Cape Fear

If you're ever out on the beach in Provincetown, Mass. -- the place at the very end where Cape Cod coils in a kind of fist -- you might see a man wading in the sea, looking down in the water. It's Tony Jackett and he's on the job in his position of monitoring the health of the oyster beds in town.

Jackett: The shellfish are really very important in keeping our coastal waters clean.  They work like a treatment plant.

Jackett is a fisherman's son, a genial guy, who is sort of the unelected mayor of main street Provincetown.

Jackett: You do have those familiar faces ... Even if you don't know them really well, you see them on a regular basis and if you have that friendly smile ... I think that's one of the real charms of the town.

Because Provincetown is what it is -- a charming 19th century village favored by artists, writers and gay men and women -- you might think that blue-collar fishermen's descendants wouldn't fit into such an eclectic community. 

But Tony and the other sons of fishermen are welcomed to be part of Provincetown's rich chowder of individualists.

One of Tony's longtime friends is avant-garde artist Jay Critchley. Provincetown is his love.

Jay Critchley: It's like an onion.  There's one layer of culture over another layer of culture over another layer of culture.  So there's always exciting, interesting people coming into town.

It didn't strike Tony's artist friend as strange that the onetime fisherman would strike up a relationship across class lines with a Vassar grad who'd been a top fashion writer in New York and Paris.

Critchley: He started telling me about this relationship he was having with Christa.
Dennis Murphy: Did you know who she was?
Critchley: Well, I knew the Worthington family.
Murphy: That's a name here, isn't it?
Critchley: That's a name.

Tony told him he'd fallen into an easy sex, no-strings-attached-affair in the summer of 1997 with the flirtatious woman in the shack across from where he worked as a Truro harbormaster.

There were no strings attached, that is, until Christa broke the news.

Jackett: I was in a state of shock, because she had reassured me there was no way that she could get pregnant.  Doctors had told her she couldn't get pregnant.

But she was pregnant and Tony Jackett, the married father of six, was about to be the father of seven. He thought Christa had used him and set him up.

Jackett: She was, you know, looking to have a baby basically.  And looking back on how things took place, you know …
Murphy: Do you think she manipulated you into becoming a father?
Jackett: Most definitely.

They talked about arrangements and ever-independent Christa assured Tony, he says, that she'd raise the baby on her own in her father's weathered gray bungalow above the salt pond.

Tony said he broke up with Christa not long after that, and he didn't even tell his wife when a baby with a mop of Brillo hair like his was born and named Ava.

Village whispers started.

Critchley: The baby does look like Tony.  Has a Tony look.
Murphy: That would cause people to chatter a little bit, right?
Critchley: It would. It would.  It did.

But then, according to Tony Jackett, Christa changed the ground rules on raising the baby. Now she wanted Tony to publicly acknowledge the child and tell his wife.

He was convinced that Christa wanted to haul him in like a catch in one of those famous Worthington family nets.

Jackett: I think the reason why she told me that she was pregnant was she might be hoping that I would leave my wife to be with her … She, I think, got vindictive because she got rebuked.

But you could look at it and say that Christa had had her fill of Tony and was moving past him. More than a year after the baby was born, she was coping with the emotional turmoil of yet another failed romance.

This time the boyfriend was an artist who lived near her cottage. He was named Tim Arnold and he talked to local writer Maria Flook when she set down an account of the Christa Worthington story in a book.

Arnold, the neighbor, said the affair had been as brief as it was turbulent.

Flook: I think he was very genuine in his affection for Christa's daughter.  I think that Tim had at least for a time been very in love with Christa.

Months into the relationship, she called it quits with her artist neighbor. Longtime friends detected some restlessness in Christa. Her decades-back Manhattan roommate thought she might be considering a return to fashion writing.

Mulvaney: She was putting her foot back in to see about getting back in.

It was a tempting idea that may have burned more brightly over the Christmas holidays in 2001 when she took Ava to New York with her.

There were rounds of glittering cocktail parties and reconnecting with old friends.

Perhaps she was still turning it all over in her mind a week later when she returned to the solitude of the Cape in the dead of winter.

The last picture that would be taken of Christa Worthington alive would be a security camera that captured her in a moment of domestic drudgery, pushing Ava through the aisles of a local market.

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