Shorecliff (31 page)

Philip snorted. “Is that all?  We were going to find Lorelei. Of course we couldn’t have her with us.”

“That’s the problem!” said Delia. “I promised I wouldn’t say anything, but you’d have to be blind not to see it. Isabella adores both of you, and you always brush her off. Philip, she practically worships the ground you walk on! But you never have the time of day for her.”

“That’s not true. I—”

“You know what she told me? She told me she’s afraid of how much she thinks about you. She idolizes you—and all you can do is ignore her and make fun of her. No wonder she’s upset!”

“Idolizes me?” Philip repeated. “That can’t be true.”

It took all my concentration to keep listening after this, for at the words “she’s afraid of how much she thinks about you,” my heart tightened, and I was overcome by a rush of anguish. Suddenly I couldn’t stand the idea of Isabella thinking about anyone other than me, and her thinking about Philip was especially bad because he cared so much less for her than I did. Of course it was ridiculous for a thirteen-year-old boy to imagine that a girl four years older could return any sort of romantic affection—especially a girl who was his cousin. Even then I knew how absurd it was. Yet I adored her, and when Delia revealed Isabella’s pitiful secret, I felt an unbearable need to have my own worship recognized. Surely, I found myself thinking, I should get some reward for how devotedly I’d followed her all summer. She had to understand that I deserved her attention more than Philip did.

The others had no idea that I was being rocked by such emotion. They were puzzling over the enigma of a secretive Isabella.

“We don’t ignore her,” said Tom. “What is she talking about? Are you sure she said that, Delia? How much of this are you making up?”

“None of it! You’re always saying she can’t do things, that she wouldn’t be brave enough.”

“Oh, come on,” said Philip. “You mean jumping off the cliff?” I thought it was significant that he remembered the incident, but no one else remarked on it. “Of course she wouldn’t be brave enough to do that—it’s dangerous!”

“If Isabella really said all that, she’s cracking up,” said Tom. “She’s going nuts. The summer has been too much for her.”

“Well, can you blame her?”

“No, but it’s idiotic, what you’re saying about her and Philip. What kind of a girl falls in love with her cousin?”

“Yvette?” Philip suggested, grinning.

Tom waved him aside. “That isn’t the same thing,” he said. “Not that it wasn’t damn weird. Anyway, Isabella is obviously upset. She didn’t know what she was saying. We’ll find her and put her back in bed, and tomorrow she’ll wish she hadn’t told you anything, Delia.”

“We’re just cousins,” Philip said, shrugging.

I scorned him—a novel sensation. It was clear enough to me how one cousin could fall in love with another; I had done it myself. And in spite of my jealousy of Philip, I felt that my obsession with Isabella gave me a badge of maturity. I too now could have a deadly secret, one mixed up with romance and sex and envy.

Delia was about to reply when a flurry of bumps and rustles erupted behind her. A seventh white blotch appeared in our circle, and after a moment of confusion we recognized Isabella’s tear-
covered
face. I shrank back, terrified that she would somehow deduce what I was feeling, yet at the same time eager for her to know.

She spoke only to Delia. “I can’t believe you told them!” she cried. “I can’t believe it. You’re my own sister, and you still betrayed me! You promised you wouldn’t say anything. I’ll never forgive you!”

She stopped for a moment, panting, and Tom grabbed her shoulder. “Calm down, Bella,” he said. “No one’s mad at you or anything. Stop crying and listen for a minute. She didn’t tell us anything—”

“I’ve been standing there listening, you patronizing creep!” She slapped his hand away. “She told you everything, and of course all you did was laugh and say I was crazy. Fine! I’m crazy! I’m crazy because I actually thought you”—she turned to Philip—“were worth caring about. You don’t think I can do anything! Well, I can. I don’t need you and your stupid philosophy to do it either. I hate all of you!” She gave a few inarticulate sobs and crashed into the woods again, disappearing before any of us could stop her.

For nearly a minute none of us said anything. When Isabella, who was always extravagant, let loose the full force of her emotion, it was like being hit by a cyclone. We could all see that she was ashamed, though no one except me blamed her for being half in love with Philip. I was sure her feelings were different from Yvette’s jealous lusting after Tom—Isabella, for one thing, would never have betrayed any of Philip’s secrets. But that made it worse. What Isabella felt for Philip was closer, I thought, to a genuine attachment—closer to what I felt for her—and that meant she preferred even his grudging scraps of attention to my willingness for total self-sacrifice. The thought made me ache with frustration.

At last Tom said, “Well, you’ve certainly done a number on her, Philip.”

“Don’t lay the blame on me,” Philip protested. “I couldn’t help it. How was I supposed to know?”

“I still think it was better that I told you,” Delia said in a muffled voice.

“Oh, God, don’t you start,” Tom sighed.

“Shut up! You’re not the person who’s just betrayed someone.”

Fisher was the next to speak, and what he said made me admire him more than ever. “Don’t you think we should go look for her?” he asked. “After all, it doesn’t matter who said what. We all love her, and I don’t think we should let her run through the woods when she’s so upset. She might hurt herself.”

“Good old Fisher,” said Tom. “You’re right. Let’s go.”

The delay had allowed Isabella to stagger beyond our reach, and the cousins fanned out to search for her. I was too distracted to make sure someone else was going my way. I heard again Fisher’s statement that we all loved Isabella, and I thought to myself, more and more fiercely, that I loved her more, though none of them realized it. They were always taking me for granted, always pushing me aside, just as Philip pushed aside Isabella, but I would show them, for the first time in my life, exactly what I felt and how strongly I felt it. Truly I believe I was possessed by a demon that night, for I had never before been so irrationally determined to make myself noticed.

By sheer chance, after fifteen minutes, I stumbled to the edge of the wood that faced the lawn in front of Shorecliff. It was still dark, but an elusive hint of lightness in the air signaled the approach of dawn. For a moment, disoriented by the sudden freedom from clawing branches and looming trees, I blinked at the vacancy of the lawn and stood motionless. Then a faint noise drifted toward me, and I heard again the sound of cousins in conspiracy. A light flickered in the distance. Someone was standing by the rattletrap.

That in itself puzzled me: the rattletrap had nothing to do with the night’s various imbroglios. Stepping forward, I bumped my leg with the telescope I was still holding, long forgotten. Now, if ever, was a time to use it. I held it to my eye, hoping that whoever was by the rattletrap would turn on a flashlight so I could have something to focus on. Soon the wavering light reappeared, blinking in and out of view beyond the fence. Significantly, it was not a flashlight but a match. What I saw in its light was a group of three people: Philip Ybarra and two more cousins who had played no part in the night up to that point.

I have arrived now at a moment I’ve been dreading. It has approached with the inevitability of a freight train. I have tried to ignore it, tried to present all the shocking and delightful events that happened beforehand without letting them be shaded by hindsight. And I think I have partially succeeded: those months at Shorecliff have regained their original colors more vividly than I thought was possible.

It would not be right, having made such an effort to re-create the events as they happened, if I described the accident that followed without first narrating what we learned only later. In justice to the summer’s last adventure, therefore, I will tell it as it happened, with all the details that subsequently emerged. After that there will be no more blank pages between me and the confession of my guilt.

C
harlie woke that night to Francesca’s face hovering inches from his, her eyes blazing and her black curls tumbling over her shoulders. He had fallen asleep less than an hour before, but Charlie was renowned among us for being able to lose consciousness in seconds. He could sleep anywhere, at any time. So Francesca was dragging him out of a deep slumber, and he was confused. He glanced at Fisher’s bed and saw it was empty, though the room was dark.

“What time is it?” he mumbled.

“Come off it, you’ve only been asleep for twenty minutes.”

“Where’s Fisher?”

“Who knows? Listen, Charlie, I want to get out of here. I’m going to take the rattletrap and drive to Portland and have some fun for the first time in my life. Do you want to come with me?”

That woke Charlie up. He raised himself on one elbow and stared at her, wondering if she could be serious. Portland, after all, was two hours farther away than Pensbottom.

“Do you mean it?” he asked.

“Of course I mean it. I always mean it, but no one else does—that’s the whole problem with this hellhole. So I’m leaving. I’m going to find Uncle Kurt and force him to show me around—if he gets all the fun, the least he can do is share it. Are you coming or what?”

“But, Francesca, they’ll hear us going. You know how much noise the rattletrap makes.”

“They didn’t hear us last time. Besides, it’s after eleven, and the aunts have been going to bed ridiculously early. They’re asleep. I could hear them snoring.” Francesca loaded this statement with all the scorn a young, beautiful girl feels for middle-aged women past the age of caring.

Charlie was hesitating. The truth was, he told us afterward, that it seemed like the wrong time for an escapade. The summer had already been so packed with betrayals and surprises that it felt foolhardy, almost insensitive, to dive into another forbidden act. But Francesca had no time for delicacies. Frustration had been eating her for the past month, and after a few more minutes of conversation, Charlie knew there was no stopping her. He went with her, he told us, to protect her in Portland, to make sure she didn’t do anything too reckless. This was true, but it was also true that he went because Francesca was irresistible and Charlie had been her slave since the first morning at Shorecliff.

They disturbed no one on their way out. The rest of us were either asleep or too busy planning to hear them leave. They got to the first floor without incident, and then, as they came into the front hall, Francesca banged her shin on a doorway. “Ow! Damn it!” she cried in an aggressive whisper. “Do you have a flashlight?”

Charlie shook his head. Most of the cousins owned flashlights, but Francesca’s was dead, and Charlie’s had been lost. “Do we really need one?” he asked. “I don’t want to risk going back up.”

“It would be a good thing to have.”

“Francesca, I don’t know about this.” Charlie had remembered other necessities, and the scale of the whole business was rising before him. “We’ll need money for when we get to Portland, and we’ll probably have to buy gas for the rattletrap, and we don’t know where Uncle Kurt is in the city…”

Francesca didn’t let him get any further. “Shut up!” she hissed, grabbing his arm with fingers like talons. “I have money. There’s an extra can of gas in the back of the rattletrap. And I don’t care where Uncle Kurt is in Portland, we’ll find him!” She tightened her grip and leaned close to him, looking, he told us, almost crazed in her determination. “This isn’t some kind of game to me, all right? I’m serious. I have to get out! And I’m going.” She released him and turned around, darting into the morning room next to the kitchen. “I don’t care whether you come or not,” he heard her saying. “It doesn’t matter to me.”

“Of course,” Charlie said to us later, “I had to go then.” And we all agreed.

Francesca was rummaging in the closet where we had found the croquet set at the beginning of the summer. She emerged a moment later with the lantern Delia Robierre had spotted months before. The rest of us had forgotten its existence, but Francesca’s scheming mind had filed it away as a possible resource for later adventures.

All Charlie said was “Matches?” He was determined to rein in her enthusiasm as much as he could.

“There are some in the kitchen,” she replied.

Minutes later they were out the door and in the rattletrap, praying it would start without too much vehicular hemming and hawing. It occurred to Charlie that it was ridiculous for two people who had never driven to Portland to attempt the trip in the middle of the night in such a rickety automobile. The probability that they would get lost was so high that Charlie was already going over the options for finding help as he turned the car and headed past the isolated fence posts in the direction of Pensbottom. Despite the rattletrap’s rumbles and bangs, no aunts appeared at the doorway and no lights flicked on in the house. Francesca, looking back, laughed a sultry, chuckling laugh and flung her arm around Charlie.

“They have no idea,” she said. “They have absolutely no idea.” Her tone implied that she was shaking off their ignorance as if it were mud on her shoes. From now on, she told Charlie, she would know what was going on—in her own family and in life as well. When people talked about speakeasies and gambling and drinking, she would know what they meant because she would have experienced it all herself. “There’s no other way,” she said. “It might end in disaster, but if you don’t go, you’re just a naive little fool, doing what other people tell you to do. I’m tired of having my own family pull the wool over my eyes. They’ve had us trapped there all summer and pretended we were still eight years old, but we’re leaving now, and we’ll find Uncle Kurt and show him he’s not the only one who can go to Portland. Besides, he understands how I feel. And once we’re there he won’t have any choice but to take us with him.”

Charlie had doubts about that, but he didn’t voice them. At this point he was also hoping they would find Uncle Kurt, simply so that he could guide them through the city and offer Francesca some protection against her own wildness.

Miraculously the two of them drove all the way to Portland without once getting lost. I could easily believe that Francesca’s determination to follow Uncle Kurt was leading her forward. They reached the city sooner—far sooner—than they should have. “I don’t understand how it happened,” Charlie told us afterward. “I must have been driving too fast. Everyone said it was two hours from Pensbottom. But we got there in two hours, all the way from Shorecliff. I don’t know…” Even then he sounded nervous. “It was as if Francesca forced us to get there faster.”

What this meant was that it was only one-thirty in the morning when they began to walk through the busy streets, after parking the car in the city center. The dangers of a city at night, even a relatively small one like Portland, hadn’t been real to Charlie before that moment. Having grown up in a country town, he wasn’t used to the lights and clamor that fill a city through the witching hours. Francesca, hardened or believing herself hardened by a lifetime in New York, felt no fear at all. Charlie took her arm, hoping no one would think the rattletrap worth stealing, and they wandered the streets aimlessly for some time. At first they avoided eye contact with passersby and simply hunted for crowds and likely-looking buildings. After a while, however, Charlie grew desperate, and he began to ask, like the greenest yokel, which way they should turn for the speakeasies. Most of the people they asked laughed in their faces or reminded them, rivaling their innocence, that Portland had been a dry town for decades. Some looked Francesca up and down appreciatively—“That made me want to punch them out, I can tell you,” said Charlie. But one man obligingly directed them toward the waterfront, the seediest, most unsavory part of town, where the dance halls and whorehouses and backroom bars were located.

Good luck aided them in their quest to find Uncle Kurt. He usually frequented a far more exclusive poker circle than anything Francesca and Charlie could have found. Kurt said later, to the circle of aunts who gathered to interrogate him, how fortunate it was that he had stopped first to have a drink at a more popular place, one the city authorities silently condoned. “It would have been more fortunate,” Aunt Rose responded, “if you’d gone hunting with Frank and Cedric the way you were supposed to.”

Francesca and Charlie tried to visit four different places before they found the one where Uncle Kurt was having his quick drink. Two of these—unmarked bars that they identified by the tide of drunken voices seeping through the windows—didn’t let them in at all, and the other two were nearly empty. The novelty of the chase was wearing off by the time they got to the fifth place, a dance hall, and Charlie harbored a secret but increasingly pressing desire to give in and find a hotel where they could sleep. The full idiocy of their scheme became clear to him only as they were picking their way through that grimy part of town, passing streetwalkers and bums and men off merchant ships who stood crying outside the gambling houses because they had just lost everything they owned.

“Really,” he told us, shuddering, “it was a horrible place. I don’t care what Francesca said, I’m not glad to have seen it. I wish we’d never gone.” Francesca must have been feeling the same way, but of course she didn’t admit it. She told him not to be a fool, that they would find Kurt eventually. She led him fearlessly down one dark alley after another until they found a sordid, dirty establishment called The Tap Shoes, crowded with made-up women in tawdry dresses and men so drunk they couldn’t dance.

Uncle Kurt saw them as soon as they came in. “I’ve never been so damn surprised in my whole life,” he said. “When they walked through that door, I almost dropped my drink.”

Francesca’s triumph in finding Uncle Kurt lasted longer than Charlie’s. Kurt marched them out the door and gave them a talking-to that probably gained an edge by coming after several whiskeys. Charlie listened with an air so hopeless and resigned that Uncle Kurt said it seemed as if he didn’t even know where he was. Francesca, on the other hand, would nod seriously and then burst into gales of laughter and shout, “We found you—I knew we would!” It was a long time before she came down from her victory. The fact that her ridiculous plan had worked, that her determination had paid off, made her almost giddy. The whole night began to seem unreal, as if anything they set out to do would happen simply because they willed it.

In truth Francesca’s plan ended with finding Uncle Kurt. According to her fantastic vision of the night, once in his care they would simply follow him from one adventure to the next. Ultimately, though, I don’t think she was concerned with those specifics. It was the initial gesture that had captivated her, the desperation of abandoning all caution and flying headlong into the underground world that, for the Hatfield family, was forbidden above all others.

“Give me a drink!” she said to Uncle Kurt, still laughing and with a voice so full of excitement, he said, that it sounded as if she were drunk already.

That was the last straw for Uncle Kurt. I had never seen him angry, and from what Charlie told us, I never wanted to. The aunts’ wrath, of course, was fearsome, but it was also familiar. Making Uncle Kurt mad, according to Charlie, was utterly different. “The worst part,” he said, “was that it wasn’t like an uncle yelling at his niece and nephew. It was one adult furious with two other adults.
Really
furious—it sounded at first as if he hated me. Not that he shouted or jumped around or anything. He just stood there and spoke in that awful voice…” Charlie trailed off, and he wouldn’t elaborate further. But none of us wanted more details.

Uncle Kurt told Charlie he had been irresponsible and careless to an unforgivable degree. “Did you ever stop to imagine,” he asked, “what would have happened if you two had been attacked in this city? This isn’t a place for children, and it’s especially not a place for a young woman as innocent and impulsive as Francesca. How,” he said, turning to Charlie, “how could you have brought her here?” That was the worst question of all, and Charlie didn’t have an answer.

With Francesca Uncle Kurt was almost gentle. He took her by the shoulders and said, “Francesca, this isn’t what you want. You don’t want my kind of life. It’s not a happy one, believe me. You weren’t made for secrecy and lies and breaking the law. Do you understand me?” Francesca looked at him with that black-eyed stare of hers. She was listening, but she wasn’t going to agree with what he said. Not one of the rest of us could have looked into Uncle Kurt’s face with the unwavering defiance she showed then. “I could see it in her eyes,” he said to the aunts. “That passion! She wasn’t going to give up a single moment of her independence.” Even so, he kept trying to reason with her. “You’ll have a long, adventure-filled life,” he told her. “You’ll do all sorts of things we’ll be stunned to hear about. But you’re young. Believe it or not, you’re still young. And there will be time for all that in the future.”

Francesca waited until he was finished and then shot him a knowing, feline smile. “I bet if you were in my position, you wouldn’t give in either—would you, Uncle Kurt?”

Uncle Kurt didn’t answer. He let go of her and turned to Charlie. And then he made a horrible mistake. “Take her home,” he said. “Take her home right now. Drive back, tell the aunts whatever you want, but make sure she doesn’t leave Shorecliff again.” As an afterthought he added, “Will you be able to find your way?”

Charlie nodded. At the time, he told us, Uncle Kurt was so terrifying that it didn’t occur to Charlie to ask him to come back with them. He was too angry, too distant, too firmly planted in a world they could see only from the outside. Also, Charlie added, Francesca was worrying him. He suspected that if she had been any other girl she would have been crying, but because she would suffer anything rather than break down when being reprimanded, she transformed all her feelings into a kind of frantic impudence. “But she was tired,” Charlie said. “I could see by the way she was standing. So I thought it really would be the best thing to get her home as fast as possible.”