Chapter 8 #2
“Malcolm’s philanthropy is performance art.
He funds things that make him look good and defunds the things that don’t.
The library renovation? That was Catherine’s project.
He finished it after she died and put his own name on the plaque.
” She leans on the counter. “Jasper put his first wife in the ground and called it a suicide, and half this island still believes him. The other half is too scared to say otherwise.”
“His first wife?”
“Georgina Caldwell. Sweet girl. Married him at twenty, dead by thirty. Jumped off a cliff, they said. Or was pushed. Depends who you ask and how much they’ve had.
” She refills my cup without being asked.
“The Merricks have been rewriting this island for a century. Malcolm’s just the current edition. ”
At the corner table, a man with hands like knotted rope has been listening to all of it over a newspaper he isn’t reading.
“That’s Fish,” Mimi says. “His grandfather saw the Fairchild ship go down.”
Fish grunts.
“What year?” I ask.
He looks up. His eyes are the color of old pennies. “Don’t know.”
“Your grandfather didn’t say?”
“Told me he saw it. Didn’t say when.” He turns a page. Conversation over.
Donna refills his coffee on the way past. “He’s been telling that story for forty years and it’s never had a date in it.”
“Doesn’t need one,” Fish says, to the newspaper.
By noon there are four of them at that corner table—Fish, two women in their sixties, and a bearded man who arrives with a thermos of something that smells stronger than coffee. Mimi calls them the Bilge Rats and they answer to it.
“Evangeline ran off with Thomas the night before the wedding,” the first woman says. “Took her dowry. Gold, jewelry, the family heirlooms, the whole fortune.”
“Bullshit,” says the beard. “She took nothing but the clothes on her back. Charles Fairchild caught them at the dock and shot her. Bled out in Thomas’s arms.”
“Then where’s the body?”
“Weighted and dropped in the sound.”
“There was never a treasure,” the second woman says. “It was a deed. Evangeline’s grandfather willed her the north shore. Charles wanted it, she wouldn’t give it up, and he killed her for it.”
“Then how’d Thomas buy that land two years later—”
“His wife Eleanor’s money—”
“Stolen money—”
They’re shouting over each other now, all four certain, none yielding, and I sit with my pen frozen above the page.
Nobody in this town agrees on what happened. But none of them believe Malcolm.
“Ask Gus,” Fish says.
The table goes quiet.
“Gus Pemberton,” Donna says from behind the counter, not looking up. “Saltbox Hardware, end of Harbor Street.”
“He won’t talk to her,” the bearded man says.
“He’ll talk to her.” Fish turns another page. “He talks to anybody who asks right.”
“What’s asking right?”
Fish doesn’t answer that, and neither does anyone else.
Mimi drains her coffee and stands. “You’re on your own for that one, honey. Gus doesn’t like me much.”
“Why not?”
“Long story involving a table saw and a misunderstanding about whose table saw it was.” She pulls her keys out of her jacket and scoops Sprocket off the floor. “You’ll do better without me. Clear your afternoon.”
I make it four blocks up Harbor Street before the rain finds me. Fine, needling stuff that only seems to happen in the Pacific Northwest. It soaks through my jacket before I’ve decided whether to run for it.
A truck slows on the street beside me.
I know the truck.
Dean leans across and pushes the passenger door open. “Get in.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re soaked.”
“I’m fine.”
He doesn’t argue. He also doesn’t drive away, and I stand there in the rain with my notebook going soft in my hands, and a woman across the street has stopped to watch us, and there are exactly two ways this ends.
I get in.
The cab is warm and smells like diesel and dog. Doug is not here, which means Dean is not on his way to or from anything.
“Where am I taking you?”
“Saltbox Hardware.”
His jaw tightens. He pulls out. The wipers slap. The heater roars.
Neither of us says anything for a block and a half.
“You were at the historical society this morning,” I say.
“Tidal maps.”
“They’re digital.”
“Old ones are better.”
“And the marina at eleven, when I came out of the coffee shop.”
His jaw works. “I work at the marina.”
“You do.” I look out the windshield. “And now you happen to be driving down Harbor Street at two in the afternoon in the rain, with no dog and no cargo and nowhere to be.”
“Scarlett—”
“You’ve been three feet behind me all day, Dean.” My voice comes out steadier than I feel. “You kissed me. Then you told me it shouldn’t have happened. And now you can’t seem to be anywhere I’m not, so pick one, because I can’t work like this.”
The truck stops at the light. The wipers slap twice.
“Curt’s back on the dock,” he says.
“What?”
“Since Tuesday. He’s been drinking at the Salt every afternoon and asking people about you.” He still hasn’t looked at me. “You’re a woman on her own with a notebook, asking questions in a town where people are already unhappy about the answers. So yeah. I’ve been where you are.”
He’s been following me all day because he was worried, and I’ve spent four blocks being angry about it.
“You could have told me that.”
“I’m telling you now.”
“After I dragged it out of you.”
“Yeah.” The light changes. “That’s how it usually goes.”
Saltbox is two blocks ahead, and I have maybe forty seconds, and I have spent all day being handed pieces of him by people who love him.
“I know about your mother,” I say.
His hands go still on the wheel.
“I know you were fourteen. I know your dad worked until he was eighty-six because stopping would have killed him faster. I know Henry took the Haven name and you didn’t get the option.
” My throat is tight. “I know you were a rescue swimmer, and something happened, and you’ve never told a single person in your family what. ”
He pulls up in front of the hardware store. Puts the truck in park. Doesn’t shut off the engine.
“Mimi talks.”
“Mimi talks because you don’t.” I turn to face him.
“I didn’t go looking for that. I sat down to ask about a land transfer from 1895, and I spent forty minutes taking notes on you, and I didn’t stop, and that’s on me.
But you don’t get to hand me your whole family for one night and then act shocked that I’m fascinated by them. And by you.”
“I’m not shocked.”
“Then what are you?”
He looks at me. Actually looks, the first time since the porch.
“Careful,” he says.
“Of me?”
“Of what happens after.” He turns back to the windshield.
“You’ll write it down. Not because you’re cruel.
Because that’s what you do, and you’re good at it, and it’ll be true, and everybody on this island will read it.
” His hands flex on the wheel. “And then you’ll leave, and I’ll still be here, and everybody who read it will still be here, and they’ll know. ”
The rain runs down the glass.
“Know what?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer.
“Dean. Know what?”
“Get out of the truck, Scarlett.”
His voice isn’t cruel. It’s worse than cruel. It’s exhausted.
I get out. The rain hits me all at once. I stand there with my hand on the door and rainwater running into my collar, and I have one thing left to say and no good reason to say it.
“For the record,” I tell him, “everything I learned about you today, I learned from people who love you. Every single one of them told me what you did, not what you failed at. You should ask yourself why you’re so sure the story is bad.”
I shut the door before he can answer.