ALLISON
The weather, as if conjured up by Tammy’s deepest desires, kept me from doing much of anything for the rest of the holiday weekend. I paced, all day and all night. I watched the film again, and then again. I tried to called Tammy back, but she wouldn’t answer, and when I got sick of trying, I left a message for Dolores at the art gallery, which was of course closed for the holiday.
It felt as if Maureen had completely taken me over, like she’d seeped into the very walls of the house. I could hear her whispers in the wind gusts. When I closed my eyes, I saw her face flickering from the grainy film, a haunted, hollow laugh.
She’d had three months, too. Three months of an endless-seeming summer to figure it all out. To hold her life in the palm of her hand. And instead, she’d opened her hand too soon, scattered it all to the ocean breeze. Three months in Opal Beach, and then she’d vanished. How easy it had been for someone to get rid of her without a second thought. How easy for her to just disappear.
The sadness settled over me. I felt trapped, like everyone here in Opal Beach. And it wasn’t just the weather. Tammy, with an eternally sick mother, stuck in a small town that she thought had only one place for her, still wrapped up in the events of thirty years before. Dolores, caring for her artist father, spending day after day in that small art gallery, eating greasy fast food, while families like the Bishops carried on at their fancy cocktail parties and people like Mabel tried to flit between the two castes, selling her real estate and wearing fake gemstones on her fingers.
And what would become of me?
Right next door to Phillip Bishop. The adulterer. And maybe more? What did Phillip know? And Clay? If only Tammy would answer my calls.
Desperate to do something, I finally dialed the Opal Beach police station, but the dispatcher said that Horace Clapper was taking time off. “Can I patch you through to someone else?” she asked, half-bored, but I declined. No way I was telling the whole story again to someone new.
I thought I might drive myself mad. On Sunday morning, I spent hours outside trying to chip away the ice on the front porch steps. I made progress, but my arms and legs and back ached. Next door, the Bishops’ house was quiet. Eerily so. I kept glancing over, wondering if anyone was home. I didn’t like the idea that we were all in such proximity with no way to escape.
On Monday, I was about to go completely insane when my cell phone rang. I picked it up, fumbling, and managed to click the green answer button.
“Ms. Simpson? This is Horace Clapper. You called?”
Even with his usual brisk tone, I was relieved to hear from him. So I wasn’t in a movie where everyone had disappeared off the planet.
“Yes, thank you... I thought... The dispatcher said you weren’t available.”
“They let me know about your call.” I waited to see if he’d say more, but he was, as usual, not very forthcoming. I longed for warmth, something to show I wasn’t nuts, but he was stoic. I wondered if it was a police tactic or just his personality.
“Well, I... I’m sorry to bother you on your day off. It’s just...” I had new evidence? Everything running through my head suddenly seemed ridiculous and childish. “I just wondered...if you’d heard from Tammy at all?”
“Tammy? No...should I have?”
“Oh, I don’t know. No, I guess not. I mean, we were going to contact you anyway, but I thought... I’ve been trying to call her and she hasn’t returned my calls and I just wanted to see...to make sure she’s okay.”
“Are you okay, Ms. Simpson?”
“Yes.” I picked at the bedspread, nervously. “Yes, I’m fine.” There was a long pause, and in my nervousness I needed to fill it up. “We found a film. An old film of Maureen’s.”
“And what was on the film?”
“Well, we were...going to bring it in to you. To see. For yourself. But with the storm and all. And now I can’t find Tammy...and...”
“Well, that’s the strange thing,” Clapper said. For the first time, I could hear hesitation in his voice. “She hasn’t returned my calls either.”
“Your calls?” I was startled. “Did you find out something?”
“No, not exactly.” He paused again, and I could picture him petting his mustache. “It’s odd—”
“What?” I asked impatiently.
“Well, you know I thought she told me that she reported that woman as missing all those years ago—foul play suspected. But when I looked up the report, there was a note in it.”
“A note?”
“Taken from the dispatcher. Tammy called in a week later, said she was dropping her report.”
“Dropping it?”
“Yeah. That she was sorry for the trouble but her friend wasn’t missing anymore. She said she’d heard from her and everything was fine.”
“Heard from her?” I couldn’t stop repeating his words. “After the night she went missing? Are you sure?”
Clapper sighed. “Of course I wasn’t here then, but that’s what it says. Noted and dated. Exactly one week after the initial report.”
“But why would she—if she heard from Maureen a week after that, why would she...?” None of it made any sense. Tammy had been insistent that Maureen was murdered.
“Well,” Clapper said quietly. “That’s what I wanted to ask her.”
“Do you think she was lying?”
“Could be,” he said. “Could be that she felt like she was in danger, talking to the police. Maybe someone threatened her to drop it, or she was worried about something happening to her, too.”
It made sense. It would also explain why Tammy had been so jumpy about the necklace and the film. Even all these years later she felt threatened.
“If that’s true, then we need to find her,” I said. “She could be in danger.”
“Now, I don’t think we need to get that dramatic, Miss Simpson,” Clapper said in his condescending tone. “With this storm, you never know. Her power could be out. Phone dead. It’s the holiday season—people are traveling, things come up... I’m sure Tammy is just fine.”
But after he hung up, I wondered if he was more worried than he was letting on.
The house was closing in on me. I kept walking from room to room, the walls pressing me closer and closer inside. I’d shut the basement door, but a chilly draft billowed in through the crack at the bottom, and if I pressed my ear to the door it sounded like a chorus of voices whispering. My mother had always believed that houses contained spirits, that their energy could infect the people who lived there, in good ways and bad.
What if she was right?
I considered for a moment all the crazy things I could do. Hold a séance in the house. Dig out the tarot cards my mother had given me when I’d turned thirteen—they were currently in a box in the garage that I’d never bothered to unpack. Test out a strange purple thing that looked like a genie lamp on the bookshelf. I walked over to it, reached up to pull it down and accidentally spilled a bowl of seashells all over the carpet.
I knelt down beside the shells and started putting them back into the bowl. There were all sorts—the white rippled shells my mother called angel wings, long curly pointed ones that reminded me of pasta, smaller iridescent slivers that were polished and smooth as marble—and I wondered if they’d been collected from the beach or bought at one of the tourist shops along the pier. There were several perfectly intact starfish and a delicate sand dollar that had broken in half.
The last shell I picked up was a hefty conch, dotted tan and white, with an inner pale shiny pink like an ear. I placed it to my own ear, like Annie and I had done when we were kids, plucking the largest ones from the giant bins in the boardwalk stores. Listen to the ocean, eager shop owners would urge, hoping our parents would buy them for us. I remembered one year our mother had caved and bought us two orange conches. I’d wrapped mine carefully in a T-shirt and tucked it into my suitcase to bring home, certain it wouldn’t work once I took it away from the beach. And when I’d unwrapped it on the floor of my bedroom and found I could still hear that lulling roar hundreds of miles from the ocean, it felt like magic.
I heard it again now as I pressed the shell to my ear. I closed my eyes, feeling a bit silly, but also mesmerized. The trick never got old, the dull whoosh, but now I realized it didn’t sound so much like the ocean as it did Duke’s white noise machine. An air conditioner, or the hum of an airplane’s engine, or a chorus of whispers and murmurs.
Get him.
I dropped the shell, startled. My ear rung and itched, and I rubbed it. The voice—it had been sharp and sudden.
I felt prickles of fear dotting my back, something inside my belly unwinding. I’d heard it. Clear as if someone was standing right next to me. But there was no one there.
It wasn’t until Wednesday that the road salt had done enough work to make the streets passable. It was raining by then, but if the temperatures dipped again it could turn to sleet, and I knew I needed to get out, see Tammy before I was shut in for longer.
The rain tapped against the windshield as I drove past the quiet, closed downtown. Tammy’s store was dark and locked up. The beach felt sleepy, abandoned. I turned off the main strip onto Tammy’s street, but her apartment duplex was dark, too. Her car nowhere in sight. She was probably still visiting her mother. But part of me also worried she might be avoiding me. Had my phone calls scared her away?
I looked down at my ring of keys, at the one Tammy had given me just in case you need it. I could go in. Wait for her. Force her to talk to me. But somehow it all seemed fruitless. How long would I have to wait for her to get back? If she’d been able to get to her mom’s house for the holiday, chances were she’d stay there for a few days extra and wait out the weather. And I couldn’t afford to get stuck at her house with Catarina back home needing to be fed.
I took the long way on the highway rather than cutting through the tall grass in the weather and was relieved to pull into the shared driveway, ready to put on my pajamas and watch Dilly fight the winds in her peacoat—until I saw them. Phillip and Zeke. Standing between their cars. I hadn’t seen them together since the country club dinner. They stared as I passed by and veered off to my driveway. Dark winter caps pulled over their heads. Long, black overcoats. I drove into the garage, breathing heavily.
You’re being ridiculous, Allison, I tried to tell myself.
I pressed my hands together. It was cold in the garage and my breath puffed out in white gusts. I thought about the vicious trolls on social media, all those anonymous posters wishing me harm. It felt like nowhere was safe. I felt myself crumble, felt that old familiar longing to just hide, sleep, forget.
Leave them alone, Allison. My brain alarm went off. Duke might not have left the chess piece for me, but he could still have been warning me off.
I moved. I got out of the car and unlocked the door leading into the house. The basement was dark, and I forced myself up the stairs, a child afraid of the boogeyman. The main floor was better lit because of the windows, but they didn’t make me feel any better. Anyone could be looking in.
I kept moving to the top floor. Pushed open the door to the top deck and stepped out. Icy snow hit my face. In the swirling wind, the ocean seemed dangerous and angry. Far off, the pier lights danced, but all the rides and stores loomed against an upset sky.
I peered over the railing. I could see one light on in the Bishops’ house.
Why did it seem like they’d been waiting for me?