The Summer Man

by S. D. Perry

Sarah hesitated again, searching for the right answer. Was there one? It was perfectly natural for him to be curious and even enthused about a grisly death; most kids his age weren’t overly burdened by empathy or an awareness of actual suffering. Really, she was a little surprised that he was actually asking for permission, but they’d only been in Port Isley for a few weeks, and he’d stuck pretty close to her since they arrived. She’d been delighted that he’d made friends with Jeff so quickly. Prematurely delighted, maybe.

  “I’m sure it is safe,” she said. “But it’s—when someone dies, honey, it makes people sad. Remember when Grandma died? I was really sad, and so were you. Do you think it would have been OK if there were people who went to the nursing home to look around where she died, to see if they could find—to see where she died? Just for fun?”

  He didn’t answer. She could actually see him struggling to tell himself that it would have been fine, so that he could, in turn, convince her that an excursion to the murder site was acceptable, but he was a bright boy, and sweet-natured; she doubted he’d be able to rationalize it.

  “It’s normal to be curious,” she said, “but it’s just not very nice to, to poke around in other people’s business when something so awful has happened…does that make sense?”

  “Yeah,” he said, and though he looked disappointed, he also seemed resigned to it. “I’m gonna go tell Jeff I can’t make it.”

  “Live or Memorex?” she asked, smiling, and he gave her a look, which she tried not to take personally. Hard to believe a twelve-year-old could muster such an adult eye-rolling.

  “That’s so dated,” he said, turning to head up the stairs. “Then I’m going to play awhile, OK?”

  “OK. Karen’ll be back pretty soon, and we’ll get on dinner. I’ll let you know when it’s ready.”

  She was already talking to his back. She watched his spindly boy-legs and sloppy sneakers retreat up the stairs, loving him deeply. He had his moments—days, even—when he could be a real pain, but mostly he was a good boy, a wonderful boy. She’d been lucky. He’d be leaving to see his dad over the Fourth, stay a few days after, and though he’d only be away for a week in all, she thought she’d miss him terribly. The week at Christmas had been tough enough.

  She heard Karen coming up the back steps to the kitchen and went to help, although her sister was only carrying two bags. Sarah took one of them, a pleasant whiff of warm bread coming from a smaller paper bag inside.

  “Hopefully fresh fish tonight, but we’ve got roast chicken and bread as a backup,” Karen said, setting her bag on the counter.

  “You really think William Oswalt is going to bring home a big one?” Sarah asked. Oswalt was a retired banker who’d obviously enjoyed a lot of deep-fried meals; he weighed three hundred pounds if he was an ounce.

  “Actually, I’m counting on Helen,” Karen said. “That woman looks like she could wrestle bear; sea bass aren’t gonna be a problem. Where’s Tommy?”

  “One guess,” Sarah said. She pulled out the bag of rolls and unloaded a carton of half-and-half and a jar of pesto.

  “Let’s see…Warcraft?” Karen asked.

  “Shocked, aren’t you?”

  Karen smiled. “He plays a lot.”

  Her tone was perfectly innocent. Sarah glanced at her older sister, looking for any hint of judgment in her expression, but it was as bare as her voice had been. Sarah sighed inwardly and went back to unloading groceries. Tommy loved World of Warcraft, Dungeons and Dragons for the computer as far as she could tell, and though she didn’t mind him playing—once they’d established some serious Internet ground rules, obviously—she had her concerns. She felt like she had a good relationship with her son, believed that he was honest with her about the things that were important in his life…but he was growing up, too, growing away. As much as she appreciated the inevitability of the process, she worried about him. It had been a hard year, and he played his game every day, sometimes for hours. She wanted him to be happy, but the game added another whole subset to the ongoing list of parental worries. She checked on him, she asked about the people he chatted with, she watched him play sometimes, asking questions about the game so she’d have some credibility when they talked about it (she’d been able to rejoice with him when he’d reached the fifty-eighth level, so he could go to Outland; the things she’d never thought she’d know before raising a kid). Then she worried about being too smothering—Tommy could recite the house rules by heart, and while she knew the divorce had been hard for him, he hadn’t rebelled much beyond the aw-Mom stage. Just as often, though, she feared that she wasn’t being parental enough. Even the possibility of a smart-ass comment from Karen had her defenses fired up, and she wanted so badly to stay on good terms with her sister, to make it a nice summer for all of them…

  “You think he plays too much?” she asked, unable to help it.

  Karen paused, a celery bunch in hand. “I guess I’d worry about it if he didn’t know how to interact with real people, but he’s fine. Better than fine. He’s a great kid.”

  Sarah nodded and smiled. “Yeah. He is, isn’t he? I thought with the divorce…I’m just glad he’s doing so well.”

  “You and Jack did it right,” Karen said. “You kept him in the loop, you made it clear that it wasn’t his fault, you don’t talk shit about each other in front of him—well. You know.”

  Sarah nodded again but didn’t answer. Karen was right, Jack had done well by their son, and while that went a long way toward making things better between them, it didn’t make up for Vanessa. For falling in love with her. For what that had done to Tommy, to all of them. That part of it still hurt, a lot.

  “He’s a total asshole, though,” Karen added, and Sarah smiled.

  “I won’t fight you on that,” she said, keeping her voice low, though it was highly unlikely that Tommy could hear them. The way she saw it, when Tommy got older, he would make up his own mind about what kind of man his father was; he didn’t need to hear it from her. The half dozen self-help divorce books she’d read had all insisted on this.

  “William and Helen aren’t supposed to be back until sixish,” Karen said, “and the Gosmans won’t be here till Wednesday, so we don’t have to make up the west bedroom yet…want a drink? I’ve been working on my sidecar.”

  Sarah made a face. “Uck. Do we still have any of that Pinot from last night?”

  Karen grinned. “Only a half case of it, in the basement. Didn’t I mention? It’s the house red this summer.”

  “I’ll be in AA by the time September rolls around,” Sarah said.

  Karen’s smile faded slightly and was replaced by a softer, warmer look. “You don’t have to leave, you know. The schools here are decent. And Seattle isn’t so far away. Tommy could see his dad regularly enough—”

  Sarah interrupted. “I know.”

  “There are going to be at least two openings at the grade school by Christmas, with Wes Martin retiring and that English teacher getting married—”

  “I know,” Sarah said again. “And I haven’t ruled it out. But I just got us settled in Bellevue—”

  “—in a two-bedroom apartment, which is just sitting there right now, anyway—”

  “—and I’ve got a job waiting for me, and it’s a lot closer to Jack. I want Tommy to see him as much as he wants.”

  Karen seemed about to say something else, then shrugged. “It’s your decision, of course. But think about it. Not just for you, either. I like having you around, OK? You and Tommy both. It’s—it gets lonely here in the winter.”

  Karen’s husband, a much older man whom she’d loved quite deeply, had died almost three years before. Heart attack. The couple had opened the bed-and-breakfast together—affectionately called Big Blue for its paint job apparently in lieu of having children. Sarah had never understood the attraction between them—Byron had been nice enough but somewhat controlling and close to their father’s age—but she knew that Karen missed him awfully.

  “I promise I�
��ll think about it,” Sarah said, sincerely. She couldn’t really see herself living in Port Isley, but she didn’t want Karen to feel blown off, either. “Now, you said something about wine?”

  “No, you said something about wine,” Karen said. “I’m having a sidecar.”

  “Glah,” Sarah said. They were both smiling. Karen headed for the basement, just off the kitchen, and Sarah finished putting the groceries away, listening to her sister’s light steps tapping down the stairs. It was good to see Karen, to spend some real time with her, and Port Isley was a nice little town. Tommy had already made a friend—Jeff Halliway was older but he seemed like an all right kid, and he was also a fellow Warcraft player, which apparently made them blood brothers of some kind—and there were parks and woods for him to explore, hikes and picnics to look forward to as the summer progressed. And she was on a real vacation for the first time in what seemed like years; no summer school for a change, no pickup classes or certification tests to study for, and an aide who’d already volunteered to go in early to set up the room and be available for questions from parents. Except for a short trip back to Bellevue in late August for the orientation, there was nothing she had to do until September, time stretching out in front of her as it had when she was a child, when summer lasted forever, when autumn was a distant dream.

  “Life is good,” she said to herself, feeling that it might actually be true, for a while. She got a wineglass out of the cabinet by the stove and waited for Karen to come back up, happy to be where she was.

  That darned front page. Front page, and he told me he’d play it down. Gosh darnit.

  Dan Turner sat at his desk, fuming, waiting for Marcie to get Bob Sayers on the line. The Press’s editor was in hiding, no doubt; there was no answer at his office, and if he was at home, he wasn’t picking up.

  Probably still out delivering the goshdarned thing, Turner thought, staring down at his own fresh copy, the headline screaming like a barn fire. TRAGEDY STRIKES PORT ISLEY, probably sixtypoint type, top of the darned front page.

  The copy itself wasn’t as bad as it might have been; there was that, at least—no sensational details, nothing but the bare facts. Not that it wasn’t bad enough; Ed Billings had murdered Lisa Meyer, then his wife, then himself. The article didn’t actually spell out that Ed and the girl had been intimate, but only because Sayers didn’t know about it yet, or hadn’t when he’d jammed in the last-minute front page. The evidence had been overwhelming, according to Stan Vincent. The cops had found compromising pictures of the Meyer girl at Billings’s house, tucked away in Ed’s desk, plus a handful of love letters and, of course, the suicide note itself. “She said she loved me.” Short and sweet, entirely pathetic, and actually spattered with a few drops of Ed’s blood. Or his wife’s. Or Lisa’s. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that it was the very start of the season, three-quarters of their summer people were already in town, and Bob had promised to keep it soft, he’d darn well promised.

  He’d be pottering around, tying flies or cabinet-making or some such thing if it wasn’t for us. Turner’s lips curled. The Press only ran because the town subsidized it, and the town meant the council. Sayers didn’t appreciate what he had. And Dan was sure that he drank.

  “Mr. Turner?” Marcie’s reedy voice piped through the intercom, irritatingly unflappable. “Rick Truman is on line two.”

  “Shoot,” Turner muttered, then leaned across his desk to stab at the intercom button, his not inconsiderable gut hindering him slightly. “What about Sayers?”

  “Not yet. I’ll keep trying.”

  He picked up the receiver, muscled a smile into his voice, and gave a silent prayer for strength. “Rick, how are you?” he said, though he was sure he already knew. If there was anything Rick liked more than complaining about his wife, it was throwing his weight around the council. Dan was the acting head councilman; he was hometown, and to win the spot you had to be hometown, but that meant nada in reality; the reality was, Rick Truman was Ricky-effing-Rich and what he said, went.

  Let he who is without sin, Dan reminded himself. It seemed like he had to do that a lot lately.

  “I thought you said Bob was handled,” Rick said. The anger was barely disguised, his voice high and tense. “Isn’t that what you said? ‘I handled him, Rick,’? ’Cause that’s how I remember it.”

  Dan fought a sudden urge to throw the phone. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said, barely a twinge of guilt for the lie. “Are you talking about the paper?”

  “What do you think I’m talking about, Danny-boy? Aren’t you looking at the fucking thing? See those words, up above my ad, the ones that talk about the fucking crazy people who live here? On the front page of the annual goddamn welcome-to-Isley issue?”

  “I see them, Rick,” Dan said, wincing from the language. “And I told Sayers to go easy, but he had to say something. I mean, it is news, right?”

  “On the front page? Are you shitting me?” Rick was so mad he almost spluttered. Dan got a brief, highly detailed mental picture of Donald Duck dressed as a drill sergeant. He could actually see the spittle flying from his beak, the olive cap, the clenched feather fists. It wasn’t funny and did nothing to ease a dawning headache; Rick was all nestled in to chew him a new one, and Dan was probably going to have to let him.

  Sadie Truman’s parents had been loaded, and had left everything to her when they’d passed in an auto accident a decade earlier; Rick had invested her inheritance wisely, and as a result, they were easily the wealthiest couple in the port. Besides Le Poisson, the Trumans owned a popular specialty foods shop, plus an apartment building, plus a number of asyet-empty lots in and around the area, just waiting to grow new businesses and expensive housing. If Dan ever wanted a piece of anything—which he did, of course, being a silent partner in his brother-in-law’s construction outfit—he’d be wisest to find something to bite and let Rick go at it.

  “He got a good quote from Peters,” Dan tried, but Rick headed him off.

  “The day that the slurred words of Poppy fuckin’ Peters mean shit to anyone with half a brain is the day I willingly fuck my wife,” Rick said.

  “Most of the summer people—”

  “Most of the summer people have met our cartoon mayor, and you know it,” Rick said. “Poppy’s a joke. Where’s my quote, Danny-boy? Fuck, where’s yours?”

  “Poppy sounded fine,” Dan said, unable to keep a snap out of his voice. He was tired of being cursed at, and he hated, hated being called Danny-boy. “He said it’s resolved, he said the cops are just wrapping things up, he said not to worry. That’s all that needs to be said. I’m sorry, all right? Bob messed up. What the heck am I supposed to do? I’m not his babysitter.”

  There was a long pause. Dan closed his eyes and waited.

  “First fucking welcome-to-Isley issue,” Rick said, his voice still heated—but not at Dan anymore. “Can you believe it? What the fuck was he thinking?”

  Dan felt himself relax a fraction. “I know,” he said.

  “Thank God he didn’t get any of that shit about Ed fucking that girl,” Rick added. “Christ, what a balls-up.”

  “I hear that,” Dan said, wincing again—Rick was a real potty mouth—but after listening to Rick have a bird, as his wife liked to say, he didn’t feel so bad about the whole fiasco. The deaths were terrible—Lucy had spent the last two days telling him that God was smiting the wicked, declaring it almost contentedly over poached eggs and dry toast—and the timing impeccably bad, but at least Rick was having a really rotten day. He silently chastised himself for the un-Christian thought, but couldn’t actually make himself feel bad about it.

  Rick blew off the last of his steam, and they agreed that Sayers needed a reminder of his place in the world—and then Dan was let go, free. He hung up the phone with barely any headache at all, a bit surprised that he’d stood up for himself…and after a moment’s consideration, slightly worried. Rick never forgot anything. If Lange’s Construction lost a contract becau
se of something Dan had said, Scott would shoot him for a yellow dog. His wife’s brother could be a real donkey for holding grudges.

  We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it, he thought, hoping that he hadn’t just torched it himself. And since Marcie still couldn’t track down Port Isley’s elusive editor, Dan closed up his desk and went out for breakfast at Elson’s, deciding that the business of the day could wait awhile.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Amanda Young woke up from the worst nightmare of her life very early on Saturday morning, the day of Port Isley’s annual town picnic. Gasping, clutching at her sheets, she was sure she had screamed—but the apartment was still, not a sound anywhere but the watery tick of the refrigerator in the next room and her own fluttering heart. If she’d screamed, no one had heard.

  “Jesus,” she whispered, rubbed at her eyes, and found they were wet. She’d cried in the dream, early on, and again at the end. When she’d seen what had happened to that woman. God.

  Nightmare, that’s all, that’s all. It was a knee-jerk thought, and it didn’t ring true. The dream still made sense, in a creepy, surreal way, as though sleep reality had leaked through the veil, into her conscious mind. Generally she made it back to real life as soon as she woke up, but every now and then it took a bit longer. She hated that feeling, that lingering, a sense that real life had become subject to the laws of the dream universe, where unexplained things were common knowledge and time was all fucked up; days passed in a blink, seconds stretched to hours. She felt that now, staring around at the edges and shapes of her small room, what little she could see by the parking lot light that filtered through the ancient, dusty curtain. She could still vividly feel the fear, the sadness…it had all seemed normal, even inevitable, and it still did.

  Because it wasn’t a dream. Not all of it, at least. And you know it.

  “Jesus,” she said again, drawing in a deep, shaking breath as she fumbled for her bedside lamp. The light crashed on, making her blink, the hyperbright banality of her room a welcome and wonderful sight. The click of the switch seemed overly loud, the light overly harsh, but it was otherwise safe and sane. Her cheap digital clock glowed a quarter after three, what seemed to her the absolute dead of night.