by JoAnna Carl
Brenda’s appearance is different from that of most Michigan girls, who, like me, tend to be built on the northern European pattern—tall and blond. I could see why Brenda’s dark hair and eyes and cute rounded figure appealed to Will. And I could certainly see why a six-foot-two blond hunk like Will appealed to Brenda.
Their romance had gone fairly smoothly the previous summer. Conflicting work schedules had kept them from seeing each other every waking moment. They seemed to have fun without getting too involved emotionally. In August Brenda and Will had gone to their respective colleges with relatively few parting tears.
In the spring Will had urged Brenda to return to Warner Pier for a second summer. Then Tracy’s parents planned a two-month trip in their travel trailer, and they told Tracy she could stay in the family home if she found a friend to stay with her. They approved of Brenda for this role.
So everything seemed fine when Brenda arrived the first week in June, planning to visit Joe and me for a few days, then move to Tracy’s house.
But on the second night she was there, things went to pieces.
Brenda had gone out with Will. Joe and I had decided to make it plain to her that we were not sitting up to check on when—or whether—she got home. Privately, the two of us had agreed that we’d retire to our own room before the eleven o’clock news.
But it wasn’t even ten o’clock when car lights bounced down our lane and passed the house.
“That can’t be Brenda already,” Joe said.
“I wasn’t expecting anyone else.”
The car had barely had time to pull into our drive when a door slammed and we heard some indistinct words from Brenda. She ran in the back door and stopped in the kitchen. Then we could see the lights of Will’s car moving again; he was pulling out of the drive.
I called out. “Brenda?”
She stayed where she was. I could hear gulping noises.
I went into the kitchen. “Brenda? Are you all right?”
“Yes.” The word was affirmative, but the tone was negative.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing! Nothing’s wrong.” She gave a huge sob, then ran up the stairs. “I’m going to bed!”
Joe and I watched her go. We looked at each other. “Well,” I said, “I guess I won’t ask if she had a good time.”
“You should go up and talk to her.”
“Sorry. If she wants to confide in me, she will. I’m not going to demand an explanation.”
“But—”
“No, Joe. She’ll explain when she wants to.”
We resumed our seats in the living room. I had been reading, and Joe had been looking over some papers dealing with one of his cases. We continued to do this. But neither of us turned another page after Brenda came in.
Our old house is like an amplifier for any sound made in it. A pin dropped in one of the upstairs bedrooms sounds like an anvil landing on the ceiling of the living room. And Brenda was definitely louder than a pin. She would sob. Then she would sniff. Then she would mutter. She would walk up and down, stomping her feet. The sounds were unnerving.
After twenty minutes, Joe got to his feet. “I’m going to get in the truck and go track Will down,” he said. “That guy needs a good talking to.”
“Joe!”
“I mean it. I don’t know what he did, but he had no right to make Brenda so miserable.”
“No!” I jumped up. “Stay away from Will! I’ll talk to Brenda.”
The steep stairs that lead to the second floor of our house seemed to have grown even steeper as I went up them. If I tried to talk to her, how would Brenda react? Would there be tears? Yelling? Would she order me out of her room? Shove me back down the stairs? What should I say to her?
The door to her room was closed. I decided that knocking was unwise, since she could just tell me I couldn’t come in. I opened the door a crack and spoke.
“It’s Lee. Ready to talk?”
I didn’t wait for an answer. I just slipped inside.
Brenda was sitting on the opposite side of the bed, leaning back against two pillows. She was still dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, though she’d kicked her tennis shoes off. Sodden tissues were heaped on the bed beside her. She didn’t speak, or even look at me.
I sat down on the foot of the bed. “Do you think Joe can beat Will up?”
Brenda gasped. “Oh! Will’s really strong! And Will’s a lot—well, younger than Joe is.”
“Yes, but Joe’s wily. He was a wrestling champion, you know. And he’s extremely mad at Will.”
“Why?”
“Because Will made you unhappy.”
She sobbed. “Why should Joe care?”
“You’re our babysitter. I mean, sister!”
Brenda gave a funny little laugh, more like a hiccup. “Oh, Lee! You’re so funny!”
“Lie down,” I said. “I’ll rub your back the way my grandmother used to rub mine.”
I was rather surprised when Brenda complied, flopping onto her stomach. I stood up, leaned over her, and began to rub her shoulders. I didn’t ask any questions, and she continued to cry quietly, but after about five minutes she spoke.
“Oh, Lee, it was awful! Will says Marco Spear can’t act!”
Marco Spear couldn’t act? That was what all this drama was about?
Somehow I managed to refrain from either laughing or blurting out, “Whoever thought he could?” I just kept rubbing Brenda’s back, and after I had control of myself I said, “How did this quarrel come up, Brenda?”
One of the activities Will and Brenda both enjoyed, of course, was movies. “I mean films,” she said. So both had taken a college course in film criticism. “You know,” Brenda said, “arts and humanities requirement.”
Since Young Blackbeard had been the most popular film of the spring semester, each class—the one at Michigan State and the one at North Texas Junior College—had discussed it. Brenda had come away convinced that the film was a masterpiece and that Marco Spear’s performance was worthy of an Academy Award. Will had been convinced that the movie was a piece of trash and that Marco Spear was a complete ham.
“It’s not just that we disagree,” Brenda said, sniffing.
“It’s that he didn’t respect your opinion,” I said.
“No! He didn’t! And besides”—she sobbed—“he said I only liked Marco Spear because he’s s-s-sexy!”
I longed to laugh, but Brenda’s emotional upset was too serious to take lightly. “Do you think Will could be jealous?”
“Of Marco Spear? That’s silly! He’s not a real person.”
Of course, Marco Spear definitely was a real person, but I understood what Brenda meant.
At least the commotion gave Brenda and me a good reason to have a heart-to-heart talk, and I found out some interesting information.
Brenda wasn’t at all sure how she felt about Will. He was “really, really nice.” And a lot of fun. And she liked him. (I interpreted that as meaning she found him sexually attractive.) Yes, someday she might want to marry him. But back in Texas she was involved in activities and fun at the area junior college. And there was another guy. “We’ve gone out since junior high. It’s not serious!” (Did that mean she wasn’t sexually attracted to him? Maybe. At least they weren’t having sex.)
Plus, Brenda said, she had made plans to go on to Midwestern University in Wichita Falls for her junior and senior years. She wanted a degree in some sort of computer design.
I felt a great gush of relief at realizing that Brenda’s ambitions were broader than getting married at nineteen and pregnant at twenty.
Brenda and I talked for quite a while. Then we went downstairs. She gave Joe a hug, and he gave her one back. “You don’t have to whip Will,” she said.
“I’m not sure I could.”
“Thanks for wanting to. That’s just what my daddy would do.”
Joe gave me a quick look to make sure that remark was okay. He knows that I had trouble learning to share my
daddy with another girl, even one much younger than I am. I couldn’t do it until I figured out that Brenda’s birth father had never been part of her life. My dad was all the daddy she had ever had.
Joe and I promised not to talk about Brenda and Will’s fight to anybody. After we were in bed that night, we shared a giggle over the topic of the fight—talk about ridiculous—but we both understood that the fight hadn’t really been about Marco Spear’s acting ability. It had been about Brenda and Will learning to be honest with each other and to respect each other’s opinions. Remembering that made it easier for me to take it seriously.
After that dramatic beginning, I was afraid Brenda’s summer would be a disaster. She might even decide to go home. But she didn’t feel she could leave Tracy. In a few days, she and Will began to see each other again. Usually they went out with Tracy and her boyfriend, Carl, and they seemed to treat each other with caution, as if saying the wrong thing could cause an explosion.
The argument over Marco Spear’s acting ability still erupted now and then, but mainly Brenda and Will ignored the subject. However, I suspected that part of Brenda’s excitement over the possibility of Marco Spear’s coming to Warner Pier was the fact that she could tease Will over it.
Whatever I thought, the rumor that he was coming spread through town. Marco! Marco! Marco!
The news was whispered down the aisles at the Superette and spoken out loud at Warner Pier Beach. Everybody was sure he was coming, although there was no official confirmation.
Warner Pier is the home of Oxford Boats, one of the last companies that build luxury yachts. Their products were not the boats you might see at a boat show or use for a fishing trip. Each yacht produced by Oxford Boats was individually designed by the nation’s top maritime architect. The yachts took a year or more to build. Most of them carried from six to a dozen crew members when they left port. Their sleek hulls and luxurious cabins inspired as much drooling as TenHuis chocolates.
Oxford Boats’ prices were in the multimillions. Someone once said that if you wonder how much it costs to own a yacht, you can’t afford it anyway. Apparently Marco Spear had made enough money from Young Blackbeard that he didn’t have to ask.
Every teenager who had access to a sailboat, motorboat, or dinghy was out on the water, peering into the big boat shed at Oxford Boats, trying to get a look at the yacht under construction.
Marco! Marco! Marco! He must be coming soon.
I got extremely tired of the whole thing. In fact, I tried to put it out of my mind completely. I wasn’t worried about movie stars. I had plenty to think about in my own life.
Joe and I live in a semirural neighborhood on the inland side of Lake Shore Drive, and at about eight o’clock in the morning on the second Saturday in August I put on a pair of denim shorts, a sweatshirt, and some sandals and walked down to the road to get the Grand Rapids Press out of our delivery box. It was a bright, crisp morning. The sunlight was filtering through the trees, and the birds were singing like mad. I scared a flock of eight wild turkeys—two hens and six half-grown poults—out of our side yard as I left the house. It was my day off. I didn’t have to rush down to the shop. All was serene.
I had barely reached the newspaper delivery box when the screaming started.
“Help! Help!”
I nearly dropped my newspaper as I whirled toward the sound. A girl wearing a neon-striped bikini came running up Lake Shore Drive toward me, a pair of orange flip-flops flip-flopping on her feet.
“He didn’t come up! He just disappeared!”
As soon as she was within clutching distance, she grabbed my arm. Her fingers felt like so many vises. I could see that tears were running down her face.
“I’m afraid he’s dead!”
“Who?”
“Jeremy! He said he was going to show me how to do a surface dive. But he never came up! I think he drowned.”
Chapter 4
Two hours later I was sitting in my folding beach chair on the sand of Beech Tree Public Access Area, a quarter mile from our house. The temperature had just hit seventy-two degrees, and puffy white clouds floated here and there in the broad blue sky. August is one of the reasons Lake Michigan is a major resort area, and that day was a perfect demonstration of its perfect weather.
At the top of the bank behind me, delightful breezes wafted through twenty-five or so elms and maples and one giant beech tree, the tree that gave the beach its name. The sun had just climbed higher than the trees, so it was now beginning to reach the beach. I had brought a big multicolored umbrella; soon we’d need it for protection from the sun.
The idyllic setting contrasted with the activities on the beach. A half dozen people in law enforcement outfits—Warner Pier Police Department and Warner County Sheriff’s Department—were talking on radios or standing in concerned clumps, staring out into the lake. There more than twenty people walked slowly through the water with their arms linked.
These were volunteers, mostly from our neighborhood, and they were using their feet to search for the body of the missing swimmer. They formed a line anchored at the beach and walked through the water in a fan-shaped pattern, re-forming at the end of each sweep to cover a new area.
Although I had phoned in the first alarm, I was a minor part of the search. My job was keeping an eye on two things: first, a large cooler of bottled water for the volunteers in the lake; second, the missing man’s girlfriend, the girl in the bright bikini. She was sitting beside me in a second beach chair.
Her name was Jill Campbell. I was assigned to keep any news media representatives away from her, unless she wanted to talk to them, and to make sure she didn’t disappear, in case the rescuers needed to talk to her. Spectators were confined to the top of the bank behind us by yellow “do not cross” tape, of course, and the umbrella was supposed to shield her from the gaze of the merely curious as well as from the sun.
Jill seemed to be barely smart enough to fasten her bikini top. She had a sweetly pretty face, blond hair that was artfully dark at the roots, and a figure a little too slim to properly display the neon-striped swimsuit that peeked out from her white terry-cloth beach wrap. Actually, it was my terry-cloth beach wrap. I’d loaned it to her. I was still wearing the shorts I’d put on to go get the newspaper, but I’d replaced my sweatshirt with a tee, and I’d put on my own flip-flops.
Joe was one of the guys out in the lake, looking for Jeremy, the missing swimmer. Since he was among the tallest, he was also farthest out.
This wasn’t my favorite way to spend a Saturday, the one day a week I don’t have to work during the height of the summer tourist season, but someone needed to sit with Jill.
Lake Michigan is an inland sea, 118 miles across at the widest point between Michigan and Wisconsin, more than 300 miles long from the Indiana dunes to Mackinac Bridge, and 923 feet deep at its deepest spot. And it can have waves. Big waves. Luckily, that day they were only a couple of feet high, but since they were coming from the southwest, the water was cloudy.
If our summer visitors hang around beaches on the east side of Lake Michigan very long, they learn that if the wind is coming from the southwest, the water is, too. That water is warm—compared to ice water—but it’s filled with sediment and waterweeds. At least we hope that’s what makes it murky. It’s coming straight from Chicago.
If the wind and water are coming from the northwest, the lake is clear but cold. If the wind is from the east, the beach is invaded by flies, and I don’t want to go down there, so I have no idea what the water is like.
Looking for a body in Lake Michigan is not a one-man job. After Jill came to our house looking for help, I called 9-1-1, then contacted a few neighbors I knew were swimmers. They called other people. Joe put on his swim trunks and headed for the beach, taking Jill with him. Joe immediately made some dives in the area where Jill said her friend had gone down, but he hadn’t found the missing Jeremy, and neither had other people who arrived on the scene within the next hour. Now the voluntee
rs were doing their gruesome line dance, hoping one of them would stub a toe on Jeremy’s body. If this didn’t work, they’d go home, and in a couple of days helicopters would start patrolling the shoreline, looking for a body floating in the water or washed up on the beach.
By now Jill wasn’t tearful. That was all right with me. Jill seemed familiar, which meant I’d probably seen her around town, but I didn’t know her, and I didn’t feel equipped to console a stranger’s grief.
She hadn’t wanted to talk a lot, which was surprising. My experience has been that people who’ve gone through traumatic experiences are eager to talk about them. But Warner Pier’s police chief, Hogan Jones—who just happens to be married to my aunt—had trouble getting the whole story out of her.
Jeremy Mattox was the full name of the missing man, Jill had told him. She said he wasn’t a serious boyfriend, just a casual date.
“He works where I work, and he offered to show me this beach. He said it was real nice, and they don’t charge to use it. So he picked me up at seven, and we came up here.”
I was curious, so I interrupted. “Why did you come so early?”
“Early?” Jill looked at me blankly.
“Yes.” I tried to look encouraging. “Beaches in our part of Michigan face west. This one has a high bank behind it, and a lot of trees on top of the bank. There’s never any sun here until late in the morning. Hardly anybody comes here to swim before noon.”
“Oh. Well.” She seemed to need a moment to think the question over. “We have to work this afternoon.”
“Wasn’t the beach cold when you got here?”
“Yes, but I brought a cover-up.”
Jill’s cover-up was a gauzy shirt that matched her neon-striped bikini. It was designed to keep the sun off, not to keep the wearer warm when the temperature was around fifty-five in the shade, as it would have been before eight a.m. at Beech Tree Public Access Area.
She didn’t have a lot more to say to Hogan or to me.
West Michigan was settled nearly two hundred years ago by the Dutch. Many of their descendants, including me, are still here, so lots of us look as if we just stepped out of the Zuider Zee. There are more people in the phone book named VanSomething-or-other than there are named Smith, and Dykstra is considered a common name.
