Buch lesen: «Rosie Thomas 3-Book Collection: Moon Island, Sunrise, Follies»

Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Prologue

The boat turned a fresh furrow of ripples in the flat water. Doug Hanscom opened up the outboard motor and set a course from his dockside moorings towards the mouth of the harbour. There was a midday haze today, not a fog but a thickness of heat and moisture in the air that almost blotted out the islands lying off at the edge of the bay. Their crests of spruce trees stood black and two-dimensional against the pearly sky.

Another boat was nosing towards him. It was Alton Purrit in the Jenny Any, with a half-dozen visitors he’d taken out to see the seals basking on the ledges at the tip of Duck Island. Alton raised his arm as they passed and called out, ‘Hope they’re crawlin’ right today, Doug.’

Doug nodded an acknowledgement. He was not noted for loquaciousness.

He turned towards the rocky teeth that guarded the south headland of the bay. The current ran viciously here and slapped collars of white foam against the rocks, but he negotiated the tideway without a thought. He had been a lobster man out of Pittsharbor, Maine for twenty years and he made the same run to haul his traps every morning. Today he had stopped first for hot coffee and a cherry muffin at the store on Sunday Street, and he could still taste the pleasant sweetness on his tongue. He was thinking that he could well have eaten another of Edie Clark’s muffins and at the same time began rummaging in the side pocket of his oil-stained pants. He took out his pipe and chewed on the stem, even though his daughter had long ago nagged him out of smoking it.

Beyond the headland the water was flat again. The first of his marked buoys floated here and he swung the tiller over and cut the engine to bring the boat alongside. There were gulls and cormorants standing sentinel on the rocks, and a dozen more made a slow circle over the buoys. Doug tilted his head to look at them and shrugged as he bent to work. The first trap he hauled was a good one. Two nice two-pounders, along with the dross of snails and hermit crabs.

The lobsters went into a tub of water in the stern and the rubbish was tipped back into the sea. The gulls widened their circle to glide overhead.

Doug manoeuvred his boat between the buoys, the stem of his pipe gripped between his teeth. The second trap was empty, but the sun was warm on his back, and he was dry and comfortable. He whistled as he worked, a sibilant ‘sss-sss’ that bubbled in the pipe.

He was leaning over the boat’s side to the third buoy when he noticed the woman’s body. It was the hair he saw first. It fanned out like fine weed, rippling gently in the current. She was hanging face down in the water, perhaps five feet below the surface.

Doug bumped down on to his knees, his hands fastening on the boat’s side as it rocked with his sudden movement. Looking again through the skin of the water he could see her quite clearly, it was no submerged log or trick of the light. Her pale shirt or vest, or whatever it was, ballooned lazily around her curved back.

The shock of seeing her had made his throat tighten and his heart bang in his chest, but now he began to breathe again. It was not the first drowning he had seen, nor did he imagine it would be the last.

With cold fingers he replaced the pipe in his pocket and groped beneath the thwarts for his boathook. Gently he fed the pole down into the water and tried to twist the hook in the loose cloth of her shirt. But his hands were not yet steady and the hook snagged, then jerked free. The body sank a foot deeper and Doug grunted with despair. If she went down any more he would lose her.

He waited a moment, gripping the hook in his right hand and bracing himself to hold steady against the boat’s rocking. Prickly sweat had broken out on his forehead and under his flannel shirt. Once again he lowered the boathook and drew wheezy breaths clogged with concentration as he tried to take a secure purchase on the clothing. He twisted the hook sharply and hoisted the pole. This time the body rose sluggishly but obediently. Doug eased it slowly closer, bending as far as he dared to meet it. When it hung a foot below the surface he knelt down again and reached with his left hand to grasp her arm. He let go of the boathook and the woman rolled over as he pulled her wrist towards him. Her head, then her face, broke the surface. The gulls circled closer over the boat.

Water streamed off her, plastering dark tendrils of hair across her features. She was not much more than a child. Perhaps fourteen or fifteen years old. Her eyes were closed and her lashes made delicate black crescents against her white skin. He could see no fish or crab damage yet, so she couldn’t have been in the water very long. But there was no question that she was dead.

Doug looked away. His granddaughter was pretty much the same age as this one. The difference was that he saw to it Stacy never went near the water without her lifejacket, and still he sometimes had bad dreams.

He raked among the gear stowed under the seat and found a good length of strong line. The waterlogged body was heavy and he didn’t think he could haul her in over the gunwale single-handed. To make her secure and tow her into the harbour was the best he could hope to do. He tied her wrist first to a cleat. Then the body bumped awkwardly against the hull as he struggled to pass more line under her arms and at one point the boat rocked so fiercely that he was afraid they would capsize. He waited until it steadied again. Sweat ran down his face as he rolled her over and tightened his methodical knots around her chest.

A huge gull settled on the transom, its hooked beak pointing at him. He cursed briefly and waved his arm at it and the bird took off again. It drifted in an arc around the stern.

Doug saw the sailboat then. It was one of those lightweight fibreglass affairs the visitors liked to sail about the bay in, a Mirror dinghy or Heron, or some such thing. It had drifted into a narrow cleft in the rocks and now it was wedged there, banging its hull as the waves slapped against it. The mainsail flapped as the boom swung dismally from side to side.

It was more than possible that the girl hadn’t been out alone.

She was tied fast now. He checked the knots and let out a length of the line so that she would ride free of the rudder and outboard. Then he made the rope fast to the cleats inside the boat.

He pushed her away from the side, fired up the motor again and cast off from the mooring buoy. At low throttle he nosed towards the inlet. The weight behind him sagged in the water, as if greedy to pull him in beside it.

Doug Hanscom searched thoroughly among the rocks and weed. But there was no sign of anyone else, in the dinghy or in the water.

When he was convinced that the girl had been sailing alone he turned his boat again and made slow progress with the unaccustomed weight sloughing at his stern, back around the headland and into the mouth of the harbour.

One

The rain fell in a steamy curtain. It hissed into the sea and blurred the windows, and pounded out a drumbeat on the roofs and decks of the five houses. Unseen in the darkness, rivulets coursed down the beach steps and washed the day’s sand prints into miniature river deltas and estuaries.

The car windscreen washers swept plumes of water aside as John Duhane followed the unfamiliar road out towards the beach. The route from Pittsharbor to the bluff was narrow, twisting back on itself two or three times, and as he drove he hunched forward to try to see ahead through the downpour. A flicker of lightning hollowed the sky and an instant later a thunderclap shook the car. The echoes rolled overhead for long seconds and the rain beat harder.

‘Great,’ Ivy sighed. ‘Just great.’

She sat slumped in the seat beside her father, twisting her body away from him even though the seat-belt bit into her bare neck.

‘It’s only a summer storm.’

In the back seat May said nothing at all. She hadn’t spoken for more than an hour, since they had passed Bangor and turned towards the coast.

They had driven all the way up from New York, stopping for a night to stay with John’s sister. May was tired of the journey and of Ivy’s sulking, but even so she was not looking forward to their arrival at the beach house. Everything would be the same as it always was, except that it would go on being the same in a different place. How could a family vacation be anything of the kind if there wasn’t a family to live it; if there were only a father and two daughters who didn’t get on?

May leant her head against the window of the station-wagon and closed one eye, squinting so the smears of rain blurred and shimmered into rainbow fragments against the lights of the last houses on the road out of Pittsharbor.

Elizabeth Freshett Newton stood in the window of her house up on the bluff. This was the evening room, that was what her mother had called it. It faced north and west, away from the beach and the ocean, and overlooked part of the sheltered pocket of garden, which had once required the full-time efforts of a man and a boy to maintain in the English style favoured by her mother. Elizabeth’s parents had liked to entertain in the evening room, where blinds filtered the setting sun and brightened squares of pattern in the old rugs. She remembered bridge evenings, and impromptu piano recitals on the baby grand that still stood between the two tall windows. The memories of those parties of fifty years ago made the house seem the more empty and silent now.

The lamp at her shoulder shone on the window glass and made broken reflections in the wash of rain. Aware that her silhouette against the light would be visible to anyone outside, she reached up and clicked off the switch. There was no one out there to see her, of course, but she felt easier in the dark. Until the sudden crack of thunder came the only sounds were the measured ticking of the long-case clock and the rain. Her hand held the cord of the curtains, ready to draw them and close out the storm. Then she leant forward, peering into the dark. The headlights of a car were veering slowly along the road.

Elizabeth stood still. The beam of the lights came closer and swept across her windows, before turning towards the gateway of the Captain’s House. She heard the engine stop and through the drumming of the rain a car door slammed.

Another sheet of lightning ripped the sky. In its split-second eerie brilliance she saw a girl, running, with her shoulders hunched and one arm crooked over her bent head in an attempt to shield herself from the storm. The flash froze her into immobility and left the image burning behind Elizabeth’s eyes.

The thunder crashed again. Elizabeth’s hand had flown up to her mouth, but as the darkness resettled she let it drop. She waited for her heart to stop pounding with shock.

It wasn’t the same girl.

It was someone else, just another girl of a similar age and build. The Bennisons had rented the old house out for the season and these were the summer tenants, that was all.

Two or three years ago Sam Bennison had laid out fancy garden lighting along the path to the Captain’s House and now these little flares suddenly shone out, lighting up sopping-wet billows of overgrown foliage. The back door of the house stood open and two girls were trailing mournfully back to the car, their hair already draggled and soaking. The lights picked out their T-shirts and denimed legs and big white sneakers. A man gave each of them an armful of luggage from the open back of the station-wagon and they trooped back to the house.

The younger girl was indeed in her early teens, just like Doone. She was stocky, too, with the same shoulder-length hair. Otherwise, Elizabeth now saw, there was no real resemblance.

She turned away from the window, leaving the curtains open.

May dumped her bag on the bed in the bedroom Ivy had not chosen. Then she sat down beside it and looked around her.

The bedhead was made of curly wrought iron, kind of French-looking, May thought, although she had no idea what a French bed might really look like. There was a pine bureau with a framed mirror screwed to the wall above it, an armchair with a worn slipcover and a set of bare shelves. Beside the bed lay a blue and grey rag rug hiding, as she saw when she pushed it aside with her foot, a burn mark in the haircord carpeting. The walls were wood panelled and painted a greyish white that reminded her of a bird’s egg. There were sticky-tape marks on the panelling showing where someone else’s pictures had once been fixed.

Except for the faintly exotic bed, the room looked what it was – a bare shell in a beach house, stripped ready for a summer’s rental. A smell of dust and salt was trapped inside the closed windows.

But there was also a forlornness about it, which went beyond mere emptiness. It made May shiver. Or maybe she was cold because her hair and T-shirt were wet from the rainstorm. She hugged herself and tried with numb fingers to rub some warmth into her arms.

Ivy pushed open May’s door with the toe of her sneaker. She came in without waiting to be asked and leant against the door frame. ‘You going to sit there all night?’

May shrugged.

Her sister sighed and her pretty top lip lifted. Once, at school, May had heard an older girl describing Ivy. ‘She’s drop-dead gorgeous, of course,’ the girl had whispered in what had seemed a knowing, adult way. Ivy was just eighteen and May fourteen. She supposed that Ivy was gorgeous, if you went for that sort of thing. She also knew that she herself was anything but.

Ivy said in her condescending way, ‘Look. We’re here, aren’t we? Can’t you try and be half-way happy about it?’

‘Yeah, all right. I notice you’ve been Miss Sunshine since we left home.’ And without waiting for Ivy to answer she got up and went to the window. After a small struggle she pushed up the sash and leant her elbows on the sill. Needle points of rain drove into her face, but the storm was already passing. Patches of faintly paler sky showed in places through the ragged masses of cloud.

‘Dad’s sending out for pizza,’ Ivy said to her sister’s back.

‘I don’t want any.’

‘Why not? Are you on another of your diets?’

‘Is that any of your business?’

‘Jesus. Suit yourself,’ Ivy snapped. She went away, slamming the door.

Left alone again, May moved slowly around the room. Lightly, with the tips of her fingers, she touched the exuberant metal curves of the bedhead, and the empty bookshelf, and the faintly splintery grooves of the panelling next to the bed, then circled with her forefinger and thumb the worn knob of one of the bureau drawers. There was a distant, fluctuating, deep-throated sound, which she only now identified as waves breaking on the beach.

The sad room seemed to enclose her, embedding her within itself in a way that was almost comforting. She sank down again on the bed. Sitting motionless, with her arms hanging between her parted knees, she let her mind wander.

‘May? Can you hear me?’

She became aware that her father had been calling from downstairs for some time. She stood up reluctantly and went to the door. Yeah?’

‘What’s the matter with you? Will you get down here?’

‘Yeah. Right, I’m just coming.’

Ivy dropped a fistful of cutlery on to the table. In the low, L-shaped downstairs room were chairs and two battered chesterfields, and a television set at one end of the long arm, and the heavy old oak table with a collection of unmatched dining chairs at the other. Even with all the lights on, the corners of the room remained obstinately shadowed. There was a yawning hearth with a stacked log basket beside it and the stone chimneypiece was blackened with smoke. The room still smelt of the driftwood smoke, as if the walls and beams were ingrained with it. In the wall facing the sea was a set of new-looking french doors, flanked by the original small-paned windows.

The unmodernised kitchen was in the short section of the L. John opened and banged shut cupboard doors as he searched for plates and glasses. Two pizza boxes stood unopened on one of the worktops. ‘There must be some goddamn glasses somewhere.’

The steep stairs rose straight up from the back of the room. Surprisingly the banister rails were carved with leaves and flowers.

May drifted down and hesitated beside the table. ‘How old is this place?’ she asked, looking around.

‘Pretty old,’ John answered, pleased by her question. ‘The original house was built sometime in the eighteen-fifties, by the captain of a whaling ship. Which is why it’s called the Captain’s House. Probably it was just this room and the bedroom above. The rest was added later.’

Under her breath Ivy made a small, dismissive sound, ‘Tchuh,’ to show she couldn’t care less about the house or its history, or about being here at all.

John found the glasses in the last cupboard. ‘Let’s eat, shall we?’ he said patiently.

They sat at the oak table, wide spaces between them. Ivy opened her pizza box and began to eat the doughy triangles straight out of it, ignoring the plate she had laid. A thread of cheese looped out of her mouth and she caught it with a silver-varnished little fingernail and pushed it between her pursed-up lips. Ivy could make even such an inelegant manoeuvre look cute and sexy.

May felt hungry enough to have wolfed down Ivy’s entire pizza and her father’s as well. But the waistband of her jeans bit into the solid slab of her belly and the stiff fabric dug into the creases of her thighs. She ate fruit and some plain crackers from the box of supplies they had brought up from the city. She cut the pieces up small and ate very slowly, as the plump mother of one of her friends had once told her they were advised to do at WeightWatchers.

Ivy left two-thirds of her dinner. The mozzarella solidified into a greasy waxen mass around the chunks of mushroom and pepperoni. Even so, May still eyed it covetously.

‘We’ll do the marketing tomorrow,’ John said. ‘It’ll help us to find our way around.’

‘Great,’ Ivy said without inflexion. She tipped her left-over food into the garbage pail, meticulously removing the traces of her own dinner and touching nothing else. ‘Mind if I go upstairs now?’

The taut thread of John’s patience finally snapped. ‘For Christ’s sake, Ivy, couldn’t you sit here with us for five more minutes? You know, family together time? Talking. Sharing things, the three of us?’

Ivy only stared at him. ‘Fantasy,’ she murmured. ‘I told you all along.’

John stumbled to his feet as if he might hit her.

‘Don’t you,’ Ivy breathed. ‘Don’t you ever.’

There was a silence. He had come close to it sometimes, after Ali had gone, but he never had hit either of them.

Ivy went briskly up the stairs. After a minute they heard music thudding out of her room. May sat still at the table, her bottom lip stuck out in a mixture of embarrassment and depression. John went back into the kitchen with the plates. He stacked them in the dishwasher and rubbed down the counter-top with a folded cloth. Then he poured himself a Jack Daniels. There was no ice yet.

Looking at him, May noticed dejection in the slope of his shoulders. Her father was a big man, broad-backed and still dark with only a few feathers of grey showing in his hair, but in her eyes he suddenly appeared smaller and weaker, the way he might turn out to be when he was really an old man. Although what she actually wanted was to hold back and keep herself safe inside the confines of her own skin, she made herself put her arms around his waist and rest her head on his chest.

‘It will be all right. Ivy’ll get over being mad because you wouldn’t let her stay in the city all summer. We’ll have a good time up here, I know we will.’

The warmth of her gesture was contradicted by a much stronger impulse, which kept her body stiff, micromillimetres removed from him, all the way from her forehead to her knees.

‘I guess so.’

He patted her shoulder and she stepped back in relief. ‘I think it’s stopped raining,’ she offered.

John tilted his whiskey glass in the direction of the doors.

‘Want to come out on the beach? Take a walk before bed?’ Slowly, May shook her head. Knowing that she should have accepted and returned his peace gesture, she wanted more urgently to be on her own in the melancholy stillness of the new bedroom, to lie on the European bed and lose herself in a book.

‘I’m pretty tired tonight. I’ll come tomorrow, okay?’

‘Okay.’ He smiled at her.

He refilled his whiskey glass and opened the door to the beach. As he slid the screen aside and stepped out on to the deck a blast of salt-laden wind hit him full in the face. He shivered and lifted his head. There was a covered porch and sandy wooden steps led down from it to an expanse of soaking grass. John walked carefully, waiting for his eyes to grow accustomed to the dark. Rainwater drenched his ankles. Glancing up, he saw a wan moon momentarily revealed by flying clouds.

At the far end of the rough patch of garden was another deck, and a heavy wooden post and rail fence on the seaward side. When he reached it John saw that the fence ran along the top of a low wall of rock. On the other side was a short drop down to the beach. The tide was out and he caught the windborne reek of low water. Only a few years ago he couldn’t have stopped the girls from racing out here to explore, even in the wet darkness. Now the deadness of their indifference weighed them all down.

A gate in the fence gave on to a short flight of rough wooden steps. He took a long pull of whiskey and descended to the beach. Crescents of coarse sand lay between patches of shingle. The stones grated beneath his deck-shoes as he crossed to the water’s edge. Ahead, across the mouth of the little bay, he could see the black hump of an island. John knew from the realtor’s description that this was Moon Island. And so the sheltered beach that faced it was known as Moon Island Beach. On the map it was just one of the dozens of bays and inlets that fretted this part of the Maine coastline.

He stared out towards the island until his eyes smarted in the wind. Then he swung south and began to walk the curve where the waves ran out in murky lacings of foam. Up on the bluff the Captain’s House lay directly behind him. There were four other houses overlooking the sheltered bay, strung in a line to his left. From down here their roofs and gables looked gothic and sinister against the storm clouds, but the lighted windows made cosy little squares of glowing amber.

The tide had turned. A seventh wave ran over his feet and soaked his shoes. He swore and directed his path further up the beach.

Back in the spring John had suggested to his daughters that they should share a last, proper summer vacation before Ivy went to college in California. He had in mind that he would teach the two of them to sail, and they would picnic and barbecue and take cycle rides together along the coastal paths. He and his sister Barbara had enjoyed just such a holiday with their parents thirty years ago.

The girls had protested. But in the end, in their different but equally reluctant ways, they had agreed that they would come.

John had written at once to the local realtors and almost by return, from Pittsharbor, they had received the details of the Captain’s House. It sounded perfect. The house was old and picturesque. The beach was partly sandy, unusually for this section of the coast, and private except for a short length at the southern end. One of the bluff houses was occupied year-round by local people, the others had been owned or rented by the same families for years. Pittsharbor was a pretty fishing town with a thriving artists’ colony. It was busy in the summer season but not yet spoilt.

The woman realtor had been quite direct. ‘It’s an unusual opportunity,’ she told John on the telephone. ‘We almost never get one of these houses becoming available for a summer let. The Bennisons have owned the Captain’s House for – oh, let me think – it must be ten years now. They’re doctors, from Chicago. I’m sorry to say that last summer their daughter, their only child, was tragically killed in an accident up here. The family haven’t yet decided whether or not to sell the house. We have been instructed to find a suitable tenant for the place for this season only.’

‘I see. That’s very sad,’ John said. ‘But I think we’ll take the house. It sounds just what we want.’

The whiskey glass held in the crook of his arm was empty now and he had reached the southernmost end of the beach. There were sailing dinghies and little rowboats beached here, tethered at the extremity of anchor chains that ran from concrete blocks half-buried in the sand. The running tide was just lapping at the bow of one of the dinghies, a fourteen-footer with a white tarpaulin cover that shone in the dark.

A flight of stone steps cut in the sloping headland led from the public part of the beach in the direction of the Pittsharbor village road. John retraced his path up the beach towards the Captain’s House.

The wind had dropped and the house was silent. He turned off the downstairs lights and went slowly up the steep stairs. The girls’ rooms were in darkness, their doors firmly closed. His ears sharpened in the stillness and he heard the old timbers overhead shift and creak, as the house settled itself after the storm.

In the sunshine next morning Leonie Beam stood at the top of the steps and surveyed the beach.

Marian, her mother-in-law, was wading into the sea. Her faded cotton skirt was tucked up out of the water, tight across her generous backside. She was wearing a rakish straw hat and a crumpled white smock, and there was a fat, naked baby hoisted astride one hip.

The sky was pearly, washed by the night’s rain. On a patch of sand scraped by the receding tide Marian and Leonie’s husband Tom had already laid out the day’s paraphernalia. There were canvas chairs and a pair of parasols with their white cotton fringes teased by the breeze off the water, sand toys and beach bags and rubber rings, and a rug spread for the babies.