George turned away from the window and grinned. "Well, I can"t accuse your family of ever acting impulsively although it would do them a world of good. Your family packs a suitcase to go to the grocery store."
"And your side steals a car and goes to California without a toothbrush or a prayer."
This was an old, well-worked routine, and they indulged it as they readied for bed. Then George turned off the light and the darkness brought silence.
It was still raining in the morning when George Hume woke. The violence of last night"s thunderstorm had been replaced by a slow, business-like drizzle. Looking out the window, George saw the Franklins walking on the beach under black umbrellas. They were a cheerless sight. All three of them wore dark raincoats, and they might have been fugitives from some old Bergman film, inevitably tragic, moving slowly across a stark landscape.
When most families went to the beach, it was a more lively affair.
George turned away from the window and went into the bathroom to shave. As he lathered his face, he heard the boom of a radio, rock music blaring from the adjoining room, and he a.s.sumed, correctly, that his twenty-one-year-old daughter Nancy had arrived as planned.
Nancy had not come alone. "This is Steve," she said when her father sat down at the breakfast table.
Steve was a very young man the young were getting younger with a wide-eyed, waxy expression and a blond mustache that looked like it could be wiped off with a damp cloth.
Steve stood up and said how glad he was to meet Nancy"s father. He shook George"s hand enthusiastically, as though they had just struck a lucrative deal.
"Steve"s in law school," Mrs. Hume said, with a proprietary delight that her husband found grating.
Nancy was complaining. She had, her father thought, always been a querulous girl, at odds with the way the world was.
"I can"t believe it," she was saying. "The whole mall is closed. The only and I mean only thing around here that is open is that cheesy little drugstore, and n.o.body actually buys anything in there. I know that, because I recognize stuff from when I was six. Is this some holiday I don"t know about or what?"
"Honey, it"s the off season. You know everything closes when the tourists leave."
"Not the for-Christ-sakes mall!" Nancy said. "I can"t believe it." Nancy frowned. "This must be what Russia is like," she said, closing one eye as smoke from her cigarette slid up her cheek.
George Hume watched his daughter gulp coffee. She was not a person who needed stimulants. She wore an ancient gray sweater and sweatpants. Her blonde hair was chopped short and ragged and kept in a state of disarray by the constant furrowing of nervous fingers. She was, her father thought, a pretty girl in disguise.
That night, George discovered that he could remember nothing of the spy novel he was reading, had forgotten, in fact, the hero"s name. It was as though he had stumbled into a c.o.c.ktail party in the wrong neighborhood, all strangers to him, the gossip meaningless.
He put the book on the nightstand, leaned back on the pillow, and said. "This is her senior year. Doesn"t she have cla.s.ses to attend?"
His wife said nothing.
He sighed. "I suppose they are staying in the same room."
"Dear, I don"t know," Mrs. Hume said. "I expect it is none of our business."
"If it is not our business who stays in our hotel, then who in the name of h.e.l.l"s business is it?"
Mrs. Hume rubbed her husband"s neck. "Don"t excite yourself, dear. You know what I mean. Nancy is a grown-up, you know."
George did not respond to this and Mrs. Hume, changing the subject, said, "I saw Mrs. Franklin and her daughter out walking on the beach again today. I don"t know where Mr. Franklin was. It was pouring, and there they were, mother and daughter. You know..." Mrs. Hume paused. "It"s like they were waiting for something to come out of the sea. Like a vigil they were keeping. I"ve thought it before, but the notion was particularly strong today. I looked out past them, and there seemed no separation between the sea and the sky, just a black wall of water." Mrs. Hume looked at herself in the dresser"s mirror, as though her reflection might clarify matters. "I"ve lived by the ocean all my life, and I"ve just taken it for granted, George. Suddenly it gave me the shivers. Just for a moment. I thought, Lord, how big it is, lying there cold and black, like some creature that has slept at your feet so long you never expect it to wake, have forgotten that it might be brutal, even vicious."
"It"s all this rain," her husband said, hugging her and drawing her to him. "It can make a person think some black thoughts."
George left off worrying about his daughter and her young man"s living arrangements, and in the morning, when Nancy and Steve appeared for breakfast, George didn"t broach the subject not even to himself.
Later that morning, he watched them drive off in Steve"s shiny sports car rich parents, lawyers themselves? bound for Wilmington and shopping malls that were open.
The rain had stopped, but dark, ma.s.sed clouds over the ocean suggested that this was a momentary respite. As George studied the beach, the Franklins came into view. They marched directly toward him, up and over the dunes, moving in a soldierly, clipped fashion. Mrs. Franklin was holding her daughter"s hand and moving at a brisk pace, almost a run, while her husband faltered behind, his gait hesitant, as though uncertain of the wisdom of catching up.
Mrs. Franklin reached the steps and marched up them, her child tottering in tow, her boot heels sounding hollowly on the wood planks. George nodded, and she pa.s.sed without speaking, seemed not to see him. In any event, George Hume would have been unable to speak. He was accustomed to the pa.s.sive, demure countenance of this self-possessed woman, and the expression on her face, a wild distorting emotion, shocked and confounded him. It was an unreadable emotion, but its intensity was extraordinary and unsettling.
George had not recovered from the almost physical a.s.sault of Mrs. Franklin"s emotional state, when her husband came up the stairs, nodded curtly, muttered something, and hastened after his wife.
George Hume looked after the retreating figures. Mr. Greg Franklin"s face had been a mask of cold civility, none of his wife"s pa.s.sion written there, but the man"s appearance was disturbing in its own way. Mr. Franklin had been soaking wet, his hair plastered to his skull, his overcoat dripping, the reek of salt water enfolding him like a shroud.
George walked on down the steps and out to the beach. The ocean was always some consolation, a quieting influence, but today it seemed hostile.
The sand was still wet from the recent rains and the footprints of the Franklins were all that marred the smooth expanse. George saw that the Franklins had walked down the beach along the edge of the tide and returned at a greater distance from the water. He set out in the wake of their footprints, soon lost to his own thoughts. He thought about his daughter, his wild Nancy, who had always been boy-crazy. At least this one didn"t have a safety-pin through his ear or play in a rock band. So lighten up, George advised himself.
He stopped. The tracks had stopped. Here is where the Franklins turned and headed back to the hotel, walking higher up the beach, closer to the weedy debris-laden dunes.
But it was not the ending of the trail that stopped George"s own progress down the beach. In fact, he had forgotten that he was absently following the Franklin"s spore.
It was the litter of dead fish that stopped him. They were scattered at his feet in the tide. Small ghost crabs had already found the corpses and were laying their claims.
There might have been a hundred bodies. It was difficult to say, for not one of the bodies was whole. They had been hacked into many pieces, diced by some impossibly sharp blade that severed a head cleanly, flicked off a tail or dorsal fin. Here a scaled torso still danced in the sand, there a pale eye regarded the sky.
Crouching in the sand, George examined the bodies. He stood up, finally, as the first large drops of rain plunged from the sky. No doubt some fishermen had called it a day, tossed their scissored bait and gone home.
That this explanation did not satisfy George Hume was the result of a general sense of unease. Too much rain.
It rained sullenly and steadily for two days during which time George saw little of his daughter and her boyfriend. Nancy apparently had the young man on a strict regime of shopping, tourist attractions, and movies, and she was undaunted by the weather.
The Franklins kept inside, appearing briefly in the dining room for bodily sustenance and then retreating again to their rooms. And whatever did they do there? Did they play solitaire? Did they watch old reruns on TV?
On the third day, the sun came out, brazen, acting as though it had never been gone, but the air was colder. The Franklins, silhouetted like black crows on a barren field, resumed their sh.o.r.eline treks.
Nancy and Steve rose early and were gone from the house before George arrived at the breakfast table. George spent the day endeavoring to satisfy the IRS"s notion of a small businessman"s obligations, and he was in a foul mood by dinner time.
After dinner, he tried to read, this time choosing a much-touted novel that proved to be about troubled youth. He was asleep within fifteen minutes of opening the book and awoke in an overstuffed armchair. The room was chilly, and his wife had tucked a quilt around his legs before abandoning him for bed. In the morning she would, he was certain, a.s.sure him that she had tried to rouse him before retiring, but he had no recollection of such an attempt.
"Half a bottle of wine might have something to do with that," she would say.
He would deny the charge.
The advantage of being married a long time was that one could argue without the necessity of the other"s actual, physical presence.
He smiled at this thought and pushed himself out of the chair, feeling groggy, head full of p.r.i.c.kly flannel. He looked out the window. It was raining again to the accompaniment of thunder and explosive, strobe-like lightning. The sports car was gone. The kids weren"t home yet. Fine. Fine. None of my business.
Climbing the stairs, George paused. Something dark lay on the carpeted step, and as he bent over it, leaning forward, his mind sorted and discarded the possibilities: cat, wig, bird"s nest, giant dust bunny. Touch and a strong olfactory cue identified the stuff: seaweed. Raising his head, he saw that two more clumps of the wet, rubbery plant lay on ascending steps, and gathering them with no sense of revulsion for he was used to the ocean"s disordered presence he carried the weed up to his room and dumped it in the bathroom"s wastebasket.
He scrubbed his hands in the sink, washing away the salty, stagnant reek, left the bathroom and crawled into bed beside his sleeping wife. He fell asleep immediately and was awakened later in the night with a suffocating sense of dread, a sure knowledge that an intruder had entered the room.
The intruder proved to be an odor, a powerful stench of decomposing fish, rotting vegetation and salt water. He climbed out of bed, coughing.
The source of this odor was instantly apparent and he swept up the wastebasket, preparing to gather the seaweed and flush it down the toilet.
The seaweed had melted into a black liquid, bubbles forming on its surface, a dark, gelatinous muck, simmering like heated tar. As George stared at the mess, a bubble burst, and the noxious gas it unleashed dazed him, sent him reeling backward with an inexplicable vision of some monstrous, shadowy form, silhouetted against green, mottled water.
George pitched himself forward, gathered the wastebasket in his arms, and fled the room. In the hall he wrenched open a window and hurled the wastebasket and its contents into the rain.
He stood then, gasping, the rain savage and cold on his face, his undershirt soaked, and he stood that way, clutching the window sill, until he was sure he would not faint.
Returning to bed, he found his wife still sleeping soundly and he knew, immediately, that he would say nothing in the morning, that the sense of suffocation, of fear, would seem unreal, its source irrational. Already the moment of panic was losing its reality, fading into the realm of nightmare.
The next day the rain stopped again and this time the sun was not routed. The police arrived on the third day of clear weather.
Mrs. Hume had opened the door, and she shouted up to her husband, who stood on the landing. "It"s about Mr. Franklin."
Mrs. Franklin came out of her room then, and George Hume thought he saw the child behind her, through the open door. The girl, Melissa, was lying on the bed behind her mother and just for a moment it seemed that there was a spreading shadow under her, as though the bedclothes were soaked with dark water. Then the door closed as Mrs. Franklin came into the hall and George identified the expression he had last seen in her eyes for it was there again: fear, a racing engine of fear, gears stripped, the accelerator flat to the floor.
And Mrs. Franklin screamed, screamed and came falling to her knees and screamed again, prescient in her grief, and collapsed as George rushed toward her and two police officers and a paramedic, a woman, came bounding up the stairs.
Mr. Franklin had drowned. A fisherman had discovered the body. Mr. Franklin had been fully dressed, lying on his back with his eyes open. His wallet and seven hundred dollars in cash and a host of credit cards was still in his back pocket, and a business card identified him as vice president of marketing for a software firm in Fairfax, Virginia. The police had telephoned Franklin"s firm in Virginia and so learned that he was on vacation. The secretary had the hotel"s number.
After the ambulance left with Mrs. Franklin, they sat in silence until the police officer cleared his throat and said, "She seemed to be expecting something like this."
The words dropped into a silence.
Nancy and Steve and Mrs. Hume were seated on one of the lobby"s sofas. George Hume came out of the office in the wake of the other policeman who paused at the door and spoke. "We"d appreciate it if you could come down and identify the body. Just a formality, but it"s not a job for his wife, not in the state she"s in." He coughed, shook his head. "Or the state he"s in, for that matter. Body got tore up some in the water, and, well, I still find it hard to believe that he was alive just yesterday. I would have guessed he"d been in the water two weeks minimum the deterioration, you know."
George Hume shook his head as though he did know and agreed to accompany the officer back into town.
George took a long look, longer than he wanted to, but the body wouldn"t let him go, made mute, undeniable demands.
Yes, this was Mr. Greg Franklin. Yes, this would make eight years that he and his wife and his child had come to the hotel. No, no nothing out of the ordinary George interrupted himself. "The tattoos..." he said.
"Didn"t know about the tattoos, I take it?" the officer said.
George shook his head. "No." The etched blue lines that laced the dead man"s arms and chest were somehow more frightening than the damage the sea had done. Frightening because...because the reserved Mr. Franklin, businessman and stolid husband, did not look like someone who would illuminate his flesh with arcane symbols, pentagrams and ornate fish, their scales numbered according to some runic logic, and spidery, incomprehensible glyphs.
"Guess Franklin wasn"t inclined to wear a bathing suit."
"No."
"Well, we are interested in those tattoos. I guess his wife knew about them. h.e.l.l, maybe she has some of her own."
"Have you spoken to her?"
"Not yet. Called the hospital. They say she"s sleeping. It can wait till morning."
An officer drove George back to the hotel, and his wife greeted him at the door.
"She"s sleeping," Mrs. Hume said.
"Who?"
"Melissa."
For a moment, George drew a blank, and then he nodded. "What are we going to do with her?"
"Why, keep her," his wife said. "Until her mother is out of the hospital."
"Maybe there are relatives," George said, but he knew, saying it, that the Franklins were self-contained, a single unit, a closed universe.
His wife confirmed this. No one could be located, in any event.
"Melissa may not be aware that her father is dead," Mrs. Hume said. "The child is, I believe, a stranger girl than we ever realized. Here we were thinking she was just a quiet thing, well behaved. I think there is something wrong with her mind. I can"t seem to talk to her, and what she says makes no sense. I"ve called Dr. Gowers, and he has agreed to see her. You remember Dr. Gowers, don"t you? We sent Nancy to him when she was going through that bad time at thirteen."
George remembered child psychiatrist Gowers as a bearded man with a swollen nose and thousands of small wrinkles around his eyes. He had seemed a very kind but somehow sad man, a little like Santa Claus if Santa Claus had suffered some disillusioning experience, an unpleasant divorce or other personal setback, perhaps.
Nancy came into the room as her mother finished speaking. "Steve and I can take Melissa," Nancy said.
"Well, that"s very good of you, dear," her mother said. "I"ve already made an appointment for tomorrow morning at ten. I"m sure Dr. Gowers will be delighted to see you again."
"I"ll go too," George said. He couldn"t explain it but he was suddenly afraid.
The next morning when George came down to breakfast, Melissa was already seated at the table and Nancy was combing the child"s hair.
"She isn"t going to church," George said, surprised at the growl in his voice.
"This is what she wanted to wear," Nancy said. "And it looks very nice, I think."
Melissa was dressed in the sort of outfit a young girl might wear on Easter Sunday: a navy blue dress with white trim, white knee socks, black, shiny shoes. She had even donned pale blue gloves. Her black hair had been brushed to a satin sheen and her pale face seemed just-scrubbed, with the scent of soap lingering over her. A shiny black purse sat next to her plate of eggs and toast.
"You look very pretty," George Hume said.
Melissa nodded, a sharp snap of the head, and said, "I am an angel."
Nancy laughed and hugged the child. George raised his eyebrows. "No false modesty here," he said. At least she could talk.
On the drive into town, Steve sat in the pa.s.senger seat while George drove. Nancy and Melissa sat in the back seat. Nancy spoke to the child in a slow, rea.s.suring murmur.
Steve said nothing, sitting with his hands in his lap, looking out the window. Might not be much in a crisis, George thought. A rich man"s child.
Steve stayed in the waiting room while the receptionist ushered Melissa and Nancy and George into Dr. Gowers" office. The psychiatrist seemed much as George remembered him, a silver-maned, benign old gent, exuding an air of competence. He asked them to sit on the sofa.
The child perched primly on the sofa, her little black purse cradled in her lap. She was flanked by George and Nancy.
Dr. Gowers knelt down in front of her. "Well, Melissa. Is it all right if I call you Melissa?"
"Yes sir. That"s what everyone calls me."
"Well, Melissa, I"m glad you could come and see me today. I"m Dr. Gowers."