Page 55 of Saltwater

“I’ll help you,” Stan says.“I’ll help you catch them.”

Stan doesn’t know it, but there’s nocatching them.The justice he wants, the revenge, won’t come from someone or something outside. Pressure like that only makes them stronger, bands them together. Any undoing of the Lingates will have to come fromwithin.

“It won’t bring her back,” I say.

I am both jealous of Stan and empathetic to him. Heknewher. He knew her enough to miss her, to still miss her, to mourn her. For better or worse, I’ve never been able to summon that pain because I only have tissue-thin memories of my mother. But in the absence of memories, other pieces of her have become outsize—her work, her letters, her clothes. Now her necklace,Saltwater.

The funicular lurches back up the hill, and an employee tells us, again, that we need to leave. This time he doesn’t relent until we exit into the bright midday sun of the Marina Grande.

“If you ever find anything that changes your mind—” Stan says.

I haven’t told him about the play. I keep it to myself for now. In part, because I don’t know if he, if Lorna, if anyone who isn’t our family, will recognize their tics and flaws, the way their dialogue works on the page. The jealousy between the brothers, their betrayals.

She didn’t put any murder on the page. Nothing for Stan or the police to use as evidence. Stan may be happy to pay for the family dynamics alone, but they aren’t a smoking gun. If this was theevidence Lorna promised Stan, it feels like a bluff. An attempt to add more money to the pot. But I don’t say that to Stan, and I still don’t know what might have been on her computer. I only know that Lorna and the money are both gone. I know it’s better if Stan stays hungry. I can work with hungry. I can leverage it.

“The offer remains,” Stan says. “It’s not as much as you were hoping for, but I can help you out with more. Really, Helen, I can help you. I’d do anything for your mother. Even now.”

“Would you mind giving me a ride back to the Marina Piccola?” I ask him.

I feel foolish for coming down here, for what I thought I saw. I haven’t wanted to consider it, but I know it’s possible Lorna has taken the cash. Left me with her mess. It’s easy to see how much she might have wanted to escape the pressure from Stan, my family, even me. And on some level, I understand. I might have done the same if I were her, too.

Stan is tapping on his phone, holding up a hand to keep the sun off the screen. Then he says to me:

“The boat will meet us at the end of the jetty.”

We walk in that direction. I look at the businesses, the security cameras dotted here and there, and I wonder if my father and uncle have already pulled the footage. If they knew, even before I did, that she was gone. Ten million euros richer, four Lingates lighter.

Stan is silent until we reach the end of the jetty, the farthest place to dock from the heart of the marina.

“I’m sorry about the other night,” he says lamely. “Your uncle and I haven’t always had the smoothest relationship, but I shouldn’t have said that in front of Naomi. I know how she can get.”

It’s precisely why, I’m sure, he decided to say it. But that dinner seems so long ago now. Less than forty-eight hours have passed, but I can barely remember that night. How we went from the villa, to the tender, to the boat, to the club. Naomi wasn’t the only one who drank too much. At the club, I threw back drink after drink in an attempt to blunt the mix of excitement and fear I felt when my uncle arrived with the bag of money.

“It’s fine,” I say. But I’m thinking about Lorna. About the money. About the fact that everyone connected to the Lingates seems forced to live in the past, while all I’ve ever wanted to do islive.Now. In the present. In the future. Lorna understood that.

I miss her.

The boat arrives and Stan helps me on board and into a seat at the back. In minutes, we are under way, looping around the eastern tip of the island, past the Villa Lysis, with its crumbling baroque interiors and tumbling gardens, past Tiberio, as the locals call the Villa Jovis. We near the swimming bay below the Salto that Ciro loves, where Tiberius used to throw people to their deaths, and the captain throttles back. I stand to see why we’ve slowed. A trio of carabinieri boats are idling against the rocks.

They’re clustered, I realize, around the inlet Freddy and I swam in yesterday, the same one Ciro and I have visited countless times. The cliffs rise directly out of the sea here, up to meet the ruins of a villa built by one of Rome’s most vicious emperors.

Stan says something to the captain, but I can’t hear him over the churn of the engine and the ringing in my ears. We pull closer to the boats, and Stan and the captain switch places. With Stan at the wheel, the captain makes his way to the bow, where he is able to yell something in Italian to a carabiniere.

I know then why we’re here. Why we’ve stopped in this place I’ve been so many times. Where, just yesterday, I watched Freddy dig his toes into the sand. Where, the day before that, Lorna pulled me underwater. This, I have always known, despite its sparkling, azurine beauty, is a place of violence.

I make it to the bow of the boat in time to hear the carabiniere call back that they’re fine, they don’t need any assistance. But they want to know if the captain has been in the area recently. Has he seen any boats?

I nearly tell them thatIhave been here. ThatIwas in one of the boats. But before I can, the captain calls back that he was in Naples earlier picking up guests of Stan’s. He hasn’t been on this side of the island in days. The officer nods, then listens intently to the radiopinned at his shoulder. He repeats something back and motions that we should keep moving. I stay on the bow and Stan joins me.

The captain knows what Stan wants. Instead of pulling away, he motors at a snail’s pace past the scene. There are divers in the water, and one of them waves to someone on a smaller boat who throws a net into the water. The diver snares something and indicates the boat should pull the net in. I can tell, even at a distance, by the way the current drags that it’s a body.

When the net reaches the hull of the boat, it is winched into the air and the thing tangled in it—fleshy, human—hits the side of the boat with a faint thump. I can see the outlines of her body immediately—the matted dark hair, the thin arms and legs that are now bloated from the sea. All of it recognizable, burned into my memory.

I wonder if they’ve found the money, too.

Because it’s Lorna. Even Stan knows.

Stan tells the captain to get closer, but the captain doesn’t. He can’t. Instead, he does the one thing he can do, which is push down on the throttle and swing us away from the scene. There’s no reason to stay. We know who it is.

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