The Bay at Midnight (5 page)

I glanced across the canal, looking toward the rooster shack, and my gaze was drawn to the tall reeds directly across the canal from my house. Fishermen were arriving. They walked along a path cut through the reeds and began setting up their gear and their folding chairs behind the fence. Every one of them was colored, and they weren’t all men, either. It was hard
to tell the women from the men at that distance, but I could tell for certain that a couple of them were children.

“Crabbing, huh?”

The voice came from behind me, surprising me so much that I had to grab the fence to keep my balance. I turned to see Ned Chapman walking toward me, grinning widely. Something happened to me in that moment. I don’t know if it was the way his blue eyes shone in the sunlight, or the triangle of tanned chest clearly visible beneath the collar of his open shirt, or the way he held his cigarette between his thumb and index finger, but I thought I might keel over and fall into the canal. I’d gotten my period for the first time in the early spring, and ever since then, I felt my stomach turn inside-out at the sight of a cute boy. And Ned was definitely
cute.
His hair was thick, the color of sunshine. He looked a little like Troy Donahue.

“Hi, Ned,” I managed to say, and only when I said his name out loud did I realize that he had the same name as Nancy Drew’s steady boyfriend. “Hi, Ned,” I repeated, this time to myself, just to feel his name on my tongue again.

He’d reached the opposite side of the fence from where I was standing and leaned over, his elbows resting on the metal bar at the top of the chain link. “You’re an early bird,” he said.

“You, too.”

“How many did you get?” He leaned farther over the fence to try to look in the bucket.

“Five, so far.”

“You like them?”

“To eat, you mean?”

He took a drag on his cigarette and let the smoke out in a long stream. “What else?” he asked.

“Actually, no.” I giggled and was annoyed with myself for sounding like a kid. “Grandma loves them, though. And I love catching them, so it works out okay.”

“So.” He rubbed his hand across his chin as though checking if he needed a shave. It was a sexy gesture. “Did Izzy get in trouble last night?”

I nodded. “She can’t go out all day. She asked me to give you something, though.”

I balanced carefully as I walked back along the bulkhead, trying to impress him by not holding on to the fence. In my yard, I put down the bucket and the net, then grabbed the giraffe from beneath the chair and carried it over to him. “She asked me to give you this,” I said.

He smiled, taking the giraffe from my hand. I felt embarrassed for Isabel that she wanted to give him something so dumb. I didn’t believe her when she’d said it was actually his.

“That’s nice of you to do that for her,” he said, looking right at me, and I stood as tall as I could, wondering how my small, barely there breasts looked in the childish one-piece bathing suit I was wearing. I needed to get a two-piece this summer, if Mom would let me.

“She said it belonged to you,” I said.

“Yeah, it does, actually,” he said. “Thanks for bringing it over. Tell her everything’s copacetic.”

Why, oh why, hadn’t I remembered to bring my dictionary?
I heard sounds coming from his screened porch and didn’t want to be in the Chapmans’ yard when goofy Ethan came outside, so I said goodbye to Ned and went back to our dock to see if any new crabs had appeared along the bulkhead.

Right after lunch, Grandpop, Daddy and I towed the boat
down to the marina. We gassed it up, Grandpop hopping onto the pier like a young man happy to be alive. I knew how he felt. Just the smell of the gasoline mixing with the salty scent of the water filled me up with joy. I thought to myself,
I take after him.
Grandpop loved everything about the shore—the water, fishing, boating, the smells, the night sky—everything, just as I did. We looked nothing alike: he was nearly bald, with a sad sort of face that always reminded me of a basset hound, but in many other ways, we were the same.

He and I went for a spin on the bay before taking the boat through the canal and into our dock. Grandpop let me pilot it myself part of the time, even allowing me to maneuver it into our dock, and he told me I did a terrific job. Our boat had no steering wheel, just a tiller handle attached to the motor, and I felt good that I was getting the hang of it so quickly. I nearly fell when I tried to get from the boat to the bulkhead, though, but Grandpop said I would have it mastered in a few days. I tied the boat to the hooks at the sides of the dock, loving the wet, rough feel of the rope beneath my fingers. I felt sorry for Izzy. Here it was, her first full day at the shore, and she wasn’t even allowed out of the house.

I sat with her and Lucy on the porch for a while, reading. Lucy and I were in the rockers, and Isabel was stretched out on the bed at the end of the porch, as close to the Chapmans’ house as she could get. I noticed that she wasn’t turning the pages of her book. She gazed in the direction of the Chapmans’ yard, probably waiting for a glimpse of Ned. He and Mr. Chapman were working on their boat, and I doubted she could see their dock from her place on the bed, but when Ned walked through their yard to get something from their house, I could nearly hear
Izzy’s heartbeat quicken. I understood how she felt. He was having the same effect on me.

Before dinner, I took the boat out by myself. Mom was nervous about it, but Daddy talked her into letting me as long as I wore the hideous orange life preserver. It was a Monday and the weekend congestion on the canal had vanished overnight. I took the boat right to the mouth of the bay. The water stretched in front of me wide and inviting and I longed to go out into it, just a little way, but I didn’t dare. Instead I turned around in a broad arc and headed for the dock between the colored fishermen and the rooster house.

Once inside the unfamiliar dock, I cut the motor. There was a short ladder on my left and I tied my boat to a rung, took off the life preserver, then climbed up. The colored fishermen made me nervous. I didn’t look directly at them, but I could feel their eyes following me as I walked between the cattails and the fence, heading away from them in the direction of the shack. I finally found a narrow path cut through the tall grass, and I followed it right to the front porch of the ramshackle little cottage.

“Who are you?”

I jumped at the sound of a man’s voice, disembodied because I couldn’t see through the screens of his porch.

“I was just coming to see where the rooster lives,” I said.

The screen door creaked open a few inches and a man stood in the doorway. He had a thick beard and a dirty old hat on his head. The early evening sunlight fell onto his face and he squinted, his eyes reduced to little beads of translucent blue, making him look a bit demonic.
The Mystery of theWarlock’s Shack
, I thought to myself. I liked the title. Maybe I would try to write my own book.

“Where do you live?” he asked.

I turned and pointed to my bungalow, which was barely visible through the reeds. It looked very far away.

“You come over by boat?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“By yourself?”

“Yes,” I said, turning to go. “And I’d better get back.”

“What were you planning to do to my rooster?” he said, as I moved away.

“Oh!” I said. “Nothing. I wouldn’t hurt it. I just wanted to see where it lived.”

He held the door open wider. “Right here,” he said.

I looked past him onto the porch and saw the rooster and a couple of hens walking around on the floor as if they were mechanical toys. I took a step backward, wondering if the man’s sneakers were caked with the droppings of his feathered pets.

“Thanks for showing me,” I said.

“There are some people around here who’d like to wring my rooster’s neck,” he said, and I thought he sounded suspicious.

“Not me,” I said. “Thanks again for letting me see him.” I turned then and walked as quickly as I could through the tall grass. It probably only took me thirty seconds to reach the dock, but by that time I’d made up two or three different stories about the man. He kept children locked in closets inside the rickety old house. He’d murdered his wife and her bones were buried beneath the porch. When I was about to climb down the ladder, I spotted something shiny in the flattened grass near the head of the dock. I walked over and stared down at a pair of sunglasses, then picked them up. Maybe they belonged to the wife the old man had killed. Who knew? They would go beneath my bed to wait just in case.

That evening, Grandpop and I walked to the end of the dirt road. For as long as I could remember, he’d kept a path cleared through the tall grasses that rose a couple of feet above my head. We followed the path, and I loved the feeling of being closed in by the grass walls. Dragonflies flew along with us as we walked, but we were covered in insect repellant so the mosquitoes left us alone. We emerged from the path in a swampy area of still water that was connected to the canal by a narrow opening in the bulkhead. As he always did, Grandpop had set his bait trap in the shallow water here, tying it to a stake in the soft, sandy earth among the grasses. I pulled in the trap. It was full of green-gray killies, flapping on the wire mesh. Grandpop opened the trap and spilled the bait into his bucket. While he was doing that, I spied something in the water a few feet from where we stood. A baby shoe! I rolled up my capris as high as I could, waded into the water to my knees, and reached out to grab the little white leather shoe, a real prize in the world of clues.

“What do you do with all that stuff you collect?” Grandpop asked me as he closed the trap again.

“I keep them under my bed,” I said. “They might be clues to something that happened. Like, what if a baby got kidnapped or something? I could take this shoe to the police and tell them where I found it and maybe they could solve the mystery.”

“I think you need a better place than under your bed,” Grandpop said. “Your mother could clean up there and toss out all that old stuff you found.”

I loved my grandfather so much right then. He always took me seriously.

“Where else could I put it?” I studied the tiny shoe in my hands.

“I have an idea,” he said. He put his hand on the back of my neck as we walked, his fingers a little rough and damp against my skin. “When we get back to the house, you gather up your clues and I’ll show you where you can keep them.”

Once home, I did as I was told. I only had three paltry clues so far: the baby shoe, the sunglasses and the silly Ping-Pong ball, but that seemed pretty good for two days worth of sleuthing. I carried them out to the backyard. Grandpop was digging a hole near the corner of the house closest to the woods. Next to him was an old tin bread box with a removable red top.

He grinned at me, his sweet basset hound face lighting up for a moment. “What do you think, Nancy Drew?” he asked. “We’ll bury this bread box in this hole, cover it with a little sand and no one will ever know your clues are here.”

I helped him lower the bread box into the hole. I put my clues inside, then slipped on the lid and covered it with a couple of inches of sand. I loved my new hiding place. No one would ever know the clues were there.

Or so I thought.

Julie

T
he sunburned waitress poured more iced tea into my glass, and I interpreted the look she gave me as sympathetic.
This is why I don’t date
, I thought. It was the waiting, the wondering, the analyzing. Why was Ethan late? Was he stuck in traffic? Had he forgotten we were to meet for lunch? Or had he simply been annoyed that I’d twisted his arm to talk with me? I wanted to explain to the waitress that, although I
was
meeting a man here, he was not a date. Not a romantic interest. But then I realized that the waitress probably saw me as too old to be dating, anyway. She was in her mid-twenties; most likely I reminded her of her mother.

The Spring Lake restaurant was barely ten miles from Bay Head Shores, and that was closer than I’d been to our former summer home since I was twelve. When I’d gotten out of my car, I could smell the salt from the ocean a few blocks away. I was surprised
that the scent elicited not only the discomfort I’d expected, but also a longing, as though a tiny piece of me was still able to remember the good times I’d had down the shore in spite of all that had been taken from my family there.

The waitress stopped by my table again on her way to another. “Can I get you a roll or something to munch on while you wait, hon?” she asked. It felt so strange to be called “hon” by someone half my age. Better, though, than
ma’am.

“No, thanks.” I smiled at her. “I’m fine.”

It was warm in the restaurant, or at least
I
was warm. I had on cropped black pants and a sleeveless red top cut high on my shoulders, but I noticed other women in the restaurant were pulling on their sweaters. I didn’t even bother carrying a sweater since menopause hit me a year ago.

I’d taken a table at the front of the restaurant so I would be able to see Ethan when he walked in. I wasn’t sure I’d recognize him. Through the window, I studied the men walking by, searching for lanky academic types. I watched people entering and leaving the little shops on the other side of the street. A young man stood directly across the street from me, rubbing lotion on a woman’s back. I watched the two of them until a pack of bicyclers sped by, blocking my view.

I looked at my watch. Twenty minutes late. Maybe he wasn’t going to show up. He certainly had not welcomed my call.

“I’m sorry Abby disturbed you with this,” he’d said, once I’d identified myself. He had a soft voice, exactly the sort of voice I would have imagined him having, and he did not sound irritated or angry. Just tired.

“She had to.” I was on the phone in my office, staring at the words
Chapter Four
on my computer screen. The rest of the page
was still blank. “She was right to,” I said. “And she and I agreed that the situation needed looking into.”

He was quiet. “I’m not sure that
I
agree,” he said finally.

“We’re talking about a serious injustice,” I said. “A man served time in prison for something he didn’t do. And we’re talking about my
sister.
” Along with the old sense of loss I felt at the mention of Isabel came the suddenly realization of my insensitivity. “I’m sorry, Ethan,” I said quickly. “I didn’t even offer you condolences. I’m very sorry. I know what it’s like to lose a sibling.”

I heard him sigh. “Thanks,” he said. “Ned…I don’t know what happened to him. He had some sort of breakdown in his late teens and early twenties. He became…I don’t know how to describe it. He was just existing. Not really living.”

Don’t you think that suggests he was carrying a guilty secret?
I wanted to ask but decided against it. This wasn’t the time.

“How bad was it?” I asked. “Was he able to work?”

“Oh, yeah,” Ethan said. “He wasn’t
that
bad off. He spent time in Vietnam, which didn’t help his condition, and he was eventually discharged for a sleep problem. Then he got his degree in accounting and worked for a plumbing company, doing their books. He never got married. He dated a little, but never anything serious.”

“Abby said…or rather, implied, that he had a drinking problem.”

“Yes, he did,” Ethan said, “but he wasn’t a sloppy drunk. It didn’t get in the way of his work or anything. Just kept him numb. We tried to get him help, but he would never admit to having a problem.You can’t change someone who doesn’t want to change.”

I had many more questions but felt anxious about asking them over the phone. I was afraid if I probed too deeply, he would hang up on me.

“Can we meet?” I asked. “I’d like to talk to you in person about this. About the letter.”

There was a silence so deep and long I had to ask him if he was still on the line.

“I’m here,” he replied in that soft, soft voice. “And yes, I’ll meet you. Where are you living?”

“Westfield,” I said. “How about you?”

“On the canal,” he said, and I doubted that he knew how those three words stopped my breath. “We winterized the summer house years ago,” he added.

“Do you live there with…”I wasn’t sure who else might be living in the Chapman’s old house with him. His parents? His wife?

“Alone,” he said. “My wife and Abby used to live here, too, but I was divorced five years ago and Abby’s out on her own now, of course. She has a daughter. My granddaughter. Did she tell you that?” There was pride in his voice. I could hear the smile.

“No,” I said. “That’s wonderful.”

“Do you want to come here?”

“No,” I said, nearly choking on the word in my rush to get it out. There was no way I was going to Bay Head Shores. “Maybe we could meet halfway.”

“Well,” he said. “I have to be in Spring Lake Friday. If you want to meet me there for lunch, we can do that.”

It was more than halfway, but that was all right. I needed to see him face-to-face to persuade him to take Ned’s letter to the police.

A man carrying a soft-sided briefcase walked through the door of the restaurant and I looked up expectantly, but the red hair and glasses were missing and I gazed out the window again.

“Julie?” I turned to see the man standing next to my table.

“Ethan?” I
queried back.

He nodded, his smile subdued, and held out his hand. “Sorry I’m late,” he said. “I got stuck in beach traffic.”

“That’s okay.” I shook his hand, and he sat down across from me.

“I would never have recognized you,” I said, then wondered if that sounded rude. The truth was, age had done him many favors. His red hair was now a gray-tinged auburn, thin at his temples. He wore no glasses. The freckled skin of his youth had weathered into something kinder and he’d put on weight in the form of muscle. He was wearing a cobalt-blue short-sleeved shirt and his arms were lean and tight. The nerdiness from his childhood was gone. Completely. “You look great,” I added.

“And you look wonderful,” he said. “I would have recognized you anywhere. But of course, your face used to be all over our house on the back of your books.”

“Used to be?” I asked.

“We both read them, but my wife got custody of the books,” he said. He glanced down at my bare ring finger. “You’re married, right?” he asked. “I recall something like ‘the author lives with her husband in New Jersey’ or something like that from one of your book jackets.”

The waitress appeared at our table, pad at the ready. “How’re you two doing?” she asked.

I looked up at her sunburned face. “He hasn’t had a chance to look at the menu,” I said.

Ethan handed the waitress his unopened menu. “Just a burger, medium well,” he said. “And lemonade, please.”

I ordered the shrimp salad, then returned my attention to Ethan. “I’m divorced,” I said. “Two years.”

“Children?”

“A daughter. Shannon. She’s seventeen. She just graduated high school.”

“College plans?”

“The Oberlin Conservatory of Music,” I said. “She’s a cellist.”

He looked impressed. “Wow,” he said.

“What kind of work do you do?” I asked, then held up my hand. “Wait. Let me guess,” I said. “You teach marine biology.”

He laughed. “I’m a carpenter,” he said.

“Oh.” I nodded. That was not what I’d expected. If anyone had told me skinny little Ethan Chapman would end up working with his hands instead of his head, I never would have believed it. I thought of his ambitious father, Rosswell Chapman III or whatever he had been. The summer I was twelve, he was chief justice on the New Jersey Supreme Court and he later ran unsuccessfully for governor. I wondered if he’d been disappointed to see his sons turn out to be an accountant and a carpenter rather than follow him into law or politics.

“I wasn’t the least bit surprised you turned out to be a writer,” Ethan said.

“No?”

“Your family was so artsy. Your mother painted, right?”

“That’s right. She was a teacher, but she painted as a hobby.” I’d almost forgotten how my mother loved to set up her easel on the bungalow porch.

“And your father was a doctor, but wasn’t he a writer, too?”

“A columnist for a magazine,” I said.

“You’ve got a daughter who plays the cello,” he continued. “And your little sister, Lucy, used to play that plastic violin.”

“What?” I laughed. “I don’t remember that at all, but you’re
probably right because she
does
play the violin now. She’s in a band called the ZydaChicks.”

He smiled. “There you go,” he said.

I took a sip of my iced tea, wondering if Isabel would have shown any special talent if she’d been given the chance to grow up.

Ethan was still smiling at me, his head cocked to one side.

“What?” I asked.

“You really, really look terrific,” he said.

I felt myself blush. “Thanks,” I said.

“I mean it,” he said, then leaned back in his chair with a sigh. “Well, I guess we’d better talk about what we came here to talk about.” He lifted the briefcase from the floor and pulled out an envelope. “Abby told me she showed you a copy of the letter,” he said, handing it to me.

I studied the envelope. Unlike the typed letter, the address of the police department was handwritten, printed in precise, slanted letters.

“Why haven’t you taken it to the police?” I asked, shifting my focus from the envelope to his eyes. They were a clear, deep blue. I’d never noticed their color behind the Coke-bottle glasses he used to wear. “I mean, it’s obvious that Ned wanted them to have it.”

“No, he obviously had second thoughts,” Ethan corrected me. His voice might have been gentle, but the words carried their own force and, although I didn’t agree with him, I liked how he stood up for himself. Glen always allowed people to steamroll right over him. “The letter was dated a couple of months before he died,” Ethan added.

“But he didn’t throw it away,” I said.

Ethan sighed. “Julie, if I take it to the police, they’re going to assume Ned did it. They’re going to start asking questions. I
don’t care what they ask me, but my father is elderly. I don’t want his last years to be spent thinking that his son murdered someone. I have a buddy at the police department and I ran this by him, in a hypothetical sort of way. He said they’d open the case up again. They didn’t do much with forensics back then, so they’d be looking at the evidence from a new perspective now. But they’d almost certainly want to talk with my father. I don’t want to put him through it.”

I saw genuine concern in his face and couldn’t help but be touched by his reasoning. I hoped I could protect my mother from ever knowing anything at all about the letter, no matter what the outcome. I wasn’t sure I would be able to, though. I knew from the sort of books I wrote that Ethan’s friend at the police department was right. It didn’t matter how old the case was, the police would reopen it. Start fresh. I just prayed they could leave my mother out of it. Ross Chapman, though, would certainly be questioned, since he was the person who’d confirmed Ned’s alibi. “Is your mother also still alive?” I asked.

The waitress arrived with our food before he could answer, and we fell into small talk with her about her sunburn. She’d fallen asleep on the beach, she said, pressing her hands to her crimson cheeks once she’d set our plates on the table.

“I’m in
agony,
” she said, with a flair for drama.

Ethan reached into his briefcase again and pulled out a tube of lotion. “Here,” he said, handing it to her. “Put this on the burn. It takes the sting away instantly.”

She looked surprised. “Thank you,” she said.

“You can keep it,” Ethan added.

“That’s so nice of you,” she said, slipping the tube into her apron pocket. “Don’t worry about a tip.”

Once she’d left our table, I turned to him. “Do you always carry sunburn cream with you?” I asked. I liked that he’d talked so easily to the waitress. Glen would have looked right through her. Why did I keep comparing him to Glen?

Ethan shrugged. “I love being outdoors,”he said, “but two minutes in the sun and I’m burned. I have to work up to it gradually.”

I smiled. I could still see the delicate little kid in him, hiding behind a much manlier facade. I watched the muscles in his forearms shift as he lifted the hamburger to his mouth. The triangle of skin in the open collar of his shirt was the same ruddy tan as the rest of him, and for a moment, I got lost in the shallow valley at the base of his throat. The muscles low in my belly suddenly contracted. It had been so long since I’d experienced that sensation that it took me a moment to recognize it as desire.

Oh
, I thought,
this is very strange.

“I was asking about your mother,” I said, returning to the relative safety of our conversation.

“Right,” he said, swallowing a bite of his hamburger. “She died last year. And that’s part of why I’m concerned about my father. He was broken up about Mom, and Ned’s death really hit him hard. I’m trying to get him to see a counselor, someone who works with the elderly, but he won’t accept help any more than Ned would.” He lifted a French fry to his mouth, then set it down again. “I actually think he wants to die at this point.”

“Is he ill?” I asked.

“Not ill. Just old. Just old and very sad. He lives in an independent-living residence in Lakewood. I mentioned that I was having lunch with you today, just to test his reaction. He seemed surprised, but that was all. It’s like he didn’t really get it.
Didn’t understand who you were.” He ate the French fry. “Are your parents still living?” he asked.