Reunion at Red Paint Bay (9 page)

“Compliments of the house, Mr. Chambers,” the innkeeper says as he holds out the tall glass. “It’s the specialty of the inn—we call it the Tonic. My grandmother used to say if this doesn’t cure what ails you, nothing ails you.” The man takes the mug and paper napkin. “The secret is using Jameson whiskey and
untreated Vermont cream, no chemicals. Don’t stir it in. Drink through it.”

He sips the sweet cream until the coffee pours through with a jolt of whiskey. He wipes his mouth on the napkin, leaving a dark smudge, which he folds out of view. “I’m not a coffee drinker,” he says, “but this is very nice.”

The wind whips the halyard on the flagpole, making them turn toward the curving driveway. “I could listen to that all night,” McBride says. “I’ve always thought the best sounds on earth are a foghorn, a waterfall, and the rattle of the halyard against a flagpole.”

“And the whistle of a train,” the man says, “one going away from you.”

McBride moves behind his guest and takes hold of a large black handle, which he turns with some effort. The blue-striped awning begins rolling up, inch by inch. “Sorry,” he says, “can’t chance a gust ripping through it. You might want to move inside.”

“A little rain never hurt anyone,” he says. But forty days and nights of it, that extinguished virtually every living thing. Six chapters after creation, God washed away humanity, repenting that He had made it. To whom does God confess?

McBride leans against an empty Adirondack chair. “I’d sit out with you if I could, but we’ve got a lot of work to do before the school reunion here next week.
Things get pretty chaotic for a few days. I hope you won’t be put out.”

“It won’t bother me at all,” the man says, a most agreeable guest.

He remembers the music
most of all—the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth, the strange meditation of violins and harp that always accompanied wakes at the Bays-water Inn. It seemed to him like music that didn’t want to end, as if the notes were bunching up at the edge of a cliff, refusing to be shoved over. He was the body watcher at so many viewings when he was a teenager that it took years to get the haunting melody out of his head. And now it has come back as he crosses the dining room toward the Viewing Room, a small outcropping off the west wing where the bodies of Red Paint’s most prominent citizens are laid out in their ornate coffins. He could have brought Jean here in her sleek bronze casket, surrounding it with large pots of white lilies. But what if no one came to her wake? What if no one remembered her at all?

He pulls open the doors and sees two computers sitting on facing desks. He steps back and looks both ways to make sure he isn’t disoriented. The Viewing Room has apparently become a small media center, and where do people in Red Paint now go to say goodbye to their dead? He takes a seat at one of the
monitors. The cursor blinks in the Google box, blinks and blinks, waiting for instructions.

That evening he sits
in the library and prints a short message in his clearest hand, all capitals. He walks over to the reception counter where an older woman is making notes in a ledger, her head down. It’s the first time he’s seen her there, and he wonders what position she holds in the McBride clan. Sprawled next to her on the counter is a muscular gray cat with an enormous lionlike head.

“Oh,” she says, looking up after a minute, “I didn’t hear you.”

It’s a familiar comment—
I didn’t hear you
, or
I didn’t see you
. Sometimes he feels like he could walk through people and they wouldn’t notice. Maybe just a little shudder and a momentary
What was that?
“Sorry to bother you,” he says, “but do you have a postcard stamp, by any chance?”

“I can do better than that, I have a meter right here.” She gestures behind her and then extends her hand. He holds the card down along his leg. “Anything wrong, Mr.…”

“Chambers.”

“Of course, the Rachel Carson suite.”

She’s waiting for his answer.
Is anything wrong?
He hands over the postcard.

“Paul Revere,” she says, noting the picture. “You should get one of our Bayswater Inn cards, show people where you’re staying. Only a dollar each, I have them here.”

“Perhaps next time,” he says.

She slides his postcard through the meter, then tosses it into a tray of outgoing mail, message side up. At this movement the cat raises its head off the counter and considers the human close by. He has never seen a cat like this one, so thick in the neck and face.

“Have you met Terrence?” the woman asks, scratching the animal’s cheek.

“Hello, Terrence.”

“He looks like a bruiser, I know. The males get that way when they aren’t neutered, all bulked up for fighting. But inside he’s just a big sweetie.” Terrence holds his gaze.

“That’s nice to know.” The man reaches out his index finger, and the cat takes a lick.

“If Terrence likes you,” the woman says, “you must be all right.”

The postcard showed
Paul Revere on the front, galloping to warn the local militias of the coming British army. The message on the back said, “You should have come alone”—an unnerving few words. Then “Faithfully yours.” Amy’s presence, it seemed, had indeed spooked the sender, as Simon thought it might. Apparently gone was the possibility of meeting whoever this person was and discovering what payback he intended. If Amy were there he couldn’t resist showing her the card and saying
I told you not to come with me
.

She was not there, and the kitchen where he stood seemed empty without her. The house seemed empty without Davey skulking about upstairs or outside, up to something. They had gone to visit her mother
in Bangor, leaving Simon with an unusual night home alone. He had a sudden craving for pizza, everything on it, and ordered it delivered. He ate at the kitchen table, drinking beer, trying to dredge up feature story ideas.

The phone rang much louder than usual, and Simon wondered if Davey had turned up the volume again, one of his little pranks. He leaned across the table, expecting to see Amy’s name on the caller ID. It was a straight shot to Bangor on the highway, and she could have made it in an hour, even in the light rain. The ID said Unknown Caller.

“Hello?”

No answer, no sound at all, like a dead line, or the few moments’ delay between when the telemarketer realizes his call has gone through and actually speaks. “I don’t want any,” Simon said and hung up.

———

As he walked
past his bedroom window later that night he noticed a car across the street. Every few seconds, the wipers passed across the windshield. A figure was barely visible on the driver’s side, a head with a flash of white on top. The face blended into the glass, indistinguishable. Simon watched for several minutes. The car’s occupant was probably pirating his neighbors’ WiFi signal. Or perhaps checking a map, searching for a way out of Red Paint. Simon considered going out to help. If he weren’t already undressing for bed, he was sure he would do just that.

He woke into darkness
, heard a faint rubbing noise, like metal against wood, and sat up. In the shadows an amorphous figure swayed side to side, as if from one foot to the other. Simon squinted to make sense of the broad shoulders, absurdly thin body, and shortened arms. It looked like some fantastic tribal costume.

The movement stilled and the shape melted away. Simon fell back on his bed, inhaling a long, slow breath to compose himself. He hated waking this deep into the night. The sudden consciousness always confused him. What was dream and what was reality? He took another breath, sipping in air until his lungs couldn’t hold any more, then exhaling slowly. A musky
breeze billowed through the open window. The night was growing a little cooler, another storm blowing up the coast. It was an unusual pattern for July.

He curled on his side and reached out with his arm. It fell into the empty space next to him. That scared him for a moment. Amy was gone. Davey, too. The only life in the house was him, and Casper, sleeping in some soft spot. The illumined numbers on the alarm clock clicked away another minute of his life, 1:15 turning into 1:16. The night would get no darker.

Simon shifted onto his back again. A gust of wind spilled into the room, and the human figure in the shadows seemed to dance.

He dresses in black
, head to toe, with a light cap tilted low over his eyes. He leaves the inn by the side door at midnight. No one sees him. He feels invisible, drained of flesh, consciousness without body. A few cars pass him on the way into town, and he wonders what the drivers perceive of him when they glance over.

He parks across the street and observes the house. There’s little to note, just a single light on in the upstairs front window. After a while a shadow passes by, and the light extinguishes. He waits a suitable while longer, then gets out of the car. He strolls across the street and up the walk, in no hurry. He doesn’t bother trying the front door this time, just continues around
the side. The lights next door are out, the neighbors asleep. He turns the backdoor knob. It opens.

He listens—no dog barking, no noise at all. He steps into the kitchen and lets his eyes adjust to the dim light from some appliance on the counter. He has a choice now, turn back or continue? He continues across the kitchen toward the doorway, hesitates, then passes down the hallway to the staircase. He turns there and puts his foot on the first step. No squeaking, a solid stair covered with a thick rug. He climbs carefully, holding on to the railing. He counts as he goes, one to eleven, an unusually steep incline. At the top he looks right, into a small room with a bed against the wall. No one there. He moves on down the hall to the end where there’s another door wide open. He leans his head around the doorjamb. In the bed a body breathes, the sheet rising and falling every few seconds, the tranquil rest of someone without a care in the world. He hears air expelling from the lungs, then sucked back in again. The rhythm of it relaxes him a little, and he soon finds himself breathing in synchrony. He feels oddly peaceful, as if sleeping himself. He has already gone further than he ever imagined he could. It thrills him to be doing this, floating through the house like a phantom. He has never felt so light, almost immaterial. It’s a surprisingly pleasant sensation. He should leave, of course, before some misstep triggers a chain of events he can’t control. But he wants to
see the man in his most artless state. One cannot pose in sleep. He crosses the threshold into the bedroom and glides over the hardwood floor rather than lifting his weight and putting it down again. He stops a few feet from the bed and stares. The image soon emerges from the darkness—the low hairline, the thin lips, the nose straight and narrow. An appealing face, as it was as a boy. Everything so symmetrical.

The chest heaves, and he steps behind the clothes stand. The body rises up, seems to look around, then falls back on the bed. After a few minutes, the breathing becomes regular again, and he reappears from the shadows. On the dresser he sees a letter opener, with its long, thin blade. He picks it up in the soft leather of his glove. The body stirs in the bed, the arms shaking, as if tied down. He muffles his own breath with his hand and leans over. He sees the eyeballs fluttering under their lids, the reflection of dreaming. Of what? He feels an odd desire to know, to rouse the sleeper from his sleep and ask what he dreams of. Falling down a flight of stairs, perhaps, something cliché like that, a mind on the verge of giving in to its deepest urges. Or perhaps just a confusion of images, the random firings of a restless brain. Still, there could be meaning in what seems like chaos, if one looks long enough.

Then what would the disturber of dreams do—run? Thrust the knife? It would surprise him to find he’s
capable of doing that, but who would have predicted that he could go this far? A gust of wind brushes through the trees outside and bursts into the room, whipping the thin blue curtains against the window frame. The sudden cool air shivers his bare arms. The temperature is dropping, a cold front moving in as predicted. Why wouldn’t a person lower the window on his way to bed? Didn’t he listen to the eleven o’clock forecast? A careful man takes note of the changing weather and adjusts his window for the temperature that would come, not that already is.