Places by the Sea

by Jean Stone

  Most incredible of all was Jill’s father. George Randall must have been a man of great patience, a man with a deeper kind of love for Florence than Jill had been capable of understanding. A kind of love Jill still did not know. If that kind of love could even exist in the bizarre, self-serving world of today.

  “Come on, kid,” Rita’s voice called out. “Let’s get out of here. I’ve had as much folksiness as I can take for one day.”

  Jill pulled herself from the ground. “Rita,” she said as they walked toward the park, toward the Range Rover. “Can we go somewhere and talk? There’s something I want to tell you about.” She’d decided to tell Rita about the diary. Maybe she’d even show it to Rita. Maybe she could help her deal with this. Maybe Rita, her best friend, could help.

  “Sure,” Rita answered. “I’ve got a great idea. Charlie probably closed up early. I know where he stashed a great bottle of single malt scotch. There’s something I want to talk to you about, too.”

  The tavern was dark, the front door locked.

  “No problem,” Rita said. “I know how to get in the back.”

  “Break in?”

  “Not exactly break,” Rita said as she motioned for Jill to follow her. “More like pry.”

  “Oh, Rita, I don’t know …”

  “Charlie won’t care. He loves me, remember?”

  Jill got in step behind her and they started toward the alley. The night was as dark as the campgrounds before the lanterns were lit, the path was narrow.

  Suddenly a can rattled. Jill stopped. Her heart raced. “Shit,” Rita said. “Me and my big feet.”

  “God, Rita, don’t do that again. You scared me to death.”

  They started walking again, Jill gingerly looking down, as though she could see her feet in the dark. She thought about the few times she’d come down this alley—tagging along behind her father. Then, Jill had known nothing would happen to her. No matter how dark or scary the alley was, she knew her father would protect her. Walking down here had been an adventure then; something to do that was much better than staying in the house, the stuffy, tension-filled house.

  As they made their way around back, a shadow fell across the Dumpster. Jill looked up: the back light was on, the way her father had always left it. She almost expected him to be there, too.

  Rita went behind the Dumpster and emerged with a crowbar. “Don’t look so shocked,” she said. “All I have to do is pry off the padlock. There’s a hammer we can put it back on with when we leave.”

  “Charlie never gave you a key?” Jill whispered, then wondered why she was whispering. If Rita wasn’t afraid to break in, why was she? After all, it wasn’t as though the Edgartown police cruised the back alleys. Besides, if they were caught by the police, Charlie Rollins would never press charges.

  “The key was lost years ago. Besides, the lock’s all rusted now.”

  “Isn’t there a regular lock? A dead bolt or something?”

  “Why? This works fine. Besides, it’s not like there’s a high crime rate on the island, remember?” Rita moved toward the door with the crowbar.

  Jill turned her back to Rita and shifted her eyes around the area, the lookout sentry. She had to admit it was fun being with Rita again, letting herself fold into Rita’s own special brand of mischief.

  “Holy shit,” Rita whispered, “looks like someone beat us to it.”

  Jill turned around. “What are you talking about?” Her eyes fell to the lock that dangled from the door.

  “Someone got here before us.”

  “Someone broke in!” Jill exclaimed, as though that wasn’t exactly what they were doing.

  “Well, hell,” Rita said as she started to open the door, “then I guess this means we’re not breaking and entering.”

  “But what if someone’s in there?”

  “Look in the window. Do you see any lights on?”

  Jill groaned. A picture of the tabloid headlines flashed into her mind: TV personality arrested for burglary. She wondered how Addie would get her out of that one.

  “Come on,” Rita said. “Don’t be such a chicken.”

  How many times had Rita said those words to Jill? Jill shook her head. “Okay, okay,” she answered, and stepped into the darkness behind Rita.

  Rita snapped a switch. Light flooded the kitchen, awakening a scent of pine cleaner and ammonia. Shiny aluminum pots hung from poles stretched across the ceiling; the long, stainless-steel counter gleamed, the huge cast-iron stove was scrubbed and tidy, standing in wait for another day, another flurry of tourists. It did not, in fact, look much different than thirty, forty years ago, when it was Jill’s father who owned it and Rita’s mother who was the waitress.

  “See?” Rita asked. “No villains.”

  Jill shivered.

  “Come on. The single malt’s in the secret room.”

  Just as they started toward the pantry closet, toward the hidden door that led to the room, laughter rang out.

  They stopped. Rita looked at Jill.

  “What?” Jill started to ask.

  Rita put her finger to her lips. “Ssh,” she whispered. “I think it came from the dining room.”

  Jill grabbed her arm and motioned to the back door. “I told you …”

  Rita shook her off and headed for the dining-room door. “If someone’s in here,” she whispered, “I’ve got to call the cops.”

  “Isn’t Charlie upstairs?”

  “If he is, he must be asleep. Or he would have heard this by now. Follow me.”

  Jill held her breath, then let it out. Rita was nuts. Rita was crazy. But Jill couldn’t let Rita go in there alone. She tiptoed to the dining-room door and looked over Rita’s shoulder.

  The door opened slowly without a creak. She peeked into the darkness. No one was there.

  Laughter sounded again. High-pitched laughter.

  Rita put her finger to her lips again, then waved for Jill to follow. They went into the dining room, maneuvering their way through the tables that stood empty, the chairs neatly stacked on top. From outside, the streetlamp cast an eerie glow into the room. Rita pointed to the bookcase beside the fireplace—the other entrance to the secret room.

  Slowly, Jill stepped beside her. They pressed their ears to the row of books; from within came the sounds of voices, muffled through the wall. Rita raised the crowbar over her head and signaled Jill to push back the bookcase. Jill hesitated a moment. Rita shot her a look of impatience. Quickly Jill grabbed the third shelf down, the one with the reprints of Dickens, the one she remembered was the trick door.

  She pulled back the bookcase as Rita cocked the crowbar. The opening was exposed, as were the intruders.

  Jill caught her breath.

  “Holy shit, what the hell’s going on here?” Rita asked, lowering the crowbar.

  But she needn’t have asked. It was perfectly evident what was going on. Kyle sat on a table, one hand holding a bottle, the other hand positioned on top of someone’s head: someone who was kneeling on the floor in front of him, her mouth deftly sucking his erect penis. That someone, Jill realized as a shock of ice knifed through her body, was Amy.

  “Get away from her!” Jill screamed at Kyle as she lunged toward Amy and grabbed her arm, yanking her upright. “Get away from her or I’ll kill you!”

  “Mom,” Amy wailed, the booze on her breath souring Jill’s stomach. “Leave me alone.”

  Kyle zipped his pants and slid from the table. He held up his hands. “No contest,” he said.

  “Jesus Christ, Kyle,” Rita mumbled.

  Her face flaming, her heart about to leap from her chest, Jill pushed Amy through the doorway of the secret room. With a firm grasp on her daughter’s elbow, she kept pushing—through the dining room, through the kitchen, out the back door. By the time they stepped outside, Jill could not catch her breath.

  Amy shook free her arm. “I can’t believe how you just humiliated me.”

  “You? You can’t believe how I just humiliated you?�
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  Amy tucked a wad of hair behind one ear. Jill stepped forward and slapped her across the face. The sound of the sting echoed in the stillness of the night. Amy’s hand flew to her cheek. Her dark eyes—Florence’s eyes—turned to steel.

  “Leave me alone, you bitch,” Amy hissed, and took off through the alley, running.

  A tremor tore through Jill’s body, engulfing her every muscle, her every nerve. She raised her shaking hands to her face that was now wet with her tears. “God, God,” she cried into the darkness. Never had she struck her children. Never. Never. Not with all the problems, not with all the arguments. She had wanted her children to know no violence. She had wanted them to be happy, she had wanted them to feel safe in their home. Yet now she had undone all that. She had become no different from the abusive parents she once reported on, on the streets of Boston, in the houses you’d least expect. She had done it because she had been trying so hard to trust her daughter. She had been trying so hard to stop being so protective, to stop being so smothering, so judgmental, the way her mother had always been with her.

  She had tried. But, like Florence Randall, she had failed.

  Her thoughts scattered in a million directions, each disconnecting from everything she’d ever believed, from every hope she’d ever dreamed. Nothing made sense. Nothing at all.

  “Jill?” It was Rita’s voice. “Jill, are you all right?”

  Slowly Jill turned and faced her best friend. The friend whose son had just violated her daughter, and subsequently, herself. She wiped the tears from her face and slipped her hands into the pockets. “Get out of my life, Rita,” she said quietly, then turned and went back down the alley, her heart filled with a heaviness that she had never known.

  Chapter 18

  Thankfully, Carol Ann’s Nissan was an automatic. Ben balanced the bulk of his right arm as he parked at the Gay Head lighthouse and emerged from the small car. He looked up into the sky: its indigo background was swabbed with its familiar streak of pink; a few gentle, gray gulls glided across it, calling out to awaken their senses, readying their lives for another day.

  On the ancient cliffs, Noepe sat, silhouetted against the dawn.

  “My friend,” Noepe said into the wind, without turning to know it was Ben.

  “Noepe,” Ben replied, then walked to the old man and squatted beside him. “There has been trouble.”

  Noepe nodded. “It was expected.”

  Ben stared off toward the Elizabeth Islands. “I no longer think Dave Ashenbach’s the one trying to stop me.”

  “Do your plans interfere with his land?”

  “Not interfere. Just abut it. I don’t think even Ashenbach is stupid enough to try to kill me over that.”

  Noepe folded his arms and closed his eyes, the lines of his face curving toward his long, white ponytail, the bronze patina of age soft on his cheeks. “You do not sound like a man who is going to give up.”

  Ben sat on the ground and kicked a small piece of shale from the cliff. “I’ve thought about it.”

  “But?”

  “But I’m not sure that the attack on me was connected.”

  “Where did it happen?”

  “In my workshop. At home.”

  “Have you been attacked there before?”

  He laughed. “No. Of course not.”

  Noepe opened his eyes, his gaze fixed on the horizon. “Great books have many thoughts on the theory of coincidence. That there is no such thing. That it is part of the greater plan.”

  “Do you agree?”

  A small smile crept across his salt-white lips. “The question is, do you?”

  A lone gull landed on the clay-colored cliffs. It pecked at a sliver of stone and raised its head, its tiny black eyes connecting, for a moment, with Ben’s. Then it took flight once again.

  “What emptiness inside you are you trying to fill, Ben Niles? Is it the loss of your wife? Are you still trying to replace her being?”

  Ben looked at Noepe in disbelief. He had never thought he was creating Menemsha House to replace Louise. He had don it to pass the time. He had done it to do something for the kids. Not to replace Louise.

  He quickly blinked and gazed out to sea again, wondering why he felt as though he wanted to cry. He wanted to answer Noepe, but the lump in his throat dared him not to.

  “I am sorry if my words upset you,” Noepe continued. “But has there been no woman for you since your wife? Has Menemsha House become your woman? These are questions you must answer only to yourself. Only then will you be able to determine if it is worthy of your death.”

  Ben remained silent, letting Noepe’s words linger in the air, float into his thoughts. Perhaps, he realized, that was exactly what he had done: tried to harness a dream to fill his soul, to prove to himself that it had been Louise, not him, who had died. Somewhere along the line his grief had subsided, but Menemsha House had taken on a spirit of its own, tapping into his rebellious nature, rousing his anger to a dangerous place, fueled by his, yes, his emptiness, his loneliness.

  “I must leave you now,” Noepe said, rising from the rocks and drawing in a deep sea air breath. “The new day has begun.” He smiled. “I must again become a boring accountant.”

  Ben smiled back but did not respond. He listened to the soft sounds of Noepe’s moccasins as they tread across the cliffs, moving, without effort, from one world to another. But Ben remained seated, studying the sea, until the sun had climbed in the sky, and the ache in his gut had calmed.

  When he arrived to work at Jill’s, Ben was surprised that Kyle’s truck wasn’t in the yard. He’d stayed at the cliffs longer than he’d planned: it was now eight-twenty, and the only vehicle around was that god-awful white Range Rover that looked like it belonged on a safari, ready to hunt down big game, bigger, certainly, than the skunks and raccoons that called the island home.

  City people, he muttered under his breath, then remembered how nice Jill had been to him last night, how uncelebrity-like, how civilized. Slipping the car into a space on the street, Ben realized that he missed his old Buick, with its obstinate steering and weighty bulk: a car that you could depend on in a world that had become undependable. He walked around to the back: the house was quiet; Kyle was nowhere around.

  Pulling off his baseball cap, Ben scratched his head. Maybe Kyle’s mother had told him about the broken arm. Maybe Kyle thought if Ben couldn’t work, he wouldn’t be needed.

  “Damn,” he sputtered, and hated the fact he was sputtering like an old man. But if this job was ever going to be finished by Labor Day, Kyle had better get over here. Fast. And it looked as though the only way that was going to happen was if Ben called him.

  He went onto the back porch and peeked in the window. Jill sat at the table, a lacy robe around her, her hair uncombed. A mug sat in front of her, which she appeared to be ignoring. Instead, she stared into space, much the same way Ben himself had just done out at the cliffs. He wondered if her problems were as grave as his, and if her dreams—or her life—were at stake.

  He hesitated a moment, then raised his good hand and rapped on the window.

  She snapped her head up, startled from wherever her thoughts had been. Seeing him, she rose from the table on what looked like wobbly legs, then shuffled toward the door and opened it.

  “Good morning,” she said, but the day-old mascara encrusted on her lashes and the red webbing that threaded through the whites of her eyes told Ben that her morning definitely was not good.

  “Sorry to bother you, but could I trouble you to use the phone?”

  “No trouble,” she said, stepping away from the door. “Come in. You know where it is.”

  He nodded and went into the hallway. “I can’t figure out why Kyle’s not here yet. I thought I made it clear to his mother last night that my broken arm can’t hold things up. The show must go on,” he said with a chuckle, hoping to ease whatever was on Jill’s mind. She was far too nice—and far too pretty, even in her obvious state of disarray—to have
such heaviness on her mind.

  He picked up the receiver as Jill stepped into the hall.

  “Hang up the phone,” her voice said, its “good morning” pleasantry now gone.

  “Pardon me?”

  “I said hang up the phone.”

  He did not ask her to repeat it again. He’d heard her. Loud and clear. He put the receiver back in the cradle. “Is something wrong?”

  “Look, Ben, this is nothing against you. But if the only way you can finish the work here is to have Kyle do it, then I’ll have to fire you. That boy will not step foot on my property again.”

  Ben stared at her. He could not imagine what had happened. He could not imagine why she didn’t want Kyle around. Had he ruined something? Stolen something?

  “Look, Jill, Kyle’s worked for me for a long time. If something has happened …”

  She folded her arms across the tie of her robe. “It’s none of your concern.”

  “Excuse me, but Kyle is my employee. If one of my employers is upset over something he’s said or done, then it damn well is my concern.”

  Jill was quiet a moment. Then she moved back into the kitchen. “Please,” she said so quietly Ben had to strain to hear her, “just go away and leave us alone. I’ll see that you’re paid in full.”

  He took off his cap and rubbed the brim between his fingers. “I don’t take money for a job not done. And I don’t leave a job until it’s finished.”

  He watched as she picked up her coffee mug and pretended to drink from it. She clutched it so hard, her knuckles paled. Coffee spilled over the rim. Quickly he reached out with his left hand. “God, Jill, you’re shaking.” He took the mug from her grasp and set it on the table. “What’s going on? And what does it have to do with Kyle?”

  She looked into his eyes, took a deep breath, then let it out slowly, painfully. “Walk with me down to the water,” she said at last. “I’ll tell you everything.”