Chapter One

Einstein and Inner Tubes

Rob Crosley had a habit of reaching over to the opposite side of the bed to make sure his wife was still there. Nearly two years had passed since Katie came back to live in the house and sleep in their bed, but he still worried her demons might return and drive her into seclusion again. She had suffered for many years from a social anxiety known as anthropophobia, a cumbersome word defined as a fear of other people. As was often the case with those affected by the condition, Katie’s fear first manifested itself in large crowds. This wasn’t so much of a concern, since it was easy to avoid large crowds. But then smaller gatherings began to be uncomfortable, and Katie found herself making excuses for not going to dinner parties or meeting up with friends. She started seeing therapists and taking medications, but her condition didn’t improve. Eventually, it only took the presence of one person to trigger a flight response. Rob and her son, Danny, seemed to be the exceptions, until one night Rob lay down next to her and the room began to spin, sending Katie into a panic and straight out of the house.

She moved across the street, into the cottage she and Rob had built with the intention of renting out one day. There she stayed, growing vegetables in her garden, making improvements to the cottage, and taking her rowboat out in the bay. Rob visited her every day for as long as she could bear, which was generally not more than fifteen minutes at a time. He hoped the frequent visits would build some sort of tolerance and familiarity, but they always ended with Katie hiding in the bedroom and asking him to leave. She avoided everyone else, except for Danny. He was the only person who didn’t provoke panic. She could be with him for much longer than fifteen minutes. This made Rob jealous.

Her road to recovery began when she was rowing her boat in the bay one day and a man with a waterproof camera swam up and took several pictures of her as she furiously paddled away. One of the pictures found its way to the Dorothy Bradford Society, a local group of women who believed Dorothy was still alive. Dorothy Bradford was the Pilgrim wife of William Bradford, who drowned in the bay after the Mayflower anchored off Cape Cod in the winter of 1620. But the Dorothy Bradford Society didn’t believe Dorothy had drowned. They believed she had survived her plunge into the icy waters and was living an immortal life on the Outer Cape, four hundred years later. One of their missions was to find Dorothy Bradford and prove her immortality. Many of the members scouted the beaches and woods, taking photographs of noble, sturdy-looking women performing physically challenging activities. The photos were presented at society meetings, but none of them sparked any interest until the picture of Katie turned up. When they saw the picture of her in her boat, fiercely pulling the oars against a rising tide, the members were sure they had finally found the immortal Pilgrim, and they sought her out. Since Katie was terrified of any attention, Rob tried to shield her from the society’s fervent efforts to enlist her as their figurehead. After a chance encounter on her own with two Bradford devotees, Katie discovered that if she assumed the role of Dorothy Bradford, like an actor in a play, her fear of other people subsided. Apparently, Dorothy Bradford didn’t have anthropophobia. By becoming Dorothy Bradford, Katie was able to function normally again. And she was able to move back into the house.

Rob’s hand found nothing but linen, the covers thrown aside. At the time, which happened to be 2 a.m., he was the only person in the bed. He debated whether to get up or fall back asleep, but his bladder needed emptying, or as much of it as his prostate allowed him to empty. He stood over the toilet with both hands firmly planted on the tank cover, a similar position to the one he had assumed when his doctor worked a couple of fingers up his ass and announced that his prostate was only slightly enlarged. “How many times a night do you get up to urinate, Mr. Crosley? More than three?” Rob didn’t keep track.

He found Katie in the kitchen, standing at the sink, washing dishes. The light over the sink was the only one on, casting a sinister glow in the darkness around her, as though she were carving up human remains.

“What are you doing, Dorothy?” he said. He called her Dorothy sometimes when she was behaving oddly, as she was now, a characteristic of the Bradford persona. Otherwise, he called her Katie or Kay.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said, sighing heavily.

“More of the dreams?”

“Yes. And a new one this time, too.”

The light above the sink flickered, and for a moment, Rob thought the power would go out. Did the power company curb the supply of electricity during off-peak hours like his prostate stemmed the flow of urine? Katie looked up at the fixture. The current evened out, and the light steadied.

“Have you noticed that before?” she said. “The lights flickering?”

“No.”

She placed the last pot in the dish drain and shut off the water, shaking her hands and drying them on the towel lying on the counter.

“Go back to bed, Rob. I’m okay. I’ll be there in a minute.” She pulled out a bottle of cleaning solution from the cabinet under the sink and began spraying down the counters.

“I want to hear about the new dream. Tell me.”

She hadn’t bothered to tie back her hair and had to keep flipping her head to the side to keep the long strands from dragging in the beads of spray on the granite countertops. Rob smoothed out his own hair, mindful that his appearance could be unsettling when he got out of bed. He had stopped cutting his hair a year ago, in large part due to his dislike of being strapped into a barber chair for half an hour. Barbers were poor conversationalists for the most part, and Rob wished they would keep their focus on their shears rather than talking about the weather. Katie offered to cut it but he decided he liked having long hair. People thought he looked like an athletic Albert Einstein.

“I had the usual ones first. The guy being buried in the woods, the two girls drowning in a pond, and an uprooted tree.”

“Just as vivid?”

“Yeah, but I still have no idea who the people are.”

“And who’s in the new one?”

“No one. I only see a stone marker on a dune somewhere.”

“A tombstone?”

“I don’t think so, but there are words on it. Corn Hill, 1620.”

“Corn Hill in Truro?”

“I guess so.”

“The year 1620? When the Pilgrims landed?”

“That would seem to make sense.”

When Katie was first introduced to the idea that she was Dorothy Bradford, she began having flashbacks to unfamiliar times and places. According to the past president of the Dorothy Bradford Society, a woman named Maggie Mason, these flashbacks were suppressed memories of her forgotten past. Maggie Mason, who was trained in psychotherapy, told Katie that the suppression of these memories was what caused her panic attacks. By accepting the memories as her own, Katie would be able to find inner peace, and her panic attacks would gradually disappear. This is what happened, more or less, but Katie later learned that the flashbacks may have been artificially induced. Maggie Mason was a proponent of psychedelics, and since many of the society’s members suffered from various forms of anxiety and depression, she served special refreshments at the society meetings in the form of beer laced with small doses of LSD. Nobody knew about the LSD until Maggie was arrested and thrown in jail.

“You think these dreams are connected somehow?” The dreams were something new. Katie had never had Dorothy Bradford dreams before, if that’s what these were—just the waking flashbacks, which continued after the LSD was confiscated by the police.

“I don’t know, but I get the feeling someone’s trying to tell me something. That I need to do something.”

“You should drive over there and take a look.”

“Somebody told me there’s some kind of Pilgrim plaque on Corn Hill. Maybe I’ll go tomorrow morning.”

“You want me to go with you?”

“No. You have your bike ride tomorrow.”

Rob had planned a long ride to Provincetown the next morning. The weather, which had been rainy for the past several days, was finally due to cooperate, and with only three weeks left until the start of the summer season, there wouldn’t be many more chances to bike to Provincetown before the roads became thick with cars.

“Maybe Rachel can go with you,” Rob said. Rachel was the manager of the Dorothy Bradford House, which is what the cottage across the street was converted to after Katie moved back in with Rob. The Dorothy Bradford House was a halfway house for troubled women. This had always been the primary mission of the Dorothy Bradford Society—to help troubled women pull themselves together so they wouldn’t end up at the bottom of the bay like Dorothy Bradford. Pulling themselves together no longer included any help from LSD. The Dorothy Bradford House didn’t allow drugs. Many of the residents were recovering drug addicts.

“I’ll be fine. I like being alone, remember?”

“Take your phone.”

“Corn Hill is only three miles away.”

He still worried when she went out on her own. She had a history of disappearing, sometimes for days at a time, hiking into the dunes or woods, out of cell phone range. He knew these excursions were important for her continued well-being, and she was entirely capable of taking care of herself. Like Dorothy Bradford, at least the one who survived for four hundred years, Katie was a true survivalist. Perhaps he worried that one day she wouldn’t come back at all and that Dorothy Bradford would so completely consume her, she’d lose touch with her real identity.

Katie finished her chores and announced she was going back to bed, hopefully to dream of things other than burials and drownings. Rob followed, trying to decide whether to visit the bathroom again. He stopped outside Katie’s closet and peeked in, imagining he might see Sidney lying in his familiar spot on the floor among Katie’s shoes. Sidney was their Australian Shepherd, who had finally been put to sleep at the ripe old age of sixteen. In his last few days, Sidney spent all of his time sleeping in Katie’s closet, only getting up when Rob carried him out to the yard to let him pee. Sidney had stopped eating and could barely stand up anymore. “It’s time,” Katie said, though she had been saying that for a couple of weeks. Rob couldn’t bear the thought of losing his dog, but he had come to realize that he had already lost him and that Sidney was getting no joy from living anymore. The vet came to the house and administered the injections right there on the floor of Katie’s closet. Sidney passed quietly, with Rob lying next to him, holding the dog’s head in his hands.

“Everything okay?” Katie said, watching her husband stare into the closet.

“Just missing Sidney,” he said, and climbed back into bed.

♦    ♦

As predicted, the sky was clear the next morning, and the temperature hovered in the sixties. Rob pulled on his bike pants and road jersey, covered with colors so bright that no driver could ever miss seeing him. He tied a kerchief over his head, both to rein in his wild hair and to keep the sweat out of his eyes. He also wore a gaiter around his neck. It was useful not only for keeping things from flying into his nose and mouth but also for wiping away the stuff that came out. Finally, he coated himself with bug repellent. Mosquitoes had recently become thick and belligerent in South Truro thanks to an overflow of a nearby dike in Wellfleet. The brackish wash-over from Cape Cod Bay into the Herring River became an ideal breeding ground, producing tens of thousands of mosquitoes with flying ranges of up to ten miles.

As he was pumping air into his tires, a fox emerged from the trees and peered directly at him. Rob instinctively looked around for Sidney, who was just small enough that a fox might not back down from a confrontation, then remembered the dog was gone. Rob emitted a loud “Yip!” and the fox ran back into the woods.

“Have you developed Tourette’s, or are your shorts too tight?” Danny Crosley was coming down the steps from the apartment above the garage. Danny was Rob and Katie’s twenty-three-year-old son, who had recently moved back to the Cape to live full-time. Danny was a distance runner, and a good one. In fact, he was the best in the world at ten thousand meters, having won the gold medal at the last Olympic Games and broken the world record in the process. His father was there to see it, as was his mother, in the guise of Dorothy Bradford. Katie Crosley would have had great difficulty going inside an Olympic stadium filled to capacity. When Danny returned home, he wasn’t sure about moving back into the house, so Katie and Rob built an apartment above the garage where he could live.

“What are you talking about?” Rob said, swatting at a mosquito while disengaging the pump valve from the rear tire.

“Uncontrolled monosyllabic shouting is a symptom of Tourette’s syndrome,” Danny said.

“You’re an expert in neurological disorders now?”

Danny was dressed for a run. He continued to participate in international meets and planned to defend his gold medal at the next Olympics. His coaches had wanted him to stay in Boston, but he refused. When the Olympics were over and his brief international fame waned, he got a job with the Cape Cod National Seashore, protecting the wildlife and clearing debris from the many beaches, fire roads, and hiking trails that ran up and down the Outer Cape. He wanted to keep doing that. It kept him outside most of the day, which was where he was happiest.

“Where are you running today?” Rob said.

“Wellfleet. Ten miles.”

“Race pace?”

“We’ll see how I feel.”

Race pace for Danny meant running ten miles in forty-five minutes, though that was on a track. Dodging cars and turkeys, which had also pervaded the Outer Cape, though not as severely as the mosquitoes, might slow him down by a few seconds. 

“Are you heading that way? I could run alongside for a while,” Danny said.

“I’m going up to Provincetown.”

“I could run that way.”

“You know I don’t like it when you run with me. It makes me feel like an invalid.”

“Well, people with neurological disorders shouldn’t be riding bikes alone.”

“I was yelling at a fox.”

♦    ♦

There was little wind, and Rob made good time riding up Route Six to where it intersected with 6A. Even though the traffic was light, Rob avoided making left turns on Route Six if he could help it, so he turned right onto South Highland Road and pedaled to South Hollow, which took him under Route Six and onto 6A. From there, it was another ten miles along the bay to Provincetown, the last town on the Cape, the place where, in 1602, the English explorer Bartholomew Gosnold caught so much cod that he named the hook of land after the fish. One hundred and twenty-five years later, the tip of the Cape was formally incorporated as a township and named Provincetown. The town was home to a year-round population of three thousand, a number that increased twentyfold during the summer.

Since it was not quite summer yet and still relatively early in the day, Rob rode through town on Commercial Street, the three-mile-long main drag notable for its galleries, restaurants, bars, shops, hotels, drag queens, and the latest addition, marijuana dispensaries. The dispensaries had innocuous outdoorsy names that only hinted at what was inside, though they were given away by the uniformed security guards posted out front, making it seem like there were jewels inside instead of weed.

Rob made a quick detour back to 6A, called Bradford Street here, to ride past the former home of the Dorothy Bradford Society. The white-shingled house, sitting just below the Pilgrim Monument, had been owned by Maggie Mason, the society’s founder and past president. After the society determined that Katie was the woman they had been looking for, Rob came to a meeting at the house to try and convince the members that Katie was not Dorothy Bradford and that they should stop chasing after her. Unfortunately, he drank too much beer and became too drunk to make any type of cogent argument, not that it would have helped. Beer-drinking was an important pastime of the Dorothy Bradford Society, owing to the fact that the Pilgrims themselves were big beer-drinkers. The water supply on sailing ships in the seventeenth century wasn’t always safe to drink, particularly on long voyages, so the passengers and crew drank beer instead, sometimes as much as a gallon a day. Beer drinking also helped to take the edge off of being stuck on a small, leaky ship for two months in stormy seas. The Pilgrims landed on Cape Cod and then Plymouth, not because they intended to, but because they were tired of sailing and had run out of beer. Maggie Mason served her homemade beer at all of the society’s gatherings and eventually started microdosing the stuff with LSD. Rob had drunk so much of it that while he was making his vain argument for the society to lay off his wife, he saw one of the gargoyles at the top of the Pilgrim Monument come to life and fly off into the center of town. That the gargoyle had stirred to life did not strike him as odd, and he wondered if anyone in Provincetown would even notice a gargoyle bounding up and down Commercial Street.

Rob didn’t see anything different about the house now, or the monument, for that matter. He wasn’t sure whether Maggie Mason had retained ownership or if the government had seized the property. The house appeared to be vacant. After Maggie was hauled off to jail, the members looked to Katie and Rachel, who had been Maggie’s assistant, to rehabilitate the society. That’s when Katie asked Rachel to move into the cottage across the street and help her convert it to the Dorothy Bradford House. There, they would continue the society’s mission of helping troubled women, without the use of illegal drugs.

Safe from the gargoyles, Rob turned back onto Commercial Street and headed toward Provincetown’s sleepier West End. At the end of the street, he took a victory lap around the rotary that marked the end of town and the end of the Cape. The Provincetown Causeway, a mile-long stone breakwater, stretched across the water to Woods End Lighthouse, squatting in the distance on a small spit of land that dangled from the end of the Cape like a worm from a fishhook. Rob had never walked across the breakwater. A mile of damp, jagged boulders covered in bird shit seemed like the perfect place to break an ankle.

Deciding to take a short rest before heading home, Rob pulled into the mostly empty parking lot of the Provincetown Inn and promptly blew out the front tire of his bike. There was a loud pop and then the sound of escaping air. He had barely been pedaling and hadn’t hit any potholes. There was no evidence of glass or other sharp objects lying on the blacktop. The inner tube had apparently just given up.

Rob dismounted, grateful that the tire had failed here rather than on the road. He walked the bike to a grassy area alongside the inn, then pulled off the tire and set about removing the inner tube and replacing it with one of the two spare tubes he carried with him. As he was threading the new tube into the tire, the door to one of the first-floor guest rooms opened, and a man walked out. He looked at Rob and waved, as though he had been expecting him. Rob had the urge to look behind him and see if there was someone else the man was waving to. He nodded his head instead. The man walked over.

“Looks like you’ve got everything you need there,” the man said, pointing to the tools Rob had spread on the grass. He was short and compact, dressed a little more formally than someone on vacation would be, wearing slacks and a button-down shirt. He had short hair and was cleanly shaven, unlike Rob.

“I do, thanks,” Rob said, wondering if the man had come outside just to talk to him.

“I do a lot of cycling myself,” the man said. “Wish I had time to do it now.”

Rob levered the tire back onto the rim, hoping the man, who was apparently not very busy, would leave. He didn’t like being watched when he was working on something he had only done a handful of times before.

“You from around here?” the man said.

“Truro,” Rob said. “Fifteen miles down the road.”

“I had a meeting there yesterday.”

“So I guess you’re not on vacation, then,” Rob said, now resigned to having a conversation. He attached the CO2 inflator to the tube stem and nudged open the valve. The tire inflated quickly.

“Nope. Business. My name’s Mike Van Winkle, by the way. Here, take one of my cards.” Mike Van Winkle held out a card. Rob had gotten up off the ground to reassemble his bike. He took the card. It said that Van Winkle was a private investigator.

“What are you investigating?” Rob said. “Or can I ask that?”

“I’m looking for someone,” Van Winkle said.

“Well, the towns are pretty small out here. Shouldn’t take long.” Rob thought he was making a joke, but Van Winkle didn’t seem amused.

“He’s from Truro. Maybe you know him? Guy by the name of Sam Boland.”

“Sammy Boland?”

“That’s him. You know him?”

Rob did know him. Sammy Boland had been a caretaker in the area who was found to have been dealing drugs on the side, running heroin and other narcotics out of the basement of one of his clients’ homes. The client’s name was Tim Desmond, a neighbor of Rob’s who lived a few hundred yards down the beach. Desmond had initially been arrested but was later found innocent of any involvement in the operation. The drugs, which came to the house by boat, were stuffed inside fish and stored by Boland in a refrigerator in Desmond’s basement. Desmond never saw anything other than the fish. Sammy Boland disappeared after Desmond’s arrest and was never found by the police.

Another of Sammy Boland’s clients had been Maggie Mason, and it was presumed, though never proved, that he was the one who was selling her the LSD. Boland, a real jack of all trades, was also a photographer, and ironically, Maggie Mason hired him to take pictures of some of the recovering heroin addicts who passed through her home in Provincetown, hanging the photos on her walls. A short time later, Maggie asked him to photograph a certain woman in a rowboat—the woman she believed was Dorothy Bradford.

“He was all over the news two years ago,” Rob said. “People say he was killed by the drug cartel.”

“How do you know he worked for a cartel?”

“I don’t,” Rob said, unsettled by the change in Van Winkle’s tone, as if Rob had somehow been involved. “That’s what people were saying. The rumor mill’s pretty thick out here.”

“I get that,” Van Winkle said.

“Hey, are you related to Pappy Van Winkle? The bourbon guy?”

“Sorry. Not much of a drinker.”

Rob wasn’t sure this was an answer. He collected his tools and stuffed them back into the pouch that fit into one of the water bottle brackets on his bike. He was reminded of the quote by Winston Churchill, who said, “Never trust a man who doesn’t drink.”

“Did Sammy’s folks hire you? Or I guess it’s just his dad, Jerry, now. I heard his mother died recently.”

“Can’t answer that one,” Van Winkle said. He hadn’t really answered the last question either. “I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name.”

Rob almost said, Can’t answer that one, but he had no reason to be an asshole. “Rob Crosley,” he said. “How does a private eye not drink?”

Van Winkle smiled. Perhaps he did have a sense of humor. “Crosley?” he said. “The one married to Katie Crosley?”

“I guess you must know all about us if you’re looking for Boland.”

“It’s quite a story. I saw the picture Boland took of her. Does your wife really think she’s Dorothy Bradford?” Van Winkle sounded more curious than condescending.

“She is Dorothy Bradford,” Rob said, preparing to mount his bike.

“Hey, before you go, can you tell me if you ever met him?”

“Boland? Once or twice at Tim Desmond’s house. I saw him on the beach a few times, too, when he was chasing after my wife with a camera, though I didn’t know it at the time.”

“You’re a friend of Tim Desmond?”

“Not really. I run into him on the beach once in a while.”

“Did Boland ever do any work for you at your house?”

“No. We do that ourselves.” Actually, it was Katie who did all the repair and maintenance work, but Van Winkle didn’t need to know that. “Listen, I’m heading out. You should go see Don Hill at the Truro Police Department if you haven’t already.”

“That’s where I was yesterday.”

“Well, I hope you have better luck than he did.” The police spent a year trying to find Boland, then gave up.

Van Winkle bent down and picked something up off the pavement. He tossed it into the bushes. Rob wondered if it was a nail.

“Your son’s the runner, right?” he said.

“He is,” Rob said.

“Gold medal?”

“He lets me wear it sometimes.”

“So your wife is Dorothy Bradford, and your son’s an Olympic athlete. What do you do?”

Rob clipped into his pedals and said, “This!” Then he headed back to the rotary, keeping watch for any nails on the pavement in front of him.