Perhaps Charlie took a moment to lean against the railing and complain about the change in the sky. Maybe he lit a cigarette, something he did occasionally to keep Eli company. He might have said something about me, the reason I wasn’t there. “Brett could tell from the last time you called that you weren’t taking your meds.”
What might Eli have said at the mention of my name? That a hundred years ago I would have been a prostitute? In frustration and sadness, Charlie might have dropped his head into his hands. Or just narrowed his eyes and looked down to snuff out the cigarette in the seashell ashtray. Enough time for Eli to grab the hammer and bring it down with lunatic force; not enough time for Charlie to stand up straight, turn around, and exert his superior strength.
One blow to stun Charlie sideways, lurching and surprised. Another blow to bring him to the ground as he tried to stagger upright. With the second blow, the blood began, and then a third that sprayed country fair splatter on Eli’s white shirt. There was a picture in one of the photo albums of Eli making one of those spray paintings, squirting paint from a plastic ketchup bottle into the whirling vortex, his head bent, serious and intent.
The coroner said it was the fourth blow that killed Charlie; by then, he would have been on the ground, unconscious. For this killing blow, the perpetrator turned the hammer around and used the claw. There must have been some sign from Charlie—a final gurgle or cessation—to signal that the attack could stop. And then the killer returned with the knife.
I turned a stiff, glue-stained page, and a picture of a childhood dog, a slender-nosed collie, reminded me that I’d forgotten to insert Lightfoot into my imaginings. Where had she been? In the open doorway, watching Eli do it? Or maybe on the lawn, in Eli’s arms as he watched someone else. She would have struggled against his grip, broken free, run to the spot beneath the front porch where I’d found her. At the base of my skull, the headache started to form, not far from the location where Charlie had received his first blow. Enough. I started to slide the album back into its place, then changed my mind. One day Sarah would want to have it.
Walking down the beach with the photo album tucked under my arm, I looked out at the water. To my left, the Huber’s beach steps, in great disrepair, whole slats missing, some clearly rotten in the middle. Charlie used to sneak up and slide their kayak from underneath the deck, sometimes hauling it over to our house for months at a time, always returning it before Memorial Day and the family’s annual return. No doubt the Hubers wondered about the new pings and scratches. Or maybe they didn’t—judging from the steps, they didn’t pay too much attention to light maintenance. Or heavy maintenance, for that matter. I imagined Charlie walking up the stairs, his foot slicing through any one of the sagging, rotting boards. And then I noticed a step toward the top, sliced clean through, its innards only a pale brown—whereas the other splintered boards were black with months or years of exposure. I put the photo album down on the bottom step and headed up, walking very carefully, placing my feet on the edges so they wouldn’t break through. Kneeling by the broken step, I pressed my fingers against damp and splintered wood. Then I stood and headed up to the house.
The Huber place was much like the Mosses’, gray-shingled and modest, standing low to the ground. Wide windows facing the water for lovely views. It also had the look of a house shut up for winter, all the outside furniture gone, curtains drawn, the driveway empty of vehicles. Days upon days of quiet gathered, settling in around me. I walked over to the deck and peered beneath it. In the wide, dusky space, I saw a few scattered beach toys, a disrupted pile of life jackets, and a rusty old hose attachment. But no paddles and no kayak, only a white smooth space where once it had rested, now slid away from its winter resting place.
BY THE TIME I got back to Daniel’s house, Sarah was wailing and protesting my long absence. I could hear her from down on the beach. When I got up to the lawn, it wasn’t Mrs. Duffy but Daniel holding her in his arms, walking her back and forth while jiggling her in an inexpert attempt at calming. Sarah cried with deep, shuddery sobs, stating the problem over and over: “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy.”
“I’m right here, baby,” I said, throwing the photo album onto the grass and holding out my arms.
Daniel couldn’t hand her over fast enough; he looked almost as despondent as she did. “I think she’s tired,” he said as she wrapped her arms tightly around my neck, her sobs growing louder instead of subsiding. Her diaper was heavy; Daniel wouldn’t know to change her.
I yelled over the noise. “I don’t think Eli did it.”
Daniel’s hand was raised, about to smooth his disheveled hair back into place. Instead he stopped and just placed his hand on top of his head, a perplexed what do I do next expression crossing his face.
“Something you don’t know,” I yelled over Sarah’s crying. My voice was so loud that she stopped, abruptly, leaning back in my arms to examine my face. She wouldn’t understand anything I’d say next. Still, I tried my best to say it in code. “Ladd and I. The day Charlie left. We were together. Here, in his cottage.”
What I had meant to tell Daniel was about the kayak, how it was missing, how someone had been up there very recently. How Eli would have ignored the pile of life jackets and pulled the kayak out to the water. It had been a clear day, better than any you’d see during the official summer, warm enough for short sleeves, the sun determined but muted by the barest amount of cloud cover and an even slighter autumn breeze. Hardly anyone walking on the beach to notice the man, paddling too far from shore, heading toward Provincetown, the curled tip of the flexing arm that made up this spit of land.
I meant to tell Daniel: How frightened Eli would have been after seeing Charlie killed. How a knowledge of himself as suspect—or simply the old resistance to hospitalization and the electric miscalculations in his brain—could have caused him to flee, paddling through the day and into the night, and stopping short of Provincetown, maybe in Wellfleet. I imagined him heading to the trails he used to love to bike. Not much of a place for hiding. Maybe he hiked out to Lieutenant Island at low tide, letting himself into someone’s summer home. Row after row of seasonal houses would offer changes of clothes, and beds, even food. He could hunker down, living on canned goods and bottled water, house to house, until one day he decided a walk was in order before it got too cold. Or else until he forgot the reason he’d run away in the first place, and paddled back, to find me.
“I know,” Daniel said.
Sarah dropped her head onto my shoulder. I swayed from my hips, moving her back and forth, feeling her dreamy gaze out toward sea, and knowing her eyelids were closing. I wasn’t sure how much I’d said aloud, how much I’d only thought.
“Ladd told me,” Daniel said. “I saw you that day, driving away. And I asked him about your visit. He was very upset, even before what happened to Charlie. He told me.”
My eyes stung. I nodded, wondering if Ladd had told him about Deirdre. And then I said, “I feel like I should tell the police.”
“I already did,” Daniel said. “And so did Ladd.”
“Ladd told them?”
“Yes, right away. That day . . .” He trailed off, looking at Sarah. Not wanting to say The day Charlie died. “They came to the house to interview him, and he told them everything.”
“But then, why didn’t they ask me about it?”
“Because,” Daniel said. He stepped in closer and reached out his hand. For a moment, I thought he was going to touch me, but instead he stroked the top of Sarah’s head, her breathing slowed to sleep. “Because you’re grieving. And you’re not a suspect. Neither is Ladd.”
I could hear Daniel’s voice, powerful man, in third person instead of second, instructing the police not to bother me with this detail, all the details, of Ladd and me. She’s grieving. What would he have said to keep them away from Ladd?
Daniel’s face looked so calm and sympathetic. Forgiving me. But I didn’t want to be forgiven. I wanted to know what happened to Charlie. If I tol
d Daniel about the kayak, he would walk into the house and phone the police. One more piece of information, one more thing they knew to look for.
“Look,” Daniel said. “All the evidence, including your own eyewitness. It’s very clear. Who did this.”
“It’s not clear,” I said. “It’s not clear to me.” I thought about mentioning the other possibility, something Deirdre-related, but the thought of Daniel’s knowing about that, Charlie’s betrayal, was too awful.
He stood there, quietly, staring at me, feeling too badly for me to contradict what was obvious to him, what was obvious to everyone. Except me.
“So what happens,” I said, not wanting to argue any further, “when they catch him?”
“I imagine a trial. And then a hospital.”
A hospital. And what sort of hospital would it be? Even before this—before being accused of a crime—the wide and rolling lawns that Daniel had paid for were far behind Eli. People grow weary of mental illness. The way it rises, again and again. The way it never gets cured, never goes away. I had grown weary of it the day I left Charlie alone at the house. I couldn’t handle the reappearances of Eli, in all his various states, the way we’d martial ourselves to get him hospitalized, to get him well, get him working, only to land in precisely the same spot, over and over again. Eli’s hospitals had already gone from private to state. And now they would end with the only permanent one possible: for the criminally insane. If he landed there, would it feel any different to him, from all the other incarcerations, against his will? The unspeakable horror, he once wrote to Charlie, about mental hospitals.
Unless Eli managed to paddle away, to somewhere else. I nodded to Daniel as if I believed him and headed into the house, his hand sliding off Sarah’s head, so that finally he could reach up and smooth his hair back into place.
I PUSHED THE DOOR to our room open with my hip, the sleeping child draped heavily over my shoulder, to find Ladd there, sitting on my bed, his legs resting sideways to keep his shoes off the covers. This the only indication of politeness—he looked agitated, angry.
“What was that?” he said. “What the hell was that?”
“Shh,” I hissed, waving my hand toward Sarah, though she was out cold.
Ladd swung around, placing his feet on the floor, and I laid Sarah on the bed. “Get me a diaper,” I said to Ladd, jutting my chin toward the bag in the corner.
He stood up obediently while I unsnapped Sarah’s onsesie and peeled off the soaking diaper.
“You shouldn’t be in here,” I said as he handed me a clean one.
“Eli didn’t do it?” Ladd said.
I wondered how he possibly could have heard—through which open window. Had he already been waiting in my room? Or maybe he’d been standing on the deck or skulking in the bushes, watching me.
“Shhh,” I said again. I lifted Sarah and placed her up toward the head of the bed and then built my little barrier of pillows around her.
“That doesn’t seem safe,” Ladd said, his voice shifting to normal. “Shouldn’t you put her in the crib?”
“What the hell business is it of yours?” I all but shouted at him. We both paused, startled, then looked at Sarah. She didn’t stir, her cheeks crimson, her little chest rising and falling.
“Maybe it’s not,” Ladd said in a fierce whisper. “But that other business. You can say it’s not mine all you want, but that doesn’t make it so.”
“You can say Eli did it all you want. Everyone can say it. But that doesn’t make it so.”
“Who then,” Ladd said. “If not Eli, who.”
I sat down on the bed, placing one hand on the flushed rise and fall of Sarah. “I don’t know.”
“No suspect?”
I didn’t answer. Ladd should have been able to figure it out, my mental list of possibilities.
“Me?” Ladd said. He pointed to his chest. “Seriously? Have you gone that crazy?”
“No,” I said, knowing full well what crazy looked like. “I haven’t gone crazy, not at all.”
Just at that moment, Daniel appeared in the doorway. I wondered where the dog had gone, probably cowering downstairs under some furniture. Ladd stepped back, away from me, and looked at his uncle.
“Ladd,” Daniel said.
Ladd raised his hands in surrender and stalked out of the room. For a long moment, it was just the three of us, Sarah, Daniel, and me, silent in the scar of Ladd’s angry departure. It hit me then, the isolation there, the lack of neighboring houses. I felt myself longing for Amherst, the reliable rows of residences, people living side by side—strangers, but there if you needed them. To hear, if you should happen to call out for help.
WHEN I FINALLY WENT downstairs, Mrs. Duffy handed me a glass of sun-brewed iced tea with a sprig of mint. The glass felt cold and alien in my hand. So strange that all these cheerful substances insisted on continuing, existing, expecting me to enjoy them. I carried it out to the deck. From where I stood, I could see Daniel’s car was gone, and I could also see Ladd, out on the beach, sitting in a lawn chair and reading a book. How long had it been since I’d known he was back from Honduras? More than two weeks, and I hadn’t yet gotten around to asking him what it had been like or what he planned to do next. Ladd was the same age as Charlie, after all, and hadn’t managed to get himself any more situated in a career. I guess I’d never thought about that much, partly because Ladd had enough money of his own to stay afloat, even if he only ever wafted from one adventure to another. Or maybe I’d just never thought about it because I wasn’t married to him.
I saw exactly what happened. What had Eli meant? And why could I never stop trying to attach meaning and sense to the things he said when by now I should know better? My mind cataloged the things that Eli could and could not have seen. He couldn’t have seen me climbing into Ladd’s lap and kissing him. But he could have seen someone lowering the hammer. Did Eli think it was me? Years ago he had tried to warn me. Maybe he thought that now, not heeding his warning, I had reached my breaking point and killed Charlie myself.
Whatever Eli saw, or imagined, or hallucinated. The day Charlie died, he arrived before sunset. The two of them could have walked down to the water. Afterward Charlie might have sent him upstairs to shower, and maybe that’s when Eli wrote his letter, slipped it into my book. I closed my eyes. Most likely it was a coincidence that he would accuse me of something on the very day I’d committed a crime. If he had even written it that day. Misfiring synapses for once getting lucky.
Out on the beach, Ladd turned a page, his long pale legs stretched out in front of him—they might be sunburned when he came back up to the house. I thought of his aspirations of being a great good man, and how I managed to get in the way, even all those years after leaving him. Upstairs, he had declared himself a suspect by denying that possibility. And I understood the impulse, both of us guilty.
Ladd closed his book and stood to fold the beach chair. I went back into the house and hurried up the stairs, out of sight.
OVER THE NEXT FEW days, pictures of Sylvia began returning to frames and tabletops. Sarah discovered the first one on a side table in the living room. She picked it up in both hands and frowned, deeply disappointed to find the lady in a place where anyone in the world could see her. After returning the picture very carefully to its spot, she opened the drawer beneath it. The little leather envelope remained, but Sarah closed the drawer, then toddled toward the sliding glass door, Lightfoot click-clacking behind her. Sarah placed her hands against the wide pane, staring out at the deck and scrub oak abutting the bluff—too small to see over the dunes and down to the beach. The dog stood beside her, staring out in the same direction, her tail wagging, not understanding why anyone would leave such a door closed.
A loud voice from Daniel’s study made Sarah turn away from the glass door and I took a moment to study my daughter’s face. She looked a little like Eli just then, with the little dog at her heels and the expression of surprise squinching her eyes at the corners. Wh
en I first knew Eli, he had reveled in the unexpected. He’d been so unafraid and so kindhearted.
Sarah’s hand traveled from the glass to rest on the top of Lightfoot’s tiny black head. My fingertips lingered on the frame. This house, without insulation, was meant for summer habitation, the walls and floorboards mere partitions. Sound carried so easily. I could hear Daniel talking on the phone in his study.
“It’s preposterous,” he said now. “We’re talking about one man, who can’t string a coherent sentence together. How can it be that he’s still at large?”
A moment later, Daniel called to me from his study. I walked down the hall. The door was open, and he sat at his desk. “Come in,” he said, gesturing at the chair opposite him as if I’d arrived for a business meeting. Sitting down, I noticed another framed picture of Sylvia, perched on the desk.
“I’m going into Boston,” Daniel said, “to meet with a private investigator. The police obviously aren’t accomplishing anything. This guy will look for Eli full-time. Then you can get on with your life.”
I nodded, wondering what that would entail. Returning to Amherst and finishing my dissertation? Applying for teaching jobs? Or staying here, with Daniel? I pictured an eternity within these walls, on this beach, traveling back and forth between the two houses, never venturing beyond appointed ground.
“I’m going to spend the night there,” Daniel said, “and take care of some business I’ve been neglecting. Mrs. Duffy can stay here at the house if you’re not comfortable being alone. Or Ladd can.”
Was it my imagination, or was this last offer a test, some faint challenge in the moment before he blinked? “No,” I said. “We’ll be fine.” And then, picturing the empty house, just me and Sarah, I amended. “Maybe, if Mrs. Duffy doesn’t mind staying, that would be better.”
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