The Drowning House (18 page)

There was no sign of Patrick. I finished the first beer and ordered another. I scanned the room again. I had the feeling I recognized someone. Why? I looked again, trying to remember where I had been since I arrived.

My eyes settled on a wiry, brown-skinned man perched on the edge of a chair, pretending to read the newspaper spread in front of him. I took inventory—the expensive sunglasses on his head, the T-shirt faded to no particular color. From a distance, he seemed to be in his twenties. You would have to get closer to see the wear in his face, the deep scoring around his eyes. Something set him apart from the other drinkers. An air of purpose, perhaps. A look that had nothing to do with missed opportunities or a future that would never
arrive. Then it came to me. When Tyler Henry had asked about illegal traffic, I’d told him,
Galveston is busier, so people are more cautious. But it’s a port city
. I wondered what the man with the sunglasses was bringing in.

The light was iffy and I had no flash, but I reached for my camera anyway and eased it out of my bag. I rested it on my lap and felt for the shutter. As I did, two hands caught and held me from behind. They circled my wrists, and a man’s chest pressed against me. I swallowed and tried to shout, but most of the sound stayed inside. A batter had walked and the booing from the TV was loud. The woman at the bar looked at me with mild surprise. I tried to push back, but my feet didn’t reach the floor and I had no way to brace myself.

I saw my Leica slide between my knees and onto the ground. When I looked up, the man with the sunglasses was gone.

Otis let go of me, then leaned down and picked up my camera. “You best put this away for now. Not everyone like to have their picture taken.”

I took it from him and inspected the lens. It seemed okay. I held it away from me and shot a frame or two to make sure the reflex mirror was moving. “This is a Leica,” I said. “It’s a really good camera.”

Otis removed a set of keys from his pocket. “Any damage, he’ll get you another.”

I knew he was talking about Will. “Did he tell you to follow me?”

He shook his head. “Not him. Faline. She said to watch out for you here. Carry you home if need be.”

My head throbbed. I was embarrassed that Faline had so easily been able to predict where I would go. I knew she meant well, that in her own way, she was looking after me. But it was like being small again, all my actions observed and anticipated. Allowed as long as they caused no trouble. I said, “Patrick comes here, doesn’t he?”

“Sometimes,” Otis said. “But it’s different for him.”

“Why?”

Otis looked at me the way you do a child who repeats the same annoying question. “Just the way it is. You ready now?”

I walked out with him to the car, one of Will’s. The haloed streetlights were painfully bright and my mouth felt sticky. “Do you always do everything Faline tells you to?” I asked.

“It’s not like that,” Otis said. He opened my door. “You been married. You ought to know.” I sank down into the car’s dark interior.

I thought about Michael. The constant push and pull of our life together.

“Who was that man?” I asked. “The one who left?”

Otis considered a moment. Then he said, “You want to find Patrick Carraday, you better off going by Saint Vincent’s. The Catholic church. On Twenty-first Street. A white building. Saint V de P they call it. You know the one?”

I stared stupidly. What could Patrick be doing at Saint Vincent’s?

Otis started the engine. He said, “But I wouldn’t take the camera there neither.” I felt sick, and the motion of the jeep made it worse. Sour bile rose in my throat. I saw him looking at me.

“It’s not what you think,” I told him. “Two beers, that’s all I had. I didn’t even finish the second. It’s a headache, that’s all.”

Otis said nothing.

I closed my eyes and leaned against the back of the seat. I thought about what had just happened. I didn’t know the man with the sunglasses. I had never been inside Lafitte’s. But I was an Islander, I had all the instincts. “You’re not going to tell me what Patrick’s doing there, at the Catholic church, are you?” I said.

There was no traffic, and the street was quiet, but Otis kept his face forward, his hands on the wheel, as though the act of driving absorbed him. “No ma’am,” he said, “I am not.”

Chapter 17

MY HEADACHE LASTED WELL INTO
the next day. When finally I went downstairs for some crackers, I passed Eleanor in the hall, and she gave me a knowing look. “There’s aspirin in the medicine chest and ice in the freezer,” she said.

I poured coffee into a tall cup and took it with me. As I drove to the archive, I thought about what Otis had said. The Carradays weren’t Catholic. When they went to services at Christmas and Easter, it was to the Methodist church. I wondered about what had happened at Lafitte’s. Did it have something to do with Patrick? Was he involved in something? (I didn’t use the word “illegal,” even to myself). Or was Otis just doing what Faline wanted, what, it seemed, everyone wanted, keeping Patrick and me apart?

I parked the car in the library lot. Across the street, on either side of the big main door, a pair of lions—their muzzles softened and blunted by weather—gazed out onto the scruffy grass bank. An arch overhead bore a series of names—Virgil, Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe. I wondered how many of them meant anything to those inside, now mostly harried mothers with small children and grizzled homeless men. People who had worn out their welcome in other places but here, at least, could not be turned away.

In the street, a tour bus was passing, a sort of tractor pulling three open cars strung together like an amusement-park ride. There were few children on board. Most of the passengers were adults, but they seemed to have regressed, as people do on vacation. They wore shorts and T-shirts, ball caps, and athletic shoes with bright-colored
stripes. They sat with their feet up on the seats in front of them or lolled back, bored and drowsy. An oversize duck head, like a big bath toy, looked back from the roof of the tractor and a loudspeaker somewhere behind its enlarged bill produced a recorded drone. I couldn’t make out the words. When it paused, there was scattered laughter.

I was not anxious to go inside. Already my eyes burned in anticipation of the fluorescent light. I tried to muster some enthusiasm for the work at hand, but my thoughts kept returning to the events of the night before.

I wondered if Harriet Kinkaid could tell me anything about Patrick. Clearly she knew the Carradays well. She had invited me to come and see her house—
the witch house
. It wasn’t far, just two blocks over, an easy walk down a well-shaded street.

Few trees grow naturally on a barrier island. Those oaks and cypress that survive the weather and wind are hunched and scruffy. In Galveston, the most desirable neighborhoods have always been distinguished by other trees—exotic, imported palms and tall, graceful hardwoods. The spreading canopy above Harriet Kinkaid’s roof said that important people had once lived there. Fashionable people.

If you looked closely you could see in each of the front-facing gables a decorative sunflower, the motif recommended by Oscar Wilde during a visit to the Island in its prime. You had to look closely because the structure and all its details were the same soft, weathered gray. None of the surfaces had been painted in years. But the garden, at first glance a riot of color and unruly greenery, showed signs of tidying. And I saw that a board in the porch had been replaced recently.

I had not expected to find the front door open. A couple of cardboard cartons waited outside on the porch. I had reached the steps when Harriet Kinkaid emerged. Her hair was up, in a crown of neat braids. “There, now,” she said, “I was hoping you’d come by. You can help me with these.” She indicated the boxes. “You may have to make two trips, they’re pretty heavy.” She added something to one of the boxes, making it heavier. “In my day I could have managed them easily, but I’m so much bigger than you.” She straightened briefly to her
full height, as if thinking about her younger self had given her new energy, and set off down the walk. Her car, an ancient Peugeot with bulging headlights and a grille like a crazy smile, was parked at the curb.

I picked up the first of the boxes. It had no lid and I could see on top several framed photographs. Halfway to the street, the cutout handles began to dig into my fingers. I hurried the last few steps and deposited the box on the ground with a bump. The contents shifted, and I wondered if I had broken something. Harriet didn’t seem concerned. She leaned against the car. “I’ll just catch my breath.” Patting the hood, she said, “Have no fear, it’s nicely warmed up. We’ve already been for a run, out past the Coast Guard station. I’m keeping track of a black skimmer nest on the beach. Such fascinating birds, with that remarkable lower bill, like the edge of a knife. They skim it along the surface of the water and snap up anything edible.”

“ ‘The lower mandible is elongated and flexible,’ ” I said.

Harriet clapped. “Bravo. Of course. Your father.” She looked at me closely. “I’ll say this for him, Anson Porterfield understood habitat. I want to make sure no one disturbs it. The nest. At least for now. It will all be gone by this time next year. You can put that there.” She gestured—a sort of backward wave—but kept the other hand on the car, and I realized she needed it for support. Walking from the house had tired her.

“We’re almost ready,” she said, smiling encouragement, and I went back for the second box.

Seated behind the wheel, she looked stronger and more purposeful. As we drove, I saw that most of the houses in the neighborhood had been lavishly restored. I wondered what their owners thought about Harriet’s property. You couldn’t say that it was run-down, but it certainly was different.

I realized I was still thinking about her earlier remark. “What did you mean, it will all be gone?”

“The beach will be. The beach as we know it. There will still be water and sand, of course. But fewer birds. More cars. And many
more tourists. They’re going to build a high-rise. And what they call a ‘beach village.’ ”

I pictured that part of the Island, where there were no houses or boardwalks, just the road that ran past the ferry landing, through clumps of tough-looking bushes that gave way gradually to tall spikes of cordgrass. Families went there at dusk to seine for crabs and sand trout. The land sloped off so gradually that waders a hundred yards out stood only waist-deep, the water flat and still around them. In the distance you could see the skeletal forms of derricks.

I was not surprised to learn that it would be developed. That was what happened in Galveston. Who would want to save that low, mixed, unimpressive landscape? I realized sadly that it was the thing I would have wanted to keep most.

“It’s selfish of me, I know, but I’m grateful I won’t be here to see it,” Harriet said.

“You’re leaving the Island?”

She smiled. “I am.” She indicated the boxes. “But first I’m giving away the family history.” I thought I must have misheard, but Harriet looked at me and said, “You’ll see. Turn right at the next corner.”

The shop was called Sally’s Stitch in Time, and I understood immediately why it appealed to Harriet—it had the unrestrained abundance of a half-wild garden. I stared at the bewildering array of time-worn belongings—furniture, old kitchen appliances, tools, piles of linens, clothing, boxes of buttons, rows of medicine bottles and cosmetic jars, military medals, pistols, swords. On one side of the room, two fully dressed figures—a World War I doughboy and a WAC wearing a mohair tie—stood together uneasily, like different generations at a family reunion. Although it was midsummer, strings of tinsel were draped here and there.

Harriet settled into a dark red chair while a woman with penciled-on eyebrows exclaimed over the contents of the first box. Although she was breathing hard again, there were spots of color in Harriet’s cheeks. She was enjoying herself.

A long table to one side was given over to photographs, and I went to look through them. There were images of all kinds—group photos,
shots of men in stiff collars behind large desks, wedding portraits of couples in formal clothes.
We were prosperous. We were in love
.

On the counter by the cash register, Harriet’s photos stood a little awkwardly, latecomers to a party that was already under way. I saw that they were about to join the others on the table, and I realized that someone might indeed buy them.

“You understand now,” Harriet said, smiling. “I wonder if someday, someone will point at me and say, ‘This is a picture of my grandmother, when she was seventeen. When she visited San Francisco. You can see the cable car in the background.’ I’ll have another whole life. Yes, that’s me,” she said, her voice full of satisfaction.

I could see why. In the photo Harriet stood at the top of a hill, sky and distant water visible behind her. The wind lifted her long hair and waved it like a banner.

“It won’t be true,” I protested.

“Oh my dear,” Harriet sighed. “Come here.” She patted the broad arm of the chair. “Does it matter? Think of the portraits you have at home. They aren’t your family. What about them?”