Stone Cove Island

by Suzanne Myers

  NINE

  True to her core belief in the hot breakfast, Mom was making eggs when I came into the kitchen the next morning. She put a plate down in front of me, without asking if I wanted any.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Mom, you’re such a social butterfly these days.” She flashed me a confused and then alarmed look. “I mean, you went out two nights in a row. When does that ever happen?”

  “There was a town council meeting last night,” she said, turning back to the counter. “Your dad wanted to go. You know I hate those things, but it’s important, because of the hurricane. We need to know what’s coming for the winter.” I nodded. Charlie’s parents were on the town council. Why did my every thought now circle me back to Charlie? I redirected my brain as Mom broke four more eggs into the bowl.

  “Didn’t Dad already go to work?”

  She looked down at the eggs. There would be too many now. “Oh. Yes. I guess that’s right.” But she kept stirring them anyway. I wondered if she was counting each stir, if she needed to reach a certain number before she could stop. I rinsed my plate and picked up my book bag.

  “Will you be home after school?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.” I improvised. “I might go study at the library.”

  Mom nodded, still focused on the eggs. “Have a nice day,” she said.

  On the way out, I detoured back through my room and grabbed the diary from its hiding place behind the bookcase.

  MEREDITH WAS ONLY FREE for the first half of lunch. She had a college admissions meeting. Since I was applying only to in-state schools that used the common application, I didn’t have to go. The schools Meredith was applying to had more complicated requirements, different essays and interviews. It was a warm day, so we sat at the picnic benches in front of the school.

  “Halloween’s getting closer,” she said. “Did you decide who you’re going with?”

  I looked at her. I had decided who I wanted to go with, but that didn’t mean it was going to happen. What I would not do, I was sure, was follow Cat’s hard-to-get strategy. I agreed with my mother, at least on that point. Thinking about this took me back to Mom’s diary. Who had Jimmy taken to the dance in the end? Maybe Cat had won. They ended up married, after all. I’d have to go back and read more.

  “I’m thinking of asking Tim McAllister,” I said finally, poking her in the ribs.

  “Ha. Ha,” she shot back. “Hilarious. Cradle robber.”

  “I really am going to ask him for you, if you don’t get it together soon.”

  “Don’t,” she said, looking suddenly serious. She pulled her knees up and rested her chin on them. It was a very Meredith gesture, one she’d done as a little girl too. It meant, I give up. “I probably can’t go anyway.”

  “What? You have been talking about nothing else since school started. In fact, if you’re not going to go, I want all that time we spent discussing it back. Plus interest.”

  “I still want to,” she said. “But I might have to go do my college auditions early. My parents are worried that if they don’t get the ferry running before the harbor freezes, it’s going to be almost impossible to get back and forth to the mainland this winter. Normally I wouldn’t have to go in until January or February. But I might go this month, if Barnard and Juilliard can reschedule me. I’m so bummed though. It’s our last fall. I just wanted to do all the regular island things, one last time.”

  “I know,” I said. Everyone’s life was turned upside down right now, and some of my classmates who planned to go far away for college, like Meredith, would leave with this broken memory of the island, instead of the image of their home the way it was supposed to be.

  “Damn,” she said, flipping over her phone. “It’s twelve thirty. I have to go to that meeting. Sure you don’t want to come?”

  “They said for UMass and local schools we don’t have to.”

  “I know, but don’t you want to anyway, in case you change your mind? And to be a good friend and keep me company?”

  “No way,” I answered.

  She stuck her tongue out at me. “Rude.”

  “Okay,” I amended. “No thank you. And you’re the one sticking your tongue out at people.”

  “See you later,” she laughed, dragging her heavy backpack behind her. Meredith always chose practical over fashionable. Her backpack looked like something you could take on an Antarctic expedition. It looked hilarious on her ballerina frame.

  “Have fun,” I said. Then she was gone and I was alone. I took out my mother’s diary. I held a pencil as a prop, so I could act like I was sketching if someone came too close and got curious. I flipped back to May, around the date of the Spring Fling. Jimmy had ended up going with Bess after Cat turned him down. Naturally, Cat was furious with Bess, who was supposed to realize that Cat liked Jimmy and turn him down. I was familiar with that type of girl logic. Mom had gone with Dad “just as friends”—right, Mom. Cat had ended up going with someone named Brian. There were no last names and sometimes my mom referred to people by their initials, so it was hard to know who she was talking about. At the actual dance however, Cat had disappeared with Jimmy, leaving Bess in an awkward threesome with my parents. Some girl called Lynn started to tag along and offered to give Mom a ride home. Mom was annoyed but didn’t want to hurt Lynn’s feelings. Dad ended up taking Bess home. Mom was bummed (served you right for going as “friends,” Mom. So chicken.) and felt even worse the next day when Cat made fun of her for getting stuck with Loser Lynn instead of the guy she actually liked, and bragged about how she’d won Jimmy’s devotion.

  It was practically a soap opera. You could diagram the drama that Cat had caused: turning down the guy she liked, then breaking up his date to make him go off with her. I still didn’t get why that was better than just agreeing to go with him in the first place, but perhaps Cat had access to feminine wiles I didn’t. Or maybe the point was to show Bess she couldn’t have Jimmy. Could that have played into it? That she’d wanted to get the guy she liked and put her friend in her place at the same time? The next day of course, my mom was in a gloom, walked on the beach alone, called Bess, etc.

  I skipped Mom’s OCD footnotes for this passage and moved on to July and August. It was clear Mom had some better weeks than others. Sometimes she sounded like any shy, insecure teenager. She went to Bess’s house for sleepovers. Nate took both of them sailing. There were beach bonfires (I guess I’d been wrong about that one), long days sunbathing slathered in baby oil instead of sunscreen. Other weeks Mom holed up in her room, listening to The Cure and the Cowboy Junkies set to repeat on her new CD player. She starved, weighed, and counted a lot during these periods.

  It was surprising to me how little she mentioned Dad or any of her own crushes. Her diary devoted way more time to Cat’s manipulations of Jimmy, Cat’s jealousy when Bess would talk to him at a party, and Cat’s opinions of who at Stone Cove High was and wasn’t worth their time. Cat, at seventeen, seemed to me to have been a classic mean girl, and I didn’t see that she’d changed all that much since. I wondered if Mom got sick of it or if eventually Cat had turned against her. Something had broken up their friendship long before I was born.

  SCHOOL WAS CREAKILY GETTING back to a modified normal. We had assemblies in the cafeteria and gym in the playground. Several times a day, the power flickered off and then whirred back on at half strength, fueled by loud generators. To me, the changes made little difference, but then I wasn’t living in the gym and taking showers in the girls’ locker room. I had already given Mom the excuse of going to the library after school, so I decided I would actually do that. In town, I noticed the village green had been cleared of fallen branches, but the grass was still burnt yellow. I wondered if it would grow back on its own or if they would have to re-sod the whole thing in the spring. It looked painful, if plants could experience pain.

  At the library, the power was back on and the Internet was up. That meant I could skip the microfiche. It also meant way more people were usin
g the library. I signed my name to the waiting list for a computer terminal, and went out to sit on the front steps and wait. Into the Wild was in my bag and I was only a few pages in when I looked up to see Charlie approaching the entrance. I had planned to be cool the next time I saw him, but I couldn’t stop my grin.

  “Hi,” I said, standing quickly. “How are you?”

  “Good.” He stopped at the bottom of the steps and looked up at me, warily I thought.

  “The Internet is working again. I was going to look up some news articles about the investigation. Greg Jurovic told me Bess’s things were discovered at the lighthouse by some surfers. If we can figure out who it was, maybe we can ask them about it.” As soon as I said “we” I regretted it. Charlie had an expression on his face that indicated he was not in the mood to be a “joiner” after all. What had I done? I wondered. We both grew uncomfortable as a long silent moment lingered between us.

  “Cool,” he said. “I’m actually here to help Mary Ellen with the library’s computer archiving setup. They want to make sure they have everything backed up properly, since the power keeps going out.”

  Cool? That didn’t even sound like Charlie. Had he had a lobotomy since I’d last seen him?

  “Very cool,” I said tonelessly. “You’d better not keep Mary Ellen waiting then.” I gave him a frosty stare and waited for him to go. It was the exact opposite of what I wanted. For an instant, I felt as crazy as my seventeen-year-old mother.

  “Yeah,” he said. His voice was so soft I could barely hear him. “I should go.” He walked slowly up the steps, not turning back. I felt like an idiot. I waited for as long as I thought it would take him to get to the librarian’s office, then added another eight minutes, so there was no danger of running into him again. I was never going to kiss another boy, that was for sure.

  As I walked back into the main room, people looked up. I might have been stomping a little, I guess, or maybe they could feel the humiliation radiating off me. I sat down at terminal 3 and logged in with a few quick clicks. One thing I couldn’t understand was how Charlie, with his journalist’s instincts, could have lost interest in Bess’s story. Losing interest in me, fine. But I knew he’d been just as consumed as I was with wanting to know what really happened on the beach that night. I knew he itched to find out why our mothers no longer spoke.

  The Providence Journal had covered the investigation the most closely of all the newspapers, at least as far as they could follow it. I found an account from a few days past the murder that reported three surfers had gone to the police after coming across the dead girls’ things. One had been Bess’s uncle, Paul Guthy. He was Grant’s younger brother. The paper listed his age as twenty-eight and said he’d been surfing on East Beach at the time of the discovery. The two boys who had actually found Bess’s clothes had ducked into the lighthouse, looking for a place to change into their wet suits. One was Billy Landron, a boy from a summer family who had owned a big house on the bluffs. I knew his daughters from sailing camp, but the family had sold the house when they moved to London a few years ago.

  The other was Jimmy Pender.

  I had to read that twice to be sure I wasn’t imagining it. Charlie’s dad. I couldn’t believe he’d actually found Bess’s bloody clothes, taken Bess to dances and Charlie had never heard a thing about her. I wondered if that was Cat’s mandate, or Jimmy’s, or something they decided together. I wanted to run back to the librarian’s office, grab Charlie and show him the article. Of course I couldn’t do that. I also couldn’t talk to Jimmy, who was not going to tell me anything about this when he’d never even mentioned it to his own children. His friend Billy Landron was long gone. But I did know where to find Paul Guthy.

  I SHOULD HAVE CHECKED in at home before heading all the way out to the marina. I knew I would make my mom worried. But I didn’t. Instead I stopped by just long enough to grab my bike without going inside. It had cooled off a lot since the strange, humid, warm weather we’d had earlier in the week, and it was suddenly getting dark a lot earlier. Winter was coming. I tried not to think about what would happen to all of us if it arrived before the island had gotten the basic necessities back in place.

  By the time I was on the road, I had warmed up from the exertion of biking. Only my fingers were really cold. It was quiet on the road. I saw only one car, heading the other way, into town. The power was out on this side of the island, and the streetlights were dark. I felt that strange vertigo you sometimes get, watching my single bike headlamp peer into the blank darkness. If you looked a certain way, up started to feel like down and down like up. I kept imagining sounds coming from behind me: the crush of dry leaves, rustling in the trees. When I looked, no one was there. I shook it off. Deer, I thought, or raccoons. Just past sunset was a busy time of day in the animal world, when the night hunters came out to look for prey and the day timers looked for a safe spot to sleep.

  The marina was lit with the dim, brownish light I’d come to recognize as generator produced. No one had bothered to put their boats back in the water after the storm here, though the slips were much less damaged than in the harbor. It was too close to the end of the season. I wondered what there was for Paul Guthy to do out here at this time of year. He worked as the caretaker of the marina. Grant had owned the business, but now the town ran it.

  Paul was there tonight, I could see through the office window. He had his back to me, his feet up on a chair, while he watched football on TV and drank a beer. I leaned my bike against a dock piling and rapped gently on the door as I opened it. There was no one else here, and I didn’t want to startle him.

  Paul turned to glare at me but kept one eye on the game.

  “Yeah?” he said. He said it like he wasn’t particularly interested in what I might say.

  “Hi,” I started, realizing I had come with no plan. I didn’t know Paul, except by sight. I was here to ask him about his niece’s murder twenty-five years ago. For all I knew, he was a suspect at the time. For all I knew, he was the one who had killed her. Wasn’t it true that most violent crimes took place between people who knew each other, and even more often, people who were related? There was no tactful way to start the conversation.

  “Hi,” I started over. I decided to go with a lie. “I’m doing a research paper for school about island history. I know your family has been on Stone Cove a long time, and your, uh, business has been really important to the island?” Why was I making it a question? Paul grunted. It could have meant “go on” or “get out.” I really couldn’t tell.

  “Your family’s owned the marina boatyard for a long time?”

  He stood up now, staggering a little and I realized he was drunk. He lumbered toward me, just a step or two, and glared harder. “What do you want?” he said. His question didn’t sound like a question.

  “I’m a senior at Stone Cove High and—”

  “I know who you are,” he said. I didn’t know if that was true. “You got some nerve, coming here to ask about my family, our business, when you know they took it and your family’s part of them that did.”

  “Do you mean, now that the town runs it? My family’s not part of the town council.”

  “It was my brother’s. They wanted it and they made sure they got it.” His eyes were bloodshot. I’d always assumed that Grant had gone bankrupt before he’d died, and that was why the marina ended up being taken over by the town. Paul obviously felt that things hadn’t worked out fairly, whatever had gone on. “So what are you here for? You got an anchor for me, too?”

  For a moment, I wasn’t sure I’d heard him right. I wanted to ask him to repeat himself. But the rage radiating off him made me change tactics instead. “Well, it’s not so much the business I wanted to ask about. For my report, I want to write about notable women from the island. I’ve been reading about your niece, Bess Linsky and—”

  Now he lunged toward me, yelling. His words were garbled and furious and the only thing I could decipher was “Get out!”

 
; In a panic, I backed away as fast as I could, through the jangling glass door and past the stacks of fishing rods and lures. Paul kept coming. My bike was about fifteen yards behind me, on the dock. I could turn and run, I thought. He was in bad shape, and I was probably faster. But I was too scared to turn my back on him. I felt my way backward, one hand guiding me along the railing that edged the water. I took big, awkward steps, keeping my eyes on him but picturing in my mind how much farther it would be to my bike. Damn. Why hadn’t I parked it facing the road? Now I would have to turn it around before I could get out. It was stupid to come out here alone, at night, without telling anyone where I was. On the other hand, why should I have been worried? Stone Cove Island was safe. Nothing bad ever happened here. Or, almost nothing.

  Paul was getting closer. He was ranting less in favor of moving faster, which seemed to take some effort through his beer haze. Every few steps, he would lose balance and I would make up a little ground. It was three, big, backward steps, I guessed, maybe four, until I got to my bike. If I went any faster I might overshoot the end of the railing and end up in the water. When I got to the place the railing stopped, I kept my hand reached out behind me and made my steps very straight. Three, two. On one, I hoped I would collide with the metal handlebars and not the bay. Instead, I collided with something else. It was a someone actually. He grabbed my arm. Paul pulled up short, startled. I turned around, now even more terrified, and saw Charlie.

  “Come on,” Charlie hissed. “Get out of here.”

  Instantly we turned and ran, leaving my bike behind and Paul staring after us. I looked back once to see if he would follow, but he didn’t. I thought of a junkyard dog, running only the length his chain would allow him to go.

  We ran as far as we could, which was almost to the lighthouse. We sat down on the rock just outside. I was gasping for air.