Page 5 of Drawing Home
“Em, can you pull this bottle for me?” Chris said, scribbling the name of a particular bottle of the Châteauneuf-du-Pape on a bar napkin. “I don’t think any of the servers will be able to find it and I’m too slammed to go myself.”
The owner of the hotel was serious about his wine. Jack had been collecting since the early 1970s, and the wine list was more than eighty-five pages long with somewhere around seventeen hundred selections. Although Emma had been employed at the hotel for almost a dozen years, the intricate maze of the wine cellar still occasionally stumped her. When she was downstairs, wandering through the rows of bottles, a thought popped into her head:Penny!It was the first time in hours she’d had a minute to think of her. Penny was going to take the news of Henry Wyatt’s death hard. Emma just hoped that she could be the one to tell her what happened, that Penny wouldn’t hear about it from someone else or see it online.
The hardest part of her job was that, when she was at the hotel for twelve or fourteen hours straight, she didn’t get much contact with Penny. It was a safe town, and everyone knew everyone, but it was still less than ideal to have a fourteen-year-old running around unfettered after school. She was a good kid, but things happened. And when Emma was caught up in a busy wave at work, she felt completely cut off from her other job, her more important job, of being a mother. A single mother.
The wine cellar’s numerical system sometimes sent her in circles and made her feel like she was misreading coordinates on a map, but tonight, thankfully, she navigated it correctly and spotted the bottle of Paul Jaboulet Aîné 2010 Domaine de Terre Ferme Red, Châteauneuf-du-Pape. Okay, so something had finally gone smoothly. Maybe the night was turning around.
Upstairs, she delivered the wine to the table and hurried back to the front desk to answer the ringing phone.
“The American Hotel, Emma speaking.”
“Emma, Jim DiMartino here.”
Jim DiMartino, a ten-year veteran of the Sag Harbor Police Department, had been one of the first responders when Henry Wyatt collapsed.
“Hi, Jim. You looking for the chief? He left a while ago.”
“Actually, that’s not why I’m calling. I’ve got Penny here at the station.”
Over the din of the bar crowd, she could vaguely make out his words, something about a party and underage drinking and someone backing a car into a house on Fahys Road. Penny hadn’t been drinking, but she’d been caught up in the sweep.
Emma looked helplessly around the room at the full tables, the packed lobby, the bar three-deep with customers.
“I’ll be right there.” Mercifully, the police station was just two doors away. She would go get Penny, and then she would have to call Angus to take her home. Angus, who used to rent the house next door, had moved in with Emma and Penny five years ago, when he lost his wife. Part of the move had been for financial reasons; why pay rent on a whole house when he lived by himself? Angus and Celia had, years before that, sold the house they’d owned together. The increased property taxes were crushing everyone, even people who were living in modest homes in modest parts of town. Now there was no such thing. A lot of people Emma knew had been forced to make tough choices.
But really, the move had been part of a promise he’d made to Celia before she died. Celia, who had babysat for Penny since she was a baby, did not want her husband to live alone after she was gone. “The man has been married for fifty-eight years,” she’d said to Emma. “He won’t fare well on his own. Good heavens, do you know how he would eat if left to his own devices?” Celia, anxious to make sure her husband would be loved and taken care of, made both Angus and Emma promise they would live in the same house.
Emma hated to call him this late. Angus spent his days volunteering at the Sag Harbor Historical Society or the whaling museum and he was usually asleep before eight. And, really, Emma should be taking Penny home herself. But just as a captain couldn’t abandon his ship, she couldn’t leave the front desk on a busy Friday night. Emma had long ago accepted that at any given moment, she was dropping the ball either at work or at home.
She turned into the alleyway between the municipal building and Page Restaurant. Page had its windows open, and music and laughter filled the night air.
The small station couldn’t house all the teenagers picked up at the party, so they were lined up as if this were a fire drill at the high school. Every young face was glued to a cell-phone screen. She scanned the group for Penny. Her daughter, tall for her age at five foot six, usually stood out in a crowd of teenagers. Her wild hair also made her difficult to miss. And yet Emma didn’t see her.
Emma made her way into the station. Sure enough, Jim had kept Penny close. She sat behind the counter at a chair next to DiMartino’s desk.
“Thanks for the call,” Emma said, shaking the officer’s hand. She turned to her daughter. “You okay?”
“Yeah, Mom. I’m fine.” In typical teenage fashion, she seemed irritated, even though Emma was the one who’d been put out. Moments like this would be so much more tolerable if she had a co-parent with whom she could share an eye-roll. But, just as she had countless times before this, she reminded herself that she was in this alone and that she and her daughter were both doing their best.
“You didn’t tell me you were going to a party.”
“It was a last-minute thing. And my phone died.”
Emma didn’t have time for this.
“Some night,” DiMartino said.
“Never a dull moment,” Emma said, though that wasn’t exactly true. There were many dull moments. Mostly dull moments, punctuated by minor catastrophes. Was that motherhood—or was it life?
She walked Penny back to Main Street and sat her on a bench in front of a sign for the old jail museum. She told her not to move an inch until Angus arrived.
Only when Emma was back behind the desk at the hotel did she remember the news about Henry Wyatt.
Chapter Three
There were houses that had addresses and houses that had names. Henry Wyatt’s home of the past thirty years was the latter. It was nine at night when Bea reached Sag Harbor and Kyle steered the car onto a private street, Actors Colony Road. In the midst of this beautiful stretch of waterfront homes, the house called Windsong sat like the jewel in a crown.
The driveway curved around the side of the house and led to a hidden garage. Of course Henry would not blight the approach to his home with anything as pedestrian as parked cars.
