Читать книгу: «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.dianechamberlain.co.uk

All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author, and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all the incidents are pure invention.

All Rights Reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Enterprises II B.V./S.à.r.l. The text of this publication or any part thereof may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, storage in an information retrieval system, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the prior consent of the publisher in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

MIRA is a registered trademark of Harlequin Enterprises Limited, used under licence.

Published in Great Britain 2010.

HarperCollins Publishers,

1 London Bridge Street,

London, SE1 9GF

© Diane Chamberlain 2005

ISBN 978-1-4089-0730-6

Version: 2018-10-26

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-year old, 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.