The Drowning House (6 page)

“It’s ready.” The man dropped the hood deliberately. “You might could use some brake fluid.”

“I didn’t ask you to do this,” I said. “Where did you get my keys?”

His broad face remained impassive. Still, I got the impression he was amused. “You left them in the car.”

“I wasn’t expecting anyone to take an interest in it,” I said.

“A kid might have gone off with it. Joyriding. It’s been known to happen.”

I felt my chest constrict, but I tried not to react. “What do you know about that?”

He pulled the rag from his pocket and wiped his hands deliberately. “Faline told me. About what you did. The two of you.”

“It was nothing. A few blocks.”
My Otis
, she’d called him. I wondered what else she might have said about Patrick and me. Faline had been my ally. She’d taken my part against Frankie, and shielded Patrick and me from the consequences of our behavior when she could. I didn’t like to think of her talking about us with Otis.

“What about the fire?” he asked. “The girl that died.” He seemed familiar and I wondered why. Was he an Islander? On the Island, everyone watches.
There goes that Porterfield girl again, no the other one, with the camera. Going down to the bait shop, probably
. Had he been one of those?

“Otis. Do I know you?”

“We never met.” He seemed a little less comfortable now. I sensed an advantage, and when he moved away, I followed him to where a door opened into a part of the garage I had never seen before. Brackets
along the walls held rows of heavy horse collars, some plain, some set with polished bells. “What’s in there?”

“The tack room.”

I stepped closer. Why didn’t I remember any of this? There were complicated harnesses, long driving whips, and other things I couldn’t identify, all of them in perfect order and smelling wonderfully of well-kept leather. But apart from the wealth of extraordinary equipment, it was a simple room. A worn Oriental rug warmed the stone floor. A round oak table held a few books and magazines. In an alcove in one corner was a bed.

“Is this a bedroom?”

“Not really.” Otis hesitated, as though he were choosing what to say. Then he added, “Sometimes he has his dinner brought out.”

I turned and saw the carriages. There were several, of different shapes and sizes. The spokes of their wheels were pointed up in gold. I peered into one of them. A silver flask rested on the tufted leather, as though it had just been set down and left. The carriages were beautiful, but even horseless and still, they had a top-heavy, precarious look. I had not realized what an act of faith it must have been to step up into one of them.

They looked old, but of course they couldn’t be. It was silly even to think that one of them might be Stella’s carriage, the one she’d tried to escape in. Surely it was gone, the wood rotted by the salt air, the springs rusted to nothing.

But looking at all those straps and buckles, it was easy to see the fingers of a groom working them. A short man, with the sleeves of his stiff-collared shirt rolled up, his eyes worried above a thick mustache. Easy to see Stella, in her white kid gloves, clutching a small reticule. To hear patches of conversation, pauses, high-pitched, nervous laughter.

Otis held out the keys to the station wagon. “Don’t make trouble for Faline.”

“I’m not a child,” I said.

“There’s all kinds of trouble.” He folded his arms across his chest.

Then I knew who he was. The gesture gave him away. I had thought of it as Faline’s alone, something defining, that pose with the chin tucked, the arms folded. Now I saw that, like a fleck of color in a woven blanket, it would appear and reappear within extended family. And I remembered something Faline had told me one night in the Carradays’ kitchen.

“You’re related, aren’t you?” I asked. “You and Faline?”

There was a toolbox on the ground. Otis squatted on his heels and opened it. “Cousins,” he said.

“I know about you, too. She told me.”

“Nothing to tell.” He closed the toolbox and snapped the metal latch as if that finished the conversation.

But I wasn’t done. “I bet you never had a wedding portrait, did you?” I asked. How could they say no to a present?

In the photo, the similarities are uncanny. It’s not just the dark hair, the sloe eyes, although, seen side by side, they are strikingly alike. It’s in subtler things too—the flat planes of their forearms, the long, straight fingers. Their arms are folded, in the gesture characteristic of both.

Only their shoulders touch, as though that were all they needed, one point of contact. I tried to remember whether Michael and I had ever had that kind of connection, one that could flow like current through the smallest opening.

Mr. and Mrs. Otis Lagarde, First Cousins
. The title was Jules’s idea. When I saw the prints, I did wonder how it would feel, making love with someone who looked so much like you. Seeing yourself in him. Would the similarity be reassuring? Would you think,
Yes, I know that, and that?
Isn’t that what we all want on some level? I remember once when I was small seeing Frankie kiss a mirror, and startled, rub the evidence away with her sleeve.

Otis shifted slightly and I knew he was listening. Then I heard it too—whistling, but not the usual kind, the thoughtless, under-the-breath noise that signals boredom or nervousness, three or four dry notes. These sounds were as firm and clear as birdsong.

So even before I saw him coming across the lawn, or registered the boyish air that his whistling and his jeans and his casual friendliness only underscored, he was not what I expected.

People say he was tall. In fact, he was several inches under six feet. But he moved with an easy economy and none of the stiffness most athletic men acquire as they get older. And there was an energy about him that was only partly physical, that left a sort of afterimage, so that when he had gone, you continued to feel his presence. His hair was thick, close-cropped, white. His eyes were the kind of blue you picture when you think of a summer morning.

He took my hand in both of his and held it. “Do you remember me?” he asked. There was something wistful about the way he posed the question, as though it were more than a pleasantry. As though it really mattered to him whether I remembered. When of course it was a given. Everyone knew him, or at least knew who he was. On the Island, his casual manner was set off by a sort of accompanying radiance that derived in part from his wealth, but also from his family history and its place in the local pageant. If he was aware, he gave no indication. This was it then, the famous charm. “I’m Will Carraday,” he said.

When I try to recall the rest of our conversation that day, I can’t remember anything specific. Will and I stood together. We talked. Otis closed and locked the garage doors and left. How long were we there? I don’t know. I remember that Will expressed sorrow about Bailey, I know he welcomed me to the Island. And somehow, coming from him, these commonplace messages seemed essential and profound.

Chapter 6

LATER I HEARD WILL DESCRIBED
as calculating, and I suppose in some ways he was. You’d expect someone who owned a controlling interest in several companies, as well as a bank, to be astute. But his pleasure as he greeted his guests that night was real.

They came through the door with their elbows tight against their sides, and stepped tentatively into the pool of light under the chandelier. But when Will spoke to them or took their hands, when he fixed his attention on them, they relaxed. Yes, he adjusted his manner, the way a good dancer adjusts to his partner’s height and ability. He was not the same with everyone. But it seemed less a conscious choice than an instinctive move toward harmony, and his guests responded to it.

Charm. Skill. Whatever you choose to call it, Will’s gift wasn’t inherited from his father, a dour man with a heavy, low-slung jaw and a habit of working his back teeth that had earned him his nickname—the Grinder. Not from his grandfather, either. Ward Carraday’s appearance was said to have frightened his customers into paying their bills.

While the guests were arriving, I stood in a narrow passage off the front hall where I could see everyone without seeming to watch for Patrick.

When I thought about Patrick, when I tried to imagine our meeting, there was no consistency about any of it. Sometimes I felt certain that I would know him despite any kind of change. At other times,
I thought the years must have turned him into an entirely different person. What Eleanor had said raised new doubts. Patrick behind a desk? I resolved to practice, so I could meet him and offer my hand casually without giving anything away.
Do you remember me?

The paneled walls of the passage were filled floor to ceiling with family photos, most of them taken years before. I was only pretending to look, but every so often something caught my eye. There, for example, was Mary Liz Carraday, Patrick’s mother, before her accident, field dressing a downed buck. Will, holding up a glistening fish.

The image below was painful—Patrick a scrawny seven or so, reaching awkwardly to put one arm around his sister, Catherine, who was already so much wider. Catherine was disabled. From the time she was about twelve, she had lived away, but I could always tell when she was visiting. She spoke only a few intelligible words, she made harsh squawking noises, and when a door or window opened, I could hear her.

“Are you hiding in there?” Eleanor was wearing a silk tunic that set off her eyes. Her hair was up, not coiled and pinned as I remembered, but loosely piled, so that it looked as if it might come down the way it had in the garden. I realized with a shock that her fitful incandescence was something other people could see.
My mother is a beautiful woman
, I thought.

“You said to come early so we could see the house.”

“I said to come early so Will could
show
you the house,” Eleanor said with careful emphasis. She touched the shoulder of a young woman standing nearby. “This is our new neighbor, Leanne.” I wondered if she could hear the invisible quotation marks around her name, Eleanor’s way of letting me know that what came next would be party talk, not to be taken seriously. “You’ve seen what they’re doing next door,” Eleanor went on, “such a wonderful job. Lots of repairs. Painting.” She raised her eyebrows at me and was gone.

“Hi. Sorry, no hands.” Leanne held up a glass and a skewered shrimp. She smiled briefly and deliberately, then her features fell back into place. Her straight blond hair was so fine I could see the pink of her scalp. She waved the shrimp. “I’m hoping if I keep my
hands full I won’t eat. I’ve still got twelve pounds to lose.” There were shadows under her eyes and a not-quite-white stain on her shoulder.
She has a baby
, I thought, and felt something turn over inside me.

“You don’t look as if you have any weight issues,” she said.

“No.”

“Lucky you.” She paused. “I mean, I bet you’re disciplined. What you eat.”

I thought of the week’s worth of junk food and the trash I’d left in the car. I shook my head.

Her smile flickered on and off. “You work out?”

“No.” I wondered why she’d asked. No one had ever mistaken me for an athlete. Then all at once I understood. I had known girls like her in high school, they came around acting friendly once a year, right before the class elections. I wondered why she thought I was worth her trouble.

“I lost my daughter a year ago,” I said.

“Oh. I’m sorry.” The color left her face. “I’m so sorry,” she said. She looked unhappily at her feet. I noticed that her heels hung out over the backs of her too-small sandals. She must have seen me looking. “My feet grew when I was pregnant,” she said. “I thought they’d go back, but it doesn’t look like they will. I mean, it’s been four months.” She smiled again, earnestly. “Now I’m going to have to get all new shoes.” She stopped. “But listen to me. When you—”

“I just didn’t feel like eating.”

“Well. You wouldn’t, would you?”

I shrugged. “Grief affects people differently. I know someone who goes out and wrecks a car when he’s unhappy. It’s expensive, but he can afford it. Or his parents can.” A waiter offered wine on a silver tray and I turned and took a glass. As I did, my camera swung around where Leanne could see it.

“Oh,” she said, exhaling, “you’re the photographer.”

“That’s right.”

“So you’re not … I mean, I thought you were part of the family.”

“Of this family? No. Thank God.”

Her face flushed suddenly.

“Clare.” Eleanor was back. She smiled brightly at Leanne. “Excuse us.” She took me by the arm and led me into the big double drawing room—pale damask walls set off by a frieze of lilies, the ceiling painted to look like sky and clouds. I didn’t need Will to give me a tour, I could have led one myself. The house was filling up, and the noise of the party eddied around us. “What did you say to her?” Eleanor demanded.

“Leanne? I guess she was disappointed. She took me for one of the Carradays and I had to disabuse her.”