like that,” the old woman wheezed. “After twenty years of love and affection, she just ups and leaves, and Walter and I never hear a peep from her again.”
Billy cast his mind back to his one, magical summer with Toni and the long conversations they had had about her parents. Love and affection had not been words he had ever associated with the Gillettis. He remembered feeling sorry for Toni, and grateful for his own, warm relationship with his father.
Mrs. Gilletti went on. “Of course, Walter lost everything. You probably know that. Died of a stroke just months after we moved in here. Left me without a penny, the tightfisted son of a bitch.”
Billy looked past her into the clean, comfortable apartment. It wasn’t the Ritz-Carlton, but he would have killed to have a place like that to come home to.
“You seem to be doing all right to me, Mrs. Gilletti.”
Sandra Gilletti’s upper lip curled. “That’s because you have low standards. Probably why you fell for our Toni in the first place. She never came back for the funeral, you know. Never even sent flowers. Heartless bitch.”
Billy left the apartment feeling deeply depressed. In prison, at least he’d had his fantasy, his little box of dreams to keep him going. Now even that was disintegrating, rained on and destroyed like everything else in his life.
And not just his life. The Gillettis had clearly lost everything too. It was as if everyone connected with that awful summer in Kennebunkport had been cursed. Billy might have been the one sent to jail, but everyone had been punished. Everyone had suffered in their own way. Billy tried not to think of the Handemeyer family, and their never-ending grief. Had they been torn apart by this too? He wondered what had happened to them after the trial. Had his imprisonment given Senator Handemeyer the closure he craved? Somehow Billy doubted it.
For the next few months Billy searched tirelessly for Toni Gilletti, but it was like trying to catch a ghost with a butterfly net. He even spent a thousand dollars of the small amount of money his father had left him on a private detective, but it was to no avail. Toni’s poisonous old witch of a mother was right.
She was gone. And she was never coming back.
It wasn’t until a few months later that Billy Hamlin recognized the emotion building up inside him for what it was: relief. He had let go of the dream, let go of his parachute, and discovered to his astonishment that he hadn’t plummeted to his doom after all. In fact, he felt as if a huge burden had been lifted from his shoulders.
Walking out of jail had not made Billy Hamlin a free man. But giving up on Toni Gilletti had. At last he could begin to build himself a life.
He’d qualified as mechanic in jail, and spent the last of Jeff Hamlin’s money buying a stake in a run-down body shop in Queens, in partnership with an old buddy from high school, Milo Bates. Milo had followed Billy’s trial on TV and had always felt bad about what had happened to him. Still living in the Hamlins’ old neighborhood, Milo was now married to a sweet local girl named Betsy and the two of them had three kids. The Bates family took Billy Hamlin under their wing, and it was their friendship more than anything that helped turn Billy’s life around.
It was Betsy Bates who introduced Billy to Sally Duffield, the woman who was to become his wife. Billy and Sally hit it off immediately. Sally was a redhead with incredible ice-blue eyes and skin like an old-fashioned porcelain doll. She had a small waist, large breasts, and a full-throated, infectious laugh that could fill a room. She was kind and maternal and had a steady job as a legal secretary. Billy wasn’t in love with her but he liked her a lot, and he wanted children. So did she. There didn’t seem any reason to wait.
For the first five years the marriage was happy. Both Billy and Sally were busy, Billy with the car-repair business and Sally with their baby daughter, Jennifer. Jenny Hamlin was the apple of both her parents’ eyes, as round and fat as a dumpling, permanently covered in floury talcum powder and cooing adorably at anyone who cared to smile at her. Billy’s only sadness was that his father, Jeff, hadn’t lived long enough to meet his granddaughter and to see his son so happy and settled. As Jenny Hamlin grew, strong and pretty and funny as all hell—no one was faster on the draw with the one-liners than Jenny—so her parents’ love for her grew as well.
Unfortunately their love for each other, never really more than a friendship to begin with, began to fade. When Sally went back to work and fell for one of her colleagues, it wasn’t so much the affair that upset Billy as the fact that he didn’t care about it. At all. When another man sleeping with your wife is a matter of complete indifference to you, something is probably wrong. And so quietly, amicably, and without an iota of drama, the Hamlins divorced.
Years later, when Billy asked his daughter earnestly whether the split had affected her, the twelve-year-old Jenny Hamlin looked her father in the eye and said, deadpan: “Dad. I’ve seen eggs separate with more emotion.”
When her mom asked her the same question, Jenny stood up and gasped melodramatically, clapping a hand over her mouth.
“What? You mean you guys are divorced?!”
The truth was that Jenny Hamlin was a happy, secure, resourceful kid. Her mother was blissfully remarried, and although Billy remained single, he was perfectly content with his business, his buddy Milo, and his season ticket to Yankee Stadium.
Then the voices started.
It began as mild depression. Billy and Milo’s business started to struggle, then fail. The debts piled up, and Billy no longer had Sally’s income to cushion the blow. When Milo and Betsy Bates’s marriage also fell apart, Billy took it hard. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but it felt as if the whole world were coming unglued. He started to drink, a little at first, then a lot. Somewhere along the line, the boundary between reality and Billy’s increasingly doom-ridden imagination began to blur. Eventually it disintegrated altogether.
Milo Bates left town, abandoning Billy to face their debts alone. Billy convinced himself that Milo had been abducted and murdered.
He told the police, “He wouldn’t leave me. Not Milo. He’s my best friend. They’ve taken him. They’ve taken him away and killed him.”
When asked who “they” were, Billy Hamlin could only reply “the voice.” An evil voice had apparently told Billy Hamlin that “they” had kidnapped Milo Bates. Billy described vivid, nightmarish fantasies of Bates being tortured and killed by this anonymous individual, and demanded that the police investigate.
Desperately worried, Bill’s ex-wife, Sally, called in the social workers. Billy was diagnosed as schizophrenic and prescribed medication. When he took it, things got better. When he didn’t, they got worse. Much, much worse.
He would disappear for months on end on mysterious “trips,” not telling anyone where he was going and refusing to discuss where he’d been once he returned. “The voice” would tell him where to go, and Billy would follow its instructions, clearly terrified. Nobody knew where he got the money for these trips, and Billy himself seemed vague about it, insisting that funds had mysteriously appeared in his bank account. Sally and Jenny begged him to get help but Billy refused, convinced that if he didn’t do what “the voice” asked, if he allowed the voice to be silenced by doctors or psychiatrists, something quite terrible would happen.
Occasionally he got fixated on specific people. Some were locals, people he knew from the neighborhood whom he believed to be in danger. Others were public figures. Baseball players. Politicians. Actors.
Most recently, and most bizarrely, Billy Hamlin had become obsessed with the new British home secretary, Alexia De Vere. Time magazine had run a picture of Mrs. De Vere as part of its profile on women in power, and Billy had fixated on it, spending hours and hours on his computer “researching” the British politician’s background.
“I have to warn her,” Billy told his daughter, Jenny.
Not again, thought Jenny. He seemed so much better lately.
“Warn her about what, Dad?”