Stone Cove Island (17 page)

“I thought you might need it for school,” she went on. I was too flabbergasted to speak. For one thing, I had run into her one place or another almost daily since that afternoon in the diner. For another, she was pretending she hadn’t read the diary, which was absurd, because if she hadn’t, how did she know whose it was? And, since it had Willa Montgomery, not Eliza Elliot written on it, how could she think it was mine or a book for school or anything other than a diary?

I also was sure I had not left the diary at the diner. I had it with me that day, but as soon as Charlie arrived, I’d put it back in my bag. I had never set it down on the table or the seat next to me. She had to have taken it from my bag, either while she was sitting next to me in the booth—or, more likely, when I’d forgotten my bag on the seat, before I’d gone back for it.

Why had she kept it so long? And why was she lying to me right now? I could probably answer the second question. I cringed, imagining LB reading all the mean things about her my mom had written.

“We might need it back, at some point,” she added, almost as an afterthought.

“We?” I said, surprised.

“I’ll let you know if we do. Anyhoo.” She took a deep breath and turned away. “Enjoy the evening, you guys. Stay safe.”

Stay safe? At the dance? What did that mean?

Charlie and I walked outside where the chill air was a relief. The music receded to a distant bass throb. We leaned against the split-rail fence and looked up at the moon. It was big and low in the sky, a harvest moon.

“Pretty,” I said.

“That was weird, with the diary.”

“No kidding.” We had not been out there five minutes when Jimmy Pender strolled up. It suddenly felt as if every adult were here to chaperone just the two of us. He stood next to Charlie, looking up at the sky, rocked back on his heels, knees almost looking bent behind him.

Jimmy Pender was a tall man, very blond with stiff hair like a brush, and pinkish skin. Charlie’s brothers took after him. They had the same build and coloring. Charlie was thinner, darker haired, with looser joints and creamier skin. Tonight Jimmy was dressed as Davy Crockett, wearing a raccoon hat I hoped was fake but suspected was not.

“Hey, Dad,” said Charlie.

“Beautiful evening, eh, kids?” Jimmy turned to include me in his big, showman’s smile. He was always on. It seemed exhausting to me. “It’s all like déjà vu being here.”

“Yeah,” said Charlie. “I feel like I never left high school.”

“Me too, son. Though in my day, I remember we liked to throw our own parties. Didn’t spend much time at official
school functions.” Jimmy laughed. “How about getting us some punch?” he said to Charlie.

Charlie nodded okay, but flashed me a glance before he headed back inside. Jimmy and I stood together, not saying anything. To me, it seemed like he’d deliberately sent Charlie away, but he was silent.

“Great pumpkins this year,” I said. That was about the best I could come up with. Every year the inn held a carving contest, and Jimmy, as impresario, always awarded the prizes and carved a masterpiece of his own. He really was pretty good at it.

“Heard you had some trouble with your bike?”

“Yeah,” I said. I didn’t want him to think I thought he had anything to do with that, but I didn’t want to say anything about Paul. “It was stolen. Probably just as a prank,” I added hastily, not wanting to say anything bad about the island. “I got it back.”

“That’s good.” I got the feeling he was sizing me up, looking for information, but I had no idea what he wanted. “Your dad was here earlier. I asked him to run up to the inn for ice. It’s so damn hot in there we ran through it faster than expected.”

“Oh,” I said. I hadn’t even looked for my dad. So he’d gone to the inn. Did that mean he and Jimmy had patched things up? Or was Jimmy trying to show who was boss, sending him out on dumb errands? I doubted the punch even had ice in it to begin with. The thought annoyed me.

“What’s your costume?”

I started to say “Katniss.” He wouldn’t know the books, so I’d have to explain the whole story. The necklace my
mom had given me was itching my chest. I pulled it from under my T-shirt, ran my thumb along the bottom of the scripty word. It came out before I could stop myself. It was like one of those devilish elves from a dark fairy tale put the words in my mouth and they popped out of their own free will.

“Bess,” I said. “I’m here as Bess.” I held out the necklace, which was plenty bright and legible in the moonlight. His face went ashen, then red. His eyes narrowed and I saw a flash in them, the impulse, just for a second, to snap my neck. At the same moment, Charlie walked up, holding three plastic glasses half filled with red juice balanced in a triangle between his hands.

“Punch all around,” he said, handing the first one to me.

“Thanks. What flavor is it?” I had to force the steadiness into my voice.

“Uh. I don’t know. Red?” He handed the next glass to his father, who met his eyes with a calm, relaxed smile.

“Thanks so much,” Jimmy said. “I’d better get back inside, check on things. You know what they say, when the cat’s away …” I’d heard him make that joke a hundred times, usually around his Anchor Club buddies, implying he and his buddies would be doing the playing (the mice), while his Cat was away. Of course that wasn’t what he meant this time.

“You kids be good, now.” He was looking right at me. Then he turned abruptly and strolled back inside the barn. Charlie held up his cup, toasting me. I returned the gesture. I wanted to hug him instead. Jimmy was dangerous. But there was no way I could tell Charlie that. I rewound
the conversation in my mind and this time a particular line stood out:
We liked to throw our own parties
.

What kind of parties were those?
I thought.

“Charlie,” I said, dumping my punch into the grass. “I think we should go to The Slip. I want to see where Bess went that night.”

The Slip was the kind of place where any time of day felt like three in the morning. The crowd there wasn’t the kind to bother with Halloween dress-up. But ours weren’t terribly out there. Nobody even looked up when we walked in.

I had never been to a bar on the island. We all knew how strict they were, and besides, a fake ID wasn’t much use on an island where everyone knew exactly who you were and how old you were. But The Slip was out of our realm somehow. Besides being on the far side of the island, it was a dark place with no music—a hideaway for serious drinking, not dancing, fun or conversation. Everyone there looked like they had regular spots, regular orders, maybe even an indefinitely open tab. If there ever were out-of-towners, they were middle-aged men on fishing trips or on an overnight from the mainland, looking to party with their buddies. You wouldn’t go there on a date, and you wouldn’t go there as a high school girl alone. It had been that way since my parents were teenagers.

I didn’t think I would find any clues at The Slip, obviously. I just wanted to get a feel for what it would have been like for Bess, on a night where most of the island was somewhere else. I thought somehow if I were there I would be able to see through her eyes. Was she there with my dad and Jimmy? With Cat? Why had she left alone? What had happened between the four of them? There were enough reasons for any of them to be mad at her, jealous of her, but to kill her? I couldn’t imagine it.

The case was stronger for it to be some outsider, a random crime. But what if she’d received an anchor? What if it was someone from the island? I thought of the flash in Jimmy’s eyes when I’d showed him the necklace, that moment where I saw he wished me dead. He could control his impulses now, but what about then?

Charlie and I found a table in the back, near the jukebox and a pool table that had deep groves scratched into the felt from many nights of drunken misses. I felt a flutter of nerves as we settled in, but the bartender didn’t even seem to see us.

Eventually Charlie stood up, went over to the bar, and ordered two beers. The grizzled bartender served him without batting an eyelash.

“What are we looking for?” he asked, pushing the heavy pint glass toward me. The glass was warm, like it had just come out of the dishwasher, and the beer was warm too. I sipped some foam off the top. It tasted bitter and soapy. I pushed it aside, not wanting to drink anymore.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just wanted to see what she saw that night.” I realized it was ridiculous as I said it. Bess’s
murder had happened twenty-five years ago. I didn’t know her. I couldn’t see through her eyes. Wearing her necklace didn’t give me some psychic connection to her. Charlie didn’t say anything. “It’s stupid. I see that now.”

He shook his head. “It’s good to look at all the angles, build the picture.”

“Did you learn that at the
Globe
?”

He looked sheepish. “Nah. Jay says that.”

“I’m still surprised he dropped this, just let it go so easily.”

“We don’t know it was easy,” said Charlie. “And it’s a small town. I think he just gets tired of fighting the same fights.” He was looking over my shoulder into the recesses of the bar, where tables even darker and more anonymous than ours lined the back wall. Suddenly his eyes widened and he looked back at me, making a face that said I should turn and look too, but not too quick.

I followed Charlie’s stare. At a corner table near the bathrooms, Mr. Malloy was sitting alone, a short glass of whiskey in front of him, staring into space. He looked like he’d been there a long time.

“What’s he doing here alone?” Charlie whispered.

“Let’s go find out.”

“Eliza. Is that a good idea? He’s your teacher and you are in a bar.”

“So are you,” I countered.

“I’m not in his English class. I’ve graduated. I can do whatever I want.”

“Charlie, he doesn’t look like he’ll remember seeing us tomorrow. And even if he does, how’s it going to look if
he turns me in at school? I could just as easily bust him for being catatonic, in a bar, instead of at the school dance.” I jumped up before he had a chance to talk me out of it, grabbing my warm beer more as a prop than anything else. Charlie was right on my heels.

“Hi Mr. Malloy!” I said as cheerfully as if I were running into him in the cafeteria. “Mind if we join you?”

I set my beer down and pulled out a chair. Mr. Malloy looked up at us, confused, as though he wasn’t sure if what he was seeing was real or some ghostly apparition. He didn’t say anything, so we sat down. If he was surprised to see us in the bar, he didn’t show it. We sat in silence. I wasn’t sure how to begin the conversation, especially after our last one had gone so badly. He was staring at the damp rings on the table, now that I was blocking his view to whatever faraway place he’d been looking before. After a few minutes, he looked up slowly, but his eyes caught and froze before they reached mine. He had just registered Bess’s necklace.

“She did see something, before she died,” he said, still not looking at me or Charlie.

“She did? What?” I asked. I allowed myself a secret sigh of relief. He was clearly either too drunk to notice that his student was drinking with him or too troubled to care. Either way, I wouldn’t bring it up if he didn’t.

Malloy didn’t answer.

“Why didn’t you ever tell anyone?” Charlie asked.

“I wanted to,” the old man croaked.

“But …” Charlie prodded, though gently.
He’ll be a good reporter
, I thought.
He can read people just right
.

“But. It was a different time then. Teachers weren’t allowed to … that is … one’s private life did affect one’s professional life. If it were now, things might be different.”

“There was something you were afraid would come out about you?” I asked, confused.

Malloy laughed a bitter laugh. “Come out,” he said. “Yes, exactly. Nowadays it probably wouldn’t matter. Though, who knows? This island hardly moves apace with the rest of the world.”

Charlie nodded. It made sense. To keep Bess’s secret, whatever that was, someone had threatened Malloy with his own secret.
I took care of Malloy
, Jimmy had said. Did he mean now or twenty years ago?

Malloy turned to me. “Since you brought her up a few weeks ago, I keep thinking, did I do the wrong thing? I kept my own secret instead of telling hers.”

“Her secret,” I asked. “You think that was why she was killed?”

He shrugged, for the first time looking both present and worried. He glanced clumsily around to see who might be listening. There was no one sitting close enough to hear a word we were saying, but he was clearly agitated. Maybe he was sorry he’d started talking.

“If you come with me,” he slurred at me in a whisper, leaning across the table. “I’ll show you what I kept. You can have it. There’s no reason for me to hold on to it.”

Under the table, Charlie gripped my arm. I could feel him thinking this might be a bad idea.

“Okay,” I said quickly, standing before Malloy could change his mind or Charlie could try to change mine.

“If you don’t mind, I’ll come along too,” Charlie said, standing with us. Malloy shrugged:
suit yourself
.

We left the bar, an odd threesome, me and Charlie in costume and Malloy weaving as he led us down the walkway from the bar. I hoped he wasn’t going to try to drive us anywhere.

“My apartment is nearby,” he said. “It’s close to Bess’s house, actually.” It felt strange, and possibly like a bad idea, to go home with our drunk teacher. But, I reasoned, there were two of us. What could Malloy do? And it wasn’t even late yet, as if bad things could only happen after midnight. Charlie walked next to me, saying nothing. I wondered if he was also thinking going to Malloy’s might be a mistake. It hadn’t occurred to me to suspect Malloy of killing Bess, but now I considered the fact that he’d kept something of Bess’s all these years, the strange way he’d talked to me about her at school, in a trance, remembering one instant, offended that I’d mentioned her the next. But that was crazy. Malloy was a respected teacher at school. If I kept on like this, eventually I’d suspect everyone on Stone Cove of Bess’s murder.