The Bay at Midnight

“All right,” I said again. “I’ll see what I can come up with and get back to you.”

“Okay,” he said. “And another thing. My friend at the department told me they’ve been talking to George Lewis’s family.”

“Wanda?” I asked.

“I don’t know who, exactly,” he said. “I do know that Lewis always stuck to the story that he was innocent.”

“I’m sure he was,” I said. “I knew he didn’t do it. Have they talked to Bruno Walker?” I asked.

“My friend said they’re having trouble tracking him down.”

“Figures,” I said. “The one person who might know what really happened and they can’t find him.”

We talked for a few more minutes, and I was putting the groceries away when Lieutenant Alan Meyers called from the Point Pleasant Police Department. Apparently, they were wasting no time. He asked if I could come to the station on Thursday morning. I said I could, then got on my computer to find a motel in the area and instantly felt like a fool. Grow up, I told myself, and I called Ethan back to accept the invitation to stay at his house.

Now, sitting in my car in the heart of Point Pleasant, I wondered if I’d made a mistake. It had been so easy to be brave from the safety of my home. I took a moment to give myself an emotional checkup before I opened the car door: I was okay. I got out, merry-go-round music and salt air surrounding me, and joined the tourists heading toward the boardwalk.

On the boardwalk, I thought I saw Isabel everywhere. She was riding the Tilt-A-Whirl, centrifugal force pressing her against the shell-like back of the carriage. She was sitting on a bench next to a blond-haired boy, facing the ocean, her long legs stretched out in front of her, her feet propped up on the railing. She was walking toward me on the boardwalk in a green bikini, her body tan and hard, her head tipped to one side as she took a bite from an ice-cream-and-waffle sandwich.

I sat on one of the benches facing the boardwalk, peoplewatching and letting Isabel in. How would she have fit in with Lucy and me? I wondered. Would she have helped us pull weeds in Mom’s garden? Would our father still have been alive if he hadn’t lost his beloved oldest daughter at such a young age? Why was I torturing myself with unanswerable questions?

“Dear God,” I prayed, mumbling the words aloud, “help me get through this.”

I stood up and walked resolutely back to my car. It was still early, so I drove around Point Pleasant for a while. I spotted St. Peter’s, where I’d gone to church every Sunday morning during the summer and to confession every Saturday evening. I remembered one of the last times—possibly the last time—I’d gone to confession there. For some reason, Mom had not been in the car with us. Daddy and Isabel rode in the front seat on the way to the church, and Lucy and I were in the back, and we were talking about my upcoming confirmation. Isabel had her taken her shoes off and had her bare feet up on the dashboard, her skirt just covering her knees.

“So, Julie,” she said as she studied her stubby fingernails. She was a nail biter and she’d bought all sort of products to make herself stop, but none of them worked. “Have you decided what middle name you’re taking for confirmation?” Isabel had taken the name Bernadette as her confirmation name. It was a great name, long and elaborate, but I was not an elaborate person and had decided on my confirmation name a year earlier.

“Nancy,” I said.

“It has to be a saint’s name,” Isabel said with an air of authority. “I don’t think there’s a Saint Nancy.”

“Well,” Daddy said, and I knew just by the tone of his voice that he was going to take my side for a change. “I believe the name ‘Nancy’ comes from the name ‘Ann,’ and there certainly is a Saint Ann. She was Mary’s mother.”

Bingo, I thought. Not only had I picked a saint’s name, but a really important one at that.

“So she has to take ‘Ann,’ right?” Isabel asked my father. She sounded hopeful. She did not want me to get my way in this. “That would sound really stupid,” she added. “Julianne Ann Bauer.”

“I’m going to take Kathy,” said Lucy. She related strongly to the baby of the family on Father Knows Best.

“You two are missing the boat,” Isabel complained. “This is supposed to be serious.”

“Isabel’s right,” Daddy said. “But we can talk to the priest about whether Julie would have to take Ann or Nancy. And Lucy, there most certainly is a Saint Katharine. The important thing is for the two of you to learn about the lives of the saints you’re interested in before you decide to take their names, the way Isabel did.”

If he only knew about his sweet Saint Isabel, who was probably going all the way with Ned, I thought.

Daddy parked the car on the street outside St. Peters, and I suddenly got the jitters. That entire week, I’d lived in fear of dying because I had not confessed all my sins the previous Saturday and I knew I would go straight to hell if I died. I simply had not known how to tell the priest about the fantasies I was having about Ned Chapman. But now I thought I had it figured out. Somehow I’d come up with the term “impure thoughts.” I must have read it somewhere, maybe in the Catholic magazine Daddy wrote for. I also remembered reading that impure thoughts were a sin even if you didn’t act on them, and that’s when I realized I’d better confess them as soon as I could. I was afraid, though. I was used to confessing to my lies and my fights with Lucy and Isabel and my disobedience. This new sin had a completely different feeling to it.

I sat in the pew between Daddy and Isabel, waiting my turn. I watched Lucy go into one side of the confessional with her little eight-year-old’s transgressions. A woman came out from the other side, and Isabel took her place. Then Lucy came out, and it was my turn.

I could feel my heart beating against my ribs as I knelt in the darkness. I heard the mumbling of a male voice and knew that my sister had finished her probably inadequate confession and was receiving her penance. Then, before I was ready for it, the priest slid open the window.