The Bay at Midnight

“Yes.”

“By yourself?”

“Yes,” I said, turning to go. “And I’d better get back.”

“What were you planning to do to my rooster?” he said, as I moved away.

“Oh!” I said. “Nothing. I wouldn’t hurt it. I just wanted to see where it lived.”

He held the door open wider. “Right here,” he said.

I looked past him onto the porch and saw the rooster and a couple of hens walking around on the floor as if they were mechanical toys. I took a step backward, wondering if the man’s sneakers were caked with the droppings of his feathered pets.

“Thanks for showing me,” I said.

“There are some people around here who’d like to wring my rooster’s neck,” he said, and I thought he sounded suspicious.

“Not me,” I said. “Thanks again for letting me see him.” I turned then and walked as quickly as I could through the tall grass. It probably only took me thirty seconds to reach the dock, but by that time I’d made up two or three different stories about the man. He kept children locked in closets inside the rickety old house. He’d murdered his wife and her bones were buried beneath the porch. When I was about to climb down the ladder, I spotted something shiny in the flattened grass near the head of the dock. I walked over and stared down at a pair of sunglasses, then picked them up. Maybe they belonged to the wife the old man had killed. Who knew? They would go beneath my bed to wait just in case.

That evening, Grandpop and I walked to the end of the dirt road. For as long as I could remember, he’d kept a path cleared through the tall grasses that rose a couple of feet above my head. We followed the path, and I loved the feeling of being closed in by the grass walls. Dragonflies flew along with us as we walked, but we were covered in insect repellant so the mosquitoes left us alone. We emerged from the path in a swampy area of still water that was connected to the canal by a narrow opening in the bulkhead. As he always did, Grandpop had set his bait trap in the shallow water here, tying it to a stake in the soft, sandy earth among the grasses. I pulled in the trap. It was full of green-gray killies, flapping on the wire mesh. Grandpop opened the trap and spilled the bait into his bucket. While he was doing that, I spied something in the water a few feet from where we stood. A baby shoe! I rolled up my capris as high as I could, waded into the water to my knees, and reached out to grab the little white leather shoe, a real prize in the world of clues.

“What do you do with all that stuff you collect?” Grandpop asked me as he closed the trap again.

“I keep them under my bed,” I said. “They might be clues to something that happened. Like, what if a baby got kidnapped or something? I could take this shoe to the police and tell them where I found it and maybe they could solve the mystery.”

“I think you need a better place than under your bed,” Grandpop said. “Your mother could clean up there and toss out all that old stuff you found.”

I loved my grandfather so much right then. He always took me seriously.

“Where else could I put it?” I studied the tiny shoe in my hands.

“I have an idea,” he said. He put his hand on the back of my neck as we walked, his fingers a little rough and damp against my skin. “When we get back to the house, you gather up your clues and I’ll show you where you can keep them.”

Once home, I did as I was told. I only had three paltry clues so far: the baby shoe, the sunglasses and the silly Ping-Pong ball, but that seemed pretty good for two days worth of sleuthing. I carried them out to the backyard. Grandpop was digging a hole near the corner of the house closest to the woods. Next to him was an old tin bread box with a removable red top.

He grinned at me, his sweet basset hound face lighting up for a moment. “What do you think, Nancy Drew?” he asked. “We’ll bury this bread box in this hole, cover it with a little sand and no one will ever know your clues are here.”

I helped him lower the bread box into the hole. I put my clues inside, then slipped on the lid and covered it with a couple of inches of sand. I loved my new hiding place. No one would ever know the clues were there.

Or so I thought.

CHAPTER 5

Julie

The sunburned waitress poured more iced tea into my glass, and I interpreted the look she gave me as sympathetic. This is why I don’t date, I thought. It was the waiting, the wondering, the analyzing. Why was Ethan late? Was he stuck in traffic? Had he forgotten we were to meet for lunch? Or had he simply been annoyed that I’d twisted his arm to talk with me? I wanted to explain to the waitress that, although I was meeting a man here, he was not a date. Not a romantic interest. But then I realized that the waitress probably saw me as too old to be dating, anyway. She was in her mid-twenties; most likely I reminded her of her mother.

The Spring Lake restaurant was barely ten miles from Bay Head Shores, and that was closer than I’d been to our former summer home since I was twelve. When I’d gotten out of my car, I could smell the salt from the ocean a few blocks away. I was surprised that the scent elicited not only the discomfort I’d expected, but also a longing, as though a tiny piece of me was still able to remember the good times I’d had down the shore in spite of all that had been taken from my family there.

The waitress stopped by my table again on her way to another. “Can I get you a roll or something to munch on while you wait, hon?” she asked. It felt so strange to be called “hon” by someone half my age. Better, though, than ma’am.

“No, thanks.” I smiled at her. “I’m fine.”

It was warm in the restaurant, or at least I was warm. I had on cropped black pants and a sleeveless red top cut high on my shoulders, but I noticed other women in the restaurant were pulling on their sweaters. I didn’t even bother carrying a sweater since menopause hit me a year ago.

I’d taken a table at the front of the restaurant so I would be able to see Ethan when he walked in. I wasn’t sure I’d recognize him. Through the window, I studied the men walking by, searching for lanky academic types. I watched people entering and leaving the little shops on the other side of the street. A young man stood directly across the street from me, rubbing lotion on a woman’s back. I watched the two of them until a pack of bicyclers