Page 18 of The Night We Lost Him

“Sure. And I get why you’d want that to be the case,” Sam says. “If a horse turns out to be anything other than a horse, then someone didn’t do their job very well. And this neighborhood, on your watch, doesn’t get to be as safe as property values need it to be.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Detective O’Brien says.

“Maybe. But what sounds ridiculous, to me, is everyone suggesting that a potential victim forgot how to walk the line on his own property,” Sam says. “Not to mention that one of three people there that night apparently is still unaccounted for. Plus, you know, we still have no information on anything that happened to our father from the time a driver dropped him off at noon until he fell eighty feet to his death that night.”

I can see Sam clenching his fingers, clenching them right over the brace. So I step in beside him, in case I need to step between them.

“But, please, feel free to enlighten us,” he says. “Which way is the horse?”

Most Likely to Succeed

After a tense goodbye, Detective O’Brien leaves.

Sam and I walk back toward the house, moving at a steady clip.

“We need to find the jogger,” he says.

I scan the police report, searching for any information about him—any information we have about the Coopers.

“We’ve got the Coopers’ contact information on the police report,” I say. “I’ll start there. See what they can tell me about him.”

Sam holds the screen door open. And I step ahead of him, up onto the back porch.

“I’m going to search Dad’s office,” he says. “I want to push down on why he changed his plans. According to his calendar, the event in New York was for Inez. Dad would have wanted to be there for that.”

Inez Reya. She was wife number three (ex-wife number three), and certainly my preferred stepmother for the brief period that she was. She created a holistic skin care line that Noone Properties featured in most of their spas. This was how my father met her. It was his shortest marriage (less than three years) but it became one of his most important friendships. My father stayed incredibly close to Inez and her now wife, Elizabeth. And their daughter, Luna.

If Inez had a launch event, my father would want to show up to support her. Why did he decide he had to be at Windbreak instead?

Sam walks into the house, disappearing down the hall toward our father’s office. I walk into the kitchen, the galley kitchen, a blast of light and familiar smells greeting me—the potted sage on the windowsills, coconut soap, sandalwood candles on the island.

I love the feel of the kitchen, which, like the rest of the house, is relaxed, and low-tech: a vintage oven, a farmhouse sink, not even a dishwasher. I lock in on the drying rack next to the sink. It almost does me in, the stupid empty drying rack taking me back to that last visit here. Jack asleep. My father turning the record player on but low, just the two of us, washing and drying that night’s dishes together.

I run my finger over the rack and lean against the counter, centering myself. Then I pull out the Coopers’ contact number. I call it, but I’m greeted with an out-of-country ringtone. I click off and send an email instead, hoping that a note will find its way to them quicker.

I leave the kitchen and head through the rest of the house. I pass by the two bedrooms (the second of which my father used as his office), the one full bathroom, the tiny powder room. All the walls are painted a soft white, the furnishings spare and thoughtful.

The clean beach air feels like it is running through all of it, especially in the room I enter last. My favorite room, the living room, which is more like a makeshift library, complete with tall white bookshelves surrounding a bay window, the walls adorned with wild bird–splattered wallpaper that doesn’t exactly feel like my father, but which I love. And which somehow fits more than anything else here.

For me, a project always starts with a central image. Something that identifies what a space or a property most organically can be. In how I approach my work, this is a fundamental principle: How am I going to take that image and build out from it? Build out from the feeling of it to craft something that isn’t only beautiful, but also that utilizes the right materials and design elements to create something healing, something hopeful.

The whole of this house, the loving force that swings out from it, seems to have started with someone imagining what this room could be.

I walk over to the bookshelves, filled with so many gorgeous books stacked in every direction. There are only two shelves not overflowing with books, two shelves that are tightly filled with framed photographs and a variety of other personal items, scrapbooks and a couple of yearbooks, old journals, old playbills.

I lean in and start leafing through some of the playbills. I can’t remember ever going to a play with my father, and yet he must have two dozen playbills here that he’s chosen to hold on to: The Real Thing, Lost in Yonkers, King Lear.

Then I turn to the photographs. Many of them I recognize—photographs of me and my mother that she had framed at her house too. Several are of Sylvia and my brothers, of Inez and Elizabeth and their little girl, Luna. One is with a past president.

The other shelf has photographs and framed newspaper clippings of my father at work. Some are with my brothers. Some are with Grace and Uncle Joe. There are photographs of the team in the New York office, clippings from hotel openings in Aspen, Whitefish, Cabo San Lucas. My father smiling happily, completely in his element with his sons; and with Grace and Joe, both of whom had remained by his side for decades, from the early days of Noone Properties until Grace passed away earlier this year—a heart attack taking her too young. Which left my father and Joe to run the business together. One trusted advisor left.

It makes me wonder how that shifted the dynamic between my uncle Joe and my father. Though, in fairness, I didn’t really keep up with how the dynamics had worked before. My mother rarely talked about my father’s company, and I followed her lead. You only need to remember two things about Noone Properties, she’d said. It happened after me. And it has nothing to do with you.

Of course, that is revisionist history. My parents may not have been together by the time my father had turned Noone into the empire that it now is, but they were still married when he took over at Hayes. They were married for the early part of that empire-building, for those early years of his meteoric rise. They had actually met during his second year working there, my father still fairly fresh out of business school.

My mother was a music teacher and a session musician at that point. On occasion, though, like the night they met, she would sing with her friend’s wedding band at the Hayes Hotel in Watch Hill, Rhode Island.

My father was spending several months on property, overseeing a renovation there. She saw him sitting at the hotel bar during her dinner break, my mother feeling fierce in her gold jumpsuit. She was the one who approached him. She took the barstool beside him and asked him if he wanted to buy her a drink.

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