The Bay at Midnight

I didn’t miss the present tense in his sentence. “Well,” I said. “It’s my opinion that Ned Chapman was that person and that his guilt is what ultimately did him in.” I was hoping we could get down to the nitty-gritty now, but Lieutenant Jaffe folded his hands on the table and leaned forward.

“You understand,” he said, “that we have to look at every angle on this case. We have to start fresh. We have your statements from 1962, but it’s important for us to look at this case with a clean slate.”

I nodded, feeling uncertain. I wanted to get this over with, to review the statements I’d made as a twelve- year-old and get the recitation of those memories out of my way. That wasn’t going to happen though, at least not yet.

“Tell us about Isabel,” Lieutenant Jaffe said.

The question was so open-ended, I didn’t know quite what to do with it.

“She was beautiful,” I began. I wished the chair I was sitting in had arms. My hands felt heavy and awkward in my lap. “And she was rebellious. A typical teenager. She snuck out every night to meet Ned at the platform on the bay.” I was quiet a moment, trying to figure out what else I should say about Isabel. The only sounds in the room were the quiet whirring of the tape recorder and the tip of the detective’s pencil racing across her notepad. When she had finished whatever she was writing, she looked up and spoke for the first time.

“How did you know she was sneaking out every night?” she asked. She had rather amazing green eyes, the color of new grass, and I wondered if she was wearing special contacts.

“I knew because I saw her,” I said. “Because I was sneaking out myself.” Surely they already had this information in the old records of the case. But, as the lieutenant said, they were starting fresh.

“What was your relationship with her like?” he asked.

I looked away from him quickly, annoyed with myself for doing so. I did not want to talk about my relationship with Isabel, and I knew that my sudden inability to look at my questioners made me suspect in their eyes. That’s what this is about, I realized. They didn’t care why I thought Ned had done it. They wanted to know my role in Isabel’s death. My anxiety took a sudden, unexpected leap.

“We were close when we were young,” I said, lifting my gaze to look squarely at the lieutenant, then the detective. “But there were five years between us and we drifted apart as she got into her teens, which was only natural. We didn’t have much in common anymore.”

“Did you argue a lot?” Detective Engelmann asked.

“Bickered,” I said with a shrug. “Typical sibling rivalry.”

“And how about Ned Chapman?” the detective asked. “What was he like?”

I felt a hot flash start to prickle and burn on the top of my head. Damn. In two seconds, my face would be as red as my shirt. I did not look away this time, though. I held the woman’s grass-green gaze as I answered. “He seemed nice,” I said. “I mean, I’d known him all my life, since he lived next door to us during the summer. He was the lifeguard at the beach. But you can’t really know what’s going on inside a person. He was nice on the exterior, but who knows what was going on inside him.”

“You had a crush on him.” The lieutenant made it a statement rather than a question.

I shrugged again. “A typical preteen sort of crush,” I said. I was using the word typical too much and wondered if they’d noticed. I could barely breathe for the heat radiating down my neck and chest. I waved my hand in front of my face, looking apologetic. “Hot flash,” I said. “A nuisance.”

They smiled at me as if they understood, but given Detective Engelmann’s age and Lieutenant Jaffe’s gender, I was certain neither of them had a clue how I was feeling. I wanted to pick up the detective’s rapidly filling notepad to give myself a real fanning.

“Were you jealous of Isabel?” Lieutenant Jaffe asked.

My eyes darted away from him again. Damn it. What was wrong with me? I wanted to say, Of course I was jealous of her. Weren’t you jealous of your older siblings? Instead, I steadied myself and nodded. “In some ways,” I said. “I wished that I’d looked like her and that I was her age and could have the freedom she did.”

“Who knew she would be on the bay at midnight on August fifth, 1962?” Detective Engelmann asked.

“I did,” I said. “And Bruno—Bruce—Walker. And possibly George Lewis, although I was never sure of that. If he knew, then Wanda Lewis probably did, as well. And, of course, Ned Chapman.”

“Although according to the old report—” the Lieutenant fingered the file in front of him, although he did not open it to look at the pages “—Ned Chapman had asked you to tell Isabel that he couldn’t meet her that night.”

“Well, yes, but he later said he might be able to.”

“You were really known for your storytelling back then, weren’t you?” the detective asked me.

They were jumping from topic to topic so quickly that my overheated brain could barely keep up, and once again, I was not sure exactly what she meant.

“I read a lot,” I said. “I read Nancy Drew books aloud to George and Wanda.”

“But you also made things up, right?” she asked. “The way you made up stories about events in your neighborhood to excite your friends.”

I stared at her, uncertain how to respond. I felt something like hatred for her building inside me. When I didn’t respond to her question, the lieutenant spoke up.

“Let me try to summarize what you’ve told us so far,” he said. “There was some sibling rivalry between you and your sister. You were jealous of her. You knew where she’d be that night. You regularly sneaked out of the house.You had a crush on—”