Kiss River (28 page)

C
lay heard Lacey and Gina talking in the kitchen as he and Sasha walked downstairs the morning after he’d banished Gina from his room. There was animation in their conversation, or at least, in his sister’s voice, and he guessed that Gina had told her about her relationship to the Poors. He hoped that was all she had told her.

He still felt burned by the night before, by the secrets that Gina had kept from both him and his sister. What was her game? Her reticence to share her connection to Kiss River still did not make sense to him.

He should not have invited her into his bedroom, and certainly should not have made love to her, although he was finding that hard to regret despite the guilt that still teased him—and the realization this morning that, as far as he knew, they had used no form of birth control. She’d said she loved him, and he wanted to believe her; her actions toward him had grown loving indeed. Yet she’d withheld so much from him.

“Morning.” He walked past the table to the back door to let Sasha out.

“Isn’t it cool?” Lacey said, as he stood at the screen door waiting for Sasha to return. “About Gina being Mary Poor’s great-granddaughter?”

“Very cool,” he said without turning around. The flat tone of his voice didn’t even seem to register on his sister’s radar. She continued talking to Gina. “Mary never told me much about her daughter,” she said. “Although I do remember her saying something about her running wild, and she didn’t want me to turn out that way.”

“Yes,” Gina said, “she was a little adventurous.”

He thought he could feel Gina’s eyes burning a hole in his back.

“So, tell me more about your relationship with Mary,” Gina said to Lacey.

Lacey laughed. “We smoked together a lot,” she said. “She always wanted a cigarette. I started to feel like her drug dealer. She couldn’t get them anyplace else, I don’t think. She told me about how great my mother was and everything. She gave me lots of old-lady type advice. You know, be a good person, be honest, save yourself for marriage—”

“Smoke like a chimney,” Clay interrupted her as Sasha ran past him into the room, ready for his breakfast.

Lacey leaned back to look at him as he scooped kibble into Sasha’s bowl. “You really got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, didn’t you?” she asked.

He set the bowl on the floor for Sasha, not bothering to respond to his sister’s question, and she returned her attention to Gina.

“You look like her,” Lacey said, tilting her head to study their houseguest. “I mean, she was ancient and you’re certainly not, but I can see her in the way your nose is shaped, and your eyes are the same shape, too, even though they’re a different color.”

Clay nearly laughed. He’d only seen Mary Poor once or twice, but Gina looked nothing like the old woman.

“Really?” Gina said. “I resemble my mother, so maybe I did get the genes from that side of the family.”

Clay dropped two pieces of bread in the toaster and poured himself a cup of coffee, which he promptly dropped on the floor, sending coffee and shards of the ceramic mug in all directions.

“Damn it!” he said.

“What’s going on with you?” Lacey sounded exasperated as she got up to reach for the paper towels.

“He’s angry that I didn’t tell both of you sooner,” Gina said. “I should have, I know, and I’m sorry. I’m a private person. With the adoption and all, I’ve just had so much on my mind.”

“Of course you do,” Lacey said, helping him mop up the mess, and Clay wondered why his sister had been the child to inherit one hundred percent of their mother’s kind tolerance.

Standing up from the floor with the pieces of mug in his hands, he looked at Gina and saw the hurt in her eyes. He remembered her tenderness from the night before. The way she’d listened to him on the lighthouse. Why should she have confided in him before last night? He certainly had not confided in her. He held her gaze now, the hard core inside him melting.

Tossing the mug into the trash can beneath the sink, he suddenly remembered that her car was in the shop.

“Do you need a ride to work?” he asked.

“I’m taking today off,” she said. “I’ve decided to call your father just one last time. I’ll tell him my connection to Kiss River. Maybe now that we know exactly where the lens is and that it’s in one piece…” Her voice faded. “I have to give it one more try.” She looked at Lacey. “Does he wear down eventually or does he just get more stubborn?”

“I’ll talk to him for you,” Lacey said.

“No, don’t.” Clay poured himself a fresh cup of coffee and sat down at the table across from Gina. “I’ll call him,” he said. He looked across the table at her, at the gratitude in her face. He wanted to reach over and touch her hand, take her back up to his room and make love to her again. And tell her that he loved her, too.

He left his office at eleven-thirty and drove to the Beacon Animal Hospital. Two men and three women sat in the waiting room, along with one crated cat, one lethargic white German shepherd and a golden retriever puppy with a serious-looking scratch on his nose.

The receptionist was new, someone he didn’t recognize.

“I’m Clay O’Neill,” he said to her. “Would you ask my father if he has time to have lunch with me today?”

“I’d know who you were without you saying a word,” she said. “You sure got his eyes, didn’t you?” She left her desk without waiting for his response and went through the door to the rear of the hospital. She returned a moment later.

“He said to give him fifteen minutes,” she said.

“Thanks.” He sat down next to the woman with the golden retriever, and the puppy immediately jumped from her lap into his.

“What happened to his nose?” He stroked the pup’s silky head.

“We’re down here on vacation,” the woman explained, “and my daughter brought her cat. Rudy got a bit too close, I’m afraid.”

“Ah,” Clay said. He held the puppy’s head between his hands as he looked into the brown eyes. “No more cats for you,” he said. It was a nice pup and it would grow into a good dog. He already had that goofy golden retriever personality, but there was a sharpness in his eyes, an alertness Clay had learned to recognize. A year ago, he would have talked to the woman about training this handsome pup in search and rescue work. He wouldn’t have been able to help himself. He might have performed a few evaluative tests with him right there, checking the dog’s sensitivity to sight and sound. Goldens could be good at search and rescue. What they lacked in nose, they made up for in obedience and willingness to please. But he was no longer a dog trainer, and when the vet tech called the woman into the examining room, he looked away without even watching the puppy’s gait.

In twenty minutes, Alec came into the waiting room.

“How about Sam and Omie’s?” Alec suggested.

Sam and Omie’s was every bit as old and nearly as casual as Shorty’s, and it was much closer to the animal hospital. But Clay knew his father’s real motivation for selecting it.

“You’re in the mood for soft-shelled crabs, huh?” he asked.

“How’d you guess?” His father smiled at him as they headed out the door.

They took Alec’s car, heading south along the beach road.

“Henry’s birthday party’s this Saturday, isn’t it?” his father asked as he drove.

“Uh-huh.” Clay had nearly forgotten and was grateful for his father’s reminder. He’d planned the surprise party for Henry’s eightieth birthday months ago. It would be held in Shorty’s back
room, and as far as he knew, everyone was managing to keep it a secret.

“How are you going to get him to Shorty’s?” his father asked.

“I’ll tell him that Lacey and I are taking him out to dinner,” Clay said. “He’ll know something’s up when we take him to Shorty’s, since I’m sure he’d expect us to take him someplace fancier, but I think he’ll still be surprised. Hope so, anyway.”

They talked about one of Clay’s projects for the rest of the drive, and he knew that his father was wondering what was really behind this request for lunch. Neither of them addressed that question, though, until they were sitting in one of the booths at the crowded restaurant and had ordered their soup.

“You seem…” Alec said, “I don’t know…a little preoccupied, I guess. Is everything all right?”

Clay hadn’t realized that his mood was that obvious. “Well,” he said, “I have some interesting news.”

“What’s that?”

“It turns out that Gina is related to the Poors.”

He saw his father’s instant look of distrust. “How so?” he asked.

Clay repeated much of what Gina had told him the night before, about her mother being adopted and her deathbed wish to learn about her roots, and about the box of effects she had received from the grandniece, along with the diary.

“Have you seen the diary?” his father asked.

“No. I don’t think she has it with her. At least she didn’t mention it.”

His father folded his arms across his chest, lips in a tight line. Finally, he spoke. “I know you like her, Clay, so I’ll just say this once. I promise. But I have to say it.”

Clay waited, knowing he couldn’t stop him.

“Could she have made this up—this relationship to the Poors—as a way to up the ante?” he asked. “You know, make our hearts bleed for her about her long-lost family roots so we’ll help her raise the lens?”

Clay sighed. “Dad, I believe her. She’s not a lighthouse historian. She admitted that. Her connection to the Poors has been her real motivation all along.”

“Then why the hell didn’t she just say that?”

Clay hated the deep crease between his father’s eyebrows as much as he hated the logic of his words.

“I think she just never expected to get to know people here. She thought she’d show up, see the lighthouse, visit the place where her grandparents lived, and go back to Washington. She didn’t want to have to explain the whole thing with people who meant nothing to her. She didn’t expect to make friends with Lacey and me. Or to have us…me…begin to mean something to her.” God, he hoped he wasn’t kidding himself about this.

“You’re in love with her, aren’t you?” his father said.

Clay nodded. “It’s your fault,” he said, half smiling. “You said to open up to her.”

His father returned the smile. “And you did?”

Clay nodded. “She was great,” he said, remembering the night before in his bedroom. “She was wonderful.”

“Is the feeling mutual?”

“I think so.”

His father sighed, then sat back as the waitress placed their bowls of soup in front of them. When she walked away, he leaned forward again and looked Clay squarely in the eye.

“I’ll think about the lens, Clay,” he said. “I will give it some very, very serious thought.”

Saturday, May 9, 1942

A
ll of a sudden, everything is going wrong.

This morning, I was late getting up and I didn’t have time to go up to the lantern room to find the note Mr. Hewitt always leaves me on Friday nights because I had to help Mama with the baking and she would’ve been suspicious. I was real quick in my trip to the Coast Guard station with the pies and cookies because I needed to get that note before anyone else did. So when I got home, I went directly to the lantern room, and you can imagine how shocked I was to find Daddy there! I was afraid he might’ve found the note. I got ready to be asked a million questions, but then I saw Mr. Hewitt’s note wedged into the coupling where it always was. What a relief! Daddy was only up there to clean the windows.

When he saw me, he put down the sponge he was using. “Guess what, Bessie?” he said to me. “They caught a spy!”

My first thought was Jimmy Brown, of course, because in the note I left Mr. Hewitt last night, I’d told him about Jimmy changing his name. But that wasn’t it at all.

“Who?” I said. I was trying not to sound all that interested because I didn’t want to make him suspicious.

“Moto Sato, that’s who!” Daddy said. “Bud Hewitt was just over here to tell us.”

I was dumbfounded, but Daddy didn’t seem to notice. He just kept on talking. “Everybody’s suspected he was up to something, but nobody wanted to believe it because he seemed like such a nice old man who just liked to spend his days fishing in the sound.”

I started stammering, I had a billion questions to ask. I was so confused!

“You know, he didn’t burn up in that fire at his house,” Daddy said, like this was news.

“Right, I know that,” I answered.

“Well, when the sheriff got to his house, Mr. Sato was sitting up by the road, soaking wet. What do you think of that?”

I wasn’t sure what Daddy was trying to say. I wondered if he knew what Sandy and I had done and was trying to trip me up. Maybe Mr. Sato had been more awake than we’d thought, and he told the sheriff we’d saved him. I clamped my mouth shut, afraid I was going to stick my foot in it if I said another word.

“So, they knew then that he wasn’t crippled at all. That wheelchair of his was still in his bedroom. He must’ve run through the house and outside, jumped into the sound, swam to land and walked across his yard to the road. A crippled man couldn’t have done all that. He couldn’t give any other explanation for how he came to be there.”

“Maybe someone saved him and left him there in his yard,” I said.

“Then why didn’t he say so?”

I didn’t know how to answer that. “Why do they think he’s a spy?” I asked.

“Because he’s been faking being a crippled man all this time. Probably been stealing out to the beach at night, sending messages to the subs. They found a burned-out radio of some sort in his house.”

It’s just a regular old radio! I wanted to scream.

“He’s
still
faking it, Bud told me,” Daddy went on. “He pre
tended he couldn’t walk when they tried to get him in the sheriff’s car.”

That old man can’t walk worth a damn. I started to cry. I grabbed the chammy and went around to the other side of the lens, pretending to help with the windows, but the first thing I did over there was pull Mr. Hewitt’s note out of the coupling and stuff it in the pocket of my dungarees. “So, what will happen to him?” I asked. I hoped he couldn’t tell I was crying from the sound of my voice.

“Bud said he’d be questioned. If they can find some evidence on him, he’ll be arrested. Otherwise, they’ll just send him to one of them internment camps. His daughter-in-law was screaming and crying when they carted him away, but they’ll be questioning her, too. She might have something to do with this. She was married to a Jap herself, after all.”

Well, I knew I had to talk to Sandy right away. We needed to come clean, even though it would mean…well, I wasn’t sure what it would mean. He might just get some kind of warning, but I would be locked in my room for life. It didn’t matter. We couldn’t let an innocent man get sent away.

I helped with the windows for a while so as not to make Daddy think I was up to something. Then I left the lighthouse and ran all the way back to the Coast Guard station, stopping only to read the note from Mr. Hewitt.

He wrote:

“Oh, what a mess!” I thought when I read that note. He wasn’t even going to bother talking to Jimmy now that he thought he had his spy.

Once I got to the Coast Guard station, I realized I had no idea what to do. I wasn’t supposed to talk to Mr. Hewitt because people would get suspicious. I couldn’t talk to Sandy for the same reason. Anyhow, it turned out that Mr. Hewitt and a bunch of the boys had gone to the scene of a sunken ship down to Oregon Inlet. Fortunately, Sandy was one of the boys left behind, along with Jimmy and Teddy and a few others. He hadn’t been around when I’d brought the pies over earlier. He looked at me when I walked in, and I knew he was upset, too. I could tell by the look in his eyes. I didn’t know how I was going to get to talk to him, but he solved the problem.

“Bess,” he said, “I’m so glad you’re here! I want to make some of that fudge you and your mama make, but I don’t know how.”

“Do you have the ingredients?” I asked. It was like we were talking in a secret code.

“Sure do,” he said. “In the kitchen.” He nodded toward the kitchen, and I followed him in there. I was afraid some of the other boys would want to come with us, but no one did.

Once in the kitchen, he grabbed my arm. “You heard?” he asked me.

“Yes. We need to tell Bud we saved him.”

“We can’t do that,” Sandy said.

“We have to,” I said. “I know we’ll get in trouble, and probably lots of it, but we can’t let Mr. Sato get sent to one of those camps or worse.”

“He’d be better off in a camp than out here where people want to burn his house down.”

“But they think he’s a spy. They might torture him. Or kill him, even.” I really don’t know how a spy would be treated, but I know it wouldn’t be good.

“Bess, listen to me,” he said. “We can’t tell anyone we were there together.”

“Then I’ll say I was there alone,” I said. “I’ll leave you out of it.” I felt like crying again.

“And why will you say you were there?” Sandy asked me. “And exactly how did a pip-squeak like you manage to cart a full-
grown man through the house, over the deck railing and through the water to the yard?”

I knew he was right, although I really resented being called a pip-squeak! I’m nearly as tall as he is.

“Then you say
you
did it alone,” I said.

“Sure,” he said. “I’ll say I was just out wandering around on my night off, and for no good reason I crossed the island to the sound and noticed Sato’s house was on fire and saved him.”

I looked down at my shoes. “Sandy, isn’t a man’s life worth us getting in trouble for being together?” For some reason, I started thinking of what Dennis Kittering would say about all this. He hated those internment camps. He would be proud of me for sticking up for Mr. Sato.

“Look,” Sandy said. “Let’s not do anything about this right now, all right? Let’s give it a few days and see what happens.”

I could tell I wasn’t going to be able to persuade him. Suddenly, though, I had an idea. I would watch Jimmy Brown on his patrol tonight. Maybe I would see something suspicious. The way to free Mr. Sato would be to find the real spy.

“Okay,” I said, “but I won’t be able to sneak out to see you tonight. I’m sorry.”

“You’re not upset about the other night, are you?” he asked. “About what we did?” He was whispering in case anyone could hear him. “You know I love you, Bess.”

How I loved hearing those words from him! I told him I wasn’t upset about it, but that I
was
upset about this whole Mr. Sato mess and we would have to talk about it again in a day or so.

“Why can’t you come out tonight, then?” he asked.

“I’m just tired,” I said. “I need a good night’s sleep.”

He seemed to believe me, although I’ve never needed a good night’s sleep before. But I was glad he didn’t ask me any more questions.

I left the Coast Guard station feeling happy he said he loved me and sad he would not tell Mr. Hewitt that we’d gotten Mr. Sato out of his house. I think he’ll come around, though. He just needs a day or two to think about it. And maybe he’s right to wait. If I can find something out about Jimmy tonight, then we won’t have to ever tell.