by Laura McNeal
“Why would she do that?”
“To get me in trouble.”
It was like he was a germ the police lady saw through a microscope. She was pretty disgusted with what she saw.
“Did Thisbe ever tell you that she felt suicidal?”
Something was wrong here and it was bigger than he’d thought. If Thisbe had parked the car on the bridge, how had she gotten down? “What is this about?” he asked.
“What do you think it’s about?”
He thought about Thisbe staring at him from the patio chair that night. Just sitting there drinking and staring for a long time, and then asking him if he was going to talk to her. No, he wasn’t. Jerome liked her, and that was that. Yes, Clay should have told her to go home when she’d snuck out and come knocking at the boat, but she smelled so good and looked so pretty and he just couldn’t help himself.
“Do you have any idea what her state of mind was last night?” she asked.
He shook his head. She was looking into his eyes like she could see Thisbe if she looked hard enough, see a tiny movie of her knocking on the door of the boat. “I have no idea,” he said. “I don’t know why she would leave her license in my car or why she would take it.”
“You didn’t see her.”
“I told you. I didn’t. I haven’t seen her in a long time.”
“She didn’t leave you any messages last night, did she?”
“No.”
She waited.
“What happened to her?” Clay asked. He was very scared to hear the answer to that question.
“It’s possible that she jumped off the bridge.”
That’s what he thought.
He looked at the floor. The lobby felt hollow and slick and merciless. “Why do you say possible?”
“The body’s not been found, but she’s gone.”
“What should I do?”
“You can call your parents.”
He touched the screen. He felt sick.
“You could do one little thing for me first,” she said.
He wanted this not to be happening and not to be as bad as it seemed. “What’s that?” he asked, sick and sicker.
She was folding a clean sheet of paper in two; then she handed it to him along with a pencil. “Write something down.”
He took the pencil. “What?”
“Just a number,” she said. “Write four slash fourteen.”
He could feel her eyes on him as he rolled the pencil on his knee. 4/14. His little system for numbering the bags. “Four slash fourteen?” he repeated. He tried to look confused.
She nodded, studying him.
“Like April fourteenth?” he said.
She nodded again.
He wrote the numbers, but he made the fours the way everybody and his brother made a four: right angle over a vertical line.
“Funny,” she said when he handed it over to her.
“What’s that?”
She looked up from the paper. “When you wrote your address earlier”—she waved the index card he’d written on for the first cop—“and you wrote 714 1st Street”—she waited a long beat—“you made your four different.”
They stared at each other a long time. She had a sad smile on her face and he tried to smile back but he felt sick about everything.
“So,” she said, “go ahead and call. I’ll be in there.”
She pointed to the room where two male officers with expressionless faces were typing into computers.
Before he dialed his father, he saw that he had a voice mail from someone he didn’t know, and it was a girl’s voice saying, “This is Ted. I need to talk to you very, very much. You need to tell the whole story and help us find her. Okay? Call me back.”
How could he help find her? And after what he’d said at the party, who would think anything but that it was all his fault?
He didn’t answer Ted. The only thing he was going to do was call his father and see if he could come and get him and fix things, the way he was good at doing. That was all.
Through the window Fen could see his uncle sitting in the backyard, holding his phone and an empty green beer bottle. Same brand his father liked: Heineken. “Hey,” Fen said.
“Oh, hey,” Carl said. “Have a seat.”
Fen dragged a rusty chair through the weeds.
“What’s your plan for this afternoon?” Carl said. “Still want to snorkel?”
“Maybe.” When Fen had mentioned his plan to take the snorkeling gear his dad had given him for Christmas to the beach, Carl had said the visibility would be bad. He said you’ll be rolled in the waves a lot. He said you should probably wear a wet suit because you’ll freeze. Don’t go, basically, because it’ll be terrible.
Carl seemed different, the way he was sitting there, looking at the weird pink gazing ball and the dead garden. “Maybe I could go snorkeling in the bay,” Fen said. “Where I sailed this morning. Is the visibility better there?”
“No!” his uncle said, like that was a crazy idea. “Why don’t you wait? I could take you out in the boat instead.”
“I’d love that.”
“But I can’t today. There’s a work thing I need to do.”
There was definitely something bothering him.
“Okay.” Fen had hoped Carl might go with him, wherever he went. “I thought you had the day off.”
“I did. Something came up.”
“I might go to the beach,” Fen said.
“Okay,” his uncle said.
In the past, when Fen had visited, his uncle had always gone to the beach with him. Always. Carl could boogie board for hours while Fen’s dad and his mom and Stacy sat and talked in their beach chairs. Carl never got tired or cold or bored of playing with Fen. He was like a porpoise or something.
“Well, okay, bye,” Fen said, and his uncle barely responded. It felt, for a depressing second, like the sunny Saturdays in Las Vegas, blank and wide, when his mom was locked in her room, working on the biography of the Brazilian lady, and his dad was out running, and Fen’s best friend (make that only friend) was playing club soccer. Saturdays in Las Vegas were lit by the same hard light as the days that followed his father’s death, when Fen was supposed to be back in class but instead was shoving open the metal doors of the gym, the sound like a cocked gun, slipping out the gate behind the handball courts, riding his skateboard home, stirring up a Carnation Instant Breakfast, and taking his snorkeling mask to the Isle of Capri Deluxe Apartments swimming pool. There he floated facedown, arms lank, his skin wet as if he were floating in the Caribbean. He pretended he was just offshore of the little island made of sand, l’île Morpion, with a dive boat somewhere behind him, out of sight but ready, and that his father was not dead but swimming nearby, observing the same creatures that Fen imagined, bright bodies that flickered and darted, and they would talk about them when they took off their masks, when they sat together in the sun.
The crazy man is in. He pulls Thisbe forward by the ankles and says it’s time to eat. It isn’t dark but it isn’t bright. Muddy light in the cabin of polished wood, which smells of tomato soup.
This time he unties the gag without tearing out any of her hair. Then she can move her arms. She doesn’t care that he leaves her ankles taped, because she can sit, and he hands her a bowl of soup.
“I knew you were Julia that time I saw you by Stingray Point. With the other girl.”
One bite, two bites, three bites. The spoon’s too slow so she decides to drink it instead.
“I see that girl more than I seen you. In her boat.”
Stingray Point was in Glorietta Bay. The edge of the golf course. You could only get there in a boat or by running across the course at night, when no one was golfing. Parties were held there on weekends, parties where everyone drank and smoked. Ted went sometimes, but Thisbe didn’t.
“Blond girl,” he says. “Little red boat.”
He knows Ted. He’s saying he knows Ted. A grotesque fear replaces, for a second, t
he greed for soup: the crazy man watched Ted sail with his creepy turtle eyes and his creepy turtle thoughts and Ted didn’t know, like Thisbe hadn’t. Did he want to shoot Ted, too, and tape her hands and call her another girl’s name?
“That one night,” he says. “I saw you both that one night.”
Thisbe and Ted had camped in the dark aboard the Getaway, Hugh’s little catamaran that had a webbed floor just big enough for two sleeping bags and a cooler and their bags of junk. Ted had rigged up a tent with a giant tarp and some rope, and it felt like forts they used to make in the backyard in Connecticut, when their dad was alive.
“Did you see me?” the man asks.
The soup is all gone.
“More?” he asks.
She nods but he doesn’t get more soup. She holds up the bowl and at least he goes to get it then.
She tries to think if she saw any other boats that night on the Getaway. She and Ted ate Pop-Tarts with their feet dangling in the water. They were not that far from the golf course, not that far from the bridge. Ted was happy to the point of smug, saying, “Told you it would be fun.” Later on, when they were in their sleeping bags with the tarp tent all snug around them, Mr. Harris cruised up and scared them to death with his megaphone, saying he was going to Breathalyze them and tow them home, but Ted said, “It’s me, Mr. Harris! Ted-not-Teddy-Theodora! Remember?”
Mr. Harris said it wasn’t safe but he didn’t make them go home, and he didn’t call Hugh, and every time a wake lifted their boat up and down, Thisbe woke up and saw the bright light of the harbor patrol boat. Mr. Harris watching over them. Or maybe this man.
“Ben died, you know.”
If this man killed Ben, she should not be slurping his soup. But she slurps it, drinks it down.
“Ben Crames. The one we played with all the time. He was there that day. Helped look for you.”
What day is he talking about?
“Cancer. A few years ago.”
Thisbe sits with the bowl. Nothing he says makes any sense.
“Do you want some water, Julia?”
She wants gallons of water. To swim in to bathe in to drink up to guzzle.
He finds a cup in his messy cupboards and fills it from a jug, not the faucet. Fills it again without her asking. When she stops drinking, he says, “Do you remember the cliffs?”
She neither nods nor shakes her head, because she doesn’t know the right answer and there are no cliffs in Coronado.
He sits down across from her and laces his gingerroot fingers. He appears to think. A wake lifts the boat, and jars clink together. The wood creaks and groans, something metal pings in the air outside. A little bulb in the galley gleams. She wants a toothbrush, her bedroom, the backyard, the day before, the day before, the day before. Who cared about Clay? He was nothing. Nothing! How wrong she’d been about problems before. To live in her house and go up and down the stairs to her kitchen to her own bed to the kitchen to her own bed was plenty. She didn’t care what college she went to. She would get in somewhere perfectly fine. She would show Hugh she could be trusted, and she still had her whole senior year to show him she was smart.
Thisbe keeps her lips together. She reaches down and pulls the baggy sock so her toe is back inside. The hole is wide and stiff like a mouth and getting wider. She looks at the hole and not the man.
He startles her when he moves toward her and she presses herself back so he won’t touch her but he’s messing with something on a high shelf. He hands her something, just a photograph, brown and cream, thin and shiny. A white frame all around the edge, like old photos have. He clicks on another lightbulb, and she can make out that it’s a boy and a girl on a beach somewhere with cliffs behind them. The girl is smaller than the boy, and she’s wearing a pair of boyish shorts, rumpled and cuffed and way too big, and a ruffly top that ties around her neck and behind her back like a bikini. Her hair is nearly the same beige as the sky. Ink-brown lips, a serious expression, not smiling. The boy is skinny and older, ten maybe, with a round chin, round nose, a dirty T-shirt, and one leg blurred by movement at the time of exposure. His hair is shaved short the way they did back then.
The man points to the boy with a yellow fingernail so thick it seems inhuman and says, “That’s me. Frankie.” Then he points to the girl and says, “You. Julia.”
She is not the girl. She knows she is not this girl in the boyish shorts and bikini top on a beach.
“This is right after Mom left,” he says. “Remember?”
Remembering seems dangerous. Not remembering seems dangerous.
“The boots,” he says, tapping the picture. “It’s one of the seven signs. It’s how I found you.”
The faded little girl is wearing boots. Black ones. Nerdaloshes. Those are not Thisbe’s boots and she doesn’t have any now. Just the socks, the hole wide open.
“Do you remember the boots?”
Thisbe nods.
“That’s us,” he says. “Do you remember me? Frankie. Everyone called me that. Still do, back home.”
Frankie and Julia. Brother and sister? She feels it again, the need to pee. “Can I go to the bathroom?” she asks. She can’t go anywhere like this. With the tape around her ankles, around her dirty socks.
“I had to do it this way. To remind you. The Seer said.”
She has no idea what he means. “Please,” she says. “I have to.” She doesn’t say pee, because she doesn’t want him to think of her pants down.
“Of course, Julia. Of course.”
She reaches for her ankles and starts trying to unstick the tape because he doesn’t move and she has to go. If she says his name, maybe he’ll let her go outside. “I could do it outside, Frankie,” she says.
“Outside?”
“The bathroom. Since the water doesn’t work.” She points as if to show him where the outside is.
“No, no. No. Not till we get home, Julia.”
She can see the steak knife. It’s too far for her to reach, lying on the fold-up table near the galley. If he brings it to cut the duct tape around her ankles, she’ll grab it and stick it right into his reptile neck.
“I can’t get it,” she says, meaning the tape. Her fingers aren’t working right.
He walks to the table and she sees how thin he is. Did he kill Julia? His own sister, that little girl in the picture? She should get the knife from him when he’s bent over, cutting the tape.
“We tried to dig you out,” he says. “We all did. But it was too late. I have the article. I’ll show you!”
He saws at the tape and she wills herself to grab the knife but she doesn’t. Not yet. Not until her legs are free.
“All the stones fell down when you were waiting for the ransom. We didn’t expect that. No one did. It was a cave-in. Me and Ben went for the ransom, like you said, and it was your idea to be tied up, make it more real, you said. You always wanted it to be real, remember?”
The tape splits under the knife he holds and her legs are separated. She could grab the knife, stab it into his neck, and walk away.
“Nobody goes to Harlow’s Cove anymore, not anybody that’s smart. Too many rock slides. But we didn’t know that then.”
She stands up and he backs away, puts the knife in a drawer, shuts the drawer.
“We didn’t know. It was a pirate game,” he says. “We always played it in the summer, down by the rocks.”
The knife is too far away and she has to go. She has to go to the bathroom and then think.
“Do you remember?” he asks.
She nods so he’ll let her go.
“What do you remember?”
“The boots,” she says. She moves slowly so he won’t touch her and she shuts the bathroom door.
Fen was gone. To the beach with some fins and a snorkel. Carl felt the way he’d always felt when he told Stacy or Paul he was too busy to do something they’d asked him to do on a beautiful sunny day: lunch or brunch or the beach or paddleboards. The emptiness of the house, a wide pool of
regret. But what he also felt—staring out the living room window at Fen’s truck, which had been Carl’s brother’s, a piece-of-junk Ford with no air-conditioning and no air bags, not really the ideal thing for Fen to be driving on interstates in aggressive traffic—was dread of going over to Anne Locke’s house without knowing what the police were thinking and why they were thinking it.
He picked up his phone and looked for Elaine Lord’s number. “Hey, Elaine,” he said. “I just got a call from Anne Locke.”
“Are you guys friends?” she asked.
“Not really,” he said. “I knew her at school.”
“Yeah, me too. More like knew of her. She was younger than me by a year. What did she want you to do?”
“Oh…to tell her that her daughter isn’t dead.”
No answer immediately came. He knew that was a bad sign.
“What am I walking into if I go over there?” Carl asked. “I said I would come by.”
“I’m headed over there now,” Elaine said.
“She said the MEs were there already. So you must be sure.”
“As sure as you can be without the body.”
“So what have you got?”
“At first it was all kind of sketchy, stuff that could be explained away, like maybe the girl dropped her license in the car some other time. But she’s missing, and the ex-boyfriend is very much alive. He says he doesn’t know why she would take his car, but she knew where the keys were. We got a call placing a girl next to the car in question, the one that was on the bridge, and the girl was standing near the rail.”
“Someone just phoned that in?”
“A guy called and said he saw someone standing up there but didn’t call it in at the time.”
“Why not?”
“He said there was already another car stopped behind the first one. So there was the white car, the one we towed, and a girl with long hair like Thisbe’s standing at the rail, and behind that, a red pickup truck. Solo driver sitting in that, the caller said. He didn’t see anything else.”