The Map of True Places. Brunonia Barry
overnight, taking only what they could carry.
Maureen had told her all this in such a matter-of-fact tone that Zee had never quite believed the story.
“Make no mistake,” her mother had said many times. “We are, every one of us, capable of murder. Given the right circumstances, it is within each of us to take a life.”
Zee never knew whether by “every one of us” her mother had meant all of humanity or simply all of the Doherty clan. She had often thought about asking that question, but she never did. In the end she decided she really didn’t want to know.
Their house had been on Eastern Avenue, near the factory but farther down the street, closer to the beach. Zee doubted if she could find the place now. It was so long ago that her grandmother had died. Her mother died only a few years later, just after Zee turned thirteen. Besides Zee, Mickey was the only Doherty left.
The factory where they’d once worked had long since closed. A sign on the front of the building read king’s beach apartments. It was directly across from Monte’s Restaurant, where she used to go for pizza with her father and Uncle Mickey in their pirate days.
When her grandmother died, Uncle Mickey had moved to Salem. He wanted to be closer to his sister, he said. Mickey could pilot a boat with the best of skippers, but he had never learned to drive a car. Though it was only a town away, Lynn was too far from what was left of his family, he said. And he didn’t like riding the bus. Though Maureen had killed herself just a few years after he made the move to Salem, Mickey stayed on. He had grown to love the Witch City. He was both a born entrepreneur and a natural salesman. He had a bit of the old clichéd blarney in him as well. When Salem reinvented itself, Mickey was right there to take advantage of the opportunity. He now ran a witch shop on Pickering Wharf, several haunted houses, and a pirate museum. He had done well. People in Salem fondly referred to Mickey Doherty as “The Pirate King.”
Lynn, Lynn, City of Sin. Zee recited the old poem in her head. A sign on a Salvation Army building read city of him. People were always trying to find a new image for Lynn. Zee liked it the way it was. It seemed to her a real place where real people led real lives.
She could smell Lynn Beach from here, fetid and heavy. At the Swampscott town line, she noticed a little shop with a woman in the window seated at a sewing machine. Outside the store hung a sign, hand-lettered, with penmanship that slanted downward as it progressed: MALE/FEMALE ALTERATIONS.
City of Sin. There was a reason she felt so right here, Zee thought. As sins go, Zee had committed her share. She felt guilty about a lot of things, not the least of which was the question that Lilly had asked shortly before her death. Lilly’s question reminded Zee so much of Maureen that she hadn’t shared it with Mattei. It was the thing that in retrospect should have tipped her off about Lilly, but instead it hit her in a much more personal way, as if someone had punched her in the stomach.
The last time she’d seen Lilly Braedon, Zee had been trying so hard to rationalize the risky behavior Lilly had been engaging in that she found herself unprepared for the question. Just as the session was ending and Lilly was walking out the door, she turned back to Zee and asked, “Don’t you believe at all in true love?”
When Lilly’s husband had first brought her to Mattei, Lilly had been heavily dosed on Klonopin. Her anxiety had become so debilitating that the internist her husband had been taking her to had first prescribed Xanax and then, when that failed, increasing doses of the branded clonazepam. Lilly could barely speak. She couldn’t drive. The pupils of her eyes looked like tiny pinpoints. But she was no longer anxious. She was zombie calm.
It turned out that Lilly hadn’t driven for the better part of a year, which had been inconvenient at best with a husband and two young children to care for. Instead of taking the kids to the yacht club to swim, Lilly had started walking them down to Gashouse Beach, which she said she preferred. But the kids missed their friends and the swimming lessons they had signed up for, and Lilly had such a bad feeling about the ocean—a terror that it would take her children, that the surf would send a rogue wave or that some remnants of red tide would seep through their skin to infect them—that she didn’t even let them wade in the water at the beach. Instead they were allowed only to sit on the rocky shore, playing in what little sand they could find, building castles, and slathered with so much 45 SPF that the blowing sand began to coat their pale bodies, making them look like sugar cookies.
By August, Lilly’s husband had taken pity on her and hired a nanny. That was when the real trouble started.
Lilly willingly surrendered her SUV to the nanny, happy to be free of it, preferring to walk around town. She had Peapod deliver groceries. And then she paced.
At first she confined her pacing to the house. She went up and down stairs. She circled from the foyer to the kitchen, through the sunporch to the dining room and library. She climbed all three flights of stairs, avoiding the basement but pacing the rough, unfinished floor of the attic, feet tapping a rhythmic heel-toe, heel-toe. She slept little, pacing the house at night until the nanny complained that she thought the old place might be haunted, because she could hear someone walking above her ceiling.
The next day, when the nanny took the children to their lessons, Lilly’s feet took her outside, through the labyrinth of Marblehead streets, past the fading window boxes where the vinca and blue scaevola struggled against the August drought. On the day when the drought finally broke, she ducked into the Spirit of ’76 Bookstore to get out of the rain, but the place was too quiet for her and she imagined that everyone could hear the squishing sound her sneakers made as she walked on the carpet, so she went back outside. But it was pouring, thundering and very windy. She stood under the awning and watched as a black plastic garbage can caught wind and rolled down the two-lane street, hitting a standing group of planters like a bowling ball, leaving a seven-ten split. She stayed under the awning until she noticed people looking at her, and then she crossed the street and entered the Rip Tide, someplace she’d never been to in her life.
It was three-thirty. The construction workers who weren’t already finished for the day were finally called off the job because of the rain, and the bar was filling up. Lilly walked to the far end and took one of the high stools, one she could wind her feet around to still their movement.
“What can I get you?” the bartender asked.
Lilly didn’t drink. She had no idea.
“Do you have any kind of food?” she asked the man. She was aware that she was the only woman in the place. She could feel all eyes on her.
“They have great steak tips,” a man two stools down offered. “Lunch is over. The kitchen doesn’t open until five,” the bartender said.
“Oh, come on, the lady looks like she could use a good steak.”
She knew they were looking at her, but she had no idea how she must appear. Wet-T-shirt contest was the first thing she thought, but she was too skinny for wet tees to matter much. Her collarbones felt sharp and jutting.
The bartender muttered and went to the back to cook. “You owe me one,” he said, not to Lilly but to the man who’d procured the steak tips for her.
The man dragged his bar stool over to hers.
His name was Adam, he told her. He lived above one of the shops on Pleasant Street, just a few houses down on the left. He did finish carpentry for a local contractor, the same one her husband had recently hired to do some work on their house.
Lilly ate the steak tips. She ate the salad that came with them, too. She even ate the garnish, something pickled and sour, though she couldn’t name what it was.
She had gone to his house, she later told Zee, because he’d offered her a dry T-shirt and a ride home.
They’d done it that first afternoon, she said, not in the bedroom but right there on the green couch in the corner, the wind whipping the aluminum sign against the side of the building, hailstones the size of golf balls crashing