Barefoot in the Sand

by Holly Chamberlin

  The editor walked her to the door. He was still standing on the front porch, waving, as Laura pulled away.

  Chapter 8

  Summer 1984

  “I’m sorry, Rob. I just can’t. It’s . . . it’s too risky.”

  Victoria was near tears. All they had wanted to do was see a movie together on a Friday night like a regular boyfriend and girlfriend. They didn’t even care what they saw, though the options were limited to Ghostbusters and Sixteen Candles. What they really wanted was to sit together in the dark, side by side, to hold hands and maybe to kiss if the theater was empty enough.

  But just as they were within a block of the movie theater in Waverly, the smallest of Port George’s neighbors, Victoria had lost her nerve. She grabbed Rob’s arm and pulled him into a darkened doorway.

  “Please don’t be mad,” she begged. “Someone might already have seen us. Oh, I never should have—”

  Rob took her hands in his. “Vicky, I’m not mad. How could I be mad at you? It just makes me sad you’re not free to live your life the way you want to live it.”

  “They’re not bad people, my parents. It’s just that they’re . . .” She bit her lip. Social snobs? “Old-fashioned,” she said finally, lamely.

  “It’s all right. Really. Come on, let’s get back to the car. I’ll take the back roads to Port George just like before.”

  Rob kissed her, sweetly and firmly. Victoria returned his kiss with passion. She loved him so very much.

  Half an hour later Rob left her at the very edge of the Aldridge property, by a rough gap in the hedge through which Victoria had escaped earlier that evening. Swiftly, the full moon lighting her way, she made her way across the property, finally reaching the house. No sooner had she put a foot on the topmost stair than the front door opened, revealing her mother.

  “Where were you?” Florence Aldridge cried. “I was so worried. What with your father at the club and my being here all alone . . .” Her hands were clasped tightly at her waist. Victoria saw that her mother had been drinking.

  “I’m fine, Mother.” Victoria managed a smile. “You shouldn’t worry so much. I just met a friend in town for ice cream.”

  “Who?” Florence demanded. “What friend?”

  Victoria thought fast. “Jean Reynolds. You remember her? We took etiquette class together a few years ago.”

  A smile of relief dawned on her mother’s face. “Oh, yes,” she breathed. “What a lovely young girl. But still, you should have told me where you were going. I worry so.”

  Victoria was not a liar. At least, she hadn’t been a liar before meeting Rob Smith. “I—I did tell you. I mean, I left a note in the kitchen. Didn’t you see it?”

  Florence frowned again. “Oh,” she said fretfully. “Oh, but I didn’t go into the kitchen, how silly of me, I should have . . .”

  Victoria felt a pang of guilt and shame. “I’m sorry, Mother. Next time I’ll be sure you know when I’m going out.” Just not with whom, she added silently.

  Florence reached out and laid her hand briefly on her daughter’s arm. “Yes, thank you. I’ll be in my room.”

  Together mother and daughter entered the house; Victoria closed and locked the door behind them. She watched her mother negotiate the grand staircase to the second floor with what remnants of grace she still possessed. Tears pricked at Victoria’s eyes. She loved her mother. She didn’t like disobeying or lying to her.

  Glumly, Victoria climbed the stairs to her own room. Quietly, she closed the door behind her and sank into the comfortable armchair in front of the window. The moon was so bright, so startlingly white. It seemed to pin her to the chair, forcefully exposing her cowardliness. She hated that she lacked the courage to rebel against her parents and their strictures, that she lacked the courage to speak her own mind. It wasn’t fair to Rob. It was insulting. How long would he put up with her insistence they live their romance in secret? True, he had never said a harsh word or in any other way given her cause to think he was losing patience with her, but a guy like Rob could have any girl he wanted. It stood to reason that before long he would get bored and frustrated being with a girl who didn’t have the guts to be seen in public with him, a girl who wouldn’t even allow herself to go anywhere near the construction site behind her home when Rob was working there, afraid that a keen-eyed observer would guess her motive.

  Victoria hugged herself. How she longed to be with Rob right then! Starting tomorrow, she would try to be brave like the heroines of the great stories she knew by heart, Juliet and Jane and even Hester Prynne. She would make sacrifices for the man she loved, she would take risks for him without thought to her own safety.

  “Oh, Rob,” she whispered to the harshly bright moon. “I do love you.”

  Chapter 9

  “Rare for Deborah and medium for you, Arden, right?”

  “You got it,” she told him with a smile.

  Gordon Richardson was sturdily built and of average height. He had bright blue eyes made all the more vivid in contrast to his still-dark hair. He was amicably divorced from his wife of eight years. There had been no children.

  After making a packet in the world of tech, Gordon had retired at the age of fifty-three and come to Eliot’s Corner in a conscious effort to simplify his life, to seek quiet, to be in a place where he could work on his sculpture. That was five years before and he had never regretted his decision. Once a year he flew to California to visit with old friends from his career days, and though he enjoyed the laughter and the reminiscing, as he told Arden, he was always glad to be home in Eliot’s Corner.

  Deborah was setting out napkins and silverware. “What a nice evening. The humidity is mostly gone. I hate running around town when it’s so humid. It’s hard to look professional when your clothes are sticking to you.”

  Deborah Norrell was as petite as Arden was tall, with auburn hair she wore in a stylish pixie cut. She dressed well even when off duty, less out of a keen interest in fashion and more out of habit.

  “Why were you running around town?” Arden asked. “Though I’m not really surprised that you were.” Her friend was a real estate agent. In Arden’s experience, real estate agents were rarely still.

  Deborah sighed. “Dealing with the craziness of the Coyne property. If I can close this sale, I stand a good chance of being made partner, and, boy, do I want to be partner. But so far, everything that can go wrong has gone wrong. Well, almost.”

  “You’ve managed the unmanageable before,” Arden pointed out. “I have faith in you.”

  “Thanks. But what I really need are the real estate gods to kick in with their support.”

  “Dinner’s ready,” Gordon announced. “At least, my contribution.”

  The women joined him at the table. In addition to the steaks, there was a salad, freshly baked corn bread, beer, and wine.

  “You spoil us, Arden,” Deborah said. “Always having us for dinner.”

  “I enjoy it,” Arden said truthfully.

  The friends tucked into the meal. Conversation was light, allowing Arden’s thoughts to wander yet again to the teenage couple she had seen walking hand in hand a few days earlier. She hoped that Aria and Ben wouldn’t join the ranks of star-crossed lovers, but there were so many reasons to think that they might. Their youth for one, and that they came from very different social circumstances. The latter shouldn’t matter, but too often it did and—

  Suddenly, Deborah cleared her throat. “I don’t mean to alarm anyone, but there’s a fuzzy beast staring at me from that window.”

  Arden looked toward the house. “Falstaff. Of course. He wants some of our steak.”

  “A little meat won’t hurt him,” Gordon added. “He is a carnivore after all.”

  Deborah frowned. “I guess. Still, that stare is unnerving.”

  “Lots lined up for the shop this summer, Arden?” Gordon asked.

  “Thankfully, yes. Several readings, book-group activities, and we’ll do a Fourth of July promotion like alwa
ys.”

  “If I can be of any help,” Gordon said, “carting around books, setting up podiums, just let me know.”

  “Hey, that reminds me,” Deborah said. “Did you hear that Clyde Jones, the guy who carts people’s stuff to the dump among other things, broke his leg on the job?”

  Arden dropped her fork. Young Ben’s father. “Sorry,” she said with a bright laugh. “Clumsy me.”

  Deborah shook her head. “Poor guy can’t drive for a while, let alone do much of anything else, so his older sons are taking over for the duration.”

  “That family has had a run of bad luck,” Gordon said. “Clyde’s wife had breast cancer two years back. Luckily, she’s okay, but things looked pretty bad for a time.”

  “They have a third son, too. He’s still in high school. I hope he doesn’t wind up dropping out like the oldest boy did. From what I hear, Ben’s the one with the brains.”

  Arden lowered her eyes to her plate. Just like Rob had been “the one with the brains,” his parents’ pride and joy, the one who would be the first to graduate college. Except that he hadn’t graduated from college. He hadn’t done anything but gone missing.

  But the summer of 1984 was so long ago, she reminded herself. The past was the past. It mattered, it did, but it was no more important than the present. Sometimes, it was hard to remember that.

  “Um, is there dessert?” Deborah asked suddenly. “Sorry, you know my sweet tooth.”

  “Chocolate chocolate-chip, French-vanilla, and cherry-swirl ice cream,” Arden announced, glad for the change of subject. “Take your pick.”

  Gordon rose from the table. “I’ll bring everything out.”

  “You okay?” Deborah asked when he was gone. “You seem a little, I don’t know, spacey this evening.”

  Arden smiled. “I’m fine. Really.”

  Chapter 10

  At seven o’clock on the dot, Laura woke up with the determination to call the reporter, Leonard Tobin, who had covered the disappearance of Rob Smith in August 1984. Fine, she wasn’t here in Port George to follow the trail of a missing boy. But what could it hurt to have a chat with someone who had known the town back in the day?

  After two cups of coffee in the breakfast room of the Lilac Inn, Laura was not so sure. It seemed a good bet that she would be wasting her time talking to Mr. Tobin. But that was the addictive thing about research, Laura admitted as she ate the last bit of her cereal, the thrill of the hunt. If you followed lots of leads, both thin and thick, you might just find the answer to the questions you had been asking, and maybe the answers to a few questions you had never even considered asking. Everything was connected to everything if you had the creativity to find those connections.

  Laura pushed away her empty cereal bowl. She would go through with her plan to call Leonard Tobin, but first she would conduct a quick search online. She opened her laptop and within minutes learned that Mr. Tobin wrote for a reputable online political magazine and had published two collections of essays on American popular culture. He seemed no longer to be a newspaper reporter and for all Laura knew might not be eager to revisit those days, but the worst he could tell her was that she could take her questions elsewhere.

  Leonard Tobin’s contact information included a phone number. Laura sent him a text, and a few minutes later he responded. He would be happy to meet with her that very morning if it was convenient for Laura. It was. He gave Laura directions to his house in the next town inland from Port George.

  Forty-five minutes later, Laura parked her car outside a bungalow-style house with the bright orange door. “You can’t miss it,” Mr. Tobin had told her. “My neighbors wish that you could.”

  The doorbell was answered by a tall man about sixty years old. He was wearing faded jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt printed with the classic peace sign first introduced back in the 1960s.

  “Welcome!” he intoned, in the booming but pleasant voice of someone who likely was a valued member of the church choir. “Come in, come in!”

  Laura followed him into the house. Glancing quickly at the piles of books on every available surface, the open laptop on a desk, and the loose papers scattered over the floor, she wondered how Leonard Tobin had gotten along with Mr. Meyer, if they had clashed, as editors and journalists were wont to do, if they had remained in touch over the years or avoided each other entirely.

  Mr. Tobin led her to a screened-in back porch. A large shaggy dog of mixed breed looked up briefly, thumped his fat tail twice on the floorboards, and promptly lost interest in the visitor.

  “That’s Otto,” Mr. Tobin explained. “He’s eleven. Hence his lethargy. Have a seat.”

  Laura lowered herself into a fairly rickety old wooden chair. It fit with the rest of the decor, which, if Laura was pressed to give it a name, might be called Intellectual Mess.

  “You said on the phone that you were interested in the Rob Smith case in relation to a podcast in production. Where does your funding come from?”

  Laura swallowed. She could not forget that this guy was a savvy media professional, bound to spot holes in her story.

  “Well, Mr. Tobin—”

  “Please, call me Lenny.”

  “Lenny, then. Our funding is private. We’re, um, pretty much independent so . . .”

  Lenny smiled indulgently. Maybe he believed her. Maybe he didn’t. “So, what do you want to know?”

  Laura smiled. “Everything?”

  “Here goes. I was a cub reporter back in 1984, eager to make my mark with a big story, and big stories don’t come along here in our neck of the woods like they do in a city. You’re lucky if once every three or four years there’s a home break-in or a fight outside a bar.”

  “And then Rob Smith went missing.”

  Lenny nodded. “Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t glad the guy was gone, I knew him by sight, small towns you know, but I was glad for a chance to prove myself. I scrambled from family members to coworkers to kids he’d gone to high school with and pestered the police for details of their investigation. I watched and listened. And everything I learned, I wrote down as best I could.”

  “Yes. I read every bit of coverage in the Port George Daily Chronicle. Was the story picked up by other news sources? The Portland or Augusta papers maybe?”

  Lenny shook his head. “No. They weren’t interested. After all, there was no sign of foul play.”

  No sensationalism, no interest. Sad. “Did Rob Smith have a girlfriend?” Port George was a small town. Lenny had said so. There was a good chance Laura’s mother, whoever she was, had known Rob Smith, if not personally then by sight. But if she had known the boy, what did it matter?

  “Not that I ever knew of. No one I interviewed mentioned a girlfriend, and I did ask.”

  “The police investigation was thorough?”

  “For a time, yeah. The police talked to everyone I had talked to, and more. Friends, family, coworkers, people at the community college. Searches were made of the wooded areas. Wells were looked into and ponds were drained.” Lenny raised an eyebrow. “Herbert Aldridge, one of the bigwigs in town, even allowed the police to drain the pond on his property.”

  Laura recognized the name; she had seen it several times in her search through the newspapers in Mr. Meyer’s archive, but she hadn’t paid much attention to it. Well, she thought, this Herbert Aldridge, whoever he was, would allow the draining of the pond if he knew full well that Rob Smith’s body—assuming he was dead—would not be found there. “Did the police search all of the Aldridge property?”

  Lenny frowned. “Not as far as I know. There didn’t seem to be a reason why they should, though I can’t see how it would have hurt. The boy was working there as part of a construction crew; the Aldridges were having a swimming pool built. Anyway, after about six weeks, when no body was found, the case went quiet. No one had even been arrested on suspicion of foul play. It was as if Rob Smith had vanished into thin air.”

  Laura leaned forward a little. “Off the record, what do y
ou think happened?”

  “I think there was foul play behind the disappearance. And I think that things were hushed up,” Lenny replied promptly. “A conspiracy of silence. I doubt I’m the only one who suspected as much. There are powerful people in Port George, always were. Maybe Rob Smith got in the way of one of them and paid the price.”

  “What exactly do you mean by powerful people?”

  Lenny shifted in his chair. “People with money and influence, people like Herbert Aldridge. It’s the same story everywhere. An old boy network. Intimidation used to keep people in line. I remember one guy even lost his business because he knew something he shouldn’t have and threatened to talk.”

  “It sounds like a mob culture. That bad?”

  Lenny shrugged. “I can’t prove any of that, mind you. But it’s pretty common knowledge.”

  Small towns, Laura thought. Not always what they appeared to be. “Does Herbert Aldridge still live in Port George?”

  “Yup. He and his wife, Florence, are still at the big house on Old Orchard Hill. Not that they get around much these days. Word is that he’s got a terminal illness and that Florence, never very strong-minded, is completely mad.” Lenny smiled a bit. “Some even say she’s been dead for the past ten years or so. But people with nothing better to do will make up the craziest stories.”

  Laura nodded. That was true enough.

  “One more thing,” Lenny went on. “About ten years after young Rob disappeared, his family had him officially declared dead. It called up the whole thing for me, and for a lot of people in Port George. Suddenly, it was like Rob had disappeared the day before. I covered the memorial service for the paper, and Ed ran that, but the background I’d written, about the disappearance all those years ago, the very reason for the memorial, was edited down to a line or two of just the facts.”

  “That is interesting. Do you think Mr. Meyer was prevented from running your entire article?”

  “I’d hate to think badly of old Ed, but maybe he was intimidated into keeping the memorial low-key so as not to stir up interest in the case again. Ed Meyer ruffled more than a few feathers in the course of his career. Which means he might have had to pay the price now and again.” Lenny smiled ruefully. “But that’s all guesswork.”