Wintertide: A Novel

by Debra Doxer

  The cold air still clung to my coat and clothes as I removed them, leaving them in a pile on the floor. In only my boxers and t-shirt, I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes. As I knew they would, the images from the evening played out in my head; the look on Eddie’s face, the feel of my shoulder pushing against him, his panicked struggle, the way his body hit and bounced off of the rocks, the way the water swallowed him whole. I rubbed my hands over my face. I couldn’t comprehend it. I couldn’t process it. I couldn’t believe it was real, and I couldn’t help thinking back to another night at the sea cliff with Eddie and Seth. The night that Eddie had leaned over the edge too far and I pulled him back before he could fall. I had prevented him from going over that night only to push him over myself years later.

  Over the next few hours, the reality of what I had done began to take hold. I hadn’t planned it, and I never would have thought myself capable of it, but I’d done it. Eddie was dead. He’d died horribly at my hands, and I wondered if his body would wash up somewhere close by. Seth no longer had to worry about the video that Eddie had threatened to expose. I no longer had to worry about him using my parents as leverage against me. Neither of us had to provide an alibi for him anymore. The removal of Eddie had effectively solved our problems.

  Once it was light out, I got up and robotically made my way through my usual routine. I hadn’t slept in days and despite the continuous movie of last night that played in my head, I knew it was important to appear normal today. Only Seth and I knew what happened last night, but I didn’t want to give anyone a reason to question me by staying in bed all day as I so badly wanted.

  The banging in the kitchen told me that my dad and his friends were still at work repairing the damage. I found my mother looking well, sitting in the living room with her coffee and newspaper.

  “Did you have fun last night?” she asked when she spotted me in the doorway.

  I just stared at her for a moment as my scrambled brain tried to make sense of her question.

  “With Kristen,” she prompted.

  The haze in my head cleared, and I offered her a strained smile as I walked into the room. “Yeah, we had fun. How are you feeling?”

  She waved her hand at me. “I’m fine. I wish people would stop asking me that. Did you know that half the town called me yesterday? Our fire was in the paper.”

  “I heard. Dad seems to be making progress,” I commented, looking back toward the kitchen where the once charred wall was now pristine and plastered white.

  “So are you and Kristen back together?” she asked me, glancing down at her paper in an obvious attempt not to seem too interested.

  “I don’t know,” I shrugged. “Maybe.”

  She was about to say something else when I told her that I had to get to work.

  “What about breakfast?” she asked, standing up and following me toward the front hall closet.

  “I’ll get something on the way.” I opened the closet door and then remembered that I’d left my coat upstairs last night. The thought of putting that coat back on, a coat that was likely covered in dirt and unwelcome reminders, caused a wave of nausea to roll through me. Instead, I grabbed a sweatshirt and my Red Sox cap and headed out the door before my mother could warn me that I hadn’t dressed warmly enough.

  The rest of my winter break from school continued uneventfully. I went to work each day and came home at night. I listened to the news for any information about the discovery of Eddie’s body. So far, there was none. Kristen invited me to a New Year’s Eve party that her friend from school was giving. I went with her and put on a good show of having fun, laughing with her and her friends, many of whom I knew from high school, and kissing her at midnight. To my relief, Seth wasn’t there. He and I seemed to have made an implicit pact to not contact each other. As he’d said, it was over. For my part, he was the last person I ever wanted to see again. It occurred to me, after the look he’d given me in the car that night, that he had come to the same conclusion about me.

  Finally, my break was over, and my mother drove me to the bus station, sending me off with tears and a hug. Back at school, I resumed my life. I continued to read the papers and listen to the news, but there was no mention of a body being found. I heard that the police still wanted to question Eddie about the killing. The Cape Cod Tribune, which I read every day on the Internet, occasionally ran a follow-up story stating that the case remained unsolved, and they still couldn’t locate the only person of interest, Eddie McKenna.

  epilogue

  Eventually, the story faded as did the speculation. But the images in my head are with me always. After nearly a year, I still couldn’t sleep soundly at night. Kristen and I were sharing an apartment in Kenmore Square by then, and I simply told her that I was an insomniac, never revealing that I was reluctant to sleep too deeply because of the dreams I often had.

  Kristen never completely understood my stubborn refusal to go home to South Seaport for more than a few hours at a time for holidays and family birthdays. If she wanted to stay overnight at her parents’ house, she did it without me. I even convinced her to elope after we graduated rather than plan a wedding that I knew she would want to have in South Seaport. Her parents never forgave her and my mother was beside herself when we told her the news.

  Taking Kristen’s comments to heart, I changed my major to journalism. After graduation, we moved to Manhattan when I got a news writing job at a radio station in the city, and Kristen found a position teaching at a private school there. I soon left radio and began working for a network news magazine program. Eventually, I struck out on my own, my work on missing persons and murder stories at the magazine show paving the way for my interest in true crime stories.

  We have two children now, a boy and a girl. I often bring my mother down on the train to stay with us. She adores her grandchildren. Eventually, I’ll move her down to live with us. I rarely see my father.

  During her last trip down, my mother told me that Seth Cooper had gotten married. She had seen his mother at the grocery store. She told her that Seth had gone through a few rough years after the divorce, but that he was living in Chicago now and working for an investment firm. I nodded absently at her news, and then I picked up my two year old daughter and held her tight while Kristen showed my mother the renovations we’d done in the kitchen since her last visit.

  Questions from that time still remain with me. To my knowledge, the lawyer Eddie claimed to have hired never came forward to say they had spoken, and I wondered if Eddie really had talked to a lawyer or if his story was a ploy to extract money from us. If Seth’s assertion that Eddie had been staying with a girlfriend was true, I wondered how much he’d told this girlfriend. Had it been her car that was left at the sea cliff? Had he hidden the fireplace poker that had been his murder weapon with her? Had he given her mine and Seth’s names? There was never any news about a girlfriend that had been harboring Eddie, and if she did know anything close to the truth, it was unlikely she would ever come forward.

  No one from the Southside Tavern ever pinpointed Seth and me as the friends Eddie had been with that night. For a small town like South Seaport, that always seemed far too fortunate to me. I began to wonder if my father had asked a favor of the police friends he mentioned when we spoke about it. When I later thought of the way he had questioned me about being with Eddie that night, I realized that it was possible he knew something more than he was saying at the time.

  Mostly, I think the police never looked past Eddie for the killer. It just so happened that he was actually guilty. He was an easy scapegoat, especially once he had disappeared. His disappearance allowed the police to indefinitely table the entire event before tourist season began again. I’m sure they never worked very hard to find Eddie. Even his father hadn’t raised a fuss when his son never returned home again.

  A person disappeared from the face of the earth, and not only did no one seem to care, they hardly seemed to notice. Sometimes, I wonder if I’m the only one wh
o still thinks about Eddie McKenna.

  THE END

  Here is the playlist Daniel was listening to while he waited for his meeting in the nearby woods with Seth and Eddie.

  “Absolute Zero” by Stone Sour

  “Just Like You” by Three Days Grace

  “Panic Switch” by Silversun Pickups

  “(Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman” by The Kinks

  “Speak” by Godsmack

  “The Missing Frame” by AFI

  “Go With The Flow” by Queens Of The Stone Age

  “Only” by Nine Inch Nails

  “Headstrong” by Trapt

  “Black Metallic” by Catherine Wheel

  “Prayer” by Disturbed

  “I Will Not Bow” by Breaking Benjamin

  “Swamp Thing” by The Chameleons

  “Unspoken” by Red Line Chemistry

  “Breakdown” by Tantric

  “Pain Lies On The Riverside” by Live

  “Hollow” by Alice In Chains

  Thank you for reading WINTERTIDE.

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  one

  two

  three

  four

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  nine

  ten

  eleven

  twelve

  thirteen

  fourteen

  fifteen

  sixteen

  seventeen

  eighteen

  nineteen

  twenty

  twenty one

  epilogue