Page 9 of Dead of Summer

HENRY

There is someone moving around inside the O’Connors’ house.

Henry points his telescope across the bay, panning through the trees and focusing on the O’Connors’ living room window.

For years the family has stayed away from Hadley, using a caretaker to check in on the place, but someone is there now.

Henry searches for Mary or Ed but finds no sign of them.

A light goes on in the upstairs bedroom and he is startled by the flash of red hair backlit in the window. His heart thuds. The daughter.

It’s been twelve summers since Orla O’Connor left the island.

Henry knows this for certain because he made note of it, diligently writing it down in his logbooks.

The same way he records everything that happens on Hadley Island.

Everything he can see anyway. And based on years of observation, he’d long since concluded that the O’Connors, much like the Gallos before them, had left for good. But Orla is back.

Henry spins away from the window toward his own living room and claps his hands together.

“Margie, you wouldn’t believe it,” he starts to say.

His eyes land on the twin armchairs facing the windows and he trails off.

They are lit by a floor lamp; a cup of tea has been recently abandoned, left steaming on a stack of books piled on the side table.

He can hear her soft snores coming through the open bedroom door.

The words catch in his throat, and he turns back to the window feeling heavy.

When he finds the O’Connors’ house again, another light has come on, this time in the kitchen.

The last time he saw Orla she was a surly eighteen-year-old heading off to college in the big city, her face creased into a permanent look of regret.

Now in shadow he can only make out the shapes and planes of it, the broad forehead and tapered chin, the slight frown she wore even as a child.

She raises her hands to her face. When she lowers them, a scowl forms on her brow.

The glass disappears from view and her head tilts up to the window and she looks right at him.

His heart bangs and the telescope jerks in his hands as he steps back.

No, no, that is silly, there’s no way she can see me hundreds of yards into the darkness.

But still, he feels exposed. He goes to the lamp and turns it off to better hide himself.

When he returns, Orla has gone deeper into the house.

The kitchen light goes off and a warmer, dimmer living room lamp comes on.

He can see the edge of a blanket and the bottoms of her bare feet poking out from the side of the sofa.

He wonders what has brought her back. From the brief glimpse he got of her face it didn’t seem like she was here on vacation.

Certainly not if she’s come alone. Henry goes to his cluttered dining table and quickly pulls his most recent logbook from a pile of tidal charts and maps.

He retrieves his pen from behind his ear and marks it.

6/14/23, 9:14pm. Orla O’Connor has returned.

He hurries back to the window, steadying the telescope once again on the island.

He carries on, running the lens up the shore the length of the O’Connors’ property, moving the telescope on its familiar path along the coastline to the Gallos’ house next door.

In the moonlight Henry can barely make out the shape of their old dock jutting into the water.

He follows it back through the tangle of foliage to the sagging front steps.

It seems like only yesterday those two little girls would play together there.

He can see them clearly in his mind even after all these years, the one with red hair and one with brown, picking their way barefoot across the strip of rocky beach at low tide, carrying toys and chattering in that delighted, open way children do.

When they were young their families would meet up some evenings.

He’d watch them carrying food to eat at one house or the other for Sunday dinner.

Until that terrible event with Alice. He feels guilty about it still.

Henry moves the telescope up the front of the house.

Now he can only see the outline of the top floor, the peak of the roof jutting up through the overgrowth like some long-buried temple.

All of it left to rot. His telescope catches the glint of something.

Startled, he braces himself and focuses on an upstairs window.

A light!

He sucks in a breath as a blur of something passes the window. A shadow climbs along an interior wall and tapers off. Someone is inside. He loses his grip on the telescope, sending it careening up and then down.

He fumbles to right it, his insides churning violently until once again he finds the dark outline of the roof poking up through the trees and follows it down to the second-floor window. It is dark now. Still.

He turns to a fresh page in the logbook, the pen trembling in his fingers.