She parked at the pier and turned off her headlights. Camera and tripod in hand, she wandered from spot to spot before choosing the landing at the top of the stairs to the Grill. She disabled the flash and adjusted the settings for dim light, as the manual had suggested she should. Extending the legs of the tripod, she screwed on the camera, opened the monitor, and took a look.
The harbor was quiet, the water as gentle as she had ever seen it. Lobster boats rocked at their moorings; those in slips seemed simply to rise and fall with each breath of the sea. Without the range of color that daylight would bring, the world was simplified. In this predawn dark, with the headlights of pickups raking the dock, the shadows of sleepy lobstermen carrying their gear, and lights going on in one wheelhouse after another, Julia found her drama.
She photographed from the distance, then zoomed in—zoomed back out when another piece of the harbor caught her eye. She captured men rowing to their boats, and those boats motoring out to sea.
As the minutes passed, the light bled from purple to blue to pink. The sky wasn’t clear; clouds were strung out between bands of color.
The play between the two was a subject in itself, evolving as she watched.
When she refocused on the dock, she saw Noah. He stood with his hands on his hips and was looking directly up at her. She straightened and smiled, feeling inordinately pleased when he left his gear there and headed her way. He wore jeans, a sweatshirt, and clogs. His hair was messed, as though he had just come from bed, which she realized he had. It was actually a lovely thought. He was an exceedingly virile man.
He trotted up the stairs and slowed at the last turn. Stopping with several steps left to go, he held the rail on each side. His face was relaxed, mouth gently curved. “Rick says you’ve been here awhile.”
She was still smiling. Couldn’t help it. She liked Noah Prine. His presence was a nice touch to the day. “Rick, huh? I wondered how you knew to look up. No one else has. It’s like I’m hidden, which makes it even more fun taking pictures.”
“Get anything good?”
“I don’t know. I’m not taking the time to look.”
“Isn’t it early to be doing this kind of thing?”
“Not if you want to photograph the harbor coming to life.”
“Are you always up at dawn?”
“In New York, never. Here, it could become a habit.”
He paused and grew serious. “About the other night? I’m sorry if I caused a problem.”
“The problem’s not your doing.”
“Did you work it out?”
She sighed. “If you’re asking whether my daughter accepts that I’m a grown woman with a right to run errands with whomever I choose, I doubt it. In fairness, though, there are other issues involved.” Not caring to go into the whole business with Monte, she reached into her camera bag and pulled out the photos she had printed. “These are for you.”
“Thanks,” he said with an appreciative smile. “I was told to expect them.”
She smiled back, enjoying feeling useful. “The harbor grapevine?”
“Actually, the chief of police, who would love it if you could email these to him. Think you can?”
“Of course.”
“That’d be great. It seems yesterday was a day of complaints,” he tapped the photos against the rail, “like sabotaged traps. But John also got some news. They found a revolver in the wreck of The Beast. It was registered to Artie.”
Julia’s eyes widened in surprise. “To Artie? Was it the one that shot him?”
“They don’t know for sure. They know that one cartridge is missing out of six, and that the caliber is consistent with the hole in Artie’s shoulder. Problem is, if there was proof the gun was fired, the ocean washed it away. Short of finding a bullet lodged in debris from The Beast—something of a needle in a haystack—they can only speculate on whether he was shot by this gun. But there’s another twist. Artie was under investigation by INS agents for smuggling illegal immigrants ashore.”
“On The Beast?” Julia asked in disbelief. Forget stealth; a boat like that would announce itself everywhere it went.
But Noah said, “Artie has another boat. It’s less pretentious, but it can handle itself a ways out from shore, where the transfer would be made. It has a cuddy cabin that could hold sixteen in a pinch. The INS isn’t so much suspecting him of using that boat as of arranging for other boats to do the work.”
“Illegal immigrants.”
“Some used as mules.”
Julia knew the term. “Carrying drugs?”
“Allegedly, enough to make it worth Artie’s while. It’d go a long way toward explaining why he kept flying high after the market bombed.”
“Could the shooting have been related to that?”
“They’re assuming it. Problem is, they can’t find a shooter. There’s no other body with the wreck. There’s no sign that anyone was with Artie at the house. A long-range rifle might do it, but not in that fog.”
Julia was oddly relieved. In a voice barely above a whisper, she said, “At least the gun wasn’t Kim’s. That would have pointed a finger at her.” More hesitantly, she asked, “Is anyone suggesting she was involved?”
Noah, too, spoke quietly. “I didn’t ask. Didn’t want to put a bug in someone’s ear. Far as I know, no one but us knows she wasn’t on the Amelia Celeste.”
“We don’t know, really,” Julia hedged, but Noah’s eyes chided her, and she trusted those eyes. “Amazing, if she was on The Beast, that she survived the crash.”
“Not so amazing,” he remarked. “She could have been on the sun platform at the very back of the boat. Those platforms are flat. There’s no railing around them. Sitting there, she’d have gone flying off at the first impact, even before the explosion.”
“But how could she allow him to drive if he was shot?”
“He might have insisted.”
“But surely when his heart gave out…?”
“She wouldn’t have known it unless she was watching him. What if she was facing the stern?”
“Would she have been able to drive The Beast herself?”
“Technically,” Noah confirmed. “She grew up here. She knows boats. The Beast would have been bigger and louder, but the mechanics are the same.”
“Do you think she was involved with the smuggling?”
He was slow in answering, clearly reluctant. “The guilt’s so bad, she’s not talking. Would a girl that young, with her whole life ahead of her, go totally mute because she survived an accident and others didn’t? Maybe. But I keep thinking there has to be more to the story to explain the guilt she feels.”
Julia thought what he said made total sense, which put her in a bind. Forget smuggling; she kept trying to muster hatred toward Kim for helping a married man cheat on his wife. Monte had had any number of Kims in his life. Julia and she should be worlds apart.
Still, she felt drawn to the girl. “Maybe it’s time I visit the bluff again.”
By the time she got there, it was late morning and the weather had turned. After those strips of color at dawn, the clouds had spread and thickened, bringing cool air and rain. Until Julia saw the small blue Honda by the ruins of the keeper’s house, she wasn’t even sure Kim would be there, and even then she had to search. She finally spotted the girl tucked in beside the porch of the house, where she was sheltered from vertical rain, though not the more slanted rain blown in on gusts of wind. She wore a yellow slicker, but the hood was down. Red hair, pale face, small hands—everything exposed was wet.
Tugging up the hood of her own slicker, Julia took an insulated bag from the seat of the car. The surf pounded and the wind had a bite, but the rain dampened both.
“Hi,” she called, though she had no fear of startling Kim this time. The girl had been watching her from the moment she pulled in, and continued to watch as she approached. “I figured something warm was called for on a day like this.” Several feet from Kim, she set down the bag, unzi
pped it, and pulled out a bag of cookies. “Fresh from my oven,” she said, digging back into the pack and extracting, this time, two travel mugs filled with coffee. She offered one to Kim. “I figured if you were anything like my daughter, you’d take it with cream and sugar.”
Kim said nothing. But she did take the mug. Opening the top, she took a drink. She held it in both hands, seeming to welcome its warmth.
Ignoring the rain, Julia sat down on the ground and opened the bag of cookies. “Still warm,” she announced, cradling the bag in her palm and holding it out.
Kim took one, bit into it, and closed her eyes for an instant while she chewed. There was no mistaking pleasure on a face that was otherwise drawn. Julia wondered if she was eating anything at home. Huddled inside the slicker, she looked smaller than ever.
“Don’t you want your hood up?” Julia asked and, of course, didn’t get an answer. So she ate a cookie herself, between sips of her own coffee, and sat quietly for a time with her legs folded under her slicker.
Kim finished one cookie and took a second, and still Julia didn’t speak—and not by conscious design. Speaking seemed unnecessary. It was beautiful there on the bluff in the rain.
After a time, quite spontaneously, she said, “This is a special place. It’s kind of like you’re away from everything up here.”
Kim nodded. When Julia passed her the bag of cookies, she took another.
“Have you been eating meals?” Julia asked.
Kim shrugged with her mouth.
“Not hungry?”
She shook her head.
“Keep thinking about the accident, huh?”
Kim took a drink of the coffee and tucked the mug in her lap.
For a time, Julia drank her own coffee and let the sound of the surf and the spatter of rain on the rocks fill the void. Then she said, “I don’t know what it is about this island. I’ve felt something since the first time I was here. I was twelve then.” When Kim seemed surprised, she said, “I was. Twelve. Zoe had just moved here, and my parents thought it’d be a good summer vacation place for my brothers and me. We used to come for a week or two at a time.”
There had been rainy days then, too, and she hadn’t minded at all. She remembered once sitting at the end of the town dock—a smaller dock, with fewer arms—and letting the rain soak her. She was wearing a bathing suit and must have been sixteen at the time, because she was a late bloomer yet remembered feeling sexy.
“Sixteen was a big summer for me,” she reminisced. “That was when I became aware of men. Boys, actually, but they did look like men to me. Big Sawyer grows them rugged. I remember sitting in the rain in my wet bathing suit and wondering what the boys could see or if they even cared to look. I didn’t have the nerve to look and see. I looked at them plenty at other times. Even took pictures of them. Boy, did I love those tattoos. Do they still do that, the local boys—have that rope tattooed around their biceps?”
Kim nodded.
“That was a turn-on,” Julia mused. “Where I grew up, only bad boys had tattoos. I thought they were the coolest thing.” She lowered her voice—not that anyone was around to hear, but it just seemed like too personal a confession not to guard it somehow. “I kept the pictures all those years. The guys in them spawned many a fantasy.”
She was embarrassed to think how recently she had indulged. Over the years, those fantasies had become a haven when things were rocky with Monte. In her dreams, Big Sawyer men embodied everything he didn’t—honesty, loyalty, faithfulness. And muscles. And big-time sexuality. With Big Sawyer men, there would be no going through the motions. They would make love like they meant it. At least, she imagined they would.
She sighed, realized what she’d done, and looked quickly at Kim. The girl was watching her closely. She tried to recall if she had said the sex part aloud. That would have been embarrassing.
More neutrally, she said, “I actually brought the pictures with me. They were in my shoulder bag when the ferry went down. I got the bag back—they recovered it from the crash site—but I can’t get myself to open it.”
She had a thought. “Did you have anything with you that they might have recovered?”
Kim gave her head a quick shake.
“Just as well,” Julia said. “Those things are from before. Everything after feels like a different life.” She paused. “You don’t feel that, do you.” It wasn’t exactly a question.
Kim’s head shake was barely a spasm, but it told Julia what she wanted to know.
“If you could go anywhere,” Julia tried, “anywhere in the world, where would you go?” She knew Kim wouldn’t answer, but the question seemed important. “I think about that a lot.”
Sipping her coffee, now only lukewarm, she looked out at the rain. Drips fell from the rim of her hood, but they weren’t bothersome. Rather, they seemed part of this very separate piece of the world.
“It’s so quiet here,” she murmured, and it was. Waves hit the shore, wind hit the bluff, and rain hit the roof of the keeper’s house, but in the midst of it all, there was a stillness. “This is a place removed. Can’t think about the usual worries here. I understand why you come.”
Actually, Julia realized, the sense of separateness applied to all of Big Sawyer. Perhaps that was what she felt when she had visited as a child. Worries had a hard time making the crossing from the mainland; in moments like this, they were spectral—not quite here, not quite gone, certainly nowhere near as ominous as they had been.
“I always imagined I could stay here forever,” she said wistfully.
Kim shot her a horrified look.
“No?” Julia asked.
A short, sharp head shake said a definitive no.
“You’d leave?”
Kim nodded.
“Why?” she asked. Then, “Where would you go? What would you do? Who would you be?” She paused, then faced forward and gave a diffident snort. “I’m a fine one to be asking you that. Who would I be? I haven’t a clue.”
Julia wished she wanted to be a lawyer like her friend Jane. She wasn’t too old to go to law school; she could see herself doing family law or even legal aid work, either of which would be time-consuming and rewarding enough to compensate for Monte’s infidelity. Or she could become an accountant. She was good at math, and accountants were in demand. Or she could take a job in her friend’s store; Charlotte was always begging her to.
If she did any of those things, she might craft a life that would allow her to leave her marriage intact. That would please Molly. It might even please Monte. It would surely please her parents.
But would it please her?
Shy of an answer, she spent Saturday afternoon alternating between the rabbits in the barn and her photo printer in the house, and spent Saturday evening with Zoe and her friends. These things kept her busy enough so that she didn’t dwell on the fact that Molly was coming and going without a word. Sunday morning, when Ellen Hamilton called, desperate for help, Julia was more than happy to oblige.
Bearing a fresh batch of cookies, she drove to the weathered farmhouse on Dobbs Hill. Far from deserted this time, the front yard was filled with cars. A U-Haul was backed up to the door, and an army of friends were carting furniture and boxes from house to van.
This was moving day. The rain had moved farther offshore, and while the sky was filled with clouds, they were the palest of gray. Sun came and went. The air was warm. Julia wore shorts, a T-shirt, and Birks. She had a sweatshirt tied around her shoulders, and though she wasn’t sure she would need it, it offered a kind of comfort. Leaving the car and approaching the porch, she felt a distinct knot in the pit of her stomach.
The girls were off in the side yard, playing with a woman Julia had met just the night before with Zoe. The woman waved; Julia waved back but continued on toward the house. She had barely reached it when Ellen rushed out. Sandy hair flying, she looked frantic.
“Thank you so much for coming,” she said, grasping Julia’s arm and pulling her toward
the yard. “Deanna’s been with the kids, but she has to leave, and the rest of us are trying to get things loaded so that I can make the noon ferry, and the girls just love you.” Even as she spoke, Vanessa broke away and, little legs wheeling, ran toward them. Halfway there, she stumbled and fell, but Julia barely had time to start forward when the child was up and running again. Grasping Julia’s leg, she tipped her head back and grinned.
Julia scooped her up. “How’s my little sweetie?”
“Good,” Vanessa said and curled an arm around her neck. “D’ya bring cookies?”
“I did,” Julia said, adding more quietly to Ellen, “Go back to work. We’ll be fine.”
Ellen didn’t need further encouragement. Deanna lingered to talk with Julia until she absolutely had to run, at which point Julia took the girls across the meadow, farther from the hubbub at the house. Sitting in the tall grass, she gave them cookies, told them stories, and played little games with them. She even asked questions about the move, which they answered in a way that suggested they had come to their own understanding of it and were okay.
That was before Ellen came looking for them, at which point Vanessa, who had been sitting snug against Julia’s leg, wrapped that little arm again around her neck, so tightly now that Julia had no choice but to lift her. Annie stayed close, as well.
“We’re ready to go,” Ellen said, forcing an enticing smile for the girls. “The ferry’s waiting for us.” She held out a hand to Annie. “All set?”
Nodding docilely, the child took Ellen’s hand. Following them, carrying Vanessa, Julia had a lump in her throat. She doubted the girls were old enough to realize that this part of their life was done. But they did sense something of the moment’s import. She could tell by the way Annie held back a little when they approached the car with the U-Haul hooked behind it, and Vanessa’s arm clutched her neck as though she would never let go.
The lump in Julia’s throat grew larger as longtime Walsh friends took turns saying good-bye to the girls. Some had tears in their eyes, others couldn’t speak, simply gave kisses and hugs. They had known these girls since birth. Sending them off to a new life in Akron was like pouring salt on the wound of the loss of Evan, Jeannie, and Kristie.
The Summer I Dared: A Novel Page 20