Excerpts

Chapter One Cool, brine-flavored night air came wafting in through the sunroof and the open windows. The Sagamore Bridge hummed under our tires, and in the darkness far below us, the ebbing tide washed through the Cape Cod Canal.     ZZ Top was singing on the CD player. Beside me, Evie Banyon was singing with them. "` She's got legs. She knows how to use 'em .'"     Evie had splendid legs, and she certainly knew how to use 'em. She was wearing a short white skirt, and she'd hitched it up to the tops of her thighs. She'd pushed her seat back as far as it would go, and those long, smooth, tanned legs were stretched out in front of her.     Evie was in high spirits. A long August weekend on the Cape in a cute little rented cottage overlooking the water in Brewster? Beachcombing and antiquing, napping in a hammock and reading on a screened porch, making love and eating lobster? What could be more fun?     Me, I was pretty grouchy. A long August weekend on the most crowded peninsula on earth? Fighting smelly traffic and rude sidewalk mobs, sweating under a blistering sun, waiting in line at overpriced restaurants crowded with screaming kids and hostile adults? What could be more aggravating?     Well, the lobster part sounded okay, and the making-love part would be fine.     I'd let Evie talk me into it despite a vow I made years ago after sitting in traffic on Route 3 for an entire Friday afternoon in July. The sun had been blazing, the exhaust fumes nauseating, the wife bitching, the two boys whining. Never again, I promised myself, would I voluntarily drive down to Cape Cod between Memorial Day and Labor Day. For about a dozen years, except for a few unavoidable, involuntary meetings with clients, I'd managed to keep my promise.     And now here I was, driving across the Sagamore Bridge on a Thursday night in August. It wasn't exactly voluntary, of course. Evie had arranged it without asking me how I felt about it.     She put her hand on my leg. "We made it," she said. "We're here. We've crossed the bridge and we're on the Cape. You can stop sulking."     "I wasn't sulking," I grumped. "I was being pensive."     She laughed. "You can pretend to be an old poop if it makes you feel better, but you can't fool me."     "I'm not pretending," I said. "I am an old poop."     I turned onto Route 6A, heading east for Brewster. Six-A is a winding, two-lane country road that follows the coastline along Cape Cod Bay. It passes over tidal creeks and skirts salt marshes as it wanders easterly through the self-consciously picturesque little villages of Sandwich, Barnstable, Cummaquid, Yarmouth, and Dennis before it arrives at Brewster, out there toward the inner elbow of Cape Cod.     On a map, the Cape looks like a half-flexed arm, with Provincetown, the hand at its tip, giving the rest of the world the finger.     "You really are quite sweet, you know," murmured Evie.     "I am not."     "I know this isn't your cup of tea."     "Actually," I said, "it's my cup of hemlock."     "That's what I mean," she said. "You're doing it for me. That's sweet."     "Well, don't tell anybody. I've got a reputation to uphold."     She leaned over the console and laid her cheek on my shoulder. Her fingers moved along the inside of my leg. "The flowers were gorgeous."     "Yeah?"     "There's nothing a girl likes better," she murmured, "than having a big bouquet of flowers from her honey delivered to her office. It shows the whole world that she is adored."     Julie, I thought. Julie must've sent them. It would be just like her. My smart secretary knew that Evie's honey was dreading the damn weekend on the Cape. I'd been crabby for a month, thinking about it. Julie knew the power of flowers. A woman who knows she's adored will put up with anything, even an old poop like me.     I probably should've told Evie right then that it wasn't exactly I who had sent them. But I didn't want to spoil her happy illusion. I'd tell her later.     Down on the south side of the Cape, Route 28, the outer coastline road, would be clogged all the way from Falmouth to Chatham at ten-thirty on a Thursday evening in August. There the T-shirt emporiums and nightclubs and souvenir rip-offs and clam shacks and miniature golf courses stayed open at least till midnight. But here on 6A we moved quietly through the darkened villages. Even the gas stations were closed.     "It's not so bad, is it?" said Evie. "Smell the ocean?"     "Low tide," I grumbled. "Rotting seaweed and outboard-motor fumes and dead shellfish."     She jabbed me in the ribs with her elbow. "You really are an old poop."     Just past the traffic light at the little cluster of enterprise at what passed for the center of town in Brewster, Evie said, "Okay. Slow down. I've got the directions here."     We took the second left past the light, another left at the fork, the dirt road on the right, and the third driveway through some scrubby pines, and then we rolled down a long, curving slope to our cottage.     It sat in a moon-bathed opening on a little sandy knoll. An L-shaped screened porch ran around the front and one side. Weathered shingles, fieldstone foundation, brick chimney. Beyond it, the salt marsh merged with the bay.     I parked in front. "Not bad," I said.     "I thought you'd like it," said Evie. "The woman sent me pictures. She said it's totally private. There's a deck out back with a hot tub. We can get naked and drink gin and tonics, and if you want, we can just stay here the whole time." She opened the car door and slid out. "Come on. Let's look."     I followed her onto the porch. She found the key under the doormat where the woman had told her she'd cleverly hidden it, and we went in.     The entire left half of the cottage was a single open room--kitchen, dining room, living room, with floor-to-ceiling bookcases, woodstove, braided rugs, and sliding glass doors along the back that opened onto the deck. A bathroom and two bedrooms occupied the right half of the cottage. The ceiling was open to skylights in the roof. Copperware hung from big rough-hewn beams over the kitchen.     "Isn't it great?" said Evie.     "It is," I said. "It's really nice." I went over to the glass sliders and gazed out on the salt marsh, which reflected a sky full of stars.     Evie came to where I was standing and wrapped her arms around my neck, and the next thing I knew, she was pressing herself against me and kissing my mouth.     "About those flowers," I murmured.     "I was deeply touched," she said, and she grabbed my hand and tugged me toward the bedroom, and I decided that this was a good time to keep my mouth shut and let her think what she wanted if it made her happy. Evie got up early the next morning to go running. I declined her invitation to join her. I knew she'd leave me in the dust.     When she got back an hour or so later, her slender body was sheened with sweat. She shed her T-shirt and shorts and sneakers on the deck and climbed into the hot tub.     I fetched coffee for both of us and joined her.     We sat naked across from each other in the tub with the hot water swirling around us, drinking coffee and playing footsie.     "I want to explain about those flowers," I said after a few minutes. "I--"     Evie put her finger to her mouth. "Shh," she whispered. "What's that?"     I listened. It sounded like someone standing right around the corner whistling. "It's a bobwhite quail," I said.     "That's so cool," she said. She slid around to my side of the tub. "Let's be quiet. Maybe we can see him."     Pretty soon we forgot about the quail. We ended up back in bed, and the subject of flowers got lost along the way.     Later in the morning, Evie took the car and went shopping for food and booze. I stayed at the cottage and read a Nick Lyons fishing book in the sunshine out on the deck.     We had tuna sandwiches and potato salad and iced tea on the deck, and while we were eating, the wind shifted, the temperature dropped, clouds gathered in the sky, and a fogbank settled over the marsh.     Evie had planned to go to the beach, but now, she said, she wanted to go exploring. Maybe it was guilt about taking credit for my secretary's thoughtfulness, so even though I'd been thinking about hammocks and books and classical music on the radio and maybe firing up the woodstove, I volunteered to go exploring with her.     "You don't have to," she said. But her tone told me that it would make her happy.     "No, really," I lied. "I'd like to."     We ended up driving in slow traffic all the way to Provincetown. We visited several art galleries and antique shops and used-book stores along the way, and in P-town I bought Evie a life-sized quail that had been carved from a single block of pine by a local artisan. Evie had a collection of hand-carved birds. She loved birds.     In my mind, that quail made up for our little misunderstanding about the flowers Julie had sent.     On the way back, we stopped at a rough-shingled seafood restaurant in Eastham. It was perched right on the edge of a tidal creek overlooking a long narrow dock and a small marina, so close to the water that high tide would wash around the pilings that held up the back porch, and even though it was a Friday night in August, we got a table by the window without having to wait.     My kind of restaurant, regardless of how good the food was.     We had gin and tonics, and both of us ordered a two-pound boiled lobster, onion rings, cole slaw, draft beer. We had barely finished our gin and tonics when the lobsters arrived.     Evie was an eat-as-you-go gal. Crack a claw, fish out the meat, dip it in the butter, and down the hatch. My method was to withhold gratification by picking out the entire lobster, filling a bowl with the meat, and eating only after I'd finished the dirty work. Our approaches to eating lobster pretty much defined the differences between us.     When Evie ate, she mumbled and groaned the way she did in bed. When I pointed that out to her, she laughed. "My grandfather in Maine had a boat," she said. "He had a string of lobster pots, and we always had lobster. When I was a kid, lobsters were a staple in my grandmother's house. I can remember my mother and my grandma and me sitting around the kitchen table all afternoon picking out lobsters. Grandma had a big glass punch bowl, and we'd fill it with tails and claws till it was full and mounded over. When we were done, we rewarded ourselves by picking the bodies and sucking the legs. I ate so much lobster when I was a kid, you'd think I'd be sick of it. But I'm not. I love lobster."     "You can pick my body," I said, "if I can suck your leg."     She smiled, picked up a lobster leg, looked at me cross-eyed, and sucked it suggestively.     "That's the first time you ever mentioned your grandmother," I said. "Or your mother, come to think of it. I didn't know you were from Maine."     "I'm not," she said. "My mother was."     "I don't really know anything about your childhood," I persisted.     "Does it matter?"     I shrugged. "It's part of you. I'm interested in you."     "Nothing interesting in my childhood," she said. She cracked a claw, pulled out the meat, dipped it in butter, and ate it. The drawn butter dribbled down her chin. "I've just had this ordinary life. Anyway, I like being mysterious."     "What about me?" I said. "Am I mysterious?"     "Sure."     "Don't you want to know about me?"     "I know I love you," she said. "What else is there?"     "We never talk about our lives before we met. It doesn't seem natural."     "So what do you want to know?"     "Well," T said, "what about--"     Suddenly Evie's head jutted forward and her eyes narrowed. She was glaring over my shoulder. "Shit," she hissed.     "What?"     "Don't turn around. There's somebody at the bar. He followed me. Bastard."     "Followed you?"     "This is no coincidence." She wiped her mouth and hands on her napkin, pushed back her chair, and stood up. "I'm gonna take care of this."     "Want me to--?"     "You stay right here, Brady. I can handle it."     Evie headed to the bar, which ran the full length of the wall behind me. I turned to watch.     The place had gotten crowded since we'd arrived. People were clustered at the bar, talking and laughing and having a drink while they waited for a table.     Evie marched right up to a man who was neither talking nor laughing. He was a stocky guy with straw-colored hair and a good tan. He had a draft beer in his hand, and he was leaning back with one elbow propped on the bar behind him, smiling at her as she approached him.     He looked to be in his late twenties, which would make him a few years younger than Evie. He had pale eyes and a shy, expectant smile.     I don't think he expected Evie to walk right up to him and slap his face.     It was no love pat. She started it somewhere around her hip and pivoted her body into it, and when her palm cracked against his cheek, it rang out like a gunshot, and the murmur and mumble of voices in the place suddenly subsided so that everyone could hear Evie growl, "You son of a bitch. God damn you. You better leave me alone."     The guy barely reacted to her slap, but he flinched at her words, then shook his head and held up his hand. He tried to smile, and I heard him say, "Come on, honey, just listen ..." before the other conversations in the room resumed and his voice was drowned out.     Evie stood in front of him, pointing her finger at his face and spitting words at him, and I recognized her anger by the hunch of her shoulders and the angle of her neck. I'd seen it before.     He looked at her with a little bewildered smile, and when she was done, he leaned toward her and said something. Evie lifted her hand as if to hit him again, and he held up his hands, stepped back, nodded quickly, turned, placed his glass of beer on the bar, and walked out of the place. Chapter Two Evie stood there with her arms folded across her chest and watched him go. Then she turned, came back to the table, sat down, and picked up her fork.     "What was that all about?" I said.     She scowled at me. "I'm so mad I could explode."     "That's pretty obvious. So who was that?"     "I don't want to talk about it." She blew out a quick, exasperated breath, then picked up an onion ring and stuffed it into her mouth. "I just want to enjoy my dinner."     "But you can't--"     "Brady, goddamn it, I do not want to discuss it. Okay?"     "Sure," I said. "Okay."     A minute later our waitress came over. "Are you all right, miss?" she said to Evie.     Evie waved her away without looking up. "I'm fine."     "The manager wants to know if--"     "Tell him I'm sorry if I made a scene."     "That's not--"     Evie lifted her head and glared up at the girl. "Look," she said. "It's private and it's over with, all right?"     The waitress, who looked like a high-school kid, hovered there for a minute, then shrugged and wandered away.     I had the good sense not to say anything.     We ate in silence. After several minutes, Evie reached across the table, touched my hand, and said, "Let's leave that girl a nice tip, okay?"     "Sure."     "I'm sorry if I bit your head off."     "Forget it," I said.     "I just don't like being stalked."     "Is that what that was?"     "What else would you call it?"     "If that guy's stalking you, we should tell the police."     "A lot of good that'd do." She shook her head. "He's harmless. Annoying, that's all."     "Stalkers--"     "Forget it, okay?"     "Right," I said. "Sorry."     We finished eating without saying much, and when we were done, we went outside and strolled down to the long T-shaped dock that extended out over the tidal creek. A few sailboats and sportfishing boats were moored there, along with several blocky craft that might've been lobster boats.     We walked out to the end of the dock and stood there watching the water. The afternoon clouds had blown away, and now the tide was coming in and the moon was rising over the marsh. Night birds were swooping around chasing mosquitoes. The air was still and quiet. Somewhere out there a fish sloshed. Some lights glowed from the cockpits on a couple of the sailboats, and from them came the soft murmur of voices, an occasional burst of laughter, the clink of glasses, all muffled by the damp, briny night air.     I lit a cigarette. "You okay?" I said to Evie.     "Yeah, I'm all right." She found my hand and held on to it, and we stood there in silence, watching the boats and the night birds and the rising moon.     After a few minutes Evie said, "Did you ever spend the night on a boat?"     "No," I said. "I don't think I ever did."     "I've always wanted to live on a houseboat," she said. "Get rocked to sleep every night, hear the slosh of waves on the other side of the hull, inches from your head. If you don't like where you are, you just start up the engines and move your house and your whole life somewhere else."     I flipped my cigarette butt into the water. "It's a lovely notion. Impractical, maybe, but lovely."     She chuckled. "Mr. Practicality."     "I fight it constantly."     She squeezed my hand. "I'm sorry, Brady."     "For what?"     "For making a scene."     I shrugged. "it was your scene."     She chuckled. "For being a bitch, then."     "You were angry. You're entitled."     She snuggled against me. I put my arm around her shoulder, and she laid her head against my shoulder.     "I went out with him a few times," she said quietly. "His name is Larry. Larry Scott. It was three or four years ago. He worked where I worked."     "In Cortland?" I said. "The medical center?"     "Yes. He was the janitor. He'd been a Marine. Served in Desert Storm, where he had some hairy experiences, I guess, and after he got out he tried several jobs. He's a good-looking man, terrific body, all that. But it didn't take me long to figure out that he was a little weird, and pretty boring besides. Self-absorbed, narrow-minded, a bit paranoid. So I stopped going out with him."     "And he didn't like it," I said.     "No." She was quiet for a minute. "tie started calling me on the phone at odd hours," she said. "Sometimes he'd wake me up late at night. He had this idea that I'd dumped him because he was just a janitor and lived at home with his mother and didn't have much money."     "How did you handle it?"     "At first I tried to reason with him. Told him I thought he was a nice man but that we had no chemistry, and that money had nothing to do with it. He'd argue with me, insist that we did have chemistry. He knew it, he said, because he could feel it, and I was a bad person for rejecting him because he was poor. At the time, I was going out with a doctor who was quite a bit older than me, and Larry figured it was all about money. I told him I didn't give a shit about money, but he never would believe that. After a while, I told him to stop calling me, he was annoying me. He kept calling anyway. I got so I stopped answering my phone. I screened all my calls, and Larry would fill my answering machine with ... I don't know what to call it. Crazy stuff. He loved me, he'd always love me. I loved him, he kept saying, and I should just admit it. We were destined for each other. He'd rant on about how he was going to have money one day, and then we could be together. And sometimes he'd talk about how he couldn't take it, I was driving him insane, that he was going to kill himself if he couldn't have me."     "Did he ever threaten you?"     "No, not really. I mean, it all felt threatening. But he never actually threatened to hurt me or anything."     Evie put her arm around my waist and burrowed against me. I held her tight against me. She was shivering.     "Finally I got an unlisted phone number," she said. "Within a few days, he somehow got ahold of it. Sometimes when I went out, Larry would follow me. Like tonight. I'd be in a restaurant or a store or something, and I'd look up, and there he'd be, watching me. And I'd find him hanging around my office pretending to change a lightbulb or something when I was working. Sometimes at night I'd look out my window and see him parked outside, sitting there in his car. He'd stay there for hours. Just sitting there, watching my window."     "You should've called the police."     "I did," she said. "They were nice to me, and understanding and all. But the Cortland cops were mostly local guys. They all knew Larry. They grew up together. Old small-town buddies, played football together in high school. So when Larry would be out there in his car, I'd call, and the police would come by in their cruiser, stop, talk with him for a while, and Larry would leave, and a few minutes after the cops left, he'd show up again. One day I went to the police station, told them he was stalking me. They asked me some questions, then told me that what Larry was doing wasn't stalking. He was surely bothering me, they said, but that was no crime, and there was really nothing they could do about it."     "If he didn't actually threaten you with death or bodily injury," I said, "it's not stalking according to Massachusetts law."     "Yes," said Evie. "That's what they said. I even talked to a lawyer about taking out a restraining order. She asked me a lot of questions and was very sympathetic, but she said no judge would go along with it. Larry and I had never been married or lived together, and he'd never hurt me or threatened to hurt me or anything like that. She said the bottom line was, ours wasn't a domestic relationship, and besides that, I wasn't in fear of him. I guess there's no law against driving somebody crazy."     "It sounds like a nightmare," I said.     "It got worse," she said. "He began leaving me gifts."     "Gifts?"     "Jewelry, lingerie, perfume. Stuff like that. Personal, intimate things. I'd come home, and there would be a gift-wrapped box on my kitchen table."     "He got into your house?"     "Yes."     "How? Did he have a key?"     "I don't know how he got in."     "Jesus," I said. "What did you do?"     "I called him. I pleaded with him to leave me alone. I threatened him. Said I'd get a lawyer, take him to court. He just laughed. See, I was playing into his hands. He'd made me call him. It seemed to convince him that I cared about him."     "You should've told your lawyer. I mean, he was trespassing."     "Oh, I did," she said. "Problem was, I couldn't prove it was him leaving those gifts." She blew out a long breath. "It got so I was convinced that I was the crazy person, that it was all my fault. I even started feeling sorry for him, guilty about the way I was treating him. I was going nuts. Fortunately, I knew I was going nuts, and I knew why. So finally I found the job at Emerson, and I left Cortland, and I didn't tell anybody where I was going. That was over three years ago, and until tonight, I thought I'd left Larry Scott behind forever."     "You haven't seen him since you moved?"     She shook her head. "Tonight was the first time. It's way spooky."     "Maybe it was a coincidence," I said. "He just happened to be here and spotted you."     "No. He followed us. I'm sure of it."     "Well," I said, "we'll have to put an end to it."     "How?"     "When we get back I'll talk to some people. I know some state troopers who'll put a scare into him."     "Well, I wouldn't mind if you did that." Evie hugged me, then tilted up her head and kissed me. "I'm getting chilly."     "Hot tub, glass of brandy," I said. "I'll fire up the woodstove."     "Mmm," she said. "Then a warm bed."     "Mmm, indeed," I said.     We held hands and walked back to the car in the moonlight. The restaurant parking lot was still jammed with cars, and Friday-night laughter and loud voices filtered out from the screened windows. We'd parked in the far corner of the lot, and when we came to my car, we both stopped short. (Continues...) Excerpted from Past Tense by William G. Tapply. Copyright © 2001 by William G. Tapply. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.