Suspicion by Joseph Finder Page B

life.
    At the time it felt like the right thing to do.
     • • • 
    Danny loathed being trapped in this pointless lie about Jay Gould: one more lie he’d have to keep track of. But he decided not to speak of it again unless and until it came up.
    Which of course it did, later that evening, as they lay in bed. Danny was rereading—well, reskimming, actually—an old book by Gustavus Myers called
History of the Great American Fortunes
, and Lucy was working on her laptop.
    “He was married only once,” she said.
    “Huh? Who?”
    “Jay Gould. You said ‘one of his wives,’ but he married once, to Helen Day Miller, who died like three years before he did.” Wikipedia’s page for Jay Gould was open on her computer screen. She gave him a sidelong glance.
    Why had he told her such an idiotic, sloppy lie? It was just the first thing that had sprung to his mind. He hadn’t given it a thought. “What made you look that up?”
    “I remember when you first started working on the book, I read something about him, I was wondering why he was considered such an evil jerk, and I noticed he only married once. Not six times or something, which you’d expect. These days, anyway. And I thought, well, I guess the times were different then. Or maybe he was a good husband at least.”
    “Did I say ‘one of’ his wives’? Long day. I misspoke.”
    She flipped the laptop closed. “No, you didn’t, Danny. There aren’t
any
Jay Gould archives at Wellesley and—”
    “Sweetie, listen. I told Abby I was doing work out there because I wanted to take her home myself. That’s all. I’m not comfortable with her being driven around by a chauffeur.”
    “So why not just tell her that?”
    “Obviously, I should have. I didn’t feel like setting off another argument.”
    “God forbid you should get into an argument with someone.”
    He shrugged. If you don’t want to be psychoanalyzed, don’t date a shrink. Lucy understood, long before he did, that he had a problem with anger. His problem was something that he never thought could possibly be considered a problem: He never gave in to anger. He felt it, sure, plenty of times. But he prided himself on his ability to suppress it. When an argument began, he’d always de-escalate. Holding anger in this way required great self-control, but he’d taught himself that self-control since childhood.
    He’d learned by example. For years he’d thought that his father, Bud, had a short fuse.
    But putting it that way, so bland and benign, made it sound normal. Bud Goodman in fact had no fuse. He was one of those chemical compounds, like liquid nitroglycerin or mercury fulminate, that would explode on impact. Danny had learned how to avoid the triggers that would set his father off, and there were many of them. Disobedience was one. Dishonesty. A raised voice.
    Bud, who was a great carpenter, a fine craftsman, was constantly losing subcontractors. He’d tell them off, or just go after them in a hot flash of anger, until they quit. He lost plenty of clients that way, too. One lumberyard in Wellfleet refused to do business with him because he once tore into the yard manager, though Bud insisted that they were selling him short lots.
    If you listened only to Bud Goodman’s side, his subs were a capricious and moody bunch, every last one of them. Danny learned quickly that there was always another side of the story, usually involving a Bud Goodman tantrum that ended in a mushroom cloud of rage.
    Even when Sarah moved out, he didn’t understand that maybe he’d gone too far in the opposite direction. “For God’s sake, what’s wrong with you?” Sarah had snapped one day. “Do you not care what happens to us? Do you not even give a shit?”
    “Come on,” he replied, making her point. “Let’s talk this through reasonably. No need to shout.”
    Lucy once told him about a psychologist and marriage therapist named John Gottman who had identified what he called the Four Horsemen of the