The Why of Things: A Novel (6 page)

“It was next to a tide pool,” Eloise says. “Some stupid fisherman littered and now it’s dead.” She sits down, props her elbows on her knees and her cheeks in her hands.

Joan sits up, knocking the sand from her torso. “It doesn’t seem fair, does it.”

“It’s
not
fair.”

Joan wiggles her legs free of sand. Mussel shells go sliding. She wraps her arms loosely around her knees and studies her daughter, who is staring intently into the sand. “Maybe we should give it a burial,” Joan suggests.

Eloise digs her heels into the sand. “Maybe we should just throw it into the quarry,” she says.

Eloise has been quietly thoughtful since she learned this morning that there indeed had been a body in the quarry, no doubt carefully processing the information, and likely coming up with all sorts of horror stories to explain the event. Joan has not pushed her to share her thoughts, but now she nudges her daughter gently. “Hey,” she says. “What are you thinking?”

Eloise lets out a weary breath. “I want to go back to Maryland.”

“We’re here, though,” Joan says. “It was a terrible thing to arrive to, but we can’t let it ruin the summer.”

“What if we’re haunted now?”

“We won’t be haunted.”

“How do you know?”

Joan takes a breath. When their old dog, Buster, died last summer, Joan had made what she now fears may have been a mistake by telling Eloise to imagine that Buster’s spirit would always be with them. She’d said it was like having an invisible dog. She hadn’t meant to inspire a belief in ghosts. After Sophie died, Eloise had asked seriously if it was like having an invisible sister now, and when Joan said that in a way it was, she saw a distinct glimmer
of fear pass across her daughter’s face. “So, Sophie is a ghost?” Eloise had asked. Joan had quickly tried to differentiate between spirits and ghosts, but she’s not sure she made the distinction clear enough. In the end, it was Eve’s quietly brutal reasoning that seemed to placate Eloise most; why, Eve had pointed out, would Sophie come back as a ghost when her whole purpose in dying was to get away?

“I just know,” Joan says now, finally, loathe to invoke Eve’s logic again.

Eloise rubs her eye. “Why did he have to pick
our
quarry?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think we’ll ever know.” Joan can think of nothing that might offer comfort. It occurs to her momentarily to point out that probably people have died on this very beach, and that they drive by spots where people have died every day on the highway, and Eloise doesn’t consider these places haunted. But she thinks better of this; she understands that observations like these would hardly make her daughter feel more secure. “Let’s go do something to get our mind off things. What do you feel like doing?”

Eloise sighs, and then gives her mother a serious look. Joan waits for the impossible, like “going back to Maryland,” but, “Ice cream,” Eloise finally says. “Can we go to Salah’s?”

*  *  *

O
NCE
it finally arrives, the tow truck is unlike any Eve has ever seen. It’s enormous, with a large crane folded on the back, giving the whole rig the leggy look of a cricket or a praying mantis. The driver—the tag sewn onto his shirt reads Tim—has backed it over the grass to the edge of the quarry, where Anders has directed him, and is now getting everything ready for the task at hand. He presses a button and flaps extend from either side of the truck, two near the back wheels, two near the front.

Eve asks Tim what the flaps are for, and in response, he presses a second button that lowers the flaps to the ground. “Stability,” he says. He pulls down on a lever. The crane begins to extend.

Eve watches, cringing at the sound of metal sliding against metal. “How high does it go?” she asks.

“Forty feet.” Tim rotates the base of the crane just a bit so that it’s angled out over the water. “Longest stage two rotator in the industry. Fifty-ton capacity.”

“That’s a lot,” Eve says, absently pulling up clumps of grass with her bare toes. “What would you ever need to lift that’s fifty tons?”

“You never know,” Tim says. He disappears around the other side of the truck. Eve can hear gears shifting and the hissing sound of hydraulics, but she doesn’t see anything happening.

“What are you doing, anyway?”

The rig emits a few more sounds before Tim answers. “Prepping the drag winch,” he says. “You ask a lot of questions.”

Eve flattens her mouth. She looks across the grass to where her father stands talking with the policeman who has also finally arrived, and two divers, who are not the same divers as last night. She is disappointed—she’d have liked to ask them what else they saw down there—but she isn’t surprised. Eve supposes you couldn’t pay them to dive here again.

Tim reappears around the side of the truck. He leans back against the rig, rolling his shoulders with a grimace. He sniffs, then folds his arms. He seems vaguely bored to Eve, which annoys her. She thinks of all the boring jobs he could have been called to do today, towing cars that have broken down on the side of the highway, or that are illegally parked and blocking driveways or fire hydrants. “You
don’t
ask a lot of questions,” she comments.

Tim looks at her.

“Aren’t you curious why you’re pulling a pickup truck from the bottom of a quarry?”

Tim moves his jaw from side to side as if he has to give the question some thought before answering. But he never answers, and shifts his attention to Anders and the divers and the policeman, who are walking across the grass toward them.

Anders motions to Eve to get out of the way as Tim begins to give the divers basic instructions on how to connect the cable to the tow hook, and where to find the tow hook underneath the body of the pickup. The policeman stands off to the side, filling out paperwork on a clipboard.

“Shouldn’t they have sent a detective?” Eve asks her father in a low voice. “Aren’t policemen more like first responders?”

“I don’t know,” Anders says. “I don’t know what they’d send a detective for.”

“Right. Because there was so obviously no foul play.”

Anders doesn’t answer.

The divers put on their masks and headlamps and flippers. One gets into the water, and the other guides the cable in his direction, which Tim is lowering using controls on the side of the truck. The first diver grabs hold of the hook at the end of the cable and waits for the second diver to climb into the water.

Eve gives her father a nudge in the side. “Do you think the divers from last night didn’t want to come back, or do you think it’s just a different shift?” she whispers.

“I’d say probably both,” Anders whispers back.

“If this happens next year,
you
can dive down,” she jokes. “Actually, Dad,” she continues, her whisper growing louder with excitement, “you really
should
, anyway. I mean—”

“Shhh,” Anders hushes her, gesturing with his chin toward the divers, two black heads bobbing on the water.

In a moment, they disappear beneath the surface, and then there is just the sound of the lowering cable and a steady stream of small bubbles. Anders and Eve stand together at the edge of the quarry, watching, and this suddenly makes Eve think of the photograph in the paper, because in it, she and her father are standing in just the same way.

“Dad,” she says.

“Yuh.”

“That picture,” she says. “In the paper.”

“What about it?”

“How do you think it got there? I mean, who took it? I didn’t see any photographers or reporters or anything, did you?”

Anders considers this. “No,” he says, after a pause. “I didn’t. I suppose it might have been one of the policemen. I guess it wouldn’t be unusual for them to want to document something like that.”

Eve thinks of the policemen last night, how they’d stood around telling jokes and talking about beer. She doesn’t think any of them could have been bothered with a photograph. She frowns and squats down, stares at the surface of the water, waiting. The cable has been reeled out as far as it needs to go; it moves slightly this way, and then that, as the divers, a hundred feet below, struggle in the darkness to affix it to the car. Eve watches, wondering about that photograph and how it might have come to be taken, if not by any of the cops. Maybe, it occurs to her, if this really was a murder, it was taken by the killer himself; she has heard about criminals who do that sort of thing, in books and movies—send in pictures of their own crime scenes.

Suddenly, the cable is still, and after several, seemingly endless minutes, the divers resurface. One of them gives Tim two thumbs-up, and, on the shore, Tim pulls a lever. The cable groans slowly upward for two or three minutes before Eve can see a disturbance
in the water, and finally the shape of the pickup itself just beneath the surface. Tim adjusts the crane so he can raise the truck without it swinging against the rocks at the edge of the quarry. The pickup comes swelling slowly up through the surface: headlights, hood, then body.

Eve stands, takes a breath as the truck emerges fully from the water. It is an old, red Ford, with rusted spots on the door. The front bumper, Eve notices, is dented, and the back right taillight case is broken, a Red Sox bumper sticker above it. Water cascades from the pickup as it dangles. It pours out of the cab through the driver’s-side window, which is smashed, and around the frame of the doors.

“Dad,” Eve says, suddenly. “Why is the window smashed?”

“Probably because the divers last night couldn’t open the door.”

“But if you were going to kill yourself by driving into the water, wouldn’t you do it with the car windows open?”

“I don’t know, Eve,” her father says. “Maybe he wasn’t thinking rationally. Or maybe it was accidental. I just don’t know.” He glances at Eve, and his expression suggests that he is tiring of her suspicions. Eve crosses her arms, says nothing more.

*  *  *

T
HE
old Buick has always vaguely reminded Joan of a boat, something about its thudding engine, or its beamy interior; two or maybe even three more people could fit on the bench seat where she and Eloise sit now, their hair whipping about their faces as they follow the shoreline around the cape into town for ice cream. The Buick is a 1982 Riviera convertible, the same car that she and Anders drove cross country the summer before they were married and that any mention of selling in the past has elicited howls of protest from the girls. It is a totally impractical car, and at this point it could never withstand a lengthy drive, but each summer,
after a jump start, to Joan’s surprise the old thing still runs. And the truth is she loves to drive it, with its enormous, padded steering wheel, its wide leather seats, the gear shift coming from the steering column, the vintage radio.

It is just a few miles from the beach into town, and Joan drives slowly, careful to avoid potholes and dips in the pavement around the frequent drainage grates. Between the houses off to the right, she can catch glimpses of the two-mouthed river that separates the island where they live from the mainland of the cape, running between Ipswich Bay to the north and Gloucester Harbor to the south, crowded as usual on a summer Saturday with boats motoring in both directions.

Beside her, Eloise sits Indian style, peering every now and then over her shoulder at the dead seagull, which lies on a towel in the backseat. That was the other thing that Eloise said would make her feel better: to bring the seagull home and give it a proper burial. Joan had tried to convince her that it would be a better idea to bury it on the beach, but Eloise insisted that the tide would only uncover it, that it would be swept to sea and eaten by fish or else caught up in the propeller of a boat, and in the end Joan found it easier to give in.

“Mom,” Eloise says now.

Joan glances at her daughter.

“There’s a lot of gas in the quarry. Evie said before that it was leaking all night.”

“There is gas in the quarry, that’s true.”

“That’s really bad, Mom. Once in Alaska a tanker crashed and all these birds had tons of oil all over their feathers and they couldn’t fly. We saw it in science class.”

Joan slows down as they approach the rotary. “That was different,” she says, watching for a gap in traffic. “And it was gallons and gallons of oil. Hundreds and thousands of gallons. There’s
just a little bit of gas in our quarry. And we don’t have birds who live there.” She pulls into the rotary, waving thanks to a driver who has slowed to let them in.

Eloise frowns. “What about the turtles?”

“The turtles will be fine,” Joan says. She sets her blinker and takes the exit for downtown. “They know to stay away from it. And right now, maybe even as we speak, a huge tow truck is pulling the truck out of the quarry, so it won’t be able to leak anymore. And we’ll get people to come clean up the gas this week, and things will be good as new.”

Eloise gazes out the window, her brow knit. “No,” she says. “They won’t.”

Joan sighs and steers onto a side street, meandering along their way. She likes the backstreets of Gloucester, which are narrow and haphazard, crowded with old, two-story, bevel-sided houses with small front stoops and fenced-in side yards.

“Where are we going?” Eloise asks. “Aren’t we getting ice cream?”

“Yes, but we’re taking the long way,” Joan says. “Looking around. Reminding ourselves, since we haven’t been here in a year.”

Eloise seems to accept this explanation, and in a way Joan supposes it’s the truth. When she arrived here for the summer growing up, she would do the same thing, crisscrossing the town on her bicycle, revisiting all the places that by the summer’s end she’d again take for granted, but that after a winter away had gained a certain magic. She’d do the same with her grandmother’s house, wandering through every room and examining as if for the first time the oddities that had cluttered the house for years: a small chest in whose every drawer were pinned rows of boldly patterned butterflies; a large copper compass that was missing its needle; the huge, toothlike gears of the grandfather clock, which
she’d set ticking. Her parents, both doctors in New York City, only came up to Gloucester on the occasional weekends when they could get away, and so Joan, an only child, spent the summers largely alone with her grandmother. She was generally shy, and more inclined to stay at home with her books or take solitary bike rides or explore the endless cabinets and closets of the house than she was to hang out with the local kids her age, who all already knew each other and seemed grouped into specific circles she didn’t have the nerve to enter.