Osprey Island (11 page)

Eden nodded.

“There’s part of me thinks I should just burn the damn thing,” the sheriff continued. “Let it be one more thing lost in the fire. But I
read
it, Eden. I read it all. And there’s things in there—I mean, I don’t fully understand all she’s saying, but I’ve got half a mind to go down to the Lodge and haul Bud Chizek into jail and toss away the goddamn key! That book there”—he pointed to it accusingly—“that book makes me feel like I’m going to lose my mind. What it says, I can’t even keep the half of it straight. I don’t even want to know half of what’s in there. But the other part—most of it, really—it’s all those letters, like, addressed to Squee . . . That boy’s going to grow up without his mother. She left him something there, and there’s a part of me feels like if I did one good thing in my life—forget police protocol—if I did one good thing I’d make sure that boy gets that book. Not now, but someday. You know—someday that boy might need to understand that there was someone on this earth once that loved him more than anything there ever was.” Sheriff Harty was fighting back tears. “I don’t know what to do with the rest of all of what’s in there. Part of me should be taking you in for friggin’ questioning, Eden,” he cried. “I don’t know what in hell you were running out here—I don’t
want
to know—I don’t want to know
any
of this . . .”

“I suppose,” Eden began, “I suppose the way one ought to handle something like this’d be to arrange some sort of way to get the book put away until Squee’s of an age to see such a thing—”

“But then you’re talking lawyers,” the sheriff interrupted. “You’re talking more people seeing this thing. You’re talking about the possibility of what’s in there getting spread here to Menhadenport—”

“What do you want me to say, Duane? You want me to take this thing and hide it away in my closet until the boy’s eighteen?”

Sheriff Harty froze, his mouth set in a grim purse. “No,” he said. “I want you to go get a safe-deposit box or some such down at the bank and keep it
there
until the boy’s eighteen.” And he just kept looking at Eden then, right at her, letting her know that he didn’t get any more serious than that. Eden looked down at the notebook, then back to Sheriff Harty. She drew in a long breath and let it out slowly. She said, “OK.”

COUNTY SANITATION HAD already brought a dumpster to the Lodge, set down—at Bud’s direction, no doubt—so that it blocked the view from Sand Beach Road to the laundry shack’s blackened husk. It was a terrible-looking thing: monolithic charred and melted washers and dryers rising above the rubble, like a miniature city, incinerated. Fire Chief McIntire was there, inspecting the wreckage, collecting data for the reports he would have to file. There were a few construction guys from the island milling around, hired for the demolition. Bud had dressed himself in a pair of old, stained Bermuda shorts and a striped polo shirt splotched with bleach, as if he planned to help with the demolition work, though it was hard to imagine Bud doing anything but bark orders from the sidelines and go inside to make “important” phone calls just when large items needed lifting. Bud was waving Roddy over. “Good morning, good morning.”

Bud started rattling off instructions when Roddy was still a good distance away. “There’s nothing we can do right here till the insurance boys make it out to have a look. They promised me they’d hustle through—we’ll start tearing it down the minute they’re done.” Roddy stopped about ten feet from Bud and listened to him orate. The construction crew guys listened too, though it seemed they’d already heard the speech. “For now, this morning, we’re waiting for the new equipment—they promised before noon—and we’ll need to get the maintenance shop cleared out. We’ll use this as an opportunity to get rid of whatever crap’s in there we don’t need—toss it all in the dumpster, but check with me first, you hear? Then I’ve got dimensions for the exhaust holes we’re gonna . . .” Bud dropped off. “Ach,” he said. “Screw it, save that for later. Let’s get the damn thing cleared out first. Load it into the pickups. We’ll store everything in the meantime off the staff quarters . . .” He turned and pointed. “That storage shed, there.” And thus a tedious and labor-intensive process began.

AT THE EAST END of the first floor in the Lodge there was a door without a room number. An index card was thumbtacked over the peephole. On it, in ballpoint pen that had faded to nearly nothing, someone had written “MAID.” Hunting down a key to the door was Suzy’s first order of business, and she walked up the hill to her folks’ house to see if Nancy had any ideas. Her mother was up and dressed and wanted to come down to the Lodge and find the key for Suzy. Making herself useful was an effective form of martyrdom for Nancy. Suzy was too tired to fight. They walked down the hill in silence, watching the men haul tools and equipment. Suzy slowed her pace to her mother’s. Nancy’s face looked thinner; she seemed perpetually near tears.

The insurance guys had shown up, and they circled the periphery of the burn site, one speaking into a handheld tape recorder, the other making marks on a company clipboard with a company pen. Bud could be heard nearly from the road, directing traffic down inside the maintenance shop.

In the Lodge office, Nancy mustered a bit of her usual fussiness to search for the maid’s key. She bustled about with an air of downtrodden frailty, like a consumptive on a mission. Suzy found something in a file cabinet labeled “Housekeeping” and sat down to pore over a sheaf of duty rosters circa 1967, which she supposed was probably the last time anyone had kept track of what got done and what went slack.

“Oh! Suzy . . .”

Suzy spun toward her mother, whose hand was clutched at her chest.

Nancy spoke as if the breath might be her last. “I think I found it!”

“Well,” Suzy said, attempting brightness, “let’s give it a try, shall we?” And she went toward the maid’s room again with the key in hand. Nancy followed, pausing for breath by the main staircase before she continued behind Suzy. Suzy tried to steel herself, not so much for what lay behind the locked door as for her mother’s reaction to it, which, she was certain, would most likely make her want to strangle the woman on the spot. She gritted her teeth.

The lock took some fiddling, and Nancy tried to edge Suzy out of the way to try it herself, as though Suzy might not know how to use such a fancy contraption as a door key. Suzy held her ground. Too much fight on Nancy’s part would have betrayed health or vigor.

The room was, of course, a wreck. As bad as the laundry shack had been, only tighter and more cramped. Nancy peered in over Suzy’s shoulder and clucked at the shame of it. “That poor girl.” Nancy shook her head sadly. “She really had control of nothing in her life, did she?”

That was that—Suzy lost it. “She was a fucking slob, Mom. Your head housekeeper was a total fucking slob! Period. It doesn’t mean she needed
saving;
it means she was a lousy housekeeper, OK? Can you drop the saint act, please? I just really can’t take it today, all right? I just can’t . . .” Suzy looked pleadingly at her mother. She’d have given a lot at that moment for Nancy to fire something back at her. Anything but continue the martyr act. Which is exactly what Nancy did: her face dropped and her body seemed to contract in a wince of psychic pain. Suzy would not have put a fainting spell past her mother at that moment. But Nancy just turned on wobbly legs and walked back down the hall, leaving Suzy alone in that filthy maid’s supply room.

When the five o’clock whistle sounded down at the docks, whatever headway Suzy had made in the room was not yet visible to the naked eye. It was highly unrewarding work as such. She relocked the door behind her, tucked the key into her pocket, and started back toward the maintenance shop–cum-laundry. The appliance truck had finally arrived while Suzy had been sequestered in the Lodge, and now a gaggle of burly men in incongruous lavender baseball caps were unloading some less-than-state-of-the-art industrial washers and dryers down the truck ramp and into the shop. Roddy was already coming toward her, pulling off his work gloves as he walked.

“I don’t know why I’d been imagining
new
equipment. This
is
my father we’re talking about . . .” Roddy and Suzy were unclear on how they should greet each other, so they simply did not greet at all, just stopped at a few paces and hovered uncomfortably.

“How you doing?” Roddy asked, feeling out her mood.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said.

“Get the kids from Reesa’s and go to Morey’s?” Roddy asked. “Squee likes it there.”

Merle Squire treated Squee like a secretary might treat the boss’s child: fine, but not as her own. That evening she entered Morey’s through the back door, came up behind Roddy and Suzy and the kids at the bar and silently placed her hand on Squee’s head by way of hello. He was nearly asleep on his stool, his dinner uneaten, and he didn’t even start at the surprise of Merle’s touch.

“How’s everyone holding up?” Merle asked them quietly. She looked at Squee, smoothed his hair tenderly. “Your dad’s missing you something awful.”

Squee was not the only one confused by this assertion.

Roddy said, “How is he?”

Merle shook her head. “He’s OK, I guess. Honestly, I think he needs to get back to the Lodge. I think he needs something to do.”

“You think he’s ready, already?” Suzy asked.

“Eh, I don’t know,” said Merle. “When are you ever ready for something like that?”

Roddy nodded at his plate of clam strips. “So when’s he going to come back?”

Merle touched the hair at the back of her neck, patting it in place. “Tomorrow, I think. It’s not doing either of us much good having him with me. Bickering . . .” She looked to Squee then, to see if he was listening, but he was zoned out completely.

“And that means Squee goes home too?” Suzy said quietly. “With that fire pit right outside his front door?”

“Lance really wants to . . . so soon?” Roddy asked Merle.

“Well, he doesn’t want to stay with me!” she said certainly.

Later, Roddy and Suzy waited in the truck while they sent the kids into Shakes for ice cream.

“We just can’t guarantee that he’ll stay up at my mom’s,” Roddy was saying. “We can’t exactly lock him in. I could lock the door to the shack, but still, it’s weird, if he comes down . . .”

“You’re right.” Suzy was nodding as Roddy spoke. “You’re right . . . I know, I just wish we could find, like, an hour, just that . . .”

Roddy was nodding too. “I just don’t know how . . .”

“This is so stupid. The kid’s mother is dead and I’m trying to stash him somewhere.”

“He’ll be back with Lance tomorrow night for better or worse. And then you can ditch your own daughter all you want and come share my shack with me.” He smiled.

“I’m not such a terrible mother as I sound,” she said.

“I didn’t say you were a terrible mother.”

“I sound like one, though.”

“How come you had her?” Roddy asked, too quickly to check himself.

“I was pregnant . . . ?”

“Yeah, got that,” Roddy stammered, self-conscious now. “I just wondered, I mean, did you mean to be . . . or . . . ?”

“I didn’t mean to get pregnant, but . . .”

“Happens sometimes,” he said.

“I was on the pill too, even. Different kind than now,” she assured him. “I’m well protected now . . .”

He smiled. “And you decided to keep it . . . her . . . I guess, obviously . . .”

Suzy laughed. “Obviously.”

“Did you . . . Were you . . .
with
her dad then? Did he . . . ?”

Suzy chose her words carefully. “I
was
with someone then. I mean, I was
with
someone. And I was also . . .”—she spoke slowly, as if testing his reaction to each word, waiting to see how it landed before she spoke the next—“having an . . . well, sleeping with . . . someone . . . else . . . also . . .” Roddy was staring at her intently, waiting for each word as apprehensively as she issued them. “It wound up being kind of messy and yucky.”

Roddy was shaking his head. “And you didn’t wind up staying with either of them?”

“I wasn’t exactly anyone’s favorite person at that point.”

“And so did you ever . . . I mean, do you . . . ?”

“Know who her father is?” Suzy finished for him. “Yes,” she said definitively, “
I
do.”

Roddy just kept looking at her, unsure what she meant.

“They both left thinking it was the other, and it seemed like that was best for all of us. And I was going to abort anyway, but then I decided I didn’t want to. I have a good job; I could afford it. I knew she’d have good genes. It just seemed like: OK, I could do this.”

“Wow,” Roddy said.

“I guess.”

The door to Shakes swung open and Squee and Mia pushed through, cones in hand, Squee’s already beginning to melt down his arm.

“Make you not want to sleep with me anymore?” Suzy asked, her face scrunched up in exaggerated worry.

Roddy snorted. He reached down to conceal his erection before the kids climbed back into the truck.

He dropped Suzy and Mia at the Lodge, then drove with Squee beside him back up to Eden’s. She wasn’t in the house when they arrived, so Roddy deposited Squee in front of the television and went out to the chicken coop to find her.

There’d been no henhouse out back while Roddy was growing up. All that had happened in his absence. Eden had a custom-built cement-floor coop with divided nest areas for each of her birds and a separate “coop for one,” as she called it—a darkened, screened-off place for a broody hen to sit on her eggs and ready them for hatching. That spring Eden had mated one of her hens—Lorraine—with a cock from George Quincy’s farm. Now Lorraine got off her eggs only once a day—not more than twenty minutes—to step outside, eat, drink, and do her business. It was Eden’s only chance to get in there and check on things, tidy up. As Roddy approached he could see Lorraine at the food. The gate was made of chicken-wire fencing stapled to a scrap-wood frame. He opened the latch, slipped inside, and secured it closed behind him. It stank of chicken shit.

“Hey, Ma,” Roddy called.