Page 5 of The Identicals
“So you won’t meet me?” Harper asks. “You’re going to make me call Drew?” This is a desperate, dirty thing to say. Harper told Reed that she has started dating Sergeant Drew Truman of the Edgartown Police Department, and it bothers Reed. Drew has the advantages of youth and a policeman’s physique and bachelorhood and his large extended family—and he’s a nice guy besides. Sergeant Truman and Dr. Zimmer know each other because of heroin overdoses. Drew has administered Narcan three times in the past year, after which he has taken the addicts directly to the hospital, where they were placed in Dr. Zimmer’s care.
“Don’t call Drew, please,” Reed says. “Just go home. Curl up with Fish.”
“Fish is adog,Reed, not a person.” Harper says. “Billy justdiedin the middle of my reading off Pedroia’s stats. What you’re asking me isn’t fair, and you know it.”
“I’ll come in the morning,” Reed says.
“Tonight,” Harper says.
“Fine, tonight,” he says. “But late. Midnight. And not to your house—that’s too dangerous. I’ll meet you in the parking lot at Lucy Vincent beach.”
“Do you thinkthat’ssafe?” Harper asks. Before Reed was comfortable coming to her duplex, they used to meet in the back parking lot of the ice rink after hours. It would be deserted this time of year for certain, whereas the beach… “It’s nearly summer, Reed. There are people everywhere.”
“I realize this,” he says. “But I’m not driving down island.” He must realize how unkind that sounds, because he adds, “That’s the best I can do if it has to be tonight.”
“It has to be tonight,” Harper says. “Lucy Vincent at midnight.”
“For five minutes, so I can give you a kiss and tell you everything is going to be fine,” he says.
“Is it?” she says.
“Yes,” he says.
Harper goes home briefly to let Fish out. He is a dog, not a person, yet he’s standing by the front door waiting for her even though, more often than not these days, he sleeps on his Orvis bed and barely turns his head when Harper comes in. But today he’s right there, paws on her thighs, licking her face, giving her all the love he can. He knows. This brings Harper to tears. Her dog knows Billy died, but she feels the need to deliver the news herself. She grabs Fish by the muzzle and looks into his glacier-blue eyes and says, “Pops is gone, bub.” He keens and rubs his flank against Harper’s leg, and she has to practically push him out the door to her front yard, where he pees on the biggest hydrangea bush on the property. Then he comes trotting back into the kitchen, where Harper says, “Lamb tonight, in honor of Pops.” But Fish doesn’t snarf down his food, as he normally does; instead he looks up at Harper, as if for permission. “Go ahead,” she says. And with something like mournful dignity, Fish lowers his head to the bowl.
When Harper leaves the house, she drives to Our Market to grab a six-pack of Amity Island ale and three nips of Jägermeister. The cashier, Robyn, has known Harper for twenty years, but Robyn is a close friend of Jude’s, so Harper is always wary and reserved.
“You want a bag?” Robyn asks.
“Please,” Harper says.
Maybe Robyn has heard the news about Billy already, because she throws a Milk-Bone for Fish into the bag for free.
It’s eight thirty, and the sun has just set. Harper prefers winter, when it gets dark at three thirty and is pitch black by the time she finishes her shift. The summer sun reveals too much.
Harper opens one of the beers using the metal end of her seat belt and chugs half of it, then she upends one of the nips of Jäger into her mouth. Her mother would be appalled.
Harper should have taken Middle Road, because State Road brings her right by Jude’s house, where Harper sees cars and trucks lining the street on either side of the Garden Goddesses sign. It’s Jude’s annual start-of-summer party for her staff. She has a pig roast and makes cornbread and green-apple slaw from scratch, and there’s a big galvanized tub filled with beer. Jude’s partner, Stella, makes mudslides in the blender and everyone listens to Jack Johnson and the newbies think,Wow, what a great place to work!Only the returning employees know that this is the last day they’ll have off until Labor Day, when Jude throws a second party, with lobsters.
Harper hits the gas. She can’t get past Jude’s property fast enough.
Siren. Lights. Harper checks her rearview.
Police. She hisses and looks at the open container next to her, but there’s no time to dispose of it and no place to hide it. She puts her blinker on and pulls over.
This is the last thing she needs. Her reputation has already been shredded, sullied, and stomped upon with steel-toed boots. Three years earlier, Harper was arrested for doing “a favor” for a man named Joey Bowen, whom she knew only casually; he was a frequent patron at Dahlia’s, where Harper waitressed one night a week. The “favor” was to deliver a package to the son of one of Jude’s landscaping clients, the Monacos; Harper was scheduled to mow the lawn and weed the beds at the Monaco house the following day. All she had to do was hide the package in her wheelbarrow beneath the mulch and fertilizer and bring it to the house. The Monaco son would come outside to collect it. Harper was supposed to park the wheelbarrow outside the side door and turn her back—and for this, Joey Bowen would pay her three thousand dollars. Harper realized she was probably delivering drugs, but the offer was too tempting to turn down; she needed the money. At that point, she was still living in Billy’s house. She wanted a place of her own, but the Vineyard was expensive, and it was hard to get ahead.
Little did Harper know that the state police and FBI had been watching the Monaco house for weeks, waiting for this particular delivery. When the son grabbed the package, agents hopped over the fence, dropped out of trees, and came charging across the lawn. The kid got cuffed, and so did Harper.
During the interrogation, Harper explained to the police that this was the one and only time she had ever delivered anything for anybody. Joey Bowen was a customer at the restaurant where she worked, she said. They informed her that Joey Bowen was wanted for drug trafficking from the Upper Cape all the way down to New Bedford.
Harper spent eighteen hours in lockup until Billy found her an attorney. She was released, receiving only six months’ probation, but she lost her job, both at Garden Goddesses and at Dahlia’s. Jude Hogan openly despises Harper for tainting her landscaping business. The other people who hate Harper are a scarier but far less visible lot—the people who used to buy their drugs from Joey.
But the worst thing, perhaps, was that the Monacos’ next-door neighbor was a woman named Ann-Lane Crenshaw, who also happened to be Eleanor Roxie-Frost’s college roommate. Eleanor heard about Harper’s arrest immediately, and she no doubt shared the appalling news with Tabitha. How could Harper not suddenly feel like the blackest of sheep?
Anyone else would have left the Vineyard. It’s a testimony to how pathetic Harper is that she has stayed.
She has nowhere else to go.
