When I worked at Rum Pond, the only time Brenda and I ever spent together was in the kitchen. She’d be peeling potatoes for dinner while I scrubbed out the pots from lunch. I can’t recall a single conversation we ever had. She was twelve, and I was sixteen, and, at the time, that was a pretty big gap.
My only real memory of actually conversing with her came one afternoon, just before I packed my bags and went home. I was mopping the pine floor in the dining room. After a while, I got the sense of someone watching me-that cold-breath feeling along the back of the neck. I looked up and she was standing in the kitchen door, this stick-figure girl, all braids and cheekbones, watching me with a weird expression. I can only describe it as hatred.
“I heard you’re leaving,” she said.
“Tomorrow. I’m going back to Scarborough.”
“Why?”
“My dad doesn’t really want me here. No one does.”
Her hands were balled into fists by her sides. “I hope you get in an accident,” she said, and darted back into the kitchen.
Those were the last words she spoke to me. At the time I remember finding that interchange funny. I remember shaking my head and laughing. And then I forgot all about them-and her-for eight years.
“I never thought about what it was like for you growing up here,” I said now. “Being the only female.”
“Doreen Pelletier was here until a few years ago, but you know how she was-the old witch. And there were always women guests. But puberty was no picnic, if that’s what you mean. After a while, though, you get used to the itty-bitty-titty jokes.” She was slouched in her Adirondack chair, watching me with those animal-black eyes of hers. “So now what?”
“We stay put.”
“For how long?”
“Until Charley comes back.”
“You mean we just sit here all day?”
“We don’t have to sit,” I said. “We can go over to Rum Pond and I can use the radio phone and find out what’s going on.”
She folded her arms across her breasts. “I told you I’m not going over there.”
“Then it looks like we’re staying put.” I removed the single shotgun shell from the chamber and put it in my pocket.
“What are you doing that for? If Truman shows up, he’ll kill us both.”
“If he shows up, I’ll reload it.”
She shook her head in disbelief. “You won’t have time. You’ll never hear him coming. The next thing you know you’ll be looking down at your chest wondering how that bullet hole got there.”
“Thanks for the warning.”
She let out a big laugh. “You’re such an asshole.”
“I get called that a lot. It goes with my job.” Or at least it used to, I thought.
“It has nothing to do with your job,” she said with a cockeyed grin. “You’re just an asshole personally.”
I could see how this day was going to go.
“You used to be a nice guy,” she said. “That summer you lived here, I really liked you, even though you never paid any attention to me. What happened to you?”
“Nothing happened to me.”
“Yeah, it did. How come you left that summer, anyway? It was only July and you were supposed to stay through August.”
“I was tired of being Russell’s serf.”
“You never said good-bye to me.” She finished her beer and then shook the can to see if she had missed a drop. She hadn’t. “You didn’t like me then, and you don’t like me now. I think I make you nervous.”
The sun slid out from behind a cloud and suddenly it became very bright and hot again on the porch.
“You don’t,” I said.
“It’s the thought of me and your old man doing the nasty.” The beer had given her voice a raspy edge. “It really bothers you, doesn’t it?”
“We’re not going to have a conversation about this.”
She smiled as if this was the exact response she’d hoped for. “You get a picture in your head of us humping, and it freaks you out.”
“Enough, Brenda.”
“Or maybe,” she said, “it turns you on. Yeah, that’s what it is. It turns you on to think about us having sex.”
“End of conversation.”
She stood up from the Adirondack chair. “I’m getting another beer. You want one?”
“No, thanks. And I don’t think you should have one, either.”
“Yeah, well, you don’t get a vote on what I put in my body.”
She opened the screen door and disappeared into the kitchen. Charley said to watch her-as if she might try something. Did he suspect Brenda of being the killer? And why had he asked her those questions about Brodeur? The suggestion was that she and my father might somehow have conspired with the deputy. Did Charley think they’d double-crossed him after he delivered Shipman to the ambush site?
And what the hell happened with Truman that the police were now searching for him so intently? Was it really possible he and Pelletier had set my dad up?
The door banged open, as if she’d kicked it, and she came out, holding two cans of beer. “I brought you one, anyway.”
“I don’t want it.”
She came over to me and set the beer down on the railing. Then she leaned forward on her elbows and gazed past me out at the lake. She was so close I could smell her sun-warmed hair. “You really do look like him,” she said, without looking at me.
“Excuse me?”
“You look like Jack. Younger, though, and without the beard. Thinner, too.”
“What are you trying to do, Brenda?”
She gave me a look of wide-eyed innocence. “What do you mean?”
“Why are you playing games with me?”
She didn’t answer at first but turned back toward the water. “I’m bored,” she said finally. “I get bored easily.”
“Then find something to do.”
With that, she straightened up and gave me a huge smile. It was as if a beautiful idea had arrived in her head like a dove from heaven. “I’m going swimming.”
“Swimming? You’re not afraid Truman’s going to show up?”
“If he does, you’ll protect me.”
Don’t be so sure, I wanted to say.
I waited outside the cabin for Brenda to put on her bathing suit. From moment to moment she seemed either much older or much younger than her actual age of twenty. She would look at me, and there would be a sad exhaustion in her eyes that reminded me of old people I’d seen in nursing homes. Then the next minute she would become this flirty teenager. Were these sudden shifts calculated or could she just not control herself?
Pelletier said that my father loved her as he hadn’t loved anyone since my mother. The more I thought about it, the more I believed that this was the truth. Brenda was definitely attractive, and her emotions were just as volatile as my mom’s.
So why had he left her behind when he turned fugitive? If he truly loved her, as Pelletier said, why did he leave her behind at Rum Pond?
I was still trying to figure it out when the cabin door opened and she came out wearing a purple bikini top and cut-off blue jeans. Her arms and legs were tanned a deep brown and her skin was so tight across her stomach I could have traced the abdominal muscles with my finger. She had freed her black hair from its braid and now it spilled loose over her shoulders.
