by Rice, Luanne
“Nothing can make this problem go away,” Alise said. “That's what we're dealing with. We started something that used to be so simple. It was all paper till Sean screwed up!”
“She's not paper,” Mark said.
“I know that. Jesus! That's what's making this so—impossible.”
Eliza heard someone shifting in the front seat; turning around to look at her as the van kept moving. Couldn't they see that she was a real live person, her father's daughter? She raised her bound feet, let them clang to the van floor.
“Christ, I can't take this anymore,” Mark said.
“What's the alternative?” Alise asked sharply. “Just pull yourself together. We'll do it now, okay? We're almost there; the tide is high enough.”
“This isn't like Sean,” Mark said. “She's not bleeding to death—”
“That part was an accident,” Alise said. “Who could have expected him to fight like that?”
“We should have just left him on the boat,” Mark said bitterly. “He would have died there, and no one would have thought it was anything.”
“Except maybe he wouldn't have. Remember the facts, okay? He was strong, he was still conscious. He was talking about this one here—” Eliza could almost feel herself being pointed at.
“She's a kid,” Mark said, lowering his voice.
“Now you're sounding like Sean. Do you want to end up in prison?”
“No.”
“Then . . .”
Eliza had been holding herself back, afraid of annoying them, but suddenly the logic and reason part of her brain shut off, and the panic and terror part took over and she began kicking and thrashing, screaming behind the sticky slimy patch of duct tape.
“Put an end to this,” Mark said. “Jesus, I can't take this anymore.”
“Clear your head,” Alise said, and she must have opened her window, because suddenly Eliza felt a blast of cold air, a wonderful, icy, refreshing gust of fresh air swirling through the closed-in horrible maroon death van as it kept moving, but slowly, slowly.
ANNIE WENT DOWNSTAIRS, TO THE KITCHEN TABLE. SHE had made the model right here; there was a cabinet filled with scissors, glue, paper, paint—craft things to keep the family busy on rainy days.
She shook her small model dory, and it rattled again. But she had built the boat herself, entirely of wood and glue; there were no nails or any other moving parts.
She examined the boat, and all was exactly as she had built it: not a seam, not a frame, not a board was out of place.
The clock read twelve-twelve. Twelve minutes past midnight.
She tipped the boat to port, heard something roll and hit the left side; then she tipped it to starboard, heard the same something hit the right side.
She had built the model with strips of balsa glued to fine frames, and she had inserted a cutout bottom, carefully made to fit directly inside the boat itself and provide a sturdy deck. Now, examining it under the bright kitchen light, she saw little scratches in the paint—as if someone, at one time, had tried to pry the bottom up.
“What are you doing there?” Tara asked, coming into the kitchen.
“Just trying to figure something out,” Annie said, concentrating. Tara watched for a few seconds, then went to the stove and put the kettle on.
“Want some tea?” Tara asked.
“No, thanks,” Annie said, although she felt comforted by the question.
She reached into the craft cabinet for the long tweezers Billy used to use during the two months—more like two minutes—that he was a stamp collector. He'd gotten a starter kit for Christmas one year, and he was bound and determined to become a philatelist. Annie almost laughed now, remembering how he couldn't even pronounce the word, but how he had saved every stamp on every letter that came to the house.
His long tweezers came in handy now, though. Annie used them to loosen the tiny seats, to remove them, and to pry up the boat's deck. She was afraid the piece of balsa, just eight inches long and pointed at one end, flat at the other, would break, so she worked very slowly and carefully.
But she did it. She lifted the deck out of the boat, and looking at what was hidden beneath, gasped. Tears filled her eyes at the sight of the small gray-blue periwinkle shell, at the folded note in her father's handwriting.
“What is it?” Tara asked, leaning over to see.
“Something from Daddy,” Annie whispered.
“Do you want me to read it for you?” Tara asked, as Annie unfolded the paper.
But Annie, seeing the first words, shook her head. “No,” she said. “It's to me. I'll read it.” And she did, out loud.
“Dear Annie,
You know that bankers write a lot of letters, but this is the hardest letter I've ever written in my life. Maybe because I'm writing it to one of the people I love the most—there are four of you: you, Billy, Peggy, and your mom. No man ever had a better family. And no man ever screwed it up more. Maybe I can still fix things, make them right.
I have a lot on my mind, and you're the one I'm going to tell it to. Annie, I hope you never have to read this letter. Because if you're reading it, it means I'm gone. I can't imagine what you and everyone must be thinking. But I hope what I have to say here will help you understand—and help the others, too. I'm putting this letter into your boat, and leaving it with Dan Connolly. I'm looking at this boat you made me, knowing how much I love you. I'm going to leave it somewhere safe, with someone who will give it back to you.
The reason I'm writing to you is that you're my oldest daughter, and right now I'm thinking about someone else's daughter. Her name is Eliza. She's the daughter of an old friend of your mother's, and she's on my mind all the time now. She's the girl in all my thoughts and fears because she's in danger. Something I did put her there.
I did some things I'm not proud of. I got tempted at the bank, made some very bad choices. People trusted me, including my own family, and I destroyed that trust. I was greedy, Annie, and I'm not blaming anyone but myself for that.
Other things, however . . . Mark and Alise Boland murdered Eliza's mother, Charlotte Connolly. I had nothing to do with that, Annie—I want you to know that. But I stayed silent, because I knew that my part in the embezzlement would come out, and silence is another way of being involved. Of looking the other way, making it possible. What I won't make possible is them hurting Eliza. They want to kill her, because she witnessed the hit-and-run of her mother. I'm going to go to the police, to turn them in and—also, myself. For what I've done at the bank.
There's a cove, down the road from the marina. I'm sitting there now, in my car. In fact, I walked down to the edge of the water and found this shell for you. The blue reminds me of your mother's eyes.
The name of the spot, and you can see it on the chart, is Alewife Cove. It's an inlet between the Gill River and the Sound. I'm telling you because it's a place I love to come and sit. I showed it to the Bolands once, when we went down to make plans, and they said it would be a good place to take Eliza. That's when I knew they were serious.
I'm writing this to you, Annie, hoping that you can forgive me. When I finish this letter, I'm driving over to Eliza's father's boatyard, to hide this in your model boat. That way you won't get it too soon—and maybe I'll have the chance to make everything right. You deserve a real rowboat as pretty as the model you made for me. I finally figured out that I'm the luckiest man—father—in the world. I just hope I have the chance to prove it to you and the others. I love you.
Love, Dad”
Annie had started out reading the letter out loud, but midway through she had become choked up with tears, and by the end she couldn't speak or even read at all, so Tara had taken over.
Now, sobbing silently, Annie reached out her hand, and Tara gently put the letter in her fingers. Tara's arms came around Annie's shoulders, and although Annie was talking to her dad, she didn't mind that Tara could hear the words: “We love you, Daddy. We love you, too.”
Now Tara left Ann
ie sitting there, holding the letter and the shell. She took another piece of paper that had been hidden in the boat—beneath the deck, along with his note—and went to the phone.
Annie stared at the tiny periwinkle shell, turning it over and over in her hand.
“Bay?” Tara said. “Is Joe there? He left? Listen to me. Annie just found a letter from Sean . . . Yes, I'm serious . . . she found it in the bottom of her boat, her model boat . . . He had wedged it under the floorboards . . . Bay, it's part confession part something else . . . He says they wanted to kill Eliza . . . there, at Alewife Cove . . . Do you think—?”
Annie was silent, listening, and so, apparently, was Tara.
“Go, then,” Tara said hurriedly. “I'll get ahold of Joe.”
33
AND THEY WEREN'T SURE; AND THEY DIDN'T know, but how could they not check? How could they not get into Dan's truck and, just in case, drive to the Gill River? Bay had called the police; she knew that Tara was calling Joe Holmes.
Dan drove crazily, down the middle of the road, as if his truck was a missile, shooting straight for the Alewife Cove and prepared to take out anything in his way.
“What would they be doing there?” Bay asked, holding on to the door handle. “Why would they have taken Eliza to the same place?”
“Because that's where they killed Sean,” Dan said, swerving to pass a car. “Because they know they can do it there.”
“They killed Sean,” Bay whispered, in shock over the revelation, the confirmation that her husband had been murdered by people they thought were friends. But more intense, immediate, was a growing terror for Eliza's life.
“You know the waters over here better than I do,” Dan said, referring to the creeks and coves across the Thames, meandering through the towns west to the Connecticut River. “So you have to tell me where to go.”
Bay directed him off the highway at Silver Bay, told him to turn right, toward Black Hall. Her heart was shimmering; it felt hot in her chest and sore, almost skinned, with the unbearable news propelling them forward. She touched her chest, felt pain under her fingertips, thought of Eliza, thought of Annie reading her father's letter, thought of Sean and bowed her head.
“Now where?” Dan asked, his voice a little loud, frantic. He was keeping it together, but just barely.
“Along the river, a quarter mile,” she said as she saw the Connecticut gleaming darkly across the narrow strip of land, the river full and black under the starlit sky. “Then left here,” she said, “and right just past that boulder . . .”
Water gave life to water. The Connecticut River was the parent of tributaries, and Long Island Sound provided an inflow to hidden coves. The river was tidal here. It was brackish, the water neither quite fresh nor all salt, but still home to saltwater species—bluefish, weakfish, flounder, fluke. And in winter, seals were sighted, seeking rocks and good fishing.
Bay leaned forward, watching the road, trying to find the right turnoff. She had come down here alone this summer, just once, to see the spot where her husband's life had ended.
“There,” she said, pointing at the narrow lane.
Dan turned the truck, and they bounced over a series of potholes. It was quiet, untraveled, back here. In the summer, people sometimes came down for picnics and fishing, and during very cold winters, kids sometimes looked for ice thick enough to skate on. But right now, in the dead of November, there was no one here.
Or maybe there was.
Up ahead, blending into the darkness, was a wine-red van. It was camouflaged by night, but the headlights of Dan's truck picked it out as they came around the corner. Beside the van, like two deer caught in the headlights, were two people, their faces white in the light.
“Where is she?” Dan shouted before he even parked the truck. “Where's Eliza?”
Bay fumbled with the door, shocked despite everything she now knew to see the Bolands here in this tangle of white pines at the edge of this salty cove, in this place where they had already killed her husband.
“Eliza!” Bay screamed.
Alise and Mark ran for the van; Alise jumped inside, and Bay heard the engine start up at the same second she heard Dan's fist smash Mark's jaw.
“Where's Eliza?” Dan shouted, and his punches landed again and again. “Where's my daughter?” The van rumbled to life, the headlights firing on, hanging in the air for a split second as Mark clung to the passenger door, trying to shake free of Dan, crashing onto his face as Alise threw the van into reverse, swung onto the rutted road, and drove away, plunging them into darkness.
But not before—for one brief, God-given second—Bay saw Eliza's face, chalk white, like a shorebird, her ferocious eyes raking the sky, begging the angels to come down from heaven, those eyes reflected in the white headlights of the maroon van, and then the red taillights, before sinking into the dark and brackish cove.
Bay ran for the water. She kicked off her shoes and dropped her jacket on the ground. She didn't think twice. The first jolt was the worst—icy cold frigid water on her toes and then her body and then in her mouth. Her clothes turned into dead weight instantly, anchoring her body, dragging her down into the cove.
Gulping water, spinning then swimming downward, hands flailing around because her eyes were of no use whatsoever; her only vision was coming from somewhere else, either deep inside or high above. It was the vision of the heart—Bay's own, but also Charlie's and Sean's, guiding her, sending her plunging to the very bottom of the cove, this inlet of the Sound and tributary of Gill River, down down down as she used her hands to feel and see, the way lobsters use their antennae.
And she heard silence in her ears, huge, thunderous silence, underwater silence . . . she had never imagined drowning before, but she was experiencing it now, all but the last breaths of seawater . . . a few wrong seconds, a desperate drawing in, and it would happen, and it would be all over. She would drown . . . and Eliza would drown . . . in this water, salt mixed with fresh mixed with Sean's blood. Her husband had bled into this cove; his car had driven straight to the bottom, his last stop on this earth. The minerals of Sean McCabe's blood had joined these molecules of water.
He was dead and Charlie was dead, but Bay and Dan were alive, and they were both in the water now. And Bay felt moved by the spirits of Charlie and Sean, parents who had tried to live and tried to love as well as they could, and had made so many mistakes, and whose journeys had ended far too soon; and Bay saw this as their last chance to make things right, to save what they had nearly, themselves, killed.
And Bay's fingers touched wood, a drowned log at the bottom of the cove, and they brushed weed, swaying in the current, only Bay knew: It wasn't wood, and it wasn't weed. Her lungs burning, she tangled her fingers in the hair, and she gathered the body into her arms, and with her legs kicking, a mother swan moving her cygnet through a patch of dangerous water, Bay brought Eliza to the surface.
Dan was beside her as they broke the surface, as Bay sputtered and passed his daughter into his arms. They emerged from the icy water to find a theater of blue light, strobes blinking from the forest. Crawling in the mud, Bay choked and spit out water and dead leaves. Her hand so numb she couldn't even feel her fingers, she reached over to Eliza's mouth and pulled off the silver tape.
Eliza's eyes were shut, her face blue, her lips white.
Danny heaved himself up from the mud, holding the young girl he'd brought into this world, and watching him Bay thought of Annie's birth, how Sean had taken their baby into his arms and held her while she cried for the first time. She watched as Dan slapped her back, trying to get her to spit the water out. He tilted back her head, shook her hard, kissing her face, frantically lowering her to the ground.
“Eliza,” he said, as if he was just waking her up for school. Then he took a breath and blew it into his daughter's mouth. Then another, then another.
“Come back,” Bay said, her voice cracking, and she could have sworn she heard the wings of angels fluttering in the air, of Sean and
Charlie themselves hovering over Eliza.
But the words, whoever had spoken them, were filled with power. And so was Dan's will to save Eliza, and so, especially, was Eliza's need to survive.
Because she coughed. She coughed very hard, and she rolled over, to throw up seawater. She retched for a long time. And when she stopped, she looked up into her father's face, right into his eyes, and she said, “Daddy,” and she threw her arms around his neck and started to cry.
34
THE WINTER SEEMED VERY LONG, LONGER THAN IT ever had.
Christmas came and went, and for the first time in her life, and as much as she had to be grateful for, Bay was glad when it was over. The moons passed, some in a clear sky, others obscured by fog, by clouds, by driving snow. Bay kept an internal clock of the lunar cycles, always acknowledging the power and brutality of nature—in the sky, in the garden, in her own life.
So much in life seemed new, unfamiliar. She watched the news, read the papers, had to ask herself whether she had been sleeping through her life, surrounded by people she thought she knew, she thought were friends. People she had never known at all.
Mark and Alise Boland were charged with murder, attempted murder, kidnapping, bank fraud, conspiracy, and embezzlement. Frank Allingham had been involved, too, and was charged with bank fraud, conspiracy, and embezzlement. Sean's role had come to light: He had embezzled from his clients, but at the end he had died because he'd been opposed to killing Eliza.
“How stupid could I have been? How could I have missed it all?” she asked Tara one night in March.
“You missed it because you have trust,” Tara said. They were bundled up in pajamas and robes, listening to a fierce gale roar off the Sound. “Because you loved Sean. Because you looked at Alise and Mark and saw them as friends.”
“I thought they were friends,” she said. “And so did Sean. And they killed him.”