CHAPTER 13

On the day that they arrested the men from Silver Lake, the rust-covered plow of the infamous tractor appeared above the surface, standing like a small sentry dead center in the black shimmering maw of The Hole. That same morning, the announcement came that mandatory water restrictions would be in effect for the month of August. The lake had retreated by inches, disappearing downward every day, and the summer people—affected at last—looked worriedly out at the shrinking pool and feared with the same gnawing panic as the rest of us. Feared that murder had slipped through the gates, that something evil was lying in wait on the lake bottom, drinking the water away. It slipped and sloshed lower on the rocks, and lower still, exposing things long hidden in the shadowy murk and waving shoreline weeds. It revealed old grudges and older graffiti, small spats over property lines and prime dockage, petty insults and four-letter words scratched angrily into dock posts or the glittering granite rocks. On the day that the police blazed through the gates of Silver Lake, the water had dipped so low that a seventy-two-year-old man, out for his morning swim, stopped and stared in amazement at two grime-covered sculptures with pointy red hats lying in the newly exposed muck below his neighbor’s dock. His garden gnomes had gone missing the previous year; at the time, the family next door had pleaded ignorance and blamed the theft on local pranksters.

Beneath the surface, we weren’t so different after all.

And two hours later, the Bridgeton police sped through the sentried gates, pulled into the flagstone drive of a four-bedroom cottage on the waterfront, pulled three never-used firearms from their snug leather holsters, and, with to-the-letter efficiency, placed two of its residents under arrest.

* * *

With the news rippling like scattershot through our phone lines and knocking urgently at our front door in the form of hovering neighbors, my mother locked the house tightly in spite of the heat, slammed four Advil down her throat, and fell heavily into one of the creaky kitchen chairs.

“If that phone rings one more time,” she said, the last three words carrying a warning edge that made no additional explanation necessary. A butter knife lay on the table; she picked it up and gestured threateningly at the handset. In the place where it had been, a gob of grease still clung to the tablecloth, but Mom didn’t seem to notice it. Lately, I thought, she didn’t seem to notice anything; I would come home from the restaurant to find breakfast’s crumb-covered dishes still piled on the countertop, glasses filled with lukewarm water and condensation rings drying on the tablecloth, the milk left out to spoil. I had struggled through July like a zombie, detached and half dead, pushing against the sensation that I had become a ghost in my own life. Now, brought halfway back to earth by James and Lindsay and the restless and inexorable pull of townie gossip, I looked at the oily gob of butter and realized that my mother might be even more checked-out than me. The evil that had arrived on our doorsteps that summer had moved inside here, too—it was living in our kitchen, poisoning the food with strange rot, whispering to her from just inside the pantry door.

From the corner of my eye, I could see the hulking, overstuffed shape of the recycling bin. I didn’t need to look to know that it was full, brimming with the piled green-glass curves of empty wine bottles.

“What’s going on?” I said, realizing at the same time that I knew well enough, realizing that I only wanted her to talk to me.

“They’ve arrested two of those obnoxious men from Silver Lake,” my mother said. She looked out the window, squinting her eyes against the brightness outside. I could see the hangover headache beating small pulses against her hairline. “You know the ones—that group, they tried to close the bridge after that kid died. Concerned Citizens of whatever-it-is.”

“Concerned Citizens of Silver Shoals,” I said. I’d seen them at the restaurant—the same height, same build, all with the same nondescript fortyish face. They walked in heavy-step unison. They were a small army of cloned mediocrity. They’d come on the scene after Brendan’s death; I remembered the Chief of Police, standing on our porch in the fading twilight and staring down the street, angry sweat sheening on his bald pate.

“Idiots!” he’d snapped. “Concerned citizens, can you believe that crap? ‘Citizens,’ my ass. And don’t even get me started on shoals, for the love of Pete, these moneyed sons of bitches don’t even know what a goddamn shoal goddamn is.”

My father, lending an ear to his longtime friend, stood in the shadows near the door with his jaw set and an edge in his voice. “What do you plan to do about it?”

The chief, head shaking slowly—as much in disbelief as anger—sighed and said, “These people, they’ve got no business telling us what to do with our own damned bridge. Or anything else. Let them sit out a winter here, work an overnight shift at the plant, and maybe then I’ll listen to their goddamn opinions on community safety.”

And then, in a move that might have been funny had it not betrayed so much barely contained anger, the Chief of Police had cocked his head to one side and spat on the sidewalk.

* * *

“Shoals,” my mother echoed, grinning slightly in shared memory of the chief’s fury. “That’s it.”

“You know what people are going to say,” I replied. I slid into the chair next to her. “They’ve been rabid about the dead girl. That was them at the street fair, too—that fight.”

She snickered; she knew the story. In truth, the whole thing had lasted less than a minute—just enough time for one of the men to cause a small commotion by accusing the entire town of incompetence, and for Tom to step outside, listen for a moment, and then cleanly break his nose with one punch.

I cleared my throat. “Some people think one of them did it.”

“Definitely not.”

I pushed back. “How do you know?”

“Well, your father and I do still talk to each other occasionally.” She sighed. “And according to him, it’s just not possible. The police have been in there more than once, and nobody’s ever seen that girl.”

We sat together in silence, my mother with her fingertips pressed against the papery, translucent skin of her temples, rubbing small circles into the spot just before her hairline. Outside, the sun passed momentarily behind a cloud; the light in the kitchen turned drab and shadowless.

I turned over the few known facts about the murder in my head, feeling the hairs on the back of my neck rise up as I thought of the body lying in the morgue. Cold, alone, unclaimed—maybe forever. No resolution, no closure. An unburied body in slow decay. A patch of isolated road where, no matter how hard it rained, the pavement was always stained the faintest shade of red.

Something horrible, something that usually stayed safely outside and away from the quiet comfort of Bridgeton, had moved into town and would never, ever leave.

On the tabletop, the phone chirped once and then began to ring. I snatched it and pressed it to my stomach, wanting to muffle the noise. My mom buried her head in her hands as I slipped out the kitchen door, lifting the handset to my ear as it swung shut behind me.

“Hello?”

“Becca?” James’s voice was so high and tense that I cringed away, wincing.

I held it several inches from my head and muttered, “It’s me, I’m here.”

His breathing was hard and fast, as though he’d run for the phone and dialed in a hurry. Something was wrong.

“James? What’s going on?”

The words came out in an unpunctuated tumble. “Have you heard what happened?”

The air left my lungs in a huff of disbelief, as inside, the rational me rolled her eyes.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “This is a gossip call? You scared the shit out of m—”

“So you know?” he said, his voice still alive with tension and worry.

“This isn’t news, you know,” I said. “You didn’t exactly get the jump on this.”

“Becca—”

“Yes, okay?” I spat. “Yes, I know they arrested two of those jerks from the lake.”

“But people are saying they did it,” he said. “You know, that they killed that girl. And—”

“People are panicking, that’s all. They just want it solved.”

“But the police arrested those guys,” he said. “I mean, that happened. They’re at the station now.”

“Yeah, for some reason that has nothing to do with killing anyone,” I said.

“Like what?” he countered.

I sighed. “I don’t know. I mean, hell, did you hear about that old guy’s garden gnomes? Maybe they did that.”

There was a brief pause and then James started laughing, just a little at first, then harder as the tension and anxiety in his voice disappeared. I started cackling too, grateful beyond words to find that we could still share a moment that was light and loose and . . .

Normal, I thought. There it is.

As my breathing slowed and settled, as I waited for James to get back under control, the thought I’d nearly had before came floating back to the surface. The men arrested that morning had no hand in the murder, but part of me stubbornly insisted that there was something else. Something missed, something misplaced.

“So I guess you heard your version of this from a reliable source.” James had stopped laughing; I heard him light up a cigarette, the spark and hiss of the match-flame echoing in the empty space after his question.

“Mother via father,” I said. “Does that count as reliable?”

“Sure,” he said. “Especially by comparison.”

“Why, who’d you hear from?”

“Craig.”

I blinked. In my head, the half-formed thought of something missing suddenly burned bright and hot.

Something horrible had arrived on our doorsteps this summer.

Or someone.

“Craig,” I repeated.

“Yeah.” He paused. “I was helping him out today, moving some of his grandma’s stuff. He went out to get beer and came back all hopped up about how some of those guys were arrested.”

“I’ll bet he was,” I said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing, I just—”

“You had a tone,” James said.

“Sorry,” I replied, hurriedly. “It’s just . . . you know. He talks about it a lot. The dead girl, the murder.”

I could hear James’s shrug. “Like you said, everyone wants to know what happened.”

“Yeah, but . . .” I paused, measuring my words. “He’s a little more interested than most. And what he said, about finding something—”

“Just a joke, Becca,” he said quickly. “Remember?”

I let out an exasperated sigh. Why did he have to have an answer for everything? There was silence from the other end, and then a thin exhalation as James blew smoke away from the receiver.

“Listen,” he said, “I hear you. I do. But you’ve got to know, whatever you’re thinking about Craig, you’re wrong.”

It was my turn to sigh with exasperation.

“Look, I’m just saying—”

“Yeah, and maybe you should think about what you’re ‘just saying.’” He spat the word out hard, urgently. “I don’t know what you think Craig did, but whatever it is, I can promise you he didn’t. You may not trust him, but can you trust me, at least? I know he’s not the type to be involved in something like this. And in this town, it could be really bad if somebody started saying that he was. Really bad.”

I stayed quiet. In the kitchen, I heard a clatter and thump as my mother stumbled against the table. A full minute passed before he spoke again.

“Look, Becca, I understand what you’re saying. I know you’re worried. And I’ll talk to him. Okay? Just let me handle it,” he said. “Promise me you’ll let me handle it, and you won’t say anything.”

“James—”

“Promise me, Becca. Please.”

If I closed my eyes, I could see him there. The phone pressed to his ear, his voice echoing in the near-empty house as he waited for me to give my word. I could see the three o’clock light slanting through the windows, the dust on the furniture, the broken boards on the porch. A warm breeze would blow lightly from the west, weaving its way between the trees, passing over the surface of the small pond and through the place, just behind the house, where there had once been a garden.

Years ago, that wind would have caressed the sharp purple spears of the clematis blossoms or shaken the golden pollen from the bobbing, heavy-petaled peonies; now, with everything gone to seed, it touched only the things that could still survive when left to fend for themselves. The wind carried news of the plants that thrived alone, forgotten and uncared-for. It swept through with the smell of the water, the pungent musk of pondweed, the dark notes of earth and leaves.

It was a year ago that I’d stood there, shifting my weight uncertainly on the porch steps. James had appeared like a ghost and waved at me from behind the dirty gray glass of the storm door. One pane was missing completely, others shattered but intact with their surfaces cut clean through by a patchwork web of silver lines. Behind, the sharp angles of his face were visible only in oblong, broken slices.

It was his father who damaged the door, he told me. Running in from the garden at the sound of James’s strangled cries, slipping in the mud at the base of the porch, vaulting up the sagging stairs in twos and threes and pounding down the hallway into the dayroom—a room full of sobbing and sunlight and everything else but the ragged sandpaper dragging of his wife’s shallow breath. The crochet coverlet that wrapped her wasted body lay perfectly still and flat against her chest. She was gone.

Later, they would find the hinges torn loose from their splintering anchors, three panes of glass cracked; another, low and on the left, had disappeared entirely.

“We never found the pieces from this one,” he had said, looking over his shoulder and smiling with so much covered misery that it made my stomach hurt.

“Weird,” I said. I ducked underneath his arm, draping its heavy length over my shoulder and resting my head against his chest.

“The paramedics probably kicked it away,” he said, his eyes fixed on a place behind us and down the steps, seeing the path that her body had followed as it was wheeled from the house, prone on a stretcher with a sheet pulled tight over her gaunt, gray face. They had called for an ambulance, not knowing what else to do, forcing James to stand on the porch and wait for the white bus with its strobing band of electric red lights to trundle up the drive. He had been the one to walk to the driver’s-side window, his shoulders hunched and face contorted with grief, and explain to the surprised EMTs in their clean khaki uniforms that they could take their time. There was nobody here to save.

Beyond the bone-white outline of the faded wood, through the place where there should have been glass but wasn’t, a dust-shrouded banister lined the stairs to the second floor. The places where fingertips had pressed against the wood gleamed like oil, three- and four-pronged marks that trailed sharply upward and then disappeared. There were photographs on the ascending wall, pictures of a brooding, little-boy version of James. He was running through a pumpkin patch, a look of intense concentration on his small, serious face. He was seated on the lap of an elderly woman with veiny hands, skin like old tissue paper, coffee-stained teeth that were flashing in a broad, uneven smile. He was here, in this house, on this stairway, with his mother’s long shadow darkening the wall beside him.

I could still remember that photograph. In it, he was turned toward the place where she had been standing, beyond the reach of the camera’s eye. His face was an open shout of delight at the surprise, Mommy, whose body was blocking the light that poured through the east-facing window, whose curly hair was casting a tendril shadow over the toe of his sneaker. It could break your heart, if you looked too long—at the shadow, at the tiny face with eyes alight and open mouth, at the gleaming woodwork and unfaded wallpaper and sweet white dabs of sunlight that played on the floor. There had been a home here, polished and scrubbed, cared for. There had been a family. There had been love, and patches of light on the stairs. There had been a time before everything turned gray.

“Aren’t you worried about this?” I’d asked, standing on the porch and trailing my finger along the inner groove where the missing glass had been. “Somebody could come in . . .”

I looked back at the endless trees, the uninterrupted forest, as James smiled sadly.

“There’s nobody out here. That was why she liked it. It’s quiet; it’s private. My mom grew up in the city, did I ever tell you that? She grew up in New York, and she was always saying—” his voice suddenly broke and he stopped short, swallowed hard. His shaggy hair—unkempt, uncut, longer than a mother would have liked—fell over his eyes as he looked toward the ground and muttered, “Sorry.”

* * *

It had still been early, then. We were still only skimming the surface of “together,” still learning each other’s tics, getting to know the nuances of expression and tone that were second nature to me now. Then, I had been uncomfortable and the moment passed with needling self-consciousness, him swallowing so hard and often that his Adam’s apple bobbed under his skin as though it were alive, me rubbing his back in awkward circles and beginning to sweat with the pressure to say something. Anything. At times like this, and there had been more than one, I felt that his mother was there—standing to the side, watching us, all mournful eyes and slow-shaking head that this trespassing girl was here, on her front porch, in her private forest, and could not even comfort her son.

Finally, he had cleared his throat, and blinked, and said, “Anyway, we don’t worry about someone coming in. There’s nothing in here that anybody cares about.”

And I had held his hand, and touched his shoulder, and wondered what kind of hopelessness he must have felt—to make himself part of that nothing.