The Bay at Midnight

by Diane Chamberlain

  I walked past Pam Durant’s house on the lagoon, thinking I would talk with her after I explored the beach. She would be less suspicious of me than she would be the police, so maybe she would open up to me more than she would to them.

  The beach was completely empty. I thought there might still be policemen in the area, but maybe they had finished searching for clues. Most likely, they thought they had their killer now. I was growing more certain by the minute that they were wrong.

  I headed for the patch of sea grass where my sister had been found. I looked for things washed onto the shore by the small, gentle waves. I found a Popsicle stick and a plastic cup, but I seemed to have lost interest in collecting any old thing I came across, and I didn’t bother to pick them up.

  Tears welled up in my eyes as I walked through the creepy tangles of seaweed. I sat down in the place where Isabel had been found, letting the water wash over my legs. I ran my hands through the tendrils of eel grass. There was nothing here. What had I been expecting?

  I left the beach empty-handed and empty hearted and walked along the road leading to Pam’s house. A dog barked when I knocked on the Durants’ door. I could see through their house to the lagoon behind, just as I could see through my house to the canal.

  Pam herself answered the door, her Doberman pinscher, the only dog I’ve ever been afraid of, at her side.

  “Oh, Julie!” she said, pushing open the door. “I’m so sorry. Come in.” She hugged me, but I felt stiff inside and I kept one eye on her dog.

  “I just wanted to talk to you,” I said. The dog sniffed at the back of my hand.

  Pam drew away from me, studying my face, but I studied hers harder. The whites of her eyes had the bluish tint of skim milk. No trace of red. No trace of tears.

  “Let’s go out back,” she said.

  “Are your parents here?” I asked, as we walked through the small living room.

  “No one’s here except me,” she said.

  She stopped at the door to the kitchen. “Can I get you some soda?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  “I almost died myself when I heard,” she said, pushing open the screen door and stepping into her yard, which was covered with smooth, blond stones. I was glad she left the dog in the house. “I was the last person to see her alive,” she said. At least Mitzi had been modest enough to say she was third to the last. Pam put herself right at the top.

  We sat on the bulkhead, our feet dangling above the still lagoon water. Pam was so pretty. Her nearly white ponytail fell in a long spiral over her shoulder.

  “I just can’t believe she’s gone,” she said. “I’ve never known anyone who died before. It’s so tragic.”

  “Do you know where Ned was the night Isabel was killed?” I asked, point-blank.

  “He was home,” she said, as though she knew this for a fact.

  “He says he was watching a meteor shower with his father in their backyard,” I said.

  “That’s probably what he was doing, then.” Pam shrugged. “He wasn’t allowed out, right? And you were supposed to tell that to Izzy, but you didn’t.”

  “But then he called her at Mitzi’s to say he could.”

  “He said he might be able to. Not that he could for sure.” She tilted her head to look at me. “You know Ned would never hurt Isabel, don’t you?”

  “I’m just trying to figure some things out,” I said.

  “He was over here yesterday.” Pam straightened her legs to look at her painted toes. “He’s all torn up,” she said. “He was really scared the cops thought it was him.”

  And you comforted him, I guess, I wanted to say. “Maybe it was,” I said, instead.

  “What?” She lowered her legs again, frowning at me. “Oh Julie, don’t be crazy,” she said. “Ned was a lifesaver. He would never kill anyone.”

  I wasn’t sure what else to ask. I was doing a poor job of keeping my misgivings about Ned to myself; Nancy Drew would have been far more clever at questioning Pam than I was being. We talked a while longer, and then I left her house with nothing to prove my hunch other than my own suspicions.

  There was one more person that I needed to interview, and I was quite sure where I could find him. I walked to the shallows at the end of Shore Boulevard and along the path cut through the tall grass.

  “Who’s there?” Ethan asked as I rustled through the cattails. I heard the anxiety in his voice. I guessed we were all a little on edge.

  “Me,” I said.

  I found him sitting at the water’s edge, where he had set up a little marine research laboratory, complete with a small fish net and microscope and a booklet on sea creatures.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  I sat down next to him, the damp sand cool beneath my thighs.

  “Was Ned really home all night the night Isabel was killed?” I asked.

  “How would I know?” He shook his head at me. “You really think you’re Nancy Drew, don’t you?”

  “And you really think you’re some sort of scientist.” I reached out and knocked over his microscope with my hand and then felt instantly remorseful. With the exception of Lucy, he was the only person in the world weaker than me, and I guessed I just needed to take out my frustration on someone.

  “Hey!” He lifted the microscope from the wet sand. “This is a precision instrument,” he said, cradling it in his hands. “You might have ruined it. What’s the matter with you?”

  “I think your brother might have killed my sister,” I said.

  “You’re full of soup,” he said, pushing his glasses higher up his nose. I hated when he did that. “The police already got that—” he nodded in the general direction of the opposite side of the canal “—that colored boy. If anybody’s responsible for killing your sister, it’s you, for letting him know Isabel was going to be alone on the beach that night.”

  “I didn’t kill her,” I said, my eyes burning.

  “Well, my brother sure didn’t, either. He was grounded.”

  “Ned probably just snuck out anyhow,” I said. “That’s what he usually did.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” With tender care, Ethan set the microscope upright in the sand again. “How do you know what my brother usually does?”

  “I know plenty,” I said.

  “If Ned did it, why would he be such a wreck right now? He’s sitting around crying about your sister.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe he’s crying ’cause he killed her and he—”

  “Shut up!” In a flash, Ethan was on top of me, his skinny arms pinning mine above my head in the sand. His knee dug into my belly, making me gasp for air. I mustered up all my strength and pushed him off me, rolling him over until I was on top of him. I punched his cheek as hard as I could. He yelped and I saw a little blood coming from his nose. I didn’t care. I punched him one more time. His head was in a few inches of water, and I could easily have turned his face until the water covered his nose and mouth. The realization that I could have such a thought shocked the sense back into me. I let go of him and scrambled to my feet, choking on my own sobs. I ran back through the tall grass, blinded by tears and confused by a rush of emotions. My heart was in a vise; my hands formed fists so tight I would later find blood on my palms from my fingernails. I wanted to kill someone. I just didn’t know who it was that I should want to kill.

  I called the police myself. My parents and I were not talking easily with one another and I could hardly ask them to do it for me. I told Officer Davis my suspicions. He listened carefully. Then he told me that George Lewis had no verifiable alibi. George had told the police he’d been on the Seaside Heights boardwalk waiting for some friends who never showed up. He had scratches on his face and arms, and said that he’d gotten into a fight on the beach that night with a white boy he’d never seen before, but the police had been unable to find any witnesses to a fight. At the Lewises’ house, they found George’s wet trunks, and—most incriminating—a towel belon
ging to Isabel.

  “But I took that towel across the canal and accidentally left it there!” I said, almost shouting into the phone.

  “There was blood on it, Julie,” Officer Davis said. “Mr. Lewis claims he used the towel after the fight he was in, and both he and your sister have the same blood type, so it’s not possible to know if it was his or hers, but it’s clear he was in an altercation.”

  “The chairs in the Chapmans’ backyard were empty that night,” I said, repeating a fact I’d already told him.

  “We’ll reinterview them about that,” Officer Davis said. “I know you’re troubled and need to feel sure we have the right suspect in custody, and I’m grateful that you called. But you let us do our job now, all right?”

  When they were questioned again, Ned and Mr. Chapman said that they’d been lying on a blanket in their backyard the night Isabel was killed and that’s why I didn’t notice them when I ran to their house. I still thought I would have seen them, and it seemed odd that they didn’t notice me running through their yard, even though I’d been a distance behind them. Surely they’d heard me get into the runabout, but no one else seemed troubled by their story.

  Bruno’s father hired a lawyer—the same one who had gotten him off on the previous year’s rape charge. George didn’t even know who his father was, much less have the money for a lawyer. He was charged and eventually convicted of voluntary manslaughter.

  Ned was not even considered a suspect. The son of the chief justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court was presumed innocent—by everyone except me.

  CHAPTER 40

  Julie

  1962

  Within a matter of days, we had packed our belongings and left the bungalow for the last time, and that put an end to my sleuthing. Isabel’s funeral took place the day after we returned to Westfield. I didn’t go because I woke up that morning with what, in retrospect, was surely a psychosomatic stomachache. Simply lifting my head from the pillow caused the room to spin and my stomach to churn. Lucy was sent to a neighbor’s house, while I stayed home alone with my aching belly and my troubled conscience. I wondered if I had cancer. I was terribly afraid of dying with such an enormous mortal sin on my soul.

  The following Saturday, I waited for my turn in the confessional. I sat between my mother and Lucy in the pew at Holy Trinity, trying to figure out what I would say to the priest. I was always so mechanical in the confessional with my carefully rehearsed list of sins. This sin did not fit neatly into my usual categories, and although I’d tried to think of a way to confess many times since it had happened, I still walked into the tiny dark cubicle with no idea how to begin.

  It didn’t matter. The second the priest drew back his little window, I started to cry. I recognized my confessor as Father Fagan, the oldest priest in our parish. He was white haired and walked with a limp, like my father, and he had big hands that had rested gently on my head more than once over the years. I let out huge, gulping sobs that could probably have been heard throughout the church. I thought my mother might open the door to the confessional to see that I was all right. Maybe she would hold me as she had not held me since Isabel’s death, but that didn’t happen.

  Father Fagan managed to find a break in my weeping to say, “Tell me what’s troubling you, my child.”

  “I…” I gulped down a fresh set of tears. “I did something that got my sister killed,” I said.

  “Ah,” he said. His voice was very calm, not at all incensed or shocked, and I wondered if he knew about Isabel’s death and my role in it. I would later learn that he had been the priest at her funeral. “I think it would be good if you and I met together in the rectory tomorrow after church,” he said. “Could you do that?”

  I was surprised. I couldn’t imagine confessing my sins face-to-face with a priest, but I knew I could not decline the invitation.

  “Yes, Father,” I said.

  “Good. Come see me at one o’clock and we’ll chat.”

  I started to stand up, but dropped to my knees again. “What if I die between now and then?” I asked. “I have a mortal sin on my soul.”

  “You’re forgiven that sin, child.”

  “But…I haven’t even told you what I did. It’s…I think it’s unforgivable.”

  “Nothing’s unforgivable, Julie,” he said, stunning me by using my name. “Right now, go to the altar and say three Hail Marys and make a good act of contrition. And then I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” I said, standing up again. But I didn’t feel forgiven. I felt as though he didn’t quite understand how terrible I’d been.

  The next day, my father took me to the rectory and waited in the parlor while I spoke with Father Fagan. We sat in a small room furnished with fancy chairs and a chandelier hanging from the center of the ceiling. I told him everything I’d done, and he listened, nodding slightly every once in a while.

  “Your sin was envy.” He sat in a large chair that made me think of something a king might sit in. He held the fingertips of his hands together as though he might start to pray at any moment. “And lust for your sister’s boyfriend,” he continued. “And lying to your parents, as well as to a number of other people. And also, disobedience.”

  I nodded as he catalogued all the things I’d done wrong.

  “But,” he said, “your sin is not murder.”

  “It wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t—”

  “You did not mean for her to die.”

  I lowered my head and watched as a tear fell from my eyelashes to form a dark stain on my blue skirt. “No,” I said.

  “You did not mean for her to die,” he repeated, as if he wanted me to truly believe it.

  I shook my head. “I loved her,” I said.

  He nodded. “I know,” he said. Then the tone of his voice changed, and I knew we were coming to the end of our session together. That disappointed me. I could talk about everything here. I couldn’t talk about any of it at home. “Julie,” he said, in his new voice. “I want you to feel you can come to me any time you need to. Any time. You can call me in the middle of the night if you need to. The Lord and I will always be here for you. Now, let us pray for your sister’s soul.”

  That’s what we did. For a few minutes, I sat with my head bowed as he asked God to watch over Isabel. I felt the tiniest molecule of peace work its way into my heart as he spoke.

  When we had finished praying and I was on my way out of the office, it suddenly occurred to me that he had not given me a real penance. The Hail Marys from the day before surely didn’t count; they were far less than I would have received from the priest in Point Pleasant for one single impure thought.

  “You forgot to give me my penance,” I said, my hand on the doorknob.

  “You need no penance from me,” Father Fagan said. “Your true penance is that you will have to live with what you did for the rest of your life,” he said.

  He could not have been more right.

  My grandparents put our bungalow on the market, and it sold quickly. That, too, was my fault. The house had meant so much to all of us and had been part of my family’s history for nearly forty years. We would never again go down the shore in the summer. That chapter of our lives was over.

  No one ever said, Julie, you are to blame for this, you are a horrible person, but no one needed to. Everyone knew that was the truth. It was weeks before my mother could talk to me without asking me, “Why? Why? Why?” For a while, I felt cut off from the warm family life I had always known. That improved over time, although except for my father’s initial compassionate response to me, no one ever said, It’s all right, Julie. We know you didn’t mean for Isabel to die. Only Father Fagan provided that sort of comfort in the weeks and months that followed Izzy’s death, but I really needed to hear those words from someone in my family. And I never did.

  CHAPTER 41

  Lucy

  “Do you recognize that little building?” Julie asked me, as we turned the corner into Bay Head Shores.
She pointed to our left, where a tiny antique shop was tucked beneath the on-ramp of the Lovelandtown Bridge.

  I shook my head. “Not even a little bit,” I said.

  “Well, it looks completely different, of course,” Julie said. “And the big bridge was just a little one back then, but the antique store used to be the corner store. Or at least that’s what we used to call it.You loved the penny candy.”

  “I remember the penny candy,” I said, picturing long strips of colorful candy buttons.

  “One time we rode our bikes here and got sprayed by the mosquito truck on the way home,” Julie said.

  “I remember that, too,” I said. “I fell off my bike and cut my arm.” I looked at my arm as though expecting to see a scar, but I wasn’t even sure which arm I’d injured. “We’ll probably die premature deaths because of that DDT or whatever it was,” I added.

  Julie turned the next corner. “Do you want to drive by the bay and our old beach before we go to Ethan’s?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “Later,” I said. I had a urinary-tract infection, which seemed terribly unjust since I hadn’t had sex in months. At that moment, all I could think about was using the bathroom at Ethan’s house.

  It was early on Friday afternoon and Ethan had invited Julie, Shannon, Tanner and me to his house for the weekend. Shannon and Tanner had begged out, but I’d accepted. Something was pulling me down to the shore. I wanted to see what I remembered.

  For a number of reasons, I wished that Shannon and Tanner were with us. I wanted my niece to see an important part of her mother’s childhood, but more than that, I thought that both Julie and I needed more time with Shannon and Tanner. I liked the little I knew of Tanner. I’d only gotten to spend time with him at the barbecue, but he’d impressed me and I thought Shannon could do far worse than a bright, socially conscious—not to mention handsome—young man. Not nearly young enough; I agreed with Julie on that point. Still, that was not our choice to make. The thing that wrenched my heart and that I knew was killing Julie, was that Shannon wanted to move so far away from us. I remembered what it was like to be young and in love and yearning for my independence, and visiting home had been one of the last things on my mind.