Enright Family Collection (2 page)

Everyone who was
anyone
in Devlin’s Light—and many who were not—had come to pay their last respects to Robert Forman Devlin. India, the only sibling of the deceased, shifted her sights first to the group gathered on the opposite side of the waiting grave, then to the large coffin, still draped and flower strewn, which rested almost at her feet. She tucked a strand of unruly blond hair behind her ear and shifted her weight, one foot to the other, all the while watching, watching, praying that someone would do something to give themselves away.

Ludicrous, she chided herself. As if Ry’s killer would step forward and announce that he—or she—was the guilty one.

But who?

Ry Devlin had been the last of the male line of those same Devlins who had come south from the New England colonies in the mid-1600s and whose name was borne by both the lighthouse they had built and the settlement they
had founded on the uncertain coast just west of the point where the Atlantic Ocean met the Delaware Bay. Handsome, affable, full of the Devlin charm, Ry had been well liked, admired, respected by all who knew him, and he had seemed to be without an enemy in this world.

Well, he’d had at least one.

India shook her head, incredulous that she should find herself here, in this centuries-old burying place, at so unlikely an event. Once, as a child, India had unsuccessfully attempted to count the number of Devlins whose final resting spots lay behind the small, whitewashed church that had served many generations of the town’s residents. The weathered structure had gone unused for years, since long before India’s birth, though it was faithfully maintained through the efforts of the Devlin Trust; for the country church, like the ancient cemetery and much of the coastal boundary of Devlin’s Light, was on Devlin land.

Beyond Ry’s grave, in this corner of the churchyard, lay the remains of their father, Robert Sr., their mother, Nancy, and their paternal grandparents, Benjamin and Sarah. A little farther down a well-worn path, side by side and for all eternity, lay Benjamin’s parents and, a bit farther more, their parents. And so on, through more generations of Devlins all the way back to Eli, Samuel and Jonathan, the first Devlins to stand on the shores of the Delaware Bay.

And there, about six feet to the left of Ry’s intended eternal home, was the marker erected but two years earlier for Maris Steele Devlin. Ry’s wife of eight months, Maris had taken a rowboat out into the bay to go crabbing one summer morning and had been caught in a sudden squall. Now Maris was memorialized here, amidst the remains of a family she had never belonged to, had never really been part of.

Unconsciously India sought and found the hand of her late brother’s stepdaughter and gave it a squeeze, then gathered the little girl to her in an embrace meant to comfort, all the while wondering if this child would ever know comfort again. As dismayed as India had been over Ry’s choice of a wife, India had adored Maris’s daughter, Corrine. Sweet, shy Corri, who had dealt with loss
far too often for one so young and who now, at six, believed she faced the world alone.

Not while I have life
, India promised silently, her fingers gently untangling one of Corri’s strawberry-blond curls. She knew exactly how deep the little girl’s grief would be, and she sought, in whatever way she could, to absorb some of it.

India bowed her head and squeezed her eyes closed against the tears welling up behind them and tried once again to swallow the lump that would not be swallowed away as the Reverend Corson cleared his throat and began the final prayers over the heavy bronze coffin. It was long and wide—“oversized,” the funeral director had noted absently—to hold the body of the deceased. Ry had been a big man, tall and broad-shouldered. Agile as a cat, though, and gentle as the wishes they made when, as children, they had sat upon the rocks overlooking the inlet, waiting for the first of the evening stars to appear in the night sky.

“Go ’head, Indy, you first,” Ry would coax his little sister. “And make it a
good
wish.
Good
wishes always come true. …

Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight …

“But you can’t tell anybody what you wish for. Or it won’t come true,” he would caution her.

I wish I may, I wish I might …

“’cept you, Ry, right? I can tell you?” she would ask, wanting to share the secrets of her child’s heart with her much loved big brother.

Have this wish I wish tonight.

“’fraid not, Indy. Got to be a secret, even from me …”

Many years later, Indy could still hear Ry’s voice, see the twinkle in his blue eyes as he searched the heavens for her very own wishing star and guided her eyes to it, encouraging her to dream.

Who could have done this to so good a soul as Ry?

“We gather together today in memory of our friend and brother, Robert …” Reverend Corson’s soft voice floated with the ease of a mist across the tranquil bay even as India’s eyes continued to skip from one face to another.

Surely not you, Peter Mason. You who knew Ry since nursery school, who fished the bay with him and shared the treasures of the marshes with him.

“… and to commend his loving spirit to its everlasting rest…”

Nor you, Ely Townsend, who spent so many summer days on the front porch of our house on Darien Road, watching the girls saunter by in their short shorts and halter tops on their way to the small stretch of beach at the end of the street.

“and so we ask you, Father, to have mercy on his soul…”

Or you, Nat Tomlin, who, with Ry, built that old playhouse in the oak tree behind our garage, where you used to sneak cigarettes and girls. The playhouse Ry fell out of when he was fourteen and broke both his legs. No football, no baseball, for all his freshman year.

“… to open the gates of heaven to your servant…”

The cry of a solitary gull echoed across the dunes and over the bay to her left, and India turned toward the sound. From behind an ancient stand of scrub pine, Devlin’s Light rose toward a cloudless sky. Though a storm was in the forecast for later in the afternoon, no sign of it could be seen at eleven in the morning. The shadow of the lighthouse reached almost to the jetty that stretched into the deep blue-green calm of the bay. Here and there a fish leaped out of the water as if to tease the ever-present gulls. But it was the lighthouse, always, that drew the eye and held the gaze.

A three-story clapboard, Queen Anne-style house, shaped like an L, with a six-story tower at the juncture of the two parts of the structure, Devlin’s Light had weathered many storms and had always survived intact. A few of the slate shingles had blown off in this storm or that, its red shutters had faded some and it sorely needed a good painting, but the lighthouse had stood on its present site since the year of its construction, 1876.

The irony of Ry being laid to rest almost in the shadow of the lighthouse that had so dominated his life was not lost on India. As a boy he had played in it. As a man he had devoted much time and energy to its restoration. There was no one spot on this earth he had loved more than he had loved the lighthouse.

The fact that someone had chosen to attack Ry in that place he loved above all others struck India as nothing less than obscene. It was merely an act of fate that he had not
actually died there, but in the back of the ambulance that had sped off through the early morning hours, sirens shrieking, though they’d not pass more than five cars between Devlin’s Light and Cape Hospital Emergency Room some twenty miles away.

“… and to grant him everlasting rest and peace in the harbor of your love, O Lord …”

An act of fate, she recalled, and of Nicholas Enright, who, from the deck of the old crabbers cabin he had purchased from Ry, watched as the lantern’s light had ascended the stairwell, then flashed a sudden and erratic descent before being extinguished at the bottom of the steep steps. It was Nicholas Enright who had called both the police and the ambulance, before setting off by rowboat across the small inlet to the lighthouse; Nicholas Enright who had found Ry at the foot of the winding stairs, who had ridden with him in the ambulance to the hospital, who had held Ry’s head and heard his last words and been the last human contact her brother had known on this earth.

India’s eyes wandered across the faces of the strangers in the crowd, wondering which one was Nicholas Enright, certain that he stood among them; since she’d never met the man who had moved to Devlin’s Light the summer before, she could not pick him out. Ry had had so many friends— most of whom she had never met—from Bayview State College, where he had taught for the past few years, from the environmental group that had worked with him to preserve the marshes, from the historic preservation group he had joined some years before to encourage renovation of the town’s many ancient structures.—Nicholas Enright could be any one of the men, young or old, who had come to pay their respects.

“… as we commend our brother Robert unto You …”

Nicholas Enright had shared her brother’s last breath and, from the accounts of the ambulance attendants with whom she had spoken, had done so with gentle affection and the greatest of care. She needed to meet him, to thank him. And, she reminded herself, she had questions to ask that only he, as close a witness to the events of that night as had come forward, could answer.

“… in His name. Amen.”

“Amen.”

“What else can I do for you, Aunt August?” India asked, placing a stack of bone-china cups and saucers on the sideboard in the dining room.

“There are more plates in the kitchen, on the counter there.” Augustina Devlin waved a small, deeply tanned hand in the direction of the tidy kitchen that had served generations of Devlins. “I expect half the town or better will be coming to call at any minute. Weddings and funerals. It’s the same all over. Brings ’em all out. There now, what’d I tell you?”

August adjusted large round tortoise-shell eyeglasses on her no-nonsense face, which was framed by a cap of short-cropped, straight salt-and-pepper hair, and nodded toward the front window, past which seemed to drift a goodly percentage of the population of Devlin’s Light. It was only a matter of seconds before the screen door opened and the first of the townsfolk appeared in the front hallway.

Come to share our grief
, Indy thought as she moved with open arms toward Liddy Osborn, who had gone through school with Aunt August in the one-room brick schoolhouse at the foot of Peck’s Lane. Liddy, it seemed, had been there to share all the Devlins’ sorrows. She had been there to hold a weeping Indy the day they’d found Robert Sr., Indy’s father and August’s brother, dead of a heart attack out on the dunes off Lighthouse Road. And Liddy had been there when Nancy died, though India was just a baby when she’d lost her mother and had no firsthand recollection of that. Liddy had been August’s best friend, always. A dear, giving woman, Liddy had seen her own share of sorrow but had refused to let it destroy her loving heart.

And Grant Richardson, there in the hallway, behind Liddy. A county judge, as Indy’s father had been, and a friend of the Devlin family for as long as Indy could remember. Al Carpenter, the chief of police, and his wife, Patsy. Mrs. Spicer, the librarian, and Mrs. Donaldson, Indy’s third-grade teacher. Todd and Wanda Fisher, who ran the general store, and Ed Beggins, Ry’s first piano teacher. Bill Scott, who used to take Ry surf fishing off of
Cape May. And Liz Porter, who, as owner of the local paper, the
Beacon
, knew everything about everyone. All come to share the memories and the pain. All part of Devlin’s Light, as much as she was.

India had not, until this moment, realized how much she missed it, this sense of
connecting
, though each time she came home the past few years, it took her a little longer to shake off the city and the ugliness that came from having to prosecute its dregs. As an assistant district attorney in Paloma, Pennsylvania, she had seen enough crudeness and pain and evil over the past five years to last a lifetime. Every time she returned to Devlin’s Light, it became harder and harder to remember what drew her back to Paloma. Obligation, she told herself. Certainly it wasn’t Ron Stillwell, the fellow assistant district attorney she had, up until about six months ago, dated pretty regularly. At one time—it embarrassed her now to recall—she had actually toyed with the idea of marrying Ron, until someone had left an anonymous note on her desk tipping her off to the fact that he was also seeing a young law clerk on a lot more regular basis than he’d been seeing her.

Suddenly there was too much loss to deal with. It hit her like a sharp blow to the head and took her breath away. She fled to the back porch, seeking refuge where she always had when things became more than she could bear. She leaned over the white wooden railing and forced deep breaths, filling her lungs with the thick humid air laden with the smell of the salt marshes and something decomposing— probably some beached horseshoe crabs, she guessed, or maybe some hapless fish—down on the beach just a short walk over the dunes.

Why did it all look the same, she wondered, when their world had changed so suddenly and so completely?

The wooden porch swing still hung at one end, its new coat of white paint giving it a clean summer look. Aunt August’s prize yellow roses stretched over the trellis in full and glorious bloom. The day lilies crowded in a riotous jumble of color against the stark gray of the back fence, line-dancing like manic clowns in a sudden gust of breeze. Fat little honey bees went from blossom to blossom, like little helicopters, oblivious to everything except the promise of
pollen and the effort necessary to gather it and take it home. A small brown sparrow plopped upon the ground below the railing and pecked intently in the dirt. Finding what she was seeking, she returned to her young, all plump, dun-colored and downy-feathered little bundles waiting to be fed by the base of the bird bath in the midst of the herb garden. An ever curious catbird landed on a nearby dogwood branch and began to chatter. Just like any other summer day in Devlin’s Light.