Stone Cove Island (15 page)

“What’s up?” I said to Meredith, sitting down. She looked a little pained.

“Oh,” she said. “Pete just asked me to the Halloween dance.”

“Was he bummed you said no?”

“I didn’t say no,” she said.

“What?” She ignored the question, staring off across the quad, looking miserable. I followed her gaze to the
parking lot, where Tim McAllister was just walking up the steps from the parking lot.

“Oh no,” I said. “You didn’t ask Tim yet.”

“No,” she said. “Not yet. Who are you going with?”

I loved that about her: thoughtful, even in her darkest moments.

“Charlie,” I said without hesitation, though I’d just decided myself. He would go, I thought. He was a nice enough guy to put himself through one night back in high school to make me happy. The idea brought a smile to my lips.

But Meredith barely heard me. Tim was headed straight for us, looking right at Meredith. And looking nervous.

“I should—” I started to get up. Meredith grabbed my wrist, clinging to me for dear life. “Ow!”

“Stay. Please?” I sat back down. Tim slowed, seeing that I’d settled back in, but he was too close to us now to stop without looking like he was turning away.

“Hey, Meredith,” he said. “Hey, Eliza.” An afterthought, but I was fine with that.

“Hi, Tim!” I said, super friendly, after Meredith let a long, tongue-tied silence elapse.

“I was wondering if you’re going to the Halloween dance,” he said to Meredith. Poor guy. He was desperate to get it over with. “I mean, if you wanted to go. With me.”

Meredith looked miserable. I beat a retreat, making noises about something I needed to turn in before first bell.
Ha
, I said to myself.
I knew he liked her too
. It filled me with a strange happiness, even though my best friend was cringing right now. At least there were still some things
on Stone Cove Island I could be certain of. Not everything had changed. For most people, in fact, nothing had changed at all.

THE FOLLOWING WEEK
, I was distracted in school, but I was hardly the only one. Kids had lost their schoolbooks and all their homework from the entire fall in the storm. Kids had moved out of their ruined houses and had to improvise pens, paper and backpacks. The computer terminals in the school library had long lines at all times of the day, even with the extended hours that had been added. There were sign-up sheets divided into half-hour blocks. If there were any slots left open, they were usually before 8
A.M
. or after 10
P.M.
I couldn’t imagine writing, say, my paper on “The Individual versus Society in
The Glass Menagerie
” in thirty-minute chunks between 6:00 and 6:30
A.M
. Even my teachers seemed dazed. I would sometimes catch Mrs. Russell staring out the window, her thoughts obviously elsewhere, or Mr. Tabersky asking a student to repeat a question he’d missed the first time around.

My dad had fixed my bike. He’d also quit or been fired from Jimmy Pender’s restoration job. I wasn’t sure which. It was not a topic open for discussion. Mom soldiered on in her nervous way, looking increasingly pinched and jumpy. Occasionally she made noises about going back to substitute teaching or tutoring, which Dad quashed before the words were halfway out of her mouth. The idea of her going back to work seemed to insult him.

Dad’s work situation didn’t bother me terribly. What bothered me the most during those tense days was that I’d lost Mom’s diary.

It wasn’t like me at all to lose things. On the other hand, being with Charlie had turned me into not quite my normal self. So I went into Mom-OCD mode. I made mental lists of every place I’d taken it (my house, Dad’s shed, Charlie’s house, school, the diner, the library, and on and on). I backtracked, trying to remember when I had it last, what I’d been doing, what I’d been thinking about, which part I’d been reading last. I tried to see myself in my memory. Had I placed it in the front or back section of my bag? Had I hidden it on the high shelf of the linen closet or in a drawer in my dresser? Did I leave it under my bed?

In the end, I started to wonder if either of my parents had found it and quietly taken it back. It wasn’t in the black bag in Mom’s closet—of course I had checked there—but maybe they had found some new, better hiding place. Maybe this was their way of telling me that it was best to keep silent about the past.

THURSDAY AFTERNOON
, AS I rode my bike past the grounds of my summer camp on the way to Charlie’s, all the campfire songs I’d learned as a kid came back to me in a fractured medley. Round and round in “The Circle Game,” and the one about the father who never had time for his son until it was too late; the soldier and the town that fought for a treasure that turned out to just be a stone that said
Peace on Earth
. They were all about a similar regret, I realized: all
about not appreciating what you had until you lost it and couldn’t get it back.

My dad had done a decent job straightening my wheels, but the front one rubbed in one place so that as it turned it made a metallic moaning sound. I had not been back to the marina, but the rhythmic whine of my bike seemed to bring the marina back to me.

The kitchen at the inn was quiet. The guests who had been stranded by the storm had all gradually found their way back to dry land and no new guests had come to replace them. It was getting close to the slow winter season anyway, but I knew its early arrival this year would stress the Penders and put even more pressure on a successful season next summer. I made my way up the carpeted back stairs.

Oddly, since my dad had fallen out with Jimmy, Charlie’s parents had been much nicer to me. I couldn’t figure out if they’d just accepted the situation and were making the best of it, or if it was more along the lines of “keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”

Charlie and I had planned to be good, by which we meant I would work on my paper and he would work on some short pieces for Jay at
The Gazette
. Ha. We lay on our stomachs on the shaggy white rug in his room. I flipped the pages of
The Glass Menagerie
. Charlie jotted ideas on index cards he spread out around us. If I’m being honest, there was a fair amount of staring into space and staring at each other.

“Oh,” I said at one point. “So, I actually did it. I applied to UCLA.”

“Are you kidding?” He grinned at me, surprised, and leaned over to kiss me. His lips were soft and tickled a little, where they brushed mine. My scalp tingled along the bottom of my hairline. “We’ll see what happens. My test scores are just okay. I’m no Meredith.”

“It’s hard to imagine anyone saying no to you, Eliza.” He kissed me again. We were not going to get any work done. That was clear.

“Like how you couldn’t say no to the Halloween dance?” I asked.

“Exactly like that.” Charlie laughed. He had agreed to go and even dress up. He was going as Clark Kent. I was going as Katniss Everdeen, from
The Hunger Games
, but I hadn’t told him what my costume was going to be. It was going to be a surprise.

“You’re a good sport, Charlie.”

I yawned, rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling. It was perfectly white. No cracks. No chips. I could hear the whirr of the space heater in the corner. Flooding had corroded the inn’s furnace. It had to be replaced, but it was going to be months before they could get a new one here. I wondered who Jimmy would get to help him with his projects now that my dad was out of the picture. Probably they would patch things up and it would all go back to normal in a few weeks. My dad wasn’t hotheaded and neither was Jimmy, as far as I’d experienced. And the options for either of them were limited. They’d most likely have to find a way to work together.

“What are you thinking about?” Charlie asked me.

“Bess,” I answered, because I didn’t want to say I’d
been thinking about our dads or their argument—or wondering why my dad would think Jimmy would mangle my bike and drop it in our driveway like a warning. It wasn’t a lie anyway. I found I was almost always thinking about Bess these days.

“Bess, yeah,” he said. “I’ve been thinking too. About Karen.”

I turned to him. “What about Karen?”

“She’s kind of the missing link. My dad doesn’t remember much about finding Bess’s clothes except that it was upsetting. And he thinks Paul’s a harmless old fool. He told me he’s what we kids would call ‘old school.’ ”

“Ouch.” I cringed at the thought of Jimmy saying that. I could hear it perfectly. Each time Charlie had broached the subject of Bess’s death, his dad had laughed him off good-naturedly, as though he understood Charlie’s journalistic impulses, was even proud of his son, but had nothing to contribute to the story.

“Karen left,” Charlie went on. “She never did interviews. She’s the one person who probably knows the most about Bess and Grant. She’s not going to be worried about talking and what people on the island will think. She’s—”

“Not a joiner?” I quipped, before I could think.

Charlie looked confused. “What?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Just something Nancy Jurovic said.” I didn’t want to hurt his feelings by saying that’s how Colleen had described him. “I just meant she wasn’t part of things. She wouldn’t care what people think. You’re right.”

“What if we called her?” said Charlie.

“And said what? ‘I’m Nancy Drew and this is Frank
Hardy. We’re investigating
The Secret of the Old Lighthouse
and …’ ”

“I could say I was doing a story for the
Gazette
,” Charlie offered.

“She didn’t want to talk to the press at the time,” I said.

“So, tell her the truth. Your mom was a close friend. You just found out about what happened and you want to ask her some questions.”

“So, I’m the one calling her?”

“First of all, you’re a girl. It might come off as less threatening.”

“Thanks a lot,” I said.

“Second, it’s your mom’s diary. We know from what she wrote that they were close. My mom had something with Bess about my dad, even if they were good friends. Your mom used to stay over there. Karen must have known her pretty well and liked her enough to let her stay at their house.”

That made sense. “Okay. I’ll call. We have to find her number though.”

“Already done,” he said, and turned his computer screen toward me. Karen Linsky, 262A Prospect St., Gloucester, MA, followed by the number.

As I let the phone ring, I realized I was nervous. I could feel a chill between my shoulder blades, and my palms were damp, like I was taking a math test or something. Cell phone reception at the inn had never been great, Charlie said, even before the storm. We were calling from a guest room on a land line that had only recently been brought back to life. I kept worrying Cat or Jimmy or anyone
working at the inn might pick up the extension while I was talking to Karen.

The woman who answered had a rough, low voice that sounded charred by years of cigarettes. She listened without comment as I babbled the explanation of who I was, who my mother was and why I was calling. I expected her to hang up on me at every moment, but she didn’t. When I finished, there was a long silence.

Then she said in her harsh, raking voice, “I don’t understand why you’re calling me about this now. Bess has been dead more than twenty years. It’s a little late to be barking up this tree, don’t you think?” She said “barking” with the classic Massachusetts accent:
bahkin
. Then, when I couldn’t think of an answer she said, “How’s your mother, good?”

“She’s okay,” I hedged. “You know, it’s funny but I think she still misses Bess after all this time.”

“She was a good girl,” said Karen. I didn’t know if she meant her daughter or my mother. “I shoulda taken her home after Grant passed, like everybody said I should.”

“Home?” I asked, confused.

“Back to Gloucester. Back where we belonged. It was a mistake, but she seemed happy on the island there.”
They-ya
.

“Was she close to her dad?” I asked.

She made an “eh” noise that sounded like a shrug. “Grant was a good-time boy, even when times were bad, you know what I mean?”

“I’m not sure.”

“The marina. How it all went down. He tried to put on
a show of happy, happy, but then behind that, he’s scrambling to keep things afloat. For a while it looked like he had a sale to this developer, but then … that never happened.” She gave a quick, harsh laugh. Behind it I could hear a whole life of bad luck.

“Didn’t the town buy his business?” I asked.

She laughed. “Right. They ‘bought’ it. Like, he could either get foreclosed or they could take it over. They acted like they were doing him a favor.” So, no inheritance, no jealous uncle. “He knew he was in trouble. What else was he going to do?”

“To do?”

“To get out of it.”

Was I understanding her right? Charlie, who was listening with me, the handset pressed between our ears, pulled away to give me a surprised look.

“Do you mean—” I wasn’t sure how to put it. “Do you think he killed himself?”

“He was a sailor first. I don’t care how drunk they said he was—and he wasn’t that drunk; the medical examiner even said—you don’t end up off your boat and tangled in your anchor.” At this, Charlie mouthed,
Anchor?

“He was alone?” I asked. She didn’t answer. Maybe she nodded, forgetting she was on the phone. There was a flick and crackle as a match was struck.

“You said something about the anchor?” I prodded.

“The anchor of the boat. He got caught up in it. That’s how he drowned.” I could hear her inhale, then blow out the cigarette smoke.

“Were there any other anchors? I mean, did he ever get
one delivered to him or did someone ever give him one? Or Bess?”

There was silence on the line. I couldn’t tell if we’d been disconnected or if she just wasn’t talking. A click and a staticky scratch on the line a moment later, followed by a dial tone, answered my question. She did not want to talk about anchors. In a movie, you would have cut to her, revealing the slab-faced, threatening guy standing next to her. Maybe he would have a knife at her throat, making sure she didn’t make any false moves. But I was letting my imagination run wild. She might just not have known what I was talking about. She might have had enough of talking to some nosy kid, bringing up her dead daughter.