Kiss River

by Diane Chamberlain

  Clay did not show up at Shorty’s during the lunch hour. Instead, Olivia Simon did. Gina didn’t recognize her at first. The woman standing inside the front door looked vaguely familiar, but Gina took her to be just another Shorty’s customer. She had only seen Olivia twice before, and one of those times had been at night on the dunes.

  Olivia stood near the cash register, refusing the seat one of the other waitresses offered her. Instead, she caught Gina’s eye and motioned to her to come over.

  “Hi, Gina,” she said. She must have seen the blank look in Gina’s eyes, because she offered her name. “Olivia Simon. Clay and Lacey’s stepmother,” she said.

  “Oh, Olivia, of course!” Gina said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t recognize you out of context.”

  “That happens to me all the time,” Olivia said. “I see people in the E.R., and then I see them later on the street and I don’t have a clue who they are.” She was so pretty. She had the loveliest green eyes and her skin was flawless.

  “What can I do for you?” Gina moved out of the way of a customer wanting to pay his check.

  Olivia looked past her toward the crowded tables. “I can see you’re very busy,” she said, “but I wanted to stop by and give you these.” She held out a grocery bag. Peering inside, Gina saw several cassette tapes.

  “What’s this?” she asked.

  “Alec told me that you’re a descendant of Mary Poor, right?”

  “Her great-granddaughter, yes.”

  “Well, my ex-husband, Paul, taped several interviews with her long ago. The plan had been to put together a booklet about the Kiss River light in order to generate funding to save the lighthouse. But the storm destroyed the lighthouse before the booklet was ever created, and after that, of course, it wasn’t needed. I’ve hung on to these tapes, although I don’t really know why. I guess you’re the reason.” She smiled. “I thought you might like to have them. To hear your great-grandmother’s voice.”

  Gina was touched. “That’s so nice of you,” she said. She had no tape recorder, but Lacey or Clay probably did. “I’ll listen to them and get them back to you.”

  “No, they’re yours to keep.” Olivia pushed the bag toward her. “I have no need for them.” She looked toward the back room. “I’ll stop in to say hi to Henry,” she said. “Then I have to get back to the E.R.”

  There were no other cars in the parking lot at the keeper’s house when Gina arrived home that afternoon. Inside the house, she poured herself a Coke, then carried it into the office to connect to the Internet and check her e-mail. Once online, her fingers automatically hit the right keys to take her to the parents’ support group.

  She noticed immediately that there were three times as many messages from the group as usual, and she saw the subject line repeated over and over again, in capital letters, with three exclamation points that marked the alarm of the parents.

  HYDERABAD CHILDREN MOVED TO STATE ORPHANAGE!!!

  God, no. “Rani,” she said out loud. “Rani.”

  She began reading the messages. As part of the crackdown on the private orphanages, many of the children were being moved to the state orphanage, a place known to be even more institutional than Rani’s current home. There would be crowds of children, with too little food perhaps, and not enough staff to give them proper care. A quiet, ailing wisp of a child like Rani would not stand a chance there. Gina plowed through the messages from the panicked parents, trying to see if Rani’s orphanage was one of those whose children had been moved, but she saw no mention of it. She didn’t dare write the question to the group. They would ask her why she had disappeared. Better to stay quiet.

  She logged off the Internet and picked up the phone on the desk, extracting her address book from her backpack at the same time. Her hand shook as she paged through the book for the phone number she needed, and she hoped it would be a while before Clay and Lacey got their phone bill. A call to India was not cheap.

  She recognized the taped outgoing message from Mrs. King. Gina had never met the woman, although she’d spoken to her on the phone several times. Certainly “Mrs. King” was an alias, and Gina was not sure if she was Indian or not. Her accent was faintly British. Her ethnicity didn’t matter, though. Her power did.

  “Leave a message after the tone,” Mrs. King said.

  “Hello, Mrs. King.” Gina heard the quaver in her voice. “I’m calling to let you know that I’ll have the money for you very soon. Very soon.” She shut her eyes. Would she? The panic rose up in her again. “Please, please make sure that Rani is not moved from her orphanage. I understand children are being moved to the state orphanage, and I’m sure you know that with her…special needs…that would be a terrible thing for her. Please do what you can to keep her where she is.” It was possible, she knew, that Rani’s orphanage might be shut down. “Or if she has to leave there, please be sure she goes someplace where she’ll be safe. I’ll have the money for you very soon. I promise.”

  She was barely able to put the phone back in its cradle, her hand was trembling so badly. She connected to the Internet and the support group again, reading and rereading the messages. There were other parents who had quietly dropped out of the support group as well; she had not been the only one. She wondered if they, too, lurked in the background, reading these messages in a panic as they struggled to pull their funds together. One hundred thousand dollars. That’s what Mrs. King demanded to get Rani safely out of India. Was that the same amount other parents were being asked to pay?

  The parents who still participated in the support group, who were either as frightened as she was right now, or content in the knowledge that their promised child was safe in another part of the country, all knew about Mrs. King. Everyone did, and most of those parents understood desperation, but they were not the type to go outside legal channels to get their children. They warned one another against resorting to the use of “baby brokers,” which is what they called Mrs. King.

  They’re fools, Gina thought. They’ll obey all the rules and end up with dead children.

  After she logged off the Internet, she sat very still in the desk chair. She felt frozen there, uncertain what to do next. What could she do? How much time did Alec need to “think about it”? Even if he agreed to help her, how long would it take to raise the lens? And even if the lens were raised and she could examine it, then what?

  She stood up quickly to stop her thoughts from racing. One step at a time. She should watch TV, or read a book, or do something to get her mind off the news from the support group. Then she remembered the tapes.

  She opened one of the desk drawers, then another and another, and finally found what she was looking for: a cassette player.

  Upstairs, she lay down on her bed and put in the tape marked “1.” The first voice she heard was that of a man. Olivia’s ex-husband, probably.

  “Just begin anywhere,” the man said.

  It was a moment before the woman spoke. Her voice quivered with age.

  “The Kiss River lighthouse was illuminated for the first time the night my husband Caleb’s father was born,” she said.

  Gina pressed her fist to her mouth. It was her great-grandmother speaking. Bess’s mother. How strange to hear her like this, across the years. She listened as the old woman described her life at the lighthouse, her life in this house. She talked about the incident with the two Germans who had pretended to be stranded Englishmen to get ashore, and she had some of the details wrong. Wrong enough that Gina smiled, listening to her. She wondered how many of the other details on these tapes were inaccurate. It didn’t matter though. It was a pleasure just to hear her speak, to know that she was, in some long-lost way, her family.

  Finally, Mary Poor spoke about her daughter, Elizabeth.

  “She was a wild girl,” Mary Poor said. “One of them girls who’s always out looking for trouble. She found it, too, I’m afraid. She found it more often than not.”

  CHAPTER 40

  Sunday, May 10, 1942

/>   4:00 a.m.

  My heart is broken in a million pieces and I don’t know what to do, besides cry. Which I am doing right now and may do for the rest of my life. And the one person I’ve turned to with my problems for the last month and a half is someone I can never go to with a problem again.

  Last night, I spied on Jimmy Brown, as I’d planned to do. I rode my bicycle to the beach about two miles north of Kiss River, where I knew his patrol would be. I was really scared, because the trail out to the beach there was not familiar to me and it was pitch-black out. I had a flashlight with me, but that just made it spookier, because it lit up the deep, dark trees as I rode. I could hardly breathe, I was so nervous. I’m not usually afraid of the dark or the woods. After all, I’ve been sneaking through woods by myself every night to see Sandy. But this was different, because I just didn’t know where that trail was going to turn or where the ruts would be or who or what might come running out of those trees.

  I could tell when I got real close to the beach from the way the waves sounded, and I left my bike in the woods and turned off my flashlight and walked as quietly as I could toward the beach. I didn’t see him at first, but I huddled down in the brush to wait, figuring he was walking up and down the beach and would show up soon. After a while, he did. He was on horseback, just slowly clip-clopping along the sand. When he’d ride out of my sight, I’d walk out on the beach and watch him from behind a dune. There was just enough of a moon so that I could see him and his horse. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. If he left his post on the beach, I guess that would be something suspicious. If he allowed someone to come out of the water onto shore, I would know for sure. That’s what I expected to happen, I guess. But although I watched him for over three hours, absolutely nothing unusual occurred and I was getting very tired, not to mention bored.

  I started back to Kiss River, and when I was close, I got the idea that I could see Sandy after all. I no longer felt that tired, and I thought it would be real fun to surprise him, since he wasn’t expecting me to come see him last night. So I left my bike by the lighthouse and started walking through woods that are more familiar to me and much less scary. I don’t even use my flashlight in those woods, I know them so well, but I carry it with me just in case. I was almost to the beach when I saw a light shining ahead and to the right of me, through the trees. I couldn’t imagine what it was. Nobody was supposed to be on the beach at night, and certainly not with a light. I stood stock-still on the path for a minute, watching to see if the light was blinking, like they do with Morse code, but it was just a small, steady beam of light. Sandy has a powerful flashlight, but he almost never uses it now that lights onshore are forbidden. Then I remembered the murderer, someone I haven’t thought about in weeks. My imagination started going wild. What if the murderer had killed Sandy and was holding the light on his body while he stole things from him or something?

  Anyhow, I walked real quietly down the path, although I don’t know how necessary it was for me to be quiet, since the ocean was rough and loud last night. I climbed up in my tree. I haven’t been up there since the night I met Sandy, but last night I thought I’d better hide up there and see what was going on before going straight out onto the beach.

  What I saw is still burned into my head. There was Sandy, pointing his flashlight out to sea. Not blinking it or anything. Just pointing it straight out. I thought maybe he was looking at something in the waves, but I must’ve known that wasn’t it, because I didn’t climb down the tree and go running out to him. I just sat and watched. I was remembering the time those Germans came onshore at Kiss River, when I held the flashlight steady so my father knew which way to go as he towed them in.

  After a few minutes, I saw something on the waves, and Sandy turned his flashlight off. Sure enough, it was a dinghy, like the one those Germans had been in, only this one had a small motor on it. I thought maybe this one had survivors from a torpedoed merchant ship, but I couldn’t see any flames out on the horizon or smell the burning smell that always blows onshore after a ship’s been hit.

  Sandy ran forward to help the men in the boat. There was just enough of a moon that I could see there were two of them. And then the thing happened that has changed everything. I heard Sandy call out to them, “Vee gates!” I was sure I’d misunderstood him. After all, the waves were crashing on the beach between me and him. But then I heard them talk back to him in very fast German, and I thought that Sandy wouldn’t possibly be able to understand what they were saying. But I was wrong. He started talking to them in German! The words came out of his mouth almost as fast as theirs did. When the men got out of the boat, I saw their German uniforms. They huddled with Sandy on the beach and talked quietly then, and Sandy handed them something in a big envelope, along with a bag of some kind.

  I couldn’t believe what I was seeing! I felt angry and hurt and just plain crazy. I got down from my tree and turned my flashlight right on the three of them. They turned to look at me, though I know they couldn’t make out who I was because of the flashlight being in their eyes.

  “Go, go!” Sandy yelled at them, and the men scrambled back into their boat and set out over the waves again. He turned to look at me. “Who’s there?” he asked.

  I turned the flashlight on my own face, and he laughed, but there was no mistaking the nervousness in the way he did it.

  “Bess!” he said. “I’m glad to see it’s only you. You scared me there for a minute.” He looked just like a little boy getting caught by his mother for doing something bad.

  I was thinking about the day I’d told him I knew a couple of phrases in German. He’d never said a word to me then about knowing a couple himself. A lot more than a couple, actually. Then I remembered how Sandy hated it when anyone called Germans Krauts. No wonder he’d been so upset when he heard that Mr. Hewitt had asked me to help him find the traitor. Well, I’d found him now. I started to get weepy as I walked toward him, because all my hopes and dreams were falling apart.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked me. “I thought you were going to stay home tonight.”

  “It doesn’t matter what I’m doing here,” I said. “What were you just doing with those Germans?”

  “Those guys?” He looked out to sea, where the dinghy had already disappeared in the darkness. “They weren’t Germans.”

  “Don’t lie to me, Sandy,” I said. “I saw their uniforms. I heard you talking in German to them. I saw you give them something.”

  Sandy rubbed his hands over his eyes. I wanted him to tell me I had misunderstood what I’d just seen. Instead he said, “You should never have spied on me.” His voice was not loud, but it was very, very angry. He didn’t sound nervous at all now, and I suddenly felt afraid of him. I felt like I didn’t know him, like he was a stranger. He could kill me out here in the dark. I backed away from him a step or two, but he grabbed my arm.

  “Have you been suspecting me of something?” he asked. “Is that why you snuck out here tonight? After lying to me about being tired?”

  He’d asked me so many questions all at once that I didn’t know where to begin to answer them. Besides, I didn’t owe him any explanations.

  “I’m glad I came out here,” I said. “I’ve discovered the truth about my boyfriend. He’s a goddamn spy.” I was trying to get my arm away from him, but he held it tight. I was truly scared, and what I really wanted to say was, “Please don’t hurt me,” but I didn’t want to sound that weak and afraid.

  “Don’t you dare say a word to Bud about this,” he said. His face was so close to mine that I could feel his breath against my cheek. “Don’t say a word to anyone.”

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked. I was crying, I think. He was hurting my arm, but my heart was hurting even worse.

  “For money, why else?” he said. “I’m getting millions from the Germans for what I’m doing,” he said. “I am going to be a very, very wealthy man.”

  He sounded so greedy. I suddenly remembered the night he told
me about how poor his family was, how he never got toys at Christmastime and how sometimes they didn’t have much to eat. A lot of money could make someone like that crazy.

  He twisted my arm harder. “Swear to me you won’t say anything to anyone about this,” he said.

  I know I should have just agreed to what he was asking, but I couldn’t. “I’m not going to stand by and watch while American seamen are being killed right and left,” I said.

  The next thing I knew, he had me pinned to the ground, my arm twisted behind me so hard I thought it was going to pop out of my shoulder. “Remember that man you found murdered right here on this beach?” he asked me.

  I nodded.

  “Well, he was the last person who snooped on me,” he said.

  I could hardly breathe. “You killed him?” I asked.

  “If you tell anyone, anyone, what you saw tonight, you’ll pay for it. And so will your parents, do you hear me? You may be willing to put your own life at risk for some stupid desire to serve your country, but are you willing to risk the lives of the people you love?”

  I loved you, is what I wanted to say, and I started crying harder.

  “Are you?” he asked me again. His knee was digging into my stomach. I shook my head no.

  He let go of my arm then, but still kept me pinned to the ground. “Look, Bess,” he said. He sounded more like the Sandy I knew then. “You’re in a lot of danger now. You need to leave here. Leave the Outer Banks. Get as far away as you can. And never talk to a soul about this.”

  “You still care about me,” I said. I couldn’t help myself. I felt joyous that he cared what happened to me, even if he was turning out to be traitorous scum.

  “You’re misunderstanding me,” he said. “All I’m saying is that, if you want to stay safe, if you want your family to be safe, you’d better go away.”