Useless Bay

by M. J. Beaufrand

  But we didn’t have Grant that particular Sunday night.

  Mr. Shepherd was calm and businesslike in his demeanor.

  Which is how I knew this Grant thing was serious.

  Behind them, in our driveway, Henry’s sister, Meredith, stood looking embarrassed, and Henry himself skulked beneath his hoodie. He hid the black eye he said he’d gotten when someone on his crew team accidentally smacked him in the face with an oar.

  “You mean Grant’s not with you guys?” Lawford said.

  My brothers lined up next to me. After all, we played basketball on the same team. We were quick to box people out—too quick, in this case. But I didn’t realize that until later.

  Mr. Shepherd said, “What kind of dumb-ass question is that? If he were, we wouldn’t be here.”

  Mom turned and glared at us. She packed a lot of expression into that glare. You have to when you’re a single mother and the smallest of your five children (me) towers over you at six feet two and three-quarter inches. “Well? What are you hoodlums waiting for? Get your gear. Go find him.” She smacked Frank with a kitchen towel.

  “It’s not as easy as that, Louise,” Mr. Shepherd said. “Last time we saw Grant, he was out in the rowboat.”

  One of us had the foresight to turn down Sinatra singing about having the world on a string.

  I felt blood sluice through my veins. Something was definitely wrong.

  Mom stared at Mr. Shepherd. “In this wind? What a stupid thing to do.”

  “He probably wanted to pull up the crab traps.” I examined my fingernails. They were hard and jagged, like something that attached itself to hulls and had to be scraped off with carving tools and Tabasco sauce.

  “He wasn’t alone,” Mr. Shepherd said. “Henry here says he saw one of yours with him.”

  Mom whipped around and fixed us all with a glare. Not one of us dared look her in the eye. She was a foot shorter than her children but in some ways taller than the rest of us put together.

  “Which one?” she growled. She looked at us, but she was talking to Mr. Shepherd. “Which one of you took a ten-year-old child in a boat with wind like this?”

  “We don’t know,” Mr. Shepherd said. “It was dark. The only thing Henry knows for sure was that it wasn’t Pixie.” Mr. Shepherd nodded at me.

  Next to Mr. Shepherd, Sheriff Lundquist chewed his gum ferociously.

  In my defense, I was stupid, and my brothers and I didn’t know any better.

  It was a reflex.

  Twelve years of school. That added up to twelve suspensions, forty-six detentions. But not one expulsion, and not one of us ever—and I mean ever—took the blame for the crime he or she committed. Instead, we assigned blame based on a rotation chart taped to the back of the bunk room door.

  Whose turn was it to be in trouble?

  I mean, what’s the point of being a quintuplet if you can’t skunk people into thinking you’re not yourself? It was just a little harmless fun. Besides, we gave back to the community in so many ways. Cutting up and removing downed trees so Island Electric could fix snapped power lines. Applying tourniquets to victims of motorcycle accidents; sometimes even holding their hands as they died so the last face they saw would be a friendly one saying, “Good thing you’re tough.”

  Until that weekend, we thought that we’d done it all and seen it all and that our identity pranks were completely harmless.

  Dean stepped forward. “It was me. Like Pixie said, Mr. Shepherd, Grant wanted to check his crab traps. So I took him out. The traps were empty, so I dropped him off in front of your house. He was on his way up the walk, and I rolled the rowboat to the garage. Grant was wet but fine.”

  “Yeah, see, that’s the thing—the boat isn’t in the garage,” Mr. Shepherd replied. “Henry saw you take Grant out, but he didn’t see you come back.”

  At times like this, people say, accusations hang in the air.

  But nothing ever hangs in the air in Useless Bay. Everything roars and rages and whistles through open doors.

  “Maybe you should come with me to headquarters . . . uh . . .” Sheriff Lundquist searched our faces. He searched his memory. He’d lived down the road from us all our lives and still couldn’t tell us apart.

  “Dean,” Dean said.

  “Dean. Right. We’ll ask you some questions and get to the bottom of this. Since you’re a minor, your mom will need to come, too.”

  “This is ridiculous,” Mom said, and threw her kitchen towel at Mr. Shepherd. “I don’t know what you’re accusing my child of, but you should know better. They’d never let anything happen to Grant.”

  “Maybe not intentionally,” Mr. Shepherd said. “But these are a reckless bunch of boys, Louise.”

  Mom looked as though she wanted to scratch his eyeballs out.

  Dean held her back. “It’s okay, Mom. The sooner we figure out what happened, the sooner we get Grant back, right? Isn’t that what’s most important?”

  She looked like she was going to hiss like our gas range, which dated from 1973. “Fine. I’ll get my coat.” She turned around. “I had better not hear that the rest of you have been sitting on your asses while we’re out. Spread out. One of you go with Meredith.”

  “I will.” Sammy said.

  “Pix, you go with Henry. Take the dog with you.” And turning off “That’s Amore” from her Rat Pack greatest hits, Mom went off with Dean into the night.

  At least Dean was saved the indignity of having to get into the back of the police cruiser, but he did have to make the walk of shame to the minivan so Mom could drive him to the Island County sheriff’s department, where he’d be questioned like a delinquent.

  I took Dean’s jacket and boots out to the front porch for Henry, since he wouldn’t come in. He threw his useless Windbreaker on the driveway and yanked the oilskin jacket and waders from me.

  I also brought my emergency kit. We had five of them—one for each of us. They had flashlights and bandages and Swiss army knives and flares and walkietalkies and EpiPens, even though it wasn’t strictly legal for us to carry them in Washington State. Allergic people were supposed to carry their own, but Frank once had to perform a tracheotomy on a kid who didn’t know he couldn’t eat shellfish. “Never again,” Frank vowed. “That kid lost his pulse way too fast.”

  I took the flashlight out of the emergency kit and flicked it on. Henry and I walked to the trailhead, Patience galumphing, leading the way.

  I knew Henry was in bad shape because he was picking at the scars on his hands again. He did that only when he was really worked up about something.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “Grant’ll turn up.”

  “Jesus Christ, will you give it a rest, Pix?” he said. “I saw you.”

  He snatched the flashlight from me and walked ahead.

  I watched the back of his head until he was so far away from me all I could see was the beam the flashlight threw in front of him, jumping over the Scotch broom.

  I had no idea what was happening. Henry was one of the few people who could tell the five of us apart. Even in a storm. In the dark. At a distance. He would’ve looked for the ponytail.

  Why was Henry lying for me?

  We both knew it wasn’t Dean who took Grant out in the rowboat.

  It was also true that Grant had said he’d wanted to check the crab traps. But when we got there, I realized something worse was going on from the way he was acting. Grant had barely spoken and appeared to be shivering, even though it wasn’t cold outside.

  What had him so worked up, I still had no idea.

  And neither, from the looks of things, did Henry.

  four

  HENRY

  Useless Bay. What a stupid name. It came from the Vancouver Expedition of 1792, when the keel of Captain Vancouver’s boat hit the bottom before his anchor could. No moorage? The place must be useless.

  That was the same expedition that gave the island its name, when Joseph Whidbey took a smaller boat through the treacherous
waters of Deception Pass to the north of the island, proving that this body of land was an island and not a peninsula. The fact that he didn’t wind up as kindling in those waters is a heroic feat in itself, worthy of having an island named after you, for sure.

  But the treacherous waters were far to the north. Here, at the southern end, there didn’t seem to be places for treachery to hide. Useless Bay was so shallow that a lot of beach was uncovered at low tides. So on mornings, as on the day Grant disappeared, there were plenty of things to explore. And treasure to be uncovered, if you counted money in sand dollars and moon snails, as Grant did.

  It also meant that on sunny days you’d think you could walk twenty miles due south on that beach, hop across the waters of Puget Sound, and tag the Space Needle. Another ridiculous thing. At some point, the depth had to fall off because there were shipping lanes between here and there. Huge freighters came past, as did Alaskan cruises, carrying passengers and salmonella.

  The tide had come in by the time Pixie took my little brother out in the rowboat. I watched them from the observatory. The rain had just begun to pick up.

  Seeing them together was just one more thing that pissed me off. Grant was my brother. If he wanted someone to take him out in the rowboat, why not come to me? True, my association with oars hadn’t been so great lately, and I had called Pixie a bitch for hooking up with Todd Wishlow, to which she’d said, “Todd who?” So my overall karma was pretty much in the toilet, and I was walking around with a pounding headache, thanks to my black eye and a lot of suppressed rage.

  It was also true that we didn’t need to call the law on the Grays, who were a nice family, and that I didn’t need to lie about Dean going out in the rowboat, not Pix. Here was my upstanding, mature reasoning for the subterfuge: my face hurt like hell, I was mad at everything and everyone. And hey, they were big kids. They could take it. Plus this gave me more alone time with Pixie to punish her both for something she did do (take Grant out in the rowboat at high tide) and didn’t do (Todd Wishlow).

  When Pix and I were on our own that Sunday evening and she was supposed to hand over Grant for real, she still wouldn’t tell me where she was hiding him. In fact, she denied hiding him at all.

  It was true, I didn’t believe the family was in on it—otherwise, they would’ve produced him when we showed up with the law.

  But Pixie was playing it tight.

  “All right,” I said, when we were out of earshot of the others. “Give him up.”

  “Grant? Believe me, I would if I had him. This is a bad night to be hiding.” She kicked at the Scotch broom that lined the walk. Yellow pollen was released into the air, then blown thirty nautical miles north of us within seconds.

  Above us, on the bluff, a huge branch snapped and launched itself against the Grays’ picture window.

  I had to yell to be heard. “Come on, Pix. I watched you row him out into the bay.”

  “Yeah . . . about that,” Pixie said, and summoned a stillness around her. Her dog sat at her feet, awaiting her next command. “That’s what scares me. He seemed upset about something. Really upset.”

  I waited for her to finish her thought while the wind blew her hair into her mouth.

  “Upset about what?”

  “No idea. Just upset.”

  I waited for more. Specifics. At least a GPS location.

  She didn’t say anything else, but she wouldn’t look at me, either. She was hiding something.

  “All right,” I said, rubbing the bridge of my nose, forgetting that my whole face was a wall of pain from where Todd Wishlow had banged it with an oar. “I’m really not in the mood for this. He has to be with one of you. He always comes to your house. Always at five thirty. You always find a bolt hole for him. So I’m telling you again, give him up now and we won’t press charges.”

  Every second made my face pound more. The more I rubbed my nose, the more it hurt. The deeper the hurt, the grumpier I got. But I kept rubbing. I could feel the jelly of my eye. It was making my life hell. I had the perverse idea that if I could pop it out, I’d feel a whole lot better.

  “I’m trying to tell you. We don’t have Grant this time, Henry.”

  “Seriously? Not one of you has him.”

  “Nope.”

  “Did you ask?”

  “No need.”

  It seemed like the Grays could communicate without talking. I called it the “psychic quintuplet network,” although never to their faces. I figured I’d just get a blank stare. The quints were what they were.

  But they were impressive in action.

  On the school basketball court, for instance. They were legendary around the state. South Whidbey High won championship after championship. People from all over packed the bleachers just to see the magic that happened when all five of them were on the floor at the same time.

  It didn’t happen every play, but sometimes when they were coming down the court, the ball moved so fast you couldn’t see it. Whiz bang tomahawk jam . . . and none of them called any plays. They weren’t the tallest kids on the court, but they knew where the openings were and which one of them could do what from where. Teamwork—effortless and uncanny.

  “Look, Henry, I don’t think you understand how bad this is. When I rowed him back, I thought he’d go straight to you. I think I disappointed him somehow. He said he’d come to the wrong person.”

  At least we agreed on something. But that didn’t get us any closer to finding Grant. He hadn’t come to me, and I hadn’t worried about it at the time because whenever he went missing he was always with them.

  Ahead of us, Pixie’s smelly dog sat perfectly still, waiting for instruction. Was this new? I don’t remember Patience being so attentive before. Usually she just peed on everything and harassed squirrels until Pix whistled for her.

  The dog was waiting for something. Something big. So was I.

  “We already looked all over for him,” Pix said.

  “When?”

  “When he didn’t show up at five thirty, trying to avoid the six o’clock ferry.”

  Yeah. None of us liked going back to the mainland after two days of freedom. Grant hated it most of all. To him, Useless Bay wasn’t just a retreat and the Grays’ house wasn’t just some broken-down rambler. It was an extension of the beach—a world filled with treasures and things of wonder, as though the Grays and all the creatures of the bay were conjured from one of Lyudmila’s books of Russian folktales, where poor men talked with fish and bridegrooms danced with bears.

  The wind blew the hood of Pixie’s raincoat down, and her golden hair swirled around her face.

  In that moment, I wondered if there was something to the urban legends about the Grays. Like the one that said they had been carved from glaciers.

  Or that they had been built for a purpose.

  Or that they were a sign from God.

  Or the spawn of Satan.

  The most broadly whispered question was: Who was their father?

  No one had ever seen or heard of a Mr. Gray. The most likely theory was that he was an officer stationed temporarily at the naval base at Oak Harbor, good for one night, and that he didn’t even know this brood of giants existed.

  At that moment, watching the weather swirl about Pix but not affecting her, I felt something different. I wondered if the Grays weren’t from any father so much as they were from the land itself—a long cold beach where it seemed you could walk forever and keep walking. A handy breed to be called up in times of crises.

  The question was: Would this be one of those times? Were we in a crisis now?

  It was then that I began to think beyond the pain in my face and that Dad might need the sheriff for more than to harass the Gray family. He might actually have to find my little brother.

  Something might have happened to Grant. Something bad. Maybe my misdirection at the Grays’ house was a stupid thing to do, because maybe my brother was really in trouble.

  The important thing now was to get him back, an
d Pix was starting to convince me that it might be harder than I thought.

  “Do you hear it?” Pix said.

  “What? The wind?”

  She shook her head. “Listen. I mean, really listen.”

  She closed her eyes and turned her face to the beach.

  Even her dog—the smelly, loud one—was so silent she seemed reverent. It was like being in church.

  So I closed my eyes and listened, too.

  The first thing I heard was my homework list, then the little ways I’d let everybody down—as well as the bigger ones. The mistakes I’d made in the past, the ones I’d make in the future, and how I could possibly avoid them.

  When I was done with those voices, then came the rip and groan of the storm, and the snore of the barn owl that seemed to be demanding, “Treat! Treat!”

  But Pixie seemed to be hearing something else, something deeper. She shivered in her Windbreaker, and I couldn’t understand why.

  “All I hear is the wind,” I said.

  “Oh,” Pixie said, disappointed. “Right. The wind.”

  I felt as though I’d failed some kind of test I didn’t even know I was taking.

  “If Grant’s really gone, we should find Yuri. He’ll know what to do,” I said.

  Yuri’s shack was at the beach end of the trail that we were on—the one that shored up and bisected the lagoon.

  “Right. Yuri,” Pixie said, and she seemed to shake off something that had settled around her shoulders like a mantle. If I didn’t know her and her brothers better, I’d say that she was afraid.

  Even though Grant went missing all the time in circumstances that sometimes seemed even worse than this, and he had his elaborate games of hide-and-seek that often involved the Grays—who, I had to admit, took pretty good care of him when he ran off—it never made me nervous. But this was the exact moment I began to worry.