The Four Ms. Bradwells (24 page)

“No kidding?” Mia said.

Trey laughed. “Actually, it’s all nonsense. It comes from
The Jupiter Effect
, but even the two astrophysicists who wrote the novel admit there’s nothing to it. Still, people will believe what they want to believe.”

“Trey isn’t the only earthling who likes to imagine doom,” Frank said as he unlocked the door to the cottage. He flipped a switch, lighting a dead bug burial ground in the frosted-glass ceiling lamp.

Spiders had set up house in just about every corner of the small sitting room. The lace curtains and the Oriental rug, the settee and the upholstered rocking chair were all faded to match the dust.

“I suppose Mother already had the wood laid in the fireplaces for
you
, Ginge,” Beau said. Then to the other fellas, “And to think, I begged Mother for years to let me stay out here with you ‘big boys’ on party weekends, before she finally decided I was old enough.”

He headed off to the single bedroom for blankets while Trey and Doug set to lighting the cast-iron woodstove. Frank announced that
these accommodations called for a drink and quickly accepted my offer of help, leaving me following him into a dreary kitchen with an icebox that fell off the ugly tree and a pump-handle faucet that ran surprisingly clear from the start.

“So you’re the famous Hell on Wheels,” he said, but in a fond way.

“Thank you, Ginger, for sharing my beloved nickname with every soul you meet.”

“It came from Trey, actually. But he means it with great respect. Trey likes a woman with spunk.”

Back in the sitting room, our glasses filled with scotch from flasks in the fellas’ pockets, Frank said to Doug, “So this is home for the week, I’m afraid. Not exactly watertight.” They proceeded to discuss whether the roof would last the week, and the merits of dragging mattresses up to the lighthouse watch room.

“One hundred thirty-six steps,” Beau pointed out. “And those mattresses aren’t light.”

Doug said, “The keepers used to carry fifty-pound drums of lamp oil up those steps.”

“I think I’ll take my chances here,” Beau said.

“Only two mattresses,” Doug observed, at which point the fellas all looked at each other and burst into laughter. “I guess your mother doesn’t mean for us to sleep much this week, unless it’s in someone else’s bed.”

“Don’t even be thinking about singing to my friends, Dougie,” Ginger said. “We’ve already got four in the waitstaff’s bunkroom. We don’t need your company.”

Ginger and the fellas started sharing stories of past visits to the island, then: earlier parties where Chawterley beds were in high demand. There was the time ten-year-old Ginger, not meaning to be excluded, had snuck out here to spend the night with the boys, causing a flood of panic in the big house when she was missed. There was the time an even younger Beau, sleeping on the pier under the stars with the other fellas, rolled over and landed in the water, sleeping bag and all.

“That bag is still sleeping with the fishes,” Frank said with a Godfather accent, brushing the back of his hand against his cheek. “It’ll come up in a crab net some day.”

And then they were talking about crabbing season, and whether there
would be crabs for the party. It was early for crabs, but with the warm weather you never knew.

“You know how crab fishing works?” Trey asked Mia and Betts and me.

The others groaned.

“No one but you thinks this is interesting, Trey,” Frank warned. “You and maybe Ginger, but that’s only because she was young and impressionable the first time she heard it, and you were the older, much-adored cousin who could still beat up Beau and me.”

Trey plunged ahead anyway, explaining how the shallow waters around the island were ideal for crabbing, how by mid-May millions of blue crabs would be digging their way up from their muddy-bottom winter homes and shedding their skins so they could grow.

Doug, in a heavy New York accent meant to imitate Trey’s more subtle one, said, “A crab sheds its shell some twenty times in its short life.”

“That’s how it grows,” Frank added in a similarly bad imitation of Trey. “It can’t grow without shedding first, leaving its little claws naked and exposed.”

“Its
crimson
claws,” Doug corrected him. “Crimson and
cerulean.
”

“ ‘Cerulean’: a word you’ve never heard before and will never hear again, but trust us, Trey means blue,” Ginger said. “He thinks he means a particular shade of blue, but really he just means to impress you with the range of his vocabulary.”

From the Latin word
caeruleus
, meaning dark blue or blue-green, which in turn derives from
caelulum
, diminutive of
caelum
, meaning … “Heaven,” I said, “or sky.”

Everyone looked at me. I shrugged. “
Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt
. Those who cross the sea change the sky, not their spirits.”

“In manners, too, dominate!” Mia and Ginger and Betts all said, flashing finger crosses without missing a beat.

“And she’s
not
law review?” Frank said to Trey. “Good thing we got into the firm when the competition wasn’t so stiff.”

“I think I’m the only one of us actually
in
the firm,” Trey said. “I believe I’ll be voting on whether or not you’ll be made partner, m’ boy, so you’d best be awfully nice to me.”

“Meaning don’t interrupt his story,” Ginger advised her brother.

Frank grinned, and said (again in the fake Trey accent), “So it’s the final shed …”

“… that makes a she-crab a sook,” Doug said.

“What good learners you gentlemen are,” Trey said. Then to us, “And a sook’s abdominal apron, her vaginal covering—”

“—takes on a triangular shape,” Doug interrupted, “which resembles nothing so much as … all together, boys.”

“The U.S. Capitol!” Frank and Doug and Beau shouted, although Beau seemed less enthusiastic about it than the others, and less drunk, too.

“The jimmy crab—that’s the male crab,” Doug continued. “His genital covering looks like …”

“The Washington Monument!” The words again delivered in synchrony, at which point Frank and Doug applauded themselves.

Trey, looking mightily peeved and trying not to, said, “
Slender and phallic-shaped
, like the Washington Monument. If you’re going to steal my story, at least get it right. You’re making it sound so unromantic.” He caught me in the harsh beacon of his gaze. “It’s really one of the most touching mating rituals you’ll ever see,” he insisted. “The jimmy cradles his girlfriend for as much as a week, and then he stands guard over her, literally makes a protective cage for her with his walking legs while she molts. He’s a patient sort. Her striptease can take two or three hours, but he just stands over her, protecting her. When she’s done, when she’s all vulnerable and shiny, he gently helps her onto her back before he takes her. She extends her abdomen so that it folds around him, and they couple like that for as long as twelve hours. Afterward, he hangs around to protect her until her shell regenerates. He carries her around until she can protect herself again.”

The whole conversation was creeping me out, though it didn’t seem much to bother anyone else. Ginger was laughing with the fellas, and if Betts heard anything more than simple biology in Trey’s voice, she was masking it well enough. Maybe she was too focused on Beau to tend much to what Trey was saying; Mia clearly was. Beau was sitting by Mia’s feet, next to the wood-burning stove he’d settled her beside. So maybe I was the one whose mind was in the wrong place. Trey was a successful young partner in a conservative firm where every lawyer was an upstanding member of the community and no one was a creep. They were talking about something natural, something beautiful and loving if Trey was
to be believed, and no one was disagreeing with him. They were laughing. They were having fun.

“You’re leaving off the part about how crabbers take advantage of all this romance?” Doug said. “That’s so unlike you, Trey.”

But it was almost dawn, and there were 136 steps to climb for the view of the sunrise we meant to have.

Betts

THE COOK ISLAND LIGHTHOUSE
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9

T
HE SUN HAS
long ago risen this time. But here we are back in the lighthouse. The Lightkeeper’s Cottage is gone just as Laney said. Ginger and I stare back through the tunnel-doorway to the blank space where it stood in 1982. Land now filled with tall grasses blending with the rest of the island. Filled-in emptiness.

“We tried to talk Mother into tearing this lighthouse itself down when they bulldozed the cottage and the oil house,” Ginger says, “but she spent a small fortune restoring it instead.”

The details fall into place then: The walls painted where they had been bare concrete. The sills of the windows along the winding stairs no longer flaking. The cracked panes replaced.

“So when it was a useful lighthouse it was a dump,” I say. “And now that it’s useless it’s
Architectural Digest
material. Maybe that’s our future, too! When we’re useless we’ll have time to polish our nails.”

Ginger examines her hands. “I have a photo shoot with
Hand Digest
this afternoon,” she says, her slight overbite disappearing into her grin.

Our feet clank and our breaths deepen as we wind up the webbed-iron stairs to the watch room, where the lighthouse keepers once monitored the light. As we catch our breath, I try to remember whether the whole floor was just one open room like this. Did the windows go all the way around for this amazing view? What I remember was a filthy service room. Its beaded ceiling flaking strips of dirty white paint. The room itself full of rusty old tools. Wire. A single chair and table. And not much else. Not even the telescope that first night. It was still in Trey’s boat. If
there was a view back then it was through windows that hadn’t been washed in years.

But the walls and ceiling are now tongue and groove, painted a glossy white. The few tools left have been cleaned and polished as if for a museum. There isn’t a loose nail in sight.

“Spira mirabilis,”
Laney says. “Miraculous spiral.” She’s looking down steps as logarithmically perfect as the swirl of a nautilus shell.

Several books sit on a polished table next to a plain wooden chair. The original chair and table where Trey Humphrey shot himself? Or was shot. Trey Humphrey who we all want to believe brought his gun up 136 steps to clean it. To this space that has nothing to do with guns.

I pick the top book from the pile and open what looks to be a handwritten diary. “ ‘Arrived at Cook Island at 9:10,’ ” I read aloud. “ ‘Commenced making inquiries for an additional man. Could not find anyone who is competent.’ ” I flip forward a few pages. “ ‘Snowed last night. Ice thick on the bay.’ ” And later: “ ‘Took inventory of all the groceries here belonging to keeper at invoice prices to be returned or sold to incoming keeper.’ ”

I pick up the next book on the stack. Read silently for a moment. “Is this …?”

Ginger stares at me. Or at the chair in which Trey died. Or both. She doesn’t seem to register that I’m talking. Her eyes have faded to the color of dirty bathwater.

“Ginger?”

“They’re the logbooks,” she says. “From when the lighthouse was manned.”

“Did your mother …?”

Ginger offers no answer to whatever question it is I can’t manage to put into words.

We haven’t any of us asked the one question that needs to be asked. For thirty years. We’ve just pretended nothing to be questioned ever happened on this island. Someone must have talked, though. One of us must have talked.

My answer to the senator’s question was too quick. My look too unfazed. Mia and I had never discussed how I should
look
when I answered. But that’s what I was going for. Unfazed. A mistake. I was too well prepared for a question I didn’t want to appear to expect.

I don’t believe I have anything to add to the public record on that
.

Ginger goes to the windows and stares out. She reaches up and touches the back of her hair. Like the day we met. Ginger standing in class insisting that her name wasn’t Cook. Insisting that identifying a woman by her marital status was demeaning. Ms. Decisis-Bradwell. Stand by that which is decided.

I don’t believe I have anything to add to the public record on that
. It’s the kind of nonanswer Mia might arm me with if she had in mind that I might need a weapon. If she worried that I might not stand by what we’d decided without the right words. Why did I let her talk me into this? Why did she want to? Mia, the one who thought we should go to the police. Who never has given up thinking she was right.

Except she didn’t talk me into anything. I’d already talked myself into it. She just fed me the words. Mia has always been good at words.

Although not good enough to persuade Ginger and Laney to tell someone what had happened when it did. Mia and I were the only ones who thought we should say something. And it isn’t me talking now.

“You don’t think Mia was the blogger, do you?” I say. The treachery coming out in a whisper. Is this why Ginger suggested Mia go with Max?
Did
she suggest it? Or was that Laney?