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The plan was simple. They’d walk to Gene Carmichael’s houseboat and call out to him. Michael would re-introduce himself then hand it over to Amelia. If there was one thing she could pull off, it was improv. It was her best talent. And here was her one shot to use it. An important shot, too.
Amelia felt her skin tingle with life as the trio strode past the marina office and onto the broad wooden pier. For a small town, Birch Harbor offered several docks with dozens of boat slips, each organized neatly by an assigned letter.
The platform carried them off land and into the life of Great People, as Wendell had always called boaters and sailors of Lake Huron, including himself. It was a lame joke back when Amelia was a girl. But as she grew up, she came to understand it. She’d seen her fair share of lake people across the States. They were nice, hard-working, salt-of-the-earth types.
Still, her dad had been right. We aren’t lake people. Lake people crack open a Coors Light on their stern, toss a line in the water, and buzz around in circles spitting cud starboard until they have to pack it in for the day. Those of us who sail the Great Lakes aren’t lake people. We’re Great People! Amelia smiled at the silly memory, happy to greet it. Funny enough, Wendell was no snob. He just took life on the lake seriously. The water was not just for recreation to Wendell. It was life.
As they walked, Lake Huron slipped in and around the docks, lapping up against the moorings in the hollow spaces between the boats, its rhythm churning a nautical time.
Turning onto C Dock, Amelia lifted a finger. “Here it is. Right, Clara? This was the one?” The third dock on the right hosted larger vessels in ample berths, but Gene Carmichael’s was the only houseboat currently moored. Modest as far as houseboats went, Amelia began to worry if it was even his.
Clara nodded urgently. “Yes, look.” She pointed, too, to the side of the boat where the name glowed from beneath a string of lights. “Harbor Hawk.”
Amelia nodded at the name, faintly remembering it from earlier in the day.
The boat was alive with lights and the faint sound of jazz, even though the sun had yet to set. Muffled voices roared up and lowered like a tide. She was silently grateful they were back. It was luck. Or, fate. Meant to be. Amelia clung to her belief in destiny and that everything was working out because it was meant to.
“Want me to do it?” Michael asked, standing impossibly close to Amelia.
Emotion overcame her, and she squeezed his hand. “Thanks, but I’ve got it.” Then, stepping up to the edge of the dock, she shook her arms out and cleared her throat. A quick glance back to Clara, who gave her a thumbs up, nearly pushed Amelia to laugh at herself for what she was about to say. “Um,” she began, biting her lip and then again shaking out her arms. “Okay, here we go. AHOY!”
Behind her, Clara and Michael fell into veritable hysterics. Amelia turned and glared. “It’s all I could think of!” She shushed them and tried again, pulling volume from her diaphragm and bellowing deeply over the ambient sounds. “Ahoy! Mr. Carmichael!”
Like magic, her old principal, the man named in her mother’s angry, missing diary entry appeared from a low door amidships. His face glowed, the sun behind him creating a halo and changing his entire look. Gone was the wan, older gentleman who kindly ruled over her high school and fumbled through recalling who she was earlier that day. In just hours he’d turned into a flamboyant houseboat partier, not yet past his prime. In that moment, Amelia saw an unwelcome connection between Mr. Carmichael the principal and her mother the country club queen. She frowned.
“Hi!” he called back, moving through his boat and to the side carefully, shedding some of the charisma he’d boasted just moments before as he took care to avoid falling. “Amelia, right?”
Impressed he’d remembered her name this time, she nodded and glanced behind her.
Michael took a step forward. “Gene. How are you?”
Mr. Carmichael cocked his head to the side, studying Michael for a moment then snapping his fingers. “Well I’ll be darned. Matuszewski’s boy. Michael, hello.” He passed a gnarled hand over the side of the boat and onto the dock, and Michael shook it. “I’m here with Amelia and her sister,” he cleared his throat, “Clara. As a friend, mainly. We, or they, rather, had a question.”
Skepticism took the place of Mr. Carmichael’s smiles, and it was Amelia’s cue to launch into her scene.
“Mr. Carmichael, I’m sure this isn’t a good time, but we’re following up on some loose threads regarding my mother’s estate. And, I suppose, my father’s, too.” She paused a beat, studying him.
His face fell. “I’m so sorry to hear about Nora. You know, I intended to come to the funeral, but...”
She cut him off, uninterested in his excuse. “Oh, it’s fine. We were going through some of my mother’s personal effects in an effort to pin down how the old lighthouse up north came to be sold. We’ve found a name—a woman called Liesel Hart—but it turned into a dead end. In some of her...” Amelia glanced briefly to Clara, finding the right word, “paperwork,” she swallowed, “she named you as, um, well.” Amelia hadn’t lost him yet. In fact, Gene Carmichael had narrowed his gaze on her and gripped onto a piling to steady himself. He waited the brief moment it took her to find exactly what she was going to say. “Mr. Carmichael, our mother told us to find you and ask you.”
He smirked at Michael, who replied by crossing his arms and setting his jaw.
“Ask me what?” Gene replied.
“Mr. Carmichael, what happened to our father, Wendell Acton?”
***
Some minutes later, Amelia, Michael, and Clara were seated at the bow, each with a margarita in hand.
Gene Carmichael had shocked Amelia when instead of begging off of the question, he invited them to sit and talk.
She accepted. Their host busied himself indicating to his guests that he had a pressing matter to attend to, then he brought out a round of drinks. Amelia caught Clara pucker, but all three of them acted politely and sipped periodically from their sour beverages while Gene Carmichael began.
“I’m not sure what you know and what you don’t,” he began, waiting for an answer from Amelia. She swallowed and exchanged a nervous glance with Clara. Maybe this was bigger than an impromptu houseboat meeting. Maybe Kate and Megan should be there.
Sucking in a deep breath, Amelia pulled from some inner reserve of leadership and maturity that she’d often hidden from her daily interactions. “If you know something, Mr. Carmichael, and it’s important, then I think I need my other sisters to hear it.”
Michael, who sat beside her, covered Amelia’s hand in his own. Her heart pounded against her chest wall, and she flicked a glance to Clara, who nodded her on.
“Well, like I said, I’m not sure if what I know is important. Or news or whatnot. You’re welcome to invite your sisters here. My company can entertain themselves. We dock at Birch Harbor no less than twice a week, you know. Usually more often than that.
“Where do you live?” Amelia asked.
“Heirloom Island.”
Her mouth fell open. “I didn’t know you were so close. I figured you’d left for a bigger city or something.”
“My heart belongs to Birch Harbor. But I couldn’t stand to be here day in, day out. Not once I retired.”
Amelia nodded as if she understood, but she did not. She turned to Clara. “I think,” she began, worried she was about to make the wrong decision. In her life, Amelia, social though she was, had usually acted independently. It rarely served her well, if her long history of loser ex-boyfriends and dead-end waitressing jobs and lack of acting gigs was any indication. But Amelia liked it that way. She liked to fight her way to a happy ending. And though for many years, her path hadn’t ended in a pot of gold, there she was. Back in Birch Harbor, with her sisters and a new friend in Michael-the-lawyer. She still didn’t have a home. She still didn’t have a job.
But there she was, on the verge of having the truth.
“We can’t do this without them,” she continued, holding Clara’s nervous stare, “why don’t you call Megan and Kate. Michael and I will wait here with Gene. Tell them it’s important.”
Clara nodded and stood, pacing a short distance away and leaving Amelia and Michael to sit with Gene, who seemed nice enough, but who also seemed to bear a deep, dark secret.
***
Soon enough, a commotion broke out on the jetty. Amelia heard her name and craned her neck to see Megan, clad in a black dress and Kate, in a white dress, appear in front of a small group of people. Squinting further, she recognized Matt Fiorillo, Brian, and Sarah huddling near the man she’d asked for help earlier. The marina manager. Jake.
“There they are.” Amelia pointed and waved, and Clara, who was still standing, deboarded the boat and waved, too. Calling out to them.
Megan and Kate sped down the jetty toward Dock C and turned. “Is everything okay?” Kate demanded, her eyes flashing from even yards away.
“Over here!” Amelia cried, standing near Michael, her body tense and awash in goosebumps at that moment. Michael and Gene also stood, smiling tightly.
With Michael’s help, Amelia’s three sisters came aboard and joined them.
“Care for a cocktail?” Gene asked.
Kate and Megan sat, bewildered, each politely declining.
“What’s going on?” Kate asked. Amelia noticed her fresh face of makeup and blown out hair. She’d been on a date. With Matt. Guilt briefly pooled in Amelia’s stomach for tearing her sister away, but she could go back to him. She would go back to him. After Gene spilled the beans.
“Gene wants to tell us something,” Amelia answered simply, lifting her palm and returning to her seat.
“I’m going to excuse myself, ladies. Gene.” Michael nodded to each then dropped his voice. “Amelia, if you need anything, I’ll be just over there.” He gestured to the shore, where the others stood confused.
She thanked him and they waited until Michael had left.
“Mr. Carmichael? I think we’re ready.”
He smiled sadly, let out a long sigh and hitched his trousers before sitting across from the four of them.
And then he walked them down a very ambling, very twisted memory lane.