Page 32 of Dead of Summer

HENRY

Henry tries to carry on as normal with his routine, but his fingers fumble as he cooks up a piece of haddock and some potatoes, and he does something wrong, forgets to put enough oil in the pan and turns the burner up too high and the fish sticks to the cast iron and turns black.

He tries to eat it, but he can feel bones sticking in his throat when he takes a bite.

Henry’s appetite isn’t good anyway. He takes his dinner out to the deck and throws it onto the rocks for the seagulls to devour.

Then he goes to the telescope and looks.

He goes first to the docks by Port Mary.

There is a lineup of people, all unfamiliar.

The ferry bobs at the dock, preparing for the return trip.

The restaurants are busy. People linger over gratuitous plates of lobster, piles of fried calamari, and bright yellow rings of banana peppers.

They finish off bottles of wine, smiling and laughing like nothing has happened.

Like a girl isn’t missing. Like Henry isn’t a suspect. Like Margie isn’t dead.

He lets the telescope go out of focus and fall from his hand. He isn’t in the mood to watch anymore. He’s lost interest in the comings and goings on Hadley. His logbook is unmarked since his last entry when Jean made her unexpected visit.

Henry knows how lucky he was that Edward Robertson was the town’s detective fifteen years ago. Without him there to talk people down, they would have locked him up. Or worse.

Henry swallows, thinking about the last time.

When Alice Gallo was declared missing, a mob had formed outside the station overnight.

In the early morning they’d filed into Hadley’s little community center and sat on folding chairs.

The camera people there had schlepped their equipment all the way from the mainland.

There were sharply dressed news reporters holding microphones too. A press conference, they’d called it.

By the time they had brought Henry in, David Clarke was already talking. He looked pale and shaken. He hunched down, his teeth chattering.

“We were out on the b-boat,” David stuttered. “We’d been drinking.” He had said this part with what sounded like deep remorse.

“And then what?” the reporter prodded.

“I don’t know exactly,” he mumbled. “I fell asleep. And when I woke up Orla was screaming and Alice was gone. I ran over and Orla was looking down into the water. There was a boat there in the dark, rowing away from us.”

“Did you get a look at who was in it, David?” the reporter had asked, putting a paternal hand on his shoulder.

“Him,” David said pointing, “Henry Wright. He had Alice in the bottom of the boat. I could see her dress.”

There was a collective gasp from the crowd.

“Now hold up,” Ed had said, holding up a palm to quiet the room. “This is just to gather information; there will be a fair trial here.”

“What direction did they go?” the reporter asked.

“Away, back to his house,” David said, and then he had raised his head and looked straight into the camera. “Please, I need you to find her. She’s one of my best friends.”

Henry was standing dumbfounded, his clothes still damp, when the reporters descended on him and shoved their microphones into his face.

“Is it true? What were you doing out there in the water?”

“I saw the young girl in distress. I was only trying to help,” he’d tried to explain but Geoffrey Clarke had appeared then in the doorway.

His arrival quieted the room as people stopped talking to watch him swagger up the aisle.

His presence filled up the small community room, a rarity, like seeing a celebrity in the flesh.

His voice sent a ripple through the room.

“This wasn’t the first time you went looking for Alice, though, was it, Henry? There are people who saw the two of you behind the old wharf building. She even told David that you were obsessed with her.”

Henry had hunched in shame. Had she really said that? “No, it wasn’t like that. She’d been the one to find me,” Henry had whimpered as the crowd gasped, titillated by this new piece of information.

“Blaming the victim is a bad look, Henry.” Geoffrey had shaken his head sadly, though Henry thought he was not actually sad.

“You said you saw her. Do you often look for girls, Henry?”

“I look at everything. I like to watch—”

“You have it there, straight from his mouth. He likes to watch! ” Geoffrey appealed to the crowd, twisting his face into a theatric look of disgust.

Henry’s mouth clamped shut. He looked around the room.

Nearly all in attendance were familiar. They were kids he’d come up with, all grown up.

Childhood neighbors and classmates, his dentist and doctor, the owner of the local deli.

Most of them people he’d known his whole life.

But their faces were unfamiliar to him now, their eyes closed off to his pleas for understanding.

A few had held their hands to their chests in shock while several others curled their lips back in disgust; they had already turned on him.

“Now, now,” Ed had interjected from the side of the room where he’d been taking questions. “I said there was no proof of anything at all. We are still investigating.”

“Just a child,” Geoffrey tutted, stepping in front of the policeman. “And they’re going to let him go with a slap on the wrist.”

“There’s no clear evidence that Henry had anything to do with it,” Ed insisted. “Please let’s all allow the process to do its job.”

All eyes went to Geoffrey, who spun toward the crowd raising his hands in question.

“The process?” he scoffed. “I don’t know about you, but I expect my police force not to pussyfoot around when a young girl’s life is at stake.

” A buzz of angry conversation rippled across the room.

Henry swore that he could see Geoffrey grow taller in front of him as he was egged on.

“My own son saw that man take his friend onto his boat.” The murmurs grew louder, angrier.

“But that’s just n-not t-true,” Henry stuttered.

“Did you go out to find the girl, Henry?” the reporter was asking him.

“Yes, I went out to find her, but she wasn’t there.

I…” Henry looked helplessly to David, whose head dropped down toward his lap.

Henry remembered how kindly Alice had treated him all those times, chatting with him and asking him questions.

He’d felt like she was a friend by the end of their last drawing session.

He’d been nervous to see the finished drawing, afraid of facing himself, but when she had turned the sketch pad toward him, he felt only a swell of pride.

How well she’d captured him. His imperfections were there, the deep grooves in his cheeks, the receding hairline, but they seemed to lend him a certain quiet dignity, something he’d never seen fully in himself.

But she did. She was a special girl, and they were out to hurt her.

He thought of the men on the boat and how they had loomed over Alice.

Anger rose up in his chest. Finding his voice, he leaned over and spoke directly into the microphone.

“Something bad was happening out there on that boat.”

“Oh, something bad?” Geoffrey waved his palms at the crowd in mock fear.

“Was it really something bad or did you see my son and his friends having fun the way teenagers do? I think you decided to spy on them and got jealous when you saw your creepy little crush there with someone her own age. What kind of perversions do you have that make you want to watch teenagers?”

“No,” Henry said. “It was you.” The truth of it was, Henry didn’t know what he saw, not exactly.

“And he’s delusional as well. I wasn’t even on the yacht, Henry.

I was at the party. Ask anyone here. They all saw me.

” There were low voices as the attendees conferred among themselves.

They had seen him, hadn’t they? Geoffrey had been in rare form that night, shaking hands, slapping backs. You couldn’t miss him.

“No, you were there,” Henry protested. “I saw you and others too. Not kids, grown men.” But his words were lost in the voices of the crowd. Henry could hear Margie’s voice trying to defend him. He strained his eyes trying to find her.

“Do you like to watch people?” the newscaster prodded him.

“That man”—Geoffrey waved his hand in Henry’s face—“was looking at children through a telescope. He says himself he does it all the time.”

An outraged murmur rippled across the auditorium.

As they jeered at him, Henry became less sure of himself.

What if it really wasn’t Geoffrey he’d seen, but his son?

“Please, Geoffrey, let’s let the law decide all this,” Ed begged, but he was losing steam against the crowd, who were growing louder and more disgruntled by the second.

Henry finally found Margie in the far back of the room. She was standing along the wall, her face pale under the fluorescent lighting. Her eyes wide with fear. Margie had been the one who suggested they leave. These provincial people , she’d always complained, I can’t bear it here anymore.

“Why you are protecting him?” Geoffrey boomed at Ed Robertson. “You have no other credible suspects, and you have a witness. Unless you are trying to hide something also?”

“That’s a disgusting lie. I’m protecting the law. Not him.” Ed was growing visibly nervous as the murmurs from the islanders grew louder and angrier.

At this Geoffrey Clarke spun back on his heels and raised his eyebrows, addressing the room again.

“My son, David, came forward and told the police right away, but they ignored him. That man is strange, we all know it. We give him a pass, but look at him. Who goes and lives on a tiny little island like that unless they have something to hide? Why else would a man move his wife out there, so far away from the rest of us, unless he was disturbed?”

Ed cut in. “We found nothing at the Wright residence to suggest—”

But Geoffrey had found his footing now. The crowd was his. He turned on the officer.

“How long did it take you to get a warrant? See, he can’t even answer? Well, I will, it was hours. I say that gave him plenty of time to do what he wanted with her. And to hide the evidence.”

The crowd gasped at the implication.

“God no, I never—” Henry had tried to defend himself, sickened by the very nature of the accusation. The jeers of the crowd grew louder and the overhead light suddenly became very hot on his face. He had one clear thought then: If only he had written it all down, he could prove it.

“If my son isn’t a good enough witness for you people, he isn’t alone. The girl saw him too.” Geoffrey pointed at Orla O’Connor. Her head dropped to her chest.

“It’s okay, dear, you can tell us,” the reporter said, his voice dripping with performative empathy.

“I saw him,” she said through the hair that had fallen in front of her face. When she looked up, her eyes were red from crying. “We went to look, and she was gone.”

“And then what? What did you see, dear?”

“Henry Wright was in the water. And I saw Alice in his boat.”

At this the roar from the public had been so intense the police had become visibly nervous. They whisked Henry away from the blur of angry villagers and out a back door to a police car.

We’ll never be able to leave now , Margie had said after that night.

The terror of their predicament was all over her face.

Unless it’s for good. But both of them knew that wasn’t an option, not really.

Hadley was all either of them had ever known.

It was home. And they weren’t the types to start over.

They were creatures of comfort. Homebodies.

They had each other, though; that was what mattered.

“Ed was the only one who stopped them from hauling you off like vigilantes,” Margie, shaken, had repeated later.

The fear in her voice had turned to anger when they were back in their chairs, safely on their little island and settled in for the night.

Henry hadn’t wanted to think then about the people he’d known all his life having it in for him.

“We don’t know what they would have done,” he’d said, turning his attention toward the water, ready to put the whole thing behind him. But Margie wasn’t ready to let it go. She shuffled angrily in her chair.

“I do,” she’d said, pulling the blanket tightly around her and shuddering. “Geoffrey would have had them tear you limb from limb. You, or anyone else that threatened to expose his terrible little secrets.”