The Summer Wives_A Novel Read online

  “Because it’s my fault.”

  “Your fault? What’s your fault? I thought Carroll was the one who—”

  “No!” She took me by the shoulders. “I was the one who saw you here with Joseph that night. I was the one who woke up Daddy and told him.”

  There was only the faintest amount of light in the room. Isobel’s face was like a shadow, a manic shadow, leering over mine. Her fingernails bit into my skin.

  “You,” I said.

  “Me.” She released me with such ferocity, I fell back a step. “He was mine. My brother. The only person in the world who understood me. You can’t just take a girl’s brother, Peaches. It’s not right.”

  “Clay. Clay understood you.”

  “No, he didn’t. He wanted something else.”

  “Maybe he did, but he understood you anyway. He loved you.”

  “Oh, shut up. It’s done, it’s finished. Daddy’s dead, he’s gone.”

  “Why—” I couldn’t seem to make my voice work properly. I tried again, and I was not myself, it was some other woman’s throat that made these sounds. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “Because it didn’t matter! I wasn’t the one who killed him, was I? I wasn’t the one holding the knife. And if Mama knew—oh God, if she knew—”

  “You mean my mother.”

  “I was more a daughter to her than you were. I was daughter and husband to her. We raised that boy together. There was nobody left but us.”

  “You,” I said. “You.”

  “No, it was you. You were the one who—”

  A flash of light caught my gaze from outside the window, startling me out of the stupor of shock. I ran past Isobel, stumbling over my own shoes, toward the sight of the sea, the shadows, the minuscule light of the stars, the pure bath of full moonlight. The flashes came from a pair of boats, large ones, and I couldn’t see their shapes or colors, but I knew what the hell they were, all right, and where they were headed.

  “The Coast Guard,” I said, and just as I was about to turn and dive for the hatch, I saw something else, glowing somewhere over the cliffs to the north. An angry orange blaze, a massive cumulonimbus of smoke illuminated by the moon. “My God,” I whispered. “What the hell is that?”

  Isobel joined me at the window. “Jesus Christ. He’s gone and done it.”

  “Who? What?”

  “Tom Donnelly. He’s burning down the clubhouse. While everyone’s drunk on the beach—the firemen even—”

  I turned and dove for the hatch on the floor.

  “Where are you going?” called Isobel.

  “Where do you think?” I yelled back.

  14.

  Isobel followed me down the ladder, the corridor, out the door to the dock. I climbed in the boat and she tossed me the rope and jumped in too.

  “I’ll drive,” she said. “I know the way.”

  Between the motor and the current, we hurtled down the Fleet Rock channel and around the point, converging on the area of Horseshoe Beach at an acute angle to the path of the two Coast Guard cutters, bent on the same destination. They must have seen us, because one of the boats—the foremost one—made a loud, electronic noise like a horn, and somebody yelled at us through a megaphone or something. Isobel didn’t seem to notice. For the first time, I wondered how much she’d had to drink that night. She reminded me of the old Isobel, swerving along the road between the Club and Greyfriars. Her face was ruthless, her hair white in the moonlight. Her hands gripped the wheel and the throttle, and mine gripped the side of the boat, praying to God we wouldn’t hit somebody’s wake, because we’d be goners. I saw the southernmost point of Horseshoe Beach, the rocky finger stretching out into the sound, and how swift and how near Isobel meant to clip it.

  “Watch out!” I gasped.

  “Shut up. This was your idea, Peaches.”

  We came within a foot of catastrophe, I think, and then the bowl of Horseshoe Beach stood before us, the sandy shore coming up so fast I stopped breathing. The surf had kicked up since I’d left a few hours ago. There were now unruly breakers crashing and rolling over the sand, and Isobel plowed right through the lines of white, threw the boat into reverse, and shuddered us up to the edge of the beach where she jerked the wheel, so we came in sideways. I jumped out and splashed through the foam. The torches were still lit, the bonfire. Everybody was milling around the tiki bar, still drinking, a drone of conversation and music from a brave band performing on the stage. I ran toward them and opened my mouth to scream Joseph’s name.

  But Isobel had a better idea. From behind me, she shouted, “Fire! Fire! There’s a fire at the clubhouse!”

  Funny thing, the word fire. Hits you right in the gut, doesn’t it, right bang in the middle of your human viscera. The band stopped playing so abruptly, it was like somebody had pulled a plug. All those Islanders, drinking restlessly, overthrown by the bizarre turn of events yet determined to remain on the scene until the night’s conclusion, they just shut right up and whirled around.

  “Fire!” she screamed again. “The clubhouse is on fire! Somebody help! Don’t you smell the smoke, you idiots? Get in the boats, the cars! Where are the firemen?”

  Somebody roared, “Donnelly, you goddamned fox!”

  And then pandemonium, absolute melee, as the Islanders ran for their boats, scrambled up the cliffs to their cars, clumsy with vodka. I don’t know if they meant to fight the fire or just take in the once-in-a-lifetime spectacle of the Winthrop Island clubhouse burning to the ground. Only Isobel and I stood still in the center of this panic, searching for the other people likely to remain where they stood on this beach, until we saw them, on the opposite point—three men, signaling in the Coast Guard cutters by means of a flashlight.

  I made a noise of despair and launched across the sand. Ahead of me, a few of the Islanders ran for their boats, moored on the sand near the rocks. I thought I saw Clay Monk and his wife. Here on the beach you could really smell the smoke, a different smell altogether from the torches and the bonfire. This was thick and heavy and filled with the ominous reek of other things, the things that burnt along with the wood, the metal that was melting and the paint that was scorching. The fire roared a few miles away and still you could smell these poisonous things. I ran straight past the boats and onto the rocks, my bare feet slipping, my breath coming in gasps. I lost a step and cut my knee, and I just picked myself up, though the blood trickled down my leg. “Joseph!” I cried. “Joseph!”

  The three men turned at the same time. One of them took a step forward, and was yanked right back.

  “Stay where you are!” came a shout. I think it was Frank.

  I kept going.

  “I said stop! I’ll shoot!”

  “Don’t you dare shoot me! He’s innocent! He’s innocent!”

  A gun fired, CRACK. I thought I heard the bullet whizzing past, a warning shot, and I kept scrambling forward, borne by I don’t know what tide of courage.

  Then Joseph’s voice, agonized. “Miranda, stop! For God’s sake!”

  So I stopped. I was about fifty yards away, maybe closer. I could see their figures in the moonlight, Johnny’s stocky frame and Frank’s thin one. Joseph between them, dark and tensile.

  “Let him go! Please! He’s innocent. His mother—”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Frank called back. “Not my business.”

  “About as innocent as goddamned Lizzie Borden,” said Johnny.

  “He didn’t do it! Don’t you care? Don’t you give a damn?”

  “I don’t, as a matter of fact,” said Frank. “I ain’t no court of law. I give a damn about getting him on that goddamned Coast Guard cutter and getting the hell out of Dodge, that’s what I care about. That’s my job.”

  I made a noise of rage and started forward again, while the noise of the propellers thudded closer, and somebody yelled through the megaphone. Another shot cracked out and whistled past, splintering against the rock behind me, and in the shock of noise I cried out.
/>
  “Miranda!” Joseph shouted. I saw him struggling to break free from Johnny’s arms, and I realized he wasn’t wearing handcuffs.

  “Run!” I screamed. “Just run!”

  “Don’t be stupid, ma’am!” said Frank. “Jesus Christ, he’ll get killed.”

  “I’m not running, I’m not running,” said Joseph. “Miranda, I’ll be all right. It’s all right.”

  I dropped on my knees. “You promised. You promised me.”

  “No, I didn’t. Let me go.”

  “But you didn’t do it. Your mother—”

  “Just let me go.” He had to shout, because the first cutter was chopping up the water about twenty feet from the point, and they were dropping a boat from the side.

  “I can’t!” I screamed.

  “Trust me, all right?”

  You know, they teach you how to scream in the movies. It’s true. Because an ordinary, instinctive human scream doesn’t cut it; you have to scream a certain way, primal, not the way you would if you were actually terrified, actually in some kind of agony, when your throat doesn’t work and your lungs don’t work. What came out of me, in that moment, as the Coast Guard fellow sprang up from the boat and scrambled to the rocks, and Frank and Johnny jerked Joseph down between them, was just a strangled noise, caught somewhere between a yell and a sob, the noise you make when something terrible unfolds before you and you can’t do a thing about it, you’re helpless, you’re just one woman with no voice, no gun, no way to stop the goddamned injustice of it all. Just to watch a piece of your soul torn out of your body, to watch it climb into a boat and spurt off toward a monstrous Coast Guard cutter and God knew what after that.

  I climbed to my feet and started to scramble again, down the long finger of rocks to its very tip, matching the progress of the boat. The Coast Guard man was piloting the outboard motor; Johnny sat in the bow, Joseph next, Frank behind Joseph. I reached the last rock and stood there with my hands in my hair, raging, and when the shot rang out I almost didn’t hear it.

  I just heard Johnny cry out. I saw him pitch forward into the water while the boat cruised past, I saw Joseph stand up and dive in too, and I screamed out, “Swim, Joseph, swim! Go!”

  But he wasn’t swimming away. Oh no. How could you expect Joseph Vargas to just swim away from a drowning man? His dark head disappeared in the foam, and for a long minute there was nothing, nobody dared to shoot because of Johnny, there was just shouting and panic and the pilot circling back, trying to find them both.

  And then Joseph burst up from the water, holding something, holding Johnny, and even though Johnny must have weighed fifty pounds more than Joseph—most of it around the middle—Joseph hauled him toward the cutter, two heads bobbing against that rough surf, until they reached the side of the boat, under the sweep of the searchlight, and Joseph grasped the bottom of the entry ladder.

  “You fool,” I whispered. “Just go. Just go.”

  One of the Guardsmen came down and grasped Johnny by the shoulders while Joseph pushed him up from below, and another Guardsman, reaching down from the railing, grabbed Johnny’s arm as the first Guardsman hauled him up. They managed to get him over the rail, but for that moment, those thirty seconds, they forgot about Joseph. I was the only one who saw him disappear under the water, surface again, and dive once more, and I didn’t say a word, I just stood there with my hand over my mouth, waiting for them to look back down.

  By that time, Joseph was gone.

  15.

  Clay was the one who drove Isobel and me back to Greyfriars, an hour or so later, right past the frantic Coast Guard helicopters sweeping the water with searchlights.

  “They won’t find him,” I said. “They can’t find him.”

  “At least he’s got a sporting chance,” said Clay.

  I turned and stared at his profile. “Why, that was you. You fired the gun.”

  He shrugged his shoulders, reached into his jacket pocket, and pulled out a gun. “My service pistol,” he said, and he stuck it in the glove compartment. “I keep it in the boat in case of sharks.”

  16.

  I wanted to take out the dinghy and look for Joseph, but Clay said there was no point. “If we find him, the Coast Guard will find us finding him. Best off letting him go his own way. He’s a tough nut. Strongest swimmer I ever knew.”

  “But the current,” I said.

  “Maybe he went the opposite direction.”

  I stood on the Greyfriars driveway; Isobel had already hurried into the house, without a word. Clay sat impatiently at the wheel of his car, eager to get home. I bent to the window. “They’re going to search the Island, every rock. He can’t hide forever. They’ll search the lighthouse, no one can stop them now.”

  “Look, I’ll keep an eye out for him, all right? That’s your brother coming out of the house. Isobel’s with him. I’d better get going. Take care of yourself, all right?”

  “All right,” I whispered, and then, as he pulled away down the drive, aiming for the marshals guarding the entrance, “let me know if you hear any news!”

  He waved back, and I turned toward Greyfriars, which was now ablaze from every room. A strobe of flashlights crisscrossed the driveway, and Hugh and Isobel marched swiftly down the lawn toward me.

  “They’re here to search the house,” said Isobel. “Every goddamned corner.”

  17.

  They searched for hours while all of us sat in the living room—Mama, me, Isobel, Hugh, the Greyfriars artists—wearing our clothes and our dressing gowns, whatever we had on at the start of the invasion. Mama offered to make tea, but they declined. They were all from the United States Marshals office, grim and determined, just doing their jobs. I have no doubt they went through our underwear drawers with perfect integrity.

  By now, I existed on nerves alone. I kept rising from the sofa and pacing the room, looking out the window at the moonlit water, the searchlights, the darkened lighthouse. The Greyfriars dock, Hugh’s new yacht at its mooring, the boathouse, the bench. I thought, He’s out there, he’s out there. Every last atom of my body strained to fly through the French door and down the lawn, fly across the water and find Joseph, help Joseph. He’s a tough nut, Clay said, but to swim so far, in darkness, against current and tide, helicopters and boats—it was impossible, impossible, impossible.

  Be alive, I thought. Be alive somewhere, but not here. For God’s sake, not here. Not down by the water, where the searchlights swept and swept over all those dear patches of lawn. Not the bench where Joseph had met me in the night, not the dock where I had helped him carry Popeye from the boat. Not the lighthouse, already searched, under surveillance from above. The marshals had a dog with them, a German shepherd, and to this day I can’t quite love a German shepherd, however much I love dogs. I think of menace, I think of that terrible night when I wanted Joseph to be alive, but not nearby. Anywhere but Greyfriars.

  By the time the telephone rang at four o’clock in the morning, Brigitte was asleep on the rug, Otto and Leonard snored from the window seat, and Miss Patty was sketching something on the back of a newspaper. Mama rose from the armchair and answered the ring, under the gaze of one of the marshals, the one who had been left to keep watch on us.

  “Yes, I see,” she said. From across the room, she met my gaze briefly, and then turned to the wall. “How awful. Yes. Yes. I’ll have Hugh come to help. Yes. Yes, right away.”

  She set down the telephone and said, in a voice of tremendous calm, “That was Father McManus. I’m afraid poor Mrs. Vargas has passed away. Hugh, would you mind taking the dinghy across with Dr. Huxley? He’s on his way here now.”

  I jumped from the sofa. “I’ll go with him.”

  “No, darling. You stay here.”

  “She’s got to stay here,” said the marshal. “Him, too.”

  Mama turned to the marshal. “Sir, there’s been a death. An awful tragedy. Poor Father McManus is stranded at the lighthouse with a—with a corpse. Surely you can allow my son to ferry
the doctor over the channel.”

  The marshal shifted his feet. “I’ll ask.”

  He disappeared, and I looked at Mama, who returned to her seat without a glance at me. Picked up her crochet and resumed the steady, even stitching of a doily or something. Brigitte stirred from the rug and sat up. “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  “Mrs. Vargas died,” said Hugh. “I’m taking Dr. Huxley over to lay out the body.”

  “God rest her soul,” said Brigitte, stretching, and she laid herself carefully back on the rug and fell asleep again, curled up like a fetus.

  The marshal returned. “All right. But we got two men going with you.”

  “Sounds fair.” Hugh rose from his chair. “I’ll go get the dinghy on the water.”

  “Not you,” said the marshal. “One of the women.”

  “Aw, you’ve gotta be kidding me. It’s heavy.”

  “That’s what they said.”

  Isobel stood up. “I’ll do it.”

  There was just the smallest pause. “Are you sure, sis?” said Hugh.

  “Sure I’m sure.”

  “You know where it is, right?”

  “Jesus Christ, Hugh. Of course I do. Miranda, can you give me a hand? It’s in the boathouse.”

  There was absolutely nothing in her voice that suggested she needed anything more than a hand with the dinghy. There was nothing in her face, as she searched me out from across the room, except the half-bored weariness of a woman kept up past her bedtime for the sake of a few more irritating chores.

  “Can’t you get it yourself?” I said.

  “Come on, Peaches. It’s heavy.”

  I sighed. “Fine, then.”

  We trooped down the lawn. The bright, full moon had sunk deep in the western sky, casting our faint shadows on the grass. Behind us came the two marshals, who made heavy footsteps that seemed, in that hour before dawn, to echo off every rock and tree and bush, every object in the universe. So we didn’t try to talk, Isobel and I, in the center of all that racket. We just walked in exact step with each other, down the long, damp slope toward the boathouse, Isobel in her white nightgown and robe, me in my clothes I hadn’t yet changed. I thought she looked like a ghost. The ghost of the old Isobel, the Isobel I used to know, who ran down often from Greyfriars in the middle of the night, wearing nothing but her nightclothes.