by Jay Brandon
Kathy tried not to think of Jack. But how could she not think of him? It had happened. There was nothing to undo it. She had tried to confess to Michael and move on. Wasn’t that what one was supposed to do? But he wouldn’t even let her confess. He kept interrupting her. Now she wasn’t so sure she should tell him. He would be devastated. Besides, it was just a one-time thing. She’d probably never see the Lefflers again. Still, she thought of Jack with . . . well, longing.
The afternoon in the sun on a now less-crowded stretch of beach
seemed more than ever a respite. It was a place beyond time. Lying on the hot sand, hearing the croaks of the gulls and the laughter of children, Kathy felt not only her normal life receding from her, but also her past. Even in this nostalgic setting, she felt for the first time the possibility of finally stepping completely into the present – and the future.
Sometimes Michael seemed part of the past; that was why she was
resisting him. She had always thought of him as confident, but now she wasn’t so sure. He seemed timid and hesitant. He’d always been a worrier, but it seemed to be getting worse. She thought of the scene at the beach, when Michael panicked when he thought something was drowning him. Kathy’s evading the marriage question no doubt shook his confidence even further. She realized that the cycle was self-perpetuating, one action causing an opposite reaction.
Ultimately, what Kathy wanted was to feel safe, secure. There was nothing novel about that. But she didn’t always feel that way around Michael. She knew it was unkind. He was sweet, no question. When Gail died, Kathy could not have asked more of him. She knew she needed him, but sometimes she felt he needed her even more. Whereas someone like Jack Leffler . . .
She pushed that thought aside. She let the sun burn it to nothing. But she was aware of one thing. Wrenched from her day-to-day Houston life and transported to Port Aransas, she was finally giving free rein to her feelings – the phrase “coming out of her shell” came to mind. She felt freer with her body, and for that matter, her imagination.
She saw Michael coming down the beach, returning from the cottage. As he hurried toward her across the sand, he seemed frightened, glancing back over his shoulder as if he was being followed.
He plopped down on the sand next to her.
“Something’s happened at the office. I’ve got to go back to Houston.” “I don’t understand,” Kathy said. They were back at the cottage, and
she was watching him pack a suitcase. “Why did you call your office on a Sunday anyway? And why was anybody there?”
“Because of the crisis I told you about. I’d promised to call and I’d forgotten until today, so when I came back for the sun block I thought I’d just call and get the answering service and leave a message, but Frank was there, he answered the phone. I mean, they’re all there, trying to figure out what to do, and Frank said they need me in the office tomorrow morning.” “An actuarial crisis?” Kathy said. It was a shame she was so smart and understood the nature of his job so well. “I thought you never had crises,
you said the great thing about your job was the lack of time pressure.”
“Well, this is a special occasion. Because this legislative committee is meeting – ”
“Over Labor Day weekend?”
“They’ve been meeting. And somebody leaked to Frank that they’re going to issue their report next week. Which is when everybody will have to announce their new rates, right away if we want to retain our biggest clients. And in the meantime we’ve got these new statistics . . . ” Michael kept talking, improvising, free to say anything that came to him, not worried if he was caught in the lies later. All that mattered was getting Kathy off the island.
Michael realized he couldn’t tell Kathy about the night visions, or the terrifying encounter with the giant at the cottage. In fact, he didn’t want to mention ghosts at all. So: the lie.
“We can at least have lunch first, can’t we?” Kathy asked.
Ah. Her acquiescent tone made him almost shudder with relief. Their two small suitcases were open on the bed, and he was swiftly packing clothes into them, unconcerned that he was mingling hers with his. “Why don’t we go ahead and get started,” he said as reasonably as he could. “Maybe stop in Rockport for lunch?” After we’ve gotten the hell off this haunted island, never to return.
“I thought we could eat here on the island, since it might be our last chance for a while,” Kathy said. She lifted one of her shirts out of his
suitcase, dropped it on the bed, and replaced it with one of his own. “Or should we eat in Corpus?” she added.
“Corpus?” Corpus Christi was the wrong direction, if they were driving back to Houston. “Why Corpus?”
“They have an airport there, Michael,” Kathy said, in a voice just as reasonable as Michael’s had been. “If this is such a major crisis, I’m sure your company will be willing to pay for you to fly back.”
She sounded fine, but she was making no sense. “What will we do with the car?” Michael asked.
“I’ll keep it, of course. I’ll drive it back here.” She saw that he still didn’t understand. Patiently, Kathy said, “I’m staying here, Michael. There’s no reason for me to rush home. I don’t have any crisis at the office. I haven’t even called the museum.”
There certainly seemed to be an edge to her last sentence. She turned away from him, removed her clothes from the suitcases, and began returning them to the dresser drawers, leaving Michael standing confused. His mind raced, but in neutral, producing nothing.
“Maybe you can take care of the crisis faster than you think,” Kathy said brightly, “and fly back here and finish the vacation with me.”
“Uh – ” His mind was functioning, no doubt about that, it was throwing out terrible images at a dazzling rate, but still coming up with nothing he could use.
Their farewell lunch was sandwiches at a café by the marina. The sun off the water dazzled, or would have if Michael had looked at it. Kathy smiled at him across the table, but the meal was mostly silent. Michael’s mind had slowed. He had the feeling he sometimes got in his work, of spiraling down to an inevitable result.
The lie hadn’t worked and the truth, Michael decided, was not an option. Meticulously he considered. If he told Kathy what had happened (a) she wouldn’t believe him, (b) she would think he had sunstroke or worse,
or (c) she would think he was a coward.
So he saw no good option, but he knew that leaving Kathy alone on the island was not a possibility. As they drove back to the cottage, he said, “It’s not right. It’s not fair.”
“What?”
“My having to go back to Houston. They should be able to take care of this without me. I’m going to call and tell them. Tomorrow, I can go on line at the library and figure it out from here – without having to leave the island.” Kathy had made him promise not to bring his laptop on this trip. In the few days he’d been here he’d learned not to miss it, but now he needed to connect.
“Now you’re talking!” she said. “First thing in the morning we’re going to get you to the library.”
Neither the distant nor the recent past would go away. The past was always with them, not only in memory but in tangible objects. When they left for dinner, they drove out their private little road to Eleventh Street, then along to where it hit Avenue G. Michael could have continued across the familiar avenue that led from the main street of town to the beach, but he felt unspoken pressure from Kathy to turn and drive along Avenue G, so he did. They drove slowly past the little clusters of cottages that had been cheap enough for them to afford when they were students; The Rock Cottages, Sea Horse Lodge, The Double Bar. They had stayed in them all. Kathy watched the buildings without saying anything. The whole town was a mosaic of memories, of such specific places and occasions that they conjured for her not only the person she had been but the time in her life when she hadn’t had a worry in the world. Michael put his hand over hers. She continued to gaze at the row
s of old cottages. What past was she remembering?
They had dinner in the restaurant behind the Tarpon Inn that had
survived a variety of names and never seemed to do much business. But on
this last night before Labor Day even it was crowded. Michael and Kathy had to wait in the bar for a while. He stared at the back of the old inn. It looked like a beach hotel from the 20’s – Franklin Roosevelt had stayed there once during his presidency – white with gray trim, with porches running the length of both its floors, featuring high-backed wooden beach chairs. No one Michael knew had ever stayed there. It had seemed too elegant, then too old-fashioned. But he found it appealing. He could picture Kathy and himself, old, retired, sitting up on that second-floor porch in the shade, wanting to smell the air but not needing any more sun, still holding hands, smiling at the same memories without any need to speak.
When he turned to say something about a happy future, he caught her staring across the restaurant with an expression between dismay and dawning delight. ‘Don’t be Jack,’ Michael thought with despair. ‘Please, don’t be Jack.’ He turned and with relief saw a man, not Jack, dining alone by the window. The man looked familiar, but Michael couldn’t place him.
Just as he realized that Kathy might have been looking not at anyone else in the bar but through the windows of the far wall, the sound of car tires came from the dimming courtyard – the sound of tires crunching on caliche, figures emerging from the car – policemen. The man near the window saw the police as well and he sprang to his feet, but the police were already through the door and were on him, wrestling him to the ground, pushing him face down, handcuffing his wrists behind his back.
“They said he robbed the bank,” whispered a woman nearby.
The handcuffed man looked sideways toward her, as if he heard her words. Michael recognized him now. It was the man from the ferry who warned of faulty cell phone coverage. He had shaved off his mustache, but when the police lifted him from the floor, the man under arrest grimaced.
”That’s my bad arm,” he protested.
Kathy said nothing, but Michael knew what she was thinking. She was remembering Michael’s suspicions about the Lefflers, which now seemed foolish.
C hapter Six
hile you’re at the library, I think I’ll do some shopping,” Kathy said. “I’ll bet I can beat the crowds today.”
Her voice was light and cheerful, perhaps artificially so, but he was willing to take it at face value. Kathy had made it quietly clear on more than one occasion that shopping was a solitary pursuit. Because Michael needed to go to the library to research his “office problem,” it presented her the perfect opportunity to browse through the island’s T-shirt and souvenir shops leisurely and alone. As for Michael, he was in fact eager to visit the library, but his reasons had nothing to do with the office.
Kathy dropped him off at the library. She reached across the seat and kissed him quickly – a kiss with familiarity in it, but just as they pulled apart a touch of longing too – before she drove away, gravel spurting from under her tires.
The public library was housed in the same one-story brick building as the city hall, which Michael found intriguing. He’d never before thought of Port Aransas as a regular town with government, city ordinances, and urban problems. He had always been aware of the island police, but otherwise he’d subconsciously regarded Port A as a temporary stage set erected every spring for the tourists and struck again in the fall. The town’s permanence made “the Tourist” Michael feel transitory.
He found only part of what he wanted in the library. It consisted mainly of a single good-sized room with a couple of annexes. In the main room there were bookshelves lining all the walls, furniture, and smaller shelves for magazines and children’s books filling the central area. It was a nice cloistered space that made Michael feel at home. Two women staffed the library, one with a badge marked “volunteer.” The latter, a tall, stern- faced-until-she-smiled woman with a pencil stuck in her graying bun, guided him to a local history shelf in the back corner. Surprisingly, there were no books on Port Aransas, but there was a collection of magazine and newspaper articles, mostly culled over the years from the local paper, and three or four guidebooks with chapters on the island included in summaries of the Gulf Coast. The latter were not very helpful, giving him mostly outdated information about restaurants and motels, but a couple of the newspaper articles were interesting. Michael had been wrong when he’d told Kathy the town of Port Aransas must be a recent invention. In fact the first settlement had been in the mid-1800’s and the island had been a popular tourist destination since the 1920’s, when the ferries had first begun operating.
But even before the settlements, the island and the pass to the Texas coast it guarded had been militarily strategic – in the Mexican and Civil Wars – and much earlier had been a good base for roving seafarers. More specifically, the island had been an occasional home for pirates. It was said that even the most famous pirate of the Gulf Coast, Jean Lafitte, had had a camp and buried treasure there. And there had, of course, been shipwrecks. The first permanent structure on the island had been the Aransas Pass lighthouse, built in 1853 to warn ships off the notoriously dangerous rocks of the pass.
Michael suddenly felt uneasy in the library, uneasy and embarrassed.
But he had made up his mind to ask.
“Ghosts?” echoed the volunteer lady. “Well, I don’t know. Let’s look. “My first request for supernatural subjects,” she added as she showed him the microfilm catalog. Michael smiled back at her weakly. So no other visitor to the island had felt haunted enough to explore the subject, at least during the volunteer librarian’s tenure.
She found him a couple of books, one of them written for children, neither of them enlightening. The volunteer seemed to know they wouldn’t be. She hovered close to him as he thumbed through the volumes and when he closed the second one she sidled next to him, almost furtively. The only other customers were a father helping his pre-school-age daughter pick out illustrated books, and they were across the room, but the lady kept her voice low. Maybe that was just habit, but it made their conversation sound sinister.
“Think you’ve seen one?” she asked in a hushed undertone. “A ghost, I mean.”
Michael hesitated. He couldn’t believably deny his visitation, so he finally just shrugged.
The volunteer librarian nodded. “You wouldn’t be the first,” she said
knowingly.
“Really? You – ”
She shook her head quickly, as if he’d accused her of an indelicacy. “But I’ve known one or two who claimed to have seen things that shouldn’t have been there. If you listen to them talk, and it’s a dark chilly night, and you walk home afterwards, you think you can feel something walking in your footprints.”
Michael stood up, so their heads were close. “Someone around here?” The lady shook her head again. “Back in Indiana.” She tilted her
head so that the pencil sticking out of her bun turned northward like a compass needle.
“Oh.”
She must have heard the disappointment in his voice and taken it as a challenge, because she immediately offered what she’d been gradually leading up to. “I know somebody who might be able to help you, though. Reverend Holroyd.”
“I don’t think so,” Michael said, starting to edge past her – not an
easy task; she was as tall as he and stood her ground.
“Young man, I’m not trying to convert you, and I don’t think you need praying over just because you think you’ve seen a ghost.”
“I never said – ”
“I’m a Lutheran myself,” she said staunchly. “Reverend Holroyd is at the Presbyterian church.” Again her pencil indicated the direction.
“And what do you think he can do for me?”
“He collects stories.” Michael merely looked at the lady, who had dropped him off far back on the road to whatever conversational destination she had
in mind. “Ghost stories,” she clarified with exasperation.
“Oh.”
“Well, not stories, exactly. More like research. He gave a talk once here at the library. You should go see him, he’d probably be glad to talk about it. It’s a hobby with him.”
“Well, maybe – the Presbyterian church?”
“Just down Alister Street. You can’t miss it.” She meant the white church with the steeple, the one he had taken to be Catholic.
“That’s very helpful,” Michael said. “Thank you.”
“Just don’t tell him who told you to come,” she said, regaining her furtive manner. “I wouldn’t want him to think I’m going to start sending him every nut who comes in here.”
“Hm . . . ”
“Not you, young man. If I thought you were a nut I wouldn’t have told you about Reverend Holroyd.” But she looked as if she were having second thoughts.
Shortly Michael gave up on the library’s scanty ghost collection, returning it to the shelf. His eye fell on a copy of the local newspaper. The headline said something about a record tide, but Michael had caught a glimpse of a familiar face, and turned to the story under the fold. “Missing Boy Not Local,” the headline said, rather dismissively Michael thought. The picture was of Antonio, the young man he’d seen riding the motorcycle outside the café, then again on the beach. The story said that
the police were investigating the circumstances of the disappearance. “He was a good swimmer,” said one of his friends from back home in South Carolina. “But of course he many not have been familiar with the currents down here.”
The story didn’t have many details, so the writer had fleshed it out with speculation. Antonio had come here with a group of friends, but then stayed behind when they left. The friends weren’t sure why; they thought he might have met someone on the island. Michael stared at the photo of the handsome young man with the mass of dark curly hair. His young face had a troubled look, his eyes too much intensity.