The Bay at Midnight

Diane Chamberlain is an award-winning author. Prior to her writing career, she was a psychotherapist, working primarily with adolescents. Diane’s background in psychology has given her a keen interest in understanding the way people tick, as well as the background necessary to create real, living, breathing characters.

Several years ago, Diane was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, which has changed the way she works: she occasionally types using voice recognition software. She feels fortunate that her arthritis is not more severe and that she is able to enjoy everyday activities as well as keep up with a busy schedule.

When not writing, Diane enjoys fixing up her house, playing with her three-legged Bernese mountain dog and getting together with her friends and grown-up stepdaughters. Find out more about Diane and her books at www.mirabooks.co.uk/dianechamberlain

Also by Diane Chamberlain

THE LOST DAUGHTER

The Bay at Midnight

Diane Chamberlain

www.mirabooks.co.uk

In memory of my grandparents,

Thomas and Susan Chamberlain,

For giving us so many memorable summers

down the shore.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Do you miss some special place from your childhood and wish you could return there for a while? When I was a child, my family had a summer bungalow on the Intracoastal Waterway, also known as the Point Pleasant Canal, in New Jersey. I miss those childhood summers in Bay Head Shores, so I decided to revisit the area by setting a story there—although the setting is the only autobiographical aspect of The Bay at Midnight. My family’s easy life at the Jersey Shore was never marred by the sort of drama and mystery that befalls the Bauer family in this story.

Many people helped me add a dose of reality to this fictional world. I drew upon the memories of my siblings, Tom Lopresti, Joann Scanlon and Robert Lopresti, as well as those of my childhood fishing-and-hayride buddy, former Bay Head Shores resident Rick Neese. Lieutenant Robert J Dikun of the Point Pleasant Beach Police Department was an invaluable source of information as I explored the aftermath of Isabel’s murder. Rodney Cash gave me insight into the 1962 world of the Lewises, the African-American family who fished on the opposite side of the canal—and a world away—from the Bauer family. My ex-college roommate and Westfield native, Jody Pfeiffer, helped me with the details of her home town. Ahrre Moros gave me information about the Coffee with Conscience concerts. I am also grateful to fellow writers Emilie Richards and Patricia McLinn, my online friends at ASA, and John Pagliuca for their various contributions and emotional support. Special thanks go to the staff at Happy Tails who provided hours of quality care for my energetic pup, Keeper, as I raced toward deadline!

Thanks to everyone at MIRA Books, where I am always encouraged to write whatever is in my heart. I am grateful to Amy Moore-Benson, the editor with whom I started The Bay at Midnight, and to Miranda Stecyk, who picked up where Amy left off with the same intelligence, grace and passion as her predecessor.

A special thank-you to my former agent, Virginia Barber, along with my best wishes for a glorious and fulfilling retirement!

CHAPTER 1

Julie

All children make mistakes. Most of those errors in judgment are easily forgotten, but some of them are too enormous, too devastating to ever fully disappear from memory. The mistake I made when I was twelve still haunted me at fifty-three. Most of the time, I didn’t think about it, but there were days when something happened that brought it all back to me in a rush, that filled me with the guilt of a twelve-year-old who had known better and that made me wish I could return to the summer of 1962 and live it over again. The Monday Abby Chapman Worley showed up at my front door was one of those days.

I was having a productive day as I worked on The Broad Street Murders, the thirty-third novel in my Granny Fran series. If I had known how successful that series would become, I would have made Fran Gallagher younger at the start. She was already seventy in the first book. Now, thirteen years later, she was eightythree and going strong, but I wondered how long I could keep her tracking down killers.

The house was blissfully quiet. My daughter Shannon, who’d graduated from Westfield High School the Saturday before, was giving cello lessons in a music store downtown. The June air outside my sunroom window was clear and still, and because my house was set on a curve in the road, I had an expansive view of my New Jersey neighborhood with its vibrant green lawns and manicured gardens. I would type a sentence or two, then stare out the window, enjoying the scenery as I thought about what might happen next in my story.

I’d finished Chapter Three and was just beginning Chapter Four when my doorbell rang. I leaned back in my chair, trying to decide whether to answer it or not. It was probably a friend of Shannon’s, but what if it was a courier, delivering a contract or something else that might require my signature?

I peered out the front window. No trucks in sight. A white Volkswagen Beetle—a convertible with its top down—was parked in front of my house, however, and since my concentration was already broken, I decided I might as well see who it was.

I walked through the living room and opened the door and my heart sank a little. The slender young woman standing on the other side of my screen door looked too old to be a friend of Shannon’s, and I worried that she might be one of my fans. Although I tried to protect my identity as much as possible, some of my most determined readers had found me over the years. I adored them and was grateful for their loyalty to my books, but I also treasured my privacy, especially when I was deep into my work.

“Yes?” I smiled.

The woman’s sunny-blond hair was cut short, barely brushing the tops of her ears and she was wearing very dark sunglasses that made it difficult to see her eyes. There was a pretty sophistication about her. Her shorts were clean and creased, her mauve T-shirt tucked in with a belt. A small navy-blue pocketbook was slung over one shoulder.

“Mrs. Bauer?” she asked, confirming my suspicion. Julianne Bauer, my maiden name, was also my pseudonym. Friends and neighbors knew me as Julie Sellers.

“Yes?” I said.

“I’m sorry to just show up like this.” She slipped her hands into her pockets. “My name is Abby Worley. You and my father—Ethan Chapman—were friends when you were kids.”

My hand flew to my mouth. I hadn’t heard Ethan’s name since the summer of 1962—forty-one years earlier—yet it took me less than a second to place him. In my memory, I was transported back to Bay Head Shores, where my family’s bungalow stood next to the Chapmans’ and where the life-altering events of that summer erased all the good summers that had preceded it.

“You remember him?” Abby Worley asked.

“Yes, of course,” I said. I pictured Ethan the way he was when I last saw him—a skinny, freckled, bespectacled twelve-yearold, a fragile-looking boy with red hair and pale legs. I saw him reeling in a giant blowfish from the canal behind our houses, then rubbing the fish’s white belly to make it puff up. I saw him jumping off the bulkhead, wings made from old sheets attached to his arms as he attempted to fly. We had at one time been friends, but not in 1962. The last time I saw him, I beat him up.

“I hope you’ll forgive me for just showing up like this,” she said. “Dad once told me you lived in Westfield, so I asked around. The bagel store. The guy at the video-rental place.Your neighbors are not very good at guarding your privacy. And this is the sort of the thing I didn’t want to write in a letter or talk about on the phone.”

“What sort of thing?” I asked. The serious tone of her voice told me this was more than a visit from a fan.

She glanced toward the wicker rockers on my broad front porch.

“Could we sit down?” she asked.

“Of course,” I said, pushing open the screen door and walking with her toward the rockers. “Can I get you something to drink?”

“No, I’m fine,” she said, as she settled into one of the chairs. “This is nice, having a front porch.”

I nodded. “Once the mosquitoes are here in full force, we don’t get much use out of it, but yes, it’s nice right now.” I studied her, looking for some trace of Ethan in her face. Her cheekbones were high and her deep tan looked stunning on her, regardless of the health implications. Maybe it was fake. She looked like the type of woman who took good care of herself. It was hard for me to picture Ethan as her father. He hadn’t been homely, but nerdishness had invaded every cell of his body.

“So,” I said, “what is it that you didn’t want to talk about over the phone?”

Now that we were in the shade, she slipped off her sunglasses to reveal blue eyes. “Do you remember my uncle Ned?” she asked.

I remembered Ethan’s brother even better than I remembered Ethan. I’d had a crush on him, although he’d been six years older than me and quite out of my league. By the end of that summer, though, I’d despised him.

I nodded. “Sure,” I said.

“Well, he died a couple of weeks ago.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” I said mechanically. “He must have been—” I did the math in my head “—around fifty-nine?”

“He died the night before his fifty-ninth birthday,” Abby said.

“Had he been ill?”

“He had cirrhosis of the liver,” Abby said, matter-of-factly. “He drank too much. My father said he…that he started drinking right after the summer your…you know.” For the first time, she seemed a little unsure of herself. “Right after your sister died,” she said. “He got really depressed. I only knew him as a sad sort of person.”

“I’m sorry,” I said again. I couldn’t picture handsome, athletic Ned Chapman as a beaten-down, fifty-nine-year-old man, but then we’d all changed after that summer.

“Dad doesn’t know I’ve come to see you,” Abby said. “And he wouldn’t be happy about it, but I just had to.”

I leaned forward, wishing she would get to the point. “Why are you here, Abby?” I asked.

She nodded as if readying herself to say something she’d rehearsed. “Dad and I cleaned out Uncle Ned’s town house,” she said. “I was going through his kitchen and I found an envelope in one of the drawers addressed to the Point Pleasant Police Department. Dad opened it and…” She reached into her pocketbook and handed me a sheet of paper. “This is just a copy.”

I looked down at the short, typed missive, dated two months earlier.

To Whom it May Concern:

I have information about a murder that occurred in your jurisdiction in 1962. The wrong person paid for that crime. I’m terminally ill and want to set the record straight. I can be contacted at the above phone number.

Sincerely, Ned Chapman

“My God.” I leaned against the back of the rocker and closed my eyes. I thought my head might explode with the meaning behind the words. “He was going to confess,” I said.

“We don’t know that,” Abby said quickly. “I mean, Dad is absolutely sure Uncle Ned didn’t do it. I mean, he is completely sure. But he’d told me about you long ago. My mom and I have read all your books, and so of course he told me everything about you. He said how you suspected that Uncle Ned did it, even though no one else did, so I thought you had a right to know about the letter. I told Dad we should take it to the police. I mean, it sounds like the guy who was sent to prison might not have done it.”

“Absolutely,” I agreed, holding the letter in the air. “The police need to see this.”

Abby bit her lip. “The only thing is, Dad doesn’t want to take it to them. He said that the man who was convicted died in prison, so it doesn’t really matter now.”

I felt tears spring to my eyes. I knew that George Lewis had died of pneumonia five years into serving his life sentence for my sister’s murder. I’d always believed that he’d been wrongly imprisoned. How cruel and unfair.

“At the very least, his name should be cleared,” I said firmly.

“I think so, too,” Abby agreed. “But Dad is afraid that the police will jump to the conclusion that Uncle Ned did it, just like you did. My uncle was screwed up, but he could never hurt anyone.”

I pulled a tissue from my shorts’ pocket and removed my glasses to blot the tears from my eyes. “Maybe he did hurt someone,” I suggested gently, slipping my glasses on again. “And maybe that’s what screwed him up.”

Abby shook her head. “I know it looks that way, but Dad said Ned had an airtight alibi. That he was home when your sis—when it happened.”

“It sounds like your father wants to protect his brother no matter what,” I said, trying not to sound as bitter as I felt. “If your father won’t take this to the police,” I said, “I will.” I didn’t mean it to sound like a threat, but it probably did.

“I understand,” Abby said. “And I agree the police need to know. But Dad…” She shook her head. “Would you consider talking to him?” she asked.

I thought of how unwelcome that conversation would be to Ethan. “It doesn’t sound like he wants to talk about it,” I said. “And you said he’d be angry that you came here.”

“He won’t be angry,” Abby said. “He never really gets angry. He’ll just be…upset. I’ll tell him I came. But then, if you could call him, maybe you could persuade him.You have the biggest personal stake in this.”

She didn’t understand how the thought of revisiting the summer of 1962 made my palms sweat and my stomach burn. I thought about George Lewis’s sister, Wanda, and the personal stake she would have in this. I thought about his cousin Salena, the woman who’d raised him. Nothing would return my sister to her family or George Lewis to his, but at the very least, we all deserved to know the truth. “Give me his number,” I said.

She took the letter from me, wrote Ethan’s number on a corner of it and handed it back. Slipping her sunglasses on again, she stood up.

“Thank you,” she said, returning her pen to her tiny pocketbook. She looked at me. “I hope…well, I don’t know what to hope, actually. I guess I just hope the truth finally comes out.”

“I hope so, too, Abby,” I said.

I watched her walk down the sidewalk and get into the white Beetle convertible. She waved as she pulled away from the curb and I watched her drive up my street, then turn the corner and disappear.

I sat there a long time, perfectly still, the letter and all its horrible implications lying on my lap. Chapter Four was forgotten. My body felt leaden and my heart ached, because I knew that no matter who turned out to have murdered my sister, the responsibility for her death would always rest with me.

CHAPTER 2

Julie

I was still sitting on the porch half an hour later, the letter on my lap, when I was surprised to see Shannon walking toward our house. She was a distance away, but I would have recognized her at a mile. She was five feet nine inches tall with long, thick, nearly black hair. She’d been a presence from the day she was born.

I was worried about her. When Glen and I allowed her to skip the third grade, I’d never thought ahead to how I would feel watching my seventeen-year-old daughter go off to college, moving into a world outside my protection. I liked to have at least the illusion of control over what happened to the people I love. Glen said that’s why I wrote fiction: it gave me total control over every single character and every single thing that happened. He was probably right.

But there was more that worried me. Something had changed in Shannon during her senior year. She’d never been shy about her height; she’d had an almost regal carriage, a haughty confidence when she’d jerk her head to toss her hair over her shoulder. Recently, though, she seemed uncomfortable in her own skin. I was certain she’d put on weight. A few nights earlier, I’d found her in her room eating from a bowl of raw cookie dough! I’d lectured her about the possibility of getting salmonella from the raw eggs in the batter, but I’d really wanted to ask her if she had any idea how many calories she was consuming.

I would sometimes catch her staring into space, an empty look in her almond-shaped eyes, and she rarely went out with her friends anymore. She’d had one boyfriend or another—all the artsy, musical types—since she was fourteen, yet I didn’t think she’d been on a date for at least six months. Her new homebody behavior made it easier for me to keep an eye on her, but I couldn’t help but be concerned by her sudden transformation.

“I just want to end my senior year with a bang,” she’d said, when I’d inquired into the change in her social life. “I don’t want to be a slacker.”

I knew Glen had talked to her about how important it was to keep her grades up during her senior year, in spite of her early acceptance into the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. No problem there. She’d ended her high-school career as senior class president with a 4.2 grade point average, but still, something seemed wrong. I wondered if she was afraid of leaving home. Or maybe she was having a delayed reaction to the divorce. It had been nearly two years and I thought she’d handled it well—aside from the fact that she seemed to blame me for it—but perhaps I’d been kidding myself.

She spotted me as she turned onto the sidewalk leading up to our house.

“Hi!” She waved. She was wearing a white-and-lime-greenprint skirt today, the sort of skirt my sister Lucy liked to wear—long and flowing—and I liked the way it looked on her. That was another change: Shannon seemed to have traded in her low-rise pants for this more feminine look.

“What are you doing home?” I called from my seat on the rocker.

“I have some time before the next lesson,” she said. “Thought I’d take a break.”

We lived in a neighborhood of turn-of-the-century houses near Westfield’s downtown. It was an easy walk for her to and from the music store, as well as to the day-care center where she spent two afternoons a week as an aide, caring for the toddlers.

She climbed the porch steps, carrying a can of Vanilla Coke.

“Love that haircut,” she said as she settled into the rocker Abby Worley had vacated only a short time before.

I’d had my hair cut to my chin a few days earlier in preparation for a photo shoot for my next book jacket. My hairdresser had added blond highlights to the auburn shade I’d worn for the past decade, and Shannon commented on it every time she saw me. Even my mother had noticed, telling me the cut-and-color looked “sassy.” I knew she’d meant it as a compliment.

Shannon leaned forward to get a good look at me, her own hair falling away from her face in a thick dark curtain. “I think you need some new glasses, now,” she said.

I touched my rimless frames. “Do I?” I asked. I thought my glasses were stylish, but I was usually three or four years behind the trend.

“You should get some cool plastic frames,” she said. “Like in a bronze color.”

“I don’t think I’m ready to be that cool.” I was amazed at my ability to carry on such a mundane conversation when my mind was still reeling from Abby’s visit.

Shannon took a long drink from her Coke. “Actually, Mom,” she said, “I came home because I need to talk to you about something.” She glanced at me. “I’m afraid you’re going to be upset.”

“Tell me,” I said, wanting her to spit it out before my overactive imagination had a chance to fill the silence.

She gnawed at her lower lip. Her dimples showed when she did that. “I’ve decided to live at Dad’s for the summer.” Shannon looked at me directly then, waiting for my reaction. I tried not to show any, my gaze intent on the dogwood in our neighbors’ front yard.

This is no big deal, I told myself. Glen only lived a few miles away, and it would probably be good for them to have some time together before she went away to college. So why were tears welling up in my eyes for the second time in an hour? This is the last summer I have with you, I wanted to say, but I kept my cool.

“Why, honey?” I asked.

“I just…you know. I’ve lived with you since the divorce, and I know Dad would like it if I…you know…if I stayed there this summer. I’m trying to be fair to everybody,” she added, although I saw right through that. Shannon was a good kid, but she was not so noble that she’d put her needs second to someone else’s.

“What’s the real reason?” I asked her. “Has he been trying to persuade you to move?”

“No.” She shook her head in a tired motion. “Nothing like that.”

“He works long hours.”

She laughed, the sound popping out of her mouth before she could stop it. “Now you get it,” she said. She smoothed her hair away from her face, her Italian charm bracelet nearly full of the small rectangular charms, all related to music.

“Get what?” I asked.

“Mom, I’ll be eighteen in three months,” she said, her voice pleading with me to understand. “You still treat me like I’m ten. I have to let you know my every move. Dad treats me like I’m an adult.”

So that was it. “Well,” I said, “now that you’re just about in college, maybe we can change the rules a bit.”

“You’d have to totally revamp your rules for them to be tolerable,” she said. “You don’t let me breathe.”

“Oh, Shannon, come on,” I said. That was always her argument. She said that I smothered her, I gave her no freedom. I was overprotective—that much I’d admit to—but I was not her jailer. “You haven’t even asked to do anything in months, so how can you say I don’t let you breathe?”

She rolled her eyes. “There’s no point in asking you if I can do anything, because you’ll just say no,” she said.

“Shannon. That’s not true and I think you know it.”

“When you go on your book tours, you still make me stay with Erika’s family even though she and I haven’t been friends since we were, like, twelve, just because her parents are even stricter than you and you know I can’t get away with anything there. I hate that.”

“You never asked to stay anywhere else,” I said, frowning.

“And you call my cell phone constantly to check up on me,” she said. “Do you know—”

“Not to check up on you,” I corrected her. “I call you because I care about you. And I don’t call you ‘constantly.’” Our too-frequent arguments often had this flavor. They started off in one direction and then took a circuitous route that left my head spinning. “What is this really all about?” I asked.

She let out an exasperated sigh, as though I was too dense to possibly understand. “Nothing,” she said. “It’s just that soon I’ll be on my own and I think it’s time I got some practice, so that’s why I think I should live at Dad’s for the summer.”

“You won’t be on your own at Dad’s,” I countered, although I knew Glen would do all he could to please his only child. He’d greet any potential conflict between Shannon and himself with his usual passivity. I’d had to be the disciplinarian—the bad guy—with our daughter from the start.

I thought about Shannon’s graduation ceremony. Glen and his sister and nephew had sat a few rows behind Mom, Lucy and me, and I’d felt as though the three of them were staring at me. I wanted to go up to Glen after the ceremony, throw my arms around him, point to Shannon and say, Look what we did together! But there was a wall between us, one that was probably my fault. I was still angry for what he’d done to me and to our marriage. Shannon knew nothing about any of that, and I planned to keep it that way. I would never have harmed her father in her eyes.

“I know I won’t actually be on my own,” she said. “That’s not the point. I’m just going to do it, Mom, okay? I mean, I don’t really need your permission, right? To stay with him?”

I couldn’t think clearly. “Can we talk about this later?” I asked. I looked down at the letter in my lap and realized I had folded it into smaller and smaller rectangles until it could fit neatly in the palm of my hand.

“What’s that?” Shannon pointed to the fat wad of paper.

I unfolded it carefully, still feeling some disbelief that Abby Worley’s visit had occurred at all. “I had a visitor,” I said.

“Who?”

“The daughter of Ethan Chapman. He lived next door to my family’s summer bungalow when I was a kid. He was my age. His older brother, Ned, died recently and Ethan’s daughter—her name is Abby—found this letter in his belongings. It was addressed to the police.”

I handed the letter to her and watched lines of worry form between her eyebrows as she read it.

“Oh, Mom,” she said, exasperation in her voice. “Like you really need this.”

“I know.” It came out as a whisper.

“Ned was Isabel’s boyfriend, wasn’t he?” She used Isabel’s name more easily than anyone else in the family, perhaps because she had never known her. To Shannon, Isabel was the aunt who had died long before she was born. The one we rarely mentioned, even though Shannon looked more like her with every year. The thick dark hair and double rows of black eyelashes, the almond-shaped eyes and deep dimples. Shannon was now seventeen, the same age Isabel had been when she died. She knew what had happened the summer I was twelve and she understood that those events were the reason I held on to her so tightly: I would never let her run wild as Isabel had. Shannon knew it all, but that didn’t stop her from resenting my attempts to keep her safe.

“Yes,” I said. “Isabel’s boyfriend.”

“Your hands are shaking.”

I looked down at my hands where they rested in my lap and saw that she was right.

“What are you supposed to do with this?” She handed the letter back to me.

“I’m going to talk to Ethan about taking it to the police. And if he won’t take it, I’ll do it myself.”

She let out a long breath. “I suppose you have to,” she said. “Have you talked to Lucy about it?”

“Not yet,” I said, although I’d been thinking of calling my sister when Shannon had arrived. I needed to talk to someone who understood how I felt.

Shannon stood up. “Well,” she said, a bit awkwardly, “I have to get back to the store. I just wanted to tell you…you know, about moving to Dad’s. Sorry that my timing sucked, and that it turned into this big, like—” she waved her hands through the air “—this altercation or whatever.”

I nodded. “When will you go?”

“In a couple of days. Okay?” She was longing for my blessing.

“Okay.” What else could I say?

She handed me the empty Coke can. “Would you mind sticking that in recycling, please?” she asked.

I took the can and held it on my lap next to the letter. “Have fun at work,” I said.

“Thanks.” She bounced down the porch steps with an ease known only to the young.

“Shannon?” I called as she walked down our sidewalk.

“What?” She didn’t bother to turn around.

“If you talk to Nana, don’t say anything about this to her.” It was an unwritten rule in my family never to talk to my mother about the summer of ’62.

“I won’t,” she said, lifting her arm in a wave.

I stood up then, letter and Coke can in my hands, and walked into the house to call my sister.

CHAPTER 3

Lucy

My cell phone rang as I got out of my car in the McDonald’s parking lot in Garwood. Seeing on the caller ID display that it was Julie, I answered it. “Hi, sis,” had barely left my lips when she launched into the conversation she’d had with Ethan Chapman’s daughter. I leaned against the car, listening, trying unsuccessfully to conjure up a cohesive image of Ethan and Ned Chapman. Ned barely existed in my memory, and Ethan was twelve and blurry around the edges. I didn’t like his daughter’s reason for showing up on Julie’s doorstep one bit.

“You know what, Julie?” I said when she’d told me everything.

“What?”

“I grant you, the whole thing is unsettling,” I said, “But I think Ethan Chapman’s daughter should solve the mystery on her own. Leave you out of it.You don’t need this.”

“That’s what Shannon said.”

“I have a very smart niece,” I said.

Julie didn’t respond.

“What are you thinking?” I reached into my shoulder bag for my sunglasses and slipped them on. Who knew how long I’d be standing out here talking with her? I couldn’t walk into McDonald’s while having this conversation: Our mother was in there.

“If George Lewis didn’t do it,” Julie said, “I can’t just sit back and let the world think he did.”

“Yes, you can,” I said, although my zeal for justice was normally, if anything, stronger than Julie’s. “Let Ethan’s daughter take the letter to the police, then. As long as she does it, I don’t see why you have to be involved at all.” I was surprised at how upset I felt. My creative, sensitive sister was already clinging to the edge with Shannon—Isabel’s double—getting ready to go away to college. I didn’t want anything to add to her stress and I was annoyed with Abby Chapman for dragging her into something she really had no need to be part of.

“That’s just it,” Julie said. “I don’t think she’ll do anything about it without his okay. I have to talk to him. I’m in a bind.”

I could tell she’d already made up her mind. “Okay,” I relented. “If you have to, you have to.”

A group of kids walked past me, their laughter loud in my ear.

“Where are you?” Julie asked.

“I’m in the McDonald’s parking lot.”

“Don’t tell Mom about this.”

“Do you think I’m crazy?” I couldn’t believe she thought I needed the warning.

“And I got some other good news today.” Julie’s voice was tinged with sarcasm.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Shannon wants to live with Glen for the summer.”

“Ah,” I said. Shannon had spoken with me about that possibility. She always ran things past me before she laid them on Julie. She told me things she wouldn’t breathe to another adult. I was the person who’d taken her to get birth control pills when she was fifteen; Julie would kill me if she knew. This year, with Shannon the age Isabel had been when she died, Julie seemed to snap, tightening her grip on her daughter just when she should have been loosening it. So, I’d told Shannon that while it would be hard on her mother to have her live with Glen for the summer, I thought it was a good idea. It might help Julie get used to letting her go.

My lack of surprise at Julie’s announcement made her suspicious.

“Did you know?” she asked.

“She’d told me she was considering it,” I admitted.

There was a brief silence on the line. “I wish you’d told me,” she said.

“It wasn’t a sure thing, and I thought it should come from her.” I felt guilty. “It might be good for both of you, Julie.”

Two men in their mid-thirties walked past me in the parking lot, not even glancing in my direction. I was approaching fifty, the age of invisibility for a woman, and I was more fascinated than distressed by the phenomenon. It seemed to have happened overnight. Four or five years ago, even though I’d worn my silver-streaked hair the same way I did now—in a long French braid down my back, with thick, straight bangs over my forehead—I’d still been able to turn heads. My skin was nearly as smooth and clear as it had been then, and I wore the same type of clothes, mainly long crinkly skirts and knit tank tops. Nevertheless, men my age and younger now looked right through me. Maybe I was giving off the scent of decay. I didn’t mind. I was taking a long, possibly permanent, break from dating.

“She seems…distant or something,” Julie was saying in my ear, and I turned my attention back to the phone call. “She’s changing. Have you noticed? I think she’s putting on weight and she doesn’t go out anymore. I’m worried about her.”

Julie was right. Shannon did seem more withdrawn lately, more reserved in our conversations, and she didn’t call as often. I hadn’t noticed the physical change in her until Saturday, when I saw her walk across the stage to get her diploma. There was a heaviness about her, more in her spirit than her body, but I made light of it to relieve Julie’s anxiety. “She’s just having a growth spurt,” I said. “And as for the social life, you used to worry when she did go out.You need to be more careful what you wish for.”

Julie sighed. “I know.”

We wrapped up the conversation and I slipped my phone into my shoulder bag as I walked across the parking lot and into the restaurant. It was full of kids, Garwood’s summer-school students, who were different from the kids I taught at Plainfield High School. Garwood’s students were from mostly white, middle-class families, while Plainfield’s public school population was ethnically diverse and economically challenged. I taught ESL—English as a Second Language—because I relished being surrounded by all those kids whose varied skin colors and languages were overshadowed by their universal yearning to belong.

I spotted my mother at the opposite end of the restaurant. She was standing next to a table in her red-and-white uniform, holding a couple of trays in her hands, talking with a young woman and her two little kids. So many of my friends my age had to visit their elderly parents in nursing homes. I got a kick out of the fact that I visited mine at McDonald’s. Mom was the greeter who always had a smile for everyone, who supervised kids in the play area and who straightened the place up with as much care as she did her own home. She looked smaller to me than she had just a month ago. I used to think she was so tall, but either her spine was contracting, shrinking her, or her height had been an illusion to me. Her hair was white and very pretty. She had it done every week, and it was always soft and natural looking. Her snowy hair was set off by her caramel-colored skin, inherited from her Italian mother. People always thought she’d just returned from a cruise to the Caribbean. Isabel had looked the most like her, but I got her perfect nose and full lips and Julie got her large dark eyes. We were both very lucky to get any part of our mother’s beauty at all.

I came up behind her.

“Hey, Mom,” I said.

She looked delighted to see me, as I knew she would. She wrapped one arm around my waist.

“This is the daughter I was telling you about,” she said to the young woman. “The bohemian one.”

I laughed, and the woman smiled blankly. I was certain the twenty-something-year-old woman had no idea what bohemian meant, but she smiled nevertheless.

“Your mother said you just got back from Nepal,” the woman said, holding a French fry in front of her little son’s mouth.

“Uh-huh,” I said. “It was a fantastic trip. Have you been?”

“Oh no.” The woman nodded at her children. “I haven’t been anywhere in three years, for obvious reasons.”

I hadn’t been to Nepal in three years, either, but it was the trip my mother loved to drag out to impress people. To her, it sounded exotic. I wished I could take her there, but although she was remarkably healthy for eighty-one, I was afraid the altitude and the walking would do her in.

“Do you have a minute to visit?” I asked her.

“Of course!” She excused herself from the young woman, but then noticed a mess left on one of the tables. “You take a seat and I’ll join you in a minute,” she said.

I bought an iced tea and sat down at a corner table. Mom was finding more things to do and chatting with one of her much, much younger co-workers, an Hispanic girl with a delicate tattoo on her wrist that made me want to get one myself. I did have a tattoo of a butterfly on my hip—a very foolish mistake made in my twenties when I didn’t realize exactly how gravity would affect that part of my body in middle age. For that reason, I’d tried to talk Shannon out of getting the tattoo of a cello on the small of her back, but she’d insisted and, I had to admit, it was kind of pretty when she wore her low-rise pants. The tattoo was so artfully done that even Julie only freaked out for about ten seconds when she saw it.

Waiting for Mom, I thought about Julie’s call. I couldn’t believe that she was going to have to deal with Isabel’s death again after all this time. I remembered so little of that summer that it never held the sort of pain for me that it did for my sister. I’d only been eight years old, and the images of our lives at Bay Head Shores came to me in tiny little clips, like those short videos you could make on digital cameras. The picture forming in my mind as I sipped my tea was of Julie catching a huge eel. It wasn’t uncommon to catch eels in the canal behind our bungalow, but that one had been particularly enormous.

“She reeled it in all by herself,” I remembered our grandfather boasting. Julie had been his fishing partner. The two of them would spend hours in our sandy backyard, sitting on the big blue wooden chairs, holding on to their poles and talking, although I had no idea what about. I was usually huddled somewhere in the safety of the house with a book.

Most people probably tossed eels back into the water, but my mother and grandmother thought they were a delicacy. Mom came out of the house and she and Julie killed the eel—I don’t recall how; I have mercifully blocked that part of the memory from my mind—and then skinned it. They were standing barefoot on the narrow platform at the bottom of our dock, Julie in a purple bathing suit, my mother in a housedress and apron. Mom held the head of the eel with a rag, while Julie tugged the skin off it like someone slipping a stocking from a leg. I was watching from behind the white picket fence at the end of the dock. I was terrified of falling in, so I never got near the edge of the dock without that fence between me and the water.

I vaguely remember Grandpop and Grandma watching from the side of the dock. There was laughter and chatter, and Ethan Chapman must have been curious because he came over from next door.

“Keen,” he said, kneeling in the sand above the platform where Julie and my mother were doing their dirty work. “That is the most gigantic eel I’ve ever seen.” Ethan was very skinny, his knees the widest part of his legs. He was entirely covered with freckles, and his hair looked brown one minute and red the next, depending on how the sun hit it. His glasses were thick.

“Why don’t you come over tonight and have some?” my mother said. Then she tossed her head back with laughter at the face Ethan made. She knew the eel she cooked was safe from anyone besides my grandmother and herself.

“I don’t want to eat that thing,” Ethan said. “Could I have the skin, though?”

Julie had been about to throw the skin into the water, but she looked up at him, the whites of her eyes in sharp contrast to her nut-brown summer tan.

“What for?” she asked.

“It’s beautiful,” he said, pointing. “Look how shiny it is on the inside. Look at all the colors.”

We stared down at the inside-out eel skin. I could see what he meant. The skin had a shimmery mother-of-pearl look to it.

“It’s yours,” Julie said, tossing the skin up to him.

Ethan reached out with one of his toothpick arms and managed to catch the slithery mess. “And can I have the guts when you clean him?” he asked.

I could see Julie wrinkle her nose. “You’re gross,” she said.

“Julie,” my mother reprimanded her quietly. Then she looked up at Ethan. “Sure you can have them, Ethan,” she said. “What will you do with them?”

“Study them,” Ethan said, and I understood why Julie was no longer friends with him that summer.

Later, when my mother threw the skinned, gutted and beheaded eel into the frying pan, it still wriggled. I had nightmares about that for several nights in a row. I’d been an extraordinarily fearful child back then. After Isabel died that August, my fears gradually began to slip away. It was illogical; I should have become more fearful once my world had been shattered. But it was as though the worst had happened and I’d survived, and I knew I would be okay no matter what happened after that.

Mom finally came over to my table in the corner and sat down across from me.

“Whew!” She smiled. “Busy place today.”

“All the summer-school kids,” I said.

Mom was not really with me. Her eyes darted around the small restaurant, looking for customers she knew and tables in need of cleaning. She’d worked there for five years and it was her home away from home.

“That girl,” she said, nodding toward the young woman she’d introduced me to earlier, “is pregnant again. Can you believe it? She’s going to have three little ones under the age of four.” She clucked her tongue. “The choices people make,” she said.

“It’s her choice, though,” I said.

“Well, I’m certain her husband had something to do with it,” my mother said. She pulled a napkin from her pocket and wiped at a spot on the table. “I wish you’d go to church with me Sunday,” she said. “It’s a special occasion.”

“What’s special about it?” I tried to remember when the holy days were, but drew a blank.

“It’s Father Terrell’s birthday.”

“Ah,” I said. That wasn’t special enough to get me inside a Catholic church. I’d explored just about every religion possible over the course of my adult life and was probably best described as a Buddhist Quaker. I wanted peace, both inside and outside. But I watched my mother carefully fold up the napkin and put it back in her pocket. She was so cute. So devoted to her job. How could I resist her?

“I’ll go,” I said.

“Oh, that’s wonderful, Lucy!” she said.

I got along fine with my mother, despite my lifestyle choices. I’d never been married, but had lived with three different men, eight years apiece. Eight years seemed to be my limit, for some reason.

Julie’s relationship with Mom had always been a little strained, though, in spite of the fact that my sister tried to do everything right. She’d stayed Catholic, gotten married, produced a beautiful grandchild and had an enormously successful career. She was conservative and reliable, the levelheaded daughter who took Mom to her doctor’s appointments and helped her with all her paperwork. Still, there was an undeniable awkwardness between my mother and Julie that I doubted would ever go away. Julie thought she still blamed her for Isabel’s death. I didn’t believe that for a minute, but it was impossible to know if that might be the case, because my mother wasn’t the type to talk about her feelings. The topic of Isabel was always off-limits, anyway. Even I would have been uncomfortable bringing it up with her. Feelings kept under wraps, though, could be far more destructive than those brought out in the open. I knew that, and I was a brave woman, but I would never have been able to form the right words to speak to my mother about Isabel.

“Listen,” my mother said, “I was thinking we need to have a big party before Shannon goes off to college. She’ll be away for her birthday on September tenth, so it could be a combination birthday and going-away party.”

“That’s not for a couple of months, Mom,” I said.

“But you know how time slips by,” she said. “If we don’t start planning it now, it might never happen.”

“All right.” Sometimes it was better to let my mother run with an idea than to try to stop her. “What are your thoughts?”

“We could have it here.”

“At McDonald’s?” I tried not to sound too horrified. “Shannon’s nearly eighteen. I don’t think she’d want to have a party here.”

“All right, all right.” My mother brushed away my comment as though she’d known it was coming. “How about at home, then?” She meant her house, the house Julie and I had grown up in.

“Good idea,” I said.

She started talking about her plans for the party—who we should invite, a theme for the decorations, what sort of food we’d have—and my mind slipped back to the eel.

“Do you remember that huge eel Julie caught?” I asked suddenly.

My mother looked confused, my question so completely out of context. “What are you talking about?” she asked. “What eel? When?”

I realized I’d made a mistake starting the conversation, because I was certain the year of the eel had been 1962.

“Just…when we were kids,” I answered. “She caught it in the canal. When you put it in the frying pan, it still moved.”

“Oh, they always did,” my mother said.

“Why?” I asked.

“Some autonomic nerve thing,” she said. “They were dead as doornails. What on earth made you think of that?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I lied. “It just popped into my head.”

My mother looked dreamily into space. “What I wouldn’t give for some eel right now,” she said.

I leaned back and sipped my soda, feeling pleased all out of proportion to the conversation: I’d said something about the bungalow and survived.

CHAPTER 4

Julie

1962

Until my sister’s death the summer I was twelve years old, I’d had a nearly idyllic childhood. The school year was spent in Westfield, a town that offered everything I could possibly need and was an easy bus ride to New York, where my parents often took my sisters and me to the zoo or the history museum or a Broadway play. My parents were smart, well educated and loving, and my overindulgent maternal grandparents, Grandma and Grandpop Foley, lived nearby. Their house was as open to us as our own.

I was a creative child—too creative, some of my teachers said—and loved making up adventures for myself and my friends. I made up stories about things going on in the neighborhood: the old lady on the corner was a witch, I had a boyfriend in another town, I was found abandoned on my parents’ doorstep as an infant. I told the kids in my class that wolves had been spotted in Mindowaskin Park, close to our homes. I loved to write plays to put on in our garage and poetry to read to my classmates.

My mother was popular among my friends, because she always took our endeavors very seriously. She’d paint scenery and sew curtains for the “stage” when we put on a play, and she’d go along with the tall tales I told the neighborhood kids, as long as I wasn’t scaring any of them too much.

My father was a physician with a busy schedule, but he made time for my sisters and me. Even though he walked with a limp from a World War II injury, he still managed to take us tobogganing or ice-skating or bowling. My world was safe and fun and easy.

Things started getting rocky around the time Isabel turned fifteen. She wanted to hang out with her friends instead of with the family, and she wanted to go to parties my parents didn’t approve of. She was nasty to me, suddenly viewing me as a liability rather than an asset. She no longer wanted me around and barely spoke to me if she was with her friends. It was a fairly tame rebellion, in retrospect. My father still seemed to think his eldest daughter could walk on water, while my mother bore the brunt of her defiant behavior. The worst part was that, by the summer Isabel was seventeen, my parents had begun arguing about how to handle her. I had never heard a cross word pass between the two of them before, and their disagreements worried me.

All during the school year, I’d hunger for my grandparents’ summer bungalow down the shore on the Point Pleasant Canal. It was in a little beach community called Bay Head Shores, only an hour from Westfield, but it seemed a world away. In 1962, we arrived at the bungalow a few days after school ended, caravanning with my grandparents, who towed our boat behind their black Studebaker. Lucy, my mother and I followed in the Chrysler, and Dad and Isabel brought up the rear in our father’s flashy yellow Lark convertible. Everyone pretended that Isabel was riding with Dad in order to get a head start on her tan in the open car, but I knew it was really that she and my mother were in the middle of one of their battles and that having her ride with Dad would be more peaceful for all concerned.

Like me, Lucy, who was eight at the time, was a book lover, but she couldn’t read in the car without throwing up, and her propensity to motion sickness also meant she had to sit in the front seat of the Chrysler next to Mom, which was fine with me. I lounged between suitcases and pillows in the back seat, reading Nancy Drew’s The Secret of Red Gate Farm, which I’d read before. I’d read all the Nancy Drew books and was systematically working my way through them once again. I liked to pretend that I was Nancy Drew myself. A few months earlier, I’d started collecting things I found around my yard or my neighborhood. I’d found a glove in the gutter, a money clip on the sidewalk and—much to my mother’s horror—someone’s bra, discovered in the woods behind a friend’s house. These items I squirreled beneath my bed in case a mystery occurred in the neighborhood and one of my finds might prove to be valuable evidence. I planned to do the same down the shore.

The small bluish-gray, black-shuttered Cape Cod was one of two bungalows at the end of a short, dead-end dirt road. My sisters and I had our shoes off before we’d even stepped out of the cars. Grandpop unlocked the front door, pretending to fumble with the key, chuckling at our impatience. The musty smell of a house closed up for ten months washed over us as we walked into the hallway, and Lucy and I raced from room to room to see that everything was exactly as we’d left it the year before.

The two bedrooms downstairs were used by the adults, while the three of us girls slept in the attic. Izzy and I loved the attic, but it terrified Lucy, who seemed to have gotten all the fear genes in the family. She and Mom had been in a car accident when Lucy was little, and she’d been pulled screaming from my mother’s arms in the emergency room and taken away somewhere for the treatment of several broken ribs and a broken leg. Since that day, she’d been afraid of everything. The attic could only be reached by rickety, pull-down steps, and Lucy was always afraid those steps might somehow snap closed while she was up there and she would be trapped. The attic itself was a source of endless fascination for me. It was wide-open, its ceiling the bare wooden underbelly of the roof, and it was filled with enough beds to sleep eight people. The beds were divided by curtains strung on wires across the room, so everyone had a little bit of privacy if they wanted it. During the day, we usually drew the curtains back, though, to allow a breeze through the small windows. The attic could suffocate us with its heat.

Everyone’s favorite part of the bungalow—and the reason for its very existence—was the canal that ran behind the house. Our backyard was a broad rectangle of sand shared with the Chapman family next door and sandwiched between their boat dock and ours. Our boat was just a runabout, a tiny, open thing with an outboard motor, but the Chapmans owned a big Boston Whaler fast enough to pull two skiers at once.

Anyone wanting to take the inland route from Barnegat Bay to the Manasquan River and the ocean had to pass through our canal, and some of the boaters were celebrities. My father boasted to everyone that he’d received a wave from Richard Nixon one time, as the then-vice-president’s boat cruised past our house. On weekends, the water could be frightening to navigate as the canal filled with boats of all shapes and sizes. The water beneath the little Lovelandtown Bridge, well within sight of our house, grew as choppy as the ocean during a storm, and accidents were not infrequent. We all loved to watch the boats dodge the pilings on a busy weekend afternoon.

When we arrived at the bungalow that summer, though, my father did not care about going into the backyard to watch the boats or climbing down the ladder in our dock to touch the water with his toes, as my mother and I did. Instead, he went directly to the phone. He’d made sure it was already turned on for the summer, because he was on a vendetta. He was outraged by the recent Supreme Court decision forbidding school prayer, and he wanted to call every Catholic person he knew to organize a protest against the court ruling. My father was a recipient of the Purple Heart, a civic leader in our community and a well-respected member of our church, since he wrote a regular column for a Catholic magazine. Still too young to think for myself and having adopted the mores of my parents, I was as outraged as he was about the school prayer ruling. I couldn’t imagine starting the school day without the Lord’s Prayer. So we all gave my father the time he needed to sit near the wall phone in the living room with his pad of names, making his calls, his voice at times loud with his anger.

All four of the Chapmans were in their backyard when we arrived. My mother and sisters went over to greet them, but I walked outside the chain-link fence and sat down on the bulkhead, my book in my lap and my feet dangling a foot or so above the water. Even though I wasn’t looking in his direction, I knew Ethan was probably watching me. I imagined him sitting on one of the chairs, swinging his legs, his flip-flops hanging halfway off his feet. Ethan and I had once been great summertime buddies. We’d ride our bikes to the little Bay Head Shores beach or fish together or climb trees. We’d even sleep over at each other’s houses. We’d been born on the same day—March 10, 1950—and we thought that gave us a lifelong bond. But we’d started drifting apart the previous summer, as opposite-sex friends sometimes did as they grew older. It seemed mutual to me, as if we’d both received word at the same time that we should avoid each other. As far as I was concerned, he’d gotten weird. He’d developed a fascination with marine life, dissecting everything he could find—crabs, blowfish, eels, starfish and the tiny shrimp that clung to the bulkhead just below the water’s surface. I was glad my mother didn’t insist I go over to say hello to him.

We ate dinner—my grandmother’s spaghetti and meatballs—on the screened porch that night, as we always did. There was a huge table at one end of the porch which was the hub of all activity in the house—the place for meals, card games and puzzles. After dinner, my sisters and I helped Mom clean up in the kitchen. I felt happy, two months of freedom stretching out in front of me. Lucy didn’t feel that freedom, though; she felt fear.

“You’ll go up to bed with me at night, won’t you, Julie?” she asked as she dried the silverware. I always had to go to bed at the same time she did, some compromise hour between the two of our bedtimes, so that she wouldn’t have to be in the attic alone.

I looked at my mother. “I want to stay up later this summer, Mom,” I pleaded. “I’m twelve now.”

“You’ll go at the same time Lucy does,” my mother said, but she drew me aside and whispered in my ear. “Go up when she does and wait until she falls asleep,” she said. “Then you can come downstairs again.”

“Lucy needs to grow up,” Isabel said as she dried a plate. “She’s never going to get over her fears if you keep coddling her.”

“What would be more helpful than your criticism,” our mother said, “is for you to offer to go up with Lucy sometimes so Julie doesn’t always need to be the one to do it.”

“Be happy to,” Isabel said. “I’ll tell her ghost stories.”

Mom was sponging off the counter, but stopped to look at Isabel. “When did you get so mean?” she asked, and turned away. I saw the look of remorse on Isabel’s face before she covered it with a smirk. My sister was not as hard as she pretended to be.

I was coming to realize that Isabel was very beautiful—and that she knew it. She could get her way with just about anyone, especially our father, using a pout of her lips or the sheen of tears in her eyes. Her dark eyes were amazing, the lashes so long and lush they looked as though they must be false. She complained about her hair all the time. It was too wavy. Too thick. Too dark. But her complaints were empty; she knew her hair was the envy of every other girl in her high-school class. She had large breasts and a tiny waist. Boys stared at her when we’d walk down the street and girls were cautious around her, afraid that their boyfriends might compare them to Isabel and decide they could do better. There was no use denying that she’d gotten the looks in the family. Lucy and I had dark hair, as well, but I had to set mine on rollers to make it wavy, and Mom had given Lucy’s short hair a perm that made her look like a poodle.

The kitchen had grown very quiet. I poured the remaining tomato sauce into a Tupperware container and burped the lid, which made Lucy giggle.

Isabel lifted the colander from the dish drainer and began to dry it. “Ned asked me to a party tonight,” she said. “I can go, can’t I?”

My mother continued cleaning the countertop with the sponge. “Not tonight,” she said. “You need to unpack and—”

“I’ve already unpacked and I helped Julie and Lucy unpack, too,” Izzy said. “And the beds are made upstairs and I swept the floor up there and cleaned the toilet and sink and everything.”

I honestly wasn’t sure if all she was saying was true or not. I knew I had unpacked my things quite capably on my own, but I said nothing.

“And we’re practically done in here, aren’t we?” Isabel asked.

“Yes, we are.” My mother turned on the faucet to rinse the sponge. “But I don’t want you gone our first night here.”

Isabel smacked her dish towel down on the counter. “That makes absolutely no sense,” she said.

My mother looked up from the sink, wringing the sponge between her hands. “I said no,” she said.

Isabel rolled her eyes and picked up the towel again. I could hear the aggravation in her breathing as she dried one of the saucepans. She didn’t say another word, and neither did my mother. There was tension in the room, and I grew quiet myself. I didn’t know the appropriate rules of behavior when the ice suddenly grew that thin.

Later, my mother and I were cleaning the deep drawers beneath the kitchen cabinets. Lucy stood nearby, brushing ancient crumbs from the old toaster. She’d refused to help us with the drawers because we had found mouse droppings in one of them and a spider in another. Daddy came into the room and poured himself a glass of ginger ale from the bottle in the refrigerator. He was wearing his summer uniform: baggy shorts that showed off his pale, scarred legs and one of his short-sleeved plaid shirts.

“Charles.” My mother looked up from the task. “Would you find Isabel and ask her to sweep and organize the hall closet, please?”

“She’s gone out,”he said. He’d taken the ice tray from the freezer and although the ice had barely had time to form yet, he cracked the tray open and dropped a couple of delicate cubes into his glass.

My mother straightened up. “Gone where?” she said.

“To a party with Ned Chapman.”

My mother put her hands on her hips. “I told her she couldn’t go,” she said.

My father looked surprised, his eyes, the same light brown as his hair, wide-open. “She didn’t tell me she asked you,” he said.

I watched a blotch of red form on my mother’s throat. “I’m going to ground her for the rest of the week,” she said.

“That’s a little harsh, Maria, don’t you think?”my father asked, swirling the ice and liquid around in his glass. “It’s her first night down the shore and she’s known Ned all her life. His father may be one of the biggest fools on earth, but you can’t hold that against Ned. I don’t see the harm in her going to a party with him.”

“Yes, she’s known him all her life, but she’s seventeen this summer,” she said, as if that explained everything. “And it’s her first night here. I think she should have stayed in. Help clean up a little. Get acclimated.”

Daddy laughed. “Acclimated?” he asked. I was not sure what the word meant, and I realized I had left my dictionary in Westfield. I didn’t like to hear my parents argue, and I buried my head deeper in the drawer I was cleaning, brushing mouse droppings into a dustpan with a small broom. I glanced at Lucy, who looked as uncomfortable as I felt. She was concentrating hard on every crevice of the old toaster.

Daddy put his arm around my mother and kissed her cheek. “We raised her right,” he said. “She’s got a good head on her shoulders.”

My mother looked wounded. “How can you say that when she just lied to you about—”

“She didn’t lie to me,” Daddy said, letting go of her and heading for the door to the hallway. “She omitted a small fact.”

“She has you wrapped around her little finger,” my mother said. “She’ll be fine,” Daddy said. He walked out of the room, turning in the direction of the front door. I knew he was working in the garage with Grandpop this evening, organizing the fishing gear and slapping a fresh coat of blue paint on the Adirondack chairs.

My mother returned to her cleaning with a vengeance, and I could see the tight line of her lips. I knew my sister lied often to our parents. When we would go to confession on Saturday evenings, I was always amazed at how short her sessions in the confessional were. I knew she couldn’t possibly be owning up to every lie she’d told. I learned from watching her. Instead of enumerating everything I did wrong, I now gave the priest the abbreviated version. “I lied five times,” I’d say. I refused to count “pretending” as “lying.” If I counted pretending, I would be in the confessional all night. “I disobeyed my mother once,” I’d continue, “and I was mean to my little sister twice.” It was a relief to do it that way, instead of spilling all the details of my sins, and the priest didn’t seem to care.

I put my arm around my mother’s waist, feeling very adult. “She’ll be okay, Mom,” I said.

My mother didn’t respond. Her eyes were glassy, as though she might cry, and I felt confused by her tears. I thought she needed to be alone, so I said I would sweep the hall closet myself, and I took Lucy’s hand and dragged her out of the kitchen with me.

At nine o’clock that evening, I climbed the creaky steps into the attic, Lucy following behind me. I clung to the railing myself. The stairs seemed more wobbly every year and if I’d had a smidgen of fear in my makeup, I probably would have dreaded climbing them, too. In recent years, Lucy and I had slept in the twin beds in the quadrant of the room closest to the stairs. This year, though, I wanted more privacy. I wanted to be able to leave the reading lamp on as long as I liked and to simply daydream in my own little curtained space without Lucy’s incessant chatter. So, earlier in the day, we’d made up our beds in separate corners of the room, while Isabel made the double bed in the far corner behind the chimney for herself. Lucy had seemed fine with the arrangement then, but now that she climbed under her sheet in the hot attic, she was not so pleased.

“Leave the curtain open so I can see you,” she pleaded. She was lying on her side, facing my bed, the white sheet up to her shoulders.

“I’m going to have the light on so I can read,” I said, busying myself fluffing my pillows and turning down the covers. “It’ll keep you awake.” I wanted her to fall asleep quickly so I could go downstairs and play canasta with my mother and grandmother. During the school year, my evenings were filled with homework and television—The Andy Griffith Show or Wagon Train or Ed Sullivan. But in the summer, evenings were the time for card games and jigsaw puzzles.

“Please,” she wailed.

“You’ll be able to see my shadow,” I said, glad that I had made the bed closest to the curtain rather than the one against the wall. “Watch.” I walked over to the small table between the twin beds in my corner and lit the lamp. Then I pulled the curtain closed. It was tight against my bed, and once I’d climbed in, still dressed in my shorts and sleeveless top, I knew how I would look to Lucy. I’d been watching the silhouettes of my sister, my cousins, my aunts and uncles through those curtains for years. “See?” I said. “You can see me perfectly, right?”

“Okay,” Lucy said, her voice small.

I heard her settle down in the bed and pictured her lying there on her side, eyes wide-open, watching my shadow as I dove back into Nancy Drew.

I read one chapter and the beginning of another. Then I pulled back the edge of the curtain closest to the head of my bed. Lucy’s eyes were closed, her thumb stuck in her mouth as if she were a three-year-old. Her ratty old teddy bear was tucked beneath her arm. Quietly I slipped from my bed. Pulling the spread from the other bed, I bunched it up under my covers, propping the book up near the pillow, then walked into the central part of the attic to see how the shadows would look from Lucy’s perspective in case she woke up. Quite convincing.

It was impossible to descend the stairs without causing them to creak, but I did the best I could.

My mother smiled at me when I walked onto the porch. She had reached some sort of internal peace about Izzy being at a party, and her smile was a relief to me.

“She’s asleep?” She was sitting across the big table from my grandmother, smoking a cigarette and playing double solitaire on the vinyl, floral-patterned tablecloth. They both wore cotton housedresses, my mother’s a pale yellow stripe and my grandmother’s, baby-blue.

I nodded, plunking myself down into one of the rockers. Like the table, all the chairs on the long porch were painted red, the paint always a little sticky from the humidity and so thick you could dent it with a fingernail. There was also a bed at one end of the porch for anyone who wanted to sleep with the sounds of water lapping against the bulkhead and crickets singing in the wooded lot next door.

“We’ll end this game and then you can join us for canasta,” Grandma said, lifting her cup of instant coffee to her lips. When she shifted her legs beneath the table, I could see that her stockings were rolled down to just below her knees. Her English was perfect, but her Italian accent was still thick some sixty years after her arrival in the United States. I loved the music in her voice. I was ten before I realized that not everyone had a Grandma who spoke that way, turning her “th’s” into “t’s” and adding the hint of a vowel to every word that ended in a consonant.

I rocked for a while, the concrete floor smooth and cool beneath my feet. I could see the light of a boat moving slowly along the canal toward the bay, its engine a soft and steady hum, a backdrop for the slapping of cards against the table. Tomorrow, Grandpop would get our own boat in the water, and I couldn’t wait. I’d piloted that boat myself for the past two summers, although always with an adult or Isabel on board. This summer, Daddy promised me I could go out in it alone if I wore a life preserver and stayed in our end of the canal, between my house and the place where the canal opened into the bay. It was not much territory, but I was excited at having that freedom nevertheless.

Someone was in the Chapmans’ backyard. It was too dark to see who it was, but the person was fishing. I saw the burning tips of a couple of mosquito-repellant coils, and the faint moonlight glinted against the fisherman’s white shirt. I guessed it was Ethan, trying to catch something he could cut up. I watched the shirt move as he swung the pole behind him, then batted the air with it, the sound of the line sailing out into the canal unmistakable. I felt my own fingers itching to hold a fishing pole.

“Are you ready to beat us at canasta?” my grandmother asked me.

I walked over to the table and sat down as she began to deal. My mother stubbed out her cigarette in the clamshell ashtray and was pulling another one from her package of Kents when the most hideous scream suddenly cut through the air. She was out of her seat before I even realized the sounds were coming from the attic. The screams continued, Lucy barely stopping for breath between each one. I followed my mother up the stairs.

“Baby!” My mother flicked on the overhead light and raced to Lucy’s bed. Lucy was huddled against the iron headboard, her teddy clutched in her arms and her poodle hair matted on one side of her head. Our mother sat next to her. “What’s the matter?”

“There!” Lucy pointed toward the ceiling near the center of the attic.

I walked over to where she was pointing and looked up. “Where?” I said.

“There,” Lucy said again, this time a little sheepishness creeping into her voice. I looked up to see an old rag wedged against the ceiling beneath the elaborate network of wires used for the curtains. That rag had been there for as long as I could remember, probably to stop a leak before the new roof was put on the house.

“It’s a rag,” I said. Lucy was such a baby.

“It looked like a head,” Lucy said. “I thought it was a head and then I looked over and saw you weren’t in bed and I was up here alone!” She sounded indignant. I glanced at the curtain surrounding my little cubicle. The bunched-up bedspread seemed to have collapsed. It was obvious I was no longer there.

My mother stood and turned out the light and the three of us looked at the rag.

“See?” Lucy said.

“It looks like a rag,” I said.

Mom sat down next to her again. “All you had to do was turn on your light and you would have seen it was just a rag,” she said. “It’s not fair to Julie to have to stay up here with you, Lucy. You’re eight years old now.You have to learn there’s nothing to be afraid of up here.You know we’re all right downstairs if you need anything. Now lie down.” She reached for the sheet and drew it over her youngest daughter.

“Can we leave the light on?”

“You’ll never fall asleep that way.”

“Yes, I will,” she said, her gaze darting to the rag again.

“All right.” My mother got to her feet with a sigh, smoothing the skirt of her housedress and offering me a conspiratorial look of exasperation that made me feel very mature and brave. She hit the wall switch for the single bare bulb that hung from the ceiling. “Good night, dear.”

“Night, Luce,” I said, following my mother down the stairs.

I awakened at five-thirty the following morning to the crowing of a rooster. I lay in bed, smiling to myself. Early-morning pink sunshine flowed through the window in my little curtained “room,” and the sense of summer freedom washed over me again.

I moved to the other bed in my small cubicle, crawling down to the footboard so I could look out the window. I knew where the rooster lived. I’d forgotten all about him and his earlymorning wake-up call. Across the canal, kitty-corner from our bungalow, was a small wooden shack, gone nearly black with age, its roof sagging and its yard home to shoulder-high grasses and cattails. It was the only house, if it could even be called that, on that side of the canal and I couldn’t remember ever seeing a soul around it, but someone had to live there to feed the rooster. A dock was cut into the land near the house. I could zip over there in the runabout, dock the boat and climb up into the tall weeds surrounding the house without being seen. I mentally added “exploration of the shack” to my agenda for the day.

I got out of bed, knowing no one else would yet be up. The curtains were pulled around Isabel’s double bed. I didn’t know what time she’d gotten home the night before and I wondered what sort of punishment my parents had agreed on for her. I hoped it was harsh. I hated that she could lie and get away with it.

I put on one of my bathing suits and pulled my capris over it, then walked across the linoleum-covered floor. We’d been at the shore less than twenty-four hours and already I could feel the gritty sand beneath my bare feet. I tiptoed as I passed Lucy’s bed. Her curtains had not been pulled shut, and I didn’t want to wake her. I was nearly to the stairs when I heard Isabel’s voice.

“Julie?”

I turned to see her pull back part of the curtain around her bed. Her long, dark hair was a tangled mess, but she looked beautiful in the pink sunlight.

I tiptoed over to her bed. She took my arm and pulled me behind the curtain.

“I need you to do me a favor,” she said. Her shoulders were bare above the sheet and I felt shock when I realized that she had slept naked. I didn’t know anyone who actually did that.

I sat down on her bed. This close, I could see that her eyes were red. “What did Mom and Dad say?” I said. “You shouldn’t have gone to Daddy after—”

“Shh!” she said. “That’s none of your business.” She fumbled among the covers on her bed and picked up a small plastic giraffe, about the size of her fist. “Give this to Ned Chapman, okay?” she asked, although I knew it was more of a demand than a request.

I looked down at the red-and-purple giraffe nestled in my hands. “Why?” I asked. I knew she couldn’t tell me it was none of my business if she wanted my cooperation.

“It’s his,” she said. “I forgot to give it to him last night.”

“What would an eighteen-year-old boy want this for?” I asked. The giraffe looked like something even a toddler would get bored playing with after a minute or two.

“Don’t ask so many questions,” Isabel said. “Just do it. Please. I’m not allowed to leave the house all day.”

“That’s all?” I thought Mom was right—she should be grounded for a week.

“That’s enough,” Isabel said. She flopped back onto her pillow. “I’m going back to sleep.”

“You’re welcome,” I said, annoyed at her ingratitude.

No one was up when I got downstairs. I went outside where the warm, damp morning air filled my lungs. I stuck the giraffe under one of the Adirondack chairs to keep it safe until I saw Ned. I grabbed my bucket and the crab net from where it leaned against the tree and began making the crabbing rounds, standing at the edge of our dock, peering into the water, looking for crabs that rested against the bulkhead below the water’s surface. I found three in our dock, then I walked outside the fence, balancing myself on the top of the wooden planks of the bulkhead as I checked the canal for crabs. The current was pulling strongly toward the river and I watched a paper cup sweep past me in the water, followed a moment later by a crab. I put my net into the water in the crab’s path and drew him up and into the bucket. It was almost too easy. A giant tangle of seaweed floated past me, and then a little ball, which I scooped out with my net and examined. It was nothing special, just a dented Ping-Pong ball, but I would put it under my bed to kick off my Bay Head Shores clue collection.

I glanced across the canal, looking toward the rooster shack, and my gaze was drawn to the tall reeds directly across the canal from my house. Fishermen were arriving. They walked along a path cut through the reeds and began setting up their gear and their folding chairs behind the fence. Every one of them was colored, and they weren’t all men, either. It was hard to tell the women from the men at that distance, but I could tell for certain that a couple of them were children.

“Crabbing, huh?”

The voice came from behind me, surprising me so much that I had to grab the fence to keep my balance. I turned to see Ned Chapman walking toward me, grinning widely. Something happened to me in that moment. I don’t know if it was the way his blue eyes shone in the sunlight, or the triangle of tanned chest clearly visible beneath the collar of his open shirt, or the way he held his cigarette between his thumb and index finger, but I thought I might keel over and fall into the canal. I’d gotten my period for the first time in the early spring, and ever since then, I felt my stomach turn inside-out at the sight of a cute boy. And Ned was definitely cute. His hair was thick, the color of sunshine. He looked a little like Troy Donahue.

“Hi, Ned,” I managed to say, and only when I said his name out loud did I realize that he had the same name as Nancy Drew’s steady boyfriend. “Hi, Ned,” I repeated, this time to myself, just to feel his name on my tongue again.

He’d reached the opposite side of the fence from where I was standing and leaned over, his elbows resting on the metal bar at the top of the chain link. “You’re an early bird,” he said.

“You, too.”

“How many did you get?” He leaned farther over the fence to try to look in the bucket.

“Five, so far.”

“You like them?”

“To eat, you mean?”

He took a drag on his cigarette and let the smoke out in a long stream. “What else?” he asked.

“Actually, no.” I giggled and was annoyed with myself for sounding like a kid. “Grandma loves them, though. And I love catching them, so it works out okay.”

“So.” He rubbed his hand across his chin as though checking if he needed a shave. It was a sexy gesture. “Did Izzy get in trouble last night?”

I nodded. “She can’t go out all day. She asked me to give you something, though.”

I balanced carefully as I walked back along the bulkhead, trying to impress him by not holding on to the fence. In my yard, I put down the bucket and the net, then grabbed the giraffe from beneath the chair and carried it over to him. “She asked me to give you this,” I said.

He smiled, taking the giraffe from my hand. I felt embarrassed for Isabel that she wanted to give him something so dumb. I didn’t believe her when she’d said it was actually his.

“That’s nice of you to do that for her,” he said, looking right at me, and I stood as tall as I could, wondering how my small, barely there breasts looked in the childish one-piece bathing suit I was wearing. I needed to get a two-piece this summer, if Mom would let me.

“She said it belonged to you,” I said.

“Yeah, it does, actually,” he said. “Thanks for bringing it over. Tell her everything’s copacetic.”

Why, oh why, hadn’t I remembered to bring my dictionary? I heard sounds coming from his screened porch and didn’t want to be in the Chapmans’ yard when goofy Ethan came outside, so I said goodbye to Ned and went back to our dock to see if any new crabs had appeared along the bulkhead.

Right after lunch, Grandpop, Daddy and I towed the boat down to the marina. We gassed it up, Grandpop hopping onto the pier like a young man happy to be alive. I knew how he felt. Just the smell of the gasoline mixing with the salty scent of the water filled me up with joy. I thought to myself, I take after him. Grandpop loved everything about the shore—the water, fishing, boating, the smells, the night sky—everything, just as I did. We looked nothing alike: he was nearly bald, with a sad sort of face that always reminded me of a basset hound, but in many other ways, we were the same.

He and I went for a spin on the bay before taking the boat through the canal and into our dock. Grandpop let me pilot it myself part of the time, even allowing me to maneuver it into our dock, and he told me I did a terrific job. Our boat had no steering wheel, just a tiller handle attached to the motor, and I felt good that I was getting the hang of it so quickly. I nearly fell when I tried to get from the boat to the bulkhead, though, but Grandpop said I would have it mastered in a few days. I tied the boat to the hooks at the sides of the dock, loving the wet, rough feel of the rope beneath my fingers. I felt sorry for Izzy. Here it was, her first full day at the shore, and she wasn’t even allowed out of the house.

I sat with her and Lucy on the porch for a while, reading. Lucy and I were in the rockers, and Isabel was stretched out on the bed at the end of the porch, as close to the Chapmans’ house as she could get. I noticed that she wasn’t turning the pages of her book. She gazed in the direction of the Chapmans’ yard, probably waiting for a glimpse of Ned. He and Mr. Chapman were working on their boat, and I doubted she could see their dock from her place on the bed, but when Ned walked through their yard to get something from their house, I could nearly hear Izzy’s heartbeat quicken. I understood how she felt. He was having the same effect on me.

Before dinner, I took the boat out by myself. Mom was nervous about it, but Daddy talked her into letting me as long as I wore the hideous orange life preserver. It was a Monday and the weekend congestion on the canal had vanished overnight. I took the boat right to the mouth of the bay. The water stretched in front of me wide and inviting and I longed to go out into it, just a little way, but I didn’t dare. Instead I turned around in a broad arc and headed for the dock between the colored fishermen and the rooster house.

Once inside the unfamiliar dock, I cut the motor. There was a short ladder on my left and I tied my boat to a rung, took off the life preserver, then climbed up. The colored fishermen made me nervous. I didn’t look directly at them, but I could feel their eyes following me as I walked between the cattails and the fence, heading away from them in the direction of the shack. I finally found a narrow path cut through the tall grass, and I followed it right to the front porch of the ramshackle little cottage.

“Who are you?”

I jumped at the sound of a man’s voice, disembodied because I couldn’t see through the screens of his porch.

“I was just coming to see where the rooster lives,” I said.

The screen door creaked open a few inches and a man stood in the doorway. He had a thick beard and a dirty old hat on his head. The early evening sunlight fell onto his face and he squinted, his eyes reduced to little beads of translucent blue, making him look a bit demonic. The Mystery of theWarlock’s Shack, I thought to myself. I liked the title. Maybe I would try to write my own book.

“Where do you live?” he asked.

I turned and pointed to my bungalow, which was barely visible through the reeds. It looked very far away.

“You come over by boat?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“By yourself?”

“Yes,” I said, turning to go. “And I’d better get back.”

“What were you planning to do to my rooster?” he said, as I moved away.

“Oh!” I said. “Nothing. I wouldn’t hurt it. I just wanted to see where it lived.”

He held the door open wider. “Right here,” he said.

I looked past him onto the porch and saw the rooster and a couple of hens walking around on the floor as if they were mechanical toys. I took a step backward, wondering if the man’s sneakers were caked with the droppings of his feathered pets.

“Thanks for showing me,” I said.

“There are some people around here who’d like to wring my rooster’s neck,” he said, and I thought he sounded suspicious.

“Not me,” I said. “Thanks again for letting me see him.” I turned then and walked as quickly as I could through the tall grass. It probably only took me thirty seconds to reach the dock, but by that time I’d made up two or three different stories about the man. He kept children locked in closets inside the rickety old house. He’d murdered his wife and her bones were buried beneath the porch. When I was about to climb down the ladder, I spotted something shiny in the flattened grass near the head of the dock. I walked over and stared down at a pair of sunglasses, then picked them up. Maybe they belonged to the wife the old man had killed. Who knew? They would go beneath my bed to wait just in case.

That evening, Grandpop and I walked to the end of the dirt road. For as long as I could remember, he’d kept a path cleared through the tall grasses that rose a couple of feet above my head. We followed the path, and I loved the feeling of being closed in by the grass walls. Dragonflies flew along with us as we walked, but we were covered in insect repellant so the mosquitoes left us alone. We emerged from the path in a swampy area of still water that was connected to the canal by a narrow opening in the bulkhead. As he always did, Grandpop had set his bait trap in the shallow water here, tying it to a stake in the soft, sandy earth among the grasses. I pulled in the trap. It was full of green-gray killies, flapping on the wire mesh. Grandpop opened the trap and spilled the bait into his bucket. While he was doing that, I spied something in the water a few feet from where we stood. A baby shoe! I rolled up my capris as high as I could, waded into the water to my knees, and reached out to grab the little white leather shoe, a real prize in the world of clues.

“What do you do with all that stuff you collect?” Grandpop asked me as he closed the trap again.

“I keep them under my bed,” I said. “They might be clues to something that happened. Like, what if a baby got kidnapped or something? I could take this shoe to the police and tell them where I found it and maybe they could solve the mystery.”

“I think you need a better place than under your bed,” Grandpop said. “Your mother could clean up there and toss out all that old stuff you found.”

I loved my grandfather so much right then. He always took me seriously.

“Where else could I put it?” I studied the tiny shoe in my hands.

“I have an idea,” he said. He put his hand on the back of my neck as we walked, his fingers a little rough and damp against my skin. “When we get back to the house, you gather up your clues and I’ll show you where you can keep them.”

Once home, I did as I was told. I only had three paltry clues so far: the baby shoe, the sunglasses and the silly Ping-Pong ball, but that seemed pretty good for two days worth of sleuthing. I carried them out to the backyard. Grandpop was digging a hole near the corner of the house closest to the woods. Next to him was an old tin bread box with a removable red top.

He grinned at me, his sweet basset hound face lighting up for a moment. “What do you think, Nancy Drew?” he asked. “We’ll bury this bread box in this hole, cover it with a little sand and no one will ever know your clues are here.”

I helped him lower the bread box into the hole. I put my clues inside, then slipped on the lid and covered it with a couple of inches of sand. I loved my new hiding place. No one would ever know the clues were there.

Or so I thought.

CHAPTER 5

Julie

The sunburned waitress poured more iced tea into my glass, and I interpreted the look she gave me as sympathetic. This is why I don’t date, I thought. It was the waiting, the wondering, the analyzing. Why was Ethan late? Was he stuck in traffic? Had he forgotten we were to meet for lunch? Or had he simply been annoyed that I’d twisted his arm to talk with me? I wanted to explain to the waitress that, although I was meeting a man here, he was not a date. Not a romantic interest. But then I realized that the waitress probably saw me as too old to be dating, anyway. She was in her mid-twenties; most likely I reminded her of her mother.

The Spring Lake restaurant was barely ten miles from Bay Head Shores, and that was closer than I’d been to our former summer home since I was twelve. When I’d gotten out of my car, I could smell the salt from the ocean a few blocks away. I was surprised that the scent elicited not only the discomfort I’d expected, but also a longing, as though a tiny piece of me was still able to remember the good times I’d had down the shore in spite of all that had been taken from my family there.

The waitress stopped by my table again on her way to another. “Can I get you a roll or something to munch on while you wait, hon?” she asked. It felt so strange to be called “hon” by someone half my age. Better, though, than ma’am.

“No, thanks.” I smiled at her. “I’m fine.”

It was warm in the restaurant, or at least I was warm. I had on cropped black pants and a sleeveless red top cut high on my shoulders, but I noticed other women in the restaurant were pulling on their sweaters. I didn’t even bother carrying a sweater since menopause hit me a year ago.

I’d taken a table at the front of the restaurant so I would be able to see Ethan when he walked in. I wasn’t sure I’d recognize him. Through the window, I studied the men walking by, searching for lanky academic types. I watched people entering and leaving the little shops on the other side of the street. A young man stood directly across the street from me, rubbing lotion on a woman’s back. I watched the two of them until a pack of bicyclers sped by, blocking my view.

I looked at my watch. Twenty minutes late. Maybe he wasn’t going to show up. He certainly had not welcomed my call.

“I’m sorry Abby disturbed you with this,” he’d said, once I’d identified myself. He had a soft voice, exactly the sort of voice I would have imagined him having, and he did not sound irritated or angry. Just tired.

“She had to.” I was on the phone in my office, staring at the words Chapter Four on my computer screen. The rest of the page was still blank. “She was right to,” I said. “And she and I agreed that the situation needed looking into.”

He was quiet. “I’m not sure that I agree,” he said finally.

“We’re talking about a serious injustice,” I said. “A man served time in prison for something he didn’t do. And we’re talking about my sister.” Along with the old sense of loss I felt at the mention of Isabel came the suddenly realization of my insensitivity. “I’m sorry, Ethan,” I said quickly. “I didn’t even offer you condolences. I’m very sorry. I know what it’s like to lose a sibling.”

I heard him sigh. “Thanks,” he said. “Ned…I don’t know what happened to him. He had some sort of breakdown in his late teens and early twenties. He became…I don’t know how to describe it. He was just existing. Not really living.”

Don’t you think that suggests he was carrying a guilty secret? I wanted to ask but decided against it. This wasn’t the time.

“How bad was it?” I asked. “Was he able to work?”

“Oh, yeah,” Ethan said. “He wasn’t that bad off. He spent time in Vietnam, which didn’t help his condition, and he was eventually discharged for a sleep problem. Then he got his degree in accounting and worked for a plumbing company, doing their books. He never got married. He dated a little, but never anything serious.”

“Abby said…or rather, implied, that he had a drinking problem.”

“Yes, he did,” Ethan said, “but he wasn’t a sloppy drunk. It didn’t get in the way of his work or anything. Just kept him numb. We tried to get him help, but he would never admit to having a problem.You can’t change someone who doesn’t want to change.”

I had many more questions but felt anxious about asking them over the phone. I was afraid if I probed too deeply, he would hang up on me.

“Can we meet?” I asked. “I’d like to talk to you in person about this. About the letter.”

There was a silence so deep and long I had to ask him if he was still on the line.

“I’m here,” he replied in that soft, soft voice. “And yes, I’ll meet you. Where are you living?”

“Westfield,” I said. “How about you?”

“On the canal,” he said, and I doubted that he knew how those three words stopped my breath. “We winterized the summer house years ago,” he added.

“Do you live there with…”I wasn’t sure who else might be living in the Chapman’s old house with him. His parents? His wife?

“Alone,” he said. “My wife and Abby used to live here, too, but I was divorced five years ago and Abby’s out on her own now, of course. She has a daughter. My granddaughter. Did she tell you that?” There was pride in his voice. I could hear the smile.

“No,” I said. “That’s wonderful.”

“Do you want to come here?”

“No,” I said, nearly choking on the word in my rush to get it out. There was no way I was going to Bay Head Shores. “Maybe we could meet halfway.”

“Well,” he said. “I have to be in Spring Lake Friday. If you want to meet me there for lunch, we can do that.”

It was more than halfway, but that was all right. I needed to see him face-to-face to persuade him to take Ned’s letter to the police.

A man carrying a soft-sided briefcase walked through the door of the restaurant and I looked up expectantly, but the red hair and glasses were missing and I gazed out the window again.

“Julie?” I turned to see the man standing next to my table.

“Ethan?” I queried back.

He nodded, his smile subdued, and held out his hand. “Sorry I’m late,” he said. “I got stuck in beach traffic.”

“That’s okay.” I shook his hand, and he sat down across from me.

“I would never have recognized you,” I said, then wondered if that sounded rude. The truth was, age had done him many favors. His red hair was now a gray-tinged auburn, thin at his temples. He wore no glasses. The freckled skin of his youth had weathered into something kinder and he’d put on weight in the form of muscle. He was wearing a cobalt-blue short-sleeved shirt and his arms were lean and tight. The nerdiness from his childhood was gone. Completely. “You look great,” I added.

“And you look wonderful,” he said. “I would have recognized you anywhere. But of course, your face used to be all over our house on the back of your books.”

“Used to be?” I asked.

“We both read them, but my wife got custody of the books,” he said. He glanced down at my bare ring finger. “You’re married, right?” he asked. “I recall something like ‘the author lives with her husband in New Jersey’ or something like that from one of your book jackets.”

The waitress appeared at our table, pad at the ready. “How’re you two doing?” she asked.

I looked up at her sunburned face. “He hasn’t had a chance to look at the menu,” I said.

Ethan handed the waitress his unopened menu. “Just a burger, medium well,” he said. “And lemonade, please.”

I ordered the shrimp salad, then returned my attention to Ethan. “I’m divorced,” I said. “Two years.”

“Children?”

“A daughter. Shannon. She’s seventeen. She just graduated high school.”

“College plans?”

“The Oberlin Conservatory of Music,” I said. “She’s a cellist.”

He looked impressed. “Wow,” he said.

“What kind of work do you do?” I asked, then held up my hand. “Wait. Let me guess,” I said. “You teach marine biology.”

He laughed. “I’m a carpenter,” he said.

“Oh.” I nodded. That was not what I’d expected. If anyone had told me skinny little Ethan Chapman would end up working with his hands instead of his head, I never would have believed it. I thought of his ambitious father, Rosswell Chapman III or whatever he had been. The summer I was twelve, he was chief justice on the New Jersey Supreme Court and he later ran unsuccessfully for governor. I wondered if he’d been disappointed to see his sons turn out to be an accountant and a carpenter rather than follow him into law or politics.

“I wasn’t the least bit surprised you turned out to be a writer,” Ethan said.

“No?”

“Your family was so artsy. Your mother painted, right?”

“That’s right. She was a teacher, but she painted as a hobby.” I’d almost forgotten how my mother loved to set up her easel on the bungalow porch.

“And your father was a doctor, but wasn’t he a writer, too?”

“A columnist for a magazine,” I said.

“You’ve got a daughter who plays the cello,” he continued. “And your little sister, Lucy, used to play that plastic violin.”

“What?” I laughed. “I don’t remember that at all, but you’re probably right because she does play the violin now. She’s in a band called the ZydaChicks.”

He smiled. “There you go,” he said.

I took a sip of my iced tea, wondering if Isabel would have shown any special talent if she’d been given the chance to grow up.

Ethan was still smiling at me, his head cocked to one side.

“What?” I asked.

“You really, really look terrific,” he said.

I felt myself blush. “Thanks,” I said.

“I mean it,” he said, then leaned back in his chair with a sigh. “Well, I guess we’d better talk about what we came here to talk about.” He lifted the briefcase from the floor and pulled out an envelope. “Abby told me she showed you a copy of the letter,” he said, handing it to me.

I studied the envelope. Unlike the typed letter, the address of the police department was handwritten, printed in precise, slanted letters.

“Why haven’t you taken it to the police?” I asked, shifting my focus from the envelope to his eyes. They were a clear, deep blue. I’d never noticed their color behind the Coke-bottle glasses he used to wear. “I mean, it’s obvious that Ned wanted them to have it.”

“No, he obviously had second thoughts,” Ethan corrected me. His voice might have been gentle, but the words carried their own force and, although I didn’t agree with him, I liked how he stood up for himself. Glen always allowed people to steamroll right over him. “The letter was dated a couple of months before he died,” Ethan added.

“But he didn’t throw it away,” I said.

Ethan sighed. “Julie, if I take it to the police, they’re going to assume Ned did it. They’re going to start asking questions. I don’t care what they ask me, but my father is elderly. I don’t want his last years to be spent thinking that his son murdered someone. I have a buddy at the police department and I ran this by him, in a hypothetical sort of way. He said they’d open the case up again. They didn’t do much with forensics back then, so they’d be looking at the evidence from a new perspective now. But they’d almost certainly want to talk with my father. I don’t want to put him through it.”

I saw genuine concern in his face and couldn’t help but be touched by his reasoning. I hoped I could protect my mother from ever knowing anything at all about the letter, no matter what the outcome. I wasn’t sure I would be able to, though. I knew from the sort of books I wrote that Ethan’s friend at the police department was right. It didn’t matter how old the case was, the police would reopen it. Start fresh. I just prayed they could leave my mother out of it. Ross Chapman, though, would certainly be questioned, since he was the person who’d confirmed Ned’s alibi. “Is your mother also still alive?” I asked.

The waitress arrived with our food before he could answer, and we fell into small talk with her about her sunburn. She’d fallen asleep on the beach, she said, pressing her hands to her crimson cheeks once she’d set our plates on the table.

“I’m in agony,” she said, with a flair for drama.

Ethan reached into his briefcase again and pulled out a tube of lotion. “Here,” he said, handing it to her. “Put this on the burn. It takes the sting away instantly.”

She looked surprised. “Thank you,” she said.

“You can keep it,” Ethan added.

“That’s so nice of you,” she said, slipping the tube into her apron pocket. “Don’t worry about a tip.”

Once she’d left our table, I turned to him. “Do you always carry sunburn cream with you?” I asked. I liked that he’d talked so easily to the waitress. Glen would have looked right through her. Why did I keep comparing him to Glen?

Ethan shrugged. “I love being outdoors,”he said, “but two minutes in the sun and I’m burned. I have to work up to it gradually.”

I smiled. I could still see the delicate little kid in him, hiding behind a much manlier facade. I watched the muscles in his forearms shift as he lifted the hamburger to his mouth. The triangle of skin in the open collar of his shirt was the same ruddy tan as the rest of him, and for a moment, I got lost in the shallow valley at the base of his throat. The muscles low in my belly suddenly contracted. It had been so long since I’d experienced that sensation that it took me a moment to recognize it as desire.

Oh, I thought, this is very strange.

“I was asking about your mother,” I said, returning to the relative safety of our conversation.

“Right,” he said, swallowing a bite of his hamburger. “She died last year. And that’s part of why I’m concerned about my father. He was broken up about Mom, and Ned’s death really hit him hard. I’m trying to get him to see a counselor, someone who works with the elderly, but he won’t accept help any more than Ned would.” He lifted a French fry to his mouth, then set it down again. “I actually think he wants to die at this point.”

“Is he ill?” I asked.

“Not ill. Just old. Just old and very sad. He lives in an independent-living residence in Lakewood. I mentioned that I was having lunch with you today, just to test his reaction. He seemed surprised, but that was all. It’s like he didn’t really get it. Didn’t understand who you were.” He ate the French fry. “Are your parents still living?” he asked.

“My father died of a heart attack two years after Isabel was killed,” I said. I didn’t need to add that the stress of losing his favorite daughter had taken a terrible toll on my father. “My mother still lives alone and is doing very well. She works at McDonald’s.”

He managed a laugh. “She always was a pistol,” he said.

I nibbled at my shrimp salad. “I think,” I said slowly, “that in addition to your father and my mother, we also need to consider George Lewis’s family, don’t you?”

He pressed his napkin to his lips. “Of course,” he said. “And I don’t feel good about that. But Lewis is dead and—”

“That makes me so unbelievably sad,” I interrupted him, shaking my head. “I always knew he was innocent and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.”

Ethan fell silent. Slowly he lifted his hamburger and took another bite.

“Did Ned ever say anything to you that might make you think he knew more than he was letting on?” I asked.

Ethan shook his head as he swallowed. “We never talked about it. Early on, I remember my parents attributing the change in him to what had happened to Isabel, but he and I never spoke about it at all.” He moved the straw from one side of his lemonade glass to the other. His fingernails were clean and short, his hands nicely shaped. “Ned and I were really different,” he continued. “Our interests were different, and…our philosophies on life. I tend to see the glass as half-full, while Ned was usually pretty down.”

“How about your father?” I asked. “Did he ever change his story on where Ned was that night?”

Ethan leaned back in his chair again, narrowing his eyes at me. “Julie, please don’t play Nancy Drew with this,” he said. “Don’t think about this as a plot in one of your books. This is real life. You’re talking about my father and my brother.”

His words took me by surprise and I felt anger rise up in me. “What about my family?” I asked, trying to keep my voice as calm as his. I recognized the power in his quiet demeanor. “I don’t want to deal with this either, Ethan. Do you think I want to relive Isabel’s death all over again? I don’t. The idea terrifies me. But we need to know what really happened. All of us. And if you don’t take the letter to the police, I have no choice but to send them the copy Abby gave me.”

Other diners were staring at me, forks halfway to their mouths, and I knew my voice had not been as quiet as I’d thought.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re right. Both our families are mired in this mess. And you’re also right that the authorities need to know about this. But would waiting a bit longer matter that much? Please.”

“I don’t want to wait, Ethan,” I said. “Your father could live another decade.” I felt cruel, but my family had lived with Isabel’s loss for forty-one years. George Lewis and his family had endured his unjust imprisonment. I hated to think that he might still be alive if he hadn’t served time for a murder he didn’t commit. If a terrible mistake had been made, it needed to be set right.

“You think Ned did it,” Ethan said.

Slowly I nodded.

Ethan closed his eyes and let out his breath. “All right,” he said, opening his eyes again. He looked out the window instead of at me. “I’ll take the letter to the police.”

“Why?” I asked, mystified by his change of heart.

“Because,” he said, looking me squarely in the face, “I need to know that you’re wrong.”

CHAPTER 6

Lucy

I lived in Plainfield, a ten-minute drive from my hometown of Westfield and only two blocks from the high school, so I always walked to and from my teaching job. Today, the air-conditioning in the school broke down during the first ten minutes of my summer-school class. I had a hard time focusing on my lesson plan, and the kids, never happy to be there in the first place, wanted to be anywhere but cooped up in that building. There we sat, twenty grumpy kids and me. I was as glad as they were when the bell rang.

Walking home, I wondered how Julie’s lunch with Ethan was going. As much as I’d tried to talk her out of it, I knew she was right to want the police to know about the letter. I just hated for her to have to go through something so emotionally taxing, and I wished she’d at least waited to meet Ethan until a day I could go with her. She’d been anxious about it. I called her during my break to give her moral support. She was on the parkway headed for Spring Lake and wouldn’t talk to me on her cell phone while she was driving. That was Julie. Always, always careful. Always afraid of making a mistake.

I lived in one of Plainfield’s painted ladies, the huge, beautifully restored Victorians on West Eighth Street. The house was divided into three spacious apartments, and mine was on the top floor, where I used the turret as my sunny music room. My neighbors were the gay couple who’d renovated the house and an African-American couple who also taught at the high school. Sometimes, in the evening, the five of us would sit on the porch and exchange stories. Everyone was tolerant of my violin practice, which was fortunate. I loved living there.

I knew Shannon was in my apartment even before I reached the house, spotting her in the turret window. Most likely, she’d been watching for me. I waved and she waved back, and I wondered what was wrong. Shannon had a key to my apartment and could come and go as she pleased, but she hadn’t stopped by unannounced in months.

I crossed the marble-floored foyer, and had started climbing the broad, circular staircase when I heard her voice from above.

“How was school?” she called down to me.

I tipped my head back to see her leaning over the railing of the top level, high above me.

“Hot,” I said. “Air conditioner broke.”

“Ugh,” Shannon said. “You poor thing.”

“And aren’t you supposed to be working?” I asked once I reached the landing. I gave her a hug.

“I’m going in late,” she said. “I have to talk to you.” She had the most beautiful brown eyes. I imagined guys melting into puddles at her feet. Were her eyes a bit bloodshot today, though? I tried not to stare.

I put my arm around her as we walked into the apartment. “What’s the problem, kiddo?” I asked.

She circled my waist with her own arm. “Only everything,” she said.

I dropped my briefcase on the dining-room chair. “Do you want something to drink?” I lifted the hem of my green tank top and waved it back and forth with my hands, trying to let some cool air reach my damp skin. “Soda? Iced tea.”

She shook her head. “I helped myself,” she said, pointing to the coffee table in the living room. I saw a glass of iced tea on a coaster. It was nearly empty; she’d been there awhile.

“It’s mango,” I said. “Good, isn’t it?”

She nodded. “Uh-huh.”

“Let me get some and then we’ll talk, okay?”

She sat on my old floral camelback sofa in the living room, looking like a model, her white shirt and capris in stark contrast to the mauve and cranberry tones of the upholstery. I poured my iced tea in the kitchen, planning my end of the conversation in my mind. Certainly, she was here to talk about Julie’s reaction to her living with Glen for the summer. I’d told her I would support her in that, and I would.

She shifted to the very edge of the sofa when I came back into the room, as if preparing for a job interview. I sat down sideways in my favorite overstuffed chair and threw my legs over one of the arms, kicking off my sandals and letting them fall to the floor.

“I know your mom didn’t react well to you wanting to move in with your dad,” I said, lifting the glass to my lips.

She shook her head, dropping her gaze quickly to her hands where they were knotted in her lap. “No,” she said. “But that’s not why I’m here.”

“No?” I prompted.

She looked at me. Her eyes were red.

“I’m pregnant,” she said, catching me completely off guard. My jaw dropped open, but no words came out.

“I’m sorry,” she said, as though she’d hurt me.

“But you’re on the pill,” I said.

“I missed one.” She played with the fringe of the beige afghan lying over the arm of the sofa. “But I took it the next day, the second I remembered. I guess I was too late with it or something.”

“How far along are you?” I asked.

“Sixteen weeks,” she said. “Almost exactly.”

“Sixteen weeks!” I looked at her belly, masked by the loose white top she was wearing. Suddenly it made sense. Her weight gain, her deadened spirit, the lack of life in her face.

“I’m due December twentieth,” she said.

“Due?” I asked. “You mean…you plan to have this baby?”

She nodded. “The baby’s father and I talked about it and we decided to have it.”

“Who the hell is the baby’s father?” I asked, not angrily. Not with much emotion other than confusion. “Your mother said you haven’t even been out on a date in months.”

“She’s right,” she said. “I haven’t, because I’m totally in love with…the baby’s father and he lives in Colorado. His name is Tanner Stroh.”

“How do you know him?” Thoughts were zipping through my mind faster than I could capture them: how Julie would react to this news, my mother becoming a great-grandmother, Shannon’s music career. She was supposed to enter Oberlin in the fall!

“I met him online when I was researching a paper on the Civil War,” she said. “He has a Web site that I went to. We started e-mailing. And we talk a lot on the phone.”

I used to teach American history, and in spite of myself, I liked the fact that this guy from Colorado, of all places, had a Web site about the Civil War. I managed to stop myself from asking if the site was biased in favor of the North or South.

“And apparently you’ve met in person,” I said, motioning toward her midriff.

“He came here over his spring break,” she said, tugging one of the pieces of fringe completely free of the afghan. She grimaced, looked at me. “Sorry,” she said.

“It’s okay.” I moved my hand in a circular motion to keep her talking. “Where did he stay?”

“He has some friends in Montclair.” Her lower lip suddenly began to tremble. “He’s awesome, Lucy,” she said, shaking her head as if she couldn’t believe her good fortune in meeting him. “You would love him,” she said. “I know you would.”

I wasn’t at all sure about that. I wished she had told me earlier. Much earlier, so we could have had a reasonable conversation about her options. I felt a little betrayed by her. Shannon had always confided in me. I thought I knew everything about her.

“Why didn’t you ever tell me about this guy?” I asked, thinking of all the lunches and dinners we’d shared during the past six months or so when she’d obviously had this Tanner person on her mind and yet had said nothing.

“I didn’t want to hear you say I was being stupid,” she said.

“When have I ever told you you were being stupid?” I asked. “And why would I start now?”

“You know…” She played with the loose piece of fringe in her hands. “Because he lives so far away and I met him on the Internet and everything.”

I felt suspicious. “What’s the everything part?” I asked.

“He’s twenty-seven,” she said, and stopped playing with the fringe as she waited for my reaction.

I tried not to let the shock show on my face. There were a hundred things I wanted to say, but none of them would be helpful to her.

“And what do you know about him?” I managed to keep my voice steady as I asked the question.

She smiled for the first time since I’d arrived home, one of her dimples showing, and her eyes got the faraway look of a woman smitten.

“He’s so amazing,” she said. “He’s in graduate school to get his Ph.D. in history. The Civil War was his undergraduate project. Now he’s working on something about the Holocaust. He’s totally gorgeous and brilliant. He wants to be a college professor,” she said, trying to win my heart. She knew I had a soft spot for anyone who teaches.

“What did he say when you told him you were pregnant?” I didn’t trust this totally gorgeous, practically middle-aged future professor one bit. He lived two thousand miles away. He could be some sleazeball fabricating his credentials. But he did have that Web site. I would be sure to check it out.

“He was really upset,” she said, “but mostly for me. I mean, he said he didn’t really want me to have an abortion, but he understood how having a baby would screw up my plans for college and everything, and he said that if that’s what I wanted, that’s what I should do.”

“And what—”

“I can’t do it, Lucy.” There was a plea in her voice, begging me to understand. “If it happened last year, I would have had an abortion. If it had happened before I was done with high school. But now…it would feel selfish of me to do it now. This is my baby.” She rested her hands over her barely there belly.

“Oh, sweetie,” I said, aching for her. I thought of how hard the past few months must have been for her, keeping this secret from the people who cared most about her. I thought of her 4.2 grade point average and her responsibilities as president of her class. How on earth had she held it together so well? She was pretty amazing herself.

“He’ll support me and the baby,” she said. “He wants me to move to Colorado and we’ll both get jobs and he’ll go to school part-time. Then, after the baby’s a little older, I can go to college.”

Tears burned my eyes. We’d all thought Shannon’s future was so neatly mapped out for her. She’d gotten into a prestigious and competitive music program. She was talented enough to have a wonderful career ahead of her with a good symphony orchestra. Now I pictured her living a marginal existence in Colorado with a man she barely knew and a baby to take care of.

“You’re majorly upset with me,” she said.

“I’m upset, you’re right. It’s too much too quick for me to absorb.”

“I know,” she said. “I should have told you about him long ago.”

“You knew I’d give you flak.”

She nodded.

“Only because I love you and worry about you.”

She nodded again, swallowing hard, the tremor returning to her lower lip.

I sat upright on the chair, pressing my palms together in the lap of my long skirt. My braid fell over my shoulder as I leaned toward her. “I’m trying to absorb what this means for you,” I said. “For your future.”

“You know how much I love kids,” she said. “I’d planned to be a cellist first and a mom later. I’m just going to reverse the order. I mean, if I had to, like, choose between the two things, I would choose being a mother.”

Was that true? Shannon had wanted to be a cellist in a symphony orchestra ever since Julie and Glen took her to her first New York Philharmonic concert when she was five years old. Had the adults in her life, anxious to encourage that dream, ignored her more ordinary ambitions, or was Shannon just kidding herself?

“You always said you had a calling to play the cello,” I said.

“I still love it,” she said. “I still want to play and I still want to go to school…eventually. I just can’t do it now. You didn’t go to college right away. Is that so terrible?”

“Of course not,” I said. I wanted to ask if this Tanner guy planned to marry her. I wanted to ask how she planned to take care of a baby and “eventually” go to school. But those questions would not be helpful. Not yet. Instead, I continued listening to her, trying to be as nonjudgmental as possible. She would get enough of that elsewhere.

“How long do you think you can keep this from your mother?” I asked. “Is that why you want to live with your dad? You think he won’t notice?”

“I don’t know what to do, exactly.” She stretched the piece of fringe taut between her hands, then dropped it in her lap. “Tanner really can’t have me move in with him until September, because he’s living with some other people right now and there wouldn’t be room for me.”

I hated him. Selfish bastard. I wondered if one of the “other people” was his wife, but I kept my mouth carefully sealed shut.

“So…” She looked at me helplessly. “What should I do? I thought maybe I should live with you, since you know about it, and I just wouldn’t—”

“Uh-uh.” I shook my head back and forth. “You have to tell your parents, Shannon.You have to.You know that, don’t you?”

“Mom will go totally ballistic.”

“Yes, she will.” Julie would have a fit. A baby out of wedlock. Thwarted college plans after she’d driven Shannon all over the eastern half of the country to audition at the schools she’d wanted to attend. A promising future now in doubt. And above all, the worry that something might go wrong. Julie had been waiting seventeen years for something terrible to happen to Shannon. Perhaps this was it.

“Yes, she will,” I repeated. “But you still have to tell her.”

CHAPTER 7

Julie

1962

I thought that getting my period on our third full day at the shore was the worst thing that could happen to me. We were getting ready to go to our local beach, sometimes known as the “Baby Beach” because it was on the bay rather than the ocean and the water was gentle enough for toddlers. I loved swimming in the bay. I was hoping I could find some kids my age there to play with. I was already feeling lonely and had to admit that I missed the friendship Ethan used to provide. There were no other kids my age on our street. Lucy was useless because she was so afraid of everything and Isabel wanted nothing to do with me. In front of her

friends, she treated me as though I was an embarrassment to her. Lucy was in the living room, watching The Edge of Night with Grandma while she blew up her Flintstones tube. Isabel was getting the beach umbrella from the garage and I was gathering towels from different corners of the house, when I suddenly got that ache low in my belly that had become all too familiar to me in just a few months’ time. I went upstairs to the attic and into the tiny curtained bathroom, pulled down my bathing suit and saw the spot. I wanted to cry, but I tried to be stoic. These were the days before slender plastic-encased tampons or stick-on pads. I pulled out the sanitary belt I had quickly come to loathe and affixed the bulky napkin to it, all the while cursing the fact that I’d been born female. Then I put on my shorts and a top, did my duty gathering the towels, marched downstairs and stood in the middle of the kitchen, the towels, some folded, some not, a bundle in my arms.

My mother was wrapping the last of the bologna sandwiches in waxed paper when she looked at me.

“Why did you change out of your bathing suit?” she asked.

“I’m not going,” I said. “I got my stupid friend.”

For a moment, she looked confused. Then she understood. “Oh, honey, I’m sorry.” She walked over to hug me, but she was smiling, which made me doubt her sympathy. “Come to the beach anyway.”

“Everyone will ask why I’m not in my bathing suit,” I whined.

She shrugged as if that was no big deal. “If they do, just say you don’t feel like swimming today,” she said.

Isabel came into the room at that moment, bopping her head to the Four Seasons singing “Sherry” on the transistor radio she was carrying.

“Umbrella’s in the car,” she said to our mother.

“Turn that down, please,” Mom said.

I nearly cringed, expecting Isabel to balk at the request. She and Mom were arguing night and day, usually about curfew and the clothes Isabel wanted to wear, and I was getting tired of it. But Isabel just flicked the little round dial on her radio, lowering the volume, and she never stopped moving to the music. I liked watching her. I knew she was sexy. I knew that was the word boys used to describe her. She was wearing a hot-pink twopiece bathing suit, the bottom barely covering her navel. Her skin was a soft olive tone that would darken to a rich tan in just a few days on the beach. I couldn’t wait to be her age.

Isabel suddenly stopped bouncing around the kitchen and stared at me. “Why aren’t you ready to go, Jules?” she asked.

“I am ready to go,” I said.

“Oh.” Isabel nodded. She looked genuinely sympathetic. “You got the curse.”

“It’s so embarrassing.”

“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry for you. I’ll teach you how to use a tampon.”

“No, you won’t.” Mom opened the cupboard and took out the little plastic badges we needed to wear on our bathing suits in order to use the private beach. “She’s too young.”

It didn’t matter whether Isabel taught me to use a tampon or not. The fact that she’d given me her attention and had made the offer were all that mattered.

“That’s my towel,” Isabel said, abruptly pulling one of the towels from the bundle in my arm, making several others fall out of the pile.

“What’s the big deal?” I said, frustrated as I picked up the towels from the floor.

“No big deal,” she said, sending me a signal with her eyes that said Shut up!

I thought I understood. The towel she’d taken was one I’d never seen before. It was very soft and huge and it had a giraffe on it. I was sure it was a gift from Ned.

We piled into the hot car for the two-minute drive to our beach. Lucy had to put a towel beneath her legs because she thought the car seat might burn her. She already had her tube around her waist, as if she was afraid she might drown in the heat, and I helped her pin her badge to the strap of her bathing suit.

Given that it was the middle of the week, our beach was not at all crowded, and that disappointed me. We walked from the crushed-shell parking lot across the hot sand toward the water, and I didn’t see another kid who looked like she—or he—was my age. Then I finally spotted one. He was lying on his stomach at the water’s edge near the sea grass, poking at a pile of seaweed with a stick. Ethan. What a spaz, I thought. How had I ever been friends with him?

We reached a spot on the sand that my mother declared to be perfect. Isabel set down her radio and giraffe towel and pushed the umbrella stand into the sand, then opened it. Mom and I spread one of our two blankets out on the sand beneath it, not far from where the bay water lapped softly at the beach, and Lucy instantly sat down on it, the tube still glued to her body. She sat cross-legged, opened her book and began to read.

“You can lay that blanket down right next to this one,” Mom said to Isabel.

Isabel looked toward the lifeguard stand and I followed her gaze. It took me only a moment to realize that Ned Chapman was the lifeguard. No wonder he was already so tan. He wore sunglasses and had white zinc oxide on his nose. His blond hair looked even lighter than it had a couple of days ago. The hairs on his bare legs glittered in the sunlight, and I felt that new bellytightening sensation I would get each time I saw him. I’d feel that way for twenty minutes or so, then lose myself in the comfort of Nancy Drew and her safe and improbable mysteries. The unfamiliar desire that was mounting in me, in combination with my impetuous nature and need for excitement, scared the daylights out of me, and Nancy offered great relief.

As if he knew I was thinking about him, Ned looked over at us and waved. I waved back, even though I knew it was not me he was greeting.

“Can I go over to where Mitzi and Pam are?” Isabel asked.

“May I please,” Mom said.

“May I please?”

“Of course. Do you want a glass of lemonade before you go?”

“No, thanks.” Isabel was already on her way, her radio and towel in her arms, and I wondered if our mother realized Ned was over there. I watched my sister’s long legs as she strode through the sand to where the throng of teenagers were tanning themselves, radios blaring, around the lifeguard stand. God, I wanted to be Isabel! I wanted to know how to use a tampon and have those long legs and fully formed breasts. I wanted boys’ heads to turn when I walked past them, the way their heads were turning toward Isabel now. I watched the group of kids greet her. Pamela Durant sat up, tugging at a strap of her bathing suit top that had slipped down her shoulder. She grinned at Isabel, patting the blanket next to her, and Isabel sat down. It was an attractive group of teenagers. There were about ten of them, all long limbs and breasts and bare chests, wavy hair shining in the sunlight and bodies glistening with iodine-tinted baby oil. Most of them were smoking, but I didn’t think Izzy had ever had a cigarette.

I knew a few of Isabel’s friends because she’d belonged to this group for the past couple of years. Mitzi Caruso was the nicest of the girls, but also the shyest and the least attractive. She had black hair that stayed frizzy all summer long and she was on the chubby side. Pamela Durant was gorgeous, maybe even prettier than my sister. She wore her light blond hair in a long ponytail on the side of her head, and she reminded me of Cricket, that character Connie Stevens played on Hawaiian Eye. The only other boy I knew was Bruno Walker, Ned’s best friend. His real name was Bruce, but only the adults called him that, and he wore his black hair in a ducktail. He had green eyes and pouty lips and his body was big and muscular. I’d heard Isabel and Pam talking one time about how he looked like Elvis Presley. They said he was wild: He rode on the hood of some kid’s car once and he drank too much. He was good-looking, but he didn’t interest me the way Ned did.

I saw Ned glance in our direction from his perch on the lifeguard stand, then jump down to the sand and walk the few steps to where Isabel was sitting. He put his hand on her shoulder, and my belly started turning flip-flops again as he leaned down to whisper something in her ear. She laughed, reaching up to give a playful tug on the black whistle hanging around his neck.

You’re supposed to be guarding the water, I said to myself. I lay down on the blanket on my stomach, turning my head away from them and closing my eyes. I was jealous, pure and simple.

I knew something about Isabel and Ned no one else did, something I could hold over my sister if I ever had that need. The day before, she and I had been reading on the porch while Mom sketched something at her easel. It looked as if she was getting ready to paint the rooster man’s shack on the other side of the canal. I wondered if she knew who lived there, but I didn’t dare tell her about my visit with him. Isabel suddenly looked up from her book.

“Can I go for a ride in Ned’s boat today?” she asked.

I waited for Mom to come back with her usual May I please, but instead she simply looked across the canal as though deep in thought. Then she nodded. “If either Ethan or Julie goes with you, then yes, you can go.”

I was thrilled! I couldn’t wait for a ride in the Chapmans’ Boston Whaler. I hoped we could ski. But Isabel was having none of it.

“Really, Mother,” she said, closing her book and getting to her feet, “that’s ridiculous.”

She walked into the house and Mom called after her, “Remember, you’re supposed to look for a job this summer.”

Mom began working on her sketch again as though nothing had happened, and disappointed, I returned to The Secret in the Old Attic. Later that day, I walked to the beach by myself and as I passed the little marina at the end of the canal, I saw Isabel standing on the bulkhead staring out at the water. I called to her, but she didn’t seem to hear me. Then I saw Ned pull his boat up tight against the bulkhead. He reached out a hand and Isabel climbed in.

I stopped walking, my mouth hanging open. I couldn’t believe she would so completely disregard our mother’s rules. I watched with envy as the boat picked up speed and raced out of the marina, and I tucked that image away for some day when I might need it.

“Come on, Lucy,” Mom said now. “Let’s go in the water.” I opened my eyes to see that she’d arranged the sandwiches and thermos, suntan lotion and her book, all in a row along one side of the blanket. Now she was ready to swim.

“I’m reading,” Lucy said. She was out of my line of sight, but I was certain she had not lifted her eyes from her book.

I saw Mom kneel down in front of her. “It’s a new summer, Lucy,” she said. “You’re eight now. It’s really silly to still be afraid of the water.”

Lucy didn’t respond.

“Chicken,” I said, closing my eyes again.

“Shh!” Mom said to me. “That’s not going to help.”

“Go in the water, Lucy.” I sat up, feeling guilty. I didn’t want to be a nasty older sister. I knew how that felt. “Then later I’ll go on the swings with you.”

With a sigh too heavy for an eight-year-old, Lucy got to her feet. My mother pulled on her own bathing cap, tucking her dark, wavy chin-length hair up inside it. Then she helped Lucy pull hers over her short permed curls, as though my sister might actually go into water deep enough to get her hair wet. I watched as the two of them walked toward the roped-off section of the water, holding hands. Mom pointed to a plane that was flying above the water, trailing a Coppertone banner behind it. As I’d figured, Lucy went in up to her knees and refused to go any farther. I couldn’t hear their conversation, but I could tell that my mother spent much of it coercing and Lucy spent much of it shaking her head no. Finally giving up, my mother walked into the water by herself. I watched her dive in once she’d reached the deeper water. She swam underwater to escape from the roped area, then began swimming parallel to the shore with long, fluid strokes. She looked beautiful, like a sea creature instead of a woman. I longed to be out there with her. She’d taught me to swim when I was half Lucy’s age.

I looked at my younger sister. She was still standing in the knee-high water, her yellow ruffly bathing suit dry, the pathetic Flintstones tube around her waist as she watched our mother swim. Suddenly I felt so sorry for her that I thought I might cry.

“Lucy, honey,” I called, the endearment slipping from my mouth before I could stop it.

She turned to look at me.

“Come back to the blanket,” I said.

She did. She trudged back to the blanket, pulled off the bathing cap, shimmied out of her tube and sat down next to me to read.

“Lay down and I’ll put some suntan lotion on you,” I said.

Mom had already coated her with it, but I just wanted to do something nice for her. She lay down on her stomach, and I rubbed the coconut-scented lotion on her back. I felt her shoulder blades, pointy beneath my palms. She seemed so fragile. I wanted to bend over and hug her. I wished I could give her just an ounce of my courage. I had more than I could manage.

I was putting the lid back on the tube when I realized Mr. and Mrs. Chapman were now on the beach directly behind us. They were sitting on striped, legless beach chairs, and Mrs. Chapman had her head tilted back, her eyes closed, face held toward the sun. She had pretty blond hair, cut short in a cap around her head. Mr. Chapman was reading a book, but he must have sensed me looking at him, because he took off his sunglasses and I could see him returning my gaze. He did not look happy to see me.

“Oh,” he said. “Hello, Lucy.”

“I’m Julie,” I said.

“Julie, of course.”

I looked toward the sea grass where I’d seen Ethan lying down, but he was no longer there. Then I spotted him sitting on the pier, holding one end of a string that disappeared below the water’s surface. He was probably crabbing. If I could still stand him, I would have enjoyed doing that with him.

“Has Charles…has your father gone back to Westfield for the week?” Mr. Chapman asked me.

I nodded. “Don’t you have to go home during the week, too?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Not since I’ve been on the Supreme Court,” he said. “We break for the summer.”

I was confused. I’d had no idea Mr. Chapman was on the Supreme Court. “Why did you outlaw school prayer?” I said, taking up my father’s fight.

“What?” He looked puzzled, then he laughed. His features were softer when he laughed and I could see some of Ned’s good looks in him. “That’s the United States Supreme Court,” he said. “I’m chief justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court.”

“Oh.” I felt embarrassed, as though this was something I should have known.

“I would have outlawed school prayer, though,” he added, “had I been in the position to do so.”

I suddenly understood why my father didn’t seem to like Mr. Chapman. I couldn’t remember ever seeing them talk to each other.

“Don’t start, Ross.” Mrs. Chapman didn’t move her head from her sunbathing, but she smiled as she chastised her husband.

“I think there should be a prayer to start the day in school,” I said, feeling immensely adult and grateful for my father’s guidance.

Mr. Chapman leaned forward. His eyes were the color of my mother’s pewter coffeepot. “It’s wonderful that you’re taking a stand, Julie,” he said. “It’s important to get involved, no matter what side you’re on. But I happen to disagree with you. In this country, we don’t only have Christians. We have Jews and Muslims and atheists. Do you honestly think those children should have to say a Christian prayer in school every morning?”

I only knew one Jewish girl and I certainly didn’t know any Muslims. I wasn’t sure how to respond. He had a point I could not argue against, but I clung so fiercely to my father’s righteousness that I couldn’t back down. “Atheists are stupid,” I said, my cheeks reddening instantly because I knew it was my statement that was stupid.

He laughed. “And they might say the same thing about your beliefs.”

“Are you an atheist?” I asked, suddenly wondering if that was his reason for wanting to abolish school prayer.

“No, I’m Catholic. Just like you are. But even Catholics can disagree on important issues.”

His wife suddenly dipped her head. She shaded her eyes to look at me, then smiled. To her husband, she said, “Stop badgering her.”

“We’re having a healthy debate,” Mr. Chapman said, and I was glad he felt that way even after my weak comment about atheists.

“How are you, Julie, dear?” Mrs. Chapman said. “We’ve barely had a chance to see your family yet this summer. Where’s your mother?”

I turned to the bay, pointing toward the last place I’d seen my mother swimming, but she was walking out of the water, pulling off her bathing cap, her dark hair springing into curls around her face. Like most women her age, she wore a black bathing suit with a little skirt on it, but it was clear that her long, lean thighs did not need to be hidden in any way. I felt a surge of pride. She was so pretty.

“Hello, Joan,” my mother said, picking up a towel from the blanket and patting it to her face. “And Ross.”

“Maria.” Mr. Chapman nodded to my mother.

“How’s the water?” Mrs. Chapman asked.

“Chilly,” my mother said. “But very refreshing.” She turned her attention to Lucy and me. “Let’s have some lunch, girls, okay?” She sat down on the blanket, her back to the Chapmans, blocking my view of them and putting an end to the “healthy” debate.

We were eating our bologna on Wonder Bread sandwiches when I looked over to where Isabel had been sitting with her friends and saw that the blankets were empty. On the lifeguard stand, a boy I didn’t recognize sat tossing his black whistle from one hand to another. I knew where they all were. I looked out at the water toward the platform, a heavy wooden raft anchored in the deep water and held afloat by empty oil drums. Every last one of the teenagers was crammed on top of the platform, which was really too small for all of them. I could hear them laughing from where I sat. I could hear music, too, and I wondered how they’d managed to get a radio out there in the deep water without it getting wet. My sister and another girl were standing up, dancing, moving to the music. Bruno Walker was balanced on the edge of the platform, and I watched him do a perfect dive into the water. Then he swam back to the platform, hoisting himself onto it using his muscular arms rather than climbing up the ladder. He took a seat near one of the girls I didn’t know.

I chewed my sandwich slowly, watching them. I’d never been on the platform, although I longed to be. I was a good swimmer and I was certain I could even hoist myself up onto it the way Bruno had just done, but I was intimidated by the teenagers who always hung out there, Isabel included. It was clearly their territory. A twelve-year-old would not be welcome. Watching them, I had no way of knowing that my sister, who looked so vibrant and alive, would be dead before the summer was over. And I had no way of knowing how that platform would one day haunt my dreams.

CHAPTER 8

Maria

I weeded my garden every day. Although it was only late June, I could already see weeds popping up through the mulch Julie and Lucy had spread for me. Most people hated weeding, but I didn’t. I loved being in the sun—the Italian portion of my blood, no doubt. Maybe I had more wrinkles than I would if I hadn’t spent so much of my life outdoors, but I didn’t care. It was a privilege to grow old, and not everyone got to enjoy it. I was grateful for every minute I was given.

I liked keeping the flower beds neat and orderly, scratching out the weeds from around the red begonias and pink peonies, making order out of chaos. Julie was exactly like me in that regard. Lucy was another story altogether. She was sloppy and complicated. I tried not to think of where Isabel would have fallen in that continuum of neatness to messiness. Thinking about things like that could drive you crazy.

That morning in late June, I was sitting on the little seat-onrollers Julie had bought for me, working on the flower bed near the front steps, when a car pulled into my driveway. It was a big car with a long hood, the kind of car an old man would drive, and sure enough, I watched as a man about my age got out of the driver’s side.

I set down my trowel and stood up slowly. That’s one thing I’d learned—I had to take my time getting to my feet after working in the sun, or everything would go dark for a few seconds. I took off my gardening gloves and dropped them to the mulch as I watched the old man retrieve a cane from the car and begin to hobble toward me.

“Hello,” I called out, taking a few steps across my lawn.

He waved at me. “Hello, Maria,” he said, and my mind started the frantic racing it did when someone unfamiliar seemed to know me. My memory was not bad at all, but when I’d meet people out of context, I often couldn’t place them. Did I know this man from church? From Micky D’s? I shaded my eyes with my hand, trying to see him more clearly. He was tall and nearly gaunt, his white hair very thin on top. He limped when he walked toward me and I knew he needed that cane and that it wasn’t just for show. He looked like a complete stranger to me.

He smiled as he neared me, and although there was something familiar in the curve of his lips, I still couldn’t place him.

“You don’t recognize me, do you?” he said, without reproach.

I shook my head. “I’m sorry, I don’t,” I said. “Do you go to Holy Trinity?”

He held his left hand toward me, his right hand leaning heavily on his cane. “I’m Ross Chapman,” he said.

I had stood up slowly enough, of that I was certain, yet my head went so light I thought I might pass out. I took his hand more to steady myself than to shake it and I could not seem to find my voice.

“It’s been a long, long time,” he said.

I managed to nod. “Yes,” I said.

“You are still a stunning woman,” he said, even though I was wearing my gardening overalls and probably had dirt smeared on my face.

“Thank you.” I couldn’t bring myself to reciprocate. Ross Chapman had once been a very handsome man, but in the fortyone years since I’d last seen him in person, he had withered and paled. After we left the summer house for the last time in 1962, I would see his picture occasionally in the papers and on TV, since he was a prominent figure in New Jersey and had even run for governor. But he looked nothing like that robust politician now.

“Is this how you spend your days?” he asked, motioning toward the flower bed. “Working in your garden?”

“I also work at McDonald’s in Garwood and I’m a volunteer at the hospital,” I said.

“McDonald’s?” he laughed. “That’s marvelous. You always knew how to keep busy,” he said, nodding with what I guessed was approval.

I wasn’t sure what to do with him. We stood for a moment in an awkward silence. I didn’t want to invite him in, but I saw no alternative.

“Would you like to come in?” I asked finally. “Have something to drink?”

“I’d like that,” he said.

I walked up the front steps and inside the house, holding the door open for him. I could see that the four concrete steps were a bit of a struggle for him and I looked away, not wanting to embarrass him by noticing his frailty.

“Why don’t you sit here?” I motioned toward the armchair in the living room, then rattled off the things I could offer him to drink.

“Just ice water,” he said.

In the kitchen, I took my time getting out the glasses, filling them with ice. I wished he had not come. I could see no point to this visit. I could have quite happily lived out the rest of my days without seeing my old neighbor again.

When I returned to the living room, I saw that he had not taken a seat as I’d suggested. Instead, he was looking at the pictures on the mantel. There was one of the four of us—Charles and myself and Julie and Lucy, when the girls were fifteen and eleven. It was the last picture I had of Charles; he’d dropped dead from a heart attack in our kitchen only a few weeks after it had been taken. Then there were Julie’s and Lucy’s old college-graduation pictures and, next to them, Shannon’s senior picture. Ross lifted that last one up and looked toward me, a smile on his lips.

“A granddaughter?” he asked.

I nodded. “Shannon,” I said. “She’s Julie’s.” I thought of telling him more about her, how she’d been accepted to Oberlin, how accomplished she was already, but I didn’t want to extend my conversation with Ross any longer than I had to.

“Lovely.” Then he poked a finger at Julie’s picture. “That’s Julie, right? She was the sharp one. The one with the brains and the spunk.”

His words jolted me. Julie had brains, all right, but her spunk had gone out the window long ago. He was right, though. When he knew my girls, Julie was the one who’d had the most gumption.

“Yes,” I said, to keep things short and simple. “She was always up to something.”

Ross limped over to the armchair and sat down. “I have one granddaughter and a great-granddaughter,” he said. He took the glass I held out for him and looked up at me. “But that’s not why I’m here.”

I set a coaster on the end table next to him, then sat on the hassock in front of the other armchair. “Why are you here?” I asked. The back of my neck ached a bit, and I rubbed it. My skin was slick with perspiration, more from anxiety than the heat.

“Do you know that my Ethan and your Julie are meeting for lunch today?” Ross asked.

“What?” I’d been about to take a sip of my water and nearly dropped the glass. “Why on earth?” As far as I knew, Julie and Ethan Chapman had had no contact since 1962.

Ross shrugged. “Ethan just said he was thinking about her and felt like getting together. They planned to meet in Spring Lake.”

“Well,” I said, recovering from the shock. “Good for them. They were friends when they were little.”

“Anyhow,” Ross said, “when Ethan told me he was going to see Julie, it started me thinking about you…about your family. About how I…” He set his glass down on the coaster and looked directly into my eyes. “I mishandled things, Maria. In every which way. I—”

“Water under the bridge, Ross,” I said. “It’s not necessary to rehash it.”

“But I think it is,” he said. I recognized his earnest look as one he’d employed when running for governor. It was a look that made you want to trust him.

“I’m old and tired,” he said. “I really doubt I’ll live much longer and I just want to make amends to any people I might have hurt during my lifetime.”

“What’s wrong?” I asked him. I wondered if he had cancer. He was so thin. “Are you sick?”

He shook his head, brushing my question away with his hand. “I lost Joan last year,” he said, then looked away from me, toward the pictures on the mantel. “And Ned…Ned died just a few weeks ago.”

“Oh,” I said. I understood then how his world had been altered. Ned must have been close to sixty, but that didn’t matter when it came to burying your child. “I’m sorry, Ross.”

“It gave me a new understanding of how you felt when Isabel died.”

“Yes,” I said.

“So, I wanted to talk to you about…I just wanted to apologize.”

“And now you have and that’s fine and enough,” I said. I didn’t like the sympathy I felt for this old man. He was a politician, first and foremost, capable of talking out of both sides of his mouth.

He looked at me so long and hard that I had to look away. I knew he wanted to say more, but whatever it was, I didn’t want to hear it. So I stood up.

“Come on,” I said, holding my hand out to help him from the chair. He’d hardly touched his water, but he had not come here for the refreshments.

He clutched my hand hard as he struggled to his feet. I let him hold on to my arm as I walked with him back down the front steps and out to his car. Neither of us spoke, although I knew there was a lot we could have said if we’d had the courage. I opened the driver’s-side door of his car for him. It made me nervous to think of someone in his condition driving. I had not even asked him where he lived, how far he had to drive.

“What did Ned die from?” I asked, before closing the car door.

“Drinking,” Ross said. “Drowning his sorrows. I don’t think he ever got over losing Isabel.”

I winced at that, then closed the door. I watched him drive away before returning to my seat in the garden. I pulled on my gloves and drew the trowel through the soil, barely able to see what I was doing for the tears. I don’t think he ever got over losing Isabel.

“Neither have I, Ross,” I said out loud. “Neither have I.”

CHAPTER 9

Lucy

Shannon spent most of the afternoon with me as we talked about her dilemma. It was a strange experience for me, watching her shift between tears of anxiety and worry and joy over the new love in her life. She had always been a very grounded, sane person, even as a young child, but listening to her talk about Tanner, I had the odd feeling that she had been taken away by some cult group, brainwashed and returned to us a different person. It was the same Shannon sitting there in my living room, the same beautiful girl who’d brought such joy into her family, but words were coming out of her mouth that were decidedly un-Shannon-like. I felt as though we needed a deprogrammer.

She left about four, saying she had a cello lesson to give at the music store, and she’d been gone no more than fifteen minutes when Julie showed up at my door. I’d tried to reach her on her cell phone to see how the lunch with Ethan had gone, but was only able to get her voice mail, so I’d pulled out my violin, planning to practice for an upcoming ZydaChicks concert.

“I’m interrupting your practice,” Julie said, glancing at the violin in my hand. There was a damp flush to her cheeks that made her look pretty, if uncomfortably warm. I knew she was grappling with hot flashes, something that was still in my future.

“Haven’t even started,” I said, taking her hand with my free one and pulling her into my apartment. “So, how did it go?” I asked, as I put my violin back in its case.

“Not bad.” Julie flopped down on my sofa. The two empty glasses of lemonade were still on the coffee table and I scooped them up and carried them into the kitchen before she could ask who had been there, but she didn’t even seem to notice them.

I glanced at her when I returned to the room. “Are you okay?”

She pressed her hands to her cheeks, which were nearly the color of her red shirt. “I’m just…” She smiled a sort of goofy grin. “Just freaking out, I think,” she said.

“Hot flash?” I asked, although by now I’d guessed it was more than that. She’d just had a conversation about Isabel’s murder. That alone would have been enough to freak her out.

“What?” she said. “Oh, maybe. I don’t even know.” She slipped off her sandals and stretched her legs out on the couch. “I convinced Ethan to take the letter to the police,” she said.

“Oh, that’s excellent.” I felt relieved. I sat down in my armchair again, drawing my legs onto the seat cushion, covering them with my skirt. “Did he take a lot of convincing?”

She nodded. “It took a lot of discussing,” she said. “It was hard and I felt sorry for him.” Julie watched her feet as she flexed them up and down. Then she looked at me. “He just can’t handle the fact that his brother could be guilty after all these years.”

“Of course he can’t,” I said. “What do you think the cops will do with the letter?”

“That’s the scary part,” Julie said. “Ethan has a friend in the police department and he sort of ran it by this guy—in a hypothetical way—to get a sense of what would happen. His friend said they’ll probably start fresh, which I figured they would do. But that means interviewing everyone involved again. I’m guessing that would be me, which is fine, of course. Maybe Ethan and Ned and Izzy’s friends. Mr. Chapman, which worries Ethan.” She bit her lip and looked at me squarely. “And possibly Mom.”

“Ugh,” I said.

“Right. I hope it doesn’t come to that. I’d love to keep her from knowing this is even going on. I could see them badgering her with questions and then she has a heart attack or a stroke or—”

“Julie.” I laughed. One reason my sister could write gripping page-turners was her skill at imagining the worst possible outcome in any situation. I dreaded the scenarios she would be able to create once she learned that Shannon was pregnant. Her ability to turn an event into a catastrophe in her mind had been one of Glen’s many complaints about her. She always worries about everything, he’d whined to me. She never lets herself have any fun. Although there was some truth to the statement, it still infuriated me that he’d made it, that he never took the time to understand the origin of those worries.

“If Mom has to be interviewed, she’ll be fine,” I said. “She would want the truth to come out.” My voice sounded strong, but I too hoped our mother wouldn’t need to be involved in a new investigation.

“I just don’t want her to be hurt any more than she already has been,” Julie said. She pulled a tissue from the pocket of her cropped black slacks, then took off her glasses and began cleaning them.

“She’ll be okay,” I said. “Do you think they’d want to interview me?”

“I doubt it,” she said. “What do you remember about that whole situation?” She held her glasses up to the light, then slipped them on her face again.

I shook my head. “Almost nothing,” I said. “I barely remember anything about the shore at all.You know what I was like—always cowering in the background while everyone else swam or went out in the boat or whatever.” It was as though I hadn’t truly been there. I supposed that I’d repressed most of the memories from the worst summer my family had ever endured. “The other day, though, I remembered when you caught that giant eel and Ethan wanted its guts,” I said.

Julie laughed, and the high flush came to her cheeks again. It made me suspicious. Maybe I wouldn’t have recognized the subtle look of infatuation in her face if I had not just witnessed the same expression in her daughter’s.

“So, what is he like these days?” I probed. “As geeky as he was back then?”

She looked away from me. “He was nice,” she said, and I thought she was trying not to break into a smile. “He…he looked good. I didn’t recognize him at first. He’s a carpenter and he has this amazing body.”

“You’re kidding.” I tried to picture the skinny, gawky kid of my memory with an amazing body.

“And he must have had laser eye surgery, because he wasn’t wearing glasses. His eyes are really blue.”

“Hey,” I said, turning in the chair and putting my feet on the floor. “Are you attracted to him or what?” Julie had shown no interest whatsoever in men since the divorce.

She laughed, shaking her head. “He just looked better than I’d expected, that’s all.”

“If you say so,” I said with a smile. I liked seeing the life and color in her face. It may have been a difficult conversation, but all in all, I thought seeing Ethan Chapman had done her good. Seeing her daughter would be something different altogether, and for the remainder of our conversation, I couldn’t get Shannon out of my mind. I sat there with my sister, knowing a secret that was going to rock her world. It was like looking at someone’s smiling picture on the obituary page.You wanted to warn them: You don’t know it, but you’re going to walk in front of a truck on March 3, 2003. I listened to my sister talk, and I hated having that secret inside me. I needed Shannon to tell Julie soon, for my sake if not for hers.

CHAPTER 10

Julie

Shannon moved to Glen’s on Tuesday. She was only two miles away; I reminded myself. Two miles. I could walk it, although I wouldn’t. She’d moved out to taste her freedom. To get away from my tight reins. What I needed to do was to back off. Sometimes I felt as though the only way I could keep her safe was to be sure she stayed in my line of sight. I wished that children came with guarantees that they would stay healthy, that they would outlive their parents.

I’d walked into her room as she was packing this morning.

“Do you need any help?” I’d asked.

She’d smiled at me, but it wasn’t her real smile. “I’m fine,” she said. She had taken apart her computer setup, the components on her bed, and she was wrapping towels around them.

I pointed to the only free corner of the full-size bed.“May I sit?”

She shrugged. “Sure.”

I watched her carefully wrap a towel around her printer. I was in need of something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I wondered if all parents felt that way when their children were leaving. It seemed monumental. A time for a good talk. To say all the things we thought about but never said to one another. I gave it a try.

“I’ll miss you,” I said.

“I’ll still be around, Mom.” She had finished with the computer and now was working on the middle drawer of her dresser. “I’m just taking one suitcase and my CDs and computer and my cello. It’s not like I’m going off to school already.”

“There’s something I have to ask you,” I said.

She didn’t respond. She folded a pair of shorts, smoothing them into her suitcase, running her hands over them as though it was important to get out every invisible crease. Her long hair swung forward, cutting me off from her face.

“We’ve never really talked about this,” I said, readying myself for a conversation two years overdue. “But I need to know. Do you blame me for the divorce?”

She glanced up at me then, stepping back from her suitcase before reaching into her dresser again, this time for a stack of T-shirts. “Of course not,” she said, dumping the shirts on her bed.

“Do you blame your dad then?”

“I think it was a mutual thing.”

“What do you think happened?” I often wondered if she knew, if she had somehow put two and two together and guessed about Glen’s affair.

She shrugged. “I figured it wasn’t any of my business,” she said.

“Honey, I just want to make sure you…you know, that you don’t think it had anything to do with you. That it was your fault in any way.”

“I know that,” she said, some irritation creeping into her voice. “I think Dad just pissed you off and you pissed him off, that’s all.”

That puzzled me, because I didn’t think I’d ever complained about her father to her.

“What do you think he did that upset me?” I asked.

She put her hands on her hips and looked at me in genuine annoyance. “Mom, I’m trying to pack,” she said. “I have to take my stuff over to Dad’s and be ready to work at the day-care center by noon.”

“I’d like to understand, though,” I persisted. I couldn’t seem to shut up. “I want to make sure that—”

“I think Dad was a slob and that got to you,” she said. “And I think you’re afraid of…the world and that got to him.”

“I’m not afraid of the world,” I said, wounded.

“Mother, you’re a hermit,” she said, grabbing one of the T-shirts and stuffing it unfolded into the suitcase. “Face it.You sit in your little cubbyhole of an office all day long, hanging around with people who don’t exist.”

“That is really unfair.” I felt both defensive and misunderstood. The only thing I truly feared, other than something terrible happening to someone I love, was water. Not water in my bathtub, or even in a swimming pool. But the thought of swimming in the open water of a bay or the ocean or a lake was enough to start my heart racing. And I had to admit, I hadn’t been in a boat since the night Isabel died. But I was not afraid of the world.

“I fly regularly,” I said to Shannon. “I go on book tours—which are stressful, to say the least—for weeks at a time. I speak in front of huge audiences. I try new foods.” My voice was rising. “I walk through Westfield in the dark. I teach memoir writing at the nursing home. I do volunteer work at the hospital. So please don’t tell me that I’m a hermit and that my fears are keeping me locked up in my office, or whatever it was you said.”

“You’re right, I’m sorry.” Her tone told me she was only saying it to end the conversation.

I ran my hand over the T-shirt on the top of the pile on her bed, recognizing it as one I’d sent her from Seattle when I was touring there. “The only thing I’m really afraid of is losing you,” I said, the words leaving my mouth before I could stop them.

She looked at me, a few bras hanging from her fingers. “Do you know what a burden that is?” she asked. “I feel like every single thing I do, I not only have to take my own well-being into account, but yours, too.”

I stared down at the T-shirt, knowing she was right, maybe fully understanding for the first time how difficult it was to be my daughter. I was uncertain what to say next.

“I’m done packing,” she said, closing the flap on her suitcase and running the zipper around it. “I’m going to carry this stuff down to my car.”

“I’ll help you,” I said, standing up. “But I want to continue this conversation some time. Not now, though. We should probably put it on the shelf for now. I don’t want you to move out with either of us angry at the other.”

“I didn’t want to talk about it in the first place,” she said, lifting her suitcase from the bed to the floor.

“I love you,” I said. “I hope it’s good for you, staying with Dad for the summer.”

I helped her load the computer and suitcase into her little Honda, and once she’d gone, I went into my office. It was true that I usually felt safe and secure in that room with my “people who don’t really exist.” But I hadn’t felt happy in there for the past few days. I still had a blank white computer screen beneath the words Chapter Four, and I had no idea how to fill it. There were times when my characters seemed unimportant and a ridiculous waste of my time. This morning was one of them.

I had written and deleted four paragraphs when the phone rang. It was Ethan.

“I took the letter to the police department yesterday,” he said.

“Oh, that’s good, Ethan.” I got up from my office chair and carried the phone to the love seat where I could get comfortable. I was surprised and pleased that he’d taken care of the matter so quickly. “What did they say?”

“Just what we expected,” he said. “They’re reopening the case. I stopped at the grocery store after I dropped off the letter, and by the time I got home, there was already a message on my voice mail telling me they want to search Ned’s house.”

I felt a flicker of guilt. I’d persuaded Ethan to take the letter to the police and already the Chapmans’ privacy was being invaded, while I sat in a house that would never be encroached on in any way.

“What could they possibly find at Ned’s house forty-some years after the fact?” I asked, although I knew the answer the moment the question left my lips: DNA.

“Who knows?” Ethan said. “A journal, maybe, though I know—or at least, I don’t think—he ever kept one. Letters. Keepsakes. But the truth is, and I told them this, Abby and I already went through everything. We threw out sacks and sacks of stuff that seemed unimportant and it’s too late to recover any of that, I’m sure. We put anything valuable in boxes that I was just going to keep in storage along with his furniture, until I have the time to go through them and see what I want to sell and what I want to hold on to. The boxes are all there at his house, and the cops plan to take them apart and go through everything.”

“I think,” I said carefully, “they’ll probably look for DNA.”

He was quiet. “How would that help them after all this time?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “If they kept anything from the scene, maybe.” I knew that, these days, they bagged victim’s hands, allowing any DNA material that might have belonged to the suspect to fall into the bags, but I didn’t know if that had been done as early as 1962.

“But Isabel was in the—” He stopped himself, I knew, for my benefit.

“In the water,” I finished the sentence for him. “I know. I don’t really know how that would affect the collection of evidence.” I didn’t want to talk about this, more for his sake than my own.

“Are you upset?” I asked.

“Not with you,” he said. “I know you and I are hoping for different outcomes, though, and I guess I’m…I’m just worried.”

“That they’ll learn it was Ned?”

“No, because I know it couldn’t have been,” he said, a stubborn edge to his soft voice. “I’m worried they might somehow put evidence together that would come—incorrectly—to that conclusion, though. I mean, I don’t understand how they’d collect the suspect’s DNA from your sister after all this time, but she was always with Ned, so it’s certainly possible they’d find his DNA on her.”

Or in her, I thought but did not say.

“And as I mentioned before, I’m worried about my father having to be dragged into this.”

“I know,” I said, “and I’m sorry this is so hard. But let’s not borrow trouble. One step at a time.”

“Right,” he said. “You know one good thing that has come out of this?”

“What’s that?”

“I enjoyed seeing you again, Julie,” he said. “Even though it wasn’t an easy conversation, it was a treat having lunch with you.”

I smiled, feeling an unexpected rush of excitement run through my body. “It was,” I agreed.

“I was remembering things about you,” he said. “Are you still a terrific swimmer?”

“Actually, I don’t swim at all anymore,” I said. “I lost interest after that summer.”

“Really?” he asked. “You were so good. I was remembering the time you and I raced across the canal,” he said. I laughed. I’d forgotten. We’d only been about ten the last summer we were truly friends. We’d known enough to wait for the slack tide and we were both strong swimmers for kids our age, but we got in a lot of trouble.

“I wasn’t allowed near the water for a week,” I said.

“I had to vacuum the entire house,” Ethan said.

“I don’t think I ever swam in the canal again,” I said. “I swam in our dock all the time when the boat wasn’t in it, but not the canal.”

“Ah, that’s not true,” Ethan said.

“What do you mean?”

“I remember watching you float down the canal in an inner tube.”

It took me a moment to place the memory, but then it came into my mind all at once. “I’d forgotten,” I said, laughing, although the memory carried with it both joy and sadness since Isabel had been so much a part of it, and though Ethan and I reminisced about several other shared experiences before getting off the phone, it was that memory which stayed with me for the rest of the day.

CHAPTER 11

Julie

1962

It was a weekday in Bay Head Shores, which meant that our father was home in Westfield. We had finished eating breakfast and Grandpop was already out in the garage working on some project, while Grandma was starting to clear the table in spite of our mother’s admonishment to relax a while. I started to stand up to help Grandma, but Mom told me to stay where I was and I sat down again. She shook a cigarette from her pack of Kents and lit it, blowing a puff of smoke into the air above the cluttered table.

“I have an idea for something we could do today, girls,” she said to the three of us.

“What?” Lucy sounded suspicious. Whatever it was, I could tell she was prepared to say she didn’t want to do it.

“Look at the current,” Mom said, and I turned my head to peer through the screen at the canal. The current was moving slowly in the direction of the bay.

“What about it?” Isabel asked. She was holding a lock of her hair in front of her face, probably scrutinizing it for split ends.

“Well,” Mom said, “after we’ve digested our breakfast a bit, how about we take the big inner tubes and ride the current all the way from our house to the bay.”

“Keen!” I said. It was an extraordinary idea.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Isabel said, but I knew she was intrigued. It was hard to get Isabel interested in any sort of family activity, and I was impressed that my mother had managed to come up with something exciting enough to draw in her oldest daughter.

Grandma laughed, sitting down at the table again, her chores forgotten. “I remember when you and Ross used to do that,” she said to my mother. She rolled the r in “Ross” in a way that made the name sound very pretty. I was surprised by what she’d said, though. So was Isabel.

“You and Mr. Chapman floated on tubes to the bay?” she asked, incredulous.

“When we were kids,” Mom said.

I always forgot that my mother had spent her childhood summers in our bungalow. Her father—our Grandpop—had built the house himself in the late twenties, and the Chapmans had moved in next door shortly after that. Mr. Chapman and our mother had been friends when they were kids, the way Ethan and I used to be.

“We were probably about fifteen,” my mother continued. “Once we floated all the way to the river.”

“Tsk,” Grandma clucked. “Do you remember how furious I was when I realized what you did?”

Mom smiled at her, turning her head to exhale a stream of smoke over her shoulder and away from the table. “I survived,” she said.

“Well, I’m not going,” Lucy announced, but this was no surprise and no one paid her much attention.

“The canal was different then,” Grandma said. “There was no bulkhead, so you could walk right into it from the yard. And of course there weren’t so many boats.”

“Gosh.” I turned to look at the water again, imagining it lapping at our sandy backyard. I wished it was still like that.

“The tubes are a little soft,” Isabel said.

We had four of the giant black inner tubes in the garage. Ethan and I used to float on them in the dock, our arms and legs dangling over the sides. This year, though, I hadn’t even bothered with the tubes. It was no fun playing in the dock alone. My loneliness was mounting, day by day. I made up stories about the rooster man, but I had no friends to scare with those spooky tales. I didn’t dare tell them to Lucy and make her more paranoid than she already was.

“Why don’t you and Julie take the tubes to the gas station and fill them up?” Mom said, stubbing out her cigarette in the big clamshell ashtray on the table. “By the time you get back, the current should be perfect for our adventure.”

After we helped clean up from breakfast, Isabel and I went out to the garage, gathered up the four fat tubes and loaded them in the car. Isabel turned the key in the ignition, then adjusted the dial on the radio until she found “Johnny Angel,” and we both sang along with it. I liked having that bond with my sister. I watched her bare arms turn the steering wheel as we backed out of the driveway. Her skin was smooth and dark, and my arms seemed pale and flabby by comparison. Isabel thought her tan was mediocre that summer because she had to work three days a week at Abramowitz’s Department Store in town and couldn’t lie out on the beach every day. She was stealing from the store; I was sure of it. She would come home with new clothes once or twice a week.Yesterday, she’d brought home two new bras, and when she was out with Mitzi and Pam, I tried one of them on, stuffing the pointy cups with toilet paper to see how I would look with real breasts, only to discover that I looked kind of ridiculous. I also tried to practice using one of her tampons so I’d be ready the next time I got my “friend.” The tampon in its cardboard tube was huge and had been impossible to get it in. It was like trying to push a Magic Marker against a brick wall. I felt scared, wondering if there was something wrong with me and I would never be able to go all the way with my husband or have babies.

“I’ve got dibs on the biggest one,” Isabel said, referring to the inner tubes.

“I don’t care,” I said. I knew the one she meant. It was fatter and wider and supported you so well it made you feel like you were floating on a cloud. But I wasn’t going to fight her for it.

As we turned onto Rue Mirador, Isabel pulled a pack of Marlboros from the pocketbook on her lap, shook one partway out of the package and wrapped her lips around it to pull it the rest of the way out. She pushed the cigarette lighter into the dashboard, waiting for it to heat up.

I was stunned. “Did Mom give you permission to smoke?” I asked.

“She smokes herself, so what can she say?” Isabel asked. She held the pack toward me. “Want one?”

I hesitated, then took one of the cigarettes, digging it out of the pack with my fingers in a graceless manner. I put it to my lips.

“I’m not going to light it, though,” I said.

“Then why did you take it?” She laughed, pulling the lighter from the dashboard. She held it to her cigarette, inhaling as the tip turned a bright orange.

I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said, but I did know. I just wanted to be with her. To share something with her. To be like her.

“I get the porch bed tonight,” she announced.

“I know,” I said. She and I had been taking turns sleeping on the porch when the weather was good. I still had to stuff my bedspread beneath my covers to placate Lucy. I’m sure she knew what I was doing, but it seemed to give her some comfort nevertheless. As long as I did that and left the light on, she was doing better upstairs alone at night.

“What are you burying in the yard?” Isabel asked, turning the car onto Bridge Avenue.

“What do you mean?” I asked, all innocence.

“I saw you bury something by the corner of the house. What was it?”

Darn. If I didn’t tell her the truth, she would probably dig in the sand by the corner of the house to satisfy her curiosity and discover my clue box anyway.

“It’s my Nancy Drew box,” I said.

“Huh?” She gave me that “what are you talking about” look as she blew smoke from her nostrils. She reminded me of a dragon.

“When I find something that might turn out to be a clue in a mystery, I put it in a box Grandpop buried there for me.”

“A clue in a mystery? What mystery?”

“Well, I don’t know yet,” I explained. “Sometimes you can find things and later on, when a mystery happens, you realize the thing you found might be a clue that would help the police solve it.”

Isabel laughed. “You’re a moron, you know that? You mean you just throw any old thing you find in there, waiting for some deep, dark mystery to occur?”

“Not any old thing,” I said, insulted. I thought of the Ping-Pong ball I’d found in the canal. Maybe I was being indiscriminate, but good clues were hard to find. I did not want her to shoot holes in my theory. Deep down, I knew the wished-for mystery would never happen, but I was having fun pretending it might. Grandpop had understood that.

“You act like such a twelve-year-old, you know it?” Isabel’s voice was tinged with disgust.

“That happens to be my age,” I said, folding my arms across my chest, managing to bend the unlit cigarette in the process. What did she want from me? “When you were twelve you probably did things like that, too,” I said, but I didn’t really think she had. Isabel had always been the sophisticated older sister. I could never catch up to her. I would probably still be reading Nancy Drew and making up wolves-are-loose-in-our-neighborhood stories when I turned seventeen.

We pulled into the gas station and carried the tires over to the air pump. I tossed my cigarette into a nearby trash can. “It’s a secret,” I said, watching her fit the air nozzle onto one of the tires.

“What is?” She looked up at me. I could see my twelve-year old self reflected in her sunglasses.

“The Nancy Drew box.”

She laughed. “Don’t worry, Jules,” she said. “I don’t know of anyone who would be interested in your so-called clues.”

I felt humiliated by her condescension and my throat tightened. I had to swallow hard again and again to keep from crying as we filled the tires in silence. When we got back in the car, “Sealed with a Kiss” was playing on the radio. I thought that was the world’s saddest song, and my heart ached as I sang along with it, turning my face toward the window so my sister wouldn’t see my tears and have another reason to make fun of me.

Once we were on the road, she reached into her pocketbook and pulled out the red-and-purple giraffe.

“I’m going to stop at the beach,” she said, “and I want you to run over to the lifeguard stand and give this to Ned.”

“I already gave it to Ned,” I said. “What’s it doing in your pocketbook?”

“He gave it back to me,” she said, as if that explained everything.

I looked at the plastic giraffe. “You think I’m acting immature,” I said. “Passing a stupid toy back and forth is really dopey.”

“It’s none of your business.”

“It’s my business if I’m the one being the messenger,” I argued.

She snatched the toy from my hand. “Never mind,” she said. “I’ll give it to him myself.”

I reconsidered, thinking of how I could get a look at Ned up on the lifeguard stand. Maybe he would accidentally touch my fingers when he took the giraffe from me. “I’ll do it,” I said, reaching toward her for the giraffe.

She handed it to me. “Thank you,” she said.

We pulled into the parking lot next to the beach, the tires of the car crunching on the crushed shells. I hopped out and ran across the sand to the lifeguard stand. It had rained during the night and the sand was damp, flying behind me in clumps as I ran.

I spotted the usual group of teenagers lounging on their blankets around the lifeguard stand. That “Sweet Little Sheila” song was playing on their radios.

“Hey!” Bruno Walker called when I neared them. “Where’s Izzy today?”

I didn’t want to let him or anyone else in on our planned adventure. “She’ll be over later,” I said. Pam Durant was lying next to him on her stomach, eyes closed, and I was shocked to see that her bathing-suit top was unhooked, the straps low on her shoulders. It almost looked as though she was wearing nothing at all on top. I could clearly see the side of her breast. I quickly averted my eyes.

I stepped closer to the lifeguard stand and looked up at Ned.

“Hi, Ned,” I said.

He lowered his head to look down at me, his eyes invisible behind his sunglasses, and broke into his gorgeous, whitetoothed grin. My legs felt like they were going to give out under me.

I held up the giraffe. “Isabel wanted me to give this to you,” I said.

He looked toward the parking lot, spotted our car and waved. He had white zinc oxide on his nose and a cigarette in his hand, and he looked so sexy with it. Women didn’t look good with cigarettes, I thought, but a man with a cigarette in his hand was something else again.

I held the giraffe up to him and he reached low for it and maybe one of his fingers touched one of mine, but I could not be sure.

“Thanks, Julie,” he said. “You’re a neat kid.”

“You’re welcome.” I wasn’t ready to leave. “Why are you sending that thing back and forth?” I pointed to the giraffe.

“I don’t think you’d understand,” he said. He looked out at the water, then stood up, blew his whistle and waved an arm, which meant that some kids were swimming out too far and he wanted them to come in closer where he could see them. Where he could protect them. The muscles in his legs were long and lean and covered with curly gold hair that I wanted to reach up and touch.

“Yes, I would. Honest,” I said, once he’d sat down again. I wondered if he would remember where we were in our conversation. He did. He’d been paying good attention.

“Do you have anything that’s really special to you?” he asked me, his eyes still on the water.

I had so many things that were special to me, I didn’t know where to begin. The clue box, of course. And my collection of Nancy Drew books. I also had a music box my girlfriend, Iris, had given me for my ninth birthday. It was oval shaped, and when you opened it up, a girl rode a bicycle around a little track.

“A music box,” I said.

“Ah, okay, then!” He seemed pleased by my answer. “When you get older and you meet someone who’s special to you, you’ll feel like sharing the music box with that person.”

“Oh,” I said. I doubted very much I’d be passing my music box back and forth between some boy and myself, but I pretended to understand. “So, Isabel is your…uh…your special person, huh?”

“You keep that between us, okay?” he said, and I thought I saw him wink behind the sunglasses. “Your old lady would flip her wig if she knew.”

I knew he meant my mother by “old lady,” but it was the first time I’d heard anyone use that term.

“I saw Isabel sneak into your boat the other day,” I said. The words seemed to have a life of their own; I had not even thought about speaking them.

His smile faded. He took off his sunglasses and looked down at me, blue eyes piercing through me to my heart. “You won’t say anything, right?” he asked.

I shook my head. You can trust me with your life, I wanted to say to him, but I kept the melodramatics to myself. “I won’t say anything,” I promised, crossing my heart. I pictured myself inside the confessional booth, the smell of incense in the air. If I withheld information like that from my parents, did that constitute a lie? I wondered.

Ned slipped his sunglasses on again and glanced out at the water to be sure everyone was all right. “How come you and Ethan don’t pal around together anymore?” he asked, then smiled at me again. “Don’t answer that,” he said. “He’s a dufus this summer, I know.”

I wanted to defend Ethan but found I couldn’t. I nodded. “Yeah,” I said.

“You tell Izzy I’ll see her later, okay?” He looked toward the car and waved again.

“Okay,” I said, knowing I’d been dismissed. It had been an incredible conversation, though. We had secrets. We’d talked almost like adults.

I walked back to the car and got in. It smelled of the hot rubber of the tubes.

“What did you talk about for so long?” Isabel sounded suspicious as she turned the key in the ignition.

“About how I saw you get into Ned’s boat in the marina.” I looked out the car window toward the lifeguard stand, nonchalant as you please.

Isabel didn’t speak, and when I looked over at her, I saw that her knuckles had gone white on the steering wheel. “And what did he say?” she asked, her voice tight.

“He asked me not to tell anyone, and I promised I wouldn’t.”

Her grip on the steering wheel relaxed. “Thank you,” she said. Then she held the pack of Marlboros out to me. “Have another cigarette.”

My mother, Isabel and I tossed our inner tubes into the canal, then quickly jumped in after them, laughing as we struggled to climb aboard.

“I’m glad no one’s taking a picture of this,” Isabel said as she struggled to hoist herself onto her oversized tube. Mom and I had already managed to get into position on our tubes, our bottoms, forearms and calves in the cool water.

“Bye!” Mom lifted her arm in a wave to Grandpop, Grandma and Lucy where they stood in our backyard, calling out their wishes for a good trip. The current was swift and our journey was effortless. We used our hands as paddles, staying close to the bulkhead to avoid being run over. Some of the colored fishermen on the other side of the canal waved to us, as did people passing by in their boats. We’d rise and fall on the wakes of the yachts and motorboats. It was glorious.

When we reached the bay, we rolled onto our stomachs and began paddling for real, steering ourselves along the coastline toward our little beach. I spotted Grandpop and Lucy waiting for us on the pier, Lucy holding on tight to my grandfather’s hand. I was impressed that he’d been able to get her out on the pier at all. I wished that my father had been at the shore so that he too could have floated on the tubes. Maybe, I thought, we could do it again on a weekend when he was with us. But we never did.

Lying in bed that night, I felt as though I was still floating toward the bay. What a great feeling it had been to flow with the current! An idea began to form in my head. If the current had been in the direction of the bay this morning, it would be going in that direction again tonight. What if I quietly took the boat out of our dock and let it float down to the bay? No one would know, because the current would carry me and I wouldn’t need to start the motor and wake anyone up. Once I was in the bay, I could start the motor and cruise around for a while. Getting back could be a problem, because I doubted I could stay out there long enough for the current to change direction, but it was only the starting of the engine that would be noisy. Coming back, the boat would just make a gentle putt-putt sound as I pulled into the dock and no one would be any the wiser.

I couldn’t believe the sheer elegance of my plan! I would be grounded for life if I was caught, but the risk seemed worth the adventure. As I climbed softly down the creaky stairs, I knew I’d have one more thing to confess on Saturday night, but just then, I didn’t care.

Our little runabout had no light, so I got the flashlight from the kitchen drawer, along with a mosquito coil and a book of matches, then walked onto the porch. As I started to open the screen door, I suddenly remembered that it was Isabel’s turn to sleep on the porch bed and I caught my breath. The half-moon was not very bright, but there was enough light that she could probably see me if she were awake. I peered toward the far end of the porch and saw that she was lying on her side under the covers, facing the opposite direction. I was safe.

Outside, I untethered the runabout, then descended the ladder and slipped into the boat. I used the oars to push out of the dock, cringing at the sloshing sound of the water against the bulkhead. Once in the canal, I had to use the oars to keep the boat going straight—the current kept trying to turn it sideways—and I felt the tiniest bit of panic over not being able to control it. But soon I was sailing easily with the current and within minutes, I was in the open water of the bay, by myself. I could see lights along the shore, though not too many. It was, after all, nearly midnight and most of the houses were dark. The half-moon offered a rippled, shadowy view of the water, and I felt infused with joy and a sense of peace. My plan had been to start the motor once I was in the bay, but now that I was floating comfortably, I didn’t feel like disturbing the silence. I was curious to see where the current would take me.

I felt a mosquito bite my shoulder before remembering the coil. I lit it and put it near me in the bottom of the boat, and as I was lifting my head from that task, our little neighborhood beach came into view. It always looked so small and perfect from the water, a smooth, pale crescent of sand. Then I heard laughter, and my eyes were drawn to the platform in the deep water. Two figures were standing on the platform. I stared at them, using the oar to move a little closer. I saw the girl’s long dark hair, the boy’s broad back, and I covered my mouth with my hand.

It couldn’t possibly be Ned and Isabel, I thought. I remembered seeing Isabel asleep on the porch…but I also remembered how I stuffed a bedspread beneath my covers to trick Lucy into thinking I was still in bed. Isabel had apparently tried the same ruse, because now she was most definitely on the platform with Ned Chapman. I nearly forgot to breathe as I watched them. My sister had on one of her two-piece bathing suits. From that distance, I could not tell its color. They were standing up, and I saw them come together. I couldn’t tell for sure, but I imagined Ned was kissing her. When he drew away from her, he took her bathing suit top with him and I saw the faint glow of moonlight on Isabel’s bare breasts.

Oh my God. My hands shook as I bent over to pull the cord to start the motor. I had to yank it three times; my hand seemed out of my control. The motor finally came to life with a metallic roar. I imagined Ned and Isabel looking out to the bay in surprise. Maybe my sister would duck down to cover herself up as I sped away from them, into the night, praying hard that they had not realized I was the person watching them.

I ran a large arc through the bay water and back into the canal. I slowed the motor to a gentle sputter as I carefully steered the runabout into our dock. I cut the motor, tossed the half-spent mosquito coil into the canal, climbed out of the boat and tied it to the dock.

I was still trembling as I opened the screen door to the porch. The fake Isabel had not moved in her porch bed and my arrival did not seem to have awakened anyone. I put the flashlight back in the kitchen and climbed the rickety stairs to the attic. Lucy’s breathing was soft and regular. I tiptoed past her bed and into my curtained bedroom. I did not let myself think about what I had witnessed until I was under my covers.

One sentence kept clanging in my brain: Were Isabel and Ned going all the way? I did not even know the term “making love.” I knew the basic elements of intercourse, but I did not know exactly how it was done. I let my imagination take me back to that platform, myself in Isabel’s place. My breasts, somehow larger and fuller, were bare, as hers had been. Ned’s hands were on them. He took off the rest of my bathing suit, then lay me down on the damp wood of the platform and kissed me tenderly. He took off his own bathing suit, and I spread my legs and invited him in, and somehow he was able to fit his penis inside me, penetrating that brick wall. That seemed an impossibility to me, but people did it somehow and Ned would know how. He would shoot sperm inside me and tell me he loved me. My body ached to be in Isabel’s place on the platform, moonlight on my breasts, going all the way with my lover.