What I Saw and How I Lied

  “I’ll let you folks get settled,” the policeman said. “If there’s any word, I’ll come by.”

  “Thank you, officer,” Joe said in his best-manners voice.

  As we walked through the lobby, my mother pressed close to me.

  “It was like an awful dream,” she said. “Like it wasn’t happening to me at all.”

  “We made it to shelter, but I thought the building would blow out to sea any minute,” Joe said. “I’ll tell you one thing: I’m through with Florida.”

  I showed them our room. No more suite for us. We had two double beds and a couch, the furniture all crowded together. It was dark. They hadn’t taken off the shutters over the windows yet. I switched on the light.

  “Glad this place has electricity,” Joe said.

  “It was so dark where we were,” Mom said.

  She saw the open suitcase on the bed and started to go through it. She shook out her blue cocktail dress. “This is the only thing you brought for me? Honestly! How do you expect me to wear this in broad daylight!”

  “I didn’t know what to bring,” I said. “I didn’t think.”

  “I’ll go back to the Mirage,” Joe said. “I’ll get your clothes, Bev.”

  “No!” Mom’s voice was sharp and on the edge of something. “Don’t make waves, Joe.”

  It was a funny choice of words, but none of us laughed.

  “He wasn’t what you thought,” Mom whispered to me that night. We lay together in one of the double beds. Joe snored in the other one. “He wasn’t what I thought, either. Joe set me straight. I should have known what he was, the way he went after you that way.”

  I was curled up, facing the wall. She was behind me, her voice thick and urgent.

  “He followed us down here, you know. He was blackmailing Joe. He was holding something over his head. Peter thought Joe owed him money. They had some deal, and Peter thought one thing and Joe thought another. That’s all. And so Peter said he’d go to the Graysons and tell them Joe was a welsher, that he’d walk away from a debt. You and I know that isn’t true. The thing is, though, this came at a really bad time for Joe. You know he just opened up two more businesses. He put all of our cash into them. So he was trapped. That’s why Peter made up to us and took us places. He flattered us and we liked his company because of that. Peter went after you behind my—behind our backs. He was using you, too. Evie? Are you listening?”

  No, it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like that at all.

  But it looked like that.

  I wanted to put the pillow over my ears. I wished she’d just shut up. So much noise was in my head.

  “I’m just lucky I showed up that night at his house. Who knows what could have happened? Nothing happened before that, right, baby?”

  I didn’t answer her.

  “Because if it did, it’s all right. You shouldn’t feel…he was trying to get at Joe any way he could. Nothing was your fault. Nothing, baby. I had to tell Joe what happened. He doesn’t blame you. Not in the least. But the thing is…we probably shouldn’t tell anyone about any of this. Better to just keep our mouths shut, since Peter’s missing. Joe wants to head back to New York. We’re going to go back just as soon as we can. Won’t you like that? Don’t you miss your friends?”

  No, I didn’t miss my friends.

  “We don’t belong here.”

  No, we didn’t belong here.

  “If we can just get home, everything will be all right.”

  She said this like it was true.

  “We can be just like we were. I promise, Evie. You’re the most important thing in the world to me,” she whispered.

  “Mom.” I gulped in air so I could get the question out. “What really happened? Tell me. What happened on the boat?”

  She rolled away from me. “Just what we said, baby. Now go to sleep.”

  I walked through the fallen trees and branches to the bridge over to the island. The lake was still cloudy and thick from the storm but the sun was out. The sky was blue again. Just a few blocks from me, you couldn’t walk along the path beside the lake, the water was so deep. They said you could take a rowboat down the main street in Delray Beach. The tiki huts were gone and so was the boardwalk. The roof had been blown off the casino in Lake Worth.

  We’ll be back! He’d yelled it at me, waving as the boat took off.

  Think of all the people in the world who said Be back soon! and didn’t come back. That’s what we found out during the war.

  People kept saying about the hurricane, At least it’s not as bad as ’28. Because no matter how bad something is, there’s always something worse to compare it to. Some people find that comforting for some reason.

  I didn’t.

  Joe wanted to leave, but he couldn’t get to his car. There was no gas, anyway. You could only buy a buck at most, not enough to get you very far. We were stuck.

  “I’m guessing you wouldn’t want to leave yet, anyway,” Officer Deary said when he dropped by the next day. “Not with your friend still missing.”

  We kept the radio on all the time. My head was full of music. The songs told me what would happen. I’d be seeing him in all the old familiar places. I wouldn’t want to walk without him. These foolish things reminded me of him. Won’t you tell him please to put on some speed. My dream would be here beside me.

  He would come back. He would tell me the truth behind the lies. We would fill up his blue convertible with gas and we would take off, the way we had on those other long, hot afternoons, when there was nobody in the world but us.

  The hotel sent our suitcases over. Joe got a ride over to pick up his car. He said it seemed like hundreds of palm trees were blown down. Green coconuts were lying smashed on the streets.

  The roads weren’t bad north of us. And he had found a place to sell him a tank full of gas. We were leaving tomorrow. After a good night’s sleep and with a thermos full of coffee, because he’d drive all day and all night if he had to, as far as he could, just to get home.

  Mom kept the lamp on the vanity burning all night long. I lay on my side and watched the shaft of light on the floor. I listened to her turn over in bed. I fell asleep to the sound of restless legs and whispering sheets. The sounds merged together in my head, in my dreams, and I wasn’t sure if I’d heard Joe and Mom whispering together or if I’d been dreaming.

  We were packing the car before sunup when the cruiser pulled up. Officer Deary got out. “Taking off?”

  We all stopped what we were doing, Mom with a suitcase ready to slide in the trunk, me carrying a stack of magazines. Joe put his hand on my shoulder. “I like to get an early start.”

  “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 I 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 ou
t 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 a 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 son’s 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.

  Everything he’d told me about himself had been a lie.

  The family friend with the house in Palm Beach? Just a mansion, closed until the season. He’d broken in. A caretaker had found evidence that someone was staying there when he’d gone over to check before the hurricane. A window had been forced. There were glasses left on a sill. Two of them. One of them had lipstick traces. Dark red, the paper said.

  The most tempting color since Eve winked at Adam.

  By the afternoon edition, the mansion was called a “secret love nest.” And Beverly had gone from “attractive blonde” to a suspect.

  Peter wasn’t who I thought he was. Could it be that Mom wasn’t, either?

  If everyone was wondering what had gone on between Peter and my mother, wouldn’t I be crazy not to wonder, too?

  SUSPICIONS GROW ON

  COLERIDGE DROWNING

  Mystery Woman Sought

  Inquest to Begin on Friday

  Judge Alton Friend to Preside

  Joe Spooner, the man I’d picked to be my dad.

  This man who bent over to turn the key of a neighbor kid’s roller skate—could he have killed somebody? This man who knew how to tie a bow on the sash of my party dress, who took me for egg creams in Manhattan drugstores for the adventure of it? This man who’d say, after I’d had a fight with Margie, “Aw, kid, you gotta let bygones be bygones. Here’s a dime, go buy yourselves a couple of Cokes.”

  This man couldn’t be a killer.

  Killers were in movies.

  Killers didn’t snore in the bed next to you.

  And Mom. Whatever had happened to her with Peter—which I couldn’t, wouldn’t think about—she was still my mother. She’d st
ill tucked me in at night, she’d still washed my blouses out in the sink every night even in winter with red cold hands, she’d still groaned every morning when the alarm went off and got up anyway and made my Ovaltine and toast. She was the one who cried hardest when the puppy she gave me for Christmas died of distemper. I remembered that puppy in her lap, his mouth all foam, while she cried a bucket of tears.

  She couldn’t have been part of it, if it was the thing I kept seeing when I closed my eyes: Joe hitting Peter on the head, Joe pushing Peter into the churning ocean.

  Imagine our surprise when we got back from lunch the next day and found Grandma Glad in our room. She still had her going-out hat on, a dark green hat with stiff speckled feathers on one side. Her brown suitcase was on my bed. She sat on the couch, her eyes on the door. Her feet were planted on either side of an old tan leather valise that had belonged to her husband, Joe. “Big Joe Spooner,” they used to call him. He died when Joe was eighteen, a big shot who’d left them in debt.

  “When were you going to tell me, Joe?” she asked.

  “How did you get here?” Joe looked genuinely stunned.

  “Eastern Airlines flight to Miami, then I hired a car. When were you going to tell me?”

  “You flew in a plane?” This was maybe more shocking than her sudden appearance.

  “It made the papers in New York. I read about it in the paper. I left messages here, but you never called me back.”

  “You took a plane?”

  “I read it in the newspaper, Joe!”

  “I didn’t want to worry you, Ma.”

  “So I can be half-killed, reading it in the paper. I almost fainted dead on the floor, and me alone in the house.” Grandma Glad eyed Mom like she was a weekold fish. “You need better help than you’ve got.”

  “We didn’t do anything wrong,” Joe said.