Her father was keeping her from him.
She was traveling, somewhere remote—trekking in the Andes maybe—trying to put him out of her mind until they could be together again.
She was working, quietly saving money for the house they were going to buy together when Billy got out.
As the fantasies grew more ludicrous, even to himself, Billy stopped talking about Toni with his fellow inmates. Instead he compartmentalized her, packing her away in a mental box to be opened joyously in secret, once the lights were out and he was alone. Sustained by these romantic dreams, by day Billy determined to get the most out of prison life, enrolling in science and mechanics classes and working long hours on the prison farm, which he enjoyed. In normal circumstances child killers were considered the lowest of the low in jail, ostracized and often physically assaulted by fellow inmates. But there was something about Billy’s kind, relentlessly cheerful nature that the other men all warmed to.
The bottom line was that no one believed Billy Hamlin had murdered Nicholas Handemeyer. His trial had been a travesty.
The day Billy walked out of East Jersey State Prison, after fifteen years inside, nobody was waiting to greet him. His father was dead and he had no other close family. There were a few people he knew from back home, acquaintances he could call. But he realized with a pang of fear that all of his real friends were behind him, on the other side of the penitentiary’s huge, locked steel gates. Billy Hamlin wasn’t ready to face the outside world, not on his own.
So he did the only thing he could.
He went looking for Toni Gilletti.
Billy’s first stop was Toni’s parents’ mansion in New Jersey. He’d never been there before, but he’d long since memorized the address, and he’d seen pictures of the place in a fancy Dream Homes magazine.
The maid who opened the door was kind. Her brother Tyrone had spent eight years in jail for petty theft, and she knew what a long stretch inside could do to a man’s soul. But she told Billy he had a wasted journey.
“Old Man Gilletti sold this place eight years ago. My people, the Carters, been here since then.”
Billy bit back his disappointment.
“Do you know where the Gillettis moved to?”
“I don’t. Back to New York City, I think. But Walter Gilletti lost a lotta money when his business went broke. There were debts, to partners, to the bank. That’s why he sold up here. They was in real trouble.”
Billy remembered Walter Gilletti as the arrogant, bullying, cock-of-the-walk figure who’d been so dismissive toward his father at the trial. Toni’s dad was not a man who would have coped well with such a huge reversal of fortune.
With a little research and a few calls to some of Walter’s ex-employees, Billy found the Gillettis’ new home, a clean but modest apartment in a midrent part of Brooklyn. When he got there it looked as if he’d had another wasted journey. An ancient, wizened crone in a dirty velour leisure suit answered the door.
“What the hell do you want?”
It was only when her mean eyes narrowed and she rasped, “Billy Hamlin? Are you out already?” that Billy placed her as Toni’s mother.
“Sandra?”
“Mrs. Gilletti to you, boy.”
Jesus Christ, thought Billy. She’s aged thirty years. More.
“I—I was looking for Toni,” he stammered. For some reason, the old woman made him nervous.
“You and the rest of the world.” Sandra Gilletti cackled grotesquely. Billy recognized the rattle of emphysema in her chest. He hoped the old adage wasn’t true, about all girls eventually turning into their mothers. “Toni’s gone, kiddo. And she ain’t coming back.”
For a hideous moment Billy thought she meant that Toni was dead. In fact, Sandra Gilletti explained, her daughter had taken off shortly after the trial, informing both her parents coolly that she wanted nothing more to do with them and that she was starting a new life.
“Just like that,” the old woman wheezed. “After twenty years of love and affection, she just ups and leaves, and Walter and I never hear a peep from her again.”
Billy cast his mind back to his one, magical summer with Toni and the long conversations they had had about her parents. Love and affection had not been words he had ever associated with the Gillettis. He remembered feeling sorry for Toni, and grateful for his own, warm relationship with his father.
Mrs. Gilletti went on. “Of course, Walter lost everything. You probably know that. Died of a stroke just months after we moved in here. Left me without a penny, the tightfisted son of a bitch.”
Billy looked past her into the clean, comfortable apartment. It wasn’t the Ritz-Carlton, but he would have killed to have a place like that to come home to.
“You seem to be doing all right to me, Mrs. Gilletti.”
Sandra Gilletti’s upper lip curled. “That’s because you have low standards. Probably why you fell for our Toni in the first place. She never came back for the funeral, you know. Never even sent flowers. Heartless bitch.”
Billy left the apartment feeling deeply depressed. In prison, at least he’d had his fantasy, his little box of dreams to keep him going. Now even that was disintegrating, rained on and destroyed like everything else in his life.
And not just his life. The Gillettis had clearly lost everything too. It was as if everyone connected with that awful summer in Kennebunkport had been cursed. Billy might have been the one sent to jail, but everyone had been punished. Everyone had suffered in their own way. Billy tried not to think of the Handemeyer family, and their never-ending grief. Had they been torn apart by this too? He wondered what had happened to them after the trial. Had his imprisonment given Senator Handemeyer the closure he craved? Somehow Billy doubted it.
For the next few months Billy searched tirelessly for Toni Gilletti, but it was like trying to catch a ghost with a butterfly net. He even spent a thousand dollars of the small amount of money his father had left him on a private detective, but it was to no avail. Toni’s poisonous old witch of a mother was right.
She was gone. And she was never coming back.
It wasn’t until a few months later that Billy Hamlin recognized the emotion building up inside him for what it was: relief. He had let go of the dream, let go of his parachute, and discovered to his astonishment that he hadn’t plummeted to his doom after all. In fact, he felt as if a huge burden had been lifted from his shoulders.
Walking out of jail had not made Billy Hamlin a free man. But giving up on Toni Gilletti had. At last he could begin to build himself a life.
He’d qualified as mechanic in jail, and spent the last of Jeff Hamlin’s money buying a stake in a run-down body shop in Queens, in partnership with an old buddy from high school, Milo Bates. Milo had followed Billy’s trial on TV and had always felt bad about what had happened to him. Still living in the Hamlins’ old neighborhood, Milo was now married to a sweet local girl named Betsy and the two of them had three kids. The Bates family took Billy Hamlin under their wing, and it was their friendship more than anything that helped turn Billy’s life around.
It was Betsy Bates who introduced Billy to Sally Duffield, the woman who was to become his wife. Billy and Sally hit it off immediately. Sally was a redhead with incredible ice-blue eyes and skin like an old-fashioned porcelain doll. She had a small waist, large breasts, and a full-throated, infectious laugh that could fill a room. She was kind and maternal and had a steady job as a legal secretary. Billy wasn’t in love with her but he liked her a lot, and he wanted children. So did she. There didn’t seem any reason to wait.
For the first five years the marriage was happy. Both Billy and Sally were busy, Billy with the car-repair business and Sally with their baby daughter, Jennifer. Jenny Hamlin was the apple of both her parents’ eyes, as round and fat as a dumpling, permanently covered in floury talcum powder and cooing adorably at anyone who cared to smile at her. Billy’s only sadness was that his father, Jeff, hadn’t lived long enough to meet his granddaughter and to see his son so happy and settled. As Jenny Hamlin grew, strong and pretty and funny as all hell—no one was faster on the draw with the one-liners than Jenny—so her parents’ love for her grew as well.
Unfortunately their love for each other, never really more than a friendship to begin with, began to fade. When Sally went back to work and fell for one of her colleagues, it wasn’t so much the affair that upset Billy as the fact that he didn’t care about it. At all. When another man sleeping with your wife is a matter of complete indifference to you, something is probably wrong. And so quietly, amicably, and without an iota of drama, the Hamlins divorced.