A Month at the Shore

by Antoinette Stockenberg

  "Yeah, sure," Ken said, lying through gritted teeth. Don't rush him.

  Billy went on, even more earnestly. "Anyway, I waited until the song was over, and then I guess I fell asleep in the van. Not real asleep, just nap asleep. I almost forgot about that part. Maybe that's why I wasn't so sure of what I saw when I woke up. Maybe I was still dreaming, even. Or maybe just sleepy."

  The furrows on the broad expanse of his brow were deep. He was trying so hard to get it right. "But, no, it wasn't because I was sleepy; I think it was mostly the fog."

  Ken felt as if he were in a free fall into hell. "I can see why you had a hard time," he said reassuringly. "Around here, you can cut a June fog with a knife. But try to remember: was it a big person? Small person? Tall person? Short person? A man? A woman?"

  To every question, Billy shook his head. "They were too hunched over. All I know is, they were having a hard time dragging—well, not Sylvia, so I don't know what it was. Maybe a bag of manure or something?"

  He sighed heavily and said, "I remember I was thinking of going over to help, but—" He dropped his voice to a whisper. "I think maybe I was afraid someone would tell on me."

  "Tell what?" Ken asked, surprised.

  Up came the massive shoulders in a sorrowful shrug. "I don't know. But it didn't look right. It made me feel funny to see it. I guess I was afraid."

  His pale green eyes looked watery and full of contrition, so much so that Ken began to be suspicious of what it was that Billy was actually sorry for.

  Nonetheless, he said to him, "You don't have to be afraid, Billy. You've told me what you saw, so now you don't have to worry. You did the right thing by coming to me and getting it off your chest. All that worrying, and see? It was for nothing. Because it couldn't be Sylvia."

  In his mind Ken was thinking, shit, shit, shit. What if there was something to all of this?

  Billy smiled sheepishly. "I feel kind of dumb."

  "Don't ever feel dumb," Ken said, shaking his head. "You have a much better recall than a lot of other people. Look how long ago that happened, and still you remember it."

  "Because I was afraid, that's why," Billy said simply.

  "And you didn't have to be."

  A hard gust of wind sent the bow rubbing into the dock. Ken stood up and said apologetically, "I've got to tie up the boat a little better; it's supposed to blow like stink tonight."

  "I'll go," Billy said, jumping up as if his pants had caught fire.

  Ken assured him that there was no hurry, but Billy was convinced that there was. Rather than step carefully down onto the dock, he leaped from the boat, tripping on a stanchion support in the process, and ended up landing on his feet with a heavy thud. Ken was surprised that he didn't break both his ankles; a sailor he was not.

  "Mr. Barclay—"

  Ken, who had dropped down to the dock behind him and was cleating off the first spring line, said, "We've been all through this, Billy. Call me Ken. I'm your age."

  "Okay. Could I ask you a favor?"

  "Shoot."

  Billy pointed a ham-sized hand at the little brass ship's bell. "Would you count to a hundred, and then ring the bell? It would be fun to hear what it would sound like if I was on one boat, and you were on this boat, and we were in the fog."

  "I'll go you one better, Billy. We'll go sailing on the next foggy day, and you can hear for yourself."

  "Uh-h-h... well, maybe." It sounded like a very iffy maybe. "I don't really like water," Billy admitted with a squeamish look. "I get kinda sick."

  Smiling, Ken said, "I understand. All right: I'm countin'. One. Two. Three..."

  Hurrying off the float and onto the main dock, Billy said over his shoulder, "All the way to a hundred, don't forget."

  "Eleven! Twelve! Thirteen!"

  Ken watched the bulk that was Billy make his way to the parking lot, where he'd left his old, rusting Hyundai.

  Grabbing the lanyard, Ken gave the bell a real whack, something he hadn't done since he was a boy plying the waters with his father in the same chill fog that was now blowing in ahead of the rain. The clear peal of brass on brass was almost shocking in its quaintness, a throwback to an age before air horns and radar and gps.

  Not to mention, an age before sophisticated forensic tests like DNA analysis.

  As Billy drove off with an answering, happy toot-toot, Ken poured all of his growing and as yet baseless fears into making the Eliza doubly secure, adding extra lines and fenders. It was the only thing he could do to control events that were currently out of his hands.

  He wanted desperately to believe that Billy had just overheard two teenagers arguing over something as inane as, say, which was the best rock group, and that Billy later had seen someone hauling a bag of something as innocuous as manure and dumping it into the compost pile. What Billy had seen was probably all very ordinary, all very accountable.

  Assuming the medical examiner was right.

  Chapter 24

  The morning after Chief Mellon confided to Ken that the bones were decomposed enough to have been there for generations, the examiner decided to revise his time line downward.

  The ME's change of mind had a lot to do with the discovery of a brass belt buckle in the shape of a maple leaf that had survived the belt to which it had once been attached. Inscribed on the leaf were the words "Canada Cup" and the year "1987."

  "So now we know," said the chief. "The body was dumped no earlier than 1987."

  "Huh." Ken had no comment beyond that one syllable; he was reeling. He'd gone to the chief for further confirmation that the bones couldn't possibly have belonged to the girl named Sylvia that Billy had been so worried about, and instead he had taken a one-two punch to the gut.

  Not that Andy Mellon was aware of the impact of his remarks. The men were sitting on the chief's back deck, having a pre-supper beer and watching the chief's twin girls playing badminton with a couple of kids who were there for a sleepover. The smell of wet grass, the squeals and laughter of the children, and the aroma of marinara sauce drifting through the sliding doors of the kitchen behind them almost made Ken wish he'd said yes to the chief's impromptu invitation to stay to dinner. There was something reassuringly stable about the scene, and just then, Ken's footing felt anything but.

  Ken was exploiting a friendship, he knew that. Andy Mellon kept a modest cabin cruiser a few slips down from Ken's at Creasey's Marina, and the two were friendly, as all men are who share a common passion. Gabe Wellerton kept a boat there, too, and so did Captain Jack, who once had owned the restaurant he'd named after himself. All of the men had caught dock lines for one another, and at the marina's end-of-summer barbecue, they had grilled burgers and dogs side by side. They weren't exactly family; but having lived in Chepaquit all of their lives, they were the next best thing.

  Because of that, Ken could trade on a certain amount of good will, and that's what he was resolved to do. He had to learn as much as he could for Laura's sake. He was in too deep emotionally even to think of watching from the sidelines as the investigation unfolded. It surprised him to think how deep.

  The chief came back with another cold one for each of them, and Ken picked up the conversation where they'd left off.

  "So ... they figure the buckle belonged to the woman who was buried there?"

  The chief gave him a somewhat condescending look. "It was with the remains."

  "Yeah ... but a woman wearing a buckle commemorating a hockey series? Sounds a little butch to me."

  "Not if you're Canadian. Not if Gretzky was playing. She was probably a big Gretzky fan. Hell, who wasn't? Come on, man—you don't remember that year? The greatest hockey ever played was played in 1987."

  Ken himself was a football fan, but he nodded in arbitrary agreement, then said, "Yeah, but still. There's no chance the bones could be of a small-sized male?"

  The chief shook his head. "There are anatomical differences. Besides, this woman was tall, young, and in good health."

  "They sound sure." />
  "They are sure."

  Suddenly a remark that Laura had made about Sylvia came skipping to the forefront: She wasn't local; she was from up north.

  The almost unnecessary question was, how far north?

  Ah, hell.

  Ken felt like a shit. At best, he was betraying the chief's hospitality. At worst, he was withholding evidence.

  That's a crime, you moron. Tell him what Billy said and let the chips fall where they may.

  He'd do it—but not until he'd seen Laura. After Billy left him on the previous evening, Ken had begged off going over to the Shore house. He wasn't convinced that he could mask his concern, and he had hoped to buttonhole the chief and pump him for an update. It hadn't happened. Now it had. How the hell was he going to manage to be reassuring to Laura today, now that he knew about the belt buckle?

  "So ... what's next?" Ken asked.

  "Now that we have a time line, we'll go through the records of missing persons in the area for the last fifteen years or so."

  "Will that kind of information be computerized between states, going so far back?"

  "Nah. Some of it will; a lot of it won't. This is bound to take a while."

  And all that while, the Shore kids were going to live under a cloud of suspicion. As for Shore Gardens itself ... it didn't take a rocket scientist, only a banker, to know that its future looked bleak.

  They heard a high yelp from Team Badminton: one of the chief's twin daughters went diving for the shuttle and slid onto her fanny, then scrambled back to her feet in a race to make the next shot.

  "Hey!" her father called out. "You're getting grass stains all over your shorts, Amy; I hope you know that."

  "Yes, Dad," his daughter said without taking her eyes from the shuttle. "I know that." Whack went the birdy.

  "And you're wrecking my newly seeded grass; I suppose you know that too."

  "Yes, Dad," Amy's sister said. "We know that too." Alice ran back and made a wild swing, slipping on the wet grass and also landing on her shorts, but with a whoop of joy that she'd sent the bird over the net and scored a point.

  "Why do I bother?" the chief said, sighing. He leaned back in his new plastic Adirondack chair and put his feet up on the matching resin stool. "Comfortable," he said with approval. "Of course, we could've had real wood if I didn't own a boat, as the wife likes to point out."

  Smiling, Ken said, "Your girls love being on the water as much as you do."

  "Don't they just? Alice, she's the one. She wants to go into the Coast Guard, and I'll tell you, I'd be proud. Still, it's Amy who's the better fisherman. Nothing fazes her, not blood, not guts. She's the one who cleans the fish with me; Alice won't go near. They're like any twins, I expect—as different from one another as they are the same."

  He was beaming. Ken felt a surge of real envy for the life the chief was leading. Suddenly he realized that he would trade everything he had for Andy Mellon's setup, including the plastic Adirondack chairs, if he could be married and sharing a beer and watching his kids play badminton on wet, newly seeded grass.

  "So. This is a fine mess, no?" asked the chief, shaking his head. "The uncle, the father. And now this. What a family."

  "Hey, come on, Andy," Ken said, demurring. "The kids are a good bunch."

  "Oh, yeah, Snack's a real peach." The chief made a wry face. "To employ a cliché: the boy's got a rap sheet a mile long."

  "Nothing serious, I imagine," Ken said stolidly. "He's not the type."

  "Stole a car, ditched it. DUI. Driving with a suspended license. Breaking and entering—although, to be fair, it was an ex-girlfriend's place and he was allegedly after his clothes."

  "Kids will be kids."

  "Cut it out, Ken. I know where this is going," the chief added gruffly. "The word's out about you and Laura. Walkin' up and down the beach on kite day didn't exactly go unnoticed."

  Oddly enough, Ken was glad to hear it. "I'm not surprised. It's a small town," he said with a shrug.

  He went back to watching the kids at their game while Mellon hid behind a long slug of beer, then rested the can on the wide arm of his new lawn chair.

  "Hey."

  Ken turned to see the police chief giving him a steady look. Mellon said quietly, "You sure you don't want to maybe come out of the water for a while? You don't know where this investigation is going; you might end up being caught in an undertow."

  It occurred to Ken that Andy Mellon had been waiting for just the right opportunity to warn him away from the Shore family, and now he was taking it. "Too late, Chief. I guess she's got me hook, line, and sinker, to mix your metaphor."

  And the funny thing was, Laura hadn't even been trolling.

  Mellon nodded and said, "Well, hey. You're a grownup." He added with a crafty look, "Does the mater know?"

  "Cute," Ken snapped. "The short answer is, there's not a hell of a lot for the mater to know. I've still got a long row to hoe before Laura will trust me enough to—"

  "Get out. Someone like that would jump at the chance."

  "She sure as hell hasn't so far."

  Ken didn't care for the way the conversation was going, and he used that as his excuse to say his goodbyes without a word about Billy. There was time enough for that. He stood up.

  "You've always been an odd piece of work, you know that?" said the chief. "I never could get a handle on you. As a kid you always marched to your own drum. Picked on, bullied, and yet as stoic as hell about it, even though your dad was jumping up and down for us to do something. I'll give you that: you took it like a man. On second thought, I've changed my mind," he said dryly. "I'm thinking you and the Shore girl might just be a match made in heaven."

  "From your lips to God's ear," said Ken, rapping his empty beer can against Mellon's thigh. "I'll say goodbye to Beth and get out of your hair."

  "Seriously. Think about what I—ow!"

  A shuttlecock went whizzing into the side of the chief's neck and he let out an oath. "That's it!" he barked to his kids, and he stuffed the feathered cork into the pocket of his T-shirt. "You're gonna put out someone's eye with this thing; it's lethal. I told you there's no room in the yard. You wanna play something, play bocce or horseshoes when someone's sitting out here."

  One of the twins said, "Oh-h-h, come on, Dad. Please? The game's tied at ten to ten. Just let us finish—please?" She gave him a winning smile that would have had Ken tearing out the deck to give them more room to play.

  Reluctantly, Mellon tossed the bird back to Amy. Or Alice. "Finish the game and that's it. I mean it." To Ken, he muttered, "No kids—you lucky bastard, you."

  Oh, yeah, Ken thought on his way out. Real lucky bastard.

  ****

  Laura opened her eyes and was depressed to see what a clear, beautiful morning it was. She'd been rooting for another day of cold, wet weather, because at least that way they wouldn't feel bad about the business they were losing to the ever-expanding investigation.

  And it was expanding. The sheds were now all officially off limits to them, and the store still hadn't opened, and Laura had no doubt that soon the house was going to be gone over with a fine-tooth comb as well.

  The police knew something that they did not. Just before the rains came, she had seen the investigators in a huddle at the site of the new compost pile, where they logically had been concentrating their search. She had gone off on a search of her own for binoculars to spy on them, but she hadn't found any and hadn't wanted to ask Corinne and raise the alarm. They would all find out any new developments soon enough.

  And in the meantime, she was having to soldier on without Ken. She had yet to see him since their accidental meeting on the beach: he'd backed out of seeing her twice in a row now—and she was getting a sinking feeling about their barely launched relationship.

  She didn't seriously think that he was afraid to be seen with her simply because she was a Shore girl. He'd been just the opposite, in fact: downright flagrant. No, if Kendall Barclay was cooling down, there were other,
more plausible reasons to consider.

  She didn't believe either of the ones he'd given her for not coming over. On window-washing night, he had called back and said that he had some unexpected work to do. Him? Please. But okay, she gave him the benefit of the doubt.

  It was the second night that had left her both tense and depressed. She had seen his Porsche parked in Chief Mellon's drive when she'd detoured past the chief's house on her way to town. She was curious to know whether she could pick up any clues as to how the investigation was going. Seeing Ken's car there—the last place she would have expected to see it—had given her a major jolt.

  She couldn't ask Ken what he was doing there without explaining what she was doing on that particular back road. It wasn't on the way to anything. Unless she wanted to admit to some ditzy spying, her only options were to wonder and worry.

  He had said he would drop by that evening. Laura hated to admit it to herself, but it was her only reason for getting out of bed.

  Breakfast was another late affair, and Laura had managed to be late even for that. She dropped into her regular chair and immediately had a warmed plate of waffles with a side of sausage and bacon placed in front of her. "Eight o'clock means eight o'clock, and not seventeen minutes after," her sister said with a sniff.

  Laura apologized and then said to Snack, "Can you load the sycamore into the pickup for me? Thank God for Gabe's Bobcat. At least we can deliver the few orders we do have," she said in a desultory voice.

  Snack nodded. He was as subdued as she was. Only Corinne was keeping up a brave front as she served one of her typically mammoth farmer's breakfasts.

  "Snack? Can you fit a fourth waffle? I have batter."

  "Yeah, sure," her brother said, leaning back on the hind legs of his chair to pass her his syrupy plate. To Laura he said, "Can't the sycamore wait? I wanted to get an early start on the rotted floor around the tub. It's gonna drop right through the dining room ceiling if I don't get to it soon."