The Darkest Evening of the Year

would have a late dinner together, whereafter Billy would kill him. When Gunny was dead, the next to the last connection between Redwing and Billy’s boss would have been erased.
    The last connection was Billy. This fact had not been lost on him. He had given it much hard thought.
    In Santa Barbara, he had booked a luxurious hotel suite in the name of Tyrone Slothrop, a pseudonym that he had not used previously, that he had been saving for a special occasion.
    Billy liked extreme luxury and especially enjoyed over-the-top hotels that provided amenities so extravagant that Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, given a chance to experience such establishments, would have been embarrassed by the comparative grubbiness of their life at the palace.
    In Newport Beach, Billy parked around the corner from the building in which Brian McCarthy had both his offices and his apartment.

 
    Chapter
42
    M illie and Barry Packard, who had agreed to keep Fred and Ethel for a night or two, lived in a shingle-sided New England-style house on a low rise above the beach.
    The front door was unlocked, as Amy had been told it would be. She and Brian followed Fred, Ethel, and Nickie through the house to the back patio, where Millie sat at a teak table, sipping a martini, in the magical light of gas-flame hurricane lanterns with prismatic panes.
    Five feet two, slender, with short shaggy blond hair and large eyes, Millie had an air of elfin glamour and looked as if she had just gotten home from playing the lead in a production of Peter Pan . She was fiftyish, perhaps too old for the role, though Mary Martin had probably still played the part in Broadway revivals at that age.
    “Freddie darling, my adorable Ethel,” she exclaimed as the two kids went straight to her, tails lashing, confident of receiving ear rubs and chin scratches. “You’re as fabulous as ever, but why didn’t you fix your folks a drink before you brought them out here?”
    “Don’t get up,” Amy said, bending to kiss Millie on the cheek.
    “Cupcake, I never get up for family, only for people I don’t like, so I can mix them weak drinks that make them desperate to go elsewhere.”
    They were family because they were both board members of Golden Heart and both besotted with goldens.
    “Brian, dear, you know where to find the liquor cabinet. We’re out of cocktail olives, it’s a tragedy of historic proportions, but we’re coping because we’re Americans.”
    After bending for a kiss of his own, Brian said, “We can’t stay more than a minute, Millie. We have to hit the road.”
    “My God, you’re a handsome young man. It can’t be natural. You shouldn’t start cosmetic surgery so young. By the time you’re sixty, your mouth will be stretched ear to ear.”
    Amy said, “Where’s Barry?”
    “On the beach with the dogs. Just for a walk. No romping in the surf. It’s too late to be combing sand out of fur, and the dogs would need grooming, too.”
    Fred and Ethel spotted the trio on the sand below. They hurried to the edge of the patio. As much as they wanted to plunge down the slope to the sea, they wouldn’t dash off without permission.
    When Millie glimpsed Nickie, her eyes widened with delight. “Oh, Amy, you’re right. She’s a beauty. Come here, you fabulous creature. I’m your Aunt Millie. Nothing they’ve told you about me is true.”
    While Nickie and Millie charmed each other, Amy watched Barry on the beach with Daisy and Mortimer.
    Past play, the dogs weaved lazily along the strand, smelling one by one the shells, the driftwood, the knots of weed, the sea urchins, the ocean-smoothed medallions of bottle glass left by the last high tide and to be carried away on the next.
    A million fragments of the shattered moon knocked together in the troughs and crests of a low surf, while in the lulls between sets of waves, the jigsaw self-assembled, repairing the silvery sphere, which shimmered in the currents, twisted, and came apart once more.
    The rhythms of the sea, the quarter-million-mile light of the moon, and the companionship of dogs inspired a sense of timelessness, of peace, of the profound grace always waiting to be discovered when the noise of daily life subsides.
    Amy had the uneasy feeling that this tranquil moment might be the last that she would know for a long time, if not forever.
    Perhaps having seen them on the patio, Barry Packard came up from the sea, his dogs preceding him.
    Of the Packards’ many fine qualities, Amy admired