The Stolen Coast by Dwyer Murphy

Author:Dwyer Murphy [Murphy, Dwyer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

19

On Saturday, I was coming back from a supply run to Philadelphia, carrying more money than I liked having around and most of it hidden in the wheel wells. Anyone searching for it would look in the wheel wells, especially on a Wrangler, which had a lot of space there, enough for a duffel bag if that’s how you wanted to carry it. Half the money was getting dropped into the trunk of a Hyundai Sonata in the parking lot outside the Dartmouth Olive Garden. I’d been there to eat once, when I was young. I hadn’t thought about the place in years, but sitting around outside it waiting for the Hyundai to show up, I started thinking about the breadsticks and the pasta e fagioli, which I had ordered, pronouncing it like I was from New Jersey because that was the only way I had ever heard it pronounced. With half the money gone I felt better, lighter.

I was thinking about how easy it would be simply to take the other half. The idea frightened me, although it really would have been simple. A quarter million, vanished.

That was when Elena called. I was driving toward New Bedford on 195, a drive she and I had made together many dozens of times. I was coming up on the sign for the old dog park, with the mechanical greyhound lifted way up over the highway and the lights flashing underneath like legs. She asked if I wanted to go to a party. I said I’d pick her up in an hour. I wanted to drop off the money first. She told me to bring the camera.

Later, she was waiting for me on the curb, wearing long black slacks, cuffed above the ankles, and a light sweater. I had never seen her dressed like that before.

We crossed over the Bourne Bridge and took County Road for a while. It was old Cape in there. Foundation stones dug from the earth and well-water connections. The old Cape was something different, whether you were in Chatham or Sandwich or on the Vineyard or Naushon, for that matter. I had never been to Naushon but I knew the stories. It was the island where the Forbeses went in summer. They brought their friends from Yale and rode horses and put on plays. The men would perform the old rites, the same as they performed them in Kennebunkport and one or two other places around New England. It was old spy country, when you got down to it. Not spies like my father but like the men who had decided where he would go and whether he would live or be sacrificed. The men who set themselves up for wars twenty years in advance and had the right interests in place and their sons positioned for Congress afterward. Their time had passed. Everyone knew it except for them, and that was what made them dangerous. It was their ignorance and their greed, which was like a dampness in the air.

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