The Incident on the Bridge (29 page)

Jerome rubbed the oil from the potato chip off his fingers. “I don't know,” he said. “It looks one way from where you're standing, and totally different from the other side.”

Camilla looked kind of confused, and he hadn't said anything about lines or learning to call balls in or out, so why wouldn't she be?

He said, “What they say in tennis is,
One percent on the line is one hundred percent in.
Meaning, if you think it might possibly be just a tiny bit in, you have to call it like that.”

“That's cool, I guess,” Camilla said, still confused.

“If there's still a chance that she's not dead, I mean, then you have to call it like that.”

“Let me know if you hear anything,” Camilla said, and he said he would. It was seven o'clock now and maybe Ted would have a plan. He would text her, and then he could do something with this awful feeling he had.

“Y
ou can't sleep here, sir,” a voice is saying.

He stares. It's not the same librarian, but she has a name tag on. The book is open to the same page and the man who was reading in the carrel way ahead of him is gone. A lady who's scanning the shelves across from him pretends she isn't listening but she's watching to see if the librarian will make him leave. Perhaps it was she who told the librarian an old man was sleeping in the chair instead of reading.

He closes the book and sets it on the desk before him. Then he stands up. The librarian crosses her hands nervously and waits to see if he'll go.

“I'm going,” he says.

She doesn't say anything, just waits for him to walk in the direction of the exit, down the shiny hall. The light outside is different: it's late afternoon. Somehow he's been asleep for hours and hours. Can that be? It's as if he were drugged.

There's nothing to do about the impeller or his money now. He must go back to the boat and do without the motor, do without the card. He needs to hurry. So much time has passed. If he doesn't hurry, when he opens the hatch to the cabin, it will be like the other time, in Oceano. The girl's body so still. What did Shiva think when Frank sailed out from Oceano after dark, when he pushed the body off the deck, when the boat sailed away from it, when the ocean failed to swallow, then opened, then she was gone? So far away. Or when he and Ben Crames decided to have an ice cream while Julia was tied up in the pirate cave because there wasn't enough money to buy three. He and Ben would buy one scoop each and then go back to find Julia and never tell her about the cones.

So much time gone now.

F
irst Clay found the rolled-up flyer. Tossed onto the deck of his boat, evidently, where he stepped on it. One more proof that people thought this was his fault, but also good news. Maybe Thisbe was missing instead of dead.

He needed to check the stash. Maybe Thisbe had taken all thirteen bags. They could be hidden all over the island like land mines if her last act before disappearing had been to ride around dropping his stash in places the police could connect to him. Should he go by the house? He wasn't supposed to disturb the tenants but this was an emergency.

Once he'd unlocked the cabin door and opened the cupboard, he found the bags lined up, thank God. He flicked through them to count them, just to be sure, and a blue card slipped to the floor, one of those playing cards Thisbe had brought the night she surprised him and he should have told her to go back home. The letter
J
on one side of the card, a blue-and-white striped flag on the other. What that one meant he couldn't remember, though he remembered stuff about being on fire and going down in flames.
Pilot me
and stuff. The thing was, he really did like her. She was not much like the girls that he normally went out with. The
facilones.
She was the opposite. More like a
difficult-oh-nay.

He needed a plan, though, so he made one, and then he started going through it, step by step.

Wait until dark.
Check.

Drop by Mark's and snag one of his mom's Tupperware things.
Check.

Transfer all baggies into Tupperware.
Check.

Borrow the half shovel from the junior toolshed.
Check.

Skateboard to golf course, where he received a message from Isabel Knapp, who said she could meet him wherever.
11th green
, he said.
30 minutes
.

Cross seventh green to Stingray Point.
Check.

Stash shovel on sand beyond the green.
Check.

He had plenty of time, so he took care to count his paces on the golf course from the seventeenth tee to the weird rubbery plants that grew at the edge of the grass, where the golf course stopped and Stingray beach began.
Check.

Bury Tupperware really deep.
Check.

Heave half shovel into bay.
Check.

Cross golf course to eleventh green without being seen.
Check.

And there was Isabel, sitting on the bunker beside the twelfth fairway, listening to her iPod, water bottle in hand. When his movement caught her eye, she pulled out her earphones.

“Clay?” she called through the damp evening air, and he felt the usual flicker of anticipation when things were fresh and new with someone, when only the good parts were happening, so it was no trouble at all to sound cheerful when he called out, “Check!”

M
andy called from Clayton's at seven o'clock to say they were slammed. Could Gretchen come in? Gretchen had been on the island all day, seeing the lawyer about her mother's estate; getting her teeth cleaned; buying bird food, milk, a new can opener; going from place to place like a zombie in the wintry air. She didn't want to go back to town again. Change into her uniform, row to shore, unlock her bike, ride to work, smile at people.

“Please?” Mandy said. “I think every enlisted man on the island is here.”

“Is that supposed to entice me?”

It did, sort of. They were good tippers. While she was thinking it over, she noticed the
Sayonara
was back. The white cat was pacing around on its deck when Gretchen rowed to the
Broker,
but she didn't see Frank's dinghy. In town, apparently.

“Lady Loch,” Peek crooned. With all the treats she'd been giving them, Peek and Roll had sort of learned their new chant.

“I know,” she said. “Dinner.”

Feed the birds, get dressed. There was a small stain by the hem of her uniform. Ketchup or salsa. She should wash the stupid dress after every shift but laundry was the royalest of royal pains on a boat. Her only other uniform was balled up in the laundry bag, so she worked the stain with a drop of water from the galley sink and a fingernail that needed all kinds of reclamation that she didn't have time for.

“Lady Loch,” Peek crooned again.

Roll climbed nervously up the bars of his cage because he knew this was the way Gretchen looked when she was leaving.

“It's okay,” she said. “Let's get you some water.” Water being the other royalest of royal pains because she had to haul it from town in the dinghy, over the mudflats, which was crazy-hard work at low tide, so Gretchen tried to drink very little on board the boat. It was unhealthy. She needed to pee now but could maybe wait till she got to work. Or use the park bathroom. Which was gross.

Gretchen twisted her frizzed hair into the requisite ponytail, leaned close to the mirror, in which she could hardly see now that she needed glasses (which you couldn't wear when applying eye makeup, so how was that supposed to work?), and drew lines on the rim of each eye that she would have to remember to check once she got somewhere with better light.

“You look like an actress,” Thisbe had said once, a long time ago, when Thisbe was little and lived next door.

“Ha ha. That's what I am,” Gretchen had said.

“Peekaboo,” Peek said.

“Roll again,” Roll said, and the two of them kept repeating their old words mournfully as Gretchen stuck the water cups into their cages and climbed down into the dinghy and rowed past the wretched
Sayonara.
She hoped she wouldn't run into Frank when she was locking her dinghy to the stay cable.

The sun had finally broken through, and the green slime of the mudflats lay like turf before her. Only trash marred the beautiful sheen of it: plastic bags, water bottles, broken lids, the eroded corner of a Styrofoam cooler. When Gretchen had time, she picked up as much trash as she could hold in two hands and threw it away so she wouldn't have to look at the mess the next time the bay drained itself.

A shiny pink thing lay half-buried in the mud, rubber or plastic like the edge of a tube, but as she approached, the tube resolved itself into a boot. God, people were lazy and careless. How hard was it to keep track of your boots? If she tried to pick that thing up, it would get mud on her dress, so she'd get it next time. She dragged her dinghy to the stay cable, flipped the boat over on the dry grass, and turned the combination lock. The light glazing the flats was so bright that it burned stripes into her corneas. From a distance, the abandoned boot looked like driftwood, a natural lump in the finely rippled skin of the beach.

She was far away, looking left for an opening in the traffic to cross Third Street, when Roll Again pushed open the door of his cage.