The Mermaid's Secret (15 page)

“So your hot date is at a nursing home?” I ask.

“Assisted care facility.”

“Alice is your grandmother?”

Matthew smiles. “No. We're not related by blood. Alice and her husband, Roger, took me in after my mom died.”

I start biting my nails, which I do when I'm nervous. I know the rough outline of Matthew's childhood. There are no secrets on an island as small as Ne'Hwas. People talk. They embellish.

They lie.

The details of Matthew's mother's death are Ne'Hwas legend. Overdosing on heroin after years of addiction. Sixteen-year-old Matthew finding her on the couch, dead. Matthew left alone in the world.

“You got a raw deal. I'm sorry,” I say.

“I loved my mom. Despite everything she did. She had a good heart. She tried to do right for me,” Matthew says. “But the drugs took away any chance she had. I always felt like she would have been okay if we lived somewhere other than Ne'Hwas. I think the island suffocated her.”

Down the pier the tightrope walker blows a conch shell and announces that his show is starting. Matthew and I start walking that way. We stop at a jewelry vendor, who looks like she's about sixteen years old. Matthew picks up a sea-glass bracelet made of delicate green beads. “I wanted to help her,” he says. “I did all the cooking and cleaning. I dreamed about making enough money to buy a place for us, away from Nipon. Away from Ne'Hwas. But by the time I was in middle school, things got out of control. Her dealers would come looking for her. She'd get hit. I stepped in more than once. Got pummeled, too, by guys a lot older and bigger than me. It was a rough time. Started fighting at school a lot, too.”

I study the crescent scar under his eye, noticing the way the line is pearl white against his tan skin. I'm not so sure it came from a fishing hook anymore.

“Eventually I stopped going to school and started turning up at the fishing boats looking for work,” Matthew says. “I was thirteen or fourteen at the time. Fishermen are a tough crowd, and they could have taken advantage of me. But there was one guy—Captain Roger Ballantine—who took pity on me. Taught me about fishing and driving boats. Gave me the sea hours I needed for my captain's license. His wife, Alice, took me in. She fed me, clothed me, cared for me. When I lost my mother, Roger and Alice let me live with them. I had no one else to go to. They saved my life. They knew all the history about my mom and they never made me feel like I was any less of a person for it.”

“And now you look after them?”

“Roger passed away a few years ago. Alice was already in the home by then. I always check in on her. She never had kids of her own. I'm like the son she never had.”

“Or the son she never wanted,” I say, trying to lighten the mood.

“Smart-ass.” He puts down the sea-glass bracelet and picks up a matching necklace.

“So all this time I had it wrong,” I say.

“What do you mean?”

“All these years, I thought it was your loyalty to Harold that brings you back to Ne'Hwas every summer. When really, it's your love for Alice that draws you here.”

Matthew smiles. He holds up the necklace and bracelet. “What do you think?” he asks.

“The necklace. She'll love it,” I say.

He pays the jeweler and we step away from the crowd to the edge of the pier.

“So you see, Creary, when I tell you that you've got to move on, I know what I'm talking about.”

I want to lean over and kiss him. And I'm terrified that I will.

He looks at his watch again. “Well, I got to run,” he says.

Before he gets to the end of the pier he turns around once and looks at me. He smiles and I feel his smile move all the way through me. This is crazy, I think. Falling for Matthew Weatherby? I've got too much on my plate right now to entertain the thought of romance. I have to figure out what's going on with the wave at Tutatquin, and how far I'm going to let it take me.

Just as Matthew slips away, another familiar face comes through the crowd. Bree Hamilton. One of Kay's childhood friends.

She was in Kay's year at school. The two of them were inseparable growing up. Girl Scouts. Princess softball. Sleepovers. I was the annoying little sister constantly tagging along.

As they got older, they drifted apart. Kay was smart, ambitious, innocent. Bree was a townie. She was one of those girls who matured early, ruled the lunch tables, always had a boyfriend, and would have been a cheerleader if Ne'Hwas High School had a cheerleading squad.

A month before Kay died, I saw Bree for the first time in years. It was early in the season and the Rongo was hopping. I was in the bathroom, rolling a joint. From behind the stall door, I heard Bree and another girl talking, gossiping, while they fixed their makeup. I heard Kay's name, which caught my attention. Bree told her friend that Kay was a gold digger and a slut and that Trip Sinclair better watch out or he'll end up with a baby mama on his hands. She said Trip was too good for Kay. That Kay would end up pregnant by the end of the summer just to seal the deal. That Kay had stalked him and jumped into bed with him on their first date. How else could a townie girl land such a catch?

I wanted to tell her she was jealous and bitter. I wanted to rush to my sister's defense.

Instead, I hid. I waited in that stall, until the coast was clear.

How could I have let her get away with it? Why didn't I stand up for Kay? What kind of sister cowers in the bathroom while her sister's name is dragged through the mud? Did part of me believe that Bree may have been right?

Quickly, I turn my back to Bree, praying she won't see me.

“Jess? Jess Creary, is that you?”

Too late.

I spin around and force a smile. “What's up, Bree?”

“Oh my God. So much. I'm getting married. Can you believe it?” She sticks her bony ringed finger in my face, proof that she's won.

“Congratulations.” I look down at the water along the pier. The outgoing tide, dark and determined, rushes by, swirling around the wooden posts. I feel it tugging at me. At the thing in me that is not human. The things that belongs out there.

Bree pulls her hand back. “So what are
you
up to these days, Jess?”

Where to start? I'm treading between human and animal. I'm trying to figure out who I am and how to move forward. And right now, with Bree standing in front of me, I realize that I'm stuck in the past. Part of me is back in that bathroom at the Rongo, wishing for the courage to stand up for Kay, to protect her.

“You were wrong,” I blurt out.

“What?”

“Kay wasn't a gold digger and she didn't want Trip Sinclair's money. She was going places. She didn't need a man to get her off this island.”

“Uh … okay,” Bree chuffs. Her face is hard, cold. “Look, I'm sorry for your loss, Jess.”

I think about Kay riding on that yacht through the dark. Trip at the wheel. Kay on the rocks. Her body under the sea. Trip climbing to freedom, leaving Kay to die.

The storm is brewing inside of me. My ears start to ring. The thing in me that wanted to strangle Harold is beating hard in my chest.

I chuck the rest of Harold's flyers in the harbor. Watch them spin and twirl in the current.

I feel trapped by so many things—the pain that is always just below the surface. The memories of losing Kay. All the injustice.

Maybe Matthew is able to bury the past, to “move on.” Not me. Drugs may be the villain in Matthew's story, but mine has a name: Trip Sinclair.

 

T
HIRTEEN

The funeral was on a Friday. A cop's daughter had died so every cruiser on the island joined the procession, blue lights flashing. Bree Hamilton gave one of the eulogies. Talked about what an inspiration Kay had been to her in school. Called her a role model. Remembered (fondly, of course) her smile and how she would light up a room, blah-blah-blah. What a phony.

At the cemetery, there were too many people to count. Childhood friends, neighborhood friends, school friends. The Ne'Hwas Police Department. The entire Passamaquoddy community. Everyone was there.

Except for Trip Sinclair, who was still under investigation at the time and advised by his attorney not to attend.

He sent a flower arrangement in his place—hundreds of red roses and white calla lilies. It dwarfed all the other bouquets, making them looking cheap and provincial.

As I walk down the pier, street performers pack up their props for the night. Tourists head toward the restaurants on Spinnaker Street.

All the sadness I feel for Kay sours. It becomes something primal and powerful. Rage. Disgust. Shame.

Whatever it is, it propels me through the crowd. I bump into a woman walking too slowly for my maddening pace. “Watch it,” the woman says and shoots me a dirty look. But I don't care. I surge forward, knocking into people, pushing, plowing, forcing myself forward.

As I cross the pier and march down the harbor road that curves along the edge of the island, I feel the heat in my body rising. My legs carry me ahead, to where, I don't know. My mind is filled only with the three syllables of his name: Trip Sinclair. My pace quickens. Before I'm even aware of where I'm going, I arrive at my destination.

The Ne'Hwas Yacht Club. The spot where Kay took her final steps on solid ground.

I ignore the
PRIVATE PROPERTY
sign and scurry past the trimmed boxwood hedges to the side of the building.

I've never been here before, but if you've lived on Ne'Hwas as long as I have, the image of the clubhouse is seared into your brain. It has appeared in page one pictures in the
Daily News
dozens of times: when the Sinclair yacht won both the Ne'Hwas Regatta and the Saint Barth's Bucket Race in the same season; the year the Sinclairs hosted a charity ball for the Ne'Hwas Hospital, when it was in danger of default.

The year that reporters were stationed out front, trying to get a quote from a member of the Sinclair tribe about Kay's death.

At the head of that tribe is Bennett Sinclair, Trip's grandfather, a ferret-faced man whose charitable donations have landed his name on park benches, a reading room at the library, a Little League field, and even the sea otter exhibit at the Ne'Hwas Cultural center.

Despite his reputation as a philanthropist, he's known on the island as a tightwad tipper, and a real jackass. He once sued a local teenager for trespassing after the boy's lure got stuck on the Sinclair's yacht. The kid boarded the yacht to retrieve the lure. Bennett sued. The kid's six-dollar lure ended up costing him thousands in legal fees.

It was no different with my sister. She was a local. A townie. A nuisance.

As the president of the club's board and a big player in the yachting world, Bennett Sinclair had a lot to lose by having his name dragged into a scandal like a manslaughter investigation.

He stood by his grandson's side during the entire investigation, the two of them smug and silent while the lawyer, Grant le Carre, did all the talking: “We have no comment on this” and “We aren't permitted to speak about that.”

Le Carre is one of those high-profile defense attorneys who wins the unwinnable cases. Got some Wall Street bigwig off on assault charges by blaming a doctor for overmedicating him.

One night that summer, a reporter from the
Daily News
caught Bennett Sinclair coming out of a restaurant and asked him, in an unguarded moment, a few questions about the nature of the relationship between Trip and Kay. Got him on record saying his grandson “wouldn't have had anything to do with the dead girl.”

Not that he
didn't
have anything to do with her. “
Wouldn't
have had anything to do with the dead girl.” Like the whole thing was hypothetical. Or else, that Trip was too good for my sister.

He had it backwards.

I walk around back to the patio that overlooks the sculpture garden. A wide green lawn sweeps down to the edge of the water, and mega yachts sparkle in the apricot glow of the setting sun.

Trip brought Kay to this exact spot. They boarded his boat right here. Was he already drunk when he got behind the wheel, or did he booze it up out on the water?

Does he have any remorse for what he did?

I make a wide arc around the patio, circling like a mako, searching for Trip Sinclair's face. Women in dresses and men in blue blazers with shiny buttons move around in groups like bait fish. Champagne is popping, glasses are clinking, but there's no sign of Trip.

I spot Bennett Sinclair standing at the bow of a sleek, black sailboat at the docks.
Sea Nymphe,
the boat says in gold lettering across the transom.

Grant le Carre is on the deck, too, holding court with a gathering of beautiful people. I look up and down the gorgeous, shimmering yacht. And then I see him. Trip is standing at the stern, hand wrapped around a scotch, smiling. The smug smile. Plastered across his face during the investigation. It was always there. He smiled through the testimony. Smiled through the arraignment. Smiled during the hearing.

Smiled in all those pictures over the years on the pages of the
Daily News
that tracked his sailing victories.

Bennett Sinclair cracks a bottle of champagne across the bow of the
Sea Nymphe
. A christening. He pats his grandson on the back and gives a long toast. I'm too far away to hear what he says, but it's clear that he's proud of his new boat,
Sea Nymphe,
and even prouder that Trip is captaining her.

This must be why he's back on island. His much-anticipated return to the racing circuit. The Sinclair family is finally emerging from the dark cloud of a manslaughter investigation, stepping into their day in the sun.

The beautiful people mill around in their own solar systems. They cheer for the Sinclairs, and for their charmed lives. They are far removed from the working-class natives who live off their tips during the season. A thousand light-years away from mothers who overdose and leave their teenage sons to fend for themselves.