Stone Cove Island

by Suzanne Myers

  It wasn’t like me at all to lose things. On the other hand, being with Charlie had turned me into not quite my normal self. So I went into Mom-OCD mode. I made mental lists of every place I’d taken it (my house, Dad’s shed, Charlie’s house, school, the diner, the library, and on and on). I backtracked, trying to remember when I had it last, what I’d been doing, what I’d been thinking about, which part I’d been reading last. I tried to see myself in my memory. Had I placed it in the front or back section of my bag? Had I hidden it on the high shelf of the linen closet or in a drawer in my dresser? Did I leave it under my bed?

  In the end, I started to wonder if either of my parents had found it and quietly taken it back. It wasn’t in the black bag in Mom’s closet—of course I had checked there—but maybe they had found some new, better hiding place. Maybe this was their way of telling me that it was best to keep silent about the past.

  THURSDAY AFTERNOON, AS I rode my bike past the grounds of my summer camp on the way to Charlie’s, all the campfire songs I’d learned as a kid came back to me in a fractured medley. Round and round in “The Circle Game,” and the one about the father who never had time for his son until it was too late; the soldier and the town that fought for a treasure that turned out to just be a stone that said Peace on Earth. They were all about a similar regret, I realized: all about not appreciating what you had until you lost it and couldn’t get it back.

  My dad had done a decent job straightening my wheels, but the front one rubbed in one place so that as it turned it made a metallic moaning sound. I had not been back to the marina, but the rhythmic whine of my bike seemed to bring the marina back to me.

  The kitchen at the inn was quiet. The guests who had been stranded by the storm had all gradually found their way back to dry land and no new guests had come to replace them. It was getting close to the slow winter season anyway, but I knew its early arrival this year would stress the Penders and put even more pressure on a successful season next summer. I made my way up the carpeted back stairs.

  Oddly, since my dad had fallen out with Jimmy, Charlie’s parents had been much nicer to me. I couldn’t figure out if they’d just accepted the situation and were making the best of it, or if it was more along the lines of “keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”

  Charlie and I had planned to be good, by which we meant I would work on my paper and he would work on some short pieces for Jay at The Gazette. Ha. We lay on our stomachs on the shaggy white rug in his room. I flipped the pages of The Glass Menagerie. Charlie jotted ideas on index cards he spread out around us. If I’m being honest, there was a fair amount of staring into space and staring at each other.

  “Oh,” I said at one point. “So, I actually did it. I applied to UCLA.”

  “Are you kidding?” He grinned at me, surprised, and leaned over to kiss me. His lips were soft and tickled a little, where they brushed mine. My scalp tingled along the bottom of my hairline. “We’ll see what happens. My test scores are just okay. I’m no Meredith.”

  “It’s hard to imagine anyone saying no to you, Eliza.” He kissed me again. We were not going to get any work done. That was clear.

  “Like how you couldn’t say no to the Halloween dance?” I asked.

  “Exactly like that.” Charlie laughed. He had agreed to go and even dress up. He was going as Clark Kent. I was going as Katniss Everdeen, from The Hunger Games, but I hadn’t told him what my costume was going to be. It was going to be a surprise.

  “You’re a good sport, Charlie.”

  I yawned, rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling. It was perfectly white. No cracks. No chips. I could hear the whirr of the space heater in the corner. Flooding had corroded the inn’s furnace. It had to be replaced, but it was going to be months before they could get a new one here. I wondered who Jimmy would get to help him with his projects now that my dad was out of the picture. Probably they would patch things up and it would all go back to normal in a few weeks. My dad wasn’t hotheaded and neither was Jimmy, as far as I’d experienced. And the options for either of them were limited. They’d most likely have to find a way to work together.

  “What are you thinking about?” Charlie asked me.

  “Bess,” I answered, because I didn’t want to say I’d been thinking about our dads or their argument—or wondering why my dad would think Jimmy would mangle my bike and drop it in our driveway like a warning. It wasn’t a lie anyway. I found I was almost always thinking about Bess these days.

  “Bess, yeah,” he said. “I’ve been thinking too. About Karen.”

  I turned to him. “What about Karen?”

  “She’s kind of the missing link. My dad doesn’t remember much about finding Bess’s clothes except that it was upsetting. And he thinks Paul’s a harmless old fool. He told me he’s what we kids would call ‘old school.’ ”

  “Ouch.” I cringed at the thought of Jimmy saying that. I could hear it perfectly. Each time Charlie had broached the subject of Bess’s death, his dad had laughed him off good-naturedly, as though he understood Charlie’s journalistic impulses, was even proud of his son, but had nothing to contribute to the story.

  “Karen left,” Charlie went on. “She never did interviews. She’s the one person who probably knows the most about Bess and Grant. She’s not going to be worried about talking and what people on the island will think. She’s—”

  “Not a joiner?” I quipped, before I could think.

  Charlie looked confused. “What?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Just something Nancy Jurovic said.” I didn’t want to hurt his feelings by saying that’s how Colleen had described him. “I just meant she wasn’t part of things. She wouldn’t care what people think. You’re right.”

  “What if we called her?” said Charlie.

  “And said what? ‘I’m Nancy Drew and this is Frank Hardy. We’re investigating The Secret of the Old Lighthouse and …’ ”

  “I could say I was doing a story for the Gazette,” Charlie offered.

  “She didn’t want to talk to the press at the time,” I said.

  “So, tell her the truth. Your mom was a close friend. You just found out about what happened and you want to ask her some questions.”

  “So, I’m the one calling her?”

  “First of all, you’re a girl. It might come off as less threatening.”

  “Thanks a lot,” I said.

  “Second, it’s your mom’s diary. We know from what she wrote that they were close. My mom had something with Bess about my dad, even if they were good friends. Your mom used to stay over there. Karen must have known her pretty well and liked her enough to let her stay at their house.”

  That made sense. “Okay. I’ll call. We have to find her number though.”

  “Already done,” he said, and turned his computer screen toward me. Karen Linsky, 262A Prospect St., Gloucester, MA, followed by the number.

  As I let the phone ring, I realized I was nervous. I could feel a chill between my shoulder blades, and my palms were damp, like I was taking a math test or something. Cell phone reception at the inn had never been great, Charlie said, even before the storm. We were calling from a guest room on a land line that had only recently been brought back to life. I kept worrying Cat or Jimmy or anyone working at the inn might pick up the extension while I was talking to Karen.

  The woman who answered had a rough, low voice that sounded charred by years of cigarettes. She listened without comment as I babbled the explanation of who I was, who my mother was and why I was calling. I expected her to hang up on me at every moment, but she didn’t. When I finished, there was a long silence.

  Then she said in her harsh, raking voice, “I don’t understand why you’re calling me about this now. Bess has been dead more than twenty years. It’s a little late to be barking up this tree, don’t you think?” She said “barking” with the classic Massachusetts accent: bahkin. Then, when I couldn’t think of an answer she said, “How’s your mother, good?” />
  “She’s okay,” I hedged. “You know, it’s funny but I think she still misses Bess after all this time.”

  “She was a good girl,” said Karen. I didn’t know if she meant her daughter or my mother. “I shoulda taken her home after Grant passed, like everybody said I should.”

  “Home?” I asked, confused.

  “Back to Gloucester. Back where we belonged. It was a mistake, but she seemed happy on the island there.” They-ya.

  “Was she close to her dad?” I asked.

  She made an “eh” noise that sounded like a shrug. “Grant was a good-time boy, even when times were bad, you know what I mean?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “The marina. How it all went down. He tried to put on a show of happy, happy, but then behind that, he’s scrambling to keep things afloat. For a while it looked like he had a sale to this developer, but then … that never happened.” She gave a quick, harsh laugh. Behind it I could hear a whole life of bad luck.

  “Didn’t the town buy his business?” I asked.

  She laughed. “Right. They ‘bought’ it. Like, he could either get foreclosed or they could take it over. They acted like they were doing him a favor.” So, no inheritance, no jealous uncle. “He knew he was in trouble. What else was he going to do?”

  “To do?”

  “To get out of it.”

  Was I understanding her right? Charlie, who was listening with me, the handset pressed between our ears, pulled away to give me a surprised look.

  “Do you mean—” I wasn’t sure how to put it. “Do you think he killed himself?”

  “He was a sailor first. I don’t care how drunk they said he was—and he wasn’t that drunk; the medical examiner even said—you don’t end up off your boat and tangled in your anchor.” At this, Charlie mouthed, Anchor?

  “He was alone?” I asked. She didn’t answer. Maybe she nodded, forgetting she was on the phone. There was a flick and crackle as a match was struck.

  “You said something about the anchor?” I prodded.

  “The anchor of the boat. He got caught up in it. That’s how he drowned.” I could hear her inhale, then blow out the cigarette smoke.

  “Were there any other anchors? I mean, did he ever get one delivered to him or did someone ever give him one? Or Bess?”

  There was silence on the line. I couldn’t tell if we’d been disconnected or if she just wasn’t talking. A click and a staticky scratch on the line a moment later, followed by a dial tone, answered my question. She did not want to talk about anchors. In a movie, you would have cut to her, revealing the slab-faced, threatening guy standing next to her. Maybe he would have a knife at her throat, making sure she didn’t make any false moves. But I was letting my imagination run wild. She might just not have known what I was talking about. She might have had enough of talking to some nosy kid, bringing up her dead daughter.

  “Wow,” said Charlie.

  “We didn’t even really get to Bess.”

  “I wonder who the developer was. Same guy who likes causeways?”

  “I wonder. You know what’s weird? She didn’t sound upset,” I said, just realizing it. “That was what I was most afraid of, upsetting her.”

  “It happened a long time ago,” said Charlie reasonably.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Still.”

  “Still,” agreed Charlie. He put his hand over mine. We sat on the old-fashioned chenille bedspread. Its snowy whiteness glowed in the lowering gloom of afternoon. Everything got very quiet. Winter was coming and I could feel that even if they got the ferry running and the houses brightly painted, nothing was going back to normal, ever.

  THIRTEEN

  For my Katniss costume, I’d gotten a toy bow-and-arrow set at the Stone Cove Variety Store. They’d reopened by moving all their stock to one side of the large—for the island that is—warehouse space and hanging clear plastic painting tarps from the ceiling to cover the unrepaired soaked drywall and imploded timber on the side the storm had destroyed. Once I’d gotten home, I’d spray-painted the arrows silver and made a quiver out of a roll of brown felt. I wore brown pants tucked into old riding boots (thrift store), a military-looking belt and a navy windbreaker under a longer suede coat (thrift store again). I braided my hair. While I got ready, Mom sat on my bed and watched. She hadn’t read or seen The Hunger Games, but I told her the story. And she loved Halloween. She’d made caramel apples to hand out to the kids, as well as the requisite supply of drugstore fun sizes.

  “It’s a circle pin with a bird in the center?” she asked. I didn’t have something to use as Katniss’s mockingjay pin. It was the last piece I needed for my costume.

  “It can be any bird pin. Gold, if possible.” She thought a minute, her index finger to her lower lip, almost in a “shhh” gesture. For a second, I could see the little girl in her face. Then she smiled, triumphant.

  “Aha!” she said, and walked to her bedroom. I followed. She took the wooden jewelry box from her dresser and set it down on the bed between us. She drew out a gold pin, shaped like an eagle. It was a proud, mean bird, clutching something in its talons.

  “Would this work?” she asked.

  “Totally!” I said, excited. “It’s perfect. Hers is a little more Soviet looking, but that one is great.”

  “Well, it’s nationalistic in its own way, I guess.” She pinned it to the collar of my windbreaker. “You won’t lose it, right? You’ll be careful.”

  “Of course I’ll be careful.” Did she know about the diary? Or was she just worrying out of habit? “I’ll be really careful.” My eye went to a gold chain, tangled in one of the little partitioned sections of the jewelry box. She seemed to notice it at the same time and picked it up.

  “Oh,” she said, slightly breathless. “I haven’t looked at this for a long time. She tried to straighten it. A stiff, scripty Elizabeth was looped in gold and held on either side by a thin gold chain.

  “After she died, her mother wouldn’t let me keep any of her things. She shut the house up and took the bare minimum with her. I don’t even know what she did with Bess’s things. Anyway, later I found this in my room, under my bed. She’d lost it in the winter sometime. I guess one time when she’d slept over. I was so mad at Karen, but then I got to keep something after all. Now I understand how scared she was.” She cut herself off abruptly, as though she hadn’t meant to speak these thoughts out loud.

  “How scared who was?”

  “Karen.”

  “She was scared after it happened? Or before?”

  Mom hesitated, “I really didn’t know Karen that well. She wouldn’t have confided in someone like me. I was a kid.”

  “But Bess was scared too,” I insisted. This was exactly what my dad didn’t want me putting my mother through, I thought guiltily. But it was like a scab I couldn’t stop picking at. She brought that same finger to her lip again, then looked at me hard, her normally cool, sea-glass eyes blazing.

  “It’s not something you need to worry about. Eliza, listen to me. I won’t let anything happen to you. Ever.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Mom kept staring.

  “Was Karen nice?” I asked, just to keep her talking.

  “Nice?” she said. “Not really. She was honest though. I respected her at that age, I remember.”

  “Did she talk about moving away before the thing with Bess?”

  “I don’t know. Bess always said she threatened to, especially when Bess was younger, but we weren’t really close until high school. It wasn’t like you and Meredith. We weren’t really childhood friends. It happened later.”

  “Who was your childhood best friend?”

  “Your dad, of course,” she answered, a little too quickly. “We were neighbors. We were in the same playgroup as babies.” This surprised me. I tried to picture them, toddling around a play kitchen, throwing toy food into the toy sink.

  Suddenly a new thought came to me, something I hadn’t realized before, which now struck me like
a brick. How had it never occurred to me? Elizabeth. We had the same name. Bess. Eliza, Elizabeth. All possibility of coincidence seemed to drain away. Was I named after Bess? Was it an accident that I’d been the one to find the letter or was it somehow my fate?

  “Mom, we have the same name.” She nodded.

  “You should have the necklace,” Mom said, suddenly decisive.

  “Mom, no, it’s your one memory of your friend.”

  “You should have it,” she insisted. “It’s not doing me any good hidden away in here. Besides, you share her name.” She smiled a weird “go figure,” smile, then threw her arms around me and crushed me to her, breathing ragged breaths I could feel through both coats. I was smothered, face pressed so hard into her shoulder. At the same time, I didn’t want her to let go.

  CHARLIE SHOWED UP AROUND eight, as planned. I hate it in books when writers describe people or things as “impossibly cute” or “impossibly charming,” but both pretty much summed up Charlie Pender that night. I’d dreaded having him pick me up at our house. I’d offered to meet at the dance, but Charlie said no. My dad was out—he’d agreed to be a chaperone; Jimmy was another, so that would make for an interesting night—but my mother was relaxed (for her)—even friendly. Charlie had brought me a little bag of Scottie dog-shaped licorice candies, a nod to Salty.

  After my dad had left for the dance, I’d rechecked the shed for the anchor. When Charlie gave me a questioning look while my mom went to get him a glass of water I knew what he meant and nodded, Yes, still there. He drank the water quickly and we left, my mother waving from the porch, looking almost happy.

  THE NIGHT WAS COOL and clear, not yet frigid the way it can get sometimes in the fall. With the island only semi-lit, the stars blazed in the sky, even more than they might on an ordinary night. People had gone out of their way to decorate with pumpkins, witches, scarecrows and ghosts. The houses that were half-destroyed seemed to have made double the effort. Walking down my street, the darkness and quiet unfurling around us like a blanket, I didn’t care if we ever reached the dance. Charlie’s hand was warm in mine, and the air was crisp against my skin and for a moment I felt completely right.