I guess they forgot I was coming.
People get caught up in their out-of-town guests, their fishing trips and beach hauls, their deliveries, their arrivals, the comings and goings that matter most, and are shocked when I show up at the door. At my regular, appointed time, like clockwork. I’m Cinderella, there to make their world sparkle and shine, and they look at me like I’m a dental hygienist come to scrape their teeth.
I was relieved, as I pulled my car onto the grass spit separating their house from the street, that the outside was cleaned up already. The grass torn up and rototilled. A small Dumpster in the driveway, and I didn’t want to look, didn’t want to think what might be inside. I expected maybe crime tape circling the house, or some sort of rope, but there was nothing. Oh, I don’t know what I expected. This was a new one.
Given what had happened, I called ahead to make sure they still wanted me there, that the house still needed to be cleaned, and Alice wasn’t there when I called, but Tom said yes, absolutely, that it still had to be cleaned before they left the next day. He said no one would be there, that they were all staying elsewhere.
But I could tell from the look of shock on his sister’s face when she opened the porch door that he hadn’t mentioned this set of facts to her.
“I’m very sorry about your loss,” I said.
“Thank you, but—”
“I spoke to your brother. He told me to come today and give it a once-over.”
“A once-over?”
I blinked. I wasn’t sure if that was exactly the term he used, but that was the gist of it. I felt my face start to redden, my words tangled on my tongue. How was it that girls like Caroline had always been so certain of everything that they made me feel uncertain?
“Yes,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say that wouldn’t come out wrong.
I heard something in the kitchen then, and I saw that she wasn’t alone. Billy Clayton clearing his throat, like a warning.
“Did he already pay you?”
“I’m paid in advance at the beginning of the seas—”
“Never mind,” she said. “Just…do what you need to do.”
Such a strange way to put it. As if I was driven by some compulsion to clean. I’d be happy to take the money and do nothing for it. I wasn’t an idiot. I didn’t live to wipe up their crumbs. And now, the house—was it haunted? Tainted? The air inside felt sealed up already. Cold. The summer had barely begun, and it felt like it was gone already.
I went upstairs. The second and third floors weren’t really dirty. Some sticky mouthwash rings in the bathrooms. Some dust on the bedside tables. I knew if there was any real work to be done, it would be in the kitchen. But that’s where the two of them were. I heard the low thrum of their voices, drawers opening, kettle whistling, then the familiar squeak of the old basement door. Not footsteps going down; just the door opening and then closing. Didn’t come upstairs and look either. Guess he didn’t have a warrant yet.
Once I asked Matt Whitaker about that door, why he hadn’t oiled it, tightened it. Everything else, every spidery trail of mold on the wall, every loose floorboard, every nick of paint, was always touched up, tended. But not the door. He had smiled, like he was remembering something, and said the family didn’t want to waste money on anything in the basement. Yeah, right, I wanted to say. Like he hadn’t wiped down and organized everything down there already, on his own dime.
I took my time upstairs, giving them ample opportunity to finish up and leave. I wiped down the banister, the floorboards. I dusted picture frames, which I almost never do. At last, I heard the thump of the screen door, flip-flops on the porch steps.
“Finally,” I muttered and carried the vacuum cleaner down the steps, not bothering to wind the cord, letting it snake behind me. Why rich people never had two or three vacuum cleaners, one for each floor, I would never know. Mysteries of the universe. Then it hit me: one set of footsteps leaving. Not two.
He sat at the kitchen table with a glass of water, paper, pen. Like an interrogation room.
“I gotta clean in here,” I said dumbly. The things that come outta my mouth sometimes.
“It’s not dirty.”
“Maybe not to your eye.”
He laughed, and I suppose I got his point. Who was more observant on this island than Billy Clayton?
“Were you cleaning here yesterday?”
“I’m here today, so no.”
“Don’t some people need you two days in a row?”
“Not the Warners.”
“Ever?”
“Ever. Not that it should matter to you.”
Sometimes I felt his power, just watching him drive around town, his window always down in case he missed something. Some sound that he might need to recall later. It wasn’t fair, the things he felt he had every right to know, on his way to learning other things. He didn’t need to know everything; he just liked to.
“You clean at the Brownsteins’ yesterday?”
“No.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“So you weren’t at the Brownsteins’ and weren’t at the Warners’, but your car was, more or less.”
“You following me, Billy?”
“Maybe.”
“I was cleaning at the Grinstaffs. Hard to park because of the fireworks. So I parked over here.”
“When did you leave?”
“Just after dark.”
“And you didn’t come here.”
“No. Do I have to say it louder for you to hear it?”
“And you didn’t go to the Brownsteins’?”
“No, I just told you that, Billy!” My mother would have told him to clean his ears, but I thought that was a bit too intimate to say, even to someone I’d known since he was in a wading pool.
“You can see the house from where your car was parked. Both of them.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So, did you see anything?”
“No.”
“Didn’t see anyone outside or cutting through the lawn between the Brownsteins’ or—”
“You don’t really think he did this?”
“Did what?”
“Chopped down the widow’s walk?”
“Is that what you think happened?”
“Jesus, Billy, I don’t know. Chopped, jerry-rigged, exploded, I don’t know.”
“Sounds like maybe you do.”
“I don’t.”
“But whatever it is, you don’t think Bear Brownstein did it.”
“No.”
“Because you’re fond of him.”
“No,” I said hotly, my face turning red again.
What was it about Bear Brownstein? Well, we were both straight shooters. We understood each other. But what does that even mean to a man like Billy? That’s not a fact; that’s a feeling, like mist.
“Then why?”
“Because he’s afraid of heights,” I blurted out.
He hesitated. I knew the information was useful and unexpected. He was probably kicking himself for not noticing this, for not finding this out himself.
“How do you know that?”
“He told me.”
“He told you? You two just sit around talking about your fears and foibles?”
“Christ on a cracker, Billy, why you gotta twist every little damned thing?”
“Twist it back then. Illuminate me.”
“He asked me to go up on his library ladder and get him a book. Said he got all wobbly up high.”
“Wobbly?”
“Yeah. So I climb up, and I’m rolling the ladder across, and I said, ‘This one? Is this the book?’ And when I looked down, he looked pale, just from watching me, just from tilting his head up.”
He took a deep sigh. He’d seen the ladder of course. He’d seen all the books. You couldn’t miss it when you stepped inside.
“Why would a man who was afraid of heights have that in his house?”
“I’m afraid of getting burned, but I still got an oven.”
He breathed in deeply, tapped his pencil. He took a long swallow from the water glass.
“You through with that?” I asked, reaching for it. “Because I got dishes to do. And don’t you have a rapist to catch? Don’t you have better things to do than bother me?”
He handed it to me, stood up, put the pencil behind his ear. A golf pencil, I saw now.
“He’s your employer, I get that. He tips you at the end of the season, he gives you his old outdoor furniture that cost more than your indoor furniture, he—”
“No, he doesn’t,” I said hotly. “Who told you that?”
“I’m speaking generally. I’m speaking symbolically, metaphorically.”
“You don’t know a thing.”
“My point is, someone is nice to you, generous, makes you like them. And when you like someone, you tend to see things a certain way, isn’t that right?”
I closed my eyes. People ask me sometimes, “Don’t you ever get sick of living on an island? Don’t you ever want to just drive off, and you can’t?” And this is one of those moments. Sometimes you do, yeah. But it’s not the island that does it; it’s the people you can’t escape. People who come here and just stick. Forever.
“Billy, that was a long time ago. I thought I did see him at Stubby’s. It was dark, and I was a k—”
“Right. We were kids. Can’t be held responsible for anything you do as a kid, can you?”
“No. No, you really can’t.”
Here was where our beliefs went in different directions. He was a law-and-order, charge-’em-as-adults kinda guy, and I was a he’s-only-a-kid kinda gal. Both sides always believe they’re right, and never the twain shall meet.
I filled the bucket with soapy water, turned my back on him. He walked across the kitchen and stopped.
“Must have hurt that you weren’t invited to that slumber party,” he said. “But then Caroline was just a kid, right?”
“You got any more questions for me, Billy? Or you just want to tease me about being unpopular when I was twelve?”
Caroline and Pippa, running up the beach together in their Speedos, ponytails flying. Girls like that made the most ordinary things look beautiful. Me with my unruly hair and skinned knees. I didn’t belong with them, and we all knew it.
He hadn’t asked if I’d heard anything, smelled anything, felt anything. Just what I’d seen. And that was his mistake. Whether it mattered or not, those moments July 4, I’d heard what I heard, and I didn’t tell him because he didn’t ask me directly and because I didn’t really like him. Simple as that. Had nothing to do with her.
“I’m not teasing you,” he said. “I’m dead serious. You hated her.”
“I did not.”
“You probably wished she’d tumbled off the walk, not her dad.”
“Well, Billy, as long as we’re having such a serious chat about our youth, one person I sure as hell didn’t see at Stubby’s that night Caroline got hurt was you. You and Connor Grinstaff used to hang out, but did anyone ask the cop’s son about his whereabouts? Huh? Or did your daddy protect you like Connor’s daddy did?”
His face burned, but I didn’t care. He was taking advantage of me being in other people’s homes. Like he had as much right to be there as I did, but he didn’t.
“So you didn’t see anything here on the Fourth?”
“Nope.”
And because he didn’t ask me if I heard anything, or smelled anything, or sensed anything, that’s all I said. Asked and answered.
“One more question,” he said. “You ever use the ladder when you clean? Get those cobwebs out of the corners?”
Everything sloshed as I pulled the bucket out of the sink. The plastic lip was cracked. The sink wasn’t deep enough. The water was turned down too cool. It didn’t really matter what Billy Clayton said or didn’t say; it didn’t matter what happened thirty years ago. Nothing we were talking about would change the cold, hard truth.
Because the truth is it didn’t matter how carefully Matt Whitaker looked after it; nothing was ever right about that house, not level or true.
“Get out of this house, Billy.”
“It’s not yours.”
“It is today.”