an inline skater, a woman with a dog, a man with some sort of baby carriage affixed behind his bike.

It was good, I told myself, to be doing something other than thinking. And then I realized that was exactly what I was doing. But I wasn’t brooding. No. I was doing something positive. Yes. That’s what I was doing. I was preparing myself for something in the future. The Pan-Mass Challenge, 110 miles from Sturbridge to the Cape Cod Canal the first Saturday in August. Preparing meant going forward, and that was good. Go forward, George. That’s good. That’s good. Keep pumping. Get in shape. Raise money. Children’s cancer fund. The Jimmy Fund. Pump your legs, raise money. Forget old man Telford and the Gregorys and Mitch White and your lost wife and anybody else you can think of forgetting.

Except I wasn’t really raising money, was I? I was contributing it. I had pledged $2,500 back in January, the minimum for the one-day ride that I was planning to do. Riders were supposed to get sponsors, send out solicitation letters, hit up friends and relatives, but I hadn’t done that. I didn’t have anybody I thought I could ask. Try my colleagues at work, maybe; make things awkward for everyone, those who gave and those who didn’t. The guy in the basement wants me to give him a hundred bucks. Look out for George, he’s asking people for money.