Granite Harbor, page 4
“Just the teachers at school. His friends’ parents.”
“How about older friends? Someone not in school he might have hung out with?”
“Nope.”
“Have you found anything in his room that looks unusual?”
“No.”
“Can I see his room, please?”
“What for?”
“It’s routine, Mrs. Wisner. I’d like to see what interests him, what he might have been reading, looking at.”
Doreen exhaled a stream of smoke and stabbed the butt out in a full ashtray. She rose and scuffed her slippers into a hall off the kitchen and opened a door onto a staircase leading downward. She switched on a light, and they descended to the basement. Damp. Cinder block walls. Rusty washing machine and dryer, furnace, steel shelves loaded with toolboxes, piles of damp sagging cardboard boxes. Two narrow windows in the top of the walls at ground level showed weedy vegetation that dimmed the daylight.
One corner of the basement was walled off with two-by-fours, enclosing a space eight-by-eight feet, Sheetrocked on the inner side, the studs bare to the rest of the basement. Doreen pushed open an unpainted hollow-core door between the studs and turned on a light. Inside the “room,” a single bed, shelves with books, a table—you couldn’t call it a desk—clothes hung on hooks, heaped in corners of the floor. A poster of a skeleton wearing a beanie—skeletal fingers clutching a skateboard above the words: SKATE OR DIE—was pinned to the unpainted gray Sheetrock walls beside dark patches of mold. There were no windows in the room—which would only have opened into the basement. The Sheetrock didn’t go all the way up, leaving a gap of an inch or two below the joists—ventilation at least between the room and the basement.
“This is Shane’s room?”
“Yuh. Dennis fixed it up for him when our daughter, Skye, was born three years ago.”
Let’s go hang at my place was something Alex didn’t imagine Shane had often said to his friends. But he asked: “Did he have much company down here? Friends after school?”
“Never.”
“Can I look around for a few minutes?”
“Suit yourself.”
Doreen turned and headed to the stairs. Alex walked into the room. He heard the stairs creaking.
He looked through the wardrobe, the clothes on the floor—bundles you might see in bins at Goodwill—under the bed—a scattering of empty Juul pods—through the shelves, which mostly held school textbooks, a few YA novels, Percy Jackson & the Olympians, Harry Potters, I Am Malala. The place was a repository for Shane’s most basic needs. Nothing, apart from the skateboard poster, indicating this particular boy’s interests, passions, desires—except the wish to be elsewhere. This was where Shane came to crash, change, leave again. Not where he lived.
Alex sat on Shane’s bed. He looked up at the gap between the Sheetrock and the joists.
You poor boy.
He took photos with his iPhone.
Upstairs, he found the two women smoking at the kitchen table. “Mrs. Wisner, could I get Shane’s father’s contact information from you, please?”
“If I can find it.” Doreen rose and ambled listlessly across the kitchen to a bookshelf crammed with magazines, baskets, bottles, a few books.
She pulled out a basket, rooted through it.
Her cousin Cathy looked at Alex unblinkingly.
“Here,” Doreen finally said. She held up an old-looking address book, open to a page.
“How old is that address?”
“I dunno. That’s where he was last.”
Alex raised his phone and photographed the page.
“Thank you,” he said, nodding to both women. “Again, I’m very sorry for your loss.”
In his car, he found himself breathing as if he’d climbed a flight of stairs very fast.
7
The ship was in trouble. It lay tilted up at the stern, the pack ice heaped around it in jagged shapes. The topmasts had broken and fallen to the deck in a tangle of rigging. Sails were shredded. A whale was breaching in the cold water nearby. Men holding spears stood on the shore, looking at the scene.
Before getting started on it, Ethan brought his space heater—one of two Isabel bought after the furnace died—down into the basement workshop, turned it on, and climbed back upstairs to the kitchen to make coffee.
He looked at the clock on the wall over the door: 11:40. Social studies, with Mrs. Davito. Yes! Ethan felt a savage pleasure. He made a fist and jabbed it upward. He’d been awake for half an hour, all of her class so far, lying in bed, scrolling through Snapchat before coming downstairs. Fuck you, Mrs. Davito!
Down in the workshop—it had been his father’s—he put a CD in the boom box—his father’s boom box, his father’s CD collection: The Bothy Band, Irish music his father loved and now Ethan loved too—and sat at the broad pine worktable. He sipped his coffee, then set the mug down well away to one side. He picked up the bottle, clamped it in the small padded vise, and peered into it from different angles.
The thick wavy glass made the ship, the sea, the men, and the whale ripple as Ethan moved his head. Along one edge of the Prussian blue sea where it met the glass rose a strip of brown material speckled with black and white paint: a distant shore. The other edge was marked with jagged white lumps: icebergs. The ship sat apparently sinking at the center of this rippling diorama, stuck in time and space.
Both the ship and the bottle were crude. Thick matchsticks substituted for some of the wooden booms and spars. The bottle, fashioned for a gallon of some ancient grog, was an equally makeshift fabrication—but the roughness was part of its charm, its originality, and, Ethan hoped, its eventual value. Modern ship-in-a-bottle makers usually put their models inside commercially produced, readily available, clear liquor bottles. Most of the new model ships, ships-in-bottles, easily available online, were made in China from uniform, machine-punched parts, as alike as the parts of model airplanes. By those standards, this one was all wrong: an imperfect piece of glassblowing, its contours irregular, its shape asymmetrical, small air bubbles trapped in the glass. But the modeler who had made the ship, imagined its dire situation, got it into the bottle surrounded by windblown seas, the surfacing whale, the imperiled men, the pack ice, could not have found a more complementary theater for his drama. Definitely old, Ethan knew—maybe nineteenth century? Contemporary with the scene it depicted? That would increase its value.
Ethan was sure that the modeler who had created this ship-in-a-bottle was a real whaleman, who had known the sea, witnessed such scenes, or was depicting a particular event. But he was also an artist. To peer at the scene through the bottle was like seeing it through a storm.
He’d found it at a yard sale: a three-masted whaleship, two masts broken, lying on its side amid the ice floes made of putty and linseed oil. The ship’s name, Concordia, was painted in tiny faded gold letters on the ship’s transom. Ethan knew that a whaleship named Concordia had been one of the fleet of New Bedford ships lost in the Arctic off the coast of Alaska in 1871—was this the Concordia?
At some point, the bottle had been dropped or jarred sharply, breaking the ship’s rig. Now Ethan would get in there, inside the bottle, fix or replace the broken topmast and other spars, pull out and repair the “torn” sails—their threads frayed from years of lying creased beneath the broken rig—and reset the gale-lashed strips of rust-colored cotton. If he made a good repair, he thought he might be able to sell it to someplace like the Salem Maritime Museum, or the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Those people would appreciate this ship-and-scene-in-a-bottle and see, he hoped, the authenticity of its creator and his work. Maybe they’d even recognize it, know the maker—know this Concordia. And pay him for it.
Like they’d paid his father. Joshua Dorr had disappeared when Ethan was five. He’d been in a yacht race, sailing alone across the Atlantic in his thirty-six-foot wooden boat from Marblehead, Massachusetts, to Falmouth, England. He was an experienced sailor; he’d sailed from Maine to the Caribbean and back many times, and crossed the Atlantic alone twice before that race.
He never arrived in England. He was missing, his mother told him. When will they find him? he’d asked her. One day she told him his father probably wasn’t coming back. He was lost at sea.
Gathering dust on shelves around the workshop sat the ship models his father had not finished or remained unsold. Joshua Dorr had crafted scale replicas of large yachts for their owners; and between such paying commissions, models to his own taste: older commercial sailing craft, whale ships, Gloucester fishing schooners. Ethan had an album containing photographs of every model his father had made and sold. Unless there was something in the photographs to show their scale, they looked like real ships. Ethan knew he could sell some of the completed, unsold models for more than enough money to buy a new furnace for the house, but he and his mother had both agreed to hold on to his father’s work.
When he turned ten, Ethan’s mother finally let him use his father’s tools—some of them were very sharp. His father had books on ship models and how to make them. Ethan sold his first model, a simple sailboat ten inches long with one mast, when he was twelve, to Star Bright, one of the tourist gift stores in Granite Harbor, for twenty dollars. He’d been amazed to later stand outside the store on Bayview Street and see his model in the store window with a price tag of forty dollars hanging off it. That meant his model was worth forty dollars—that he should be able to get forty dollars for it. He made more models. As quickly as he made them, the store sold them. He told the store’s buyer he wanted more money for them. The buyer smiled at him and said he thought thirty dollars was a lot of money for a twelve-year-old boy. Ethan never took another model back to the store.
Instead, he started his own website and promptly sold a model of the Gertrude L. Thebaud, the famous Gloucester fishing and racing schooner, for $250. He bought his mother a new beanie and a large bag of dog food for Flynn. He also located on eBay and bought for himself a really outstanding Bathing Ape shark head hoodie that glowed in the dark. But it had taken him four months, between school and other distractions, to build the model, and he realized it would take him years to make money building models as his father had.
One of his father’s books was about making ships in bottles. It recommended looking for old bottles at yard sales. It showed how to make the rough wavy “sea” inside the bottle with linseed oil putty mixed with Prussian blue oil paint—Ethan learned to get that oozy paste into the bottles and push it into wavy shapes with long wooden spatulas that he whittled to tool-size and shape, then touch the blue wavetops with white paint on a small brush. He made the ship’s hull narrow enough to fit through the neck of the bottle, with masts that hinged flat on small loops of wire. He slipped that into the bottle and sat it in glue on top of the sea, and when it was dry he pulled on a string attached to the rigging to raise the masts, and finally sealed the bottle with red sealing wax. He sold the first one on his website for $150.
Once Ethan started selling his models, it was all he wanted to do. School was a total waste of time. His grades got worse. He failed classes. He fought with his mother, and they were both unhappy—until, amazingly, she’d given in and let him stay home. They agreed he would practice “unschooling,” a version of homeschooling that allowed him to pursue his own interests. They stopped fighting. The house was peaceful. Now he spent most of his days—school hours, anyway—downstairs in the workshop making models and ships-in-bottles—or playing video games upstairs in his room. He liked being home alone. He made long late breakfasts for himself in the kitchen. He loved his new independence.
And he was making money—not a lot, but he’d been able to tell his mother to stop giving him an allowance.
* * *
When he went upstairs to make another cup of coffee, his phone dinged and he saw his mother’s text: Call me when you wake up. It’s very important. Call me first thing. I mean it. Call me. He didn’t feel like calling her, hearing whatever was so important, breaking his peaceful mood and space. What? he responded.
I’ll be home early. Stay there!
Mom, chill, he thumbed back.
Downstairs, he passed an hour pulling the broken pieces of the Concordia from the bottle with the long surgical tweezers before he heard his mother coming into the kitchen upstairs. WTF? What was she doing home so early?
She called down the stairs. “Ethan? Are you home?”
There was an edge to her voice. Like he’d done something wrong.
“Wha-ut?” he answered, slightly annoyed.
He heard her clomping down the stairs in her crazy witch’s shoes.
8
It was one of the little Craftsman-style, Sears, Roebuck houses, bought by catalog, shipped in prefabricated sections by railroad in the 1920s. There were four on Jacobs Avenue. Three had been nicely renovated. Isabel’s was the one that needed paint, with a gutter askew, and bushes at the side of the house choked by weeds. But it was still pretty, with a low, overhanging hip roof, small dormer upstairs, porches with tapered rectangular posts, double-hung windows with separated lights on the upper sashes.
Alex had liked the inside too. The cozy living room, the fireplace, the accommodating old sofa.
He parked in the driveway and came, as always, to the kitchen door. The dog, new since he’d last been there, barked furiously when he knocked.
“Flynn, stop!” her voice barked back, followed by the sound of the back door to the deck opening and closing again. Then he saw her coming toward him through the glass. She still wore her costume, but she’d removed the linen headwear. Her shaven head was new since his time too. He’d seen her around town in her beanies. He’d worried she might be going through chemo, but a mutual friend had told him no, it was just the way she wore her hair now.
“Come in,” said Isabel, opening the door. The wan midday light plain on her face.
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion, Francis Bacon, Viscount St. Alban, philosopher and statesman, had written sometime in the seventeenth century. Ian Fleming had always given James Bond’s women some errant blemish: a broken nose, a limp, a flaw in the pupil of one eye. They were the more beautiful for it. Isabel’s “strangeness” was the asymmetry of her face. One eyebrow arched upward, the eyes on a subtly different plane, giving the other eye, the one beneath the lower brow, a cool, acute regard. He’d loved her face.
Grief had collapsed it. Five years had deepened the hollows in her cheeks.
She led him through the mudroom into the kitchen. The air inside the house was colder than outside.
“I’m sorry it’s cold. The furnace is broken.”
Ethan stood beside the kitchen table. He was almost fully grown now. He’d elongated with a teenage spurt. Tall, skinny, mass of tousled long hair, baggy jeans, sweatshirt beneath a fleece bathrobe, worn sheepskin slippers. He was pale and shaking.
Alex had told her on the phone it was Shane.
She’s told him.
“Hi, Ethan.”
“What happened to Shane?” he croaked.
“Can we sit down?” Alex asked them.
They sat beside each other. Alex faced them across the table.
“What happened to Shane?” Ethan repeated, his brown eyes huge, boring into Alex.
What words would he use to tell Sophie? “Someone killed him, Ethan.”
“I know that. Who? How?”
“We don’t know who. Or even how yet. There’s still a lot we don’t know. That’s why I need to ask you some questions.”
“Why me?”
“Because you and Shane were best friends. You and Jared. I’m going to talk with him too. I need to talk with everyone who knew Shane. Who spent time with him. That will help us figure out what happened. When did you last see him?”
“Tuesday night.”
“What were you doing?”
“Just hanging out. Skateboarding.”
“Where?” Alex had his notebook out.
“Just around. Like, Chestnut Street. Limerock Street.”
“Until what time?”
“Like, seven, maybe?”
“Did you see anyone else around?”
“No.”
“Any cars?”
“A few, I guess.”
“No one stopped and spoke with you?”
“No.”
He went slowly, pressed for details, scribbled answers, steering toward the question he most needed to ask.
Alex looked down, as if reading his notes. Then he looked up, across the table at Ethan. “Was Shane into anything weird? Like, I don’t know, witchcraft? Rituals? Funny stuff with animals?”
Ethan’s face scrunched into confusion. “No. Why?”
“It’s just some—”
“Because of how he was killed? What was it?”
“We just have to look—”
“What happened?” He was furious, quivering. “Was he shot? Or … what?”
“Honestly, Ethan, until there’s an autopsy, we won’t—”
“Bullshit! Fuck!” Ethan brought both fists down on the table in front of him. Then his face collapsed and he began to cry. His mother put her arm around him and pulled him close.
“I’m sorry,” Alex said.
Ethan abruptly pulled away from his mother, stood, and ran to the door to the basement, opened it and disappeared, slamming the door. Thumping down the stairs.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, to Isabel.
She was looking studiously at the door to the basement.
“How come he’s not in school?”
“We’re doing homeschooling now.”
She stood up.
His cue. He stood and put away his notepad. “How’s that working?”
“We’re figuring it out.” Not a sharing tone. She walked toward the mudroom.
“I’ll probably need to talk with him again. You’ll have to be present.”
“I understand. Just let me know.”
She paused at the door. “You can’t tell me how he was killed?”
