The Gate House Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2008 by Nelson DeMille

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Grand Central Publishing

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  First eBook Edition: October 2008

  The Grand Central Publishing name and logo is a trademark of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  ISBN: 978-0-446-55182-3

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  PART I

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  PART II

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  PART III

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  PART IV

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

  CHAPTER SEVENTY

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOVELS BY NELSON DEMILLE

  Available from Grand Central Publishing

  By the Rivers of Babylon

  Cathedral

  The Talbot Odyssey

  Word of Honor

  The Charm School

  The Gold Coast

  The General’s Daughter

  Spencerville

  Plum Island

  The Lion’s Game

  Up Country

  Night Fall

  Wild Fire

  WITH THOMAS BLOCK

  Mayday

  This book is for James Nelson DeMille, a new chapter in my life.

  PROLOGUE

  How beauteous is this garden; where the flowers of the earth vie with the stars of heaven.

  What can compare with the vase of yon alabaster fountain filled with crystal water?

  Nothing but the moon in her fulness, shining in the midst of an unclouded sky!

  — Inscription on a wall of Alhambra Castle, Granada, Spain From Washington Irving, The Alhambra

  It is a warm summer evening, and by the light of a full white moon, I, John Whitman Sutter, am watching my wife, Susan Stanhope Sutter, as she rides her horse Zanzibar across the quiet acres of Stanhope Hall, her ancestral estate.

  The rising moon is eerily bright, and it illuminates the landscape with an unearthly glow, which transforms all color into silvery shades of blue and white.

  Susan passes through a line of tall pines and enters a neighboring estate called Alhambra, and I wonder why she has trespassed on this property, and I hope she has gotten permission from Alhambra’s new owner, a Mafia don named Frank Bellarosa.

  Majestic trees cast long moon shadows over the grassy fields, and in the distance I can see the huge stucco villa, which is dark except for a light from the closed glass doors of a second-story balcony. That balcony, I know, leads to the library where Frank Bellarosa sits in his leather armchair.

  Susan draws near to the house, then dismounts and tethers Zanzibar to a tree. She walks to the edge of a long marble reflecting pool set in a classical garden of mock Roman ruins.

  At the far end of the pool is a statue of Neptune, holding aloft his trident, and at his feet, stone fish spout water from their gaping mouths into a large alabaster seashell, which overflows into the pool.

  At the opposite end of the pool, closest to me, is a statue of the Virgin Mary, which is new, and which I know was put there by Bellarosa’s wife as a counterbalance to the half-naked pagan god.

  A soft, balmy breeze moves the cypress trees, and night birds begin their song. It is a beautiful evening, and Susan seems entranced by the moonlight and the enchanted garden. I, too, am mesmerized by this magical evening.

  As I turn my attention back to Susan, she begins to take off her clothes, and she drapes each piece over the statue of the Virgin, which surprises and bothers me.

  Susan moves to the edge of the pool, her red hair billowing in the breeze, and she is gazing down at her naked reflection in the water.

  I want to take off my clothes and join her, but I notice that the light from the library has gone out, and the doors of the balcony are now open, though no one is there, and this gives me an uneasy feeling, so I stay where I am in the shadows.

  Then I see a man silhouetted against the white walls of Alhambra, and he is moving in long, powerful strides toward the pool. As he comes closer, I see that it is Bellarosa, and he is wearing a black robe. He is now standing beside Neptune, and his face looks unnatural in the moonlight. I want to call out to Susan, but I can’t.

  Susan does not seem to see him, and she continues to stare down at her reflection, but Bellarosa’s stare is fixed on Susan. I am incensed that this man is looking at my wife’s naked body.

  This scene stays frozen, Susan and Frank as motionless as the statues beside them, and I, too, am frozen, powerless to intervene, though I need to protect Susan.

  Then I see that she has become aware of Bellarosa’s presence, but she does not react. I don’t understand this; she should not be standing naked in front of this man. I’m angry at her, and at him, and a stream of rage races through my mind, but I can’t put this rage into words or sounds.

  As I stare at Susan, she turns her back to the pool, and to Bellarosa, and I think she is going to leave. Then she turns her head in my direction, as though she’s heard a sound. I
make a move toward her, but suddenly she lifts her arms and springs backward into the pool, and in long, powerful strides, she moves naked through the moonlit water toward Frank Bellarosa. I look at him, and I see that he is now naked, standing with his arms folded across his chest. He is a large, powerfully built man, and in the moonlight he appears as imposing and menacing as the naked stone god beside him.

  I want to shout out to Susan, to warn her to come back, but something tells me to stay silent—to see what happens.

  Susan reaches the far end of the pool and lifts herself into the water-filled seashell, where she stands near the towering statue of Neptune. She is looking up at Bellarosa, who has not moved from the edge of the pool, except to turn his face toward her.

  They stare at each other, unnaturally motionless, then Bellarosa steps into the shallow water of the seashell where he stands in front of Susan.

  They are speaking, but all I can hear is the rushing sound of the spouting water. I am enraged at this scene, but I still can’t believe that Susan wants to be there, and I wait for her to dive back into the pool and swim away from him. Yet the longer she remains standing naked in front of him, the more I realize that she has come here to meet him.

  As I let go of any hope that Susan will dive back into the pool and swim away, she kneels into the shallow water, then moves her face into Bellarosa’s groin and takes him into her mouth. Her hands grasp his buttocks and pull him closer to her face.

  I close my eyes, and when I open them again, Susan is lying on her back in the scalloped seashell, her legs are spread wide and they dangle over the edge of the waterfall, and Bellarosa is now standing in the reflecting pool, and he buries his face between her thighs. Then, suddenly, he pulls Susan’s legs up so they rest on his shoulders, and he seems to rise out of the water as he enters her with a powerful thrust that forces a deep cry from her lips. He continues his rough thrusts into her until she screams so loudly it startles me.

  “Mr. Sutter! Mr. Sutter! Sir, we are descending. Please fasten your seatbelt.”

  “What . . . ?”

  “We’re descending,” a female voice said. “You need to fasten your seatbelt and put your seat in the full upright position.”

  “Oh . . .” I adjusted my seat and fastened my seatbelt, noticing that Little John was also in the full upright position. My goodness. That’s embarrassing. What brought that on . . . ? Then, I remembered my dream . . .

  I never asked Susan how, when, and where she began her affair with Frank Bellarosa—this is not the sort of information one needs to hear in any detail—but it was something that remained missing from what I did know. My shrink, if I had one, would say that my dream was an unconscious attempt to fill in this lacuna—the missing piece of the affair. Not that it mattered a decade after I divorced her. In legal terms, I charged adultery, and she admitted to it. The state did not require any juicy details or explicit testimony, so neither should I.

  The British Airways flight from London to New York crossed over the Long Island Sound, descending toward John F. Kennedy International Airport. It was a sunny day, a little after 4:00 P.M., Monday, May 27, and I remembered that today was Memorial Day in America. Below, on the North Shore of Long Island, I could see a place called the Gold Coast, where I used to live, ten years ago. Probably, if I looked hard enough, I could see the large neighboring estates called Stanhope Hall, and what was once Alhambra.

  I now live in London, and the purpose of my return to America is to see an old lady who is dying, or who may well have died during my seven-hour flight. If so, I’d be in time for the funeral, where I’d see Susan Stanhope Sutter.

  The presence of death in the coffin should compel us into some profound thoughts about the shortness of life, and make us rethink our many disappointments, resentments, and betrayals that we can’t seem to let go of. Unfortunately, however, we usually take these things to the grave with us, or to the grave of the person we couldn’t forgive in life.

  Susan.

  But now and then, we do find it in our hearts to forgive, and it costs nothing to do that, except some loss of pride. And maybe that was the problem.

  I was sitting on the starboard side of the business class cabin, and all heads were turned toward the windows, focused on the skyline of Manhattan. It’s truly an awesome sight from three or four thousand feet, but as of about nine months ago, the main attraction for people who knew the city was the missing part of the skyline. The last time I’d flown into New York, a few weeks after 9/11, the smoke was still rising from the rubble. This time, I didn’t want to look, but the man next to me said, “That’s where the Towers were. To the left.” He pointed in front of my face. “There.”

  I replied, “I know,” and picked up a magazine. Most of the people I still knew here in New York have told me that 9/11 made them rethink their lives and put things into perspective. That’s a good plan for the future, but it doesn’t change the past.

  The British Airways flight began its final descent into Kennedy, and a few minutes later we touched down.

  The man next to me said, “It’s good to be home.” He asked, “Is this home for you?”

  “No.”

  Soon I’d be in a rental car on my way back to the place I once called home, but which was now a place that time had partly eroded from my mind, washing away too many of the good memories and leaving behind the hard, jagged edges of the aforementioned disappointments, resentments, and betrayals.

  The aircraft decelerated, then rolled out onto the taxiway toward the terminal.

  Now that I was here, and would remain here until the funeral, perhaps I should use the time to try to reconcile the past with the present—then maybe I’d have better dreams on my return flight.

  PART I

  So we beat on, boats against the current,

  borne back ceaselessly into the past.

  — F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

  CHAPTER ONE

  A week had passed since my return from London, and I was sitting at the table in the dining room of the small gatehouse of Stanhope Hall, my ex-wife’s former estate, wading through old files, family photos, and letters that I’d stored here for the last decade.

  After my divorce from Susan, I’d fulfilled an old dream by taking my sailboat, a forty-six-foot Morgan ketch named the Paumanok II, on a sail around the world, which lasted three years. Paumanok, incidentally, is the indigenous Indian word for Long Island, and my illustrious ancestor, Walt Whitman, a native Long Islander, sometimes used this word in his poetry—and if Uncle Walt had owned a forty-six-foot yacht, I’m sure he’d have christened it the Paumanok, not “I Hear America Singing,” which is too long to put on the stern, or Leaves of Grass, which doesn’t sound seaworthy.

  Anyway, my last port of call was Bournemouth, England, from which my other distant ancestors, the Sutters, had set sail for America three centuries before.

  With winter coming on, and sea fatigue in my bones, a dwindling bank account, and my wanderlust satisfied, I sold the boat for about half what it was worth and moved up to London to look for a job, eventually signing on with a British law firm that needed an American tax lawyer, which is what I was in New York before I became captain of the Paumanok II.

  I spread out some photos of Susan on the table and looked at them under the light of the chandelier. Susan was, and probably still is, a beautiful woman with long red hair, arresting green eyes, pouty lips, and the perfect body of a lifelong equestrian.

  I picked up a photo that showed Susan on my first sailboat, the original Paumanok, a thirty-six-foot Morgan, which I loved, but which I’d scuttled in Oyster Bay Harbor rather than let the government seize it for back taxes. This photo was taken, I think, in the summer of 1990 somewhere on the Long Island Sound. The photograph showed a bright summer day, and Susan was standing on the aft deck, stark naked, with one hand covering her burning bush, and the other covering one breast. Her face shows an expression of mock surprise and embarrassment.

  The occas
ion was one of Susan’s acted-out sexual fantasies, and I think I was supposed to have climbed aboard from a kayak, and I’d discovered her alone and naked and made her my sex slave.

  The woman had not only a great body, but also a great imagination and a wonderful libido to go with it. As for the sexual playacting, its purpose, of course, was to keep the marital fires burning, and it worked well for almost two decades because all our infidelities were with each other. At least that was the understanding, until a new actor, don Frank Bellarosa, moved in next door.

  I picked up a bottle of old cognac that I’d found in the sideboard and topped off my coffee cup.

  The reason I’ve returned to America has to do with the former residents of this gatehouse, George and Ethel Allard, who had been old Stanhope family retainers. George, a good man, had died a decade ago, and his wife, Ethel, who is not so nice, is in hospice care and about to join her husband, unless George has already had a word with St. Peter, the ultimate gatekeeper. “Wasn’t I promised eternal rest and peace? Can’t she go someplace else? She always liked hot weather.” In any case, I am the attorney for Ethel’s estate and so I needed to take care of that and attend her funeral.

  The other reason I’ve returned is that this gatehouse is my legal U.S. address, but unfortunately, this house is about to pass into the hands of Amir Nasim, an Iranian gentleman who now owns the main house, Stanhope Hall, and much of the original acreage, including this gatehouse. As of now, however, Ethel Allard has what is called a life estate in the gatehouse, meaning she has a rent-free tenancy until she dies. This rent-free house was given to her by Susan’s grandfather, Augustus Stanhope (because Ethel was screwing Augustus way back when), and Ethel has been kind enough to allow me to store my things here and share her digs whenever I’m in New York. Ethel hates me, but that’s another story. In any case, Ethel’s tenancy in this house and on this planet is about to end, and thus I had returned from London not only to say goodbye to Ethel, but also to find a new home for my possessions, and find another legal U.S. address, which seems to be a requirement for citizenship and creditors.

  This is the first time I’d been to New York since last September, coming in from London as soon as the airplanes were flying again. I’d stayed for three days at the Yale Club, where I’d maintained my membership for my infrequent New York business trips, and I was shocked at how quiet, empty, and somber the great city had become.