Page 33 of In the Bones
As she gaped at Woody, who was still yapping about the fortune to be made on the site of their old high school haunt, Mac pictured the building the way it had looked when she, Nicole, Woody, and all of their friends spent Saturday nights skating to Dire Straits and playing arcade games. She didn’t have to try very hard to remember the cool, chemical smell of the ice, the plink and buzz of the arcade games that splashed blue and orange light across the walls. It was sensory overload, always. A riot of music and noise. It closed down when Mac was in her thirties, but before that it had been a candy-coated teenage dream, so much so that Mac was depressed for days when she heard it was finally shutting its doors.
She remembered something else about the Rivermouth. There had been an auction last September, a chance for people to bid on the abandoned property. A news report on TV announcing someone had purchased the place and planned to renovate. Mac had seen that report—everyone had—and she’d bet her life the man credited with making the purchase was not her brother-in-law.
Investment. That’s the word Woody had used just moments prior. Christ, was he for real?Had Woody and Nicole actually done this? Renovating a huge amusement center that was in a severe state of disrepair would cost a goddamn fortune, and that was money she was sure they didn’t have.
“Woody.” Mac heard the shift, knew her voice sounded too urgent, but she couldn’t concern herself with that now. “What the hell did you do?”
He studied her for a long time. In the half-light, he almost looked young again, his eye bags and wrinkles ferried away. The vision might have engendered pity, if Mac hadn’t known that Woody Durham was far from innocent.
“Should have known you wouldn’t understand,” he said, his fiery bluster replaced once again by the flinty expression Mac had seen before.
With difficulty, Woody wriggled out of his chair, and lurched across black grass toward the party.
The moment he was gone, Mac took out her phone. GoogledRivermouth Arena auction purchase, and watched a series of videos appear in the search results. It took some digging to find the one she remembered seeing last year. The structure and surrounding land had gone for just over seven hundred thousand, an amount Mac knew was nowhere near the balance in Nicole and Woody’s bank account.
There was no mention of Woody Durham in any of the stories. The original articles hadn’t included the buyer’s name, either.
They did, however, mention that the new owner was from out of town.
A D.C. resident who, though presented with countless other options, had chosen to lay roots and spend his summers in the North Country.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Molly
Nine months ago
“Ican’t believe it,” Gigi said, eyes squinting against the electric blue sky. “I remember this. I’ve been here before.”
She laid a hand flat against the wall of the white tower, and her lips sailed into a grin.
I’d seen the lighthouse online while researching motels in search of something cheap and close to the village. We’d been on our way there that first day in Cape Vincent when we stopped for lunch.
“You ladies headed up to the lighthouse?” the man in the taco truck had asked as we chatted and loaded our paper plates with cilantro and pico de gallo from the salsa bar. “You know, someone famous lives out that way.”
“Oh yeah?” I was instantly intrigued, in the way that makes your skin go hot even though you’re standing still. Everyone I meet seems to have a celebrity encounter in their back pocket—they bumped into John Lithgow at the airport, served Serena Williams at Starbucks, sat behind Tony Bennett at Radio City Music Hall. I didn’t have a single story like that, but famous people fascinated me. I was awed by the way the world parted for them like a sea. They navigated it so differently, following secret trails to places normal people didn’t know existed. Was that power learned, or innate? What was it like to be followed and fawned over by strangers? I had always wanted to know.
“His place is a few houses down from the point. Big white farmhouse with a circular driveaway. You two hockey fans?”
“I like hockey,” Gigi told the taco guy, and she wasn’t just being polite. She had a degree in sports marketing, and when it was her night to choose the bar, we always went to placeslined with big-screen TVs. That was part of Gigi’s lore; her dad had been big into sports, and Gigi had played on multiple teams back in high school. Far-flung travel games, March Madness, Sunday football on the TV while her mom cooked chili or pot pie or stew … this had been the backdrop of her childhood. Some of the exotic trips she’d taken had even been sports-centric, like when her dad brought her all the way to Ireland just to play golf. Celebrity athletes didn’t do it for me—my decision to work at Wins was strictly about the paycheck—but the lighthouse was already part of our plan, so we ate our tacos on a shaded bench outside the truck and headed for the peninsula.
Windows down, wind stirring our loose hair. My hands smelled of fresh lime when I brushed an unruly curl from my lip. Gigi rippled her arm out the passenger side window like a wave, and as I watched her, I caught the moment when the river fell away. Near Tibbetts Point it was so wide open that we could have been looking at the Atlantic. The river mouth, they called it—where the lake meets the St. Lawrence, and two wholly different bodies of water combine.
Neither one of us remembered about the famous athlete until we’d taken pictures by the lighthouse to show Gigi’s mom and cooled off in the dusky shade of the tower. Even Gigi wasn’t prepared to go out of her way to find him, but there was only the one road back to town.
“Is that it?” I said on our return trip to the village, Tibbett’s Point shrinking in my rearview mirror. The house I’d spotted was large, the driveway horseshoe-shaped, but everything else about the property looked shabby and dated.
Gigi said, “Doesn’t look like a star’s home to me.” The way she wrinkled her nose, disappointed and a little offended, sent me into a panic. Looking for a star athlete’s house hadn’t even been my idea, but I wanted Gigi to have fun on our trip. I wanted her to have fun withme.
Over the past few months, Gigi had filled a huge hole in my life in a way that I hadn’t expected, and I was carrying some guilt about how I’d treated her when we first met. She’d helped me out once when I still barely knew her, letting me stay ather house for the night after a date that got sketchy, and how did I repay her? By taking some cash from her mom’s purse. And so, that day in Cape Vincent, I slowed the car to a crawl, searching. Hoping we’d see him and that, when we did, Gigi would be impressed.
It was Gigi who found him. There was a dock on the other side of the road, and a man was pulling himself from the water. His wet body shimmered in the noontime sun. Tattoos wrapped both of his arms, and from a distance, they looked like sleeves of black lace.
“Forget what I said before,” I told Gigi. “I think I do like hockey.”
She laughed loudly enough to get his attention.
Dripping on the sun-bleached dock, the man smiled.
