What I Saw and How I Lied (17 page)
I'd given Mr. Grayson's letter to Joe. Joe knew he could still make a deal. He thought Peter stood in his way.
If I thought back to what might have happened on that boat, my brain just locked.
Joe that morning, so jovial and false. And Peter so
wary. And Mom so stunned and numb, like she couldn't resist Joe.
The three of them on that boat.
And Peter's strange smile.
Let me put it this way: I think he'd be a hell of lot happier if I disappeared.
"There are some things we have to talk about," Mom said when they got back. She'd gone right for a cigarette, and Joe had gone right for a drink. "Things we need to get straight between us. Because the police might want to talk to you, and we should make sure you remember how things really happened. They separated me and Joe, in little rooms, tried to trip us up on things. Detectives questioned us, not that nice Officer Deary."
"But we were ahead of them, weren't we, baby doll?" Joe asked. He looked rattled, though, no matter what he said.
"What things?" I asked.
"How we met Peter, what we did with him, things like that," Mom said. She was talking to me but her eyes kept flitting to Joe, like a sparrow darting back and forth between the lawn and a branch. "That we were friends, holiday friends, like that. We didn't know him terribly well."
"But everyone saw us," I said. "We saw him every day."
"Well, sure," Joe said. "But casual-like. The way you strike up a friendship on vacation with someone you barely knew before."
"And he really wanted to go out on the boat that day, so we said all right," Mom said.
"But Joe said—"
"No, it was Peter," Joe said. "You remember, Bev. He was talking about how good he was at handling a boat, am I right?"
"I remember," Mom said. "Don't you remember, Evie?"
I didn't say anything.
"Evie, the thing is," Mom said, "the police here? They don't like New Yorkers."
"This one cop, he kept asking me if I was a Jew," Joe said. "Because they heard the story about the Graysons, I figure. Can you beat that? I was an altar boy. Not that I'd tell him I was Catholic. They don't like Catholics, either."
"So, if you don't remember something clearly, like who said what, then maybe it's better to say you don't remember at all," Mom said. "Understand?"
I did understand. "You want me to lie," I said.
"Do you get it?" Joe's face was dark. "They're trying to pin this on me!"
"Joe." Mom's voice sharpened. "No sense scaring Evie."
"Why not? I'm plenty scared!" Joe took a pull on his drink. When he turned back to me, his voice was softer.
"Say, kiddo. A lot of things have happened. We just lived through a hurricane, right? And we're just saying that things can get hazy. And cops can twist things, and the next thing you know, they've trumped up a case where there is no case, just to get themselves in the headlines. They do the third degree down here. They know how to beat a man without marking him."
"Joe!"
"She should know what could happen!"
I thought of the cops, and the third degree, and a soft voice asking me questions, and me having to think before I answered, me having to be careful. Then I thought of why they were telling me this, and that made me more scared.
Joe gripped my arms hard. "We're a family. What's that thing you and your Mom say? We stick together like glue. Right?" He waited for my nod. "That's my girl."
Over his shoulder, I looked into Mom's eyes. I didn't see someone I recognized. I saw someone smaller. Someone scared. Scared of the police? Scared of Joe?
No. My mother was scared of me.
Chapter 28DROWNING OF NEW YORK TOURISTDEEMED SUSPICIOUSCouple Questioned in Mysterious DeathCoroner Expected to Call for Inquest
I walked all the way downtown to buy the paper. I didn't want to buy it at the newsstand in the lobby. I read it at the deserted bandshell, surrounded by men cleaning up the fallen branches. My blouse was soaked, I'd gotten so hot on the walk, but I shivered as I read.
Peter Coleridge, twenty-three, a wealthy tourist from Oyster Bay, Long Island, fell overboard on the afternoon of September seventeenth, the day before landfall of the hurricane. Winds were gusting up to fifty knots and there were numerous squalls out on the ocean. Coleridge, Mr. Joseph Spooner, and his wife, Beverly Spooner, from Brooklyn, New York, hired a boat, the
Captive
Lady, from Captain Stephen "Sandy" Forrest at the town dock on Wednesday.According to the police, the engine of the
Captive Lady
failed during high seas while the group motored from the Palm Beach inlet toward Jupiter. Mr. Coleridge made an attempt to repair the engine, placing a wrench on the deck above while he worked below in the engine well. The motion of the boat sent the wrench into the engine well, striking him on the head. Stunned from the blow, he came up on deck, and a rogue wave sent him overboard.Mr. and Mrs. Spooner attempted to rescue him, to no avail.Mr. Coleridge's body washed up near Manalapan, where a surf caster, Kelly Marin, discovered it early Thursday morning.Beverly Spooner, an attractive blonde, and Joseph Spooner, a businessman, were guests of Le Mirage on Palm Beach island, along with the deceased.The coroner's report included "suspicious markings" that could be "inconsistent" with the "natural batterings" that a body would be prone to sustain during such a hurricane.Mr. Coleridge's father, Ellis Coleridge, a fisherman, has journeyed from his home in Patchogue, Long Island, to identify his sons body. He was unavailable for comment.
A fisherman?
It was all in next day's morning edition. Peter wasn't loaded. They found that out pretty fast. He'd never been to college, let alone Yale. He was an only child. All through high school he'd worked summers at a country club in Oyster Bay. That's where he'd borrowed his manners from. And the blue convertible. The friend he'd borrowed it from had reported it stolen when Peter had taken it and hadn't returned.
Everything he'd told me about himself had been a lie.
The family friend with the house in Palm Beach? Just a mansion, closed until the season. He'd broken in. A caretaker had found evidence that someone was staying there when he'd gone over to check before the hurricane. A window had been forced. There were glasses left on a sill. Two of them. One of them had lipstick traces. Dark red, the paper said.
The most tempting color since Eve winked at Adam.
By the afternoon edition, the mansion was called a "secret love nest." And Beverly had gone from "attractive blonde" to a suspect.
Peter wasn't who I thought he was. Could it be that Mom wasn't, either?
If everyone was wondering what had gone on between Peter and my mother, wouldn't I be crazy not to wonder, too?
SUSPICIONS GROW ONCOLERIDGE DROWNINGMystery Woman SoughtInquest to Begin on FridayJudge Alton Friend to Preside
Joe Spooner, the man I'd picked to be my dad.
This man who bent over to turn the key of a neighbor kid's roller skate — could he have killed somebody? This man who knew how to tie a bow on the sash of my party dress, who took me for egg creams in Manhattan drugstores for the adventure of it? This man who'd say, after I'd had a fight with Margie, "Aw, kid, you gotta to let bygones be bygones. Here's a dime, go buy yourselves a couple of Cokes."
This man couldn't be a killer.
Killers were in movies.
Killers didn't snore in the bed next to you.
And Mom. Whatever had happened to her with
Peter — which I couldn't, wouldn't think about — she was still my mother. She'd still tucked me in at night, she'd still washed my blouses out in the sink every night even in winter with red cold hands, she'd still groaned every morning when the alarm went off and got up anyway and made my Ovaltine and toast. She was the one who cried hardest when the puppy she gave me for Christmas died of distemper. I remembered that puppy in her lap, his mouth all foam, while she cried a bucket of tears.
She couldn't have been part of it, if it was the thing I kept seeing when I closed my eyes: Joe hitting Peter on the head, Joe pushing Peter into the churning ocean.
Imagine our surprise when we got back from lunch the next day and found Grandma Glad in our room. She still had her going-out hat on, a dark green hat with stiff speckled feathers on one side. Her brown suitcase was on my bed. She sat on the couch, her eyes on the door. Her feet were planted on either side of an old tan leather valise that had belonged to her husband, Joe. "Big Joe Spooner," they used to call him. He died when Joe was eighteen, a big shot who'd left them in debt.
"When were you going to tell me, Joe?" she asked.
"How did you get here?" Joe looked genuinely stunned.
"Eastern Airlines flight to Miami, then I hired a car. When were you going to tell me?"
"You flew in a plane?" This was maybe more shocking than her sudden appearance.
"It made the papers in New York. I read about it in the
paper.
I left messages here, but you never called me back."
paper.
I left messages here, but you never called me back."
"You took a plane?"
"I read it in the newspaper, Joe!"
"I didn't want to worry you, Ma."
"So I can be half-killed, reading it in the paper. I almost fainted dead on the floor, and me alone in the house." Grandma Glad eyed Mom like she was a week-old fish. "You need better help than you've got."
"We didn't do anything wrong," Joe said.
"You're crazy if you don't see that it doesn't matter," Grandma Glad said. "They want to pin it on you. Can't you read the papers? And you don't help matters. What are you talking to a reporter for?"
"He called me. He asked a question."
"I talked to John Reilly," Grandma Glad said. John Reilly was a fat lawyer with a red face. Everybody went to him for wills and deeds and when their kid got caught doing something.
"That shyster," Mom muttered.
"That shyster knows his business. He says don't talk to reporters — you put your foot in it and you can't get it out. You said in the paper you didn't understand why they called the inquest. Dumb, Mr. Reilly said. He said, you say you
welcome
the inquest."
welcome
the inquest."
Joe dropped his head in his hands. "What am I going to do?"
"What's the most important thing down here?"
I couldn't get over it. There Gladys sat, in her navy flowered dress, her Red Cross shoes planted firmly on the carpet. She had gotten some authority somehow, and it wasn't just because she'd talked to a lawyer. Gladys Spooner, sitting in a chair, listening to the radio, looking out the window, gossiping on the porch. All that time, she was gathering information for just this moment to take over.
"The tourists," Grandma Glad went on. "Murder hits the papers and they have to take care of it so the tourists keep coming."
Mom went pale. "It's not a
murder.
Nobody's calling it a murder."
murder.
Nobody's calling it a murder."
"They are, and we might as well, too, or else, how are we going to fight?" Grandma Glad said. I hated her for using the word out loud, but she made us all shut up, that's for sure. Once the word was out, we had to face it square. I hated her for it, but she was right.
"I'm sunk," Joe said. "I'm a nobody. They'll pin it on me, all right."
"You're not a nobody," Grandma Glad said fiercely.
"He
was a nobody."
"He
was a nobody."
I started to cry, but nobody paid attention, even when I had to put my hands over my mouth so that the noise wouldn't go out into the hall. Peter was there in the room with me suddenly. I could see the golden hair on his forearms, the way he twisted his mouth when he was trying not to smile at me. A
nobody.
He was still so clear and so alive and so much him. There was so much
Peter
inside me I felt sick.
nobody.
He was still so clear and so alive and so much him. There was so much
Peter
inside me I felt sick.
Dead. My stomach twisted as it hit me again. Dead.
"I told you not to marry her," Grandma Glad said. It was like me and Mom weren't even in the room. "I told you she was trouble. I said she'd run around on you."
"Yeah, and you kept on saying it, even when Joe was overseas and I was working to put food on your table!" Mom said.
"Working." Grandma Glad sniffed. "Is that what you call it? Is that what you were doing with that Coldidge fellow?"
"Coleridge," I said. My voice was all choked and wavery. "His name was Coleridge." I couldn't stand hearing her. I had pushed evil away, I had tried to keep everything straight, and even though everything was horrible, she'd walked in the door and brought evil in.
"This isn't helping any," Joe said. "We can't fight each other. Not now."
"I'm going to get you out of this, Joey," Grandma Glad said.
"What about me?" Mom asked, her voice quiet. "You going to leave me in the soup, Gladys? You going to pin it on me and let your boy go free? This is Christmas for you, isn't it? Wrap me up and hand me over with a big fat bow."
That stopped my crying. Mom had put her finger on it, all right. That was the possibility in the room, and I wasn't even seeing it.
Grandma Glad hesitated. She let Mom swing on the rope for a while.
"Ma?" Joe said.
You could tell she was about to eat some week-old brussels sprouts because they were the only things in the icebox. She didn't want the taste of what she was about to say in her mouth. "What happens to you, happens to my boy," she said to Mom. "I'd let you stew in the soup if I could. But I can't."
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