"Well, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to stay for a few more days," the sheriff said.
"Officer Deary, we've been here for two days since the hurricane," Joe said. "You have my address in New York. I have several businesses to run. This delay is costing me."
Officer Deary nodded a few times. "I appreciate that, I surely do. I know how busy you Northerners are. Peter Coleridge's body has been found."
I gasped. The sentence had come without warning. There was no / came here to tell you or I have news.
It was the word body. I could see it, something heavy, like a log, not like a person, turning with the waves, bumping up on a beach.
Mom dropped the suitcase. Pebbles shifted, a fallen palm leaf blew, the fronds tap-tap-tapping against the trunk of the tree.
"We'd like to ask you and your wife some questions," Officer Deary said. "Right now."
Chapter 27
They left, and I was left with this, that Peter was dead. I couldn't cry. You have to have your arms open and your mouth open and your heart. My heart was a fist.
Maybe it wasn't him that they found, maybe it was someone else. Someone not as lucky as Peter, not as golden, not as charmed.
Could I go back, why couldn't I go back, why couldn't I stop them from taking out the boat, why couldn't I go back and stop Peter from going?
I'd given Mr. Grayson's letter to Joe. Joe knew he could still make a deal. He thought Peter stood in his way.
If I thought back to what might have happened on that boat, my brain just locked.
Joe that morning, so jovial and false. And Peter so
wary. And Mom so stunned and numb, like she couldn't resist Joe.
The three of them on that boat.
And Peter's strange smile.
Let me put it this way: I think he'd be a hell of lot happier if I disappeared.
"There are some things we have to talk about," Mom said when they got back. She'd gone right for a cigarette, and Joe had gone right for a drink. "Things we need to get straight between us. Because the police might want to talk to you, and we should make sure you remember how things really happened. They separated me and Joe, in little rooms, tried to trip us up on things. Detectives questioned us, not that nice Officer Deary."
"But we were ahead of them, weren't we, baby doll?" Joe asked. He looked rattled, though, no matter what he said.
"What things?" I asked.
"How we met Peter, what we did with him, things like that," Mom said. She was talking to me but her eyes kept flitting to Joe, like a sparrow darting back and forth between the lawn and a branch. "That we were friends, holiday friends, like that. We didn't know him terribly well."
"But everyone saw us," I said. "We saw him every day."
"Well, sure," Joe said. "But casual-like. The way you strike up a friendship on vacation with someone you barely knew before."
"And he really wanted to go out on the boat that day, so we said all right," Mom said.
"But Joe said—"
"No, it was Peter," Joe said. "You remember, Bev. He was talking about how good he was at handling a boat, am I right?"
"I remember," Mom said. "Don't you remember, Evie?"
I didn't say anything.
"Evie, the thing is," Mom said, "the police here? They don't like New Yorkers."
"This one cop, he kept asking me if I was a Jew," Joe said. "Because they heard the story about the Graysons, I figure. Can you beat that? I was an altar boy. Not that I'd tell him I was Catholic. They don't like Catholics, either."
"So, if you don't remember something clearly, like who said what, then maybe it's better to say you don't remember at all," Mom said. "Understand?"
I did understand. "You want me to lie," I said.
"Do you get it?" Joe's face was dark. "They're trying to pin this on me!"
"Joe." Mom's voice sharpened. "No sense scaring Evie."
"Why not? I'm plenty scared!" Joe took a pull on his drink. When he turned back to me, his voice was softer.
"Say, kiddo. A lot of things have happened. We just lived through a hurricane, right? And we're just saying that things can get hazy. And cops can twist things, and the next thing you know, they've trumped up a case where there is no case, just to get themselves in the headlines. They do the third degree down here. They know how to beat a man without marking him."
"Joe!"
"She should know what could happen!"
I thought of the cops, and the third degree, and a soft voice asking me questions, and me having to think before I answered, me having to be careful. Then I thought of why they were telling me this, and that made me more scared.
Joe gripped my arms hard. "We're a family. What's that thing you and your Mom say? We stick together like glue. Right?" He waited for my nod. "That's my girl."
Over his shoulder, I looked into Mom's eyes. I didn't see someone I recognized. I saw someone smaller. Someone scared. Scared of the police? Scared of Joe?
No. My mother was scared of me.
Chapter 28
DROWNING OF NEW YORK TOURIST
DEEMED SUSPICIOUS
Couple Questioned in Mysterious Death
Coroner Expected to Call for Inquest
I walked all the way downtown to buy the paper. I didn't want to buy it at the newsstand in the lobby. I read it at the deserted bandshell, surrounded by men cleaning up the fallen branches. My blouse was soaked, I'd gotten so hot on the walk, but I shivered as I read.
Peter Coleridge, twenty-three, a wealthy tourist from Oyster Bay, Long Island, fell overboard on the afternoon of September seventeenth, the day before landfall of the hurricane. Winds were gusting up to fifty knots and there were numerous squalls out on the ocean. Coleridge, Mr. Joseph Spooner, and his wife, Beverly Spooner, from Brooklyn, New York, hired a boat, the Captive Lady, from Captain Stephen "Sandy" Forrest at the town dock on Wednesday.
According to the police, the engine of the Captive Lady failed during high seas while the group motored from the Palm Beach inlet toward Jupiter. Mr. Coleridge made an attempt to repair the engine, placing a wrench on the deck above while he worked below in the engine well. The motion of the boat sent the wrench into the engine well, striking him on the head. Stunned from the blow, he came up on deck, and a rogue wave sent him overboard.
Mr. and Mrs. Spooner attempted to rescue him, to no avail.
Mr. Coleridge's body washed up near Manalapan, where a surf caster, Kelly Marin, discovered it early Thursday morning.
Beverly Spooner, an attractive blonde, and Joseph Spooner, a businessman, were guests of Le Mirage on Palm Beach island, along with the deceased.
The coroner's report included "suspicious markings" that could be "inconsistent" with the "natural batterings" that a body would be prone to sustain during such a hurricane.
Mr. Coleridge's father, Ellis Coleridge, a fisherman, has journeyed from his home in Patchogue, Long Island, to identify his sons body. He was unavailable for comment.
A fisherman?
It was all in next day's morning edition. Peter wasn't loaded. They found that out pretty fast. He'd never been to college, let alone Yale. He was an only child. All through high school he'd worked summers at a country club in Oyster Bay. That's where he'd borrowed his manners from. And the blue convertible. The friend he'd borrowed it from had reported it stolen when Peter had taken it and hadn't returned.