Kiss River (18 page)

Saturday, April 11, 1942

I
love Sandy. I thought I did before last night, but what I feel for him this morning goes a thousand times deeper.

First of all, all day yesterday planes were flying over the ocean. There’s always some planes because of the bombing range not far from here, but this was different. I figured they were looking for the submarine that let off Miles and Winston. When I got out to the beach to be with Sandy last night, I asked him if that’s what they were doing. He wasn’t sure. He said the water out there is pretty murky, and unless the U-boat was on the surface or not far below it, it wouldn’t be that easy to see. I wish those planes could find it and destroy it. I am getting pretty hard-hearted, I guess.

Then he gave me my birthday present! He pulled a little package wrapped in tissue paper from the shirt pocket of his uniform. I opened it up and inside was a beautiful ruby necklace! He put it on me, and I wished I’d had a mirror to look at it. I can only wear it with him, since Mama would be sure to notice and ask me where I got it. It’s the most beautiful thing I own.

Then we got down to the serious business. Sandy knew that Daddy had killed one of the Germans the night before and that the second German had died the afternoon of my birthday without ever coming to. It wasn’t so much the boar that killed him, Bud Hewitt told us, but that he must’ve fallen when the boar attacked him and split his head on a rock. Anyhow, I feel strange about it. I don’t like taking pleasure in somebody dying. But if anybody deserved it, those German boys did.

So Sandy knew all about how they died, but what he didn’t know, because Daddy wanted it kept real quiet, was what that Miles boy tried with me. I wanted Sandy to know, even though I wasn’t going to tell him all the embarrassing details. We walked along the beach while he was on his patrol and I told him how I woke up, thinking he was touching me, and that it was really Miles. Sandy started cussing up a storm. “Bastard,” he kept saying. “Damn lousy son of a bitch.” I’d never heard words like those out of his mouth before, and I believe that if Miles and Winston, or whatever their names really are, had been there at that moment, Sandy could have killed them both with his bare hands. He was picking up pieces of driftwood and throwing them far out in the ocean, and I knew he was working off his anger.

After he was done cussing and throwing things, he sat me down on the beach and held me in his arms. “I wish I’d been there to protect you,” he said. He had his arms wrapped tight around me and I could feel his cheek against my forehead. “It must have been so frightening,” he said, and then I started crying. I ended up telling him
everything.
I couldn’t even tell my own mother what that German did to me and I hadn’t really intended to tell Sandy either. But with him holding me close, I knew I could tell him. I felt so safe talking to him. I could feel his whole body stiffen up as I spoke, like he was going to explode. I cried the whole time I talked. It was the first time I cried about what happened and I was amazed at all the tears I had inside me. I told him how I’d felt dirty afterward, how I scrubbed my skin raw in the bath basin, trying to get any hint of that boy’s touch off me.

After I told him everything, he was quiet for a while. I finally had to ask him what he was thinking.

“Now I truly know I’m in love with you,” he said. “I thought
I was, but the way I feel right now, how I want to protect you, how I feel as bad for you as if something terrible had happened to me…Well, I think that means I love you.”

“I love you, too,” I said. I felt very happy. Strange how something good could come out of something so bad.

“Your first time needs to be with someone who loves you,” he said. “Someone who will take care of you and never hurt you.”

I’d never thought I’d be the kind of girl who would have sex at the age of (barely) fifteen. I thought only trampy girls did that sort of thing before they were married. But I love him so much that I wanted to do it with him right then and there!

“Do you think I’m too young?” I asked him.

He laughed a little. “Yes, you’re way too young,” he said. “But I want you. I want to erase those bad feelings you have from that German touching you. I want to make you feel wonderful about making love.”

I have to admit, I wasn’t sure what to do. To be honest, I don’t really know how men and women have relations. I know the basics, of course, but that’s about it.

“I don’t know how,” I said to him.

He laughed again, but not at me. “I do,” he said. “Only one of us needs to know how.”

I turned my head to kiss him, and immediately felt how hot and crazy he was with wanting to make love to me. He touched my breast, but it was through my jacket, so I could barely feel it, and I wanted to tear my jacket off to get him closer. All of a sudden, though, he let go of me.

“Not now,” he said. “This isn’t the right time or place. I have to finish my patrol, and I want you to have all my attention without me having one eye on the beach. And it’s too cold out here. You’ll catch your death. And timewise, it’s all wrong. Too close to what happened to you with that German. I don’t want what I do to you and what that son of a bitch did to you to be confused together in your mind.”

I knew he was right, and I was grateful to him for stopping himself, even though I really wanted to do it
right then!
I kissed him, whispered “someday soon,” and then I left him alone to finish his patrol.

I walked home through the dark feeling completely unafraid. The bad guys were dead, and I am in love with the world’s most wonderful man.

G
ina leaned over Walter Liscott’s shoulder to pour more coffee into the cup resting next to the chessboard. He’d add plenty of milk to it, but how these old guys could drink so much caffeinated coffee and not be climbing the walls, she didn’t know. Come to think of it, Brian’s and Henry’s hands did tremble a bit as they moved the chess pieces around the board. She’d assumed it was old age, but maybe it was just Shorty’s potent brew. Walter’s hands, though, were still steady enough to carve his ducks.

Henry Hazelwood sat across the table from Walter, and Gina rested a hand on his shoulder. “You’re coming over for dinner tonight, aren’t you, Henry?” she asked. Henry came to the keeper’s house for dinner, followed by an hour or so of gin rummy, every Wednesday night. Gina had begged out of the get-together the week before, her first Wednesday in the house, because she’d felt a bit intrusive. After living in the house for a week and a half, though, she knew she would be welcome.

“Sure am,” the old man said. He was playing—and beating—
Walter, while Brian observed every move like a hawk. “You cooking?”

“As a matter of fact, I am,” she said. “I’m going to make you some Indian food.”

“Indian food!” Brian Cass said. “You making him buffalo meat, girlie?”

“Her name is
Gina.
” Walter shook his head with his usual irritation, but Gina laughed.

“
East
Indian food, Brian,” she said. “You know, from India.”

“Too spicy for that old man.” Brian pointed his crooked finger at Henry.

“I’ll make it mild,” she promised.

“I don’t need it mild,” Henry said, obviously annoyed with his friend. “I’ll eat whatever you can dish up, honey.”

“Gina!”

Gina turned at the sound of her name to see Brock waving to her from the pool table.

“Bring us a round?” he asked, pointing to the motley crew of his friends standing near him.

She nodded. “In a minute,” she said. Her shift was ending, and she would give the order to the waitress who was taking her place. She’d tried to avoid waiting on Brock since the incident on Sunday. Without telling the other waitresses her suspicions, though, she could not avoid him completely. He’d come in yesterday sporting yet another tattoo, this one a finely detailed sea turtle on his back, a bit lower and to the left of the mermaid, and she wondered if he had used her money to pay for it.

She returned her attention to Henry, who was waiting for Walter to make a move on the chessboard.

“Clay asked me if I’d pick up some books for you at the library on my way home today,” she said. “He said you like mysteries, right?”

“Whodunits.” Henry nodded. “I like that…uh…” He waved a finger in the air, trying to come up with a name.

“That A is for apple lady,” Walter said.

“Right. That one.” Henry nodded again.

“I know who you mean,” Gina said, although she couldn’t
come up with the author’s name off the top of her head either. “What letter are you up to?”

Henry laughed. “I jump around,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter. I can read the same one over again and not remember I read it the first time.”

“All right.” Gina squeezed his shoulder. “I’ll get you a couple of those.”

“Thank you.” Henry smiled.

“You boys need anything else before I leave?” she asked.

“Your shift ending?” Walter looked up at her, his hand on his queen.

“Yes sir,” she said. “And my feet are happy about it.”

“Well,
we’re
not happy about it,” Brian said. “Nobody here can pour coffee the way you do.”

She laughed. She never got a tip from any of them. As a matter of fact, she wasn’t sure they even paid for all the coffee and occasional beer they drank, but they had definitely become her favorite customers. They’d grieved with her over the outcome of the talk she’d had with Alec on Monday, amazed that he could turn down the request of “such a bright and beautiful girl.” Such sweet old guys. She wondered if they had been jerks when they were younger, like every other man she knew. Except, perhaps, for Clay, whose kindness toward his wife’s grandfather was doing its best to redeem her faith in men.

She was taking off her apron in the main restaurant when Kenny Gallo walked in. Spotting her, he waved.

“Hey, Gina,” he said, leaning on the counter near the cash register. “You just getting off?”

“Uh-huh.” She folded her apron in half, then quarters, making sure her tips were tucked well inside the pocket.

“Well, have a drink with me,” he said, pointing to an empty table. “Or a Coke, or coffee, or whatever you like.”

“Thanks, Kenny,” she said, “but I—” She noticed the embroidered name on the pocket of his green polo shirt. Gallo Maritime Construction. “Is that where you work?” she asked, pointing to his pocket

He glanced down at his shirt. “I own the place,” he said, more
than a little pride in his voice. He motioned toward the table again. “Come on,” he said. “Just for a minute. I won’t bite.”

She nodded, then walked ahead of him to the empty table, guilty that her motivation for doing so rested in the lettering on his shirt and not the man himself.

“What sort of work does your company do?” she asked once they were seated and had ordered his beer and her Coke from one of her co-workers. The other waitresses were probably talking about them already. “I don’t really know what maritime construction means. I assume you build ships?”

“Not build so much as repair,” he said. “A couple other guys and me do most of the underwater stuff. Welding, cutting, inspection, that kind of thing.”

“And you dive even on your time off, huh?” She smiled at him, remembering that he and Clay had explored the
Byron D. Benson
the previous weekend.

“Can’t get enough of it.” He grinned. He was cute, in a teddy-bear sort of way, with his full blond beard and laughing blue eyes. “That’s why I’m just about deaf in one ear.”

“I didn’t know that,” she said. “From diving?”

“Takes a toll after a while,” he said.

Their drinks arrived, and Gina took a sip of her Coke while thinking through her next question. But he interrupted her train of thought.

“You really give this joint some class,” he said.

She smiled. “Thank you,” she said. “I like working here.”

“A girl like you should be working at one of the high-end restaurants, though,” he said.

Lay it on a little thicker, why don’t you,
she thought. “Thanks, but I feel at home in Shorty’s.”

“I’m not saying I want you to leave,” Kenny said. “I’d miss seeing you here.”

She smiled again, wondering how she could gracefully turn the conversation back to the subject that interested her most. She took another swallow of Coke.

“Does your company do any salvage work?” she asked.

He looked surprised by the sudden return to the previous
topic, but shook his head. “No,” he said. “Plenty others around here for that.”

She toyed with the straw in her drink. “I’m very interested in salvaging the Fresnel lens from the Kiss River lighthouse,” she said.

“Oh, yeah. Clay said you’re a big fan of that lighthouse.”

She nodded. “I am. And I’d like to get that lens on dry land and see it displayed somewhere.”

“It’s probably in so many pieces you could never find them all,” he said.

“Well, then I’d like to see all the pieces displayed,” she nearly snapped.
Settle down,
she told herself.
Slow and easy.

“Won’t work,” he said.

“Why not?”

“They tried years ago but there were these protestors and such, who—”

“I know all about that,” she said. “But as you pointed out, that was years ago. Maybe things would be different now.”

“I doubt it.”

“Well, let’s pretend, just for the sake of argument, that things
are
different now. Hypothetically. What would it take to get the lens up? I mean…the mechanics of it. Do you know?”

“Sure, I know,” he said. “First off, you’d have to find it. Or the pieces of it.”

“I was wondering if a plane might be able to spot it.”

“Possibly,” he said. “Depending on, one, if any of the pieces are big enough to be seen from the air, and two, how deep the water is where it’s at, and three, how clear the water is the day the plane is looking.”

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s say all the conditions are right. And the plane finds it. Then how would the lens—or the pieces of the lens—be raised?”

“How much did that lens weigh, do you know?”

“Six thousand pounds,” she said.

He nodded, thinking. “Well, you’d have to blow away the sand from around the pieces, then pass lifting slings underneath them and pull them up with a crane attached to a barge or a dragger.”

“What’s a dragger?” she asked.

“Fishing boat.”

“Would the whole thing be a huge operation?” she asked.

“Not huge at all,” he said. “I watched them raise a two-hundred-and-fifty-ton tug a couple years ago, south of here. A few pieces of glass would be a snap.”

“Do you know anybody who’d be willing to fly over the area to see if they can spot the lens?”

Kenny grinned at her. “Do you ever talk about anything else?” he asked.

She shook her head with a smile. “Apparently not,” she said.

“Well, I can’t say Clay didn’t warn me.” Kenny took a long pull on his beer. “Clay and I have a buddy who flies tourists up and down the coast,” he said. “I could talk to him. See what he’d charge to do the job for you. But, as I said, the conditions would have to be right for him to be able to see anything.”

She tried not to let her excitement show. “I’d really appreciate that, Kenny,” she said. “And thanks so much for the information. I’ve wondered how this could be done, and you had all the answers.”

“Listen,” he said. “Would you like to see a movie tonight? Or this weekend? Or ever?” He grinned his teddy-bear grin at her again.

She shook her head, the weight of her guilt on her shoulders. “Kenny,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m not interested in dating anyone. And I’d certainly understand if that changes your willingness to talk to your pilot friend.”

“Do you have a boyfriend or something?” he asked. “You know, back in Washington or wherever you’re from?”

“No.” She shook her head again. “I’m just not into men these days.”

His eyes widened.
“Oh,”
he said, and it took her a minute to understand his reaction.

She laughed. “No, that’s not it,” she said. “I’m not into women either. I just need some…time off from dating and…all of that. Haven’t you ever taken time off from it?”

He shook his head with a laugh. “Not intentionally,” he said.

“Well, I’m trying to be honest with you. And I understand if that means you might not want to help—”

“I’ll talk to my buddy the pilot,” he said. “No obligation.”

Fiction was shelved in a small room at the side of the library, and when she stepped through the doorway, she was instantly surrounded by color. It was like being at the keeper’s house. Stained glass hung in every window. Ignoring the books, she walked around the perimeter of the room, studying the panels. The stained glass was similar to Lacey’s in its exquisite craftsmanship, but there were subtle differences she couldn’t quite put her finger on. There were many panels of ethereal-looking women in long gowns that swirled around their legs. Simply stunning. It wasn’t until she came to the last window that she noticed the small plaque on the wall: “Stained glass donated by Annie Chase O’Neill.” Clay and Lacey’s mother. What a talent. She shook her head, feeling sadness over the loss of a woman she had never known. How wonderful that Lacey had carried on her work with glass.

It was another minute before she remembered her reason for being in the room. She turned to the stacks, her gaze wandering over the spines.
H Is for Homicide.
She reached for the book, but stopped her hand in midair as she watched her skin turn blue and green and purple in the light from the window. She held her hand there, mesmerized, until another patron walked past her, looking at her as if she was quite odd. Smiling to herself, Gina lifted the book from the shelf.