Read Online Trophy House by Anne Bernays - Free Book Online

anti-Semitism in Truro? She had pushed the right button, and I took off with opinions that had been shaped and hardened over the past few years. She was writing a lot of what I told her in a notebook while keeping an eye on the small, pricey tape recorder she’d brought with her and which presumably was whirring away, recording my words for the ages. She asked me about the Tinkham murder. “There’s absolutely no connection,” I said, sensing the direction she was pointing: Truro—trouble in paradise. I tried to assure her that crime was almost unknown here—the police have nothing more to do than look out for windows blown open in the winter when the summer folks have gone back to wherever they came from. “You’ll have to admit that two incidents in so short a time indicates something,” Megan said.
    â€œWell yes,” I said. “But that’s just a coincidence.” Her eyebrows shot up.
    Beth said, “We don’t lock our doors…”
    â€œIs that so?” Megan said. “Is that going to change, do you think?”
    â€œAbsolutely not,” I told her.
    â€œI’ll have that iced tea now,” she said.
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    Megan stayed for lunch—tuna fish sandwiches and one of my quickie cold soups. It turned out that she and Beth had friends in common, people who they started babbling about. Well, this was going swimmingly and maybe she would soften her attitude toward the very rich.
    When Megan Solomon’s piece appeared later that same week, my fears were realized. “The majority of the residents of Truro, a small, isolated rural community—it boasts neither supermarket, gas station, nor community center, not to mention bar and grill—seem to think that, because they are ecologically virtuous, they are immune to the ills that plague modern society, things like greed, corruption and violence. And so they were awoken with a start last week when an ecoterrorist, a man who calls himself Lyle Halliday, a clever and elusive individual, allegedly poured fake blood all over a new house and left a hate message behind.” Solomon’s piece touched on the unsolved murder as well, implying that the Truro police had demonstrated not even minimum competence. She had interviewed a dozen people, all the way from the one member of the Tinkham family willing—and stupid enough—to talk to a reporter, to the owner of the biggest and noisiest gay bar in P’Town, to the owner of the incrowd’s restaurant in Wellfleet, to the owner of the place with the swimming pool, to just regular folks—including me. She got people not only to talk but to blab. She was very good—cheeky behind a reticent exterior.
    Solomon’s article didn’t bother me the way it bothered some—Molly, for instance, who wondered how this green kid could come out here and get the whole picture in forty-eight hours. “I’ve lived here for fifteen years and I still know squat about what really goes on.” Even Raymie grumbled. “She was a little hard on us. I mean as far as most communities go, I know we’re not exactly the model of virtue, but we’re hardly the most morally dense either.”
    I said I thought Solomon had done what she came here to do. “She had an agenda. On the other hand,” I told her, you couldn’t discount how much satisfaction it gave certain people to dump on trophy houses—or alternatively, “McMonsters.” These folks were venomous. And do you know what was so odd about the situation? That people like Mitch Brenner thought the rest of us were envious of him and his hideous house. I worried there was nothing to compare this to. Then I realized I was wrong—there was: “You know how you said you don’t want to wear anything that has somebody else’s name on it, not even an alligator. But the people who pay big bucks for a Coach bag or a Burberry—they think