The Bay at Midnight

I sneaked the boat out to the bay several more times that July. I only took it out once in August, and that had been a mistake.

CHAPTER 12

Lucy

I was in the basement of the Methodist Church in Westfield getting ready for my band to perform at a Coffee with Conscience concert. I stood next to the pillar near the small stage, watching the place fill up. This would be the ZydaChicks last concert of the season, and we always liked to end the year locally, performing for our supporters in Westfield. Proceeds for the Coffee with Conscience concert would go to charity, which was the way we liked to operate. Our music was the feel-good variety, a happy fusion of zydeco, folk, and rhythm and blues, and only three of the five of us were “chicks,” a fact that always required me to provide a long explanation somewhere midway through our performance.

The scent of coffee was thick in the air as I watched some of my old Westfield neighbors slip into their seats at the round tables. I saw a few of my Plainfield friends walk in, and best of all, several of my ESL students showed up. Three boys, two girls, all Hispanic. The kids spotted me standing next to the pillar and waved, grinning. It touched me to see them there. They looked out of place, a little uncomfortable, but sporting their usual “don’t mess with me” bravado. Two of my former lovers were there, as well, and I was glad to see that they took seats at tables on opposite ends of the room. I made a mental note to be careful after the concert. Most of my previous boyfriends knew about each other and were cool about it, but those two had a rather hostile relationship. I would have to greet each of them individually.

Finally, just minutes before we were to go onstage, I spotted Julie and Shannon entering the room. I knew that Julie had picked Shannon up at Glen’s and I wondered how that had gone. I’d gotten a ride to the church from one of my band members, and Julie was going to take me home. I was hoping the three of us could stop off someplace for dessert. I wanted to try to facilitate a discussion between mother and daughter. I knew Shannon hadn’t told Julie about her pregnancy yet, and she wasn’t going to get any skinnier.

Julie looked a bit tense from where I stood, but then I saw her laugh as she exchanged a few words with a woman she must have known. The laughter made her look pretty and ten years younger, and I was relieved to see it.

My gaze dropped to Shannon’s midriff. She was doing an excellent job of hiding her pregnancy. She had on a loose white peasant blouse, a gift I’d given her years ago when I’d returned from a trip to Guadalajara. I’d never seen her wear it before, but it was perfect as camouflage. Loose and airy, the blouse drew the eye up to the elaborate embroidery at the neckline. Shannon was not smiling, and I wondered if she ever smiled these days. Her life had taken quite a serious turn. Maybe she smiled when she talked to her twenty-seven-year-old boyfriend, Travis. Or Taylor. Or Tanner. Whatever his name was, I did not trust him.

The house was packed and too warm by the time we took the stage, and I blocked everything but the music from my mind. I can’t say that our performance was seamless. Something happened at the end of every season: We tended to get too cocky. We didn’t practice enough and then we screwed up in the middle of an old song we should have been able to play in our sleep. I doubted that the audience knew or cared, though. They were drinking iced coffee, tapping their toes, and some of our most devoted fans sang along. A lot of people were on their feet and the energy in the room was high. I loved it when an audience responded that way.

Afterward I chatted with my students and some of my friends—neither ex-beau hung around, which was a blessing—and then met Julie and Shannon by the front door.

“Great concert,” Julie said. She took my violin case from my hand as though she knew I’d appreciate a break from it.

“You just need a cellist,” Shannon teased me. It was her contention that every band on earth could be improved through the addition of a cello.

I gave her a one-armed hug. “How about we get some ice cream?” I said, as we walked outside into the warm night air.

“I need to go straight home,” Shannon said, then caught herself. “I mean, straight to Dad’s.” She’d been living with her father for four days, and I’d been glad that she’d agreed to go out with Julie tonight. Apparently, though, she wanted to make a short evening of it.

“Oh, come on, Shannon,” I said, my arm still around her shoulders. “Just for a while.”

“I’m expecting an important phone call,” she said, giving me a look that told me who the important call was from, just in case I hadn’t guessed.

“You can call them back,” Julie said. “Lucy’s probably starved.”

“It’s true, I am,” I said. “You know I don’t like to eat before a concert.”

If I hadn’t piped up, Shannon probably would have argued with her mother over stopping for dessert, but once I’d made my case, she gave in.

“Westfield Diner?” Julie asked as she opened her car door.

“Sure,” I said. “You want the front, Shannon?” I motioned to the passenger door of the car.

“Back’s fine,” she muttered, barely loud enough to hear, and I knew she was either sullen or scared, expecting me to bring up her situation over ice-cream sundaes, which was indeed my plan.

We settled into one of the booths at the diner, Shannon sitting next to me, the slight swelling of her belly hidden from her mother’s eyes by the table.

“How’s work?” I asked her.

She nodded. “Good,” she said, studiously avoiding my eyes as she checked out the dessert menu.

“Are you still playing the cello at the hospital?” I asked.

“Uh-huh,” she said. “I went yesterday. I saw Nana there.”

“Cool,” I said. We were all hospital volunteers. I was a translator for Spanish-speaking patients, Mom worked in the gift shop, Julie visited patients, often reading to them or just keeping them company, and Shannon played the cello in the hallways outside patient rooms. We had a long culture of volunteerism in my family.

“What should I do with your mail, honey?” Julie asked. “You’ll probably be getting a lot of it from Oberlin over the summer.”

Here was Shannon’s chance to tell her mother, I thought. I squeezed her knee beneath the table, but she pulled her leg away from my hand and I sensed her annoyance. I knew right then that the talk I wanted the two of them to have wasn’t going to happen tonight.

“Just stick it in a grocery bag for me, please,” Shannon said, not looking at either of us. “I’ll pick it up when I come by.”

“Okay.” Julie turned her menu over to look at the desserts. “And if it looks important, I’ll let you know.You’ll probably find out who your roommate’s going to be in a few weeks. I think you should try to get in touch with the girl during the summer to see what she’ll be bringing to the room and all of that.”

Shut up, Julie, I thought.

“Uh-huh.” Shannon studied the menu as if she didn’t know it by heart.

Julie and I ordered sundaes and Shannon, a small bowl of chocolate ice cream. Then Julie excused herself to go to the rest room.

I shifted away from Shannon on the bench so that I could look at her.

“How are you doing, really?” I asked.

“Fine,” she said. “Everything’s fine.”

“Living with your dad is going okay?” I asked.

She rolled her eyes. “I might as well still be living with Mom,” she said. “She calls me, like, ten times a day.”

“Why don’t you tell her about the baby now?” I asked. “With me here? I can help soften the blow.”

“Don’t push me, Lucy,” she said. “Let me do this on my own timetable, all right?”

“What is your timetable?” I couldn’t seem to stop myself.

“I don’t know.” She spoke slowly, teeth gritted.

“All right.” I gave up. “Sorry.”

“Thank you,” she said, as if I’d been holding her down on the ground and had finally released her.

“Can you give me…what’s his name? Tanner?”

She nodded and looked at me, curious to know what I was asking.

“Can you give me his Web site address?”

“Why?”

“So I can check it out,” I said, then added, “from the perspective of a former history teacher.”

“Are you going to write to him or something?” She looked suspicious.

I shook my head. “No.”

She hesitated. “You swear you won’t?”

“You have my word. I just want to…you know, get to know this person who’s so important in your life. I mean,” I added quickly, “get to know him by seeing his Web site, that’s all.” I thought I sounded guilty, as if I did have plans to try to reach him—which I did not—but Shannon tore off a piece of her napkin, pulled a pen from her pocketbook, wrote down the address and handed it to me. I slipped it in my jeans pocket.

“Thanks,” I said.

“It’s a cool site,” she said, that glowy look coming into her face again. “He knows everything about computers.”

Julie returned to the table and sat down again.

“Who knows everything about computers?” she asked. “Dad?”

“No,” Shannon said. “Just a friend.”

The waitress took our orders

“Any news from Ethan?” I asked.

“Who’s Ethan?” Shannon asked.

“Ethan Chapman,” Julie said. “Remember I told you about the visit I had from his daughter? How she—”

“That letter?” Shannon interrupted her.

“Yes,” Julie said. “Ethan took it to the police. They searched Ned’s—Ethan’s brother’s—house, but didn’t find anything. Or at least, they didn’t tell Ethan that they found anything.” Although what she’d said was not particularly good news, Julie was smiling. Something was going on. I swore I saw a little spark in her eyes when she said the name “Ethan.” I was sure now that she had a thing for him.

“He reminded me of the time Mom and Izzy and I floated to the bay on inner tubes,” Julie said to me. “Do you remember that?”

“To the bay from where?” I asked.

“From the bungalow,” Julie said. “You were there when we jumped into the canal and there with Grandpop when he came to the bay to pick us up.”

I shook my head. I must have been a space cadet when I was eight. I remembered so little.

“You floated on an inner tube?” Shannon looked at her mother in amazement.

“Yep,” Julie said. She leaned back as the waitress set our ice cream in front of us.

“I totally cannot picture you doing that,” Shannon said, lifting her spoon. “You’re scared to death of the water.”

“I wasn’t then,” Julie said with a shrug.

“Your mother did everything,” I said. “She was adventure girl. I was the chickenshit.”

“That would be cool,” Shannon said. “Floating down a canal on a tube.”

Shannon had never seen the canal and had only been down the shore a couple of times with friends, as far as I knew. Certainly Julie had never taken her.

“It’s probably not legal to do that now,” Julie said.

“It probably wasn’t even legal then,” I added.

We finished our ice cream, then drove to Glen’s town house. He waved from the front door when Shannon got out of the car, and I waved back. I didn’t know if Julie acknowledged him at all. I didn’t think they talked anymore. They’d been able to communicate about Shannon, though. They’d coordinated trips to colleges and actually went together to parent-teacher conferences, but I thought their relationship was truly over now. Most—although not all—of the pain and animosity seemed to have shifted to indifference, and I was glad of that. I knew from my own broken relationships just how comforting indifference could be.

“I bet she’s getting zero supervision over here,” Julie said as she pulled away from the curb.

The horse was long out of the barn as far as supervision was concerned, and I ignored her comment. “So,” I said, instead. “Do I detect some real interest in Ethan Chapman now?”

She might have blushed. I wasn’t sure. “It was good to talk with him,” she said. “He has the nicest voice.”

“So, he looks great,” I said. “He has an amazing body. Nice voice. Is good to talk with. What more do you want?”

“I don’t want anything,” she said. “If he weren’t Ethan Chapman, I might be interested,” she admitted. “But I certainly don’t want someone who lives in Bay Head Shores and is almost surely the brother of my sister’s murderer.” She was vehement and had a good point. I decided to change the subject.

“I remembered something when you were talking about floating on the canal,” I said.

“What?”

“I remembered Dad going over to the other side of the canal to get you when you were fishing with the Lewis family.”

“Oh,” she said, letting her breath out. “He was not pleased with me.”

“He was hard on you sometimes, you know?” I said. “I learned from watching you. I learned not to make waves around him.”

“He was never hard on Izzy, though,” Julie said. It was not the first time she’d said something like that.

“Did that bother you?” I asked.

“Not really,” she said. “I think I just had a way of doing things he couldn’t tolerate. Like hanging out with the Lewises.” She suddenly grew very quiet as she pulled up to the curb in front of my apartment house.

“Do you want to come in?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No. I’m tired.” She smiled at me. “It was a great concert. I love watching you. You have so much fun up there.”

“Thanks,” I said, but I felt worried about her. “Are you okay?” I asked.

She looked at her hands where they rested on the steering wheel. “You just got me thinking about George,” she said.

I touched her shoulder. “I’m sorry I brought it up,” I said.

She shrugged. “It’s just that…if I’d never gone over there to begin with, George would never have gone to prison.”

“Oh, Julie,” I said, leaning over to give her a hug. “I wish Ethan and his daughter had just dealt with that letter on their own and never let you know about it.”

She smiled gamely as I pulled away from her. “I’m okay,” she reassured me. “Honest.”

I opened my car door, then looked back at her.

“With regard to Ethan…” I began.

She waited, eyebrows raised, to hear what I was going to say.

“Grab some joy, Julie,” I said. “Grab it.”

Before going to bed, I spent an hour on Tanner Stroh’s Civil War Web site. It was undeniably excellent, a scholarly site overflowing with information and so little bias that I wasn’t able to tell if I would agree with his politics or not. By the time I turned off the computer, I had one overriding thought in my mind: maybe Shannon had actually found herself a winner.

CHAPTER 13

Julie

1962

Grandpop and I were in competition. We stood a few yards from each other behind the fence in our backyard, the morning sun in our eyes and our fishing poles in our hands as we waited to see which of us could catch the biggest edible fish. I was wearing my purple one-piece bathing suit and after spending a few weeks in the summer sun, my skin was as dark as my grandmother’s. Grandpop was still pretty pale. He never seemed to tan. He wore his usual brown pants—he must have had six pairs of them—and a white short-sleeved shirt and sandals. I’d never seen him go barefoot.

By the time we’d been out there for half an hour, I’d caught absolutely nothing, while Grandpop had reeled in two blowfish, which we considered less than nothing because they were too dangerous to eat. Their organs contained a deadly toxin, and after Grandpop tossed the second blowfish back into the canal, I came up with a plot for an intriguing mystery: The colored fishermen on the other side of the canal would begin dying, collapsing right there in the reeds, and it would turn out they’d been poisoned by the Rooster Man, who had fed them fried blowfish livers. I loved the idea and nursed the story along in my mind as we fished.

After what seemed like a very long time, I felt something good and strong tug at my line. I reeled it in, only to discover a hideous sea robin on my hook. Grandpop couldn’t stop himself from laughing. There was nothing uglier in the universe than a sea robin, with its long bony fins poking out all over its body. I grimaced, watching the fish sway back and forth on my line. I was not squeamish, but the thought of holding on to that spiny creature while taking it off the hook was not pleasant.

“I bet Ethan would like that sea robin,” Grandpop said, nodding toward the Chapmans’ yard.

I looked over to see Ethan sitting in the sand, a huge pile of mussels in front of him. I had not even realized he was outside.

“Hey, Ethan,” I called.

He looked up, the sun reflecting off his glasses so that I couldn’t see his eyes.

“You want this sea robin?” I held my pole in the air, the fish flapping its tail and winglike fins.

“Keen!” Ethan said. He picked up a blue bucket from the sand and walked over to where Grandpop and I were standing.

“You have to take it off the hook,” I said.

“Okay.” Ethan seemed undeterred. He took the rag I’d stuck in the chain-link fence, grasped the fish with it, and extracted the hook with an ease I couldn’t help but admire. He looked at me, grinning as though I’d given him a chocolate bar. “Thanks,” he said. He dropped the fish in his bucket and walked back to his yard.

Grandpop and I began fishing again. We were tired of standing, though, so we pulled two of the Adirondack chairs close to the fence and sat down. I put my bare feet against the fence and slumped down into the chair, feeling very comfortable and at peace with the world.

“Looks like we’re on the wrong side of the canal,” Grandpop said after a while.

“What do you mean?” I followed his focus across the canal to where the colored people were fishing.

“I’ve seen them reel in a few keepers over there,” he said.

“Oh, they’re probably just catching blowfish, too,” I said. “Daddy said colored people eat them ’cause they don’t know any better.”

My grandfather stared straight ahead, not speaking for a minute. “Charles said that, huh?” he asked finally.

I nodded. “He said they’re not as smart as us. And they’re poor, so they have to eat whatever they can.”

There was a long silence that I didn’t recognize as anything out of the ordinary until Grandpop spoke again.

“Did it ever occur to you that, if they do eat blowfish, which I doubt, it might be because they’re actually smarter than we are? Maybe they know how to avoid the poisonous part. Maybe we’re the stupid, wasteful ones.”

There was a serious tone in his voice that was rare for my grandfather. “I don’t think Daddy would agree with that,” I said.

“Did you know that I lived in Mississippi until I was your age?” Grandpop asked me.

“I thought you grew up in Westfield,” I said.

“I didn’t move to New Jersey until I was fourteen,” he said. “When I was a boy, we lived with my mother’s family in Mississippi. We had a housekeeper and she had a son my age. He was my best friend. Willie was his name, and he was colored.”

“Your best friend?” I said, amazed. I couldn’t imagine it. I had never even spoken to a colored person.

Grandpop nodded, smiling. “Willie and I had some good times together,” he said. “We lived near a lake and we’d fish and swim and explore. But he couldn’t go to my school because of segregation.”

I nodded. I knew what segregation was, even though it was easy not to think about it in Westfield, since every single person I knew there was white.

“His school was far inferior to mine,” Grandpop said. “Willie was just as smart as me—smarter in some things—but he didn’t have a chance. And here’s the worst thing.” He shook his head and I leaned closer to his chair, wanting to catch every word of the “worst thing.”

“One time he and I went into the town near our houses. We were only eight or nine and we decided we wanted to buy some candy. But coloreds weren’t allowed in the store.”

“That doesn’t seem fair,” I said.

“Of course it’s not fair,” Grandpop agreed. “So I went in the store—it was a general store, I guess you’d call it. And I bought a bag of candy for a few cents and took it outside and Willie and I sat on the curb and ate it. Then he had to go to the bathroom really bad. The store had a privy behind it. An outhouse. But there was a sign on it that said No Coloreds, so Willie couldn’t use it. So, I went into the store and asked the lady at the counter if she would make an exception, since he was just a kid and had to go real bad, but she wouldn’t allow it. We went to another store, and they wouldn’t let him use their privy either. He ended up wetting his pants.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling sorry for Grandpop’s little friend.

“And then a man came and started smacking Willie around, calling him names, saying that’s why…” Grandpop hesitated a moment and I had the feeling he was going to clean up the man’s language for my ears. “He said that’s why Negroes weren’t allowed in nice places, because they soiled themselves and such.You can just imagine how humiliating that experience was for Willie.”

It was an awful tale. I thought about how it would feel to be prohibited from entering the little corner store where I rode my bike to buy penny candy. I imagined a sign on the door that read No White Children Allowed. I imagined feeling desperate to pee and not being allowed in.

But I felt uncomfortable about the conversation, because Grandpop was telling me—not straight out, but he was telling me just the same—that my father was wrong. That he was prejudiced. My father was such a good and admirable person. It was hard for me to reconcile the man I loved and respected with a bigot.

“Dad wouldn’t ever…you know, tell a little boy who needed to use the bathroom that he couldn’t,” I said, desperately wanting my grandfather to agree with me.

Grandpop smiled at me. “You’re right about that,” he said. “Your daddy’s a fair man. But he’s really had no experience with colored people, so he just doesn’t know any better than to say what he said. People are prejudiced mostly because they don’t know any better.”

I felt relieved. For a minute, I’d been afraid that Grandpop didn’t like my father.

“Do you know that a lot of people thought your grandmother wasn’t as good as they were when she was growing up here in New Jersey?” he asked. “They thought she was stupid.”

“Why?” I asked, perplexed. “She’s not colored.”

“She’s Italian. She didn’t speak perfect English. To some people, that’s considered even worse than being colored.”

I thought I was lucky to have an Italian grandmother. She was sweet to my friends and she cooked fantastic lasagna and made cookies at Christmastime with almond flavoring or rose water. It was hard to imagine anyone not loving her.

I suddenly got another tug on my line, this one nearly pulling the pole out of my hands. Grandpop tucked his pole beneath his chair to hold it in place and came over to help me.

“You’ve got a good one this time, Julie,” he said.

He held the pole as steady as he could while I reeled in the biggest fluke I had ever seen come out of the canal. I was whooping and hollering, jumping up and down as the fish sprang out of the water and we pulled it over the fence and onto the sand. It flopped from its flat, brown, two-eyed side to its white side and back again, and Grandma and Mom came out of the house to see what the fuss was all about. Lucy came out, too, but hung back near the porch door, afraid of the fish or the hook or the water. It was anyone’s guess.

Mom and Grandma watched as Grandpop held the fluke and I carefully extracted the hook.

“He’s a beaut,” my mother said.

“You win, Julie,” Grandpop said, as I dropped the fish into our bucket. It was nearly too big to fit. “I’m going to go clean it right this minute.” That was the loser’s task, to clean the catch.

I felt satisfied with myself as I watched my grandparents and mother walk back toward the house, but all of a sudden, I sensed a presence behind me. I turned and there stood Ethan, just a few feet away from me.

“That’s the most gargantuan fluke I’ve ever seen,” he said. “Can I have its guts?”

The next morning, I was sitting on the bulkhead, using binoculars to watch the boats bobbing and weaving in the rough water beneath the Lovelandtown Bridge. Grandpop had not only cleaned what he continually referred to as the “biggest fluke ever caught in the Intercoastal Waterway,” but he gave me a pair of binoculars, as well.

“I’ve been saving them to give you for a special occasion,” he said. “But I think catching that fish was pretty special.”

I guessed it was my conversation with Grandpop that made me turn the binoculars on the colored fishermen across the canal. That’s when I saw the girl. She was standing close to the dock that separated the fishing area from the Rooster Man’s shack, and she was bending over, doing something with her pole, baiting the hook, perhaps. How old was she? I studied her hard, turning the little dial on the binoculars to try to bring her into better focus. I couldn’t see what she looked like very well, but she was my age, I felt sure of it.

I went into the garage and grabbed my fishing pole and bait knife, took one of the boxes of squid out of the refrigerator, hopped in the runabout and motored across the canal before I had a chance to think about what I was doing. I pulled into the dock near the girl. I felt nervous, but a little excited, too. Maybe she would have a sense of adventure. Maybe she could become my friend, the way Willie had been my grandfather’s friend. I was so tired of being by myself.

I tied the runabout to the ladder at the side of the dock, then climbed up to the bulkhead with my pole and my bucket, the binoculars still around my neck. There were six people all together. Near me were my hoped-for future friend, an older boy, a woman—probably their mother—and a distance away, three men. Every one of them turned to stare at me. All those black faces. I felt like I’d gotten out of my boat in Africa. I had never felt so white and out of place in all my life.

I had to force my legs to take the few steps to where the girl was standing.

“Hi!” I said to her, my voice far too loud and cheery. “What’s biting?”

The girl stared at me blankly as though she didn’t understand English. Her skin was very dark and she had large eyes in the same deep shade of brown. Her hair had a bunch of plastic barrettes in it, all of them shaped like little bows in different colors. She was shorter than me and maybe a little younger than I’d guessed. I thought she was cute, but she sure didn’t seem to have much to say and my greeting just hung there in the hot July air.

The older boy standing next to the girl narrowed his eyes at me.

“What you doin’ over here?” he asked.

“I just wanted to fish on this side of canal for a change,” I said with a nervous smile.

“We got enough trouble catchin’ fish for ourselves without you taking up space,” the boy said.

“Hush, George,” the woman said, moving closer and resting her hand on the boy’s muscular forearm. “I’m Salena,” she said. “What’s your name, sugar?”

“Nancy,” I lied. I looked at the girl who was close to my age. “What’s your name?”

“Wanda,” the girl said. Her voice was high and it rose up a little on the second syllable of her name.

“How old are you?” I asked.

“Eleven,” she said. I could barely remember being eleven, but I guessed it was close enough.

“I’m twelve,” I said. “Could I fish here next to you for a while?”

“’Spose,” she said.

“What you using for bait, Nancy?” Salena asked.

“Squid,” I said, reaching into my bucket. I cut off a bit of bait with my knife and ran my hook through it, my hands shaking the whole time. “What do you use?” I directed my question to Wanda.

“Bloodworms,” she said.

“I use them sometimes, too.” I baited my hook and cast carefully, not wanting to catch the hook in any of their heads and have them madder at me than they already seemed to be. Their hair was really different from mine. Salena and Wanda had stiff-looking hair even blacker than Isabel’s. Wanda’s stuck out from her barrettes in little pigtails all over her head. I couldn’t see the men very well because they were quite a distance from me, but George’s hair was extremely wiry and tight to his head. He was wearing a white T-shirt and baggy tan pants and he looked like he played a lot of sports, every bit of him thick and shiny with perspiration.

“Can you read?” I asked Wanda.

“’Course she can read.” George scowled. “You think we pick cotton all day or something?”

“Shut up,” Wanda said to George. Then to me, she said, “Sure I can read.”

“Have you read any Nancy Drew books?” I asked.

“Some,” she said.

I wasn’t sure I believed her. “Do you have a favorite?” I was testing her, unable to picture a colored girl reading Nancy Drew. I wondered what it was like to be colored and read a book entirely filled with white people. For that matter, what was it like for Wanda to read just about any book or watch any TV show? The only one I could think of with a colored person in it was Jack Benny’s show with Rochester, the butler, or whatever he was.

“Ain’t got no favorite,” Wanda said, reeling in her line, which was tangled up in a mass of seaweed. “I like them all.”

I was quite convinced she was lying now. How could she not have a favorite? “Well, my favorite is The Clue of the Dancing Puppet,” I said. “It’s new.”

“I ain’t read that one.” Wanda set the bottom of her pole in the sand and worked the seaweed loose. “I liked the one where she joined the circus.”

My mouth dropped open. “The Ringmaster’s Secret?” I asked.

“Yeah, with that—” she pointed to her wrist “—that horse charm.”

“Right,” I said. She actually had read it and I felt terrible for thinking otherwise. “My name’s not really Nancy,” I said to her, wanting to reward her honesty with my own. “It’s Julie.”

“Why’d you tell me it was Nancy?”

“’Cause I like solving mysteries, just like she did.”

“Ain’t no mysteries here,” George said. “So you can go back over your side of this here canal.”

“Shut up,” Wanda said to her brother again. She rolled her eyes at me. “You got any brothers?”

I shook my head, smiling.

“You lucky,” she said. Her worm was still on her hook, and with a forward motion, she cast the line into the canal again.

“You got a sister, though,” George said.

“I have two,” I said. “Lucy and Isabel.”

“Which one wears that bikini?” he asked.

“Neither,” I said, but I knew he meant Isabel, even though her bathing suit was not actually a bikini, since the bottom was big enough to cover her belly button. Pam Durant was the only girl I knew who wore an actual, navel-revealing bikini.

“You lie,” he said. “There’s one who wears that two-piece bathing suit. She sits out on the bulkhead sometimes, talking to boys in their boats.”

“That’s Isabel,” I said. “She’s seventeen.”

“She a fine-lookin’ woman,” George said, and the way he said it made me uncomfortable.

“Don’t talk about my sister that way,” I said.

“What way’s that?” he asked, grinning. He had the most perfect set of white teeth I’d ever seen.

“You know what way,” I said.

I thought I heard something, and I cocked my head, listening. There it was—the clucking sound of chickens. I looked over my shoulder toward the Rooster Man’s shack. It was barely visible for all the grasses and reeds surrounding it.

“Have you met the Rooster Man?” I asked Wanda and George.

“Who’s the Rooster Man?” Wanda asked.

There was a tug on my line. I pulled back, reeled it in a bit, but whatever had been there was gone. Most likely, my bait was gone as well, but I really didn’t care about fishing. I was making new friends.

“He lives in that shack.” I pointed to the ramshackle little building on the other side of the dock.

“I seen him,” Wanda said. “George and me went over there to fish one time and he chased us away.”

“I think he’s hiding something,” I said.

George laughed. “You just lookin’ for trouble, ain’t you, girl?” he said.

“He has a rooster and some chickens he just lets run all over his house,” I said.

Salena walked over with a big bowl of raspberries and offered me some.

“Thanks,” I said, taking a couple of the berries and popping them in my mouth.

“Your mama know you’re over here, sugar?” Salena asked me.

I shook my head. “No, but I’m allowed to go anywhere on this end of the canal,” I said, telling what I hoped was the truth. I knew I was allowed to take the boat anywhere on this end of the canal. No one had ever addressed my getting off the boat and visiting someone.

“Well, you ask next time, hear?” Salena said.

I nodded.

“Yeah, you say, ‘Hey, Mama, can I fish with dem niggahs?’” George said.

I was shocked he used that word. He looked at my stunned face, then broke into a laugh.

“Hey, girl,” he said. “I’m just razzin’ ya.”

Salena laughed, too, but Wanda looked at her brother with disgust. “You so retarded,” she said to him. Then to me, “He turned eighteen yesterday and now he’s more retarded than ever.”

So, I had some new friends. They were different from anyone else I knew, but that only intrigued me. I went across the canal a couple more times that week. I liked being over there. Salena turned out to be their cousin, not their mother, as I’d originally thought. I learned that all of them—including the men, who stuck pretty much to themselves—were cousins. Wanda and George had no father and their mother was sick, so this bunch of older relatives took them in.

There was always a lot of “razzin’” going on, as George would say, and it took me a while to realize it was a sign of affection between them. I gave them any fish I caught and discovered that they, too, released the blowfish and sea robins. I shared my binoculars with them, letting them take turns looking through them. I picked a bowlful of berries from the semicircle of blueberry bushes that grew in the sandy lot across from our house and shared them with the Lewises. I brought over The Clue of the Dancing Puppet, sat on an overturned bucket, and read it out loud to Wanda. She never offered to do the reading, and I didn’t ask her, afraid she couldn’t read as well as me and might be embarrassed. I put a lot of drama into the reading, and even George and Salena listened after a while.

I took Wanda for a ride in the boat, making sure I’d brought an extra life preserver with me that day. I wanted to take her across the canal to meet my family but instinctively knew I’d better not. I’d told no one where I was spending my mornings. All they needed to do was look hard across the canal to see me, but they were so used to ignoring the colored fishermen that I guess they never did.

One day, though, I was standing next to Wanda, starting to bait my hook with a killie, when a white man suddenly emerged from the path cut through the tall grass. We all turned to look at him, and my thoughts were so removed from my family that it wasn’t until I noticed his limp that I realized it was my father.

“Daddy!” I said. “What are you doing here?”

I noticed some gray in my father’s brown hair as he walked toward to me. He skirted a fish bucket and gave George an even wider berth. George cut his eyes at my father, looking as though he would happily stick a knife in his side if given a chance. It was a side of George I hadn’t seen before.

“You need to come home,” Daddy said. His voice was very calm, but I knew the calmness masked his anger. My father was not a hitter, not even a yeller, but quiet anger could sometimes be even harder to endure.

“Why?” I asked, knowing perfectly well why. I was holding the killie in one hand, the hook in another, and both my arms felt paralyzed.

“We were looking for you,” he said. “You know you’re supposed to let us know where you are. Throw that killie in the canal and come with me,” he said.

Feeling self-conscious, I tossed the killie over the fence. “This is Wanda Lewis, Daddy,” I said. “And her brother George. And her cousin, Salena.”

“You got a nice girl,” Salena said. “She’s welcome to fish with us anytime she like.”

Daddy nodded to her. “Thank you,” he said. He put his hand on my shoulder and I tried to measure the anger in his touch: Nine on a scale of one to ten. I was afraid to go with him. My hands shook as I gathered my up my gear.

“What about the boat?” I asked him.

“Grandpop can come over later to get it,” he said.

“Bye,” I said to the Lewises, then turned to follow my father. He was already halfway down the path on his way to the small sand lot where he’d parked the car.

He didn’t speak until we were both in the car and he’d turned the key in the ignition. Then he looked at me, shaking his head slowly as though he couldn’t believe I was his child.

“What in God’s name do you think you’re doing on this side of the canal?” he asked, a cold, hard edge to his voice.

“Fishing,” I said.

“You think they’ve got different fish over here than on our side?”

Actually, I did, but I took a different tack.

“Grandpop said I should try to make friends with them,” I said, then cringed. I was a terrible person for pinning the blame on my grandfather. Daddy didn’t believe me, anyway.

“You’re starting to lie way too much, Julie,” he said as he drove the car from the lot onto the road. “You have a good imagination, and that’s fine. But you have to remember there’s a difference between making up stories that are harmless—that don’t hurt anybody, including yourself—and telling lies.”

“There’s no girls my age near us, Daddy,” I said, and I suddenly thought I was going to cry.

“You can play with Lucy,” he said.

“I would, except she never wants to do anything.”

Daddy suddenly looked sad. He reached across and stroked his hand over my hair, his touch gentle, the anger gone and worry in its place, which was almost worse. “Honey,” he said, “I know you’re lonely this summer. But don’t try to mix with the Negroes. No good can come of it.”

“Wanda reads Nancy Drew,” I said.

“I don’t care if she reads Dostoyevsky,” he said, his voice remaining calm. I had no idea who Dostoyevsky was. “I don’t want you to go over there again. Understood?”

“If Izzy was doing it, you wouldn’t care,” I said.

“If Izzy was doing it, I’d lock her in the house for a year,” he said. He turned the steering wheel to take us onto the road leading to the Lovelandtown Bridge, then glanced at me. “You think I favor Isabel?” he asked.

“I know you do.”

He said nothing as we drove over the bridge, the steel grating rumbling beneath the car’s tires.

“Isabel was my first child,” Daddy said quietly, once we’d crossed the bridge. “She’ll always have a special place in my heart, but I love all three of you equally. I’m sorry if I ever let you think otherwise.”

Although I hadn’t meant to manipulate my father with my accusation, it definitely seemed to have worked to my advantage. Daddy hugged me when we got out of the car in our driveway and said he thought his lecture had been punishment enough. I cried then for real, because I loved him with all my heart—and because I knew I was incapable of being the obedient girl he wanted me to be.

That afternoon, I sat on the bulkhead, dangling my feet above the water, looking over at the Lewis family as they packed up to go home. George and Wanda waved to me, and I waved back.

“Your dad went over and got you, huh?”

I recognized the voice without even turning around.

“Flake off, Ethan,” I said.

“I think it was neat that you went over there,” he said.

I turned to look at him, surprised. He was leaning on the fence. He had on sunglasses that were as thick as his regular glasses.

“My father had a big fight with your father,” he said.

“What are you talking about?” I swiveled on the bulkhead, drawing my legs up so that I was facing him.

“Your father was looking for you, and my father was out here and your father said, ‘Have you seen Julie,’ and my father said, ‘She’s where she is every day, on the other side of the canal, fishing.’”

“Your father finked on me?” I asked.

“Your father said he was going over to get you, and my father told him that, somehow, you ended up with an open mind and your father was trying to close it. And your father called mine a liberal asshole, and said that what happens in his family is none of my father’s business.” Ethan grinned. “It was pretty keen.”

Pretty keen if you’re not the subject of the dispute, I thought. I had to admit, though, that the argument sounded like the most excitement we’d had down the shore in weeks. I couldn’t believe my father had used the word asshole.

I did not fish with Wanda and George for a full nine days, but then I returned. I told Salena I had Daddy’s permission. I brought more blueberries and ate their raspberries and big hunks of corn bread Salena had made. I shared my binoculars with them and read to Wanda. I would only go when my father was in Westfield.

And I practiced the line I would use in confession: “I disobeyed my parents just about every single day of the week.”

CHAPTER 14

Julie

I arrived at my mother’s house the morning after the ZydaChicks concert and was in the process of getting my gardening gloves, sunscreen and insect repellent from the trunk of my car when Lucy pulled up behind me.

“I brought bagels,” Lucy said as she got out of her car. She held up the bag for me to see.

“Oh, you’re good,” I said. “I didn’t think of that.”

“Love that hat with your haircut.” Lucy walked toward me, reaching out to touch the brim of my straw gardening hat.

“Thanks,” I said. “Where’s yours?”

“I forgot it. Mom’ll have an extra, I’m sure.”

We started up the sidewalk to the white split-level that had been our childhood home. We did this several times during the year—joined forces to help our mother with the yard work. Mom was able to maintain her front yard flower beds beautifully, and she even mowed the lawn herself, much to our chagrin. She used a monster riding mower we had not yet been able to wrest away from her despite our many attempts. I’d offered to pay a service to handle the job for her, telling her I was afraid she might fall or the mower might tip over, but she waved off my concerns as ridiculous. I wondered how, when the time came, we would be able to talk her into giving up her driver’s license. At least Mom had accepted our help with the vegetable garden in the backyard, and that was to be our task for the morning.

We’d reached the front door, and Lucy rang the bell. I could see our reflections in the storm door nearly as well as I would have been able to in a mirror. The only thing alike about us, I thought, was our oval-shaped sunglasses. Mine were prescription. Our features were quite different, although I was usually able to see the presence of both our parents in our faces. Lucy’s hair was well on its way to being completely silver. Except for her thick bangs, her hair was pulled away from her face into the long French braid she always wore down her back, and I wondered if, beneath the dye and highlights, my own hair was now the same color as hers.

“Okay, Mom,” Lucy said to the air as she rang the bell again, “we’re here.”

We waited another full minute. It was early, but it had to be at least eighty degrees already, and I was hot standing on the shadeless front step.

“Is the car here?” Lucy leaned away from the door and looked toward the closed garage as if she might be able to see inside it.

“I called her yesterday before the concert to tell her we’d be coming,” I said, a smidgen of worry making its way into my brain. I reached into my pocketbook. “I have my key.”

I pulled open the storm door, glad to see our mother had not locked it, fit my key into the lock of the main door and pushed it open.

We stepped into the relative coolness of our old home.

“Mom?” Lucy called.

No answer. I walked into the kitchen and opened the garage door to see her silver Taurus.

I was about to head upstairs when Lucy said, “There she is.” She pointed through the sliding glass doors leading from the dining room onto the patio. I was relieved to see our mother sitting at the glass-topped patio table, her back to us. She was still in her light summer robe and terry-cloth slippers.

“She must have forgotten,” I said.

Lucy and I slid open the door and our mother jumped at the sound. She tried to look behind her, but couldn’t turn her head quite far enough to see us, and I was distressed that we’d startled her.

“It’s just us, Mom,” I said quickly. I bent over to kiss her cheek.

She was looking at an old photograph album, and she fumbled with it, trying to close it quickly but failing. Among the black-and-white photographs, I saw one of Isabel standing on the bulkhead dressed in a pale sundress, waving at the camera. My God, she looked like Shannon! A sailboat was on the canal behind her, heading toward the bay. I caught Izzy’s dimpled smile just before my mother managed to close the cover on the book, her hands fluttering, shaking.

“Hi, girls,” she said, struggling to put cheer in her voice. “What are you doing here?”

Lucy gave me a worried look over the top of our mother’s head. Mom was no more forgetful than I was most of the time, but it was clear that we’d walked in on a private moment.

“We’re here to work in the garden,” Lucy said.

“Oh, that’s right.” Our mother got to her feet, lifting the photograph album to her chest. We were all going to pretend it wasn’t there. That was the way we operated in our family: We were masters at ignoring the elephant in the room. If we pretended it wasn’t there, it couldn’t hurt us.

“Let me get dressed and I’ll help you,” she said. She kept her head lowered as she scooted past us, as though she knew her eyes were rimmed with red and was hoping we wouldn’t notice. It was clear she wanted to get away from us to pull herself together. Seeing her self-consciousness made me ache for her. I longed to touch her. Hold her. I wished I could ask her what had her so upset, but it was clear that was not what she wanted and I let her pass.

“I brought bagels,” Lucy said, most likely because she didn’t have a clue what else to say.

“And there’s juice in the fridge,” Mom said, as she opened the sliding door.

Once she was in the house, Lucy and I looked at each other again.

“Maybe we should have called before we came over,” Lucy said in a hushed tone.

“How weird that she was looking at old pictures now,” I said.

“What do you mean, ‘now’?” Lucy asked.

“You know,” I said. “Ned’s letter. Me talking with Ethan. Having to think about Isabel’s death. All of that.”

“A coincidence,” Lucy said, then reconsidered. “But you’re right. It is kind of strange.” She held up the bag in her hand. “Cinnamon raisin, oat bran or plain?” she asked.

We each ate half a bagel in the kitchen, then left them on the counter for our mother. Lucy found one of Mom’s old gardening hats in the hall closet and she tugged it low on her head. Then we doused ourselves with insect repellent and walked out to the toolshed in the rear of the yard.

We opened the door to the musty-smelling shed and began digging through the tools.

“Any word from Ethan?” Lucy asked, as we put a couple of hoes and weeders in the wheelbarrow.

I laughed. “It’s only been…what? Ten hours since you asked me that question last night.” I felt the start of a hot flash, the damp heat burning the crown of my head, then radiating downward over my cheeks and neck. I took off my hat, fanning myself with it.

Lucy laughed. “One itty-bitty mention of Ethan, and look what happens to you,” she said.

I was only mildly annoyed with her. “Just you wait a few years,” I said. “I’m not going to forget how unsympathetic you’ve been to me while I’ve been going through this.”

I put my hat back on and we began pushing the wheelbarrow toward the garden.

“Do you think sex would be difficult?” Lucy asked.

I looked at her. “What are you talking about?” I asked.

“I mean…” She looked utterly guileless. “You know, with you being menopausal and all that.” Lucy had a knack for bringing up the most difficult subjects with an air of innocence. “Let’s say that you could get past your concerns about having a relationship with Ethan and—”

“I doubt very much that I could.” I stopped pushing the wheelbarrow at the edge of the garden and lifted out the hoe. “And even if I wanted a relationship with him, I doubt he wants one with me.” I started raking the hoe between the rows of tomato plants. The garden was the same oversized plot of fertile soil that Lucy and I had grown up with, but it seemed like much more work now than it had been when we were kids. “And besides,” I added, “I have very little interest in sex these days, anyway.” That was a half-truth. I’d gotten used to thinking of myself as asexual. I couldn’t have cared less about sex during the last few years of my marriage to Glen, which might have been part of the problem between us—yet another thing that was my fault. But my reaction to seeing Ethan—even to talking with him on the phone—was forcing me to rethink my definition of myself as a sexless creature.

“I’m afraid that’s happening to me, too.” Lucy dropped the kneeling pad next to the lettuce.

“You?” I looked at her in surprise. I’d expected Lucy to have an insatiable appetite for sex until she was on her deathbed—and maybe even then.

“Sad, isn’t it?” she said, lowering herself to her knees on the pad, a trowel in her hand. Her hat flopped low over her sunglasses. “I never thought I’d hear myself say that.”

We heard the sliding-glass door open and turned to see our mother walking toward us. She was dressed in the gardening overalls I’d bought her a couple of years earlier and wearing green rubber shoes and a straw hat, and she looked much, much better than she had just a half hour before.

“Mom,” I said, “why don’t you sit and relax and let Lucy and me do this today?” I suggested.

She stopped walking toward us. “Not a bad idea,” she said. “I’ll just get a cup of coffee and a piece of bagel and pull a chair over so I can visit with you.” She turned around and disappeared into the house again, and Lucy and I exchanged another look.

“What’s going on with her?” Lucy asked. It was not like our mother to let us do the work ourselves, not that we minded in the least.

I brushed a bug from my damp forearm. “Maybe she finally realizes that gardening in this kind of heat is more than she should be doing,” I said, dropping my hoe to the ground. I walked over to the patio and carried a chair back to the garden, setting it in the shade near where we were working.

“How can she drink coffee when it’s this hot?” Lucy said, when Mom appeared again on the patio. She walked toward us carrying a cup of coffee and half a bagel on a napkin. She sat down on the chair, all smiles.

“I was so sorry I couldn’t join you at your concert last night,” she said to Lucy. “How was it?”

“A lot of fun,” Lucy said.

“They were great, as usual,” I said, picking up the hoe again. Mom had planned to go to the ZydaChicks concert with Shannon and me, but she’d canceled yesterday afternoon, saying she was too tired to go out. I’d thought little of it at the time, but now I wondered if whatever had tired her out last night was related to her sadness this morning. As for me, I still felt a little high from having had that quality time with my daughter the night before. I missed seeing her every day. I knew I was calling her too much, irritating her, but I was only calling once out of every ten times I thought of her.

“Did Lucy tell you I want to plan a combination birthday and going-off-to-college party for Shannon?” Mom asked me.

“No,” I said, delighted. “That’s a great idea.”

“I thought we should have it at Micky D’s,” she said, “but Lucy thought it should be here.”

I sneaked a smile at my sister, mouthing the words thank you to her.

“Here would be perfect,” I said out loud.

“I think we should make it a surprise party,” Mom continued, “so could you put together a list of her friends for me, Julie?”

“Sure,” I said. I leaned on the hoe, thinking through the idea. “How about I take care of the invitations so you don’t have to worry about that part?” I suggested. “We’ll have to look at our calendars and see when would be good. She has to be at Oberlin in late August.”

“I don’t think a surprise party is such a great idea,” Lucy said.

“How come?” I asked, scraping the hoe through the dirt and weeds again.

“I don’t know,” Lucy said. “I think…she might want to have some say as to who gets invited. That sort of thing. I know I would if I were in her shoes.”

“Well, why don’t you two talk it over and get back to me on it?” our mother said. She took a sip of her coffee. “And meanwhile…” She hesitated so long that we both looked over to see if she’d forgotten what she’d been about to say. “I have a question for Julie.”

“What?” I asked.

“I was wondering when you planned to tell me you had lunch with Ethan Chapman.”

Speechless, I looked at Lucy. Did you tell her? I asked with my eyes. Lucy looked as surprised as I felt and gave a little shake of her head.

“How did you know about that?” I asked, holding the hoe at my side.

“I have my ways,” she said, tucking a strand of her white hair beneath her hat.

“Mom,” I said. “How?”

“His father paid me a visit,” she said.

“You’re kidding.” I pictured Mr. Chapman as he had looked the last time I’d seen him. He’d been on TV, a slender, handsome middle-aged man, shaking hands, kissing babies and making promises as he ran for governor. It must have been in the late sixties. “Why?” I asked.

“He said Ethan told him he was going to see you and that started him thinking about our family, so he decided to pay me a visit.”

“Weird,” Lucy said. She, too, had stopped her weeding and was now sitting down on her kneeling pad, hugging her shins. “How did it go?”

“Oh, fine,” Mom said. “He’s a feeble old goat. Hasn’t aged too well. He shouldn’t be driving a car, if you ask me.”

I suddenly thought of the photo album she’d had out that morning. No wonder. Seeing Ross Chapman must have brought back many memories of the shore for her.

“What did you talk about?” I asked.

“Not much,” she said. “He was only here a few minutes. What I’m curious about is what you and Ethan talked about.”

Could she possibly know about the letter? I reassured myself that there was no way she could, since Ethan had not even told his father.

“Sort of the same thing,” I said. “He just wondered about us. You know he and I were really good friends when we were little, and I guess he started thinking about me.You know how that happens sometimes.”

“Is he single?” Mom asked.

“Well, actually, yes,” I said. “He’s divorced.”

“So, he’s hunting for a new Mrs. Chapman, then, I guess,” she said.

I laughed. “Oh, Mom, I don’t think that’s what he’s after at all.”

“Well, if it is, I hope you’ll ignore his overtures,” she said.

“Why should she ignore them?” Lucy asked.

My mother let out a heavy sigh. She took a long swallow of coffee, then brushed a bagel crumb from her lap while Lucy and I waited. “Because,” she said, “the Chapmans are a reminder of times I would just as soon forget.”

I could almost see the elephant tromping in our direction from the patio, plopping down in the garden on top of the tomato plants.

“So—” my mother rested her coffee cup on the arm of the chair and folded her hands in her lap “—let’s decide if Shannon’s party should be a surprise or not.”

CHAPTER 15

Lucy

1962

I remembered something.

I’m not sure what stirred the memory. Maybe it was Mom mentioning Mr. Chapman. Maybe it was that, before she managed to close the photograph album with those fumbling, anxious fingers, I’d gotten a good look at one of the old pictures. It had been taken from the water and was of our bungalow standing next to the Chapmans’, the small houses bookended by our two docks. As I pulled weeds late into the morning, the sun hot on my arms, the memory came back to me in bits and pieces until it was fully formed.

When I was a child, my mother was obsessed with me learning to swim. An excellent swimmer herself, it worried her to have any of us unsafe around the water. I wanted to learn how to swim. I honestly did, but there was some fear in me that just wouldn’t let it happen. At the bay, I would stand shivering in knee-high water, terrified of…what? Crabs biting my toes? The sucking pull of the sand in the bottom of the bay? Drowning? I am not sure now, and I’m not sure I could have said even then what terrified me, but I could not go in. In the winter, Mom would take me to the Y, where she would hook me up with a male teacher who was known for getting even the most recalcitrant kids into the water. But I could outlast anyone in the game of “come on in, honey,” and after two years of trying, that teacher gave up on me. Everyone gave up on me, except for Mom.

One day during the summer of 1962, Mom thought up a new plan for teaching me to swim. I had just gotten my first violin—a silly, lightweight, off-white plastic thing from the five-anddime—and all I really wanted to do was sit on our screened porch and practice playing the simple songs in the music book that came with it. But Mom was insistent.

“I have a feeling today is the day!” she said, with her usual enthusiasm. She stood in front of me in a black-and-white polkadot, skirted bathing suit, the child-size orange life preserver in her hands. “I really do,” she said. “And I asked Mr. and Mrs. Chapman if we could use their dock because it has a slope you can walk down to get into the water. Doesn’t that sound perfect?”

I looked through the screen toward the Chapmans’ dock. I could see the top of their motorboat jutting above the bulkhead.

“Their boat is in there,” I said.

“Yes, but it’s a double-wide dock,” my mother said. “Plenty of room for both you and the boat.”

I don’t remember what prompted me to set my violin down and let her buckle me into the life preserver. I don’t know if I sighed with resignation as I followed her out the porch door, or if I felt some hope that, this time, I might actually do it. I might actually learn how to swim. For whatever reason, I walked with her across our yard and the Chapmans’. I remember kind of skating with my bare feet across the sand. I had walked that way in the Chapmans’ yard ever since stepping on a prickly holly leaf from one of the bushes that grew in their front yard. I was determined to swish any leaves away from my feet before they could hurt me.

The Chapmans’ dock was very wide, and Ned had moved their boat to one side so that there was still plenty of room for my swimming lesson. The entire male contingent of the Chapman family was there, plus Ned’s friend, Bruno. Ned and Bruno were cleaning the interior of the boat with rags and a bottle of blue detergent, and “Sherry” was playing on a transistor radio that rested on the bulkhead. Ned was as tan as his black-haired friend, and it was the first time that I realized that some blondes could tan every bit as well as people with darker hair. I liked that Ned was there, since he was a lifeguard. It made me feel a tiny bit more secure.

Skinny Ethan stood in the water to encourage me, and Mr. Chapman leaned against a tree near their dock, watching us approach the concrete incline.

“Are you ready to learn how to swim today, Lucy?” Mr. Chapman asked me.

“Maybe,” I said, my eyes on the water.

My mother held my hand as we walked onto the slope. It was not what I’d expected; I could barely see the concrete for the slimy green growth covering it. I was afraid of slipping, and I clung tightly to my mother’s hand.

I stepped into the water up to my ankles.

“That’s good,” my mother said. “It’s not too cold. Isn’t it nice?”

I nodded, concentrating on the dark water in the dock. You couldn’t see what was below the surface. I’d watched Julie net a zillion crabs in our dock and I knew this one would be just as full of them. Through the ankle-deep water, I could see that my toes were exposed and vulnerable.

“I need to go get my flip-flops,” I said.

“Why?” my mother asked.

“Because of the crabs.”

“The crabs have better things to do than munch on your toes,” Bruno said. He was kneeling on the bow of the boat cleaning the windshield. He was wearing his swimming trunks and nothing else, and I had never seen a body like his before. Even his muscles had muscles.

“Use my flip-flops,” Ethan called from the water. He pointed to the sand behind us where his flip-flops had been carelessly kicked off, one of them resting on the other. I scrambled back up the slope and put them on. They were too big, but they would have to do.

“Look, Lucy!” Ethan said, when I’d returned to the ankledeep water and the safety of my mother’s hand. He was standing at the bottom of the slope, or so I assumed. I couldn’t really see. “It’s only up to my waist here.” He held his arms out above the water. I could see every one of his ribs.

“Let’s take one more step,” my mother said. “Just one step at a time.”

I wanted to give her something, and so I did it. I took a baby step down the slope and shivered as the cool water inched halfway up my calf. My teeth were starting to chatter. I could barely make out my toes now, and I kept hopping from foot to foot to keep the crabs away. The flip-flops were not enough to make me feel secure. I should have worn my sneakers.

“It’s easier if you get in all at once, Lucy,” Ned said. He was the expert and I knew he was right, but I just couldn’t do it.

“One more,” my mother said, and I held my breath and took another step forward. The water lapped at my knees, and my teeth were chattering so loudly now that I was sure everyone could hear them. My arms were covered with gooseflesh.

“That’s great, Lucy!” Ethan said. “Keep coming.” He was patting the surface of the water like someone might pat the cushion of a sofa to encourage a friend to sit next to them.

“Are there crabs by your feet?” I asked him.

“No!” he said. “The crabs are afraid of you. They see your feet and run away.”

That did not reassure me. I wanted to hear that there were no crabs at all.

“What if they don’t see my feet until it’s too late? Then they’ll bite me.”

“You’re being a big baby, Lucy,” Bruno said from his perch on the bow.

“Leave her alone, Bruno,” Ned said.

“How do you stay so patient with her, Maria?” Mr. Chapman asked.

My mother looked up at him. “Haven’t you ever been afraid of anything, Ross?” she asked.

“Not like that,” he said, and I felt like a freak in a circus.

“I don’t want to do this, Mom,” I said. “Can we go home?”

“Please, Lucy.” My mother sounded as though she was begging me. I wanted to please her, but I was shivering all over. I didn’t think I could take another step.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just can’t,”

Finally she gave up. She looked at Ethan. “Thanks for helping, Ethan,” she said.

“Sure,” Ethan said. He took a couple of steps backward into the deeper water and began treading. Why could he go into water that deep and I couldn’t? Why was I the only one to feel such fear?

My mother and I climbed back up the slope and I felt relieved to be on level ground again. I unbuckled the life preserver and kicked off Ethan’s flip-flops.

We had taken a couple of steps in the direction of our bungalow when I suddenly felt myself being lifted up and tossed into the air, the life preserver flying off my arms. I may have screamed; I don’t know. I do remember my mother shouting “Ross!” as I fell. I saw the bulkhead whip by in front of my eyes, and then I was in the deepest part of the Chapmans’ dock. I shot beneath the water’s surface, flailing my arms in the green, blurry, underwater world. I could hear voices, muted shouts. Then I broke through the surface of the water, gasping for breath, my mother holding me up, her dark wavy hair wet around her face.

“You’re okay, darling,” she said to me, her hands firm and secure on my rib cage.

I was sobbing. I pressed my head to her shoulder.

“Why’d you do that, Dad?” I heard Ethan ask.

“It’s the best way to get over a fear,” Mr. Chapman was saying. “Just jump right in. See, Lucy?You were in the deep end and you didn’t drown.You bobbed right up to the surface.” His voice was kind, but I was never going to go near him again.

My mother half carried me back to the slope, where she set me down and took my arm, walking me up the slimy green surface, and I saw then that she, too, was crying. At the top of the slope she let go of my arm, marched over to Mr. Chapman and smacked him hard on his shoulder.

“How dare you!” she said.

Mr. Chapman rubbed his arm where she’d hit him. “If you took her to a psychiatrist—which might not be a bad idea—he’d recommend you do what I just did,” he said.

My mother grabbed my hand. “She’s not your daughter!” she said, starting toward our house with me. I had never seen her so angry. I could feel her fury in my fingers where she was squeezing them. She called back over her shoulder, “Don’t you ever lay a hand on one of my children again!”

At home, even I knew I was milking the traumatic event for all it was worth. Grandma clucked over me, helping me change out of my wet bathing suit while I bemoaned the terrible treatment I’d received at the hands of our neighbor. She rubbed me all over with talcum powder from her special pink tin of Cashmere Bouquet, then dressed me in my favorite green baby-doll pajamas. I could hear my mother complaining to my grandfather about what had happened and Grandpop’s soothing voice in response. I was allowed to stay up late, playing my plastic violin, and Julie was forced to go to bed at the same time as me, so that I would be able to fall asleep without nightmares about the rag-that-looked-like-a-head stuck in the wires on the attic ceiling.

When I was nine, I jumped into my neighbor’s pool and began to swim. I’d had so many lessons that I knew the mechanics by heart. All I needed was the practice—and the courage that came from surviving one of the worst things life had to offer: the death of my sister.

CHAPTER 16

Maria

1927-1939

It was funny how when you neared the end of your life, you could find yourself thinking about its beginning. I was only five when my parents and I spent our first summer at the bungalow. The canal was brand-new back then, only having been completed the year before. There were very few houses in Bay Head Shores at the time, and everyone already knew one another, so I think it was particularly difficult for my mother to make friends at first. Rosa Foley was an oddity, with her exotic dark looks and Italian accent, but my father was so very American that he was able to make inroads for us with the other families and their children and I quickly had several playmates.

When I was eight, nine-year-old Ross Chapman moved in next door and became my best friend. We’d fish together in the canal and swim together at the beach. He taught me how to play tennis when I was eleven and I taught him how to dance when I was twelve. The Chapmans lived in Princeton during the rest of the year, while we lived in Westfield, so Ross and I never saw each other or even exchanged letters during those months. Come summer, though, we’d pick up right where we left off.

The summer I was fourteen, I started viewing Ross differently. He’d grown tall and lanky in a very handsome way. I’d started that adolescent yearning for a boyfriend, and although he and I were still just pals, I fantasized about him being more than that. He was on my mind even during the school year, and when talking with my Westfield girlfriends, I would refer to him as my boyfriend. My friends were envious, thinking I had a luscious summer love. I knew Ross would probably clobber me with his tennis racket if he knew how I talked about him. I was still just the girl next door to him.

When my daughters were growing up, they liked to date one steady boy at a time, but things were different when I was a young teen. My friends and I did everything as a group. “Maria’s gang” was how my father referred to us. At the shore, my “gang” consisted of about twelve youngsters. Many of us had boats, and we’d cruise between the bay and the river with ease.

The summer Ross was sixteen, he showed up at the shore with a Ford Phaeton convertible. Oh, my, the fun we had with that car! Of course, it was only meant for four people, but we managed to squeeze six or seven of us into it, some of the kids standing on the running board, hanging on for dear life. We were wild—not by today’s standards, of course, but we thought we were pretty crazy. Everything felt so safe back then. No one I knew ever got hurt in a car crash. No one drowned in the ocean. And certainly, no one was murdered. Our placid lives would all change in a few years, with the stock-market crash and the Second World War, but our teenage years were easy and fun filled.

Once several of us could drive, we started hanging out at Jenkinson’s Pavilion on the boardwalk. We nearly lived there, dancing to live music in the evening, swimming in the huge saltwater pool during the day, and basking for hours on end in the sun. It was a wonder I never got skin cancer, but I had my mother’s Mediterranean skin and I guessed that saved me.

My dark looks, however, came with a price.

The summer I was seventeen, the intensity of my attraction to Ross had deepened to the point of obsession. Not only was he handsome, he was brilliant as well, getting straight A’s in his private high school and being accepted to Princeton for the fall, where he would follow in his father’s footsteps by studying law. It seemed, though, that we would never be more than friends. Ross would often give me a ride to parties and other get-togethers, and on the way home, we would talk about who we were attracted to, who we would like to go out with. You, I wanted to say. It’s you I want to go out with. It was hard for me to listen to him say he liked Sally or Delores, when my longing for him was eating away at my insides. I played the game, too, though, telling him I had a crush on Fred Peters, the best-looking boy in our group. Ross only responded that he thought Fred was interested in me, too.

The change came when I was crowned queen of the Summertime Gala, an annual Point Pleasant event. It featured a small parade, and I rode on a little float pulled by a few of the boys from my gang, Ross and Fred included. I was dressed all in white from head to toe and wore a crown. My envious girlfriends treated me coolly, but my fifteen minutes of fame seemed to alter Ross’s view of me.

He drove me home after the parade. He turned the car onto Shore Boulevard, but instead of continuing down the road to our houses, he pulled over and parked in front of the woods.

“What are you doing?” I asked him.

He glanced at me, then smiled almost shyly. “I want to tell you something, Maria,” he said.

“What?” I asked.

“You made a very beautiful queen,” he said. Ross had never said anything like that to me before. He’d never commented on my looks in all the years I’d known him.

“Thank you,” I said.

“I hope you don’t think this is silly of me,” he continued, “because I know we’ve always just been friends, but I thought about you over the winter. I thought about how swell it was going to be seeing you again this summer.”

“I thought about you, too,” I whispered.

“You did?”

I nodded.

“I went out with some girls in Princeton, you know, but I was thinking of you the whole time,” he said. “I’d look at pictures my parents had of you and me…you know, sailing and in our tennis clothes and…you know those pictures.”

I nodded again, my heart brimming with joy and gratitude. These were the words I had longed to hear from him and had heard only in my imagination—and in the lies I told my Westfield girlfriends.

“Today, when I saw how other men looked at you…” He shook his head. “I knew I had to let you know how I feel. I couldn’t take the chance of letting you get away.” He took one of my hands in both of his. “I’m in love with you, Maria.”

I was sure that my smile lit up the car. I let go of his hand and reached out to hug him. “I’ve loved you for years,” I said, my lips against his ear.

He drew away from me, then leaned over to kiss me, so tenderly I barely felt it. He raised his hand to my breast, touching it through my silly white queen dress, sending a spark through my body.

“I want you.” He smoothed my thick hair behind my ear.

“I want you, too,” I said.

“Tonight,” he said, “let’s break away from the gang at Jenkinson’s. We can go out on the beach under the stars.” He lifted my hand and drew it to his lips, and I nodded.

“All right,” I said. I knew what I was saying, what I was agreeing to, and I knew it was a sin. But I didn’t care.

That night at Jenkinson’s, we danced, both with other people and with each other, trying not to be too obvious. Around nine o’clock, Ross and I stepped out onto the broad porch and down the stairs to the beach. We slipped off our shoes and our feet had barely touched the sand before we were kissing. We made love beneath the Jenkinson’s boardwalk, while the band played Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller songs almost directly above us. It was the first time for me, although I was sure it was not for him. I lost my virginity to Ross that night on the beach. I’d lost my heart to him years before.

Ross and I began going out separately from our gang of friends. He’d come to pick me up, and my parents, who had always liked him, were delighted at seeing us together. Of course, they had no idea how far our relationship had gone. They invited him to dinner or to play cards with us, and I felt proud of how easily he slipped into my family. Our relationship, always based in friendship, became more sexual than I ever could have imagined. It was rare that one of our evenings together did not end with lovemaking, often in the sandy lot across from our bungalows, where a crescent of blueberry bushes provided the right amount of cover. It was not the sort of tender lovemaking I’d grown up imagining, but rather a hungry, animalistic devouring of each other. During daylight hours, when I would be helping my mother around the house, the memory of being with Ross the night before would make me suck in my breath with a sudden blaze of desire.

Ross and I rarely spoke about the fall, when he would be going to Princeton and I would study teaching at the New Jersey College for Women, but we did talk about the future.

“I’d rather you study art than education,” he said one night. I was lying in his arms, encircled by the protection of the blueberry bushes, my dress draped over my bare skin. Hanging on a chain around my neck was his high-school ring, which he’d given me the day before. I couldn’t stop myself from fingering it.

“What could I do with an art degree, though?” I asked him. “I’ve always wanted to teach.”

“That’s because you’ve been thinking you’ll have to earn a living to support yourself,” he said, kissing my nose. I heard the smile in his voice.

“What are you saying?” I asked.

“Well, you know I’m not in a position to ask you to marry me now,” he said, “but if you and I do get married one day, you won’t have to work. I wouldn’t want you to work. You would have plenty to do helping me entertain my law colleagues.”

I smiled to myself, snuggling closer to him. I could see my future in front of me. Our future. I pictured our elegant home in Princeton, our beautiful children—a boy and a girl. I could see myself in an exquisite hostess gown, welcoming our distinguished guests.

“We’ll see,” I said, because although the fantasy was delightful, my parents had instilled in me the satisfaction that could be gained from having a career of my own. I knew it would take me a while to let go of that dream.

Our friends had quickly realized we were a couple, despite our initial attempt to keep our relationship to ourselves. Once we were out in the open, the girls seemed to feel less threatened by me and they became my friends again. I’d missed them and I was glad.

One night, Ross and I were at Jenkinson’s with the whole gang. We were standing in line at the fresh orangeade stand, the boys telling jokes and the girls groaning in response. The orangeade vendor was Italian, his accent stronger than my mother’s but very similar. James, one of the boys in our gang, gave him a dollar bill to pay for a ten-cent orangeade. I was never sure exactly what happened, but James somehow tricked the vendor into giving him two dollars in change. I watched most of the boys and some of the girls in my gang snickering as we moved away from the orangeade stand. By the time we were out of earshot of the vendor, James was nearly doubled over with laughter.

“Can you believe that imbecile?” he asked us. “Stupid wop!” I looked quickly at Ross. He was grinning. His upturned lips, his teeth, the laugh lines at the corners of his eyes—those details would stay with me for the rest of the night. They were all I could see when I looked at him. I was half Italian. My mother was a full-blooded “wop.” Why couldn’t I tell him how much his mockery of the immigrant vendor hurt me? If he wondered why my lovemaking that night lacked its usual energy, he said nothing about it. I was waiting for him to ask me what was wrong. Then I would tell him about my sense of betrayal. But he never did ask, and I tried to push my sadness to someplace deep enough inside me that it would not rise up again.

A few days later, my mother found a forgotten bag of pine nuts in the pantry and she made a double batch of pignoli. She put a dozen of them on a plate and told me to take them over to the Chapmans’.

I crossed our backyards and knocked on our neighbors’ porch door. I knew Ross was playing golf with his father, but his mother was home, and she pulled open the screened door for me.

“Hello, Maria,” she said. “How is the queen of the gala today?”

“Fine, thank you, Mrs. Chapman,” I said, stepping onto the porch. In my younger years, I’d spent plenty of time in Ross’s house, but now it seemed we only got together at my house. I assumed Ross felt that my parents were warmer and more welcoming than his—which they certainly were. “Mother made an extra batch of pignoli for you,” I said, holding out the plate of cookies.

“How lovely of her!” she said. “Bring them into the kitchen.”

I walked into their kitchen and set the cookies on the table in the corner. When I looked up at her, she had lost her smile.

“Whose ring are you wearing?” she asked me.

My fingers flew to the ring hanging around my neck. Hadn’t Ross told her?

“It’s Ross’s,” I said.

I saw by her expression that Ross had not told her. She looked into my eyes, confused. “Why on earth would he give you his ring?” she asked.

What could I say except the truth? “We’re going steady.” I dropped my hand from the ring to my side, suddenly self-conscious.

“But…he has a girlfriend in Princeton,” she said.

I knew about Veronica, the girl his parents kept pushing him to go out with.

“Veronica’s not his girlfriend,” I said, trying not to sound defensive. I held out the ring as proof.

She turned away from me, ostensibly to put away a cup that had been resting on the counter. “I didn’t know that,” she said tightly. “I thought he was still interested in her.”

“Well,” I said, the sense of betrayal welling up in me again, “maybe you should talk to Ross about that.”

I went home, angry with Ross for not telling his parents, or at the very least, for not telling me that his parents didn’t know. I was helping Mother with the dusting when I heard the Chapmans’ car chug past our house on the dirt road. I walked out to our screened porch so that I might be able to hear their conversation if it was loud enough.

The yelling started quickly, but I couldn’t make out anything that was being said. I ached for Ross, wishing I could have said something to his mother that would have eased the barrage of fury being thrown his way. If only I had known he hadn’t told them about us, I could have pocketed the ring. In my naiveté, I thought they were angry that he had not told them he’d lost interest in Veronica or that he’d not told them that we were going steady. The real content of their argument was something else altogether.

Later that evening, Ross came over and asked if I would go for a walk with him. Of course, I said yes, anxious to hear what had transpired between him and his parents. He held my hand as we walked up Shore Boulevard.

“I have to break up with you,” he said, the words slicing clear through my heart.

“Why?” I asked. “Is it Veronica?”

“No, no,” he said quickly, then tightened his grip on my hand. “I don’t care a whit about Veronica.You know that. I love you, Maria. I always will, and maybe someday, when we’re out on our own, we can start seeing each other again, but right now I just can’t.”

“Why didn’t you tell your parents about us?” I asked, tears welling up in the corners of my eyes.

He rubbed the back of my hand so hard my skin burned. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he said.

“Tell me.”

He was quiet a moment. “It’s because you’re Italian,” he said finally.

“So what?” I said defensively. “And I’m only half Italian.”

“Your mother came over on the boat, and to them, that’s…I don’t know.” He shook his head. “My parents have antiquated views about things.”

“You’ve known all along I was Italian,” I said angrily. “That hasn’t stopped you from making love to me when you feel like it.”

“I don’t care what your background is,” he said. “You know that, darling.”

“Then why are you letting them dictate who you can see?” I asked.

“Dad said he won’t pay for me to go to Princeton if I continue seeing you.” He blurted out the words.

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “He wants you to go as badly as you want to go. Do you think he would actually follow through on that threat?”

“I have no doubt at all that he would,” he said grimly. “I’m so angry with him right now that I could—” He shook his head, unable or unwilling to finish the sentence.

The tears began trickling down my cheeks, and when I spoke, it was hard for me to get the words out. “But we’ve been friends forever,” I said. “Does he expect us to stop being friends?”

“We’ll always be friends, Maria,” he said.

We were in front of our houses again, back where we’d started our walk. And we were in front of the lot with the blueberry bushes as well. Standing there, we looked at each other a long time, the darkness no barrier to seeing the longing in each other’s eyes. He took my hand again, nodded toward the bushes.

“One last time,”he whispered, as he led me onto the sandy lot.

I was certain we both knew he was lying.

CHAPTER 17

Julie

On Wednesday afternoon, I drove down the shore. I’d told Ethan I would arrive at his house around four, and although it was little more than an hour’s drive, I left Westfield at one o’clock. I was afraid that once I reached Point Pleasant, it would take me a while to find the courage to drive to our old Bay Head Shores neighborhood. And I was right.

I found a parking place in the huge and crowded lot across from the Point Pleasant boardwalk, but it was a moment before I got out of my car. Even with the windows closed and the air conditioner blowing, I could smell the ocean. People, some of them sunburned or deeply tanned, walked through the parking lot in their bathing suits, carrying towels and beach chairs or pushing cranky toddlers in strollers. I looked straight ahead of me at the merry-go-round I’d ridden on dozens of times as a kid. It had been a ritual in my family to visit the boardwalk at least a few times a month during the summer. We’d go on the rides and eat sausage sandwiches at Jenkinson’s and frozen custard at Kohr’s. I’d lived for those family outings back then; now I was afraid to get out of my car.

Ethan had called on Monday afternoon. I was rushing in from the car, bags of groceries in my arms and dangling from my fingers when the phone rang. I saw his name on the caller ID and felt both relief and trepidation. Dropping the bags on the counter, I grabbed the receiver.

“Ethan?”

“You sound breathless,” he said.

“I just got in the house,” I said. “Any news?”

“A few things,” he said. “They’re really moving on the investigation. They interviewed me this morning.”

“Oh.” I sank onto one of the kitchen chairs. “What was it like?” I wondered how hard it had been for him. “What did they ask you?”

He hesitated. “They want to interview you next,” he said, not answering my question.

I shut my eyes. I supposed I’d been hoping the police would somehow be able to pin Isabel’s murder on Ned without the need to question me again.

“When?” I asked.

“This week, most likely,” he said. “And I was going to suggest you come here. Stay at my house. I have loads of room and—”

“Next door to the bungalow?” I asked, as though he’d suggested I sleep in a tree.

“Is that a problem?” he asked.

I was quiet for a long time. “I haven’t been down the shore since Isabel died,” I said. “I’ve avoided it. It’s painful to me to even think about being there.”

It was his turn to go quiet. “Are you saying that you haven’t been to the beach…to the ocean at all in forty years?”

“I’ve been to other beaches,” I said, thinking of my honeymoon in the Caribbean. Trips to California. “Just not the Jersey Shore.”

“Well,” he said, “you’ll have to come down here to talk with the police. Of course, you don’t have to come to Bay Head Shores or spend the night at my house, but I thought it might be good for us to put our heads together. There were questions they asked me about Ned’s old friends, you know, that sort of thing, that maybe we could help each other remember. You could stay in a motel somewhere and I could meet you for dinner.”

That sounded like an excellent compromise. “All right,” I said. “I’ll wait to hear from the police, and then I’ll make reservations and—”

“You’ll have to go inland,” he interrupted me. “The beach motels will be booked.”

“All right,” I said again. “I’ll see what I can come up with and get back to you.”

“Okay,” he said. “And another thing. My friend at the department told me they’ve been talking to George Lewis’s family.”

“Wanda?” I asked.

“I don’t know who, exactly,” he said. “I do know that Lewis always stuck to the story that he was innocent.”

“I’m sure he was,” I said. “I knew he didn’t do it. Have they talked to Bruno Walker?” I asked.

“My friend said they’re having trouble tracking him down.”

“Figures,” I said. “The one person who might know what really happened and they can’t find him.”

We talked for a few more minutes, and I was putting the groceries away when Lieutenant Alan Meyers called from the Point Pleasant Police Department. Apparently, they were wasting no time. He asked if I could come to the station on Thursday morning. I said I could, then got on my computer to find a motel in the area and instantly felt like a fool. Grow up, I told myself, and I called Ethan back to accept the invitation to stay at his house.

Now, sitting in my car in the heart of Point Pleasant, I wondered if I’d made a mistake. It had been so easy to be brave from the safety of my home. I took a moment to give myself an emotional checkup before I opened the car door: I was okay. I got out, merry-go-round music and salt air surrounding me, and joined the tourists heading toward the boardwalk.

On the boardwalk, I thought I saw Isabel everywhere. She was riding the Tilt-A-Whirl, centrifugal force pressing her against the shell-like back of the carriage. She was sitting on a bench next to a blond-haired boy, facing the ocean, her long legs stretched out in front of her, her feet propped up on the railing. She was walking toward me on the boardwalk in a green bikini, her body tan and hard, her head tipped to one side as she took a bite from an ice-cream-and-waffle sandwich.

I sat on one of the benches facing the boardwalk, peoplewatching and letting Isabel in. How would she have fit in with Lucy and me? I wondered. Would she have helped us pull weeds in Mom’s garden? Would our father still have been alive if he hadn’t lost his beloved oldest daughter at such a young age? Why was I torturing myself with unanswerable questions?

“Dear God,” I prayed, mumbling the words aloud, “help me get through this.”

I stood up and walked resolutely back to my car. It was still early, so I drove around Point Pleasant for a while. I spotted St. Peter’s, where I’d gone to church every Sunday morning during the summer and to confession every Saturday evening. I remembered one of the last times—possibly the last time—I’d gone to confession there. For some reason, Mom had not been in the car with us. Daddy and Isabel rode in the front seat on the way to the church, and Lucy and I were in the back, and we were talking about my upcoming confirmation. Isabel had her taken her shoes off and had her bare feet up on the dashboard, her skirt just covering her knees.

“So, Julie,” she said as she studied her stubby fingernails. She was a nail biter and she’d bought all sort of products to make herself stop, but none of them worked. “Have you decided what middle name you’re taking for confirmation?” Isabel had taken the name Bernadette as her confirmation name. It was a great name, long and elaborate, but I was not an elaborate person and had decided on my confirmation name a year earlier.

“Nancy,” I said.

“It has to be a saint’s name,” Isabel said with an air of authority. “I don’t think there’s a Saint Nancy.”

“Well,” Daddy said, and I knew just by the tone of his voice that he was going to take my side for a change. “I believe the name ‘Nancy’ comes from the name ‘Ann,’ and there certainly is a Saint Ann. She was Mary’s mother.”

Bingo, I thought. Not only had I picked a saint’s name, but a really important one at that.

“So she has to take ‘Ann,’ right?” Isabel asked my father. She sounded hopeful. She did not want me to get my way in this. “That would sound really stupid,” she added. “Julianne Ann Bauer.”

“I’m going to take Kathy,” said Lucy. She related strongly to the baby of the family on Father Knows Best.

“You two are missing the boat,” Isabel complained. “This is supposed to be serious.”

“Isabel’s right,” Daddy said. “But we can talk to the priest about whether Julie would have to take Ann or Nancy. And Lucy, there most certainly is a Saint Katharine. The important thing is for the two of you to learn about the lives of the saints you’re interested in before you decide to take their names, the way Isabel did.”

If he only knew about his sweet Saint Isabel, who was probably going all the way with Ned, I thought.

Daddy parked the car on the street outside St. Peters, and I suddenly got the jitters. That entire week, I’d lived in fear of dying because I had not confessed all my sins the previous Saturday and I knew I would go straight to hell if I died. I simply had not known how to tell the priest about the fantasies I was having about Ned Chapman. But now I thought I had it figured out. Somehow I’d come up with the term “impure thoughts.” I must have read it somewhere, maybe in the Catholic magazine Daddy wrote for. I also remembered reading that impure thoughts were a sin even if you didn’t act on them, and that’s when I realized I’d better confess them as soon as I could. I was afraid, though. I was used to confessing to my lies and my fights with Lucy and Isabel and my disobedience. This new sin had a completely different feeling to it.

I sat in the pew between Daddy and Isabel, waiting my turn. I watched Lucy go into one side of the confessional with her little eight-year-old’s transgressions. A woman came out from the other side, and Isabel took her place. Then Lucy came out, and it was my turn.

I could feel my heart beating against my ribs as I knelt in the darkness. I heard the mumbling of a male voice and knew that my sister had finished her probably inadequate confession and was receiving her penance. Then, before I was ready for it, the priest slid open the window.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” I said, making the sign of the cross. “It’s been one week since my last confession and these are my sins. I disobeyed my mother and father three times,” (the trips across the canal to fish with Wanda and George) “I lied to my little sister once,” (telling her there were no crabs in the Chapmans’ dock) “I had some impure thoughts, and I fought with my older sister two times.” There. I’d slipped it in perfectly.

“Tell me about the impure thoughts,” the priest said.

Oh, God. “I…I thought about the boy who lives next door to us,” I said.

“Often?” the priest asked.

I swallowed. “Yes, Father,” I admitted. Every waking moment.

“And have you committed the most grievous offense of masturbation?” he asked.

What was he talking about? I’d never heard the word before, but I guessed he meant intercourse. I couldn’t imagine what else he might mean.

“Oh, no, Father!” I said, so loudly my family probably could hear me in the pews.

“Good,” the priest said. “Be sure you never do.”

Never? I wanted to ask him if it would be okay to do it when I was married, but he sounded so stern and frightening that I didn’t dare.

“Yes, Father,” I said.

“For your penance, say six Hail Marys and five Our Fathers and now make a good Act of Contrition.”

The rote words spilled out of my mouth. All the while I was thinking that I’d gotten out of it easy. For a few extra Hail Marys, I would continue having impure thoughts about Ned. I wasn’t sure I could stop them even if I wanted to.

CHAPTER 18

Julie

I lay in the double bed in the guest room in Ethan’s house. The room was dark, but I remembered my impressions from when I walked into it for the first time that afternoon to deposit my overnight bag on the handsome wood chair in the corner. The walls were a spectacular blue—robin’s-egg, only richer and deeper. The curtains fluttering against the open window were a bold white-and-blue stripe. The painting on the wall looked like something my mother might have created: an impressionistic view of what could either have been a body of water or a green field, depending on how you wanted to look at it. I wondered if the simple yet dramatic decor was Ethan’s doing or that of his ex-wife. I didn’t need to wonder who was responsible for the stunning carved headboard or the dresser. By the time I’d made it to the guest room, I already knew that Ethan was no ordinary carpenter.

Many things had changed in Bay Head Shores since 1962. As I drove through the area before heading to Ethan’s house, I tried to remain in control and dispassionate, as if I were a scientist making observations instead of a woman visiting a place that haunted her. The little corner store where my sisters and I used to buy penny candy had been turned into a tiny antique shop, and now it was tucked beneath the overpass leading to the large bridge that had replaced the old Lovelandtown Bridge. There were many more houses, and the area had the feeling of a resort as opposed to the simple bayside neighborhood it once had been. The sun was brilliant against the architecturally varied houses. The yards were manicured with pebbles or sand and salttolerant landscaping. I drove the curved road leading to our little beach—the Baby Beach—with a tight knot in my throat.

Okay, I said to myself as the beach came into view. Be objective. There’s the little playground. Could those swings possibly be the same ones Daddy used to push us on? I didn’t think so. There’s the lifeguard stand. And loads of people. Brightly colored beach umbrellas. The shallow area’s still roped off for the kids. But… My eyes searched the water beyond the shallow area. No platform. I was glad to find it missing. I’d dreaded seeing it. I had seen quite enough.

Shore Boulevard, my old street, had changed more than I could have imagined. To begin with, it was no longer a dirt road. Houses sat nearly on top of one another, filling both sides of the street. The woods were gone. Two houses stood in the lot where the blueberry bushes had once flourished. I was surprised that it didn’t sadden me to see how built-up it had become. Instead, it relieved me that it didn’t feel like the same street at all.

I nearly stumbled upon our old bungalow. Everything seemed so different that I hadn’t expected the house to suddenly appear on my right. I stopped the car abruptly, lurching forward, glad there was no one behind me on the quiet street. The house looked lovely and well cared for. It had been a grayish blue when I was growing up, with black shutters. Now it was a sunny pale yellow trimmed with white. An old anchor leaned against the tree in the front yard. The obviously custommade mailbox at the edge of the road was painted to resemble the ocean, and a model sailboat rested on top of it. Someone cared about the house my grandfather had built, and I felt gratitude to them, whoever they were.

Between the bungalow and the newer house to the right of it, I could clearly see the canal. The water had an instantaneous, visceral pull on me. The current was swift, the water that deep greenish-brown I remembered so well. I rolled down my window and let the humid air wash over me. Here’s the only thing that hasn’t changed in this little corner of the world, I thought, as I watched the canal race toward the bay. The water, with its shifting current and its salty, weedy scent. I stared at it, going numb, a defense against feeling anything that could shake my fragile hold on the here and now. I was amazed that, so far at least, I seemed to be surviving this homecoming.

I turned into the Chapmans’ driveway, parking behind a pickup truck I guessed belonged to Ethan, and got out of my car.

“You made it!” Ethan walked from his house and across the sand to where I was standing. His feet were bare and he was wearing jeans and a blue T-shirt. His smile was filled with an ease I did not feel and he surprised me with a hug.

“Quite a trip,” I said, trying to return the smile.

“Traffic?” he asked.

“No. Just…I drove around.”

“Ah.” He seemed to understand. “Changed a bit in forty years, hasn’t it?”

The screen door opened again and it was a moment before I recognized the woman who emerged from the house as his daughter, Abby. She was carrying a sleeping infant, six months old at the most, in her arms.

“Hi, Julie,” she said, walking toward us. She had a baseball cap on her short blond hair and a blue quilted diaper bag over her arm.

“Hello, Abby,” I said, and I leaned down to try to get a look at her baby. The child’s head rested against Abby’s shoulder. It had to be a girl. Her eyes were closed, but her lashes lay long and curled on her pudgy cheeks. “And who’s this?” I asked.

“My granddaughter, Clare,” Ethan said. He reached up and rubbed his hand softly over the little girl’s back.

“She’s gorgeous,” I said.

“Clare and I are just leaving.” Abby smiled at me. “I’m glad I got to see you, Julie, if only for two seconds,” she said.

“You, too, Abby.”

Ethan put his arm around his daughter. “See you Sunday for dinner,” he said.

“You got it.” Abby stood on tiptoe to kiss her father’s cheek. “I love you,” she said, stepping away. Then she walked toward the white Beetle convertible parked in front of the house.

“Love you, too,” Ethan called after her. He grinned, watching his daughter and granddaughter get settled into the little car. He looked at me. “I am one lucky dude,” he said.

I nodded. “Abby’s really a lovely young woman,” I said, but I was thinking about Shannon, trying to remember the last time she had told me she loved me. I told her all the time. When had she started responding to those words with “okay” or the occasional cherished “you, too”?

“Hand me your bag and we can go in the house,” Ethan said.

I rolled my overnight bag toward him and reached into my pocketbook for my eyeglass case. I traded my prescription sunglasses for my regular glasses, then followed him into the house. Once inside, I realized that I had very little memory of its interior. When Ethan and I had played together indoors as kids—rarely, unless it rained—it had usually been at my house. We’d play cards on the porch or board games on the linoleum living-room floor. What had definitely changed inside the Chapmans’ house, though, was its furniture. The first thing that greeted me in the living room was a striking, floor-to-ceiling entertainment center in a pale wood, the craftsmanship exceptional even to my untrained eye. That was only the first of Ethan’s creations I noticed. Everywhere I turned, I saw evidence of his gift. There were end tables and a coffee table. Beautiful chairs with curved backs and silky smooth arms. The kitchen cabinets were a pale maple, and even the countertops were made of a eye-catching striated wood I couldn’t resist running my hand over.

“Tiger maple,” Ethan said. “I love the stuff. You’ll see it all over the house.”

I felt chastened by reality. I’d viewed his being a carpenter in negative terms. In my mind, I’d labeled him a man who worked with his hands instead of his head. But here were the results of his labor. He’d used not only his hands and head in the creative process, but there was plenty of evidence of his heart as well.

“The humidity here is terrible for the wood,” he said, smoothing his fingers over one of the cabinet doors. “But I don’t see the point of making beautiful things if you aren’t going to use them, so I use them.” Damn, he was cute, and I found myself smiling at him. He radiated a relaxed, soft-voiced, blue-eyed charm. The goofy kid who had begged for fish guts was simply not in evidence, and the attraction I’d felt to him in the Spring Lake restaurant was back in spades.

I looked through the kitchen to a jalousied sunroom.

“You enclosed your porch!” I said. Through the open jalousies, I could see the backyard and canal. “Let’s go out there.” I wasn’t sure if I truly wanted to be in the backyard we’d once shared or if I simply wanted to get it over with.

“Sure,” he said.

As we walked onto the sunporch, I squinted my eyes toward the opposite side of the canal. The weathered wooden bulkhead was gone. In its place was a steel bulkhead the color of rust. “What happened to the bulkhead?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you,” Ethan said. “Come on.” He led me through the porch with its white wicker love seat and chaise longue. Once outside, I saw that our two yards were now separated by a decorative wire fence, nearly the color of the sand.

“Who lives there?” I found myself whispering.

He took my elbow. “Come on,” he said again. “Let’s sit down and I can fill you in on the neighborhood.”

There was a beautiful boat in Ethan’s double-wide dock. I no longer knew a thing about boats, but I could tell this one had power and speed.

Ethan pulled two of the handmade wooden beach chairs closer together and patted the back of one, encouraging me to sit.

I sat on the chair, a few feet behind the chain-link fence that separated us from the water.

“God.” I shook my head. “I can’t tell you how strange this feels to be here. To see this water. I feel like I was here just last week, it’s so familiar to me. And look across the canal.” I pointed to the thick green reeds where George and Wanda and their cousins used to fish. No one was fishing there this afternoon. “It’s still undeveloped,” I said.

“Right,” Ethan said. “One of the few areas on the canal.”

“The Rooster Man’s shack is gone, though,” I said, marveling at the cluster of angular gray buildings that stood where the shack had once been.

“Condos,” Ethan said. “If you’ve got about $ 800,000, you can get one with two bedrooms.”

I looked at him, openmouthed. “Are you kidding?” I asked.

“You don’t want to know how much your old house is worth,” he said.

I winced. “You’re right,” I said. “I don’t.” The current value of the bungalow didn’t matter. My grandparents would have sold it even if they’d had a crystal ball to see the future of real estate in the area.

Ethan told me about the old wooden bulkhead succumbing to erosion and being replaced by the rust-colored steel walls years earlier. He told me about the changes on our street, how quickly the houses had gone up during the seventies. We watched as a massive yacht, crowded with well-heeled revelers, sailed by in front of us, and I realized I had not even turned in the direction of my old yard. I sighed.

“It’s easier for me to focus on the bulkhead or the boats—” I nodded toward the yacht “—than over there.” I shifted my gaze to the right, letting myself truly look at the yard for the first time since my arrival at Ethan’s.

“I know,” Ethan said. “I figured you’d get around to it when you were ready.”

The old painted Adirondack chairs were gone and in their place, sleek metal patio furniture sat on the sand. More of the wire fencing surrounded the dock, and nearby was a large tree, barely recognizable as the tree I used to lean my crab net against. The screened porch that had seemed so big in my childhood still ran the length of the house, but it was not nearly as deep as I remembered it. A circular, above-ground swimming pool sat in the shade of the tree, and I could see the top of a motorboat in the dock.

“Who lives there?” I asked again.

“A young couple,” Ethan said. “The Kleins. Very nice. They moved in about four years ago and they have a boy about seven years old.”

“Ah,” I said. Now I understood the need for all the fencing. It gave them the illusion of safety. I said a little prayer that the boy would grow up to be a strong, healthy adult.

“I told them that you—someone who used to live in the house—was coming to visit me,” Ethan said, “and they said you’re welcome to come over and see how the house has changed, if you like.”

“No,” I said quickly. I didn’t want to set foot in that house of memories. “Do they know…you know…what happened?”

“No.” Ethan smiled, leaning forward, elbows on his knees. “Julie, you have to realize that that house has probably had—” He looked out at the water for a moment, thinking. “I don’t remember, exactly. Probably eight or nine owners in the last forty-one years.”

I chuckled at my foolishness. To me, what happened in that house seemed like only yesterday. I wanted to ask Ethan if he missed being able to sit out on the wooden bulkhead; the steel one offered no place to sit. I wanted to ask him if he missed the blueberry bushes and the woods we used to play in and the clanging sound of the old bridge when it swung open to let the boats through. But I realized those changes, like the eight or nine owners of our house and the Rooster Man’s shack being taken over by condos, were ancient history to him. In Bay Head Shores, he lived in the present, while I was still stuck in the past.

“This is hard for you, isn’t it?” he asked. “Being here?”

I nodded, staring at the water. “A tragedy occurs,” I mused. “Then you move on, or at least you try to move on, and you go through the motions of living your life, but you never quite forget it. It’s always there under the perfectly calm surface. And then…wham.” I pounded my fist on my thigh. “Something happens—like Ned’s letter—and you’re forced to deal with it all over again.”

“You’re the one who wanted me to take it to the police,”he said.

I looked at him sharply. “It’s not your taking it that shook things up,” I said. “The letter existed, whether you took it or not.”

He reached over to squeeze my shoulder. “You’re right,” he said. “And I didn’t mean to sound glib or like I’m blaming you. It was the right thing to do to take it to the cops, and they got on my case for not bringing it sooner.” He stared at his hands, rubbed them together, turned them palm side up, and I saw the signs of his work on his fingers. The skin looked rough and callused.

I wanted to take one of his hands in mine. I felt bad for snapping at him. This was no easier for him than it was for me. “I think they suspect that I wanted the time to clean out Ned’s house,” Ethan said. “You know, to make sure they wouldn’t be able to find anything incriminating.”

“I assume they didn’t find anything?” I asked.

“No, and I hadn’t found anything when I went through his stuff, either. No secret journals. No letters of confession. My friend who works at the department, though, told me they were able to find enough hairs and…whatever at his house to use for DNA matching.”

“Well, that’s good,” I said, although I didn’t know exactly how Ned’s DNA could be used at that point. “What did they ask when they interviewed you? What are they going to ask me tomorrow?”

He sat back in his chair, hands flat now on his denim-covered thighs. “They wanted me to give them the names of everyone Ned knows. Knew,” he corrected himself. “His drinking buddies. Women he dated. College friends. People he might have confided in. I couldn’t come up with many. Ned kept to himself. He wasn’t a social drinker. He drank to get drunk. Solo. Period.”

“What sort of relationship did you have with him?” I asked.

“Very difficult,” Ethan said. “He didn’t want to be around me because I was always badgering him about his drinking. About getting help. He didn’t want to hear it. He rarely saw Dad, either, which I know just killed my father. He still feels as though he failed Ned, that he should have been able to do something to help him.”

“Oh!” I said. “I forgot to tell you something.”

He looked at me, waiting.

“Did you know your father went to see my mother?”

His eyes grew wide. “What?”

“He did,” I said. “He showed up at her house the same day you and I met in Spring Lake.”

He looked as though I’d imagined it. “Why would he do that?” he asked.

“I don’t know, and she wasn’t very forthcoming,” I said. “She said he was thinking about us and decided to visit her. Does he know about the letter?”

Ethan shook his head. “He couldn’t possibly,” he said. “And I’ve talked to him since you and I met and he never said a thing about visiting your mother. Did he drive all the way up to Westfield to see her?”

“Yes. At least, he came to her house. I assume he drove.”

“Oh, brother,” Ethan said. “He scares me when he drives around the corner, much less to Westfield. I’ll have to talk to him about it. I don’t know how long I can let him live independently. He’s…” He shook his head. “Now, this is where Ned and I communicated,” he said. “We could talk about Dad—what should be done as far as taking care of him and that sort of the thing. I’m on my own with it now.”

I thought of Lucy, how glad I was to have her as my sister. How much I treasured her.

Ethan rested his head against the seat back, and a faraway look came into his eyes. “I just want…” he began. “I wish there was something I could do to keep the police from talking to my father,” he said. “I know they plan to, and probably soon, since he’s the only one who can support Ned’s alibi. I’m afraid they’re going to badger him because they probably think he used his influence to get Ned off.” He shook his head. “I dread telling him about that letter.”

“I know,” I said. “I can’t imagine telling my mother about it.”

“You might have to, Julie.” He looked at me, the blue in his eyes so clear I felt like diving into them.

“I know,” I said again, but I was thinking, Not if I can help it.

“Well,” Ethan said, “here’s what I think you and I can do that might help the investigation,” he said. “We should try to remember Ned and Isabel’s friends from 1962 and anything important about them. The police might want to talk to them.”

I leaned my head back against the wood of the chair. I thought about Isabel’s old crowd that used to hang out on the beach. “Why can’t they find Bruno?” I asked.

“He’s left the area, his parents are dead, and his real name—Bruce Walker—is pretty common,” Ethan said. “But my friend assures me they’re looking for him.”

“Isabel had two best girlfriends here,” I said. “Pamela Durant and—”

“Oh, yeah,” Ethan said, a little of the lecher in his voice. “Hard to forget her. She never came back to the shore, though, after that summer, but I still remember her.”

“Down, boy.” I smiled. “I didn’t know you had any interest in the opposite sex back then, except as something to study under a microscope.”

He returned the smile. “The geeky thing was just a facade,” he said.

I laughed.

“Who was the other girl Isabel hung around with?” he asked.

“Mitzi Caruso,” I said. “She lived on the corner. Right down there.” I pointed in the general direction of the Carusos’ house.

“I vaguely remember her,” Ethan said. “I think she came back a few more summers, but I couldn’t really say for sure. There were a couple other guys Ned hung around with, but I’m completely blank on their names. Summer kids. Do you remember any of them?”

I shook my head. The rest of those teenagers from Izzy and Ned’s crowd were as faceless to me as they were nameless.

Ethan looked at his watch, then stood up.

“Listen,” he said, “it’s a gorgeous evening. Let’s go out in the boat, and then we can make dinner—I picked up some flounder—and talk some more.”

I glanced toward his dock. “I don’t do boats these days,” I said.

“Really?” He looked puzzled. “When I picture you, it’s in that little runabout of yours. Out there by yourself on the canal, twelve years old, zipping around like you owned the water.”

It was hard to believe I’d ever been that child. “I haven’t been on a boat since that summer,” I said.

“Come on.” He held out his hand to me. “Let’s go. We can head toward the river if the bay upsets you.”

He didn’t understand. There would be no pleasure in it for me, only a sort of panic. “I don’t want to, Ethan,” I said.

He saw that I was serious and gave up. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll skip the boat ride and go right to dinner, then. Are you hungry?”

I helped him cook, although he was at ease in the kitchen. Watching him, I realized he was a man at ease, period. And lying here now in his handmade guest-room bed, it occurred to me that he had always been that way. Even when he was a nerdy little kid, he hadn’t cared what others thought of him. He’d been comfortable in his own skin. I hadn’t expected to find myself admiring him any more than I’d expected to find myself attracted to him. And yet I was both.

CHAPTER 19

Julie

Sometimes you could find yourself feeling very anxious about one thing only to discover that you should have been anxious about something entirely different. That’s what happened to me the morning of my interview by the police.

I’d awakened early to the sun-washed blue of Ethan’s guest room and the comforting scent of coffee. I longed to stay in that room all day. My head hurt a little and I thought of calling the police department, telling them I couldn’t come in, that I was sick. I did not want to go over what had happened in 1962, detail by detail, which is what I figured they would ask me to do. How would I be able to bear it? Putting the interview off until later, though, would provide only temporary relief, so I got up, showered, dried my hair, dressed in khaki pants and my red sleeveless shirt and walked downstairs. Ethan was reading the paper at the table on his sunporch, but he hopped up when he saw me in the kitchen.

“Eggs or pancakes?” He put the newspaper down on the counter. “I can go either way.”

“Toast?” I asked. “And bacon.” I motioned toward the plate of bacon he’d already prepared, although I wasn’t sure I’d be able to eat anything at all.

“Sit down and I’ll feed you,” he said.

I took a seat at the kitchen table, lifting up the tablecloth to admire what I knew would be beneath it—another of Ethan’s creations.

“How are you doing this morning?” he asked, putting two slices of bread in the toaster.

“I think I’m okay,” I said slowly, like someone who had just sustained an injury and was trying out the muscle to be sure it wasn’t sprained.

“Do you want me to drive you?” he asked.

“Just give me directions and I’ll be fine,” I said with false bravado. I liked the idea of him coming with me, but I was sure he had work to do.

He jotted a phone number on a slip of paper and handed it to me. “This is my cell number,” he said. “I’m stopping over at a job this morning, but let me know when you’re done and I’ll meet you back here.”

I nodded. The toast was ready and I carried it and the bacon onto the sunporch while he followed with two cups of coffee. The jalousies were wide-open, and the reedy scent of the canal, the swift current, and the boats cutting through the water all combined to take hold of my heart and squeeze. I nibbled at the toast, my appetite gone as I tried to carry on a conversation about the job Ethan had to check on that morning. I had made it through half a slice of toast and an inch of bacon by the time I needed to leave, and as I headed out the door, I wished that I’d accepted his offer to go with me.

The room I was taken to at the Point Pleasant Police Department was small and bare, and there was nothing to look at other than the faces of my two questioners. I sat on a hard, straightbacked chair across a table from Lieutenant Michael Jaffe from the Prosecutor’s Office and a very young, blond detective, Grace Engelmann, from the Police Department. They each had a notepad in front of them, and a tape recorder rested on the table between us, a thick file of papers next to it.

There was a little small talk at first, designed, I thought, to put me at ease.

“It’s changed a lot since you were a kid here, huh?” Lieutenant Jaffe asked after he’d introduced himself and the detective. He was a handsome man with wavy salt-and-pepper hair and a youthful face.

“Yes,” I said. “I haven’t been back since my sister’s death.”

“Really,” he said, as if that surprised him. “I didn’t come here until ninety-two myself, so I’ve only known it the way it is now. What sort of changes have you noticed?”

He had to know how the area had changed, whether he’d lived here or not, but I figured I would play along with the putting-me-at-ease game.

“Well,” I said, “there were a lot of summer people back then. And far fewer houses. The bulkhead is different. That new bridge wasn’t there.”

He frowned. “The new bridge?”

“Over the canal,” I said, and he and Detective Engelmann both laughed.

“We call that the old bridge now,” he said. “It really has been a long time for you, hasn’t it?”

I smiled. I could hear the tape running in the small machine resting on the table.

“You know,” he said, “my wife and I love your books.”

“Thank you.” I was tempted, as I always was, to ask which book he liked best, but decided against it, in case he was simply making conversation and had not read them at all. The last thing I wanted to do was make him uncomfortable. Detective Engelmann wrote something down on her pad. What I had said to prompt her to do that, I couldn’t imagine.

“How did you happen to go into mystery writing?” Lieutenant Jaffe asked.

I always got that question. I had a long answer designed for speaking engagements and a short answer designed for times like this.

“I loved Nancy Drew as a kid,” I said. “And I loved writing. So it seemed a natural fit.”

“Ah, yes,” he said, as the detective continued writing on her pad. “You know, I remember reading an article about you in some…I don’t know, probably some magazine or newspaper, where you said that when you were a child, you entertained your friends by making up mysterious events and pretending they’d occurred in your neighborhood.”

Were we still in the small-talk mode, or did I detect a subtle shift in the tone of his questioning? “That’s true,” I said.

“And then there was the real mystery…the ultimate mystery in your own family,” he said.

I was confused for a moment and must have looked it.

“The murder of your sister,” he said.

“Oh,” I said. “Yes.” I shifted in the hard, armless chair. I wanted to cut to the chase. I wanted to tell him and the so-far-silent Detective Engelmann that I’d always suspected Ned was guilty and that, in my opinion, that was what he’d been alluding to in his letter. But this was not my show, and I waited for the next question.

“What can you tell us about George Lewis?” he asked.

The thought of George brought an rueful smile to my lips.

“He was a teaser,” I said. “I spent quite a bit of time with him and his sister, Wanda. I don’t think he knew who his father was, and I’m not sure what happened to his mother. He and Wanda had been raised by a cousin, Salena. I think his family was very poor, but they were close to each other and there was a lot of affection between them.” I remembered the look of daggers George had sent my father the day Daddy came over to drag me home. “He had a tough facade and was probably pretty streetwise.”I added, “Although I’m only guessing. I never actually saw that side of him. It makes me so angry…so upset…to know that he went to prison for something he didn’t do.”

The lieutenant nodded. “I imagine the person who’s responsible for your sister’s murder carries a lot of guilt around for letting the wrong person go to prison.”

I didn’t miss the present tense in his sentence. “Well,” I said. “It’s my opinion that Ned Chapman was that person and that his guilt is what ultimately did him in.” I was hoping we could get down to the nitty-gritty now, but Lieutenant Jaffe folded his hands on the table and leaned forward.

“You understand,” he said, “that we have to look at every angle on this case. We have to start fresh. We have your statements from 1962, but it’s important for us to look at this case with a clean slate.”

I nodded, feeling uncertain. I wanted to get this over with, to review the statements I’d made as a twelve-year-old and get the recitation of those memories out of my way. That wasn’t going to happen though, at least not yet.

“Tell us about Isabel,” Lieutenant Jaffe said.

The question was so open-ended, I didn’t know quite what to do with it.

“She was beautiful,” I began. I wished the chair I was sitting in had arms. My hands felt heavy and awkward in my lap. “And she was rebellious. A typical teenager. She snuck out every night to meet Ned at the platform on the bay.” I was quiet a moment, trying to figure out what else I should say about Isabel. The only sounds in the room were the quiet whirring of the tape recorder and the tip of the detective’s pencil racing across her notepad. When she had finished whatever she was writing, she looked up and spoke for the first time.

“How did you know she was sneaking out every night?” she asked. She had rather amazing green eyes, the color of new grass, and I wondered if she was wearing special contacts.

“I knew because I saw her,” I said. “Because I was sneaking out myself.” Surely they already had this information in the old records of the case. But, as the lieutenant said, they were starting fresh.

“What was your relationship with her like?” he asked.

I looked away from him quickly, annoyed with myself for doing so. I did not want to talk about my relationship with Isabel, and I knew that my sudden inability to look at my questioners made me suspect in their eyes. That’s what this is about, I realized. They didn’t care why I thought Ned had done it. They wanted to know my role in Isabel’s death. My anxiety took a sudden, unexpected leap.

“We were close when we were young,” I said, lifting my gaze to look squarely at the lieutenant, then the detective. “But there were five years between us and we drifted apart as she got into her teens, which was only natural. We didn’t have much in common anymore.”

“Did you argue a lot?” Detective Engelmann asked.

“Bickered,” I said with a shrug. “Typical sibling rivalry.”

“And how about Ned Chapman?” the detective asked. “What was he like?”

I felt a hot flash start to prickle and burn on the top of my head. Damn. In two seconds, my face would be as red as my shirt. I did not look away this time, though. I held the woman’s grass-green gaze as I answered. “He seemed nice,” I said. “I mean, I’d known him all my life, since he lived next door to us during the summer. He was the lifeguard at the beach. But you can’t really know what’s going on inside a person. He was nice on the exterior, but who knows what was going on inside him.”

“You had a crush on him.” The lieutenant made it a statement rather than a question.

I shrugged again. “A typical preteen sort of crush,” I said. I was using the word typical too much and wondered if they’d noticed. I could barely breathe for the heat radiating down my neck and chest. I waved my hand in front of my face, looking apologetic. “Hot flash,” I said. “A nuisance.”

They smiled at me as if they understood, but given Detective Engelmann’s age and Lieutenant Jaffe’s gender, I was certain neither of them had a clue how I was feeling. I wanted to pick up the detective’s rapidly filling notepad to give myself a real fanning.

“Were you jealous of Isabel?” Lieutenant Jaffe asked.

My eyes darted away from him again. Damn it. What was wrong with me? I wanted to say, Of course I was jealous of her. Weren’t you jealous of your older siblings? Instead, I steadied myself and nodded. “In some ways,” I said. “I wished that I’d looked like her and that I was her age and could have the freedom she did.”

“Who knew she would be on the bay at midnight on August fifth, 1962?” Detective Engelmann asked.

“I did,” I said. “And Bruno—Bruce—Walker. And possibly George Lewis, although I was never sure of that. If he knew, then Wanda Lewis probably did, as well. And, of course, Ned Chapman.”

“Although according to the old report—” the Lieutenant fingered the file in front of him, although he did not open it to look at the pages “—Ned Chapman had asked you to tell Isabel that he couldn’t meet her that night.”

“Well, yes, but he later said he might be able to.”

“You were really known for your storytelling back then, weren’t you?” the detective asked me.

They were jumping from topic to topic so quickly that my overheated brain could barely keep up, and once again, I was not sure exactly what she meant.

“I read a lot,” I said. “I read Nancy Drew books aloud to George and Wanda.”

“But you also made things up, right?” she asked. “The way you made up stories about events in your neighborhood to excite your friends.”

I stared at her, uncertain how to respond. I felt something like hatred for her building inside me. When I didn’t respond to her question, the lieutenant spoke up.

“Let me try to summarize what you’ve told us so far,” he said. “There was some sibling rivalry between you and your sister. You were jealous of her. You knew where she’d be that night. You regularly sneaked out of the house.You had a crush on—”

“Stop it.”I stood up, the chair scraping the floor. “I didn’t come here for this,” I said. “I came to help in your investigation. I came to tell you what I remember, not to be accused of murdering my sister. I didn’t kill her, if that’s what you’re getting at. I would never have hurt her.”

“Please sit down again,” Lieutenant Jaffe said calmly, and against my better judgment, I did so. I sat on the edge of the chair, though, ready to make my exit.

“We have to look at everyone involved,” he said. “Everyone who could have been in the same place as your sister that night. That includes you.”

I held on to my anger. If I didn’t, I knew I would start to cry. “I didn’t kill my sister,” I said, slowly and deliberately. “I had nothing to do with it.”

The lieutenant suddenly looked at his watch, then stood up. “We’ll be talking with everyone,”he said. “And we appreciate you coming in.”

Was that it? I’d been expecting the handcuffs to be produced at any second. I was thinking about my lawyer, who’d never handled a criminal case in his life. But now, free to go, my thoughts shifted to my mother.

“Are you going to need to talk with my mother?” I asked, slowly getting to my feet. Detective Engelmann was still sitting at the table, still writing. She didn’t even lift her head from her work.

“Most likely, yes,” Lieutenant Jaffe said. “You don’t have a problem with that, do you?”

I shut my eyes, holding on to the back of the chair for balance. I felt a little dizzy, and my mind was slow and logy. If I answered yes to his question, it would look as though I was afraid of what my mother might say. If I explained that my family never talked about Isabel’s death, it would look even worse. I opened my eyes and spoke the truth. “I don’t want my mother to suffer any more than she has,” I said. “I don’t want her to endure…” I waved my hand through the air, encompassing the room, my two questioners and the entire situation. “I don’t want her to have to deal with all of this,” I said.

“We understand,” the lieutenant said. “And we’ll keep that in mind.”

CHAPTER 20

Julie

1962

“How about we go to the beach today, girls?” Mom said. All the women in the family—my sisters, grandmother, mother and myself—were relaxing around the porch table after a breakfast of fruit salad and French toast.

“Okay,” Lucy said. “Just don’t expect me to go swimming.”

“Not if you don’t want to.” My mother leaned over to brush a crumb from Lucy’s lip, then she sat back to admire her youngest daughter. “You’re turning a nice nut-brown color,” she said.

Of the three of us girls, Lucy was the least tan, since she spent most of her time indoors reading or playing cards with Grandma, but it was impossible to be at the shore and avoid the sun altogether.

“I promised Mitzi and Pam I’d go to the beach with them,” Isabel said, then added quickly, “but I’ll see you there.” She was sitting on the side of the table closest to the house, the seat that would give her the best view of the Chapmans’ backyard. Her huge, almond-shaped eyes darted in that direction every twenty seconds or so. She was so obvious I couldn’t believe my mother never caught on. Did Mom think for one minute it was Mitzi Caruso and Pamela Durant that Isabel wanted to hang out with at the beach?

But I supposed I was no less skillful in masking my real intentions.

“And I want to stay around here,” I said, wishing I could turn around in my seat to see if the Lewises had arrived yet across the canal.

My mother raised her eyebrows at me, obviously suspicious, and I ran my fork through the syrup on my plate to avoid her scrutiny. “Maybe I’ll fish and catch something for dinner,” I added, for something to say. I waited for her to admonish me not to cross the canal, knowing I could not disobey her direct command to stay in our yard, and I was relieved when she didn’t give it. Instead, she turned to Grandma.

“Why don’t you come with Lucy and me today, Mother?” she asked. Grandma always seemed content to stay in the house, sweeping the floors or doing the laundry, an arduous job without a washing machine.

“Well, maybe I will for a change,” she said, surprising everyone.

Perfect, I thought. No one would be around to care what I did. Grandpop was on an all-day fishing trip with some of his buddies. He’d invited me to join him, but I’d gone with that group last summer and had felt like I didn’t belong—which I didn’t. Everyone took off for the beach after we’d cleaned up from breakfast. I grabbed my bait bucket and walked to the end of the road. Happy in my freedom, I made up a little song about the dragonflies as I walked along the path through the tall reeds until I reached the area where Grandpop kept his killie trap. I dropped to my knees in the damp sand, tossing my binoculars over my shoulder so I didn’t get them wet, and was pulling the trap from the water when someone called out, “Who’s there?”

I jumped, startled, before I recognized the voice as Ethan’s.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“Over here.” His voice came from somewhere to my left. I had to wade into the water to circumvent the reeds and cattails and finally saw him sitting cross-legged in the shallows, the water lapping at his knees. He was wearing only his trunks, and the freckles on his bare chest seemed to have converged to give him something of a tan.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Come look,” he said. “I found some baby eels.”

I had never seen a baby eel, and I was curious. I stepped as close to the grass as I could, trying not to disturb the water. Then I knelt down next to him, so close I could smell the suntan lotion on his skin.

“There.” He pointed.

I saw three squiggly black eels, thinner than a pencil, wriggling below the water’s surface.

“They’re so cute,” I said.

“I wanted to catch one of them to dissect,” Ethan said, “but I can’t. They’re just babies.”

He was weird, but I was touched nevertheless. “Yeah,” I said. “Don’t do it.”

He glanced in the direction of the bait trap, which he could not possibly see through the tall, thick wall of grass. “Didja get a lot of killies?” he asked.

“Haven’t checked yet.”

“Where’s your grandfather?”

“On a fishing boat.”

“So…” He pushed his thick sunglasses higher on his nose. “You going across the canal to fish today?”

“Yes,” I said. “And keep your big mouth shut about it.”

“I will if you take me with you.”

“I’m the only one allowed over there,” I said, not even sure what I meant by the statement. All I knew was that I had no desire to share my new friends with Ethan. He’d want to study Wanda and George under a microscope the way he did his sea creatures.

“I’ll tell, then,” he said.

“You are such a spaz.”

“Takes one to know one,” he replied.

“Don’t you dare tell, or else,” I said, without finishing the sentence. I let the implied threat hang there in the air as I walked through the water, hoping that would be enough to deter him.

There were loads of killies flapping helplessly against the wire walls of the trap as I pulled it onto the sand. I emptied the small fish into my bucket, then tossed the trap into the water again. I didn’t bother calling goodbye to Ethan as I walked back along the path to the road.

Wanda waved from her side of the canal as I got into the runabout. I couldn’t wait to get over there. I was bringing The Bungalow Mystery with me today, since I thought it fit perfectly with being down the shore. I put everything I needed in the runabout, then headed across the canal. The current was strong in the direction of the river, but I had no problem and I pulled easily into the dock between the Lewises and the Rooster Man’s shack. That dock felt nearly as familiar as my own these days. I kept thinking of how Mr. Chapman had defended my being over there to my father. I had the respect of the chief justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court. I adored my father, but he was wrong about this.

George stood on the bulkhead above my boat.

“Can you carry me and Wanda to the river?” he asked. He pointed in the direction of the Manasquan River.

“What?” I wasn’t sure what he meant.

“We ain’t catching nothin’ here,” he said. “But a guy told us they biting in the river.”

Wanda appeared at his side. “Salena says we can go if you can carry us,” she said.

Salena’s crazy, I thought. Couldn’t she see how fast the current was moving? I was not allowed to take the boat to the river, which was a mile and a half north of my house through the canal. I wasn’t allowed to take it north of my house, period. But what an adventure it would be! I looked toward my bungalow, barely able to see the porch because of the bulkhead being in the way. No one was there, though. No one would know.

I tipped my head back to look at George and Wanda again. “Okay,” I said. I leaned over and grabbed a rung of the ladder to pull the boat close to the side of the dock. “Get in,” I said. “And bring a net. I don’t have one.”

They grabbed their gear and climbed down the ladder into the runabout. Salena appeared above us.

“Come back by one, hear?” she said.

“Okay.” I yanked the cord on the motor and inched into the canal, making sure I wasn’t pulling out in front of any boats that might be close to the bulkhead.

Once in the canal, the current grabbed the boat and I held tight to the tiller handle to keep us on a steady course. As we passed my empty bungalow into the water north of it, I felt exhilarated. The low Lovelandtown Bridge was directly ahead of us, though. I’d sailed beneath it with my grandfather and others, but had never taken my boat through it by myself. The current was fast, and the too-close-together pilings of the bridge were coming up on us quickly, the water racing between them as rough as rapids.

“Girl,” George said, “you know what you doin’?”

“’ Course,” I said, hanging on to the tiller handle for dear life. I realized there was only one life preserver in the boat, and none of us was wearing it.

A bigger boat was ahead of us and I knew its wake would only add to the turbulent water. If the current hadn’t been so strong, I would have tried to stall my boat and wait for the wake to run its course, but I had no choice. My sweaty palm was getting jerked back and forth on the tiller handle as we headed beneath the bridge. A huge wave from the wake of the boat rose up in front of us, and we sailed over it, then plunged into the water on the other side as a second wave headed straight for us. I may have screamed. I surely said a quick prayer. I had just enough time to think about the sin I was in the middle of committing and how death might be a fitting punishment for it. The wave washed over the front of the little runabout, soaking us, splashing salt water into my eyes and my mouth, and for a moment I wasn’t sure if we were on the surface of the water or beneath it. How I kept control of the runabout, I couldn’t say, but I must have seemed very confident, because George and Wanda just whooped with the fun of it all, as though we were riding a nice, safe roller coaster.

We made it through. My heart pulsed in my ears as we met the calmer water on the other side of the bridge. The speed of the current no longer seemed so daunting after what we’d just endured. I was not looking forward to the only other bridge we had to pass beneath, but as it turned out, the water there was not nearly so rough. I had managed to put enough distance between us and the larger boat that its wake was not a problem, which I think disappointed my passengers.

The current carried us into the open water of the Manasquan River. I headed west instantly, afraid that George might suggest we travel east to the inlet and out into the ocean. I’d had enough boating adventure for one day.

We were not the only fishermen on the river, but we found a nice spot just to the side of the channel out of the way of the traffic. I turned off the motor and George lifted my anchor and tossed it overboard, handling it as if it were made of paper.

Wanda took one of the killies out of my bucket and began baiting her hook. “That another Nancy Drew book?” She nodded toward The Bungalow Mystery, which now rested in an inch of water in the bottom of the boat.

“Yeah,” I said. I lifted it up and rested it on my knees. “I’m not sure how readable it’s going to be now,” I said. I felt terrible. Grandpop had given me that book for my birthday the year before.

We all cast our lines into the water, and then I found the bottle of suntan lotion floating beneath my seat. I unscrewed the cap and rubbed some of the lotion on my arms and face. George took off his shirt, and he looked so handsome that I started having some impure thoughts about him. I wondered what was wrong with me that even a colored boy could make me feel that way.

“Can I have some of that?” he asked, pointing to the lotion.

I must have looked surprised.

“What?” he said. “You think black people don’t need no suntan lotion?”

He peeled an inch of his shorts down and I could clearly see the difference in the color of his skin. Wanda smacked his shoulder.

“We don’t want to see your ugly drawers,” she said.

I laughed as I handed George the bottle. He used some and passed the lotion to Wanda. Then, to my surprise, he put his shirt into the water in the bottom of the boat. He soaked up the water, wrung it out over the side, then soaked up some more. I was grateful. I hadn’t known how I was going to explain an inch of water in the bottom of the boat to my grandfather.

I opened the book resting on my thighs, but the pages were clumped together, already wavy from the water. It was ruined.

“Maybe when it dries you can pick them pages apart,” Wanda said. I could tell she felt sorry for me. I’d really come to like Wanda. She was quiet, except when razzin’ her brother, and although she never told me everything that had happened in her life, I knew it hadn’t been easy for her. One day when I complained about how my father’d dragged me home from her side of the canal, she’d responded with, “’Least you have a father,” which gave me something to think about. I was glad she had Salena looking out for her.

Whoever had told George that the fish were biting in the river was right. We caught black fish and fluke and a couple of feisty snappers, reeling them in one after another. I wondered how I was going to explain my magnificent haul to my mother without telling her where I’d been. I figured I would let Wanda and George take most of my fish, just keeping a couple of fluke for myself.

“Can I borrow them binoculars?” George asked, after we’d been fishing a while.

I slipped them over my head and handed them to him. He lifted them to his eyes and started exploring the world around us, his fishing pole snug, for the moment at least, between his knees.

I was baiting my hook again when I spotted something pale bobbing in the water a few feet from the boat. I handed my pole to Wanda and reached for the object with the net.

“What’s that?” Wanda asked as I lifted the net from the water.

“A doll, I think.”

It was a doll, a baby doll, no bigger than the length of my fingers. She was naked, with plastic, painted-on brown hair and perpetually open blue eyes. I took it out of the net and picked it clean of seaweed.

“What you gonna do with that raggedy ol’ thing?” Wanda asked.

I shrugged. “I don’t like to see trash floating in the water,” I said. Even Wanda didn’t know about the Nancy Drew box.

None of us had a watch, but when the sun had passed overhead, I knew we’d better start back. George raised the anchor and I pulled the cord to start the motor. It made a sputtering sound, followed by silence. I pulled again, and it made a sound like someone blowing air through his lips. I kept yanking, the boat drifting, and I imagined all sorts of nightmarish scenes of being rescued by the Marine Police and having to explain to my parents what I was doing with the colored people I’d been forbidden to visit on the river I had no right to be in. I couldn’t seem to breathe.

“What’s wrong with it?” Wanda asked.

“Hey, ain’t that your sister’s boyfriend?” George was looking through the binoculars in the direction of the canal.

“Where?” I asked.

“In that boat.” George held the binoculars steady as he pointed to our right. I turned and could see several boats in the area, but from that distance, I never would have been able to tell who was in them. “I think that’s him for sure,” George said, “but I got a news flash. That ain’t your sister he’s with.”

I forgot about my drifting boat for a moment. “Let me see!” I reached for the binoculars and he pulled them over his head and handed them to me. I held them to my eyes. “Where?” I said, trying to adjust the focus from George’s needs to mine.

“Well, I can’t tell now,” George complained. “Them boats is specks without them binoculars.”

“We’re gonna float clear out to the ocean, you don’t get this boat runnin’,” Wanda said.

She was right. I slipped the binoculars’ strap over my head and pulled once more on the cord. The motor sputtered again, then went silent.

“What’s wrong with it?” Wanda asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. Sometimes I did have to yank two or three times to get it going, but I’d never had this much trouble. “Let me,” George said. We shifted positions in the boat so that he was near the motor. He held on to the cord and pulled it back so fast his arm was a blur. Instantly the motor came to life and I could finally breathe. As we sailed toward the canal, though, my mind returned to the boat George had seen through the binoculars.

“Are you sure it was Ned?” I asked.

“I think it was that white boy you showed me the other day,” he said. “Your sister’s boyfriend.”

I’d pointed Ned out to George and Wanda through the binoculars.

“And who was he with?” I asked. “What did she look like?”

“I couldn’t see her that good,” he said, “but good enough I could tell she’s easy on the eyes. A blondie with a long pigtail.”

“Pam Durant?” I asked, my voice high. “Was the ponytail on the side of her head? Were there other people with them?”

“Girl, don’t get your drawers all tight.” George laughed. “Maybe they was just taking a boat ride as friends. Like we doing.”

We headed back to the canal, the current nearly slack now, much to my relief, making the bridges far less difficult to negotiate. I pulled into the dock where their cousins were fishing, and Salena and one of the men came over to look down into the boat, marveling at our catch. I moved a few fish from my bucket to theirs. George looked at me quizzically, then seemed to get it.

“Tell your folks it was just a good fishin’ day on the canal,” he said, slipping the largest black fish back into my own bucket.

I crossed the canal and docked my boat. Climbing up the ladder with the bucket of fish, I thought that as much as I craved a good adventure, I really couldn’t handle a day like this one more than once a month or so. There’d been too many close calls. My guardian angel must have been looking out for me.

I was relieved to find that no one was home yet. I got the scaler and a knife from the kitchen and went out to the cleaning table in the side yard to work on the fish. It took me a long time, and when I was finished, I looked at the pile of filets and knew there was no way I could explain them to my mother. I left six of them on the cleaning table, then put the rest onto the cutting board along with their heads and tails and guts, and I carried them to the canal and tossed them into the water.

After dinner, I went out in the yard with the little baby doll I’d found in the river. I sat at the corner of the house and smoothed a couple of inches of sand from the buried bread box. I was just starting to lift the top of the box when it suddenly flew up into the air. I shrieked, jumping quickly to my feet. Then I saw what had raised the lid: a large, coiled toy caterpillar had been pushed into the box, ready to spring out at me like a jackin-the-box. I heard laughter, and turned to see Ned Chapman standing in his yard, hands on his hips, a look of amusement on his face.

“Did you put this here?” I yelled, getting to my feet, marching in his direction.

He held his hands up in the air. “Don’t look at me,” he said. He was trying not to smile.

I knew he’d done it, and I knew Isabel must have told him about the box. How else could he know?

“Don’t you ever touch my things again!” I said, a fury in my voice that I was not truly feeling. I was secretly thrilled by his attention. I thought of asking him if he’d been out on his boat with Pam Durant, but I suddenly realized he couldn’t possibly have been. He would have been lifeguarding at the Baby Beach. George had probably made the whole thing up just to tease me.

It was still light out, so I sat on the bulkhead with a book. I was there about fifteen minutes when Isabel came out into the yard. She walked beyond the fence and sat down on the bulkhead a few feet away from me. She had the giraffe towel knotted around her waist and she was staring at me, no expression on her face whatsoever.

“What?” I asked.

“I know what you’re doing,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I was doing so many things I wasn’t supposed to be doing that I didn’t know which one she was talking about.

“I mean, I know you’ve been going out in the boat at night,” she said.

I tried to put an expression of confused disbelief on my face. “What are you talking about?” I asked.

She leaned down to scratch her calf. “I happened to go outside the other night and I noticed the boat was gone,” she said. “I knew Grandpop hadn’t taken it because I could hear him snoring practically from the yard. I went upstairs and saw your bed was empty.”

I dropped my attention to my book again, as if I could possibly read after hearing what she’d said. “So?” I asked.

“Where are you going in the middle of the night?”

“None of your business.” She’d used that line on me so often it felt good to be able to say it back to her.

“Look, Julie,” she said. “You’re only twelve. I’m afraid you’re going to get in big trouble.”

“I can take care of myself,” I said.

“Either you tell me what you’re up to,” Isabel used her bossiest tone, “or I’m going to have to tell Mom what you’re doing.”

I looked at her sharply. “Go ahead and tell her,” I said. “And then I’ll tell her where you go in the middle of the night.”

She didn’t budge from her seat on the bulkhead, but I could see her face blanch beneath her tan.

“How would you know where I go?” she asked, some of the bluster gone from her voice.

“I have my ways,” I said. “Just…you just keep what you know about me to yourself, and I’ll keep what I know about you to myself.” I had the upper hand with her for the first time in my life. It was an extraordinary feeling of power. I could tell she was struggling with a response, and that pleased me. “By the way,” I added, “was Ned at the beach today?”

She looked confused. “What does that matter?”

“Just, was he?”

“No,” she said. “He had errands to run.”

My heart twisted a bit in my chest. I’d thought it would give me pleasure to imagine Ned cheating on her, but pleasure was not what I was feeling. I was about to ask her if Pam had been at the beach that morning, but she spoke first.

“I’m so in love with him, Jules,” she said. She looked out toward the water, a smile growing on her lips. “I know it’s hard for you to understand, but someday you will. It’s amazing to feel this way. To love someone so much and to know he loves you back.”

What could I say? That I was in love with Ned, too? That I understood how that half of the equation felt?

Suddenly she moved closer and put her arm around me. I stiffened, but it felt so soft and warm that my shoulders relaxed. I couldn’t remember the last time Isabel had touched me with affection. “Julie,” she said, and her voice was very quiet, so quiet that I had to look at her to truly hear her. Her face was very close to mine. Her eyes were like something edible, like chocolate pudding. I could imagine how Ned felt when he was this close to her. “Listen to me, Julie,” she began again. “I’m seventeen years old. What I’m doing may not be right, but it’s my business and I’m old enough to take care of myself.You’re not. I’m worried about you. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

The surprising tenderness in her words, the love behind them, stung my eyes. “I’m okay,” I said, my voice small now.

“Tell me you won’t do it anymore.” She squeezed my shoulders. “Whatever it is you’re up to. Tell me.”

“I won’t,” I said, although I knew I was lying. My sister and I had both turned into liars this summer.

And we would both pay.

CHAPTER 21

Julie

I hadn’t intended to call Ethan after I got out of the interview. I was certain I’d cut into his work time the day before and didn’t want to take up any more of it, so my plan was to drive back to his house, leave him a thank-you note, and head home. But as I pulled away from the police department, still shaken from so many unexpected questions, the memories churned in my head and I felt lonely with the weight of them. George. Ned. Isabel. They were all I could think about, and I hadn’t said anything I’d wanted to say about them to the police. I’d screwed up the interview, letting my interrogators rattle me. I needed Ethan. I needed to talk. To vent. I swerved over to the side of Bridge Avenue, stepped on the brake and grabbed my cell phone. I had to dial three times before I managed to tap out the right number.

“Julie?” Ethan answered the phone. “How’d it go?”

I started to cry, unable to find my voice.

“Meet me at my house,” he said. “Are you okay to drive?”

“Yes,” I managed to say. I felt such relief at reaching him.

His truck was already in his driveway when I arrived at his house. I walked inside without knocking and he greeted me in the hallway, pulling me into a hug as he had the day before, but this one was not a surprise and it felt natural and welcome to me. I pressed my forehead into his shoulder, my hand against his back, clutching the fabric of his shirt.

“Shh,” he said, as if comforting a child in the middle of a nightmare. “It’s going to be okay. It’s all going to be okay.” He took a step away from me. “Do you want to sit outside or on the sunporch?”

I thought of the neighbors in my old bungalow, possibly sitting on my old screened porch, watching me fall apart in Ethan’s backyard. “Sunporch,” I said, already walking toward the back of his house.

I sat on the white wicker love seat facing the canal, and although there were other seating options available to him, Ethan sat down next to me. He’d been working outside; the skin of his arm was hot against mine and I could smell the scent of sun and soap on him. I was glad he was there with me. We were on different teams in the investigation, wanting and expecting different outcomes, yet I knew he would understand how I felt.

“So,” he said, “what got you so upset?”

“They questioned me as if I were a suspect,” I said.

We were sitting so close together that I couldn’t really look at him, but I felt him nodding.

“I was afraid of that from some of the questions they’d asked me about you,” he said. “I’m sure they don’t really suspect you, though. They just need to rule you out. They have to look at everyone who was involved at the time. They asked me some tough questions, too.”

“I just never expected it,” I said. “I’d never thought about the case from the authorities’ perspective. I do look guilty. I had the motive. I knew where she’d be. I was there at the same time.” I shook my head. “I understand why they’d have to look at me that way. It’s just that it took me completely by surprise. And I got angry and said I had nothing to do with her murder, but of course…” My voice caught in my throat.

“Of course what?” Ethan asked.

“Of course I did have something to do with it.”

“Julie.” He took my hand and held it on his thigh. “You were only twelve. You were a child.”

People had said that to me before. Friends. Therapists. But Ethan had been there. He’d known me. He’d known the sort of person I was. The words meant more to me coming from him.

“Thinking about everything made me remember…caring things about Isabel,” I said. “We didn’t get along that summer, but I know deep down we cared about each other. I know I loved her.”

“Of course you did,” Ethan said. “Ned thought I was a jerk and treated me accordingly back then, but I still know he loved me. And,” he added, “I also know he loved Isabel. That’s why it doesn’t make sense that he’d kill her.”

I watched a sailboat make its graceful way toward the bridge. A child wearing a life preserver was on board with her two parents, and it looked like her father was trying to teach her to dance.

“I’ll tell you what I told the police,” I said, my thoughts returning to Ethan’s comment about Ned. “I told them that you can never really know another person.You don’t know what was really going on inside of Ned, Ethan. No one could.” Glen had provided my unhappy introduction to that theory. “I thought I knew my ex-husband as well as I knew myself,” I said. “I thought he was so in love with me. I thought he was honest and honorable. But while I was thinking all those things, he was having an affair.”

“Oh.” Ethan rubbed the back of my hand with his thumb. “I know what that’s like,” he said. “So did Karen. My ex-wife.”

“Really?” I wondered how similar our experiences had been. “Did it go on a long time?”

“About a year.”

“Glen’s, too,” I said. “At least I think it was only a year, but like I said, I didn’t really know him. How did you find out?”

“She told me. She was in a play with the local community theater and she came home one night and told me she was in love with the director of the play and wanted a divorce.”

“Wow,” I said. I tried to imagine the scene. Which room of this house had they been in when she told him? Had he slept in the guest room that night? Or had she? Glen had slept on the sofa in the family room; our guest-room bed had been covered with boxes of my books. “Were you devastated?” I asked.

“Completely,” he said. “I’d never pictured myself getting a divorce. It wasn’t a word in my vocabulary. My parents were married nearly sixty years, and they were excellent role models on how to run a marriage. They had good communication and a lot of love. I thought my marriage was the same way, but I was wrong.”

“That’s what I mean,” I said. “You have this illusion of what someone is like.You assume that if the marriage is great for you, it’s great for them, and unless they speak up, you don’t have a clue.”

“Your husband didn’t speak up?”

I shook my head. “No, and guess how I found out?”

“How?”

“The woman called me. She said she knew Glen was struggling with how to tell me, so she decided to tell me herself.”

Ethan laughed. “Well, you know who wore the pants in that relationship,” he said.

“I thought it was a cruel hoax,” I said. “Maybe one of Glen’s co-workers was angry with him and trying to hurt him. But when Glen came home that evening and I told him about the call, he started to cry…and that was the beginning of the end.” I let out my breath in a long stream. “It was so incredibly painful to imagine him with someone else.”

“Oh, yeah,” Ethan said, and I knew he understood. “Did he end up marrying her?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “They broke up right after he and I separated.” I looked down at our hands where they rested together on his thigh. His skin was a ruddy color, his beautiful fingers smooth on top, rough on the bottom where they pressed against my skin. There were tiny, nearly microscopic, lines everywhere on the back of my own olive-toned hand. My hands were turning into my mother’s. “It was partly my fault,” I said. “The end of our marriage. I was a workaholic.”

“Are you still?”

I had to laugh. “Well, I was, until this whole thing with Ned’s letter came up. I haven’t written a word since then. At least not a word worth publishing.”

“I try not to think in terms of fault,” Ethan said. “I know it sounds trite, but Karen and I just drifted apart. She got very involved in her theater work and it was new and exciting for her. She got more and more into it until she said she wanted to move to New York to have a better chance at acting.”

“Really! Is that where she is?”

“Uh-huh. She married her lover, but she’s not acting, ironically. She’s still teaching, just as she was here. I think she’s happy, though.”

“You don’t sound angry,” I marveled.

“I’m not. I’ve forgiven her. It wasn’t easy for her, either.”

Men handled the end of relationships better than women did, I thought. “I think I’ve forgiven Glen,” I said, not sure it was the truth. “But I still get angry with him for not letting me know he was unhappy. For being so passive. It’s hard to fix something if you don’t know it’s broken.” I thought of Shannon and the toll the divorce had taken on her. “Does Abby know about her mother?” I asked.

“That she left me for another guy?” he asked, and I nodded. “Yes. It was no secret. She was furious with her for a while, but they’ve worked it out.”

“Shannon doesn’t know,” I said. “I don’t want her to think badly of her father.”

“That’s wise of you,” he said.

I rested my head against the wicker back of the love seat, looking at the paneled ceiling of the porch. “My own relationship with her is going south fast, though,” I said.

“How come?”

“She says I’ve suffocated her and I probably have,” I said. “Sometimes I feel as though she hates me. When I came to your house the first time and Abby was leaving, she told you she loved you, and I realized I couldn’t remember the last time Shannon

said those words to me.”

“You tell her, I guess?” Ethan asked.

“Of course. And either she doesn’t respond, or she says something like ‘uh-huh.’”

Ethan chuckled. Then he asked, “How often do you tell your mother you love her?”

I was taken aback. Never, I thought with a jolt. The last time had probably been when I was a child. Probably before Isabel’s death. “I show her I love her in a lot of ways,” I said.

“It’s not the same, though,” he said. “You want to hear those words from Shannon, but how can you expect her to say them to you when you don’t even say them to your own mother?”

I was quiet, thinking. How did you express those feelings after a lifetime of holding them in? I thought of calling my mother right that moment and telling her I loved her. I couldn’t do it, and I knew the reason why: I was afraid she wouldn’t be able to say the same words back to me.

The topic was a sad, difficult one, and still I liked sitting there with Ethan, talking with him about everything on our minds. It was perfect, like pillow talk without the sex. What could be better? Yet there was a very small part of me that was wondering how it would feel if our hands were resting on my thigh instead of on his. I liked this new and improved Ethan very much.

“I’m sorry I was so cold to you when we were twelve,” I said.

He laughed. “Don’t be,” he said. “I was in my own little world. I was an oddball, and a frustrated one, because I had a huge crush on you that summer.”

“You’re kidding?”

“I thought you were so cool, a tomboy but with a certain twelve-year-old feminine charm.”

I laughed as well.

“But I didn’t know how to talk to you anymore,” he said. “You’d matured beyond my reach. I wanted to go crabbing and fishing with you, like we used to. I wanted to ask if I could go out in your boat with you, but I knew you didn’t want me hanging around you anymore.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “If I’d known you’d turn out this good, I would have let you tag along, believe me.” The words poured out easily, and I was not sorry I’d said them.

“Thank you,” he said. “That’s really nice to hear.”

A moment passed and again I found myself imagining his hand on my thigh, my belly tightening a bit at the thought.

“You had so much spirit,” Ethan said. “You were such an adventurer.”

“That girl’s gone,” I said with some sadness. “She died when Isabel did.”

“I bet she’s still in there somewhere,” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Life is so good, Julie,” he said. “And it’s so short. We’ve got to take advantage of every minute we’re given.”

“Are you on antidepressants or something?”

He laughed again. “I’m just lucky,” he said. “I think I got an overabundance of serotonin when I was born. Maybe I got Ned’s share.” He sobered at that thought, growing quiet, and I let him have his silence. Then he spoke again. “I think I was influenced by my parents,” he said. “They were very positive, can-do sort of people. I always remember something my father said in one of his speeches after he lost his bid for governor. We were all there with him. It was in Trenton, and I was standing behind him with my mother and Ned, and I was about fifteen and trying not to cry because I didn’t want to look like a jerk, but I felt really sorry for my father. He’d worked so hard on his campaign and, to me, it seemed as though nothing mattered anymore. Dad did the usual sort of speech about thanking his staff and the people who’d voted for him. A reporter shouted out the question, ‘What will you do now?’ and my father waited a minute and then answered that he didn’t believe the old adage that when a door closes, a window opens. He said he believed that when a door closed, the entire world opened up to you, and that he would find other ways of serving the people. And that’s what he did. He reopened his law practice and took pro bono work. We had money, so that was never the issue. He worked quietly and tirelessly until he retired. Anyhow, his words that day stuck with me. He didn’t stay mired in his sadness.”

“He was a wise man,” I said. I was thinking, A man like that would be able to tolerate learning about his son’s guilt. He would be able to bounce back from that revelation.

Ethan must have been thinking along similar lines.

“You know what, Julie?” he asked.

“What?”

“We’re going to have to tell our parents about Ned’s letter before the cops do.”

“I know,” I said, resigned.

Ethan let go of my hand and put his arm around me. “And maybe an ‘I love you’ when you share that news with your mother might soften the blow,” he said.

CHAPTER 22

Maria

At McDonald’s this morning, I was chatting with a woman I knew from church when my young co-worker, Cordelia, came up behind me.

“Maria.” She sang my name in my ear, her Colombian accent so pretty, and there was something teasing in the sound. “You have a visitor,” she said.

“Where?” I asked, turning, and she nodded in the direction of the restaurant entrance. I think I knew who it was even before I saw him. Ross. He stood near the door, leaning on his cane, his face unsmiling. He nodded in a gentlemanly fashion when he saw me.

I tried to keep my face impassive in front of Cordelia.

“Thank you, dear,” I said to her.

“Is he your boyfriend?” she asked, grinning.

“No way, no how,” I said as I moved past her in Ross’s direction.

“Hello, Ross,” I said to him, my voice as neutral as I could make it. I really wanted to yell at him. I wanted to say Why are you bugging me, you old goat?

“I’d like to chat a bit,” he said. “I’ll get some lunch and then could you sit with me, please?” “I don’t think we have a thing in the world to chat about,” I said. I picked up a dirty tray from a nearby table, emptied the wrappers into the trash bin and set the tray on top of it. I was glad to have something to do so that I didn’t have to look at his face as I spoke.

“Please,” he said. “I drove all the way from Lakewood.”

Well, whose fault is that? I thought. But there was something so pathetic about him that I gave in. “All right,” I said. “You get off your feet and I’ll get you something to eat. What would you like?”

“I’ll get it myself,”he said, still the prideful man I’d once known.

“Fine,” I said. “You get what you want and I’ll sit with you for a while. I don’t have long, though,” I added. “I’m working, you know.”

He moved toward the line, which was not long, since we were in between the breakfast and lunch crowds.

I wished that more of the tables were dirty or that there were some toddlers to watch in the little play area, but there was not much to absorb my attention as I waited for Ross to get his food. I chatted with my acquaintance from Holy Trinity again until I saw Ross leave the counter with his tray in his hands, the cane over his arm. I thought of helping him, but in spite of my distaste for the man, I didn’t want to bruise his ego any more than it had already been bruised by age and circumstance.

When he reached a table in the corner, I walked over and sat down with him. I was keenly aware of my young fellow employees giggling about us behind the counter, probably imagining the budding of a romance between their grandmotherly co-worker and this old geezer.

“So,” I said, “did Ethan ever say anything to you about how that lunch went with Julie?”

“Just that it was nice to see her,” Ross said. He had not unwrapped his burger and seemed to have no intention of doing so, but he lifted his cup of coffee to his lips and took a sip.

“Aren’t you going to eat?” I asked.

He didn’t seem to hear me. “Do you look back at any of your life with regret, Maria?” he asked.

I had to laugh. “Of course I do,” I said, then lowered my voice. “My relationship with you is one of my major regrets.”

He looked down quickly, fingering the napkin on his tray as though it suddenly needed his attention, and I thought I’d hurt him with my words. I felt a twinge of guilt for that. He was not an evil man. Maybe not a bad man at all, although I’d certainly voted against him when he ran for governor; it doesn’t pay to know too much about your politicians. I knew he’d gone on to do some very good things with his life. I knew he’d represented poor people in court. I knew he had strong values and had put his money where his mouth was on more than one occasion. As I sat there studying his too-thin face and the web of wrinkles around his pewter-gray eyes, I wondered if my regret had more to do with my own weakness than with anything he had done. I was not sure. When it came to Ross, I always ended up a little confused about my feelings.

“I don’t blame you for feeling regret, Maria,” he said, raising his eyes to me. “And I just want to offer you my deepest, deepest apology for ever having hurt you in any way. There are so many things I did wrong…” He looked out the window next to our table, where a couple of young boys dodged the cars in the parking lot on their skateboards. “To start with, I was a covert bigot, adopting my parents’ prejudices as my own. I let them rule me. Own me. I should have stayed with you, out in the open. I was a fool for that.”

Whew. Did he plan to go through his crimes against me one by one, waiting for my forgiveness after each apology? That I couldn’t bear. The truth was, his words were not enough. Nothing would be enough. And I did not regret his breaking up with me when I was so young and stupid; I only regretted that I’d allowed the relationship to continue in its clandestine form. I could see, though, that the only way to get rid of him now was to accept his apology. If that eased his emotional pain, I would just have to let that happen.

“All right,” I said. “Thank you for telling me that.”

He looked surprised, then smiled. “You are beautiful,” he said. “I mean…I’m not trying to be…to flirt.”

That’s good, I thought. An old man flirting was not a pretty sight.

“I mean,” he said, “you’re not only physically beautiful, but a beautiful person as well.You always were. And I…didn’t handle your kind nature very well, did I, and—”

“Ross, no more, please.” I felt the Egg McMuffin I’d had for breakfast begin to rise in my throat. I couldn’t do this. “We’re done with this conversation. I forgive you for any and all transgressions, imagined or real. Now please, just get on with your life. And I need to return to work.”

I stood up, feeling his eyes on me as I walked through the restaurant toward the rest rooms. I needed to escape, not only from him but from the inevitable questioning I would be facing from my co-workers. I splashed water on my face, swallowing hard over and over again to get that McMuffin back where it belonged, and when I emerged from the rest room, I saw that Ross had gone, leaving his tray with its untouched burger and nearly full coffee cup for me to clean up.

1939

I was never able to tell my parents the truth about my breakup with Ross. How could I tell them that Ross’s parents—our next-door neighbors—had forbidden his son to date me because I was the daughter of an Italian immigrant? How that would pain my mother! So I told them that he and I had decided we wanted to date others for a while to be sure we were right for each other. I knew my parents thought that was strange; we had seemed an ideal couple to them. On a couple of occasions, they caught me crying and questioned me, wanting to make sure the breakup was my idea and not just Ross’s. I assured them I had been in agreement with him.

I returned Ross’s ring to him, and when the other kids in our gang expressed surprise, we said that we’d simply realized we weren’t ready for a steady relationship. My girlfriends did not quite believe that excuse, and although I would usually confide just about anything to them, I could not tell them the truth. It made Ross look weak and shallow. Still in love with him, I wanted to protect his exalted image to our group of friends.

It was painful, though, to be with him in a crowd without touching him. I’d watch him talk to the other girls and wonder how each girl’s pedigree compared to mine. I’d watch his hands when he ran them through his hair or when he’d cup them around a cigarette as he lit it, and I’d ache with the yearning to have those hands on my body again.

One night at Jenkinson’s, I was dancing with another boy when Ross tapped him on the shoulder to cut in. Ross put his arm around my waist, his hand pressed tight against my back. The band was playing Glenn Miller’s “Moon Love.” Ross was a good dancer, but it was not the dance I was thinking about. It was the nearness of him, the familiar scent of his cologne that filled me with longing.

“Maria.” He pressed his lips close to my ear. “I can’t stand it any longer. I have to find a way to be with you.”

I closed my eyes and breathed him in. “But how?” I asked. I wanted to hear him say he would stand up to his father, that he would give up Princeton, give up college altogether if that’s what it took to have me. But I knew that was hardly a fair expectation, and I wanted the best for him. Giving up all he’d worked for would not be it.

“I am going to start dating Delores,” he said. “And I want you to start dating Fred.”

“What?” I leaned away from him, startled. “What do you—”

“Shh,” he said, pulling me close again. “Listen. We date them. Casually, of course. And we let our families and everyone know that we’re involved with them. But then, you and I will meet on the sly.”

“How?” I whispered.

“We’ll have to work that part out,” he said. “But first, I need to know if you’re willing. What do you say?”

I felt weak-kneed, I wanted him so much. This was a way I could have him. Maybe we could continue the ruse through his college years until he was free of his parents’ control. Then we could finally come out in the open. Be married. “Yes,” I said. “Yes.”

I took Fred by surprise when I started flirting with him and in no time at all, he’d asked me to the movies. Ross had no problem arranging a date with Delores; she’d had her eye on him for years. Ross made me promise that Fred and I would do no more than kiss, and I extracted the same promise from him with regard to Delores. Thus our cover was complete.

The first night we attempted our ruse, it did not work as planned. I was to go to the movies with Fred, while Ross went dancing with Delores. I hated the thought of him having his arms around Delores, but reassured myself that his dancing with her was only a means to an end.

Fred was to bring me home at ten o’clock, an hour shy of my curfew. I would say good-night to him in front of my house, then slip across the street to the empty lot. Ross would drop Delores off at her house, then park on the street on the other side of the lot and meet me by the blueberry bushes. There, we would have a full hour together before we needed to go home.

I said good-night to Fred in his car and started to get out, but he was too much of a gentleman for that. He raced around the car to open my door for me and then walked with me to the front stoop of the bungalow.

“Your parents would think I was a boor if I didn’t make sure you got in all right,” he said.

I glanced over my shoulder at the lot, wondering if Ross was there yet. If I went into the house, I knew I would not be able to get out again without my parents asking a lot of questions.

“Well,” I said, when we reached my door, “I don’t want to go in right away. I think I’ll just sit on the step for a while and enjoy the evening.”

Stupid me!

“You’re right, it’s beautiful out,” Fred said. He sat down next to me and put his arm around my shoulders.

I heard the closing of a car door somewhere on the opposite side of the lot and wondered how on earth I was going to get rid of Fred.

“I was so glad when you and Ross broke up,” he said. He turned to kiss me, and I dropped my head so the kiss landed on my forehead. The light was on. Ross could surely see us from the lot and I couldn’t bear to have him see Fred kiss me. I knew how I would feel if I had to watch him kissing Delores.

“Sorry,” Fred said.

“Just…not yet,” I said, feigning a prissiness that was not usually part of my character. Then I slapped my arm as if a mosquito had bitten me. “They’re really biting tonight,” I said. “I think I’d better go in.” I thought I would slip quietly into the house, stand inside the door until I heard Fred drive away, then slip out again.

I said good-night to Fred, then opened the door and stepped into the hallway. Our tiny bathroom was right next to the front door and I froze when I heard the toilet flush. The bathroom door opened and my father walked into the hall.

He looked surprised. “Well, hello, sweetheart,” he said. “I didn’t expect you home this early. Did everything go all right?”

“Fine, Daddy,” I said. “I didn’t want to make a late night of it.”

Foiled, I walked to the back porch to say good-night to my mother before going into my small bedroom. My bedroom’s only window faced the Chapmans’ house. I thought of removing the screen and climbing outside to meet Ross, but what if my parents discovered I was gone and worried about me? I sat on the edge of the bed, the room so small that my knees were up against the windowsill, and watched for Ross’s car to pull into his driveway. I heard a noise outside and yelped when his face suddenly appeared outside my window.

“Shh!” He pressed his finger to his lips and I giggled. “What happened?” he asked.

“Fred wanted to be sure I got inside all right,” I said.

“Figures,” he said. “Can you get out?” He touched the edges of the screen. “Does this pop out?”

“It does, but I can’t, Ross,” I whispered. “I’m sorry.”

Whatever anxiety compelled me to stay inside that night fell away in the nights that followed. I learned how to quickly pop out the screen and slip through the window. I eased my fear of worrying my parents by leaving a note on my pillow. It read: “I didn’t want to wake you. Just felt like going for a walk.” And then I would meet Ross across the street, where we’d pick blueberries in the darkness and make love with their taste on our tongues.

Ross became my summer lover. I went to the New Jersey College for Women, and he followed his father’s footsteps to Princeton. We didn’t communicate during the school year, but I believed we both lived for the summers, when we would date others but take every opportunity we could to be together, away from the prying eyes of his parents. It was a wonder we were never caught. Perhaps it was also a shame.

CHAPTER 23

Lucy

Shannon wasn’t returning my calls. I hadn’t spoken with her since the ZydaChicks concert and I could only conclude that she didn’t want to listen to me lecture her again about telling Julie and Glen that she was pregnant. This afternoon, though, she finally left a message on my cell phone, sounding nonchalant, as though I hadn’t been trying to get in touch with her for the past week.

“How about I bring over some subs and we just veg in front of the TV?” she suggested.

I left a message for her in return. “Excellent,” I said. “See you at seven.” I would take her any way I could get her. She arrived wearing no makeup, and she was fresh faced and pretty, her long hair still damp and a little tangled from a shower. She looked only slightly more pregnant than she had at the concert, and it might even have been my imagination. She could pass as a girl who had simply put on a bit too much weight. In the next few weeks, though, that was sure to change.

“I got one turkey and one Italian,” she said, dropping the bagged, foot-long subs on my kitchen counter. “Which do you want?”

“I’ll eat half the Italian,” I said, opening the refrigerator. “Lemonade?”

She peered around me to look at the contents of my fridge. “Diet Coke,” she said.

I handed her the can and dropped a few ice cubes into a glass for her. We put the subs on plates and carried them into my living room.

“What do you want to watch?” I asked as we sat down on the couch.

“I don’t care,” she said. “Everything’s reruns, anyway.”

I clicked the buttons on the remote until we found a rerun of Friends. We’d both seen the episode more than once, but it didn’t matter. I just needed some background noise for my inquisition.

“So,” I said as we started to eat, “how are you feeling?”

“Perfect.” She pulled a long sliver of onion from her sandwich and popped it into her mouth. Apparently she was not suffering from indigestion. “I saw the doctor and she says I’m doing fine,” she added.

“Good,” I said, instead of the five million other things on the tip of my tongue. I wanted to know who her doctor was and the exact meaning of the word “fine,” but I thought I’d better mete out my questions bit by bit. I kept quiet for a while as we watched Monica and Rachel argue about something on the TV—I had no idea what. They were not my concern.

“What’s the latest on you and Tanner?” I asked when I’d eaten about half my sandwich and thought enough time had passed since my last question.

“He’s coming here in a week and a half,” she said. “We’re going to talk about our plans then.” She lifted the top of her sandwich and peered inside, pulling out another piece of onion and slipping it into her mouth. “I’m craving onions,” she said. “Isn’t that the weirdest thing?”

“I remember when your mom was pregnant with you, she craved peanut-butter-and-potato-chip sandwiches,” I said. “She ate them all the time.”

“Ugh,” Shannon said. “Maybe that’s what’s wrong with me. She ate crap the whole time she was pregnant with me.”

I reached out and tugged at a strand of her thick hair. “There’s nothing wrong with you, baby girl,” I said softly. “You’re perfect.”

She looked at me, a smile on her lips. “I can’t wait for you to meet Tanner, Luce,” she said.

“I’m looking forward to it,” I said, lying only a little bit. “I guess you haven’t told your dad yet, huh?” I was sure she hadn’t told Julie. I would have heard.

She shook her head. “It’s such a relief to be living there, Luce,” she said. “Really. He just lets me do what I want. I don’t have to call him every two seconds to tell him where I am and that I’m alive.”

She sounded so mean, but I knew that was not her intent. She just didn’t understand Julie the way I did.

“I wish you knew your mother better,” I said.

“What do you mean?” she asked. “Who knows her better than I do? I’ve lived with her my whole life.”

“Yes, but you didn’t live with her before you were born, and that’s the time that really…that formed her. It’s hard for you to understand—”

“I understand totally,” she said. “A million years ago, when she was barely out of diapers, she thinks she screwed up with her sister and caused her death and now she’s afraid of everything. Of losing people. Of losing me.” She set her plate on the coffee table and I guessed the topic had killed her appetite. “I need space from her, Lucy,” she said. “She suffocates me.”

“That’s normal,” I said. “You need your independence.You’re ready to leave the nest.”

“Then why are you giving me a hard time?”

“Because much as you want to be free of your mother, she’s still your mother and still responsible for you and you have got to tell her that you’re pregnant.”

“I’ll tell her when I have to,” she said.

I thought of all Julie was dealing with: Ned’s letter, the interview with the cops, worrying that our mother would be dragged into the investigation, Shannon moving out. It was a lousy time to lay one more thing on her, but this particular thing couldn’t wait.

Another show was on the TV now and I clicked the mute button on the remote. “I want you to know what’s going on,” I said.

“What do you mean?” Shannon looked worried. “What are you talking about? This isn’t about that letter again, is it?”

“Yes, it is,” I said. I told her that Julie had gone down the shore to be interviewed by the police and that she’d stayed in Ethan’s house, next door to our old bungalow. “Both things were hard for her,” I said. “Having to remember everything that happened and being someplace that reminded her of your aunt Isabel. And it looks like the police might need to interview your grandmother, so your mom’s going to need to tell her about the letter and she’s worried about that. About how Nana will react. So she has a lot on her plate right now.”

Shannon studied my face while I spoke, then shook her head slowly. “I wish I had a magic wand to make that whole thing go away,” she said. “Mom should be, like, in intensive therapy or something.”