Chapter 20
It took more coaxing than it should have to get Arietta into the car.
The nurse for Shannon’s father had already been there for more than twenty minutes before Shannon was able to start the engine and get them out of there.
In the passenger seat, Arietta shook violently, her eyes to her knees as they clacked together.
Shannon didn’t bother with the radio. The silence felt heavy, like molasses in their ears.
At the station, Shannon led Arietta into the front room, where a secretary with a bad perm clacked on an ancient-looking computer.
Shannon guessed there wasn’t a whole lot to do in a place like Nantucket.
Any crime being committed was probably white-collar and handled at a higher level. The FBI had to be involved.
The woman at the desk raised her eyebrows at Shannon and Arietta.
Her face echoed surprise. It was only then that Shannon realized their states: Arietta still had last night’s makeup all over her face, and Shannon was still in her big sleep T-shirt.
Why hadn’t they thought to put anything else on?
Shock, of course. But she hoped it wouldn’t hurt their case.
“We need to talk to an officer about several incidents,” Shannon explained. “My mother is being blackmailed.”
The woman didn’t flinch. She pressed a button on the desk, and a man who introduced himself as Officer Turnwell came into the front room. His pants were baggy around his waist, and he was balding with a big suntan line on his forehead. “Morning, ladies,” he said. “Step into my office, please.”
Shannon had the sense that they were high schoolers in trouble and being called into the principal’s office. They sat and crossed their ankles, waiting for Officer Turnwell to bring up the online form into which, he said, he’d “write up their report.”
When Arietta couldn’t speak at first, Shannon did her best to explain the situation. “My mother received a letter demanding twenty thousand dollars,” she said. “The blackmailers told her that they would expose her and my father if she didn’t pay up.”
“But I didn’t know what they meant,” Arietta hurried to add. “I still don’t really know.”
“Huh.” Officer Turnwell typed that into his computer, then crossed his arms. “You paid these people?”
Arietta nodded, her face pained. “I didn’t know what else to do.”
“So, I take it you wanted them to remain hush-hush about whatever it was they knew,” Officer Turnwell said, puffing out his chest, as though he’d already figured it all out.
Arietta looked stricken. “It’s hard to explain.”
“Try, please,” Officer Turnwell said. “That’s why we’re filing this report. We need information.” He spoke to Arietta as though she were five.
Shannon fumed. She wanted to tell this officer that they’d been through enough. They hadn’t come here to be belittled.
“My husband had a stroke. It’s been about two months now,” Arietta went on.
“It’s been chaotic, to say the least: moving him here to the island and finding a rhythm within our days.
He can’t speak, read, walk or do anything he used to do.
I don’t mind, of course. I love him, and he loves me, and it’s my duty to do these things as his wife. But…”
Shannon’s stomach flipped. She wondered why her mother felt she needed to tell the cop this last bit.
Officer Turnwell sighed. “But you paid them? Twenty grand?”
Arietta let her chin fall to her chest.
“I feel like you’re not telling me everything, Mrs. Peters,” Officer Turnwell said, sounding flippant. “I can’t understand why you’d pay twenty grand to people you don’t know, to hide a secret you say you don’t know. It’s all too murky for me to understand.”
“They told her it would be over if she sent the twenty grand,” Shannon interjected. “She wanted to get them off her back. But of course, they’re now asking for more.”
“One hundred thousand dollars,” Arietta said in a meek voice.
Office Turnwell blew all the air from his lungs. “Now that’s something.”
They remained quiet for a moment.
“We went through my dad’s calendar,” Shannon said finally. “By the looks of things, he had a life that none of us knew anything about.”
“An affair,” Officer Turnwell said simply.
Arietta let out a strangled sob, then dropped her eyes to the ground.
“We don’t know for sure,” Shannon said. “But what we do have is the bank information for the blackmailers. Mom, can you show them?”
Arietta had taken a screenshot of the bank information and showed it to Officer Turnwell.
He took his sweet time entering that information into their file.
When he followed the lead, however, it led to an anonymous banking website, one that needed to be “cracked” via FBI intervention to identify the account owner.
“Your blackmailers are crafty people,” he said, teasing them.
Shannon thought she was going to scream. She wanted to tell Officer Turnwell to take their grief and their fears seriously. She demanded to see another officer. But she had the hunch that there was nobody else around.
“Is there anything else?” Officer Turnwell asked.
Shannon and Arietta had told him everything they could. At least, Shannon thought they had. It was impossible to know if her mother was keeping something private, something for herself, if only to protect her marriage and Fred. Shannon was exhausted.
They’d booked Fred’s nurse for the next several hours, and although Arietta was exhausted, Shannon suggested they use their time out of the house wisely.
Neither of them was hungry, so they grabbed coffee on the boardwalk and watched tourists mill about in gorgeous outfits, eating croissants and talking about their upcoming afternoons on their sailboats.
Arietta hadn’t said anything for more than thirty minutes, and Shannon ached to know what was on her mind.
Suddenly, Arietta began to laugh gently. She set her cup of coffee down and wiped a tear from her cheek. “I can’t get my mother’s voice out of my head.”
Shannon was surprised. It had been a while since they’d spoken about Grandma Regina, although she knew that she was never far from either of their minds.
She was the reason that Arietta wrote almost obsessively about Alzheimer’s research.
She was the reason Shannon had thrown herself so completely into the world of memory research and neuroscience.
“She told me not to marry him, you know,” Arietta said.
“Grandma told you not to marry Dad?” Shannon gasped. A few tourists glanced at them, having overheard. It certainly did sound like juicy gossip.
“She did. I don’t think she thought I would be happy with him,” Arietta said. “Obviously, I was in no position to listen to her. What twentysomething listens to her mother? This is part of the reason I try never to give you and your sisters any advice. It’s like screaming into an abyss.”
Shannon let out a nervous laugh.
Arietta sipped her coffee. There was animation in her eyes. “When I got that blackmail letter, my first thought was it was an affair. Of course it was. Like all marriages, Fred and I had our ups and downs. We loved each other more, sometimes, than we did other times. I figured that was natural.”
“It sounds natural,” Shannon offered, although she, at twenty-four and single, knew less than zero about marriages.
Arietta shrugged. “But now that he’s in this state, now that I’m spending so many hours of my day making sure he’s comfortable and fed and washed, I don’t know.
I don’t know if I can hear about his scandalous, sexy affairs.
I don’t know if I can hear about how happy he was with other women, now that I’m the one left to pick up the pieces. ”
Tears began to roll down Arietta’s cheeks. Shannon reached for her mother’s free hand, but Arietta brushed it aside, as though she couldn’t take that level of tenderness.
“People have affairs,” Shannon breathed, trying to offer compassion to both of her parents. “That doesn’t make it right, of course. But it happens. It’s been happening since the beginning of marriages.”
Arietta’s eyes were lined with pink. “I’ve had friends who’ve had affairs.
Women back in Boston who ran around behind their husbands’ backs.
Of course, it’s important to remember that their husbands were running around behind their backs, too.
Some of them told me that I should have an affair of my own, that it would ‘protect’ me emotionally if I ever found out that your father was cheating on me.
But I never had it in me to cheat. All I wanted to do was love him. ”
At the idea that so many wives were cheating as a way of protecting themselves, Shannon felt a heaviness in her chest. She remembered that Cole had been cheating on her, too.
Should she have protected herself? Should she have had a flirtation, at least, on the side?
It wasn’t her way. But maybe “her way” was only going to hurt her down the line.
“Oh, but if these blackmailers want to take everything from me over a silly affair,” Arietta continued. “That’s just about the stupidest thing, isn’t it?” She sniffed and tried to laugh it off.
“It’s just an affair.” Shannon prayed that that was all it was.
Arietta was quiet for a moment. “His mistress must live near you. Near Yale. I wonder if she’s a professor or something like that.”
Shannon had been thinking about this, too.
She couldn’t imagine when her father would have met his Yale-based mistress.
But what really turned her stomach was the idea that her father had been near her sometimes as many as three times a month, and he hadn’t bothered to call her.
He hadn’t bothered to meet her for coffee. He hadn’t cared.
This stung more than the affair, she thought.
“You can’t pay them,” Shannon said gently.
Arietta sighed. “I know that. But I also don’t think the cops are going to be of much help tracking whoever this is down.”
“Doesn’t seem like it.” Shannon and Arietta shared a secret smile.
Shannon considered bringing up the fact of her father’s health.
She considered asking her mother if it was better to find a safe, comfortable, and clean place for Fred to live for the rest of his life.
Somewhere they could visit him, and he wouldn’t serve as a permanent reminder of everything Arietta had lost—both when he was conscious and when he was not.
But before Shannon could find the words, Arietta stood and said it was time to head back home. “I want to do something with my day,” she said firmly. “That article for Jasper won’t write itself.”