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  Problem was, I had to be somewhere.

  CHAPTER 3

  Sutton family,

  Marietta, Georgia, Wednesday, July 3, 1946:

  Two men sat at the kitchen table, illuminated only by a dim light bulb. Each of them held a jelly glass; the bottle between them was already half empty. The store owner had his elbows on the table. His hair was greasy with sweat. He pushed it back from his brow and rested his face in his palms for a moment, and then he gripped the edge of the table top.

  “Jesus,” he said. “I don’t know what the Christ to do. I really don’t.”

  His pale young wife stood in the corner of the room, her hip against a peeling sideboard. “You’re her father,” she said. “You better do something. She has no chance of a decent life, of getting married, nothing. These niggers’ll have it all over town. You know they will. We won’t be able to walk down the street the way this is.”

  “Decent?” the man asked sourly. “Like you?”

  She crossed the room in an instant, and the sound of the slap was like a pistol shot. The man stood up, his cheek reddening. The other man, her brother, raised a hand to separate them.

  They stopped and looked at him. He laid a pistol on the table.

  “We’re gone do what we have to,” he said, one index finger resting on the gun. “No one’s doing any talking about this family.”

  “You can’t shoot someone over a thing like this,” the store owner protested.

  “You shut up!” his wife hissed, leaning over the table. “Thank God there’s at least one man in this house.”

  “I never said we were shooting anyone, or not shooting them,” the brother said. “I did say no one’s going to be talking about this. That’s what I said.”

  Standing, he picked up the gun and tucked it behind his belt. He looked at the other man. “Let’s go.”

  ***

  Present Day:

  In the morning, I brought my breakfast out to the front veranda and set it down on the steps. I sat next to it. When I picked up my coffee, the cup left a dark wet ring on the old wood. Early May sunshine filtered down through fresh leaves and stained the clearing in front of my cabin a bright new green. The sky was mirrored in the bits of lake I could see between the trees in front of me. It was chilly, but the patch of sun on the porch was warm.

  I watched the big yellow dog nosing through the pine needles on the floor of the clearing. He wasn’t mine, and he didn’t look at me.

  “Hey, stranger,” I called. “Where’d you come from?”

  I tossed a piece of toast in his direction. He ignored it, and me.

  His owner must have come in by canoe. The sides of my island sloped so steeply into the water that the dock was the only place to land a boat, and I had seen no one arrive. It seldom occurred to summer explorers that the island was private. The infrequent appearance of picnickers or hikers didn’t bother me, though. I sometimes welcomed the company.

  My Echo Island was a seven-acre egg. It sat in Hollow Lake, thirteen miles of cold water, a couple of hours north of Toronto. It was mostly covered with tall pines, and the interior stayed dim and cool, even in the summer time. A single dead oak stood by itself on the north shore. It looked like an enormous scarecrow, put there to guard the conifers.

  My cabin was a century old. The living area and kitchen were part of the original structure, made of wide boards and rough-cut beams. I had built an addition on at the back, which housed a modern bathroom and my bedroom.

  There were two larger islands that were my neighbors. Duck and Long Duck Islands swam side by side, with a passage between them. On misty mornings they appeared to hover above the surface of the lake.

  The southern shore had a gravel road running along it, with a few summer cottages sprinkled along its length. Most of the vacation homes on the lake were on the north shore, accessible only by water. The people who summered here valued privacy.

  There were only a handful of us who lived here all year, and we stuck together. Molly Bean lived in a small white house on the south road. The MacMillans, Bill and Diane, owned the small marina at the other end of the lake and lived upstairs, above the office.

  The yellow dog put his head up and stood still. He listened to something that I couldn’t hear and then trotted off, headed for the trail that led behind my cabin. I was curious, so I finished my coffee and stood up to follow him. The pine canopy overhead kept the path free of undergrowth, and the soft loam underfoot deadened footsteps and imparted a deep hush.

  Down the trail, the dog joined a small boy, who was peering intently at a tree trunk. He appeared to be carving something in the wood. I walked toward them. The boy was black and very small, probably eight or nine years old. He wore too-big denim overalls that were cut off at the knees, different from the standard brightly-colored bathing trunks or shorts that were nearly a summer uniform among the area children.

  He spotted me, waved happily, and skipped off. The dog followed him over a rise in the path and they disappeared. I walked to the tree and saw most of a crude heart scratched in the trunk. I started to trace the heart with my finger and was stopped by the sound of a boat approaching across the reach. I changed direction and walked back and onto my dock.

  The sun was bright on the water, and I squinted through a million sparkles. The morning wind was warm and smelled fresh. Molly Bean’s red and white boat emerged from the light, headed toward me.

  The dock rose and fell underneath me as the boat came close, and I caught the line she tossed at me. I took her wet hand as she jumped out.

  “Little early for wearing shorts, isn’t it, Molly?” I asked. “You’re freezing.”

  She smiled sweetly at me. “If summer won’t come to me,” she said, “I’ll go to summer. You have to believe in it.”

  Dark-haired, with clear skin and strangely amber eyes, Molly made the day bright. I had met her the summer before. The first time that she had turned her head and looked at me, I was head-over-heels, just-like-the-fifth-grade in love with her. The past year had only deepened my feelings, and I had no idea what to do about her.

  She lived part of the time with her estranged husband. I wasn’t clear on their relationship or on what his role in her life was. He appeared for a week or two at a time and then vanished again. He seemed to dismiss her, and I never saw any gesture or word of affection pass between them, yet I knew that Molly was still in love with him, because she had told me so.

  She loved me too, but it was not with the same hopeless fascination that she felt for him. Occasionally, she spent the night at my cabin. Each time it happened, I woke up in the morning believing that we had bridged a gap, and then each time she moved away again to a safe distance.

  We were in love with being loved. Romance was the excitement of being reflected in the mirror of someone else’s adoration. I didn’t think I was going to have that from Molly. Still, she was my best friend, my sometimes lover, and I’d made a decision to settle for what parts of her she was willing to share.

  “Summer’s almost here, and winter just left,” I said. “I’ve hardly had time to even notice spring yet. It just came and I miss it already. Funny, every season makes you miss it when it’s gone.”

  “The trick is to kiss them while they’re here,” Molly said.

  “Kiss them?”

  She nodded.

  “You might be right,” I said. “Want coffee?”

  We walked slowly up toward the cabin.

  “I still miss your damn dog,” she said. “I keep looking for her to run out to the dock every time I come here.”

  “I do too,” I said. “There’s another dog around here this morning. Might be a lost one.”

  “Doubt he’s lost, unless he’s a good swimmer. Someone’s probably here for a walk.”

  “I mean a really lost one, Molly. I didn’t get too close, but there was something odd about him. He was with a boy.”

  She looked at me, surprised. For a couple of years, I had seen things that weren
’t really there, in the normal sense. I saw people who had died, and sometimes scenes from events that had happened a long time ago. I didn’t know what caused it and had never been interested in those things until they started to happen to me. I considered myself almost painfully average. Sometimes I figured that everyone saw things that weren’t quite there and didn’t realize what they were seeing.

  “A ghost dog?” she asked.

  “Sure. I think so.”

  She looked away. “Well then,” she said. “If he’s not real, then I guess you can’t keep him.”

  I smiled. Molly saw ghosts, too. We didn’t talk about it much. We didn’t always see them, we didn’t always see the same ones at the same times, and we didn’t quite experience them the same way.

  We didn’t seek it out and took no pleasure in it. We didn’t play with Ouija boards or hold séances. We seldom discussed it with each other or with anyone else. It wasn’t an important part of our daily lives, and we were usually both able to ignore it. We just lived with it when we couldn’t.

  Molly’s aunt ran the post office in Ansett, the nearest town. Kate Bean was Molly’s de facto mother and a good friend to me. She sometimes saw things too, and she put it down to an Irish quirk that was passed down to the females in their family line, from mothers to daughters. She once hinted that her younger sister had been driven a little bit crazy by things that haunted her before she died. Molly didn’t talk much about her mother, and I didn’t ask.

  I didn’t see ghosts until I divorced and moved to the island, or if I did, I didn’t recognize them for what they were. Molly saw living spirits, entities acting in the here and now. She was more comfortable interacting with them than I was, and, on the occasions that we had been together and witnessed a visitation, she was as kind and natural with them as she was with everyone else. I admired her for it. In contrast, I seemed to be more prone to seeing past events, or strongly symbolic scenes connected to the places that I happened to be.

  We’ve all been in a crowded room or a subway car and felt someone else’s eyes. We look up and our glance immediately homes in on the person who is looking at us. It happens without thought or hesitation. We sense their presence, and even if they are in a sea of a thousand faces, we lock their gaze immediately.

  So it is with ghosts. More often than not, you feel a gaze and look up at...nothing. Your reliable radar has malfunctioned, you think, because there is no one there. Sometimes the feeling persists, and you have to tear your attention away. Where other people saw a vacant room or an empty street corner, Molly and I saw who was there, staring at us. It was that simple.

  Usually, they looked like anyone else. It was often something inappropriate about them, something jarring about what they were wearing, or the things they said or did, that alerted me to what they were. Molly claimed that they missed the shine that living eyes had. I couldn’t say if that was true or not. I was usually too scared when I saw something ethereal to sort through details like that.

  “Come here,” I said. “I’ll show you.”

  I led her up the path to the tree where the little boy had been. She looked at the carving in the trunk. “It looks like a heart,” she said.

  “I thought so, too.”

  “Do ghosts draw things on trees?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I just had a feeling about him. He seemed...wrong, not real. You know what I mean.”

  “Well, I think it’s very sweet, whoever he was.”

  We went back to the cabin, and I made coffee. She sat at the table and watched me. When it was ready, we took it out onto the porch.

  “So what’s new?” she asked. “You said your dad is coming to visit?”

  I sighed.

  “Guess so. No idea why--we don’t even talk on the phone any more. He told my ex that he needs to tell me something. I really don’t know why he couldn’t just tell her and get her to pass it along to me.”

  “There’s more to it than that, right? More is bugging you than the inconvenience of having a visitor.”

  “An island is pretty close quarters when you don’t really get along with someone, Molly.”

  She sipped her coffee and looked out at the lake. “This is good,” she said. “I don’t know why I make such shitty coffee, no matter what I do. I can’t even drink my own, mostly I don’t even bother. What’s he like anyway? You never talk about him.”

  “There’s not much to talk about,” I said. “I hardly know the man.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Tull family,

  Marietta, Georgia, Wednesday, July 3, 1946:

  They followed the dim glow of headlights off of the road and onto the packed dirt of the front yard. The house squatting in the darkness wasn’t much more than a shack. The roof sloped into a covered porch that sagged at one end. A rusty sedan rested on its belly in front of them. It had not moved since before the war. They bumped forward until the lights were aimed at the door. A figure came out and stood on the step, one hand raised as a shield against the glare. Holding the wheel in one hand, the store owner turned and looked at the small figure in the back seat.

  “Stay here, y’hear? Don’t move. Had enough trouble from you.”

  The girl didn’t answer. She sat huddled in the darkness.

  “Let’s go,” the uncle said. He opened his door and got out.

  “Who’s that?” the man on the porch called.

  “Got to talk to your son. Bring him on out.”

  “He sleeping, sir. Talk to him about what?”

  The men from the car sounded nervous and impatient.

  “Never mind,” the uncle said. “We’ll get him ourselves.”

  He bounded the steps and took the black man by the shoulders. He moved him aside and went inside, stopping briefly to hold the screen door open for the girl’s father, who had come up behind him.

  In contrast to the outside of the dwelling, the front room was swept and tidy. A single oil lamp burned on the table, and shadows danced around the room, whirling into and then spinning out of, the corners. A woman stood in the gloom, wearing a cotton nightdress open at the neck. She twisted her hands. Her skin shone with sweat.

  “Go put something on,” the store owner said, his nervousness rising. “Shit. Never see a white woman say hello to company like that.”

  Her nipples were defined under the thin fabric. Both of the men noticed them, and the evil in the room increased, as if a feral cat had been let loose and was climbing the curtains. The uncle pulled his pistol out. The dirty chrome reflected the lamp light dully. All eyes in the room settled on the gun, and, at first, no one saw the boy enter and stand by his mother. The uncle was the first to notice him, and the spell in the room changed.

  “You, boy,” he said. “You know we got to talk to you.”

  The boy was fast and moved to run, but the man was faster and had him by the arm. There was a struggle.

  “Help me with this,” the uncle grunted, his hair in his face. The girl’s father moved in, and the three of them moved in jerks toward the door.

  The small boy began to scream and throw himself backward, straining to reach his parents. Finally, the two men picked him up and carried him out. At the car, the uncle pulled open the rear door and shouted something. The door on the other side opened, and the girl scrambled out and got into the front. The uncle piled into the rear seat, his arms wrapped around the wailing boy, and the girl’s father slammed the car door behind them.

  The headlights came on, and the car turned around in the yard. At the road, the clutch was disengaged too fast, and the engine stalled. The starter ground, and to the three people standing on the porch it seemed for a moment as if a divine hand might work to save all of them, but then the engine caught and roared. The helpless parents stood with their remaining son and cried, watching the single red eye of the tail light turn through the trees and disappear, taking all of their lives with it.

  The man’s whole body was shaking. His wife hugged herself and stood apart from h
im. The other boy was motionless, eyes wide, staring at the spot his little brother had vanished into. After a time, they went inside, because there was nothing else to do, but some parts of the three of them stood on the porch and stared into the darkness that was the road for the rest of eternity.

  ***

  Present Day:

  “I don’t think I’ve ever really known my dad. Not like you’d know a father. It’s not that he was abusive to me or anything--it’s more he didn’t know what to do with me. Like someone had given him a cat, and he wasn’t interested, but he figured he’d better take care of it.”

  I heard a noise behind the cabin, stood up, and walked to the end of the porch. I looked up the path. I realized that I was looking for the dog, but I didn’t see him, so I came back.

  “It was worse after my mother died. He seemed to withdraw. He taught high school and I always figured the kids in his class knew him way better than I did. I was never in any of his classes--didn’t want to be, but sometimes I wish I had been. I might have some idea what he was like.”

  “I don’t know if that’s so weird,” she said. “I never had parents, just Kate. I’ve only seen pictures of my mother when she was staying here, on this lake. No one talks about her anywhere else. She doesn’t exist except as a girl younger than me, water skiing here. My father could be anyone, could even be some old man from around here that I know now.”

  Her shoulders were hunched, and she seemed dwindled by her memories. She was always lovely and, usually, self-assured. This was a side of her I had never imagined. Her hurt made my heart feel heavy.

  “Bill’s enough of a father figure for me anyway,” she said. “Between him and my Aunt Kate, I could have done a whole lot worse.”

  She shook the mood off. “How did your mom die?” she asked.