Page 29 of Dead of Summer

HENRY

Late in the afternoon there is an unexpected pounding on the screen door.

Henry has spent all day dealing with a new crack that had sprung up overnight.

It is common to have cracks in the walls; the pylons below the house tended to shift ever so slightly.

But the night had been particularly windy, angry gusts rattling at the walls, and he awoke to the sound of splitting wood.

Rushing into the main room, he found a new crack traveling from the floor up to the ceiling.

Water was already leaking through, streaming down the walls.

“If you don’t fix that today it will grow,” Margie had said. Henry had sighed as he continued not wanting to face it. “It will spread and spread. This whole place could go down before you know it.”

Of course, Margie was right. A crack that big would need instant attention.

Dismayed that he’d have to forfeit most of the day’s observation time to repairing it, he’d dragged supplies out of the closet and mixed up some plaster.

Up close the wall was crisscrossed with a web of plaster lines from previous repairs, and he saw this crack was even worse than he thought.

He’d swallowed anxiously as he took in the fissure, wider than any he’d seen before.

The first coat of plaster sank into the crack, making multiple coats necessary.

It was still a garish thing to look at, a wet river of gray that traveled in a jagged lightning bolt down the wall.

“Just a minute,” Henry calls loudly to whoever is banging on the door.

Glancing at the logbook still open on the table, he rushes back and sloppily slides a large tidal chart across the top of it, smudging it with plaster.

No one else needs to know about Matilda Warren’s trip down to the water in her bathrobe last night.

He’d watched in shock as the octogenarian had slipped it off and dove into the waves completely nude, gracefully swimming out into the cove in the dying light.

When he turns back, Jean hasn’t listened to him and has already opened the door.

She barges inside. Her cheeks are red from the wind, her graying hair frizzled by the ocean air. This time she has no grocery bags.

“I need you to tell me what you know about Gemma.” The words fall out of her.

“Who?” Henry asks, trying to keep up. His heart thuds.

“Gemma,” Jean says again, impatient. “The young girl I hired at the Crab. The one who came to the house.”

“What about her?”

“She’s gone,” Jean’s voice crackles.

Henry’s chest seizes. “What do you mean gone ?”

“Just gone. Vanished. What else can I say?” She throws her hands up, her fingers stiff with frustration. “The police came by the Crab just after close.”

Henry puts his hand to his cheek, worrying his fingers up along the grit of his stubble. “When was this? What night?” Fear has started to gnaw at his insides.

“Last time I saw her was right after I was here with you.”

Jean paces in front of the windows. “I knew it. I thought she was a good worker. That she wouldn’t have gone and quit with no notice like this.

But I called her mother, and she hadn’t seen her either.

That stupid woman. I should have said something sooner, should have gone to the police. It could have been useful.”

Henry recalls the slim figure of a young woman cutting up Harbor Street and the man going in the other direction.

How they’d disappeared behind the thicket of rose hips on the side of the road.

He’d moved his telescope, waiting for them to emerge, but they never did.

He had brushed it off, assuming maybe they had met each other and gone off together onto the beach.

He itches to page through his logbook, to be sure of the details. He would have written it down.

“What’s wrong, Henry?” Jean stops pacing and looks at Henry suspiciously.

She stands at the edge of his table catching her breath.

“Nothing, I—” Henry backs away. He wishes Jean would go. He needs to think, to look back in the book.

“You saw something, didn’t you?” Her face pales.

“Me? No! What would I have—” he starts feebly, glancing anxiously toward the table, hoping she can’t see the edge of the logbook peeking out from under the tidal chart. He darts toward the kitchen, where he keeps his back to her and fusses with the kettle. But Jean is relentless. She follows him.

“You did, didn’t you? What did you see? What did you see, Henry? ” Her voice is coarse and desperate. It sends him stumbling back toward the kitchen island.

“I don’t know what you mean.” It comes out more gruffly than he intends. His mind is whirring, trying to recall the details of that night. The shadow on the road. “Lower your voice, please.” His eyes flick toward the bedroom. Henry puts the water on and fills the kettle, trying to drown her out.

“Was it her? Was it Gemma?” She is right next to him now.

“Jean, please stop.” He turns the faucet up higher. He is getting angry. What right does she have to barge in? Jean shouldn’t be here. This isn’t her day to come.

“Don’t think I don’t know, Henry,” Jean says quietly. “I’d have to be an idiot not to know after all these years.”

Henry grips the counter. The blood rushes into his face, fizzing at the top of his head, where his hair has started to thin.

“Know what, Jean?” He tries to laugh. He could never lie to her. Not outright. Not even by omission.

She snaps her palm up, quieting him. “I know that you spend your days holed up here spying on people. Now, I’ve never said anything. But you must know Margie and I never have had a secret.”

“Whatever you’re thinking, you’re wrong.” He couldn’t let her think about him that way. His only friend.

“I—” Henry slumps over. He supposes he thought that his and Margie’s life was theirs alone, but he should have known better.

The way she and her sister spent so much of their time together, ankle-deep in the mud offshore looking for clams or sitting out on the dock, bottles of beer in hand, their voices dulled by the wind so that all he could make out were the occasional sharp cackles passing between them.

He hears Jean behind him. She is leaving. Good. But her footsteps carry on deeper into the living room. Oh god. No. He turns back to see her marching across the room toward the table, where the thin tidal chart teeters precariously on top of his latest logbook.

“No! Stay away from those, Jean,” Henry croaks, running toward the table.

Jean reaches it first, lunging for the tidal chart.

Henry intercepts her and tries to cover it with his thin torso.

Their arms tangle as they scramble. He is surprised to find that Jean is stronger than him, and nimbler as well.

Her hand easily shoots under his rib cage and takes hold of the edge of the chart.

There is a loud rip as she yanks the sheet away.

There is a thundering of paper as it slides to the ground in two giant pieces, revealing the logbook below, still open to this morning’s observations.

Henry pants, watching in horror as she snatches it up and retreats with it to the far side of the table. She flips through the pages, something awful taking hold of her features. Her eyes narrow. How could he have let this happen? Henry watches helplessly as she examines a page.

“June fourteenth, Orla O’Connor returns,” she reads out loud. Her eyes snap up to look at him before she turns the page. “Guess you didn’t need me to tell you.”

“Jean,” Henry starts, his voice shaking. How can he make her understand that it is just something he does, that there is no harm in it, none really? She is shaking her head.

“It was none of my business. I always thought it was a strange thing to do, this obsession you have with watching, but probably not harming anyone. Now I’m not so sure.”

Henry retreats, his shoulders hunched in shame. “Please, Jean. It’s only a hobby.”

“Oh, really, Henry? Spying on people is a hobby?” She turns the page in the logbook and points to her own name: “4:12 a.m., Jean leaves the Crab.” Jean lowers the book and gives him a look that skewers his heart in two. “Spying on me, too, then, are you?”

“It’s not so creepy as it seems. I swear. I just wanted to make sure you’re okay.”

“And if I’m not? What are you going to do, Henry? Jump in your boat and come for me?”

He stares at her startled. What is she implying? She draws closer to him. “Oh yes, I know about her , too, Henry. The young girl. The other one.” She lowers her voice to a hiss. “Alice.”

Henry reels back. He didn’t think Margie would have told her that.

He thought that it would have been a secret.

He’ll have to tell her that there are things too dangerous to talk about with Jean.

He stands up straighter now. “You weren’t meant to be here.

This is our house. Our things. What right do you have to show up here unannounced and, and—? ”

They are both breathing heavily now, eyeing each other across the table warily as though afraid to make the next move.

“I don’t care what you do, Henry. This—” She flaps a frantic hand at the corner of the table. “This is your business. But I swear to you, if you know something about that sweet girl and you don’t tell me? I will never forgive you, Henry Wright.”

Henry quickly does the calculation in his head.

He can’t afford to lose Jean. She is their one thin tether to reality, the only person who cares.

There is something else that is happening, filling him up with a weak, fuzzy feeling.

He is relieved that he’s not the only one who has carried it all this time.

That she’s been carrying it all this time also.

“I saw something,” he exhales.

“When?” she asks quickly.

He puts his hand out for the logbook, and Jean hands it over to him. He turns the pages until he finds the entry. “Wednesday. It was mostly a shadow in the streetlight. A woman walking down Harbor Street toward the Clarkes that night. And a man as well, coming from the other way.”

“And?” she asks.

“That’s it,” he says, feeling flustered. “They disappeared.”

“What do you mean?” Jean narrows her eyes at him.

“Just that there was a man coming the other way, and they sort of converged.”

“Could you see who?”

He shakes his head. His mouth opens and closes helplessly. Jean looks at him for a moment as though she is trying to decide whether or not to believe it. Then she presses her fingers into her eyes.

“Jean, are you all right?” He trails behind her as she walks to the door.

“No. I’m afraid,” she says.

“I’m sure it’s nothing. I’m sure the girl will be okay.

” His heart twists with the desire to make it better.

For Jean or for himself, he isn’t sure. He puts his hand out toward her shoulder, wanting to comfort her, but he stops himself.

It hovers just above, where she can’t see it.

He can feel the bracelet Gemma gave him.

It digs into his skin, hidden just below the cuff of his shirt.

“I’m not afraid only for Gemma, Henry. I’m afraid for you.” She stops but does not turn to face him. Instead, she lets her body fall, exhausted, slumped into the doorframe.

“For me?” He almost laughs. But Jean’s face is stricken when she finally turns around to face him. Her eyes water dangerously. Henry can’t bear to see her crying.

“Jean, please don’t worry, I—” He tries to comfort her.

She stiffens and turns back, walking through the door and onto the deck; when she reaches the stairs, she stops. “They will come for you, Henry. They will lock you up. And this time no one will be able to protect you.”

“But Margie…” he begins helplessly. She gives him a look. It is stern mixed with pity.

“Now, I know it’s been hard for you,” she starts as the panic begins to fill his chest.

No no no. He backs away from her. His limbs feel weak. Please don’t say it.

“Margie wouldn’t want me to let you keep going like this. It’s not… healthy.” Jean sighs, ignoring his pleas and stepping toward him. “Stop it, Henry. She’s dead! Dead! You can’t keep walking around this little place pretending she is still alive.”

He lets out a low moan and covers his eyes.

How hard he’d tried to convince his wife to leave the island for medical care, begged her to go to the mainland. “I’ll go with you,” he’d pleaded.

Margie would hear none of it. “Those doctors, you can’t trust them.

They’ll say I need treatment, and the next thing you know I’ll be hooked up to a bunch of tubes and machines and god knows what else.

” She’d bustled around behind the counter, rubbing it down with a rag as though scrubbing away any idea he might have of her going anywhere.

Henry opens his mouth now to speak, but whatever words he might come up with are lodged firmly in his throat.

He flees back inside as soon as the motor starts.

“Besides,” Margie had said, swatting him playfully on the knee as she brushed past him toward the kitchen. “What would you do without me here?”

Eight years on and Henry still doesn’t know.