* * *
It was still raining in the morning when George Hume woke. The violence of last night’s thunderstorm had been replaced by a slow, business-like drizzle. Looking out the window, George saw the Franklins walking on the beach under black umbrellas. They were a cheerless sight. All three of them wore dark raincoats, and they might have been fugitives from some old Bergman film, inevitably tragic, moving slowly across a stark landscape.
When most families went to the beach, it was a more lively affair.
George turned away from the window and went into the bathroom to shave. As he lathered his face, he heard the boom of a radio, rock music blaring from the adjoining room, and he assumed, correctly, that his twenty-one-year-old daughter Nancy had arrived as planned.
Nancy had not come alone. “This is Steve,” she said when her father sat down at the breakfast table.
Steve was a very young man—the young were getting younger—with a wide-eyed, waxy expression and a blond mustache that looked like it could be wiped off with a damp cloth.
Steve stood up and said how glad he was to meet Nancy’s father. He shook George’s hand enthusiastically, as though they had just struck a lucrative deal.
“Steve’s in law school,” Mrs. Hume said, with a proprietary delight that her husband found grating.
Nancy was complaining. She had, her father thought, always been a querulous girl, at odds with the way the world was.
“I can’t believe it,” she was saying. “The whole mall is closed. The only—and I mean only—thing around here that is open is that cheesy little drugstore, and nobody actually buys anything in there. I know that, because I recognize stuff from when I was six. Is this some holiday I don’t know about or what?”
“Honey, it’s the off season. You know everything closes when the tourists leave.”
“Not the for-Christ-sakes mall!” Nancy said. “I can’t believe it.” Nancy frowned. “This must be what Russia is like,” she said, closing one eye as smoke from her cigarette slid up her cheek.
George Hume watched his daughter gulp coffee. She was not a person who needed stimulants. She wore an ancient gray sweater and sweatpants. Her blonde hair was chopped short and ragged and kept in a state of disarray by the constant furrowing of nervous fingers. She was, her father thought, a pretty girl in disguise.
* * *
That night, George discovered that he could remember nothing of the spy novel he was reading, had forgotten, in fact, the hero’s name. It was as though he had stumbled into a cocktail party in the wrong neighborhood, all strangers to him, the gossip meaningless.
He put the book on the nightstand, leaned back on the pillow, and said, “This is her senior year. Doesn’t she have classes to attend?”
His wife said nothing.
He sighed. “I suppose they are staying in the same room.”
“Dear, I don’t know,” Mrs. Hume said. “I expect it is none of our business.”
“If it is not our business who stays in our hotel, then who in the name of hell’s business is it?”
Mrs. Hume rubbed her husband’s neck. “Don’t excite yourself, dear. You know what I mean. Nancy is a grown-up, you know.”
George did not respond to this and Mrs. Hume, changing the subject, said, “I saw Mrs. Franklin and her daughter out walking on the beach again today. I don’t know where Mr. Franklin was. It was pouring, and there they were, mother and daughter. You know…” Mrs. Hume paused. “It’s like they were waiting for something to come out of the sea. Like a vigil they were keeping. I’ve thought it before, but the notion was particularly strong today. I looked out past them, and there seemed no separation between the sea and the sky, just a black wall of water.” Mrs. Hume looked at herself in the dresser’s mirror, as though her reflection might clarify matters. “I’ve lived by the ocean all my life, and I’ve just taken it for granted, George. Suddenly it gave me the shivers. Just for a moment. I thought, Lord, how big it is, lying there cold and black, like some creature that has slept at your feet so long you never expect it to wake, have forgotten that it might be brutal, even vicious.”
“It’s all this rain,” her husband said, hugging her and drawing her to him. “It can make a person think some black thoughts.”
George left off worrying about his daughter and her young man’s living arrangements, and in the morning, when Nancy and Steve appeared for breakfast, George didn’t broach the subject—not even to himself.
Later that morning, he watched them drive off in Steve’s shiny sports car—rich parents, lawyers themselves?—bound for Wilmington and shopping malls that were open.
The rain had stopped, but dark, massed clouds over the ocean suggested that this was a momentary respite. As George studied the beach, the Franklins came into view. They marched directly toward him, up and over the dunes, moving in a soldierly, clipped fashion. Mrs. Franklin was holding her daughter’s hand and moving at a brisk pace, almost a run, while her husband faltered behind, his gait hesitant, as though uncertain of the wisdom of catching up.
Mrs. Franklin reached the steps and marched up them, her child tottering in tow, her boot heels sounding hollowly on the wood planks. George nodded, and she passed without speaking, seemed not to see him. In any event, George Hume would have been unable to speak. He was accustomed to the passive, demure countenance of this self-possessed woman, and the expression on her face, a wild distorting emotion, shocked and confounded him. It was an unreadable emotion, but its intensity was extraordinary and unsettling.
George had not recovered from the almost physical assault of Mrs. Franklin’s emotional state, when her husband came up the stairs, nodded curtly, muttered something, and hastened after his wife.
George Hume looked after the retreating figures. Mr. Greg Franklin’s face had been a mask of cold civility, none of his wife’s passion written there, but the man’s appearance was disturbing in its own way. Mr. Franklin had been soaking wet, his hair plastered to his skull, his overcoat dripping, the reek of salt water enfolding him like a shroud.
George walked on down the steps and out to the beach. The ocean was always some consolation, a quieting influence, but today it seemed hostile.
The sand was still wet from the recent rains and the footprints of the Franklins were all that marred the smooth expanse. George saw that the Franklins had walked down the beach along the edge of the tide and returned at a greater distance from the water. He set out in the wake of their footprints, soon lost to his own thoughts. He thought about his daughter, his wild Nancy, who had always been boy-crazy. At least this one didn’t have a safety-pin through his ear or play in a rock band. So lighten up, George advised himself.
He stopped. The tracks had stopped. Here is where the Franklins turned and headed back to the hotel, walking higher up the beach, closer to the weedy debris-laden dunes.
But it was not the ending of the trail that stopped George’s own progress down the beach. In fact, he had forgotten that he was absently following the Franklins’ spoor.
It was the litter of dead fish that stopped him. They were scattered at his feet in the tide. Small ghost crabs had already found the corpses and were laying their claims.
There might have been a hundred bodies. It was difficult to say, for not one of the bodies was whole. They had been hacked into many pieces, diced by some impossibly sharp blade that severed a head cleanly, flicked off a tail or dorsal fin. Here a scaled torso still danced in the sand, there a pale eye regarded the sky.
Crouching in the sand, George examined the bodies. He stood up, finally, as the first large drops of rain plunged from the sky. No doubt some fishermen had called it a day, tossed their scissored bait and gone home.