“Oh, my God,” Julie said. “It’s still here.”
We all sat down on the ground, and Carter and I helped sweep the sand away with our hands, while Julie worked with the shovel and Jim held the lantern balanced on his knee. Soon the top of the box was completely exposed, and Julie dug her fingers around the lid on one side while I did the same on the other.
Julie looked at me across the box. “One, two, three,” she said, and we lifted the lid together, sending a fine dusting of sand onto the objects below.
Carter reached into the bread box, and I wanted to stop him. This was Julie’s box of treasures. I wanted her to be able to do this herself.
Ruth seemed to read my mind. “Wait, Carter,” she said. “Let Julie do it, since it’s really her box. Then maybe she’ll let you use it for some of your own toys and things in the future.”
Julie nodded her thanks to Ruth. “Of course, I’ll let you use
it,”
she said to Carter. “After tonight, it will be yours.”
“Oh, good!” Carter folded his hands in his lap. What a nice kid.
I could see how hungry Julie was to dig through the old remnants of her life, but I had to go to the bathroom and that was all I could think about. I wished the antibiotics would kick in and knock the infection on its rear. I was about to tell everyone I needed to leave, when Julie suddenly let out a squeal. She reached into the box and pulled out a tiny leather baby shoe. It had probably been white at one time; in the lantern light it took on a yellowish-orange glow.
“Omigosh,” Julie said. “I found this in the shallow water where Grandpop used to keep his killie trap.” She looked across the open box at Ethan and smiled. “And where Ethan kept his marine laboratory.”
Ethan laughed. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I forgot about that.”
“Did your microscope still work after I…you know?” she asked him, and I could tell the question had an esoteric meaning known only to the two of them.
“It was fine,” Ethan said.
Julie reached into the box again. “And look at this!” she said, pulling out an old record, a forty-five. She held it under the splash of light from the lantern and laughed. “Neil Sedaka. ‘Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen,’” she said. “I don’t know where I picked that up.”
I had to interrupt. “I’m afraid I need to use the bathroom,” I said, getting to my feet. “I’ll go over to Ethan’s and be back in a min—”
“Use ours,” Ruth said, nodding toward the house. “Go ahead.”
“Thanks,” I said. I walked up the two steps to the porch, pushed open the screen door, then raced down the hallway toward the bathroom, leaving my sister’s yelps of discovery behind me.
Julie
S
ifting through that box was the strangest thing. I was glad for the poor lighting in the backyard, because my eyes were misty and I didn’t want anyone to notice. I felt sympathy for the lonely girl who’d tucked meaningless objects away, longing for a mystery to solve. She’d never imagined the real, unwanted mystery that would await her midway through that summer. Picking out the scraps of old cloth, the dented Ping-Pong ball, the baby shoe, I became aware as never before that I had indeed been a mere child, a twelve-year-old with little concept of real danger. The only scary things I’d known about were from my Nancy Drew books, where the heroine always prevailed in the end.
Something caught my eye in the bottom corner of the bread box, tucked beneath another record and a piece of cloth. It couldn’t possibly be what I thought it was.
“Could you move the lantern a little closer, please, Jim?” I asked.
The circle of light fell into the box, and there it was. Red and purple, as I remembered it. I reached into the corner and pulled out the small plastic giraffe.
“I never put this in here,” I said, quite certain that was the truth.
“What is it?” Ethan asked, leaning closer. I could feel his breath against my bare shoulder.
“A toy,” I said. “A giraffe. Isabel and Ned used to—”
“That was Ned’s,” Ethan interrupted me. “Our uncle gave it to him. He gave us both one. Mine was an elephant. It’s a puzzle.” He reached for it.
“A puzzle?” I was confused. “I thought it was just a token they used to pass between each other.”
“Who did?” Ethan examined the giraffe. “Ned and your sister?”
I nodded.
“I’m not sure how this one works,” he said. He was manipulating the giraffe’s tail and neck; I had never even realized the toy had moving parts. Suddenly the red and purple halves of the giraffe sprung apart, and I laughed out loud.
“They must have sent
notes
to each other in the giraffe!” I said. “I never guessed.”
Ethan held the halves of the giraffe beneath the lamplight.
“It looks like there’s a note in here right now,” he said.
Lucy
I
finished in the bathroom and walked into the dimly lit hallway. I was standing next to the screened front door when I heard laughter out on the road. I turned to look, but it had grown so dark that I could barely make out the group of small, giggling children as they ran down the street. I couldn’t have said how many there were or if they were boys or girls, but watching them, I began once again to remember the night Isabel died, and for a moment, Julie and her Nancy Drew box were forgotten.
I remembered waking up alone in the attic that night, determined not to scream. I remembered my frantic race down the pull-down stairs and the way they’d shivered under my light weight. But I had not gone immediately to my parents’ room and then to the couch to sleep, as I’d previously recalled. First,
I’d gone to the back porch to find Julie. I’d looked in the direction of the bed at the end of the long porch, but it had been too dark to see if anyone was there.
“Julie?” I’d called.
There’d been no answer and the darkness had felt suffocating to me. I could hear the water lapping against the bulkhead, and the croaking of a frog joined the nighttime music of the crickets. I was aware of the woods outside the screens to my right, but I couldn’t see the trees for the darkness, and the thought of what might be lurking out there made me turn and run back into the living room and then down the hall.
That’s when I stood outside my parents’ door, listening to my mother’s breathing. I’d thought of pulling the cushions from the sofa, setting them on the floor outside her room to sleep there, as close as I could get to her. But before I could act on that idea, I realized I needed to use the bathroom. I walked quietly down the short hallway, comforted by the sound of my grandfather’s snoring from the front bedroom he shared with Grandma. The screen door leading to the front yard was in front of me, the main door held open by a heavy iron doorstop shaped like a Scottie dog. It was as dark on the other side of that door as it was in the hallway. I hated that we never locked the doors at night. Oh, the screen door was secured by one of those flimsy hook-and-eye locks, but that had offered me little peace of mind once I realized how easily it could be foiled.
I turned on the light in the small bathroom, glad to finally be able to see everything. I urinated, not bothering to flush because I didn’t want to awaken anyone and have to explain what I was doing downstairs at that hour. I turned off the light and quietly left the room. To my right, the hallway leading back to the liv
ing room looked dark and foreboding, so I stood by the screen door as I waited for my eyes to adjust again to the darkness.
Outside, I saw a flicker of light through the woods, somewhere near the road. I thought at first it was a firefly, but the tiny light burned bright orange and I quickly realized it was a cigarette. I watched the light arc and sway as the shadowy person carrying the cigarette walked along the dirt road in the direction of our house. I smiled in relief.
Isabel.
She was probably walking home from Pam’s or Mitzi’s, enjoying one last smoke before she had to come in. But how did she expect to get in with the lock on the door? I thought it was her good fortune that I happened to be there.
I lifted the lock with my finger and was about to push the door open when the shadowy image and its cigarette continued down the road, past our sidewalk, past our driveway. I slipped the lock back into the eye. It was not Isabel after all. I lost sight of the person, but the light of the cigarette continued to burn, making a sharp angle in the air as the smoker turned to walk up the Chapmans’ driveway.
Julie
“I
t’s too dark to read it out here,” I said, carefully unfolding the small sheet of paper I’d removed from the front half of the giraffe. “I’m not even certain there’s any writing on it.”
Jim moved the lantern closer to my hands, but Ethan touched my shoulder.
“Let’s take it back to my house,” he said. “We’ve taken up enough of the Kleins’ time.”
I sensed his concern. He knew that a note written by my dead sister or his dead brother was sure to elicit emotions he didn’t want to share with his neighbors.
“Oh, but this is fun,” Ruth said, obviously curious about what we’d found.
“Probably just a love note from my brother to Julie’s sister,” Ethan said. “Not fit for the PG-13 crowd.” He got to his feet.
I tucked the paper back into the giraffe, holding the red and purple halves of the toy together as Ethan helped me up. Jim and Ruth stood, as well, but Carter remained seated next to the buried bread box, still peering inside it, although without the lantern light I was certain he could see little. I guessed he was thinking about the wonderful treasures he could bury there himself.
The screen door squeaked open as Lucy left the porch and rejoined us in the yard.
“Thank you so much for the tour,” I said to the Kleins. “And Carter, the treasure box is all yours now.”
“Awesome!” he said, getting to his feet.
“Thank Julie,” Ruth instructed him.
“Thank you,” he said.
“You’re very welcome.” I looked at Ruth and Jim. “And thanks for letting us dig up your yard.”
“Sure.” Jim grinned, his face ghostly in the lantern light.
“Please feel free to come over anytime,” Ruth said.
We walked between the two houses to get to Ethan’s front yard. I held on to Lucy’s arm.
“We found this old plastic giraffe in the Nancy Drew box,” I told her. “There’s a piece of paper in it. Ned and Isabel used to use it to send notes to each other. But the weird thing is, I am ninety-nine point nine-percent sure I never put it in the box.”
Lucy was quiet. As Ethan pushed open his front door, she whispered in my ear, “I remembered something about the night Isabel was killed,” she said.
“What?” I whispered back, uncertain why we were being stealthy.
She didn’t answer me.
“What?” I asked again, and she shook her head quickly.
“Later,” she whispered, and I knew better than to push her; she must have had her reasons for keeping her memory from Ethan.
We followed Ethan out to his porch, where he turned on the floor lamp, flooding the table with light.
“Let’s take a look at that paper,” he said, as the three of us sat down.
I opened the giraffe and the folded piece of paper fell out. Carefully I flattened it on the tabletop. It was a note, written on what looked to be half a sheet of pale pink stationery, its one edge ragged, torn on an angle. The writing had faded to a bleached bluish purple, but I recognized it instantly.
“It’s Izzy’s writing,” I said. Isabel had had a distinctive, rounded handwriting that had gotten her into trouble with the nuns in catechism class.
I read the note aloud.
“You are a decietful pig and I hate you,”
I read.
“I can’t wait to tell my father everything. He adores me and you can bet he will kill you.”
The three of us were quiet, letting the words sink in.
Ethan was first to speak, his voice a tired whisper. “Damn,” he said. “She and Ned must have been on the outs.”
I thought of telling him my suspicion about Ned’s involvement with Pam, but before I could speak, I realized that Lucy was crying.
“Oh, honey.” I put my arm around her, guessing that she was moved and shaken by seeing a note from our sister. But that was not it.
“I remembered something,” she said, to both of us now.
Ethan pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to her, and she pressed it to her eyes.
“The night Isabel died,” she said, “I woke up alone in the
attic. I was afraid and came downstairs, looking for you—” she spoke to me “—but of course, I couldn’t find you, since you’d gone out in the boat. I went to the bathroom, and when I came out, I happened to look toward the road and I saw someone out there. I saw the burning tip of a cigarette. I thought it was Isabel at first, walking home from one of her girlfriends’ houses. But then the person walked right past our house and up your driveway.” She looked at Ethan.
Ethan closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. We were all quiet for a moment.
“I feel sick,” he said finally.
“Did Ned smoke?” Lucy asked.
Ethan nodded without opening his eyes. “Like a chimney.”
“I’m sorry, Ethan,” I said.
“It still doesn’t make sense, though.” Ethan opened his eyes and looked at the note again as if he might be able to read between the lines. “What does this mean? How did he deceive her?” He shook his head with a stubborn resolve. “I still refuse to think that Ned was capable of killing anyone.”
“I think he was seeing Pam Durant on the side,” I said.
“Why do you say that?” he asked.
I told him the reasons for my suspicions—George possibly spotting Ned and Pam together on the boat, Mitzi’s suggestion that they would start dating after Isabel’s death, and how Ned had turned to Pam for comfort.
“Isabel probably found out,” I suggested. “She wrote him this note. He met her on the platform at the bay and they argued and he…”
“Maybe it was an accident,” Lucy said kindly. “He didn’t mean to kill her.”
“Things don’t add up,” Ethan said. “I mean, to begin with, Ned told you to tell Isabel he couldn’t meet her that night.”
“But remember, he called her at Mitzi’s to say he might be able to.”
Ethan looked surprised. “I don’t think I ever knew that,” he said.
“How did the note end up in your Nancy Drew box, of all places?” Lucy asked.
“I have no idea,” I said. “They used me as a messenger, giving me the giraffe to pass between them, but I never realized it was a puzzle. Something they could hide notes in. And maybe I…I have no memory of this at all…but maybe I
did
stick it in the box and don’t remember doing it.”
“Or maybe Ned put it in there thinking you’d find it and realize what had happened and turn him in,” Lucy said. “Maybe he felt guilty but couldn’t bring himself to admit what he’d done.”
“Wait a minute,” Ethan said. “He had an
alibi.
He was in our yard with my father.”
“Ethan.” I rested my hand on his forearm. “Did it ever occur to you that your father was just trying to protect him? That he made up the alibi for him?”
Ethan shook his head. “He wouldn’t do that,” he said, but I thought he was only saying what he longed to believe.
I don’t think any of us slept that night. Next to me, Ethan tossed and turned. I was haunted, not so much by what Isabel had written or by the realization that Ned was probably responsible for her death, because this was not a surprise to me, but by seeing Izzy’s handwriting. By seeing that part of her, still so alive all these years later. Seeing the rounded
a
’s and the mis
spelling of
deceitful.
The misspelling made me want to cry. It humanized my big sister and made her seem so young and guileless.
Over breakfast the next morning, Lucy suggested we leave the shore early, drive home and pay a visit to our mother to tell her about the note before giving it to the police.
“I don’t think we need to tell her,” I argued. “You know she hasn’t been herself lately, and this would only upset her more.” I knew I was protecting myself, as well. I didn’t want to talk to my mother about Isabel any more than I had to.
“I know it’ll upset her,” Lucy said, “but that’s inevitable, and I want to keep her abreast of things. The less she learns from the police instead of from us, the better.”
“I think Lucy’s right,” Ethan said. “And as soon as the cops see this note, they’re going to want to talk to my father again. I can’t believe, though, that he would have lied about where Ned was that night.”
“Maybe he wasn’t lying,” Lucy offered. “Maybe he was just off on his timing. Give him a chance to explain.”
Ethan looked toward the canal and the heavy Saturday-morning boat traffic. “Damn,” he said, more to himself than to us. “I wish Ned were here to tell us what really happened.”
“Me, too,” I said.
I dropped Lucy off at her house in Plainfield, and we agreed to meet at Mom’s that afternoon when she got home from McDonald’s. By the time I turned onto my street in Westfield, I felt a mixture of deep sorrow and vindication. I had been right about Ned all this time. I wished George Lewis were alive. I wished I could hug him, tell him how sorry I was that I had not
been more capable of proving Ned’s guilt when I was twelve years old.
I slowed down as I neared my house, surprised to see cars crowding my driveway, spilling out into the street. One of them was Shannon’s car. The rest were unfamiliar to me, and with a sense of betrayal and disappointment, I realized that Shannon had taken advantage of my weekend away to use the house for a party, one that had apparently continued overnight and late into the next morning. Perhaps she planned for it to run the entire weekend.
I had to park in front of my neighbors’ house, since there was no room in front of my own. I walked into the house, greeted by the overwhelming stench of stale beer and possibly marijuana, although that might have been my imagination. Teenagers were sleeping on my living room furniture as well as on the floor. One girl lifted her head from the sofa when I walked in.
“Where’s Shannon?” I asked, barely able to control my anger. I could feel my face and neck redden with it.
“Shannon who?” the girl asked. “Oh, the girl who lives here?”
“Yes,” I said through my gritted teeth.
“I think she’s upstairs.”
I marched upstairs and into Shannon’s room, where I found two blond girls sleeping together, one of them nude, their arms wrapped around each other. My fury mounted as I walked toward my own bedroom. I threw open the door to find my daughter and Tanner in my bed. Tanner was asleep, but the noise of my entry apparently awakened Shannon. She sat up quickly, pulling the sheet against her chest, her long hair tangled over her bare shoulders.
“Mom!” she said.
I threw my pocketbook down on my dresser. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I asked.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” she said, clutching the sheet tighter to her chest. She was speaking softly, as though she didn’t want to disturb Tanner. “People just kept showing up,” she said. “I’m really sorry. We were going to clean everything up before you got home. Change the sheets and everything. And vacuum.”
I stared at her. Who
was
this child?
“I feel like I don’t know you,” I said. “What happened to the responsible girl I raised?”
“I
am
responsible,” she argued. “I planned to tell you what happened. About the party and everything. I didn’t expect you to come home yet.”
“That’s obvious,” I said. “You know what, Shannon? You are absolutely
not
moving to Colorado. I’m still your mother and I’m not going to let you live like this.” I waved my hand in Tanner’s direction. “And what kind of a man would sleep with you in your mother’s bed?” I asked. I couldn’t believe Tanner was actually sleeping through my tirade. He was probably awake and listening, but had decided it was best if he pretended otherwise.
“I am too going,” Shannon said.
“No, you’re not.”
She shook her head, an ugly expression on her otherwise beautiful face. “Sometimes I really hate you,” she said. I hadn’t heard those words from her since she was a four-year-old begging in vain for candy in the grocery store, but I didn’t flinch.
“I don’t care,” I said. “I’ll lock you in your room if I have to. I have to protect you.”
My voice broke on the word
protect,
and I began to cry. I sank onto the chair in front of my vanity dresser, burying my face in
my hands. I could hear her getting out of my bed, pulling on her clothes, but all I could think about was Isabel’s angry note hidden in the giraffe. Her fury in that note had not been directed at our mother, but it often had been in those days. I could remember her telling Mom that she hated her, and I wondered if my mother had felt as hurt and helpless as I did right now.
Shannon came to my side, wrapping her arms around me, and I leaned against her, aware—so aware—of her swollen belly beneath my cheek.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” she said. “I know I screwed up.”
I couldn’t speak. I sat there with Shannon’s arms around me. I remembered how hard my mother had tried to rein Isabel in and how spectacularly she’d failed. She must have been so scared to see her daughter slipping out of her control. Just as I was scared now.