The Boat House

TWENTY-FIVE

The next time that he saw Diane was at the funeral, some three weeks later. She came alone, as a representative of the Liston Estate, and she stood alongside him in Three Oaks Bay's tiny hillside churchyard. Together they watched across the old gravestones as Ted Hammond waited patiently by the lych gate, thanking each of the mourners as they left.

"I don't know what to say to him," she admitted.

"Who does?" Pete said.

Ted was looking dignified, but broken. His clothes didn't fit, his skin was grey, his eyes were dead. His sister had come over with her family from the next valley and was standing just behind him; Shaun had flown home as well, a taller, broader Wayne-that-might-have-been, but he hadn't yet come out of the church.

When Pete finally turned to move away, Diane had gone. Standing in her place was Alina, red-eyed and waiting to be taken home.

They'd found them after five days, with Sandy's parents hammering at Ted every minute of the time. Ted's initial fear was that they'd done something stupid and run away together, but then after a while he'd begun to hope for this and nothing worse. The missing keys to the boat house and to the Princess had been the clue, spotted by Pete and reported to Ross Aldridge in a phonecall when Ted was out of earshot. It all made a horrible kind of sense, and he hoped that he was wrong. But he wasn't. Aldridge had found the lights shorted out, the cruiser's batteries run down, and the two children lying just under the surface of the water inside the big sliding gates. They'd been entwined in an embrace, and Sandy's hair had been spread like a fan; by Aldridge's account it had been a touching, harrowing sight.

The inquest was local, held in the parish hall and presided over by a doctor from the big resort town further down the lake. The locked doors, the circumstances, and the lack of contradictory medical evidence led to a verdict of misadventure within fifteen minutes. One of the tabloids got a couple of columns out of it — Teen Lovers' Nude Death Riddle on Dizzy's Yacht — but mostly the papers left it alone. The entire village closed down on the day of the funeral, and the trickle of early-season trippers found themselves looking around bemused at the drawn curtains in the houses and the handwritten notes in the shop windows before shrugging to themselves and passing on through. Two kids drowning in an accident didn't sound like much to the world outside.

Neither Pete nor Alina spoke during the drive home afterwards. Alina had sniffled her way through half a box of Kleenex from the glove compartment, and she seemed even more disinclined toward conversation than Pete. He couldn't help noticing how much she was being affected; it was a sign, he supposed, of how she'd come to consider the valley her home and its people her own. On a day when good feelings were pretty scarce, it didn't seem wrong to spare just one moment to be glad for her.

As always, she went straight to her room when they got home. Pete went to the refrigerator, took out a beer, and then carried it along with a kitchen chair out onto the porch. His inclination was to be down at the yard. But Ted had his real family around him now.

Pete was remembering the night — it seemed like years ago, but it wasn't so long — that the three of them had sat in the Zodiac down in the workshop and Wayne had made some gentle fun of Pete's funeral suit. He was wearing it again today. So much change, in so short a time; Pete felt as if he'd aged more in ten weeks than in the ten years that had gone before. Now he sat out on the porch with his chair tilted back and his feet up on the rail, and he sipped at his beer as he watched the patterns of sunlight on the forest over on the far side of the track.

He remembered what Alina had said to him, way back at that first dawn. Her instincts were right, this was a fine place to be.

It was just that some days could be rather less fine than others.

After an hour he went to see how she was doing, and to see if she needed anything. She smiled weakly, and said not. She was sitting on the bed with her album — that sparsely peopled record of whatever it was that she'd left behind — and she wasn't leafing through it hugging it close, as if it was a physical source of comfort to her when times were at their lowest.

She said, "I've been trying to think about Wayne, but instead I've been thinking about myself. Isn't that terrible?"

But Pete said that it wasn't, because for much of the hour he'd been doing the same. It wasn't something that he'd intended, but it wasn't something he could help. All through the valley people would be reflecting on the brevity of life and their own missed chances at happiness, and thinking of their common frailty in the shadow of the dark beast that had passed so close and taken someone so young.

And then he said, "You want to come for a ride in the car? Get out of the valley for a while, see somewhere new?" But again she smiled and she shook her head, saying that she preferred to stay here for a while and… just think about things. And Pete was relieved, because he hadn't really felt like going anywhere, either.

He left her in her room, thinking that perhaps he'd climb up to the rocks on the crest of the headland and watch the sunlight on the lake until the mountain shadows took it away.

He left her there, on the bed, with the book held close.

And then, when Pete McCarthy was safely out of the way, she opened the book, and the book spoke to her.

You've been unwell, the book said. My name is Belov. I'm a doctor.