Page 40 of Dead of Summer
“You’ve completely disappeared, David. I don’t even know where you are half the time.”
David stiffens. Then he shakes his head in disbelief. “I’ve been doing myjob.”
Before she can stop herself, she shoots back, “In the middle of the night?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he demands, but she can tell by the way he tenses up that he knows exactly what she means.
“You came to bed at three a.m. Where were you?” she pushes.
“Now you’re spying on me in my own house. That’s great.” His eyes dart around. Cornered.
“I woke up and you weren’t there,” Faith cries, feeling called out. “What was I meant to do?”
“I don’t know. Go back to bed like a normal person?”
Faith’s chest hurts. They’ve never fought like this before. There is a meanness in his voice that has never been there before. There is also a challenge in her own voice that he has never heard. She feels like they are beginning to spin off the rails. Faith should stop before it’s too late. She knows she should apologize, to reel it back if she wants to keep things okay between them. But the ring is gone. And so is the girl, Gemma. Faith has less and less to lose.
“Were you with Orla?” she asks him quietly.
“What? Why would I be with Orla?” he scoffs. “Of course not. Look, your obsession with her has really gotten out of control.” He looks down at her, a sneer on his perfect face. For the first time he looks ugly to her.
“You’re lying to me,” she says before she can stop herself. “I saw your shirt. You left it at her house.”
David watches, stunned, from the side of the blanket. The wine has tipped over and is spilled on the blanket between them. The little picnic is ruined, but Faith no longer cares.
She stands up and slips into her shoes as he sputters angrily, “I invite you into my home and you sneak around spying on me and digging up things from my past?” He abruptly stops speaking.
“I never pegged you for the jealous type,” he says at last, shaking his head. Faith’s stomach sinks.
“There’s another girl missing, about the same age as your friend Alice was,” Faith says, even quieter. “But maybe you already knew that?”
At this David leaps up from the blanket. He advances on her and she stumbles back across the grass. “Where did you hear that?”
“It’s a small town, David. People talk.”
“My father has never done anything wrong,” David insists, his voice rising angrily.
Startled, Faith looks at him. “Why do you say that? I never once mentioned your father.”
David is staring at her now and breathing heavily. Why did it take her so long to see who he is? All this time she’d thought of David as the victim, assuming he was being manipulated by his father out of a sense of duty, but maybe it was deeper than that. Maybe they were protecting each other. She was wrong about David. Wrong about it all. Her mother would have told her that men like David were nothing but trouble.
David storms petulantly toward the car, leaving the picnic behind for someone else to clean up. Faith can see right into him now. He isn’t angry anymore. He is afraid.
HENRY
Henry tries to carry on as normal with his routine, but his fingers fumble as he cooks up a piece of haddock and some potatoes, and he does something wrong, forgets to put enough oil in the pan and turns the burner up too high and the fish sticks to the cast iron and turns black. He tries to eat it, but he can feel bones sticking in his throat when he takes a bite. Henry’s appetite isn’t good anyway. He takes his dinner out to the deck and throws it onto the rocks for the seagulls to devour.
Then he goes to the telescope and looks.
He goes first to the docks by Port Mary. There is a lineup of people, all unfamiliar. The ferry bobs at the dock, preparing for the return trip. The restaurants are busy. People linger over gratuitous plates of lobster, piles of fried calamari, and bright yellow rings of banana peppers. They finish off bottles of wine, smiling and laughing like nothing has happened. Like a girl isn’t missing. Like Henry isn’t a suspect. Like Margie isn’t dead.
He lets the telescope go out of focus and fall from his hand. He isn’t in the mood to watch anymore. He’s lost interest in the comings and goings on Hadley. His logbook is unmarked since his last entry when Jean made her unexpected visit.
Henry knows how lucky he was that Edward Robertson was the town’s detective fifteen years ago. Without him there to talk people down, they would have locked him up. Or worse.
Henry swallows, thinking about the last time.
When Alice Gallo was declared missing, a mob had formed outside the station overnight. In the early morning they’d filed into Hadley’s little community center and sat on folding chairs. The camera people there had schlepped their equipment all the way from the mainland. There were sharply dressed news reporters holding microphones too. A press conference, they’d called it.
