The Bay at Midnight

She nodded. “Of course,” she said.

“And you know that his brother, Ned, died, right?” I wasn’t sure if Mr. Chapman had told my mother about that or not.

She nodded again, silent now.

“Well, when Ethan and his daughter cleaned out Ned’s house, they found a letter Ned had written—but never mailed—to the Point Pleasant Police.”

My mother frowned. “What did it say?”

Here we go, I thought. “It said that the wrong man went to prison for Isabel’s murder and that he—Ned—wanted to set the record straight.”

My mother looked frozen, as though she’d had an attack of paralysis. Her eyes bored into mine, and in the silent moment while she was absorbing my words, I remembered that she had slapped me— hard—the day Isabel died. It was the only time either of my parents had ever laid a hand on me. My cheek stung to remember it.

“Ned did it?” she asked finally. “But Ross said he was—”

“No one knows for sure who did it,” I said quickly. “Ned didn’t confess to anything in the letter.” I took off my sunglasses and rubbed my eyes. “I think it’s likely he did, Mom. I mean, that’s what makes the most sense, but Ethan can’t believe Ned could have done something like that and the police are looking at every possible suspect. They may want to talk to you. I hope not, but it’s possible.”

My mother looked toward the vegetable garden, where the tomatoes were ripening and the zucchini vines were quickly getting out of control. I knew she was not truly seeing the garden, though. Her mind was someplace far away.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” I said. I wasn’t sure what I was apologizing for. Telling her about the letter. Isabel’s murder. Everything.

“George Lewis was innocent?” she asked me, as if I knew for sure.

“The letter makes it sound like it,” I said.

She stared at me for another moment and I wasn’t sure she’d understood what I said. Then she stood up slowly. “I’m going to take a nap,” she said, brushing a few small leaves from her overalls.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

She didn’t answer and I got to my feet as well and started walking toward her, but she held up her hand to stop me.

“I’m fine,” she said. “This all just makes me tired. It’s so…” She looked at me then. “You lose a child and they make you lose her all over again. Again and again and again…” Her voice trailed off as she walked away from me. I wasn’t sure what to do. Should I follow her into the house? Make sure she was all right? It was clear that she wanted time alone. I would give that to her, at least for the moment. I picked up the pruning shears and headed toward the hydrangeas.

CHAPTER 26

Maria

I couldn’t believe what was happening.

All of a sudden, a time I had tried to put to rest more than forty years ago was coming back in a most hideous way. My Isabel. I’d failed her so. If only I had been a better mother. If only I had known how to handle her rebellion.

Was there a day in the past forty-one years that I hadn’t imagined what her last moments had been like? This is what I’d been picturing for all those years: Isabel was at the bay, alone on the platform in the darkness, excited that Ned would soon be joining her there. Then the black boy, George Lewis, appeared on the beach and started to swim out to her. Next followed the part I could never understand. Isabel was an excellent swimmer. Why didn’t she jump into the water to try to escape him? Why didn’t she swim to the beach or the pier or…I don’t know. Or maybe she didn’t see him. Maybe he’d cut through the water so quietly that she’d been unaware of him until he climbed onto the platform with her. There had been bruises on her arms. Did he try to rape her? Did she jump into the water to escape him? Did she hit her head on the platform or did he knock her out with a weapon? I didn’t know. I couldn’t know. All I knew was that my baby had to have been terrified. My little girl had been trying to act so much like a woman, trying so hard to be grown up, to make decisions for herself, albeit poor ones. She thought she was so independent, on the road to freedom from me and my rules. I was certain that, at that moment on the platform, she was reduced to the little angel of a child I used to carry around on my hip. The little girl who called me Mommy, who thought the sun rose and set on me.

Whenever I thought of her final moments, I felt her fear, a wringing, wrenching terror, in the center of my chest. It made me want to scream and pound the walls. It once made me strike my little daughter, Julie. It was hard to admit to hating one of my children, but for a few days, I believe I did hate Julie for her part in Isabel’s death. It wasn’t until much later that I realized it was myself I loathed. But back then, Julie took the brunt of it all. She took the full weight of my grief.

Sometime in the last forty-one years, I’d been able to make a sort of peace with that night. Peace might have been the wrong word, but I’d at least been able to live with what happened and with my failings as a mother. I’d forgiven Charles for his permissiveness with Isabel, and I’d taken comfort in knowing that the man responsible for her death and for those last horrible minutes of her life was rotting in prison. I’d felt such hatred for George Lewis, and that hatred extended to every other black man I’d see, before my intellect would take over and I could remind myself that Lewis was one man who acted alone and was not representative of his entire race and gender. Now it seemed that all the hatred I’d expended on him might have been misdirected.

Had it been Ned himself then who murdered Isabel? That was certainly the implication of the letter he’d written to the police. What else could it mean? I believe he loved Isabel as best as an eighteen-year-old boy could love a seventeen-year-old girl, and therefore I had to assume it was an accident for which he never came forward to take responsibility. In a way, that explanation was reassuring to me, because Izzy would have been with someone she loved and trusted, so fear might not have been the last thing in her heart. But if it had been Ned, Ross must have fabricated his alibi.

My mind spun as I tried to figure out what had truly happened. Julie said the police might want to talk to me again. How I would tolerate that, I didn’t know. I would tell them that I was a bad mother who didn’t know how to parent a teenage girl. I’d tell them that I was jealous of how my husband adored her and that maybe that got in the way of how I treated her. And I would long to ask them questions of my own, but I never would. Asking my questions could only invite more of theirs, and I had far too much to hide.