The Dark of Summer

anxious to hear her reaction. He said, “Do you believe me, Gwyn?”

“No.”

Inwardly, however, she was not quite so certain what she should believe and what she shouldn't; circumstances were no longer clear cut, but shadowed and vague. She supposed there was at least a modicum of truth to what Younger had said about International Seafood Products, though she was sure that the plant could not be so clean as he said it was. After all, her Uncle Will had said that it would be filthy, and so far as she could see, he had no reason to make up elaborate lies for her. On the other hand, what reason did Younger have for lying to her?

He said, “Your uncle really is lying to you, Gwyn, as hard as that may be to accept. I can't say why he's lying, but he most certainly is. His behavior is usually difficult to fathom.”

Gwyn turned to face him again, her eyes so dazzled by the sunlight on the sea that he appeared cloaked in shadows and spots of moving light. She said, “I suppose you'll tell me that you never made threats against Uncle Will, either.”

“Me, personally?” he asked.

“Don't play word games with me,” she said, angrily.

“I'm not.”

“You know perfectly well what I mean,” she said. “Did the fishermen, in general, make threats against him?”

He said, “There's none of us who like your uncle, of course, but there's also none of us who would hurt him — or even threaten to hurt him. That isn't our way.” He paused, saw that she was still not prepared to believe him, and he said, “One thing I do understand about William Barnaby.”

She waited.

He said, “I understand his fanatical belief in classism, though it seems foolish to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“He's a very refined bigot,” Younger said.

“That's absurd!”

“Oh,” Younger said, “he's not an out-and-out racial bigot, because that's not fashionable any longer, not even in the least well educated social strata. I'm sure he wouldn't consciously discriminate against a black man or a Spanish-American merely because of race. In fact, he'd most likely go out of his way to show racial minorities special courtesy. No, your uncle's bigotry is based on far different standards, though it's nonetheless petty for that.”

“What other standards?”

“Social rank and position,” Younger said. “I suppose this kind of snobbish bigotry isn't uncommon in wealthy families with a long social history and genuine blue-blood ancestry. Yet, he seems like a fool for clinging to it. Gwyn, your uncle seems to hate all fishermen, automatically, without even knowing us, simply because we aren't of his own social level. He pushed us out of Lamplight Cove because he didn't want to have to associate with us, even in the role of our landlord. He was terrified that his hoity-toity society friends would think of him as a patron to the likes of us, as a renter of old docks and flensing sheds. And when we had the gall to stand up and argue with him, he hated us twice as much as before; in his mind, you see, we should always remain silent and assent to whatever he does to us, merely because we are — by his scale, and no other — his social inferiors, a pack of dirty laborers.”

“Uncle Will isn't like that,” she said.

“Then you don't know him at all.”

She said, “He used to be like that, I admit. But he's gotten over that, outgrown it. He's changed.”

“Has he, now?”

“Yes” she said. “And I'm proof that he has.”

Younger looked perplexed. He said, “You're proof? How?”

“That's a private, family story,” she said. She thought about her dead father and how mindlessly, unreasonably, the Barnaby family had hated him, how they had rejected him for being born into a family of less social stature than theirs. “But I can assure you that Uncle Will realized his own shortcoming along these lines, and that he's changed.”

“I doubt he has.”

“You're impossible,” she said.

“No more than you are,” he said.

She sat down on the sand and began to slip on her tennis shoes, fiddled with her laces, managed to string them tight and tie two neat bows even though her hands were shaking.

While she was thus engaged, Younger walked closer to the water's edge, turning his back on her, and began to scoop handfuls of sand up, balling the wet earth and throwing it out to sea. He worked fast, scooping and pitching, scooping and pitching, as if trying to drain himself of his anger. His broad back and brown muscular arms worked in a healthy, flowing rhythm that was not unpleasant to watch.

Shoes tied, Gwyn got to her feet, brushed sand from her clothes, and turned away from him, heading back toward Barnaby Manor.

“Gwyn?”

She turned.

He was facing her now, his hands hung at his sides and covered with wet sand, perspiration strung across his forehead in a band of transparent beads.

“Yes?”

He said, “I wanted to be friends.”

“So did I,” she said. “But you never gave it a chance.”

“It wasn't all me,” he said.

She did not reply.

He said, “Don't go yet.”

“I have to.”

“Let's talk a while longer.”

“We've nothing to talk about.”

“Why don't we get together tomorrow for—”

“That won't be possible.”

“But—”

“I've been told that I'd be wise to avoid you,” she said. “And now I see that was good advice.”

She started walking away again.

“Gwyn, wait!”

She continued walking.

“Who told you to stay away from me — that uncle of yours, that sweet and unprejudiced paragon of a man?” he shouted after her, his voice ringing from the cliffs, flat against the rolling sea.

She ignored him.

“I'm right about him, you know!” he shouted.

She did not respond, but walked a little faster. As the tone of his voice grew uglier, and as he put more volume to it, she grew more afraid that he would follow her.

He shouted something else.

With relief, she found that she had put so much distance between them that his words were indistinct.

Fifteen minutes later, moving through shimmering curtains of heat waves as the mid-day sun beat down mercilessly on the brilliant white sand, Gwyn reached the steps that wound up the cliffside toward Barnaby Manor like a stone snake. As she stepped to that cool, shadowed shaft of risers, she discovered that the dead girl — pale, quiet, soft and wraithlike, but nonetheless real — was waiting for her. The dead girl looked up, her blue eyes bright as gems, smiled gently, pushed a yellow, lock of hair out of her face with a long-fingered hand as white and as unearthly as anything Gwyn had ever seen.

“Hello, Gwyn,” the girl said.

The specter sat on the third step from the bottom, her bare feet on the first step, still dressed in a fresh,