“Charlie, what are you doing out here?” I panted.
His lungs were heaving, his eyes wild as Paul’s, but clear. “I think you mean, what are you doing out here? And thank you for showing up when you did?”
“Yes,” I said. “Both of those. Thank you.”
He straightened, catching his breath. He avoided my gaze, glancing back toward the dock. “I felt bad about the library today. I wanted to explain. I came to your house, but you were just leaving on your bike. So I ran after you.”
“You ran here? It’s three miles.” The deer and raccoon sounds were now making sense.
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s a pretty long run. What were you doing at the marina at night?”
I wanted to tell him the whole story. There were so many pieces he’d missed, I had to think where to start. It felt like a big jumble.
“Well,” I said, “the first thing is, I found my mom’s diary from when she was in high school. But that’s not why I’m out here. I can tell you more about the diary later.” I hesitated, then added, “If you’re interested.”
“I’m interested,” he said.
“When I was at the library today, I was looking up the stuff I told you about. I found it in the Providence Journal. The three people who found Bess’s things after the murder. One was Billy Landron. You remember the Landrons? They moved to London?”
He nodded.
“Another was Paul. Bess’s uncle. He was out surfing when Billy found her clothes and hair in the lighthouse. I thought I could ask him to tell me about it, but when I got there, he was drunk and, um, unfriendly. I should have left right away. He was angry when I asked about his family and the marina, and then when I mentioned Bess’s name, he completely freaked out. I don’t know what would have happened if you hadn’t been there.”
“Me either,” Charlie said, looking serious. “Do you think he killed Bess?”
I shuddered. “I kind of do now.”
“Who was the third person? At the lighthouse?”
I hesitated again. “I’m really not sure whether I should tell you.”
“Why? Of course tell me,” he said.
“Okay. If you’re sure you want to know. It was your dad.”
Charlie took this in, looking stunned.
“He’s never talked to you about Bess or any of this, has he?”
“No. He hasn’t.” Charlie shook his head, his jaw tight.
“He took Bess to the Spring Fling before that summer,” I went on, even less sure about telling him this part. “Your mom was really upset about it.”
Charlie sat there, very quietly not reacting. It was too much, too uncomfortable. I had to find a way to get off the topic.
“You said you came over to explain something?” I asked. I was nervous to hear what he had been going to say, but anything was better than watching him process what I’d just told him.
“Yeah,” he said. “But it’s also an ‘I’m not sure whether I should tell you.’ ” He had a girlfriend in Boston, I realized suddenly. That’s what this is about.
“Okay,” he began. “First of all, I’m sorry about this afternoon. I handled it really badly.”
“It’s a side of you I wasn’t familiar with,” I said in a tone I hoped sounded detached.
“So I’m just going to tell you the whole thing, how it happened. And I hope I’m doing the right thing.” He looked at me for confirmation, which was hard for me to give since I had no idea what he was about to say.
“After you left the other day—when my mom came in?”
I laughed. “Yes, I remember that part.” It’s not like I needed my memory jogged.
He laughed too. “My mom said she wanted to talk to me. She’d heard—I guess she was standing there for a while—she’d heard us talking about Bess. She told me she was really worried about me digging up the past. She said she understood about me wanting to be a journalist, but that it was a bad idea for me to be talking about any of this stuff with you.”
“Me specifically?” I asked.
“She told me that she’d known your mom really well in high school and that she’d had some serious problems with depression.” He looked at me, to see if this road was okay to continue down. I nodded. It’s not like this was exactly news to me. “She said after Bess died, your mom was in a really bad state. She said it got so bad your mom had to be hospitalized. She tried to kill herself.” Charlie looked at me to see if he was still on familiar ground. He wasn’t. But I wanted him to go on. “So after, she recovered, I guess. Your dad helped get her through it and they ended up getting married. But my mom said she’s worried that if all this gets dredged up again, if your mom starts fixating on what happened, that she could get sick again.”
My mother had tried to kill herself? I took this in. I hadn’t actually thought I was endangering Mom, despite what my father had said. I thought he was just worried about upsetting her and even then mostly because of what a pain she could be. But then I thought about Cat, the Cat of Mom’s diary, and her games. Why was she saying this? Why was she so concerned about my mother suddenly, when it was obvious how much they disliked each other? I had no idea what to believe. Charlie was looking at me like he was afraid he’d inflicted serious damage. I wanted to reassure him. And change the subject.
“Oh, is that all?” I said, trying to make my voice light. “I thought you just didn’t want to kiss me.”
His head shot up, his eyes locking with mine. His lips curled in a puzzled smile. “Are you serious?” he whispered.
“Very,” I said. Before he could respond, I stepped forward and pressed my lips against his.
Maybe this was only “apocalyptic energy”; maybe whatever flame had sparked so suddenly between Charlie Pender and me would die the second things returned to normal on the island. On the other hand, maybe things would never return to normal ever again. And right now, that didn’t scare me so much.
IT FELT LIKE THE longest day of my life but by the time Charlie and I walked back it was only eight o’clock. I was worried I would never see my bike again. I could see Paul in his fury dumping it right in the bay. It turned out that while Charlie had been taking a break from me, he had not taken a break from Bess. He’d spent time at the library too, trying to find any mention of the Black Anchor Society. He’d come up empty though, both in Internet searches and local history books. Mary Ellen and Cathy, the librarians, didn’t know anything about it. We talked the whole way back, piecing together what we each had gathered on our own. Charlie wanted to see the diary, so when we got to my house, I signaled for him to follow me to the shed. The gravel crunched thunderously under our feet, though we were trying to be quiet. Why didn’t it make noise in the daytime? I flipped the light and showed Charlie in, handing him the diary.
“Here,” I said. “You catch up. I’m just going to duck my head in and tell my parents I’m back so they aren’t out looking for me. Maybe there’s something about Paul in there.” I didn’t know if my mom even knew Paul. After tonight, I hoped she didn’t.
The back door swung in with a creak. I balanced on the threshold on the arches of my sneakers.
“Mom?” I called. She came from the kitchen, a light dusting of flour on her sleeves. “I have to run to Meredith’s for a sec to get a book.”
“Eliza, it’s a school night.” She pursed her lips. I smelled pumpkin bread.
“Mom, the book’s for school.” It was easy to work up exasperation, even for a lie.
“All right. Don’t be late.”
“Is Dad home?” I let my book bag drop to the floor.
“No, he had another council meeting. Preservation review again.”
“You didn’t go?”
She shrugged. “He’ll be home in an hour or so. He didn’t think it would go too late.” Charlie and I had an hour. I walked through the house to the front, left that way and then backtracked to the shed. Charlie was deep in the diary. He barely heard me come in.
“Nothing about Paul so far,�
�� he said. “But … wow. It’s unbelievable. It’s like they were all different people back then.”
“I wonder,” I said. “If my mom’s still like that underneath and just better at hiding it.”
“It must be hard to read,” he said.
“It’s … yeah. Upsetting. But I knew some of it. Not the part you told me. But she’s still up and down. Like in the diary.”
“My mom comes off as so, I don’t know what. Venal.”
“Well, yes, but that’s according to my seventeen-year-old mom. You have to take it with a pretty big grain of salt when you consider the source.” Actually, I thought his mom seemed just as described in the diary, but you couldn’t say that to someone about his own mother. “It’s clear she was into your dad though. She definitely knew what she wanted.”
“That part sounds like her. I think we should look at the section right before Bess’s murder, or what was going on with any of them back then. Maybe she mentions a guy Bess met that summer? Or anything strange?”
“Sure. I haven’t read the whole thing.” The diary was thick and crammed with my mom’s tiny, swirly writing. Pages had words along the margin where she’d run out of space and turned up the side of the page, and little observations added later, crammed in above or below what she’d already written. It gave the book a feverish quality. I sat down on the floor beside him. He was wearing a flannel shirt and it was warm against my shoulder.
“Are you cold?” he asked, reading my mind.
“I’m okay. I didn’t bring anything to write with though. We might want to take notes.” My dad usually had a Sharpie or a carpenter’s pencil lying around in his woodshop. I started to open drawers. Charlie skimmed the August pages.
“So here’s what was going on before Bess died in August,” he began. “My mom was mad that Dad hung out with Bess at a party. Some girl named Lynn cut her hair just like Mom’s and all three of them made fun of her. Mom wanted Willa to tell Bess to stay away from Jimmy, but Willa said no—”
“Willa said no? My God. Red-letter day.” I was still digging around, looking for something to write with. My fingers brushed a rough piece of metal.
“My mom is so mad at everyone all the time in this. Is that what girls are really like?”
“Some girls, I guess.” I reached back farther, feeling for the metal object. It seemed too big and too heavy to be a pen. I grasped what felt like a ring on one end and pulled it from the drawer.
“Charlie,” I gasped.
I was holding a black anchor.
TEN
Charlie came over to stand with me at the worktable where I had laid down the anchor. We both stared at it. Gobsmacked was the word that leaped to mind for some reason. Theo Dorset, on the British Olympic sailing team, always says it. I don’t think we have an equivalent term, but I certainly had the equivalent feeling. I felt sick, really.
The anchor was made of iron, about four inches long and heavy for its size. It had a ring on one end. You could tie a thin rope to it or wear it as a necklace. Although, picturing the latter, it would be like wearing a metal albatross or brand. I thought back to tenth-grade English, Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter. She had been banished within her own village, forced to wear the scarlet A and parade her shame as she went about her daily activities. I would have left, if it had been me, but it probably wasn’t so easy to do that as a young, pregnant woman back then. Or now, come to think of it.
“It couldn’t be a real anchor of some kind, could it?” asked Charlie. He already knew the answer to that.
“Maybe for a sailboat in your bathtub,” I answered. “Why does my dad have it?” I went to put the anchor back where I’d found it.
“And who’s it for?” he asked. He got out his phone and snapped a picture. “Okay. We better put it back where we found it.”
I put the anchor back exactly as I had discovered it, or close enough I hoped. The blood was pounding in my ears.
“I don’t know what to do now,” I said.
“We need to figure out where it came from and figure out what your dad is planning to do with it.”
“My dad would never hurt anyone,” I said.
“I know,” said Charlie. “We’ll figure out what it means. Don’t worry.” He leaned toward me and kissed my forehead, then circled his arms around me. In just a few days it felt like I’d gone from trusting the whole island to trusting just one person. All of a sudden, I felt scared. I didn’t like change. I’d been lying to myself when I’d kissed him earlier. I liked the way things had been before, Charlie notwithstanding. Of course, Charlie was a big notwithstanding.
IT WAS VERY HARD to sleep. Charlie had lingered in the backyard with me, our heads and hands together, until I got too nervous that my mom would look out the window or my dad would find us outside. I lay in bed, staring at the water marks on the ceiling left by the storm. I was shocked by the anchor, shocked that it was even possible that the myth about the island could be true, but I could not believe my dad was part of it: my dad, who had lived here his whole life, who had built and repaired so many homes here, who had spent so many hours coaching swimming just because he loved it, who had patiently nursed my mom through so many dark spells.
Could he really be the one to deliver the threatening anchor? The one to decide who got to stay and who had to go from Stone Cove? I did not think it was in his nature, that kind of judgmental outlook on the world, deciding who belonged and who didn’t. He liked to be part of the gang, a friend to everyone. There had to be some other explanation. I rolled over for the thousandth time, trying to get comfortable. At last, just as I started to drift off, my body jolted back awake, as though I’d caught myself falling. My father who loved swimming, who was a great swimmer. My mother never had been. Bess was an excellent swimmer, and so was Dad.
IN THE MORNING WHEN I woke up, my eyes felt like they’d been rubbed with sandpaper. My stomach churned. I’d forgotten to eat dinner, but food was the last thing I wanted. I wasn’t sick really, I knew. But I couldn’t go to school. I couldn’t fake my way through a whole day instead of finding out what that black anchor was doing in my dad’s shop. I lay in bed, trying to come up with a plan. I didn’t think Dad would leave something like that lying around for long, even in what was supposed to be his private domain. It seemed too risky. But I couldn’t follow him around the island all day.
I went into the bathroom, ran the hot water in the sink and threw a towel over my head and let the steam envelop me. Luckily the power was on, so there was hot water. Then I dried my face and stumbled to the kitchen. It wasn’t hard to look exhausted.
“Mom,” I said in a scratchy voice that I hoped I wasn’t overdoing. “I don’t feel well.” She put her hand to my forehead and tensed her own with worry.
“You feel hot. Do you want to go back to bed?”
“But I have school …” I said, my voice wispy.
“Better to get well. Missing one day won’t hurt you.”
I nodded. “Where’s Dad?” I asked.
“At the inn. They’re starting on the roof today. Finally.” If my dad was at the inn, Charlie would be able to keep tabs on the anchor.
“Are you going to be here?”
“I have to go to market this morning but I shouldn’t be long. I can stay home with you,” she replied.
“Thanks,” I said, even though that wasn’t why I was asking. I turned back to my room, got dressed and lay under the covers until I heard her click and bolt the door on her way out. She always locked the door when she left, even if there was still someone at home. Then I counted to one hundred and slipped out the back way.
In the shed, I had the creepy feeling of being watched. It must be my own guilt, I thought. The anchor was still in the drawer, exactly as I had left it. That meant my father wasn’t delivering it to the Penders, Colleen or any guests at the inn. Maybe, I told myself optimistically, he’s not delivering it to anyone.
Back inside, I wrote a quick note to my mom—on paper. She wa
sn’t much of a text message girl. Feeling so much better. Going to try school for the afternoon. I took my book bag, my math notebook and Mom’s diary. I was going to the library to see what I could find out about Grant, Paul and what had happened to the marina. I had until about 4 P.M., when my dad would be home from work. I texted Charlie. I wanted him to come to the library with me, but it seemed like a better—less fun, but better—idea for him to stay close to home and see if my dad did anything weird. Charlie texted back that he’d stick around. miss you though. That was nice. ditto, I wrote.
Terminal 3 was open. The library was almost deserted. That meant I could spread out and not feel worried about anyone reading over my shoulder. Once I reassured Mary Ellen that I didn’t need help, she went back to her office and left me alone. I thought briefly of my bike. How was I going to get it back? I wasn’t in a hurry to return to the marina, that was for sure.
There weren’t any news stories about the town taking over the marina. Grant’s boating accident didn’t even make any paper other than our local one. The Gazette ran a short obituary, no picture: Grant Guthy, former owner of the Stone Cove Marina Boatyard and Boat Rentals had drowned in an accident while fishing alone. The vague details and lack of description of Grant himself implied disapproval, which I took to mean either drinking or drugs. Neither Karen nor Bess was mentioned.
Counting backward, I figured Bess would have been about eleven at the time. I wondered if my mom was already friends with her when her father died. My searches on Paul turned up two DUIs in the Gazette crime blotter. Maybe he could use my bike, I thought. In the issue before Grant’s death there was an ad for the Marina Boatyard (UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT!) but no article.
The transfer seemed to have taken place silently. Had Grant lost the business through debt? Or had he made a lot of money selling it? If that were true, would Bess have inherited the money? Could she have been killed for that reason? What if Paul thought that the money belonged to him? I didn’t know who would be able to answer these questions, but this part of the story felt more like gossip than fact, so I decided to take my coffee break at the Picnic Basket rather than talking to Jay.
Stone Cove Island Page 9