by Luanne Rice
“The police stayed in touch with me the first few months,” she said. “They told me they’d keep me up to date. But after a while, they stopped calling. And I never followed up.”
“Some people want to know every detail,” he said. “Seeking justice makes them feel they have more control.”
“I can understand that, even though it’s taken me a while. I want justice,” she murmured, a huge wave of grief overtaking her. “But not as much as I want Charlie back. I want you to know him.”
“I want that, too.”
“He was a great boy,” Sheridan said. “One of the all-time wonderful kids.”
“I believe you. We’ll get justice for him,” Gavin said, hugging her even more tightly. “I promise you, Sheridan.”
She leaned back and he kissed her. She felt as if they belonged to each other in a whole new way. He’d just made her a promise, and until this moment, she hadn’t realized how much it mattered to her: justice. It had seemed so abstract, an ideal for someone else, when all she’d wanted was the solidity of having her son back.
Gavin held her hand, pulled her up. He started toward the stairs, and he led her up to the second floor, into her bedroom. She knew she should fight it—this wasn’t right for her, for him; in spite of what she’d said about people changing their minds, she knew that she was too broken to go back, to love Gavin the way she once had. But he held her so firmly, and she wanted him so badly. All her thoughts and reason fell away, and she was swept along by her feelings.
Everything had changed since they were young. Sheridan and her sisters had slept in the small rooms across the hall. Now she occupied the big bedroom that had been her mother’s. It faced the beach, had a big bow window with a window seat overlooking the curved crescent of white sand, the half-moon bay, the heavily wooded rocky point that led to Little Beach.
They pulled each other down onto the big bed. Sheridan had bought it for herself a few years ago; no one else had ever been in it with her. But looking into Gavin’s eyes, she admitted to herself how often she’d dreamed of him here. She’d needed him all these years. Her heart had longed for him, her body had craved him, and even though she knew they could never make it right, she knew she’d never needed anyone more.
“I’ve wanted you for so long,” he whispered. “More than you can imagine.”
“I think I know, because I’ve wanted you so badly.”
They clung to each other, undoing buttons and zippers, not caring whose was whose. There must have been a moon in the sky; she couldn’t see it yet, perhaps it hadn’t quite risen over the trees. But ghostly blue light streamed through the skylight and windows, painting their bodies in white light.
Sheridan kissed the shadows on Gavin’s body. The dark edges of his muscles, the hollow of his stomach, the long, crooked scar down his side. It represented all his past mistakes, which made her love him more—because she’d made so many of her own. He rolled over, to hold her close above him, her hair falling into his face. They kissed through it, too passionate to push it away. She eased off, onto her side, then her back, and he entered her.
Every inch of her body came alive. His touch made her shiver. She writhed and ached with love, and felt nothing but joy. And then she tumbled into exquisite longing for more, something like sorrow, a feeling that she only wanted this, forever, and she knew she couldn’t have it, that it would have to end, that she would hurt him again, and that was too much to bear.
Gavin kissed her on the lips, his mouth hot, scorching her, making her arch her back so there wasn’t an inch of space between them. He slid his arms around and behind her, holding her closer than two people had ever been. Sheridan blinked, looking up at him, saw that he was watching her so closely, as if he could never look away.
She knew this was an interval of time. Charlie’s death had taught her something about forever, and she felt bittersweet knowing that she and Gavin couldn’t go on. But she held his gaze, wrapped in his arms, wishing life were different. They moved together, holding tight. The blue moonlight bathed them like water, and they were swimmers, cutting through the waves, the gentle waves so particular to Hubbard’s Point, toward the beach that had always been their home.
CHAPTER 16
THE NEXT MORNING, GAVIN SWAM FOUR MILES. HE FELT he could have kept going, all the way to Orient Point and back. He hadn’t slept, but he was filled with energy; just before diving in, he’d stood on the deck of his boat staring up at Sheridan’s house—he’d left early, returned to the boat to check for updates from Joe—wondering why he wasn’t still there especially because the fax tray was empty. Being with Sheridan was the first thing that had really made sense to him in years.
As Gavin powered through the water he turned everything over in his mind. He swam parallel to the shore, from Hubbard’s Point to the mouth of the Connecticut River and back. He’d been the rescue swimmer on his first vessel, when he’d first joined the Navy. He’d liked the long training swims, designed for endurance. But he’d always excelled at short competitions—brief bursts of speed. In life, he’d found he had to do both.
When he returned to the Squire Toby, before pulling himself out of the water, he hung onto the boarding ladder, breathing hard as his heart rate slowed. Wiping salt water from his eyes, he stared up at Sheridan’s house, wondering what she was doing.
Even after his long swim, his body still felt her. She had lain in his arms long after they’d made love. The bed, her house, had felt solid; Gavin had been sleeping on boats for so long, he didn’t know how to sleep with nothing moving beneath him. So he’d stayed awake while she slept.
Sometime around dawn she’d woken up, and they’d made love again. The sun rose behind Hubbard’s Point, falling on the crescent beach and curved bay slowly. He hadn’t wanted to leave, and he wouldn’t have if he wasn’t so anxious to complete the investigation. He worried she wouldn’t let him back; she was bothered by the direction he was taking. He’d felt it last night, when she’d wanted him to back down from what he was thinking about Charlie. It was a subtle thing, because he wasn’t really onto anything solid—he just had to stay open to what had happened, and he knew that meant seeing Charlie through his own eyes. The dynamic had come between them before—a way she had of viewing the world, and wanting him to see everything the same way.
From her bed, holding her as the sun came up, he’d been able to see this boat. This was his home, and he loved it, but he would have liked to stay up there with Sheridan and never come back here—keep the moment going forever. Standing in the cockpit, he toweled himself off. Shaggy-haired and dripping, he looked up and saw Nell coming around the walkway from the bow.
“I thought we’d talked about this,” he said. “You call first, and…” Then he really saw her, the acutely troubled expression in her green eyes, and he pulled a deck chair open for her. She glared at him, dark crescents under her eyes. She paced, refusing to sit down.
“Where were you?” she asked.
“I went for a swim.”
“Last night I called and called you!”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I had my cell phone turned off. Weren’t you celebrating with your dad and Stevie?”
“I saw Charlie,” she said, her voice thin and high, stretched like a wire about to break.
“What are you talking about?”
She was tense and crackling, her skin glinting with salt from her swim out from the beach. A small runabout puttered out the channel under the footbridge, heading for Wickland Reef. Two teenage boys were laughing and joking; when they spotted Nell, they changed course and came closer. Gavin saw them both staring at her. He watched for her reaction, but she had none. She didn’t even see them.
“Hey, Nell,” called one. “It’s my day off—come with us. We might head over to Shelter Island.”
She ignored him, staring at Gavin, her fists tightly clenched. Her chest was rising and falling with quick, shallow breaths. She looked as if she hadn’t slept and was about to pass out
. Gavin walked over to ease her down into the deck chair, but she shook him off. The boys waited a moment, their boat idling. Then they drove away.
“Didn’t you hear me?” she asked.
“I heard,” Gavin said.
“But it turns out it wasn’t him at all,” she said. “It was his exact double.”
He stared at her, holding both ends of the towel draped around his neck. “Okay,” he said. “Start at the beginning.”
“I’ll start with the fact he has a brother. Did you know that?”
“Yes,” Gavin said. He’d known about the two other boys, as well as the fact that Randy was a deadbeat dad and never bothered to participate in their lives, ever since he’d investigated him during the divorce.
“Well, one of them looks just like Charlie. His name is Jeff Quill. And he’s here.”
“Here? In Hubbard’s Point?”
“Not right now, no. He’s staying in town. But he was here, at Charlie’s grave. I saw him.”
“How do you know his name?”
“I chased him,” she said. “And I caught him, too. I made him tell me everything.”
“Jesus, Nell!” Gavin said.
She glared back at him. “What was I supposed to do?”
“Not go chasing after someone you don’t know. You know nothing about this guy—you could have gotten hurt in more ways than I can count.”
“Gavin, he knew Charlie,” she said, the fight going out of her as she sat down in the cockpit. “I didn’t get to hear it all, because I…well, I sort of got upset and ran away. But he told me some. You were right about something.”
“I was?” he asked.
She nodded. “Charlie did keep a secret from me. Or Jeff said maybe he just didn’t get around to telling me. But they met—”
“Did he tell you when?”
“Right after Charlie got to NYU.”
“How did that come about?”
“Their father introduced them. Randy. See, that’s what’s so confusing to me,” Nell said. “I knew that Charlie wanted to see his father! He told me that, we used to talk about it all the time. He even wanted to make that documentary…”
“Yes,” Gavin said, watching her growing agitation.
“So why wouldn’t he tell me about this?”
Gavin thought of the website printouts, and had his own theory. He knew that timing was central to everything, and he had to put it all together. Right now Nell’s distress was so deep, he figured that moving slowly would be his best bet. He sat down beside her, put his arm around her shoulders.
“It’ll be okay, Nell,” he said.
“You know what upsets me most?” she asked. “I thought that this was a mystery about how Charlie died. But it’s turning into a mystery about his life. I thought I knew everything about him. But I don’t.”
“Nell, that’s the thing they don’t tell us. Everything in life is a mystery. I read something somewhere once. Can’t remember who said it, but he talked about ‘the dark unknowability’ in every one of us.”
“There’s nothing dark and unknowable about me,” she said, sounding defensive.
“Yeah, there is,” he said. “And it’s not bad. It’s just life. We all have our hidden corners. I know you won’t believe this, but even I do.”
She laughed, snorting through tears. “That I have no problem believing.” But then despair took over again. “But Charlie! He was just like the sun to me—so open and bright. We told each other everything. I’m…hurt that he wouldn’t have talked to me about his father, and even more…what if there was something between him and that girl in the band?”
“You don’t have any reason to think there was.”
“I do, though. Because when I mentioned her to Jeff last night, he acted upset. And he seemed really evasive.”
“Did he tell you why he’s here? What he came for?”
“To visit Charlie’s grave,” she said.
Gavin took that in, tried to process it with what he’d been thinking about Randy. Could Randy have put the kid up to something, dragged him in? Gavin was thinking of bank accounts and trust documents, social security numbers and passwords. To know Randy Quill was to check to make sure he hadn’t lifted your wallet.
“You mentioned that Jeff’s name is Quill,” Gavin said. “Did he make it sound as if Randy’s been in his life all along?”
“No,” Nell said. “I wondered that, too. He said he’s known him three years, since he was twenty-two.”
“So why’s he calling himself Quill?”
“I don’t know. He seemed…” Nell thought for a minute. “Surprisingly happy to be Randy’s son. I told him I knew Charlie would never take his father’s name.”
“What did he say to that?”
“Nothing. That’s when we started talking about the girl.”
“Where’s Jeff now?” Gavin asked.
“At the Renwick Inn,” she said.
“What do you say we take a ride over there, to talk to him? I’d like to meet Charlie’s brother.”
She nodded, wiping her eyes. “You want me to drive?”
“That’d be great,” he said. “Because I don’t have a car.”
AND SO THEY HAD A PLAN. Gavin went down below, pulled jeans and a shirt onto his damp, salty skin. He rowed them into shore. Instead of beaching the dinghy, he rowed under the footbridge into the creek, tied up at the steep steps. They walked up the stone steps to the path that led to Stevie and Jack’s. Nell picked up the car keys, and they climbed in.
She had to stop at Foley’s to ask Peggy to cover her for the lunch hour. Gavin was glad, watching her go through the paces of her everyday life, grounding her as they prepared to confront Charlie’s brother. The more Gavin learned about Cumberland, the more he suspected that Randy had been in New York on August 31. He wanted to ask Jeff what he knew about that.
Charlie’s father had the most to gain from his death. That was just a raw, immutable fact. If the father was anyone but Randy, Gavin would have dismissed it as unbelievable. But tigers don’t change their stripes, and Randy had been so greedy and so disinterested in his son at the time of his birth, he couldn’t believe he would have suddenly stopped caring about the trust fund scheduled to be paid to him on his eighteenth birthday.
“I’ll be just a minute,” Nell said.
“No problem,” Gavin said, following her inside.
The store looked like an old barn. Huge, drafty, it had been supplying provisions to Hubbard’s Pointers for generations. The gas pumps had been modernized, but that was about it.
Foley’s brought a whole new realm of memories back to Gavin. He’d come here with his grandmother when he was little. When he got older, he’d come with his friends on rainy days. They’d buy comic books, penny candy, and Mountain Dew. As teenagers, they’d go into the Hangout and play the jukebox and pinball machines.
The plank floors creaked with age. Gavin followed Nell to the soda fountain in back. He’d come here for lunch a thousand times. They made the best lemonade in the world. Sheridan had liked strawberry ice-cream sodas.
He walked over to a square table near the phone booth. Running his hand over the weathered surface, over all the initials that had been carved there over the years, he came to rest on the ones he’d put there himself, with his Buck knife, one rainy day a million years ago: GD + SR. They were black with age, but the message was still clear: Gavin Dawson and Sheridan Rosslare.
“Here are ours,” Nell said. She led him to a table across the room, pointed at a set of initials—not as black as his and Sheridan’s, but obviously weathered by a year or two of salt air. CR + NK.
“Charlie carved them?” Gavin asked, and Nell nodded.
Gavin knew they both loved Rosslares, and it made him feel even more bonded to the young woman.
“Nell.”
They turned around, and a red-haired girl stood behind them, holding a tray of food.
“Peggy, I was just coming to ask you to cover for me at lunch,�
�� Nell said.
“Sure,” she said, looking troubled. “But I have to talk to you. Let me just drop this off, okay?”
They watched her run over to a table, place the coffee and pancakes down, and return. She looked from Nell to Gavin and back.
“You’re the detective, right?” she asked.
“Yes,” Gavin said.
“I forgot, you haven’t officially met yet!” Nell said. “Peggy, this is Gavin Dawson. Gavin, this is my best friend, Peggy McCabe…”
“Bay McCabe’s daughter?” Gavin asked.
“Yep,” Peggy said.
“Tell her I say hi,” Gavin said.
“So, what’s up?” Nell asked.
“Okay. I’m just going to say it,” Peggy said. “Someone saw Charlie. Mark and Ally were on Oak Road, and they saw him coming out of a yard there.”
“A yard, on Oak Road?” Nell asked.
“That’s the part you find surprising?” Peggy asked. “Not the part about seeing Charlie alive in the first place?”
“Well,” Nell said, “not as much as you’d think. It’s not Charlie.”
“But Mark said!”
“Peggy, Charlie has a brother. And I’ve met him.”
“You’re kidding!” Peggy said.
“No,” Nell said. “They look so much alike, I couldn’t believe my eyes. And Oak Road…that’s where I was chasing him yesterday. That’s probably when they saw him, right?”
“They came in this morning, and the way they talked—they were so worked up—I had the feeling they’d just seen him,” Peggy said.
“It had to be yesterday, Peg,” Nell said. “Because that’s when Jeff was up there. He’d have no real reason to go back today.”
A customer called for a coffee refill, and Peggy said she’d be right there. But first she gave Nell a hurt look. “When were you going to tell me?” she asked. “That you met Charlie’s brother, that no one knew he had?”
“I’ve been running a little crazy,” Nell said. “But I planned to tell you at lunch today…”
“Okay,” Peggy said. “Whatever.”
