Eddie wasn’t sure what made him decide to head down to Cru at two o’clock on Saturday afternoon; he realized it was going to be a blender (this was the nicest word he could come up with, though he had dozens of others at his disposal). Barbie refused to leave her house during Figawi Weekend. She never told Eddie exactly what she did at home, but if he had to guess, he would say that when it was sunny, she sat on her back deck and drank prickly-pear margaritas. And if it rained, she indulged her lifelong crush on James Garner and watched old episodes of The Rockford Files.

Eddie supposed if he had to name what truly motivated him, he would say he wanted to be where the action was. Some day, these Figawians would grow up to be attorneys and surgeons, college presidents, NFL coaches, and, of course, hedge-fund managers. In five years, many of these Figawians would be married with a toddler on the ground and a baby on the way, and looking for a rental-one week, then two weeks, then the month of July, then the summer. In ten years, these Figawians would be ready to buy.

So basically, Eddie thought, the drink he was about to have was an investment in his pre-retirement years.

He bypassed the Gazebo, even though a rumor was circulating that two defensemen from the Boston Bruins were snuggled up against the bar in the midst of that dense black hole of humanity.

How do people breathe in there? he wondered. How did they find room to bring their drinks to their mouths without elbowing someone in the jaw?

He bypassed the Straight Wharf Restaurant, although he liked it there. They served excellent bluefish pâté, and the restaurant attached to the bar was some of the finest dining on Nantucket. But Eddie wouldn’t touch it with a ten-thousand-foot pole this weekend. Even as he passed, he saw two young bucks holding a girl in a white strapless sundress by her ankles over the side of the balcony.

She was screaming, “Put me down! Damn it it, Leo, put me down! I’m going to puke! I’m going to… puke!”

Eddie slowed down to see if the young lady would, in fact, puke, or, better still, if her breasts would pop out of her dress, or if the young bucks would lose their grip on her ankles and drop her headfirst into the bushes.

“I see London, I see France,” one of the bucks said, looking down the girl’s skirt.

“I’m going to puke, Leo!” she screamed. And a split second later, she did, and Eddie checked his watch. Five minutes after two, and the puking had begun.

Eddie headed down to Cru. Cru was upscale; the crowd was marginally older and more monied. Three years earlier, Eddie had happened across the owner of 10 Low Beach Road at the back bar at Cru, and that was where the deal for Eddie to rent the house had been struck.

Do you think you can get fifty K? the owner had asked.

I don’t think I can, Eddie had said. I know I can.

I like the confidence of that statement, the owner had said.

In the back of his mind, Eddie was hoping for similar luck from this outing. He needed something big. Something legal. Financially, he didn’t feel that much different from the girl hanging upside down-desperate, about to lose every shred of dignity.

The deal with DeepWell had gone so smoothly that Barbie had volunteered to call certain other groups renting Low Beach Road and offer the same scenario-five beautiful Russian women, ten thousand per night. Eddie couldn’t believe how ballsy his sister was-he would be terrified to propose the idea to anyone-but he realized that the arrangement sounded better coming from a woman. Eddie had overheard Barbie in action on the phone. She was equal parts Barbara Eden from I Dream of Jeannie-granting these men their wildest wishes-and Israeli special-ops soldier, a person not to be messed with. To Eddie, she said, “If they turn me down, they turn me down. I pretend I never mentioned it.”

But, so far, nobody had turned her down. Every corporate group wanted in. That very evening, a mining concern from West Virginia was checking in, and they were gung-ho for the girls.

And the girls-well, the girls were ecstatic.

Eddie was grateful for the cash, but there was a trade-off. He had chronic heartburn, and it was difficult to sleep at night. He constantly worried that someone was watching him.

But he needed the money. Grace had written a fifteen-thousand-dollar check to the Great Harbor Yacht Club, which had bounced.

“Bounced?” Grace had said when he told her. “What is going on, Eddie? I thought maybe it was Eloise’s fault. I thought it was an administrative glitch.”

He said, “The spec houses are taking all my spare funds, Grace. We might have to take a hiatus year from the yacht club, until I sell them.”

Grace gave him an incredulous look. “You’re telling me we don’t have fifteen grand for the yacht club?”

“That’s what I’m telling you.”

“But when you say the check bounced, it makes it sound like we don’t even have fifteen thousand in our account.”

Eddie cleared his throat. He was not enjoying this conversation one bit. “We do not, presently, have fifteen thousand dollars in our account.”

“How is that possible?” Grace said.

“The spec houses are eating me alive,” Eddie said.

“Can’t you just sell one unfinished?” Grace asked.

“That’s a possibility,” Eddie said. “Or we can be patient and wait until I sell a house.”

“Do you have any irons in the fire?” Grace asked.

He smiled. “Always.”

“Okay,” Grace said. She took a deep breath. “I can survive the summer without the yacht club.”

Eddie was relieved. Occasionally, in anger, he accused Grace of being spoiled because she had grown up with so much money. But the truth was, Grace was as levelheaded a woman as he had ever met. “Thank you for being understanding.”

Grace said, “You still have money to pay Benton, though, right? And Hester Phan?”

“Right,” Eddie said, uncertainly. Hester was the publicist who was supposed to get their garden into a magazine. The only reason Eddie had agreed to sponsor that effort was because he thought the potential article might reflect well on him as a real-estate agent.

The spec houses were in danger. Eddie had taken his cash from DeepWell and paid his plumber and Gerry for half the foundation of number 13.

As for Madeline and Trevor’s money-well, he didn’t know how to handle that situation.

He needed to sell a house.


The beautiful brunette owner of Cru was standing at the podium when Eddie walked in. Eddie had known her since she landed on the island, straight out of the University of Richmond. She greeted him with a nice hug and said, “You’re not going to believe this, Eddie, but I have one stool available at the back bar. Are you alone?”

“I’m alone,” he said, then wondered if he should feel embarrassed by this. Nobody celebrated Figawi alone; it went against the very nature of Figawi, which was all about getting shit-faced en masse and living out stories that no one could ever quite remember but that could be fudged and embellished for years to come. To venture out on Figawi weekend alone screamed loserdom, or so Eddie worried.

The bartender, a young woman who used to babysit for Eddie’s twins, said, “Hey, Eddie, what can I get you?”

He couldn’t remember his former babysitter’s name. It was in the Elisa/Alyssa/Alicia vein, but he wasn’t sure exactly which. Grace would know-Grace would also probably know the girl’s middle name-but if Eddie texted her to ask, he would receive a response sometime next month, because Grace never checked her cell phone. He was disappointed in himself. He was a real-estate agent; it was his business to remember names.

“I’ll have a…” He wasn’t sure what he wanted. Around him, the drink of choice seemed to be the Bloody Mary. But drinking a Bloody would immediately give Eddie heartburn; he was getting heartburn just looking at the Bloody belonging to the man next to him. “I’ll have a Triple Eight martini, straight up with a twist, please.”

“You know who invented the twist, right?” asked the man next to him. “It was John D. Rockefeller. He was a germophobe, and citrus was a natural disinfectant, so Rockefeller always asked his bartenders to run a lemon peel around the rim of his glass.”

Eddie turned to the man. “I did not know that,” he said, but such nuggets of trivia were always of great use to him. He would use that tidbit the next time he took a client out for drinks. As soon as that thought formed, Eddie realized that the man next to him was not just a man-it was Ed Kapenash, the chief of police. “Whoa! Chief!”

“How you doing, Eddie?” the Chief said with a smile. He and Eddie shook hands, and when Elisa/Alyssa/Alicia set down Eddie’s martini, they touched glasses with great camaraderie. The Chief was here at Cru! Eddie could not have been more surprised if he’d bumped into the Chief in some foreign location-a bar in Hong Kong or a café in Amsterdam. He wondered if the Chief was following him. But again, the Chief had been here first. This was merely a coincidence.

“What are you doing here?” Eddie asked. The Chief was deeply incognito. He was wearing a navy polo shirt, a pair of khaki shorts, and the red Mount Gay Rum Figawi baseball hat that announced one’s participation in the festivities. Eddie lowered his voice. “Are you undercover?”

The Chief threw his head back and laughed, which, in turn, made Eddie laugh. The Chief sucked down what was left of his Bloody Mary and ordered another from their bartender, whom he called Eliza.

Eliza!

“I came down to check on the guys, see how they’re doing, even though I’m off duty today,” the Chief said. “Everyone assumes I hate this weekend, but everyone is wrong. I’m a sailor myself. I enjoy the energy.”

Eddie nodded and laid into his drink, which had been perfectly made by his former babysitter Eliza.

Immediately, his mood improved.

“I don’t mind it either,” Eddie said. “And I enjoyed that story about Rockefeller. History always was my best subject.”

“Oh yeah?” the Chief said. “Mine, too. I’ve done a bunch of reading about Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Mellon-all the big industrialists.”

Eddie said, “I wonder what future generations will say about us. I’m pretty sure they’ll call us the Cell Phone Era.” At that very moment, Eddie’s cell phone rang-his ring tone was “Smoke on the Water” by Deep Purple, which made the Chief chuckle.

“That right there is the first and only song I ever learned to play on the guitar,” he said.

Eddie checked his display: it was Nadia calling, probably to find out what time the girls should be at the house tonight. Eddie’s skin grew hot and prickly. He silenced his phone, slipped it into his pocket, and took another swill of his drink.

“I forgot you were a sailor,” Eddie said. He would call Nadia on his way back to the office. He obviously couldn’t say one word to her while he was sitting next to the chief of police.

“I haven’t sailed in six years,” the Chief said. “Since Greg and Tess MacAvoy…”

“Oh God,” Eddie said. “Right. I’m so sorry. I wasn’t thinking…”

The Chief picked up his Bloody and rattled the ice, then added a shot of Tabasco, squeezed the lemon wedge, and stirred it up with his celery stick. “It’s okay,” the Chief said. “Greg and I used to sail Figawi every year. It was a tradition for us. I guess the real reason I come down here is to honor those memories. We always came here for a drink when we were done, back when it was the Rope Walk. Bloody Marys and a dozen littlenecks apiece.”

Eddie finished off his drink and signaled Eliza for another. Eddie wasn’t sure how they had landed on such a maudlin topic, but he felt it was his fault, and he wanted to make it right. When Eliza delivered his second martini, he held it up. “To Greg MacAvoy,” he said.

The Chief nodded solemnly as he and Eddie clinked glasses again, but the Chief seemed too overcome for words. The Chief, Eddie realized in that moment, was just a human being, like the rest of them. He wasn’t here to sting Eddie; he was a guy who had lost his best friend and was still mourning. “Greg had his flaws,” the Chief finally said. “But I loved him like a brother. It’s six years later, and I still can’t believe he’s gone. Sometimes, when it’s just me in the cruiser and I’m out late either on rounds or headed for home, I can hear him laughing.”

“I’m going to tell you something pathetic,” Eddie said. “I’ve never had a friend like that.”

“You’re friends with Trevor Llewellyn,” the Chief said. “Right? You guys do stuff together all the time.”