Excerpts

Prologue
Chapter I
Chapter II

Prologue

  It is a warm summer evening, and by the light of a full white moon, I, John Whitman Sutter, am watching my wife, Susan Stanhope Sutter, as she rides her horse Zanzibar across the quiet acres of Stanhope Hall, her ancestral estate.

      The rising moon is eerily bright, and it illuminates the landscape with an unearthly glow, which transforms all color into silvery shades of blue and white.

      Susan passes through a line of tall pines and enters a neighboring estate called Alhambra, and I wonder why she has trespassed on this property, and I hope she has gotten permission from Alhambra’s new owner, a Mafia don named Frank Bellarosa.

      Majestic trees cast long moon shadows over the grassy fields, and in the distance I can see the huge stucco villa which is dark, except for a light from the closed glass doors of a second-story balcony.  That balcony, I know, leads to the library where Frank Bellarosa sits in his leather armchair.

      Susan draws near to the house, then dismounts and tethers Zanzibar to a tree.  She walks to the edge of a long marble reflecting pool set in a classical garden of mock Roman ruins. 

      At the far end of the pool is a statue of Neptune, holding aloft his trident, and at his feet, stone fish spout water from their gaping mouths into a large alabaster seashell, which overflows into the pool.

      At the opposite end of the pool, closest to me, is a statue of the Virgin Mary, which is new, and which I know was put there by Bellarosa's wife as a counterbalance to the half-naked pagan god.

      A soft, balmy breeze moves the cypress trees, and night birds begin their song.  It is a beautiful evening, and Susan seems entranced by the moonlight and the enchanted garden.  I, too, am mesmerized by this magical evening.

      As I turn my attention back to Susan, she begins to take off her clothes, and she drapes each piece over the statue of the Virgin, which surprises and bothers me.

      Susan moves to the edge of the pool, her red hair billowing in the breeze, and she is gazing down at her naked reflection in the water.

      I want to take off my clothes and join her, but I notice that the light from the library has gone out, and the doors of the balcony are now open, though no one is there, and this gives me an uneasy feeling, so I stay where I am in the shadows.

      Then I see a man silhouetted against the white walls of Alhambra, and he is moving in long, powerful strides toward the pool.  As he comes closer, I see that it is Bellarosa, and he is wearing a black robe.  He is now standing beside Neptune, and his face looks unnatural in the moonlight.  I want to call out to Susan, but I can't.

      Susan does not seem to see him, and she continues to stare down at her reflection, but Bellarosa’s stare is fixed on Susan.  I am incensed that this man is looking at my wife's naked body.

      This scene stays frozen, Susan and Frank as motionless as the statues beside them, and I, too, am frozen, powerless to intervene, though I need to protect Susan.

      Then I see that she has become aware of Bellarosa's presence, but she does not react.  I don't understand this; she should not be standing naked in front of this man.  I'm angry at her, and at him, and a stream of rage races through my mind, but I can't put this rage into words or sounds.

      As I stare at Susan, she turns her back to the pool, and to Bellarosa, and I think she is going to leave.  Then, she turns her head in my direction, as though she's heard a sound.  I make a move toward her, but suddenly she lifts her arms and springs backward into the pool, and in long, powerful strides, she moves naked through the moonlit water toward Frank Bellarosa.  I look at him, and I see that he is now naked, standing with his arms folded across his chest.  He is a large, powerfully-built man, and in the moonlight he appears as imposing and menacing as the naked stone god beside him.

      I want to shout out to Susan, to warn her to come back, but something tells me to stay silent – to see what happens.

      Susan reaches the far end of the pool and lifts herself into the water-filled seashell, where she stands near the towering statue of Neptune.  She is looking up at Bellarosa, who has not moved from the edge of the pool, except to turn his face toward her.

      They stare at each other, unnaturally motionless, then Bellarosa steps into the shallow water of the seashell where he stands in front of Susan.

      They are speaking, but all I can hear is the rushing sound of the spouting water.  I am enraged at this scene, but I still can't believe that Susan wants to be there, and I wait for her to dive back into the pool and swim away from him.  Yet, the longer she remains standing naked in front of him, the more I realize that she has come here to meet him.

      As I let go of any hope that Susan will dive back into the pool and swim away, she kneels into the shallow water, then moves her face into Bellarosa's groin and takes him into her mouth.  Her hands grasp his buttocks and pull him closer to her face.

      I close my eyes, and when I open them again, Susan is lying on her back in the scalloped seashell, her legs are spread wide and they dangle over the edge of the waterfall, and Bellarosa is now standing in the reflecting pool, and he buries his face between her thighs.  Then, suddenly, he pulls Susan’s legs up so they rest on his shoulders, and he seems to rise out of the water as he enters her with a powerful thrust that forces a deep cry from her lips.  He continues his rough thrusts into her until she screams so loudly it startles me. 

*** 

      "Mr. Sutter!  Mr. Sutter!  Sir, we are descending.  Please fasten your seatbelt."

      "What...?"

      "We're descending,” a female voice said.  “You need to fasten your seatbelt and put your seat in the full upright position."

      "Oh…"  I adjusted my seat and fastened my seatbelt, noticing that Little John was also in the full upright position.  My goodness.  That's embarrassing.  What brought that on…?  Then, I remembered my dream…

      I never asked Susan how, when, and where she began her affair with Frank Bellarosa – this is not the sort of information one needs to hear in any detail – but it was something that remained missing from what I did know.  So, my shrink, if I had one, would say that my dream was an unconscious attempt to fill in this lacuna – the missing piece of the affair.  Not that it mattered a decade after I divorced her.  In legal terms, I charged adultery, and she admitted to it.  The state did not require any juicy details or explicit testimony, so neither should I.

      The British Airways flight from London to New York crossed over the Long Island Sound, descending toward John F. Kennedy International Airport.  It was a sunny day, a little after 4:00 p.m., Monday, May 27, and I remembered that today was Memorial Day in America.  Below, on the North Shore of Long Island, I could see a place called the Gold Coast, where I used to live, ten years ago.  Probably, if I looked hard enough, I could see the large neighboring estates called Stanhope Hall, and what was once Alhambra.

      I now live in London, and the purpose of my return to America is to see an old lady who is dying, or who may well have died during my seven-hour flight.  If so, I’d be in time for the funeral, where I’d see Susan Stanhope Sutter.

      The presence of death in the coffin should compel us into some profound thoughts about the shortness of life, and make us rethink our many disappointments, resentments, and betrayals that we can’t seem to let go of.  Unfortunately, however, we usually take these things to the grave with us, or to the grave of the person we couldn’t forgive in life.

      Susan.

      But now and then, we do find it in our hearts to forgive, and it costs nothing to do that, except some loss of pride.  And maybe that was the problem.

      I was sitting on the starboard side of the business class cabin, and all heads were turned toward the windows, focused on the skyline of Manhattan.  It's truly an awesome sight from three or four thousand feet, but as of about nine months ago, the main attraction for people who knew the city was the missing part of the skyline.  The last time I'd flown into New York, a few weeks after 9/11, the smoke was still rising from the rubble.  This time, I didn't want to look, but the man next to me said, "That's where the Towers were.  To the left."  He pointed in front of my face.  "There."

      I replied, "I know," and picked up a magazine.  Most of the people I still knew here in New York have told me that 9/11 made them rethink their lives and put things into perspective.  That’s a good plan for the future, but it doesn’t change the past.

      The British Airways flight began its final descent into Kennedy, and a few minutes later we touched down.

      The man next to me said, “It’s good to be home.”  He asked, “Is this home for you?”

      “No.”

      Soon, I'd be in a rental car on my way back to the place I once called home, but which was now a place that time had partly eroded from my mind, washing away too many of the good memories and leaving behind the hard, jagged edges of the aforementioned disappointments, resentments, and betrayals.

      The aircraft decelerated, then rolled out onto the taxiway toward the terminal.

      Now that I was here, and would remain here until the funeral, perhaps I should use the time to try to reconcile the past with the present – then maybe I’d have better dreams on my return flight.

Back to Top

Chapter I

A week had passed since my return from London, and I was sitting at the table in the dining room of the small gatehouse of Stanhope Hall, my ex-wife’s former estate, wading through old files, family photos, and letters which I’d stored here for the last decade.

      After my divorce from Susan, I’d fulfilled an old dream by taking my sailboat, a 46-foot Morgan ketch named the Paumanok II, on a sail around the world, which lasted three years.  Paumanok, incidentally, is the indigenous Indian word for Long Island and my illustrious ancestor, Walt Whitman, a native Long Islander, sometimes used this word in his poetry – and if Uncle Walt had owned a 46-foot yacht, I’m sure he’d have christened it the Paumanok, not “I Hear America Singing,” which is too long to put on the stern, or “Leaves of Grass,” which doesn’t sound seaworthy.

      Anyway, my last port of call was Bournemouth, England, from which my other distant ancestors, the Sutters, had set sail for America three centuries before. 

      With winter coming on, and sea fatigue in my bones, a dwindling bank account, and my wanderlust satisfied, I sold the boat for about half what it was worth and 

moved up to London to look for a job, eventually signing on with a British law firm that needed an American tax lawyer, which is what I was in New York before I became captain of the Paumanok II.

      I spread out some photos of Susan on the table and looked at them under the light of the chandelier.  Susan was, and probably still is, a beautiful woman with long red hair, arresting green eyes, pouty lips, and the perfect body of a lifelong equestrian.

      I picked up a photo that showed Susan on my first sailboat, the original Paumanok, a 36-foot Morgan, which I loved, but which I'd scuttled in Oyster Bay Cove rather than let the government seize it for back taxes.  This photo was taken, I think, in the summer of 1990 somewhere on the Long Island Sound.  The photograph showed a bright summer day, and Susan was standing on the aft deck, stark naked, with one hand covering her burning bush, and the other covering one breast.  Her face shows an expression of mock surprise and embarrassment.

      The occasion was one of Susan's acted-out sexual fantasies, and I think I was supposed to have climbed aboard from a kayak, and I'd discovered her alone and naked and made her my sex slave.

      The woman had not only a great body; she also had a great imagination and a wonderful libido to go with it.  As for the sexual playacting, its purpose, of course, was to keep the marital fires burning, and it worked well for almost two decades because all our infidelities were with each other.  At least that was the understanding, until a new actor, don Frank Bellarosa, moved in next door.

      I picked up a bottle of old cognac that I’d found in the sideboard and topped off my coffee cup.

      The reason I've returned to America has to do with the former residents of this gatehouse, George and Ethel Allard, who had been old Stanhope family retainers.  George, a good man, had died a decade ago, and his wife Ethel, who is not so nice, is in hospice care and about to join her husband, unless George has already had a word with St. Peter, the ultimate gatekeeper.  “Wasn't I promised eternal rest and peace?  Can't she go someplace else?  She always liked hot weather.”  In any case, I am the attorney for Ethel’s estate and so I needed to take care of that and attend her funeral.

      The other reason I’ve returned is that this gatehouse is my legal U.S. address, but unfortunately, this house is about to pass into the hands of Amir Nasim, an Iranian gentleman who now owns the main house, Stanhope Hall, and much of the original acreage, including this gatehouse.  As of now, however, Ethel Allard has what is called a life estate in the gatehouse, meaning, she has a rent-free tenancy until she dies.  This rent-free house was given to her by Susan’s grandfather, Augustus Stanhope (because Ethel was screwing Augustus way back when), and Ethel has been kind enough to allow me to store my things here and share her digs whenever I'm in New York.  Ethel hates me, but that's another story. In any case, Ethel's tenancy in this house and on this planet is about to end, and thus I had returned from London not only to say goodbye to Ethel, but also to find a new home for my possessions, and find another legal U.S. address, which seems to be a requirement for citizenship and creditors.

      This is the first time I’d been to New York since last September, coming in from London as soon as the airplanes were flying again.  I’d stayed for three days at the Yale Club where I'd maintained my membership for my infrequent New York business trips, and I was shocked at how quiet, empty, and somber the great city had become.

      I’d made no phone calls and saw no one.  I would have seen my daughter Carolyn, but she had fled her apartment in Brooklyn right after 9/11 to stay with her mother in Hilton Head, South Carolina.  My son Edward lives in Los Angeles.  So for three days, I walked the quiet streets of the city, making two visits to what came to be known as Ground Zero.

      Heartsick and drained, I got on a plane and returned to London, feeling that I'd done the right thing, the way people do who come home for a death in the family.

      Over the next few months, I learned that I knew eleven people who’d died in the Twin Towers; mostly former neighbors and business associates, but also a close friend who left a wife and three young children.

      And now, nine months after 9/11, I was back again.  Things seemed to have returned to normal, but not really.

      I sipped my coffee and cognac and looked around at the piles of paper.  There was a lot to go through, and I hoped that Ethel would hold on a while longer, and that Mr. Nasim wasn't planning on getting his encumbered gatehouse into his possession the minute Ethel's life tenancy expired.  I needed to speak to Mr. Nasim about that; speaking to Ethel about hanging on until I tidied up my papers might seem insensitive and selfish.

      Because the night was cool, and because I didn't have a paper shredder, I had a fire going in the dining room fireplace.  Now and then, I'd feed the fire with some letter or photo that I wouldn't want my children to see if I suddenly croaked.

      In that category were these photos of their mother whose nakedness revealed a lot more about her head than about her body.  Susan was, and I'm sure still is, a bit nutty.  But to be honest, I didn't mind that at all, and that wasn't the source of our marital problems.  Our problem, obviously, was Susan’s affair with the Mafia don next door.  And then to complicate things further, she shot and killed him.  Three shots.  One in the groin.  Ouch.

      I gathered the photos and turned in my chair toward the fireplace.  We all have trouble parting with things like this, but I can tell you, as a lawyer and as a man, no good can come of saving anything you wouldn't want your family or your enemies to see.  Or your next significant other, for that matter.

      I stared into the fire and watched the flames dancing against the soot-blackened brick, but I held onto the photos.

      So, she shot her lover, Frank “The Bishop” Bellarosa, capo di tutti capi, boss of all bosses, and got away with it – legally, at least – due to some circumstances that the Justice Department found mitigating and extenuating.

      Fact is, the Justice Department took a dive on the case because they'd made the mistake of allowing Mrs. Sutter unobstructed access to don Bellarosa, who was under house arrest in his villa down the road, and who was also singing his black heart out to them, and thus needed to be kept happy with another man's wife.

      I'm still a little pissed off at the whole thing, as you might guess, but, basically, I’m over it.

      Meanwhile, I needed to decide if this trip was a death vigil, or perhaps something more permanent.  I had kept up with my CLE – continuing legal education – and I was still a member of the New York State Bar, so I hadn’t burned all my bridges, and theoretically I was employable here.  In my last life, I had been a partner in my father's old firm of Perkins, Perkins, Sutter and Reynolds, still located at 23 Wall Street, an historic building that was once bombed by Anarchists at the turn of the last century, which seems almost quaint in light of 9/11. 

      And, for the last seven years in London, I’d worked for the aforementioned British law firm, and I was their American tax guy who explained that screwing the Internal Revenue Service was an American tradition.  This was payback for me because the IRS had screwed up my life, while my wife was screwing the Mafia don.  These two seemingly disparate problems were actually related, as I had found out the hard way.

      I guess I’d hit a patch of rough road back then, a little adversity in an otherwise charmed and privileged life.  But adversity builds character, and to be honest, it wasn't all Susan's fault, or Frank Bellarosa’s fault, or the fault of the IRS, or my stuffed-shirt law partners; it was partly my own fault because I, too, was involved with Frank Bellarosa.  A little legal work.  Like representing him on a murder charge.  Not the kind of thing I normally did as a Wall Street lawyer, and certainly not the kind of case that Perkins, Perkins, Sutter and Reynolds would approve of.  Therefore, I’d handled this case out of my Locust Valley, Long Island office, but that wasn't much cover when the newspapers got hold of it.

      Thinking back on this, I couldn't help but know I was committing professional and social suicide when I took a Mafia don as a client.  But it was a challenge, and I was bored, and Susan, who approved of and encouraged my association with Frank Bellarosa, said I needed a challenge.  I guess Susan was bored, too, and as I found out, she had her own agenda regarding Frank Bellarosa.

      And speaking of Susan, I had discovered through my son Edward that, quote, “Mom has bought our house back.”

      Bad grammar aside – I sent this kid to great schools – what Edward meant was that Susan had reacquired the large guest cottage on the Stanhope estate.  This so-called cottage – it has six bedrooms – had been our marital residence for nearly twenty years, and is located about a quarter mile up the main drive of the estate.  In other words, Susan and I were now neighbors.

      The guest cottage and ten acres of property had been carved out of the two hundred acres of the Stanhope estate by Susan's father, William, who’s an insufferable prick, and deeded to Susan as a wedding gift.  Since I was the groom, I always wondered why my name wasn't on the deed.  But you need to understand old money to answer that.  You also need to understand pricks like William.  Not to mention his ditsy wife, Susan's mother, Charlotte.  These two characters are unfortunately still alive and well, living and golfing in Hilton Head, South Carolina, where Susan had been living since the unfortunate gun mishap that took her lover’s life ten years ago.

      Before Susan left for South Carolina, she'd sold the guest cottage to a yuppie corporate transfer couple from someplace west of the Hudson.  You know your marriage is in trouble when your wife sells the house and moves to another state.  In truth, however, it was I who ended the marriage.  Susan wanted us to stay together, making the obvious point that her lover was dead, and thus we needn't worry about bumping into him at a party.  In fact, she claimed that was why she'd killed him; so we could be together.

      That wasn't quite it, but it sounded nice.  In retrospect, we probably could have stayed together, but I was too angry at being cuckolded, and my male ego had taken a major hit.  I mean, not only did our friends, family, and children know that Susan was fucking a Mafia don, but the whole damned country knew when it hit the tabloids: “Dead Don Diddled Lawyer’s Heiress Wife.”  Or something like that.

      It may have worked out for us, if, as Susan had suggested, I’d killed her lover myself.  But I wouldn't have gotten off as easily as she had.  Even if I’d somehow beaten the murder rap – crime of passion – I’d have some explaining to do to don Bellarosa’s friends and family.

      So, she sold the house, leaving me homeless, except, of course, for the Yale Club in Manhattan where I am always welcome.  But Susan, in a rare display of thoughtfulness, suggested to me that Ethel Allard, recently widowed, could use some company in the gatehouse.  That actually wasn't a bad idea, and since Ethel could also use a few bucks in rent, and a handyman to replace her recently deceased husband, I’d moved into the extra bedroom and stored my belongings in the basement where they'd sat for this past decade.

      By spring of the following year, I'd made a financial settlement with my partners and used the money to buy the 46-foot Morgan, which I christened Paumanok II.  By that time, my membership in the Seawanhaka Corinthian Yacht Club had been terminated by mutual consent, so I sailed from the public marina where I'd bought the boat and began my three-year odyssey at sea.

      Odysseus was trying to get home; I was trying to get away from home.  Odysseus wanted to see his wife; maybe I did, too, but it didn't happen.  I’d told Susan I would put in at Hilton Head, and I almost did, but within sight of land, I headed back to sea with just a glance over my shoulder.  Clean break.  No regrets.

      I threw the nude photos of Susan on the table, instead of the fireplace.  Maybe she wanted them.

      I poured more cognac into the dregs of the coffee and took a swallow.

      I looked up at a large, ornately framed, hand-colored photo portrait of Ethel and George Allard, which hung over the mantle.

      It was a wedding picture, taken during World War II, and George is dressed in his Navy whites, and Ethel is wearing a white wedding dress of the period.  Ethel was quite a looker in her day, and I could see how Susan's grandfather, Augustus, who was then lord of Stanhope Hall, could cross the class line and fiddle with one of his female servants.  It was inexcusable, of course, on every level, especially since George, a Stanhope employee, was off to war, protecting America from the Yellow Peril in the Pacific.  But, as I found out as a young man during the Vietnam War, and as I'm discovering with this new war, war tears apart the social fabric of a nation, and you get a lot more diddling and fiddling going on.

      I stared at Ethel's angelic face in the photograph.  She really was beautiful.  And lonely.  And George was out of town for a while.  And Augustus was rich and powerful.  He was not, however, according to family accounts, a conniving and controlling prick like his son, my ex-father-in-law, William.  I think Augustus was just horny (it runs in the Stanhope family), and if you look at a picture of Augustus’ wife, Susan's grandmother, you can see why Augustus strayed.  Susan, I guess, got her good looks from her mother, Charlotte, who is still attractive, though brainless.

      And on the subject of brains and beauty, my children have both, and show no signs of the Stanhope tendency to be off their rockers.  I’d like to say my children take after my side of the family, but my parents aren't good examples of mental health either.  I think I was adopted.  I hope and pray I was.

      Actually, my father, Joseph, passed away while I was at sea, and I missed the funeral.  Mother hasn't forgiven me.  But that's nothing new.

      And on the subject of children, paternity, and genetics, Ethel and George had one child, a daughter, Elizabeth, who’s a nice woman and who lives in the area.  Elizabeth gets her beauty from her mother, but looks enough like George to put my mind at ease about any more Stanhope heirs.

      I'm taking the long view of this in terms of my children inheriting some of the Stanhope fortune.  They deserve some money for putting up with Grandma and Grandpa all their lives.  So do I, but a probate court might find my claim on the Stanhope estate – to reimburse me for years of putting up with William’s bullshit – to be frivolous.

      In any case, there is a history here – my own family goes back three hundred years on Long Island – and this history is entwined like the English ivy that covers the gatehouse and the guest cottage; interesting to look at from a distance, but obscuring the form and substance of the structure, eventually eating into the brick and mortar.

      F. Scott Fitzgerald, sitting not too far from where I was now sitting, had it right when he concluded The Great Gatsby with, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”  Amen.

      As I reached for the cognac, I noticed a stack of old greeting cards held together by a rubber band, and I slid a card out at random.  It was a standard Hallmark anniversary card, and under the pre-printed words of love, joy, and devotion, Susan had written, “John, you don’t know how many times I wake up in the morning and just stare at you lying beside me.  And I will do this for the rest of my life.”

      I gathered the stack of cards and threw them in the fireplace.

      I got up, went into the kitchen, and I poured another coffee, then went out the back door and stood on the patio.  I could see the lights of the guest cottage, where I used to live with my wife and children.  I stood there a long time, then went back inside and sat again at the dining room table.  I didn’t think this would be easy, but I certainly didn’t think it would be so hard.

Back to Top

Chapter II

 I stared at the fire for some time, sipping coffee and cognac, my mind drifting between past and present.

      So, I thought, I'm here in the gatehouse of the Stanhope estate, partly because Ethel Allard had an affair with Augustus Stanhope during World War II, and partly because my wife had an affair with a Mafia don.  As Mr. Bellarosa himself would say, if he were alive, “Go figure.”

      And now, according to Edward – and confirmed by my daughter Carolyn – Susan, a.k.a. Mom, had shown up on the doorstep of the yuppie couple and made them an unsolicited and probably spectacular offer for their home, convincing them, I'm sure, that they'd be happier elsewhere and that she, Susan Stanhope Sutter, needed to return to her ancestral roots.

      Knowing Susan, I'm certain this couple felt as though they were being evicted for using the wrong decorator.  Or maybe they knew that Mrs. Sutter had killed a Mafia don, and they thought that this was an offer they shouldn’t refuse.  In any case, it was a done deal, and my former wife was now back in our former house, within the walls of  

the former Stanhope estate, and a five-minute walk up the drive from my temporary lodgings.  It was as though someone had turned back the clock a decade and captured that brief moment in time when Susan and I were still living within walking distance of each other, and all it might have taken for us to be together was a phone call, a knock on the door, or a note.  But that time had passed, and we'd both written new chapters in our histories.

      Susan, for instance, had remarried.  The lucky man was, according to Edward, “an old guy,” and with age comes patience, which one would need to be married to Susan Sutter.

      Edward had also described the gentleman as “a friend of Grandpa’s, and really boring.”  The boring old guy’s name was Dan Hannon, and he had lived down in Hilton Head, and as per Edward, played golf all day, and had some money, but not a lot, and as per Carolyn, “Mom likes him, but doesn't love him.”  Carolyn added, “She kept our last name.”

      My children apparently thought I needed to know all of this, just in case I wanted to go down to Hilton Head, smack Dan on the head with a golf club, and carry Susan off to an island.

      Well, before I could do that, Dan Hannon played his last round of golf and dropped dead, literally on the eighteenth hole while unsuccessfully attempting an eight-foot putt.  Edward said that Mr. Hannon’s golf partners gave him the shot, finished the hole, then called an ambulance.  I think Edward is making up some of this.

      In any case, Susan has been widowed for almost a year now, and according to Carolyn, Susan and her hubby had very tight prenuptial agreements, so Susan got only about half a million, which is actually not that bad for five years of marriage, boring or not.  My own prenup with Susan Stanhope gave me the wedding album.  The Stanhopes are tough negotiators.

      And so here we are again, and we can see the lights from each other's house, and the smoke from our chimneys.  And I've seen Susan's car pass by the gatehouse and out the big wrought iron gates.  She drives an SUV (these things seem to have multiplied like locusts in my absence) and I think it's a Lexus.  Whatever, it still has South Carolina plates, and I know that Susan has kept her Hilton Head house.  So maybe she intends to split the year between here and there.  Hopefully, more there than here.  Though, on second thought, what difference does it make to me?  I’m only passing through.

      My car is a rented Taurus that I park beside the gatehouse, so she knows when I'm home, but she hasn’t stopped by with home baked brownies.

      I don't actually follow her movements, and it's rare that I’ve seen her car passing by in the last week.  The only other car I've noticed is a Mercedes that belongs to Mr. Nasim, the owner of the mansion.  What I'm getting at is that I don't think Susan has a boyfriend.  But if she did, I wouldn't be surprised, and I wouldn’t care.

      As for my love life, I’d been totally abstinent during my three-year cruise around the world.  Except, of course, when I was in port, or when I had a female crew member aboard.  In fact, I was a piggy.

      I suppose there are all sorts of complex psychological reasons for my overindulgence, having to do with Susan’s adultery and all that.  Plus, the salt air makes me horny.

      But I had calmed down considerably in London, partly as a result of my job, which required a suit and a bit of decorum, and partly as a result of having gotten rid of the sailboat, and not being able to use clever lines like, “Do you want to sail with me on my yacht to Monte Carlo?”

      Anyway, for my last year or so in London, I’ve had a lady friend.  More on that later.

      I stoked the fire, then freshened my coffee with cognac.

      Regarding the former Mrs. Sutter, as it stands now, neither of us has called on the other, nor have we bumped into each other on the property or in the village, but I know we'll meet at Ethel’s funeral.  To be honest, I’d half expected that she'd come by to say hello.  Probably she had the same expectation.

      This place is heavy on etiquette and protocol, and I wondered how Emily Post would address this situation.  “Dear Ms. Post, My wife was fucking a Mafia don, then she shot and killed him, and we got divorced, and we both moved out of the state and met other people who we didn’t kill.  Now, we find ourselves as neighbors, and we’re both alone, so should I bake brownies and welcome her to the neighborhood?  Or should she do that?  (Signed) Confused on Long Island.”

      And Ms. Post might reply, “Dear COLI, A gentleman should always call on the lady, but always phone or write ahead – and make sure she’s gotten rid of that gun!  Keep the conversation light, such as favorite movies (but not The Godfather) or sports or hobbies (but not target shooting), and don’t overstay your visit unless you have sex.  (Signed) Emily Post.”

      Well, I think I’m being silly.  In any case, my children are bugging me about calling her. “Have you seen Mom yet?”  I’m sure they ask her the same question.

      I’d actually seen Susan a few times over the last decade since we'd both left Long Island – at our children's college graduations, for instance, and at the funeral of my Aunt Cornelia, who was fond of Susan.  And on these occasions, Susan and I had always been polite and cordial to one another.  In fact, she had been friendlier to me than I to her, and I had the impression she had gotten over me and moved on.  I, on the other hand…well, I don’t know.  And I had no intention of finding out.

      On the subject of funerals, I’d attended Frank Bellarosa’s funeral because...  Well, I actually liked the guy, despite the fact that he was a criminal, a manipulator, a sociopathic liar, and my wife’s lover.  Other than that, he wasn't a bad guy.  In fact, he was charming and charismatic.  Ask Susan.

      Also on the subject of funerals, the one I was really excited about attending was the one for William Stanhope.  But last I heard from Edward, “Grandpa’s feeling pretty good.”  That's too bad.

      I picked up the stack of photos again and flipped through them.  She really was beautiful and sexy.  Smart and funny, too.  And, as I said, delightfully nutty.

      As I stared at a particularly sexy photo of Susan mounted naked on her stupid horse, Zanzibar, the doorbell rang.

      Like most gatehouses, this one is built inside the estate wall, so no one can come to my door unless they pass through the iron gates that face the road.  The gates remain closed at night, and they are automated, so you need a code or a remote control to open them, and I can usually hear them or see the headlights at night, which I hadn’t.  Therefore, whoever was at my door had come on foot from the estate grounds, and the only current residents of the estate were Amir Nasim, his wife, their live-in help, Susan, and me.

      So it could be Mr. Nasim at my door, perhaps to pay a social call, or to inform me that Ethel died two minutes ago, and I had ten minutes to move out.  Or, possibly, it was Susan.

      I slipped the photos back into the envelope and walked into the small front foyer as the bell rang again.

      I checked myself out in the hallway mirror, straightened my polo shirt and finger-combed my hair.  Then, without looking through the peephole or turning on the outside light, I unbolted the door and swung it open.

      Standing there, staring at me, was the ghost of Frank Bellarosa.