Chapter 17 Susan
Chapter 17
Susan
“Are you sure you don’t want me to stay with you?” Ethan asked. He stood in the doorway, half in and half out of the bedroom, torn between remaining at home with his wife or joining the rest of his family. The others were all downstairs waiting, equipped for the day with hats and water bottles and sunscreen and a folding chair, should Elizabeth get tired during the ceremony. And they had the urn with George’s ashes, of course. He was the reason they’d all come to Maine, the reason they’d congregated in this accursed place. Today, George’s friends and family would drive up to Cameron Mountain to say their farewells and scatter his ashes, leaving what remained of George Conover to enrich the soil and find new life in a blade of grass or a wisp of dandelion fluff. In his last will and testament, George had laid out every detail of this ceremony, from the songs they would sing to the poems they would read, and now the family was about to honor his final request.
A request that Susan no longer gave a damn about. She remained sitting on the bed, her hands clasped in her lap, wishing that Ethan would just leave the room. That they would all just leave and grant her the privacy to suffer in solitude.
“I don’t have to go,” said Ethan. “I’ll stay here with you.”
“Of course you have to go. Your father wanted you there.”
“But I don’t want to leave you alone.”
“Ethan!” Colin called from downstairs. “Are you coming?”
Ethan glanced over his shoulder, then looked at Susan. “It might be good for you to get out of the house. This will only be for a few hours.”
“What if the police need to reach me?”
“They’ll call.”
“What if there’s no cell service up on the mountain? What if Zoe comes home and there’s no one here? Someone has to be here.”
“You’re right.” He sighed. “I should stay with you.”
“No, I’d rather you didn’t. Go, Ethan. It’s what you all came to do. It’s what your father wanted. I’ll be fine. I just need to be alone.”
“Ethan?” It was his mother this time, calling from downstairs.
“Go,” Susan said, waving her husband out of the bedroom.
She was relieved when he finally walked out of the room and down the stairs. She heard car doors slam shut, then tires crackling across gravel as the family drove away. Only then did she feel she could take a deep breath. For too many hours, she’d had to endure being closed up in this house with the Conovers, forced to tolerate their attempts at sympathy, their useless advice, their uneasy glances. Yes, they might mean well, but she felt suffocated by so much closeness.
Once again, she looked at her cell phone. It was practically grafted to her hand, this tenuous lifeline to her daughter, but she saw no new texts, no new voicemails. She couldn’t help herself; she called Zoe’s phone yet again, only to hear the same recording. How many messages had she left? The voice mailbox must be full by now. Was Zoe hearing any of them? Could she hear them?
Suddenly desperate for fresh air, she headed downstairs and left the house. Walked down the sloping lawn to the dock. It was another heartbreakingly beautiful day, the sun shining, the water as flat as mirrored glass. Where are you, baby? Not in this pond; they knew that now. No, Zoe the mermaid would never drown in water so calm, so benign; she could easily swim ten times the length of Maiden Pond. Instead, the bones of some other poor soul had been dragged up, someone who must have been in the water for a long time, long enough to be forgotten. Here is where people come to disappear.
Staring across the sun-gilded water, she suddenly noticed the man facing her from the opposite bank. On the evening Zoe vanished, Susan had seen that same man’s shoulders silhouetted in the window across the pond. And yesterday, when the warden service divers were searching the water, he’d been there again. Watching. As they stared at each other, she felt rooted to the spot, unable to break off her gaze. Then a loon suddenly took off, wings flapping as it cut across the water between them, and the spell was broken. She backed away from the pond, away from the man’s stare.
She hurried up the lawn and back into the house. The door slammed shut behind her, and the gust sent papers flying off the coffee table. It was Ethan’s handwritten manuscript, now scattered across the floor. That goddamn novel. If he had not been so focused on his writing, if he hadn’t left the house to buy more paper, he would have been home when Zoe returned. He would have paid better attention to her. Who she was with, where she had gone. God, how she wanted to scoop up these pages and set them all on fire. She took a breath and swallowed back her rage. Bent down to collect them, not bothering to put them back in order. She plucked up the last scattered sheet and was about to place it on the stack of pages when her gaze landed on the sentence at the top of the page.
This is where it began. And this is where it all came to its bloody and inevitable end, in this poisonous house on Maiden Pond.
He’d never told her his novel was about Moonview.
She shuffled the pages back in proper order. Thank God he’d numbered them, or she’d never be able to reconstitute the manuscript. Another sentence caught her eye. She saw the names Corcoran and Connor and Nathan. Character names so close to Conover and Colin and Ethan that it was glaringly apparent he was writing about his own family, including their neighbors. The Groens next door were obviously the real-life Greenes, with a daughter named Helen, not Hannah. Here was where reality veered wildly into fantasy, with raven-haired, beautiful Helen described as dangerously tempting, the spark that would ignite the firestorm to come.
Hannah as temptress. That much, at least, was clearly fiction. But the setting on Maiden Pond, the two brothers at odds with each other, and the iron-willed mother all felt uncomfortably close to reality, but a far darker, more sinister reality.
She flipped back to the first page of Ethan’s manuscript, when the fictional Corcoran family arrives at Moonview.
This is where it began. And this is where it all came to its bloody and inevitable end.
Someone rapped on the door. Startled, she snapped up straight in her chair. Zoe, she thought. Someone’s here about Zoe.
She jumped up and ran to answer the door, expecting to find Jo Thibodeau standing outside. Instead, a man loomed on the porch, a man with unsmiling eyes and a face weathered by a lifetime of hard winters. It’s him, she thought. The man from across the pond. The man who’s been watching our house.
“You’re Ethan’s new wife,” he said.
She swallowed, glanced past him, at the pond. Wondered if anyone would hear her if she called for help. “If you’re here to see the Conovers, I’ll tell them you came by.” She started to close the door, but he put up his hand to stop it.
“You didn’t even ask my name,” he said.
She took a breath and stood straighter. “What name should I give them?”
“Tarkin. Reuben. That’s my camp over there.” He pointed across the pond, to his ramshackle cottage. “My father used to work for the Conovers.”
“I’ll let Elizabeth know—”
“I’ve seen the family here every summer, watched those boys grow up. But I’ve never seen you before.” His gaze was so steady it unnerved her. As if his blue eyes were lasers, piercing straight into her skull. “Have they found your girl?”
She was so startled by his question, she just stared at him for a moment. “No,” she whispered.
“But they found someone in the pond. I saw them bring up the bag.”
“It wasn’t Zoe. It wasn’t my daughter.” She released a shaky breath. “I’ll tell the family you were here.” Again, she started to close the door.
“Tell them I haven’t forgotten. Tell that to Arthur Fox too.”
“Haven’t forgotten what?”
“Just tell them I haven’t forgotten what they did,” he said. Then he tipped his head and added, quietly: “I hope they find your girl, ma’am.”
She watched him walk away, down the lawn toward Moonview’s dock, where his blue kayak was tied up. Shaken, she closed the door and locked it. The encounter had unsettled her so deeply that for a moment she stood paralyzed, his words echoing in her head.
Tell them I haven’t forgotten what they did.
She looked at the coffee table, at Ethan’s handwritten pages, which now took on new significance. What they did. She pictured the family standing at this moment on Cameron Mountain, singing George’s praises. A memorial service was not the place to speak of a person’s flaws or misdeeds. No, they would release his ashes with words of praise. A fine man, a generous man. A good husband and father and grandfather. Whether truth or fiction, the accolades would be spoken, and then they would all come down the mountain again. Mission accomplished. George’s last wishes fulfilled.
She went to the window and gazed across the water to the opposite bank, where Reuben Tarkin was already pulling his kayak ashore. What hasn’t he forgotten? she wondered.
What did the Conovers do to you?