Ash
I screwed up.
I screw up a lot, though. I’ll be the first to admit it.
I screwed up with my dad by telling him about the intervention beforehand, thinking he’d do the right thing and be a man and
check himself in, and not what he actually did, which was clean out the bank account, charter a private jet, and take off
to play golf in Arizona.
I screwed up just after college graduation by telling Nicole I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to get married or have kids, which
more or less drove her into the arms of Henry, my best friend and now Nicole’s husband and father of her cute four-year-old
twins.
And I screwed up everything here in West Harbor, not only by saying Mrs. Baumgarten imagined buying those groceries that later
got stolen, and initially denying her a refund, but by even renting out the house for the summer. Maybe if I’d taken occupancy
of the place earlier, Emma would have found me already.
And I wouldn’t have screwed up everything with Frankie.
It seems weird to call her Frankie when she’s such a Francesca. But that’s what she wants to be called. And all of our neighbors call her Frankie—I know because I spent the afternoon going up and down the street, introducing myself to them.
I guess it sounds weird, a grown man knocking on his neighbors’ doors and introducing himself.
But if I’d only done this a few months ago when Emma first went missing, maybe some of them would have remembered seeing her—providing
Emma was even in the area back then—and been able to tell me something to help find her. Their memories would have been fresher,
the story of Emma’s disappearance more front of mind.
It wasn’t that hard to get them talking today, though, because I was right: they do all think of me as the guy who denied
his Summer Person a refund, then got the cops called on him.
I told them that’s why I was stopping by to introduce myself. I said I wanted to reassure them that the cops weren’t there
for me—they were there for the missing girl Frankie had found outside my house.
This instantly made me a hero in their eyes. Mrs. DeLong even gave me a loaf of banana bread from a batch she was baking,
and said I was a “good boy,” and that my mother had raised me right. “Do you have a girlfriend?” she’d asked.
“No, ma’am.”
“Don’t worry; you will soon.”
When I asked how she knew, she’d only laughed knowingly and said, “This is West Harbor, isn’t it? I’m a witch!”
But despite being a witch, Mrs. DeLong didn’t have any information about Meg Boucher or the other missing girls.
Neither did my other neighbors. They hadn’t told the cops anything during their house-to-house earlier that day because none of them had seen anything .
. . none of them except possibly Mr. and Mrs. DeLongs’ grandkids, who are only ten (Eddie), seven (Robby), and five (Sammy), but still insist they saw a “strange boat” at my dock around six when they went down to the lake to go fishing.
“You mean the wooden boat?” I asked. “No, that’s mine. I had it put in dry dock for the winter, and they only delivered it
a few months—”
“Not that boat,” Eddie scoffed. “That’s a twenty-two-foot Chris-Craft Deluxe Utility. This was a little boat. We saw it at your dock this morning.”
“But it wasn’t tied up,” Robby informed me. “That’s probably why, later, it was gone.”
“If you don’t tie up your boat,” Sammy said solemnly, “it can float away.”
It’s always hard to tell if kids are simply imagining something, or if it really happened.
I feel like the mystery boat that appeared and then disappeared from my dock might be made up for dramatic purposes, but then
again, you never know with kids.
As a token of my gratitude for their services, I sneaked the boys a couple pieces of bubble gum I bought yesterday at the
grocery store. At the time, I didn’t know why I was buying it. I don’t even like gum.
But today I know why that gum found me: to ingratiate me to the DeLong kids, who were so impressed by my gift that they promised
faithfully to report any further boat sightings.
I try not to think too much about Francesca—I mean Frankie—for the rest of the day.
I try not to even look over at her house.
I know the sister with the weird hair showed up late in the afternoon, wheeling an overnight bag.
She must have had a fight with her husband.
I’ve seen him around Francesca’s place from time to time, helping out with things like fallen tree branches, especially right after Dr. Dick packed up and left.
He’s usually wearing some kind of green uniform, like a forest ranger.
He definitely has a forest ranger’s big muscles and long, straggly beard.
He must have screwed up pretty badly to make his wife so upset that she packed a suitcase and left him.
But when I look toward Frankie’s house a few hours later, I see that both her little red Prius and the sister’s car are gone from her driveway.
This is big. Francesca—Frankie—almost never leaves her house. Why should she, when she works from home? Sure, she has to go
buy food once in a while, but not that often since that brother of hers stops by almost every other day with takeout from
the restaurant.
It’s only on Sunday afternoons that she disappears for hours, but that’s to go to what she calls dinner—but is really a late
lunch—at her mother’s house. I know because I was once standing out on my deck and overheard Dr. Dick telling Frankie he couldn’t
join her for “Sunday Gravy” at her mom’s because he was stuck at the hospital with a suicidal patient.
But he said this to her while on his cell phone out on the back deck of their house, wearing yoga clothes and smoking a massive
blunt.
I know it’s strange and even potentially stalkerish that I know my next-door neighbor’s schedule so well, especially considering
the fact that I don’t even really live here. But I’m an observant guy, and Francesca Giovanni is definitely worth observing.
And one thing I’ve observed about her is that it’s unusual for Frankie to leave the house on a Saturday. I’m guessing she
went off with her sister to do a little marriage counseling or something. Either that or she finally got finished with all
her patients and is taking the cat to that vet she mentioned.
Which is good because that’s what she’d said she wanted to do, but finding Meg put a big dent in that plan. I’m glad Frankie
isn’t too badly affected by my latest screwup. That means I can go to Derrick’s engagement party with a clear conscience.
It’s the same engagement party Frankie told her sister on the phone yesterday that she wasn’t going to. I don’t think she
knows I overheard that conversation, or she wouldn’t have tried to use it as an excuse to get out of dinner with me.
Hey, I get it. I appreciate that she even bothered to make up an excuse, but I’m not surprised. Frankie would never be rude
enough to say she wants nothing to do with a screwup like me (at least to my face), but there’s no way she’s really going
to the party.
And that’s perfect because it means I can go and not have to answer questions about it, like “How do you know Derrick?” which
is inevitably followed by, “Wait, how can he be your uncle when he’s only a year or two older than you are?”
My family dynamics are complicated—even more so than the Giovannis, though I doubt Frankie would ever believe that. And like
Frankie, I love my family—but that doesn’t mean I can always explain their behavior.
Still, I try to be supportive. So that’s how I find myself at Derrick Winters’s engagement party.
I don’t expect him to look thrilled to see me—there’s always been a kind of sibling rivalry between us, even though we’re
uncle and nephew, not brothers.
But I certainly don’t expect him to grimace when I walk up to him and say, “Congrats on the engagement!”
“What the hell are you doing here?” Derrick’s expression is a mixture of disbelief and disgust.
Since Derrick always looks this way when he sees me, I don’t take it personally—just like I’ve never taken it personally that
he is nearly five inches taller than I am, always dresses in black, rides a motorcycle, and can heal with his touch. He won
our family genetic lottery. I won . . . other things. I’ve accepted this, even if he has not.
“Geez, thanks a lot. Nice to see you, too.” I lean against the bar—it’s an outdoor one, since the party is on the deck of
the Brewport. It’s turned out to be a beautiful evening—a bit chilly, but the sky is turning lovely shades of pink and purple
as the sun sets. The deck is crowded. A lot of people have shown up to celebrate Derrick and Jessica’s engagement.
But not Frankie. I see the sister with the weird hair—it’s spikier than ever in the front—hanging with her husband in front
of the stage where the band is playing. It’s a live band, featuring a few young girls dressed in black who seem to have limited
musical skills but plenty of magic. I recognize a glamour when I see—or hear—one, and these girls have definitely cast one
to enhance their sound, kind of like a supernatural autotune.
“I’ll take a Heineken,” I say to the girl behind the bar, because my other choices are all local IPAs with names like Season
of the Witch, Witch’s Brew, and Basic Witch. It’s not that I have anything against witch-themed pale ale, I just tend to stick
with what I know. To Derrick, standing beside me with a bottle of one of those pale ales in his big hand, I say, “I replied
to the e-invite a few weeks ago. Didn’t you see that I said I was coming?”
Derrick scowls some more. “No. I’m not in charge here.
It’s all Jessica and her friends.” He throws an aggrieved look across the front of the stage to where a bunch of women in fancy dresses are all laughing and dancing.
I can’t tell which one is Jessica because I’ve never met her. We’re not really that kind of a family.
“Why would you come all the way out here to West Harbor for my engagement party,” Derrick growls, “when you could be in the
city? It’s Saturday night, and you’re single.”