The Bay at Midnight

worried.”

“That they’ll learn it was Ned?”

“No, because I know it couldn’t have been,” he said, a stubborn edge to his soft voice. “I’m worried they might somehow put evidence together that would come—incorrectly—to that conclusion, though. I mean, I don’t understand how they’d collect the suspect’s DNA from your sister after all this time, but she was always with Ned, so it’s certainly possible they’d find his DNA on her.”

Or in her, I thought but did not say.

“And as I mentioned before, I’m worried about my father having to be dragged into this.”

“I know,” I said, “and I’m sorry this is so hard. But let’s not borrow trouble. One step at a time.”

“Right,” he said. “You know one good thing that has come out of this?”

“What’s that?”

“I enjoyed seeing you again, Julie,” he said. “Even though it wasn’t an easy conversation, it was a treat having lunch with you.”

I smiled, feeling an unexpected rush of excitement run through my body. “It was,” I agreed.

“I was remembering things about you,” he said. “Are you still a terrific swimmer?”

“Actually, I don’t swim at all anymore,” I said. “I lost interest after that summer.”

“Really?” he asked. “You were so good. I was remembering the time you and I raced across the canal,” he said. I laughed. I’d forgotten. We’d only been about ten the last summer we were truly friends. We’d known enough to wait for the slack tide and we were both strong swimmers for kids our age, but we got in a lot of trouble.

“I wasn’t allowed near the water for a week,” I said.

“I had to vacuum the entire house,” Ethan said.

“I don’t think I ever swam in the canal again,” I said. “I swam in our dock all the time when the boat wasn’t in it, but not the canal.”

“Ah, that’s not true,” Ethan said.

“What do you mean?”

“I remember watching you float down the canal in an inner tube.”

It took me a moment to place the memory, but then it came into my mind all at once. “I’d forgotten,” I said, laughing, although the memory carried with it both joy and sadness since Isabel had been so much a part of it, and though Ethan and I reminisced about several other shared experiences before getting off the phone, it was that memory which stayed with me for the rest of the day.

CHAPTER 11

Julie

1962

It was a weekday in Bay Head Shores, which meant that our father was home in Westfield. We had finished eating breakfast and Grandpop was already out in the garage working on some project, while Grandma was starting to clear the table in spite of our mother’s admonishment to relax a while. I started to stand up to help Grandma, but Mom told me to stay where I was and I sat down again. She shook a cigarette from her pack of Kents and lit it, blowing a puff of smoke into the air above the cluttered table.

“I have an idea for something we could do today, girls,” she said to the three of us.

“What?” Lucy sounded suspicious. Whatever it was, I could tell she was prepared to say she didn’t want to do it.

“Look at the current,” Mom said, and I turned my head to peer through the screen at the canal. The current was moving slowly in the direction of the bay.

“What about it?” Isabel asked. She was holding a lock of her hair in front of her face, probably scrutinizing it for split ends.

“Well,” Mom said, “after we’ve digested our breakfast a bit, how about we take the big inner tubes and ride the current all the way from our house to the bay.”

“Keen!” I said. It was an extraordinary idea.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Isabel said, but I knew she was intrigued. It was hard to get Isabel interested in any sort of family activity, and I was impressed that my mother had managed to come up with something exciting enough to draw in her oldest daughter.

Grandma laughed, sitting down at the table again, her chores forgotten. “I remember when you and Ross used to do that,” she said to my mother. She rolled the r in “Ross” in a way that made the name sound very pretty. I was surprised by what she’d said, though. So was Isabel.

“You and Mr. Chapman floated on tubes to the bay?” she asked, incredulous.

“When we were kids,” Mom said.

I always forgot that my mother had spent her childhood summers in our bungalow. Her father—our Grandpop —had built the house himself in the late twenties, and the Chapmans had moved in next door shortly after that. Mr. Chapman and our mother had been friends when they were kids, the way Ethan and I used to be.

“We were probably about fifteen,” my mother continued. “Once we floated all the way to the river.”

“Tsk,” Grandma clucked. “Do you remember how furious I was when I realized what you did?”

Mom smiled at her, turning her head to exhale a stream of smoke over her shoulder and away from the table. “I survived,” she said.

“Well, I’m not going,” Lucy announced, but this was no surprise and no one paid her much attention.

“The canal was different then,” Grandma said. “There was no bulkhead, so you could walk right into it from the