Promised Land Read Free

its sight and not always its scent or sound. Sometimes just the sense of vast space on each side of you. Of open brightness stretching a long way under the sun.
    Route 132 took me into Hyannis center. The soothing excitements of scrub pine and wide sea gave way to McDonald’s and Holiday Inn and prefab fence companies, shopping malls and Sheraton Motor Inns, and a host of less likely places where you could sleep and eat and drink in surroundings indistinguishable from the ones you’d left at home. Except there’d be a fishnet on the wall. If Bartholomew Gosnold had approached the Cape from this direction he’d have kept on going.
    At the airport circle, I headed east on Main Street. Hyannis is surprisingly congested and citylike as you drive into it. Main Street is lined with stores, many of them branches of Boston and New York stores. The motel I wanted was at the east end of town, a big handsome resort motel with a health club and a good restaurant of Victorian decor. A big green sign out front said DUNFEY’S. I had stayed there two months ago with Brenda Loring and had a nice time.
    I was in my room and unpacked by nine-thirty. I called Shepard. He was home and waiting for me. Ocean Street is five minutes from the motel, an extension of Sea Street, profuse with weathered shingles and blue shutters. Shepard’s house was no exception. A big Colonial with white cedar shingles weathered silver, and blue shutters at all the windows. It was on a slight rise of ground on the ocean side of Ocean Street. A white Caddie convertible with the top down was parked in front. A curving brick path ran up to the front door and small evergreens clustered along the foundation. The front door was blue. I rang the bell and heard it go bing-bong inside. To the left of the house was a beach, where the street curved. To the right was a high hedge concealing the neighbors’ house next door. A blond teenage girl in a very small lime green bikini answered the door. She looked maybe seventeen. I carefully did not leer at her when I said, “My name’s Spenser to see Mr. Shepard.”
    The girl said, “Come in.”
    I stepped into the front hallway and she left me standing while she went to get her father. I closed the door behind me. The front hall was floored in flagstone and the walls appeared to be cedar paneling. There were doors on both sides and in the rear, and a stairway leading up. The ceilings were white and evenly rough, the kind of plaster ceiling that is sprayed on and shows no mark of human hand.
    Shepard’s daughter came back. I eyed her surreptitiously behind my sunglasses. Surreptitious is not leering. She might be too young, but it was hard to tell.
    “My dad’s got company right now, he says can you wait a minute?”
    “Sure.”
    She walked off and left me standing in the hall. I didn’t insist on port in the drawing room, but standing in the hall seemed a bit cool. Maybe she was distraught by her mother’s disappearance. She didn’t look distraught. She looked sullen. Probably mad at having to answer the door. Probably going to paint her toenails when I’d interrupted. Terrific-looking thighs though. For a little kid.
    Shepard appeared from the door past the stairs. With him was a tall black man with a bald head and high cheekbones. He had on a powder blue leisure suit and a pink silk shirt with a big collar. The shirt was unbuttoned to the waist and the chest and stomach that showed were as hard and unadorned as ebony. He took a pair of wraparound sunglasses from the breast pocket of the jacket and as he put them on, he stared at me over their rims until very slowly the lenses covered his eyes and he stared at me through them.
    I looked back. “Hawk,” I said.
    “Spenser.”
    Shepard said, “You know each other?”
    Hawk nodded.
    I said, “Yeah.”
    Shepard said to Hawk, “I’ve asked Spenser here to see if he can find my wife, Pam.”
    Hawk said, “I’ll bet he can. He’s a real firecracker for finding