The Storm King: A Novel

by Brendan Duffy

  “Yeah.” The big guy was trying to help, and Nate couldn’t fault him for that.

  “And the thing is—the thing to remember—is no matter what happens, you get used to it. You can survive it,” Owen said. “I mean, if I can do it, believe me, you can.” He hazarded a smile.

  Nate just managed to raise his mouth to a less-grim line when the chief returned from the ICU.

  In the years Nate had known him, he’d only seen the man’s stoicism slip a few times, and this was one of them. Grams looked as bad as her condition suggested, and the chief had known her since his own youth. Of course he was shaken. She was his best friend’s mother. But by the time he got to Nate, he’d regained his composure.

  “She’s a tough lady, your grandma,” he said. “But you’ve been up all night. Must need some air. Let’s go for a ride. May as well get that talk out of the way.”

  The man strode for the automatic doors, and Nate understood that this wasn’t a request.

  “See you later, Nate,” Owen said. “Be careful out there.”

  “I’ll let you know if anything with Grams changes.” Tom’s face was a complicated mosaic of grief and sympathy. But there was something else there, too. Something in the tautness of his mouth and the intensity of his friend’s eyes that Nate couldn’t place. It could have been some iteration of Tom’s dread at the sight of his bloody hands. Nate wasn’t sure. When he raised a hand in farewell, Tom matched it with his own.

  Dawn should have come, but there was little sign of the sun. Clouds gouged the sky from one end of the horizon to the other. Rain lashed at the streets as wind ripped at the trees.

  The chief had parked under the ER’s overhang, so they avoided the worst of the rain. The interior of the car was cold, and under his raincoat Nate’s clothes were still damp from Grams’s lawn. Next to him, the chief’s face was stone.

  The air in the car was faintly scented with plastic and soap. Within it, Nate couldn’t smell the rain or mud or shredded foliage. He could feel the wind only so much as Medea rocked the cruiser. The car was a tiny pocket of the raging world where temperature and breeze could be adjusted at the turn of a dial. This should have brought comfort, but it didn’t.

  In one of the Lake’s stories, Nate felt he’d be entering the middle section. This was the crucial stage where agendas were unveiled and true characters revealed. The action here could break in any number of ways. Nothing was assured, because in the Lake the good guys didn’t always triumph. Few of its stories had heroes to begin with.

  These were fraught chapters, but it was in these pages that Nate believed he had a shot at learning what he wanted so badly to discover.

  Chief Buck hadn’t uttered a syllable since putting the car into drive. The rasp of wipers pawing at the windshield was the only sound in the tight space.

  While their conversation would surely be about Lucy, its shape depended upon what the chief knew, or believed he knew. But Nate found the chief’s silence suggestive. His years of dealing with sick children and their terrified parents had taught him that it usually took only a small thing to put a person more at ease. A crooked smile. A stupid joke. A question that had nothing at all to do with whatever catastrophe that had fallen from a clear sky to expose the cardboard underpinnings of their lives. So it was clear to him that the chief didn’t want him at ease.

  They were driving down the flooding streets toward a performance, and Nate guessed it starred everyone’s least favorite half of the Good Cop/Bad Cop routine.

  The chief wanted Nate off-balance. He saw Nate as being out of his element, exhausted, and dulled with shock, and he intended to make the most of it. Nate expected traps to be set and trip wires to be strung. And it was true that the story of their long-ago high school graduation was a perilous narrative, overgrown with long-thorned brambles and pockets of pitch-black. Traversing it with a hostile escort at his heels was dangerous. It was a history easy to become ensnared in. It was a story that bit back.

  But Nate didn’t let himself worry.

  He’d been known to pull off a solid Bad Cop himself.

  “TELL ME HOW it all ended,” Lucy said. Her hand was in Nate’s hair, resting flush against his scalp. “Tell me about the last day.”

  His stubble bristled against her belly as he smiled. He’d told Lucy many stories about the Night Ship, but something about this one particularly thrilled her.

  “In 1964 the pier was gearing up for its—”

  “Stop!” Lucy tightened her hand into a fist, pulling the waves of his hair into taut bands. “You know that’s not how I like our stories.”

  Nate laughed into the curve of her ribs, then rolled off her and pulled on his jeans. It was mid-June, but the planks of the Night Ship were cold in the early morning. In the dawn, the lake glowed like the sun.

  “Just June,” he said. He peered around the cavernous dark space of the dance floor as if uttering her name might conjure the woman herself. Like all legends, the details varied from telling to telling, but the bones remained the same. “How does that old rhyme go?” he asked. Like the best ghost stories, the Night Ship’s tales weren’t merely told, they were performed.

  “Just June made all the boys swoon, cost you just a dollar to bring her to your room,” Lucy sang. It was a children’s verse, but on her lips it sounded like an invitation.

  “They say Just June grew up in the Night Ship, that she and her twin sister were the daughters of one of Morton Strong’s prostitutes,” Nate continued. “Since the father could have been anyone, she was known only by her first name. ‘June what?’ her clients would ask. ‘Just June,’ she’d answer.” Nate threw open the door to the boardwalk. He was usually more careful in daylight, but it was so early that not even the Daybreakers were out yet. He turned to look at Lucy, lying on her side in a puddle of clothes. The cool breeze on his bare chest, the sun of a new day, and the sight of her made him feel like he could live forever.

  “And by ‘clients’ you mean…” Lucy affected a confused look. Nate lay back down next to her and ran his finger from her neck to her navel.

  “Johns, tricks, transactional lovers. It’s the world’s oldest profession, but it’s a tough thing to make a career of. Terrible retirement package. June was smart and fierce, and for a while was Strong’s right hand, but she was mostly one of his whores. She’d pounded the sheets since her early teens by some accounts, and that kind of life takes its toll. Into her middle age, what’d been a flood of customers had slowed to a trickle. New, bright-eyed young things arrived to work the beds of the Century Room every season, and June couldn’t compete. No longer the bombshell with all the right moves and the body to pull them off, June was all but used up. Soon the only clients she could get were the strange ones, the ones with the weird fetishes and kinks.”

  “I wonder what qualified as kinky back then?” Lucy asked. Her fingernail clicked along the zipper of Nate’s jeans. “I’ll have to do some research.”

  “And she didn’t just have herself to worry about. Her twin sister was a few matches short of a box. May was her name. June and May, the prettiest months of the year. They were the Night Ship Girls. Strong could have used May as a prostitute, too, but maybe he had a scrap of humanity after all. She was paid a slave wage to scrub the kitchen and mop the floors. June was devoted to her sister. May was June’s heart. And they both relied on June’s usefulness to Strong. But June was no longer the draw she’d once been, and this hadn’t gone unnoticed by old Morton. The club had a reputation to uphold; the girls who worked there had to have a certain je ne sais quoi, and Just June had begun to look more and more out of place. ‘End of the summer,’ Strong told June one Memorial Day. Come September, she’d have to find some other place to sell what little she had left to offer. You can imagine how that must have felt for her. The Night Ship was all she’d ever known. She was afraid. And she was angry.”

  “Hell hath no fury,” Lucy said. She was living proof of the phrase. The year and a half since Adam Decker’s house
burned had marked a run of terrible luck for the enemies of Lucy Bennett.

  “And it wasn’t just Morton Strong she was angry with.” Nate leapt back to his feet. “She loathed the younger girls who’d replaced her. Her clients filled her with disgust. In fact, she’d begun to hate just about everyone who had anything to do with the Night Ship. They all had to pay. But she was no dummy, our June. She was sweetness itself when Strong told her that her days were numbered.”

  “They never see the sweet ones coming, do they, McHale?” Lucy rolled onto her stomach and kicked her feet into the air. It was a classic pose, but like everything else, Lucy found a way to make it her own. She pulled her journal out from under her crumpled tank top, but Nate knew her attention was still on the story. They were almost to her favorite part.

  “So she plays nice, our June, right up until the big Fourth of July celebration. Independence Day is the centerpiece of every resort town’s summer, and the Lake goes all out. Fireworks are shot off from Blind Down Island. Sailboats festooned with lights bob on the water. Bands play in the bars and along the streets. Packs of children run along the shore trailing a wake of sparklers. The Lake is rocking, and no place rocks it harder than the Night Ship.” Nate moved to the scarred dance floor. “Men in linen suits dance with women draped in silk.” He shuffled his feet to the tune of an imagined song. If Nate tried, he could see others in their finery moving to the same rhythm. “The air’s thick with cigar smoke and the euphoria of a summer night. Elaborate centerpieces blazing with candles and sparklers erupt from every table. Punch overflows from two hundred glasses. The Night Ship is the place to be. And you know how things can feel on a night like that. The right place, the right time. The right music, the right clothes. The right girl.” Nate turned to Lucy. “Everything so perfect, you can’t imagine a future less golden than the present.”

  Lucy smiled and looked down at her journal. She was as fearless a person as Nate had ever known, and he loved that he could still make her feel shy.

  “But it wasn’t to be for the folks at the Night Ship that Independence Day. The backdoor operations in the Century Room were put on hold for big celebrations like this. No reason to flaunt their indiscretions in front of the town’s leading citizens. So the prostitutes worked as waitresses and played the role of eye candy. But Just June was relegated to the kitchens,” Nate said. “A final insult.”

  “In more ways than one.”

  “The Night Ship throws the best parties. But the best parties have the worst hangovers. Around midnight, some of the patrons begin to get queasy. Too hot, they figure. Too much smoke. Too much booze.”

  “What was in that punch, anyway?” Lucy said. She wrote something in her notebook. She was always scribbling in it. In the fall, she’d be studying journalism at NYU while Nate would be just a subway ride away at Columbia.

  “Indeed. The punch at the Night Ship was notoriously strong, but this year, Just June put her own twist on it. A one-of-a-kind blend of nail polish, antifreeze, rat poison, and who knows what else. At first only a few guests get sick, but within the packed hall, it soon becomes clear that something’s deeply wrong.” He jumped onto a table.

  “Fear ripples through the crowd. First a woman screams, then a man pushes. An animal panic takes grip. Consider that this is a crowd wasted on punch and poison, with half of them in high heels. Remember it happens at the end of a pier in a stifling nightclub decorated with elaborate sparkler displays.”

  “Mayhem.” Lucy smiled.

  “People rush for the exits in the front and the back. The ones who go for the back get stuck among the seats arranged there for the fireworks. In the crush, some are pushed off the boardwalk into the water. Others jump into the lake by their own choice, hoping to swim for shore. Those who make for the promenade have better luck, but they also have more incentive. Some of those sparkler displays had been knocked over in the flight for the doors and set tablecloths and women’s dresses ablaze. The curtains soon follow.” Nate pointed to a charred wall on the far end of the club. The stubs of burned drapes still hung there like shorn hair. “The Lake’s children used to leave sparklers at the barricade, you know. Before they started leaving glow sticks. Anyway, at some point the massive aquarium by the restrooms shatters. This contributes to the chaos, though it also douses a few of the burning women.”

  “A party no one’s ever going to forget.”

  “Between the fire, the poison, the drownings, and the stampede, over a dozen people die that night, with many more seriously injured. Morton Strong is among the partygoers who make it out of the Night Ship, but he indulged in a bit too much holiday cheer. Most of the poisoned revelers survived, but June’s punch destroys his insides. He doesn’t live through the night.”

  “So Just June gets the revenge she wanted,” Lucy said.

  “No one’s coming back here after that. The lawsuits bankrupted the entire pier. That was the party that sank the Night Ship. But, in Shakespearean fashion, June’s revenge is achieved only at tremendous personal cost. Though she gave her twin, May, the strictest instructions on how to remain safe throughout the night, May’s a sweet soul who could never turn her back on someone who needed help. When she sees a woman running, dressed in flaming lace, she has to help her. While trying to smother the burning woman’s dress, May is caught in the push for the exits and is trampled to death by the crowd. June finds her on the boardwalk amid thrashing tropical fish from the broken aquarium, soaked to the bone, broken from a hundred stomping feet. June comes undone. She brought down the Night Ship as much for May as she did for herself. Vengeance for a lifetime of indignities. But now she’s responsible for the death of the one person who matters to her. May was her heart. And no one can live without their heart. June’s alone now, with only one route out of the trouble she’s made for herself.”

  “The long walk,” Lucy said.

  This part of the story always sent a shiver through Nate. Beyond the windows, the lake lapped the headlands like innocence itself.

  “She tied herself to one of the boardwalk’s wrought iron benches, then shoved it through a broken railing and into the cold water below,” Nate said. “Something that heavy might have kept her body hidden for a good long while, but the lake—”

  “The lake returns what it takes,” Lucy said. Her green eyes flickered toward him. The old adage couldn’t be uttered without recalling the accident of two years ago when Nate had been inexplicably returned by that same cold water.

  Those words signaled the end of many of the lake’s stories. For Nate, they marked the beginning of a second life.

  “I liked the part you added about the flaming lace,” Lucy said, shutting her journal. “Sometimes imagining the clothes on the rioters is my favorite part.”

  “And here I thought it was the body count.” Thinking of the lake had turned Nate’s thoughts toward his family. These days, there was little anger attached to the memory. He’d found ways to exorcise such rage. There was still a sense of absence: an ache he felt sure would never leave him. But this was survivable, especially on a morning like this. In the dawn, there was a sense of something perfect and unbroken about the universe. As if everything was connected through some golden design in which nothing was ever truly lost. In which no one was ever really gone.

  “You still with me, McHale?” Lucy asked. She wrapped her arms around him from behind. His skin slid against hers as he turned to face her. Though the lake was still empty, there was something audacious about her nudity.

  “Always.” He rested his forehead against her crown of auburn hair. “But we should go. Your mom’ll be up soon.”

  “You realize we’re not fooling her, right?” Lucy said. She walked to her clothes and shimmied her underwear up her thighs. “We’re not fooling anyone. I see the way Grams looks at me. She knows I’m the filthy slut tarnishing her beautiful golden grandson.”

  Gold doesn’t tarnish, Nate thought. He turned his T-shirt right side out. “It’s not about fooling her. Grams k
nows I sneak out to be with you, but it’d be more unseemly to do it in the open. What would people say? If anything, lying to Grams and your mom is the best demonstration of our respect for them.”

  “Golden boy with a silver tongue.” She shook her hair free of her top. “One day, you’ll get someone into real trouble.”

  Nate rolled up the foam mat they’d been lying on and tossed it behind the bar. It settled among the sleeping bags, coolers, lanterns, and alcohol they stored here. They’d never seen a stranger in the year and a half that they’d been coming here, but they were still careful.

  When Lucy was ready, they headed for the spiral staircase that led to the Century Room. These stairs also descended to a dark maze of low-ceilinged rooms constructed for God only knew what purpose. The stories about the Night Ship spoke of hidden passages in the walls and under the floors, though Nate had never succeeded in finding these. However, there was a large, intricate trapdoor in the undercroft that doubled as a boat launch. Nate and Tom agreed that this had probably been constructed for bootleggers during Prohibition. Concealed behind an array of pilings, this was the perfect way to get to the abandoned pier undetected.

  Nate had left the launch door open, and their black canoe bobbed serenely where he’d tied it. In the shadow of the pier, the lake was obsidian. He held Lucy’s hand as she stepped into the boat. Once seated, she picked up a paddle and propped it by the bow where it would be ready for him.

  Nate was the only one who ever rowed. He liked squiring Lucy across the waters, as he knew she liked being squired. In the quiet of the lake, there was just the two of them.

  Nate’s own step into the boat coincided with a swell that sent the vessel rocking. They didn’t come close to capsizing, but the oar tipped into the water. It floated just a foot from the hull, but Nate hesitated to reach for it.