by Rosie Thomas
‘Why now? Why so sudden?’
It wasn’t sudden, it had been gradual but inexorable. ‘We don’t love each other any more.’
He didn’t try to deny it. There was another breath-taking spasm within her as she wondered if she should try to take back the words, if after all it might not be too late. ‘Tom?’
‘Yes. What do you want to do? You’re not at home, I called there.’ His voice was flat, weighty with resignation.
He wouldn’t make himself the villain, she remembered. Nor would he put himself out to rescue the two of them, after their eleven years of marriage. The wringing in her stomach transmuted itself into a flutter of excitement, of liberation. ‘No. I rented a place, I just want to stay here for a while to think things out. I called because I didn’t want you to worry about where I am.’
‘Thank you.’ There was sarcasm now, a familiar weapon. He added, remembering, ‘There is a worry here. The younger Duhane girl has gone missing. Her father called, she’s been out all night.’
She said stupidly, ‘What?’ although she had heard too clearly. And she remembered the harbour wall and Doone’s waterlogged body brought ashore. The bustling street had gone so still and she had watched in the middle of it with the condensed chill of the Ice Parlour bag squeezed to her chest.
Not again. Another adolescent, neither child nor woman. ‘Leonie? Is this anything to do with you?’
Tom had made a connection. It was one of those sudden, blinding flashes of insight, which illuminate a landscape better left in merciful darkness. She knew it and she didn’t care. ‘No. I don’t see how it could be.’
He didn’t reply at once. There was some noise in the background, confused Beam voices.
Leonie drew herself inwards, even at this distance. ‘I’ll call John right now. There may be something I can do.’
‘Yes. Let me know what you do decide, Leonie, won’t you?’
‘Yes,’ she promised.
She lifted the receiver again as soon as the connection was broken and jabbed out the number of the Captain’s House. The engaged tone sounded at her and with a twitch of impatience she hung up and walked the steps to the kerb. She gazed unseeingly at the litter of butts and candy wrappers washed up against the kerb stones, not letting her thoughts focus yet on what could have happened to May.
She dialled the number three more times, but it was always engaged. She fought against the impulse to race down to Pittsharbor at once. There was nothing to be done before she had spoken to John. Perhaps May was already safely back at home.
She left the shade of the store front and crossed the road to a wooden bench in a worn semicircle of grass. She sat down and bent her head, waiting. The yellow dog ambled up and lay panting at her feet.
Lucas pounded up the steps from the beach and ran across the hummocks of grass to the porch. He had wanted to do something to help find May, but had been unable to think of anything useful. He had been wandering along the tideline staring out across the water, then he had noticed something. The others looked up and watched him dashing towards them. ‘The boat,’ he shouted. ‘The rowboat’s gone.’
He pointed, and Marian and the others followed with their eyes. Once they saw, it seemed incredible that no one had noticed before. It was an hour past high water but the sailboat and the other dinghies rode comfortably on the swell of the waves. Nearer to the shore, within wading distance, bobbed the little white plastic buoy where the Beams kept the tender moored. There was no line, no boat.
Marian stood up, her hand to her throat. ‘I’ll go and tell John Duhane.’
Elizabeth waited with Spencer and Alexander.
Spencer listened to the news as she relayed it and said, ‘I saw her on Pittsharbor night.’
‘We all did. She was at the barbecue party.’
‘No, it was much later than that. There was a moon and I went out on the deck for some air. Someone was down on the beach, just sitting on the shingle looking out to sea.’
‘She was by herself?’ Elizabeth asked. The image of May out alone in the dark deepened her sense of foreboding.
‘At first. I couldn’t even see who it was. I wasn’t particularly interested.’ He leant across to a table and shook a cigarette from a pack. He tapped the filter but didn’t light it. ‘Then Marty Stiegel came rushing out of nowhere. Not running, but moving at a pace. The kid whipped round and I saw it was the young Duhane girl. They talked for a minute, then they went back across the beach together and up to the Stiegels’ place.’
Alexander had been sketching in a notebook. Elizabeth tilted her head automatically and saw that he had been drawing her hands as they lay in her lap. They looked to her like ancient hooked claws. Now he snapped the book shut. He exchanged a glance with Spencer and Spencer gave the smallest shrug.
‘She was at home until yesterday evening,’ Elizabeth fretted. ‘Her father said so. She didn’t go missing on Pittsharbor Day.’
None of them recalled aloud the similarity to the circumstances around Doone’s death. There was no need to.
‘What can we do?’ Elizabeth asked.
Alexander sighed, ‘Nothing much at the moment. She’s probably just run off to a friend, or to see some boy. The way thoughtless kids do.’
I know she hasn’t, Elizabeth thought, but she made herself nod. She turned her head to look at the view of the bay.
Marty took the call from John Duhane. Justine had been fretful and Judith had taken her out in her stroller for a walk along the Pittsharbor road.
Afterwards he took off his glasses and held them clasped in one hand. His eyes were closed and there were furrows of concern over the bridge of his nose and pulling the corners of his mouth. He stayed motionless for a long moment then, as if having come to a decision, he jumped up and went to the locked filing drawer in the corner of his study.
He put on his loose jacket with its deep pockets and walked along the beach to the Captain’s House. When he came to the porch door he peered into the shadows inside and saw John talking on the telephone, walking distractedly up and down as he did so. Marty tapped on the glass and John’s head jerked up. Seeing it was only Marty he gestured briefly to him to come on in. Ivy was sunk in the corner of one of the sofas. She gnawed at the corner of her thumbnail, her face sharp-pointed and tight with anxiety.
‘No, don’t worry just yet,’ John was saying. ‘If Amy does hear anything from her, will you give me a call? Sure. Yes. Yes, thanks. Goodbye.’
Hunching his shoulders he looked across at Marty. ‘None of the kids locally nor any of her friends in the city have heard from her. One of them got a postcard, that’s all. She hasn’t run to them anyway. She hasn’t taken any of her clothes or belongings either. Nothing is missing.’
‘Nothing at all?’
‘Nope.’
‘I came to see what I could do.’
‘That’s good of you, Marty. I don’t know yet.’ He shrugged, showing his helplessness, then glanced briefly at Ivy. ‘There may be an explanation, something that isn’t sinister. I can’t think what it might be, that’s all.’
‘The police?’
‘Not yet. But I’m going to …’
Marian Beam appeared in the porch doorway, cutting him short. There were red blotches disfiguring her neck and throat, and her hair was an uncombed mass of knots. She looked as if she might be losing control. ‘Our rowboat is gone,’ she said.
Ivy jumped up and they crowded to the window with Marty behind them.
‘When?’ John demanded. The white buoy bobbed naked on the ebb tide.
‘I don’t know. Lucas just saw it wasn’t there. I came right over.’
The colour faded out of John’s face. Beneath his tan he looked aged and grey. Marian went out again on to the porch and he and Ivy followed her to the beach steps. There was no dinghy drawn up on the shingle, nowhere else for it to be.
Marty was left alone. Quickly and silently he flitted up the stairs. Thirty seconds later he descended and followed the other
three out on to the deck. He was pensively waiting, with his hands deep in the pockets of his jacket, as they turned back to the house.
‘If she’s taken the boat…’ John began and let his words fade, because he couldn’t voice the possibilities. ‘I’m going to call the police,’ he said.
Karyn and Elliot took the sailboat out to search the nearby bays for any sign of the missing rowboat, and Shelly and Richard paddled two canoes across to the island. They made a circuit of it, examining all the rock shelves and inlets, but they found nothing.
Under Marty’s direction two groups, including Spencer and Alexander and Lucas Beam, walked the headlands to the northeast and in the opposite direction towards Pittsharbor. Tom and Marian stayed behind with Ashton and Sidonie. While the babies were taking their naps the two of them climbed to the widow’s walk, which crowned the roof of the big house. They stood shoulder to shoulder in the small space, their hands on the warm metalwork spikes of the railing.
‘I haven’t been up here in so long,’ Marian said.
The view was a tapestry of turquoise and silver-grey. Moon Island was a whale-back spiked with the silhouettes of spruce and the islands in the open water beyond seemed to sail through a fine veil of mist. The bay was busy with shuttling boats.
‘Where has this child gone?’ she breathed.
‘I hope to God not the same way as the other one.’
Marian lifted her hands and clenched them again on the spear-tips. The metal left a fine deposit of salt and flaking paint in her palms. ‘I don’t know what’s happening up here,’ she repeated. To hear his mother express uncertainty gave Tom a jolt of surprise. She was different today; her looks and her bearing, and even her voice had changed. She seemed older and almost frail.
‘I’m sorry about Leonie and me. It must have come as a shock to you.’
‘I didn’t know you were so unhappy.’
‘Unhappy? Yes, I suppose so. In a long-term, low-level way that we didn’t take notice of until it suddenly became acute. It was only this summer. Up here at the beach.’
The light-drenched sharpness of the view, striated rocks and wing-stretched gulls and shifting water ought to have made the notion of unhappiness seem murky and incongruous. But there was sadness here like a sea fog. It penetrated the bluff houses and lay in the corners as black as shadows at midday.
‘She wanted a baby.’
‘Of course,’ Marian said. And after a moment, ‘What will you do?’
‘I don’t know that there is much to do.’
‘You don’t seem to want to try very hard. Why don’t you go and get her, wherever she is, and bring her back where she belongs?’
That was more like Marian. ‘Because Leonie doesn’t want to be got, or brought. We haven’t been like you and Dickson, you see. You set an example for us all that was kind of hard to follow.’
‘Did we?’ Marian said. ‘Is that so?’ She was looking at Dickson’s flag. It stirred and flapped in the light breeze.
The day ticked on and slid into a motionless afternoon. The searchers trickled back to the bluff, having found nothing except a fearful awareness that there was so much space and so little for them to go on. May had simply vanished. If she had taken the Beams’ boat, then that had vanished with her.
John and Ivy sat on in the Captain’s House, waiting, willing some news to come. The police had earlier taken the view that May Duhane was almost fifteen years old, there had been a family disagreement, it was too early yet to launch a full-scale search for her.
John shouted, ‘Something has happened to my daughter. She has never done anything like this in her life.’
‘Sir, we fully understand your concern,’ the officer stonewalled him.
It was Ivy who showed her strength. After the first shock she became resolute, turning John from the comforter into the comforted. ‘We’ll find her,’ she repeated.
Unable to sit still, she crossed and recrossed the room in a frenzy of contained energy, prowling from corner to corner and seizing the telephone every time it rang. It was only offers of help, never May herself. In one of her loops Ivy went up the stairs to search her room again.
She came down with the red-and-black book in her hand. ‘We didn’t see this before.’
John took it and flipped through the ruled pages. ‘It’s some kind of diary.’
‘Yeah. Doone Bennison’s.’
‘Why didn’t her parents take it?’
‘Perhaps they didn’t know it was here.’
The silvery artemisia bush shivered outside the windows of Elizabeth’s evening room. ‘Why aren’t they looking on the island?’ she demanded of Spencer.
‘Karyn Beam and Elliot and Lucas walked right over it to the ocean. They didn’t see anything.’
Spencer put down the magazine he had been pretending to read and walked through to the kitchen where Alexander was cooking. He mounded a neat heap of herbs on the wooden chopping block and rocked the mezzaluna over them. The scent of thyme rose cleanly. Spencer leaned against the dresser and stacked a pyramid of kitchen weights on the plate of the old set of scales.
‘What are you going to say?’ Alexander asked.
‘To whom?’
‘We should say something to somebody. In case there is a connection. We agreed last time that there wasn’t, that there was nothing to change and a lot of people who would be hurt. But two teenage kids?’
Spencer was making an inverse pyramid now. The brass discs rocked threateningly as he lowered the heaviest into place. ‘Yes. I believe you’re right.’
‘The police?’
‘No.’ They went on separately with what they were doing, balancing and chopping, without the need to enlarge further on why the police and the usual channels and the straight world were antipathetic. The top-heavy pile of weights overbalanced and noisily crashed. ‘Not first off, anyway. I’ll talk to him and tell him what I saw.’
Alexander nodded. ‘When?’
‘You’re concerned about this kid, aren’t you?’
‘Yes. I am.’
Elizabeth came in and began fussing around the margins of the kitchen. Spencer picked up the weights and replaced them, then smoothly changed the subject.
The tan station-wagon nosed down the bluff road. Hannah peered ahead of her, then hunched forward over the wheel to give herself a better view. Her first impression had been right, it was a squad car ahead. She could see the square heads of the two officers inside. They passed the path and steps that led down to the public end of the beach, but the car didn’t stop. Its destination must be one of the five houses. ‘Whatever is going on?’ she muttered. Looking sideways, she saw that Aaron had briefly fallen asleep. Slumber came on him often, without warning. His jaw sagged open and his slow breath caught in his throat. He was ill, but he had insisted so vehemently on being brought home from the hospital that she had given way to his demands. As she turned towards the house she saw that the squad car had gone all the way to the end of the lane.
It took all her strength to manoeuvre Aaron out of the car and up the porch steps. He gasped painfully for breath and each small pace he took, with all his weight on Hannah’s arm, cost him an effort. There was nothing left spare in him for talking, but she encouraged him forward with a little monologue of praise and reassurance. At last she had him in his chair beside the wood stove. She brought a plaid rug and tucked it around his legs.
‘You know what I want?’ he demanded.
‘What’s that?’
‘A glass of five-fruit.’
It was the soda-fountain flavour of long ago. Neither of them had tasted it for twenty-five years. Hannah kept her voice light. ‘We don’t have any five-fruit. I’ll get you a Coke.’
She was in the kitchen when she saw Marian Beam hurrying towards the porch. She sighed at the sight, but curiosity made her open the door and let her in. Marian didn’t often come visiting the Fennymores.
Marian sat beside Aaron’s chair. She had brought the news of May’s disa
ppearance, but once she had conveyed it she showed no sign of leaving. They talked a little about the police and the search that was under way. Hannah took away Aaron’s untouched glass of Coke. ‘I have to go and buy some supplies,’ she said, with her mouth tight.
‘I’ll stay with him,’ Marian told her.
‘Why thank you, Marian.’
When they were alone together they sat for a minute in silence. Aaron’s eyes were closed, and the colour of his skin and the lines etched from each side of his beaky nose made him look like one of his whalebone carvings. Marian folded her two hands around Aaron’s cold, knotted one. Then she lowered her head, very slowly, until it rested on his knee. He lifted his free hand and placed it on her hair.
A tear ran down the bridge of Marian’s nose and lay like a bead on the hairy surface of the plaid rug. ‘I wanted to come to the hospital.’
‘There was no need.’
‘I felt the need.’
His voice was bone-weary, hardly more than a whisper. ‘It has been a long time, Marian.’
‘Twenty years. Twenty-two since Dickson died.’
In his fifties Aaron had been still strong. There had been an unhappy violence about him, an original wildness just contained within the flesh of convention. He had seemed not to be afraid of anything, nor to place much value on anything either, and there was a powerful erotic attraction in that. Plenty of women in and around Pittsharbor had been drawn to Aaron Fennymore, Marian knew perfectly well. He had a reputation as a sexual aggressor. He had assaulted her widowhood and she had been pleased to give him what he demanded; more than pleased, she had given herself up to him. It had not mattered, at first, that he returned so little.
‘How are you?’ she asked. His hand was so light she could hardly feel where it rested on the curve of her skull.
‘I am tired.’
‘Do you remember the woods?’
They used to climb up on to the headland and lie in the hollows between the spruce trees. Regardless of their age. Without thought of their grown children.