Moon Island

by Rosie Thomas

  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 launc
h 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 disappearance, 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.

  He spoke so slowly that his lips hardly moved. ‘Full of sex.’

  The woods were full of sex. It was true, but no longer theirs. She nodded her head, complicit and valedictory, with the weight of grief gathering within her. ‘Where has this other girl gone?’ she whispered.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  They were thinking of the black tree trunks and the mossy hollows.

  ‘How is Hannah?’

  ‘She didn’t need any supplies. I don’t want her to be hurt, Marian.’

  After so long. ‘I know that. I love you, Aaron.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Darkness fell early, bringing with it a shower of sharp rain. The change in the season seemed to have come within the space of a single day. Yesterday it had been full summer, but today there was the smoky, wet-leaf warning of autumn in the air. In a week it would be the end of August, then Labor Day and the summer visitors would empty out of their rental cottages and turn back to the cities.

  All the lights were burning in the Captain’s House and the open ground at the road’s end was lined with parked cars. May Duhane had been officially declared missing, twenty-four hours after she had last been seen. With the dark the search for her had been called off, but it would resume at first light.

  Marty put Justine to bed. He went through the routines of Pampers and baby-powder and sleep suit, and wound the musical box that stood at the side of her crib, but he was clumsy with her and
she cried intermittently. She was teething, and her fat cheeks were flushed and prickled with a faint rash.

  He held her on his lap and tried to soothe her, and at last she grew drowsy. Her fists relaxed and her eyes faltered shut, her wet eyelashes making crescents of tiny shadow spikes. He put her in her crib and settled the quilt around her. He was relieved to be briefly free of her unending needs and at once felt the needle of self-reproach. If there wasn’t Justine, what worth was there in anything else?

  Downstairs, Judith was waiting for him. She half-turned from the window and the invisible sea, and he saw her as a profile of abstract curves and mounds, flesh compressed and seamed by her clothes. ‘Pour me a drink,’ he begged. ‘I thought she’d never sleep.’

  ‘Wine okay?’

  ‘Anything. Just alcohol.’

  Their voices sounded flat, all the resonance leached out of them by the damp and the cloudy vapour of apprehension.

  ‘Any news?’

  ‘I haven’t heard anything,’ Judith said.

  ‘I wish there were something …’ Marty whispered. A knock at the door made them gaze at each other in hope and fear.

  It was Spencer Newton, a cashmere sweater over his summer shirt. ‘Do you have five minutes?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure. Come on in.’

  Judith was behind them, nursing her glass of wine, listening.

  ‘No, I wondered if we might take a walk along the beach.’

  Marty looked back over his shoulder. He sketched a gesture of puzzlement at his wife and answered, all compliance, ‘Right now, Spencer? Well, okay, if there’s something I can help you with.’

  Judith looked dubious, but she dismissed them with a reminder to Marty that they should eat before too long.

  The rain had eased off, leaving the air cold and moist. The beach pebbles glistened like jet underfoot and long black waves with curling lips of grey foam seemed superfluous to so much wetness.

  They had been silent as they made their way down to the water’s edge. Marty was constrained, as if he knew and feared what was coming. When they reached the tideline they began to walk towards the Pittsharbor steps.