Two Time by Chris Knopf

said Appolonia. “She’s still working for his business, tidying things up. Though not for much longer. I have the number and address.”
    She rose with little effort and went to get a piece of paper out of a small fold-down desk. She stood with her weight on one leg while she wrote down the information. I noticed for the first time that she had a little shape around the chest and hips, despite her thin arms and legs. She actually was, or could have been, very attractive, if you like your women in black and white. I wondered if Jonathan liked having her all to himself. She’d always be there whenever he came home. To sit and engage him in witty, sophisticated repartee. Fragile and desperately in need of protection. To be indulged, and coddled. His own alone. No one else to see or hear. A world unto themselves. Refined, yet profoundly isolated. Until it collided with several pounds of high-grade plastic explosive.
    She walked over and handed me the slip of paper.
    “I do have one thing to tell you, though you’ll find it of no use whatsoever.”
    “Sure. Can’t hurt.”
    She was now close enough for me to smell her. It was a flower smell, sweet and fresh. Like Easter Sunday. Or something you’d get from Crabtree & Evelyn. She seemed to be unsure about telling me what she wanted to tell me.
    “Go ahead.”
    She pursed her lips and nodded. She went back and sat down in her yellow chair. The flowers lingered in the air. I waited until she was ready.
    “Have you ever looked over at the person you’re closest to, and thought, just for an instant, that you have no idea who they really are?”
    “Yes.”
    “I never felt that way about Jonathan Eldridge. Some people are just so completely who they are. I don’t believe he knew he would be killed, because I would have certainly known it, too.”
    She didn’t expect me to respond, so I didn’t. I just finished my tea, thanked her for her time, shook Gabe’s hand and made for the door, one eye peeled for Belinda. Before I could grab the doorknob, Appolonia called to me.
    “Mr. Acquillo.”
    I stepped back so I could see her in her high-backed chair.
    “Yeah.”
    “Jonathan was everything to me. I can’t imagine going on without him. I don’t know why I bother.”
    Belinda finally came from wherever she was lurking and made a grab for the door, hoping to propel me out of the house. I held my ground.
    “Maybe you’re more curious than you think,” I said to Appolonia. “About how it happened.”
    She nodded, a faint, indifferent little nod.
    “Perhaps. Some perverted form of curiosity.”
    “Hey people have lived for less,” I said, backing out of the door and into the color-drenched heat where I belonged, where I could take a few big gulps of air and re-establish my bearings.
    But the day had turned cooler, for no reason I could divine. The weather in the Hamptons is like that. It can foolyou all the time. You might think it’s a metaphor for human nature, but that’d be presumptuous. A truly pathetic fallacy. Nature as a whole never did, and never will, care all that much about the contradictions of human behavior. The zigs and zags between philanthropy and betrayal, adoration and deceit.

FIVE
    J ACKIE O ’ D WYER MADE THE MISTAKE of marrying the first guy she slept with after graduating from law school and moving back to her hometown of Bridgehampton. A mistake rectified when Bobby Swaitkowski inserted his brand new Porsche Carrera into the trunk of a two-hundred-year-old oak tree that was protected by the Historical Society, and therefore allowed to define the inside of a very tight curve along a back road connecting Bridgehampton and Sag Harbor. The Highway Department moved to clear the hazard—an impulse not unlike shooting a trained bear that’s attacked a tourist—but were immediately thwarted by members of the Society who pointed out that Bobby’s Porsche hit the tree about twelve feet off the ground, which, extrapolating from an abrupt rise in