“There’s a painting in the rectory at Star of the Sea,” she said. “That’s where I first heard of it. All these years and I never knew, a shipwreck right in our backyard.”
Shuffling across the floor in his bare feet, Nick entered the kitchen. His hair stood on end like a cartoon character just frightened out of his wits. I suppose he had been, Jack Peter thought. I mustn’t forget about the dog.
His father tousled Nick’s hair. “Orange juice?”
Nick and Jack Peter nodded, and he fetched two glasses from the cupboard.
“So I went to the Maritime Museum yesterday,” she said. “Did you know they have an archives there with a record of every ship that hit the rocks from here to Machias?”
His father poured the juice. “Say when.”
She buttered a muffin and chomped a half-moon from the edge. “And here’s a list of all the passengers. No survivors, can you imagine? And some of the drowned came ashore. Listen: ‘bodies taken by friends.’ And the others were never found. Do you understand what I mean? Tim, are you listening?”
“Bodies taken,” he said.
“Not that. Some bodies were never found. And I looked on the Internet to find out what happens to bodies left at sea.”
Gingerly, he stroked the red marks on his neck. “Honestly, Holly. In front of the boys.”
She chewed another bite. “You boys can take it, can’t you? It’s not as if it happened just yesterday. Bodies disappear quickly, but in the right conditions, the bones can last for years, for centuries. The bone, Tim, the arm bone.”
In the next chair, Nick shoved a spoonful of cornflakes into his mouth and crunched.
“I’ll bet you anything,” she said, “when the tests come back, they’ll say just how old it is, just how long it has been in the water: 1849.”
His father pulled out the sports page from the newspaper. “And the dog just found it on the beach?”
“Don’t you get it? The bone, the shipwreck, the weird voices in the night. Miss Tiramaku says there might be ghosts. Funa-yurei, she says.”
Clearing his throat, Tim leaned back against the counter, regarding her with wonder. “Tiramaku,” he said at last, making the name sound like an insult.
His parents stared at each other from their respective corners, a truce passing between them before any shots could be fired. His mother was the first to break, glancing at her watch. “I’m late. You boys be good.”
They mumbled their promises through their cornflakes.
*
The boys vanished after breakfast, off to their secret games. Tim let them go with a smile. They were close as brothers sometimes. On the counter lay the jumble of Holly’s papers, and he stacked them neatly in their folder, sighing at his wife’s latest obsession. Old bones, ghost ships. That ridiculous Japanese woman with her crazy ideas. He washed the dishes and gathered the plastic garbage bag to take outside to the trash cans. He shivered as he looked out to the snow clouds collecting off to the west. He had just lifted the lid from the metal can when a blur of white in the yard frightened him.
Flushed from his hiding place, the white man bristled alert and then darted between the fir trees and crossed the road. All angled arms and legs, he galloped along the edge of the Quigleys’ house and disappeared from view. It all happened so quickly that Tim could not believe what he was seeing. He shoved the trash bag into the can and considered following, but knew from hard experience that it would be as futile as chasing a rabbit. The cold handle cut into his palm, so he screwed the lid back in place.
White as a ghost, white as paper. Tim had thought it was dead, if such a thing could ever be called alive. Or shown to be a great white dog. Or a figment of his mind, but there was the white man again, running not twenty feet from the house. Where the man had brushed against the evergreen branches, needles still swept the air. For the longest time, Tim stared at the path the thing had taken like a deer caught in the open and gone to cover. He thought if he waited long enough he might make him reappear.
Across the street, in the parlor window of the Quigleys’ house, the curtains parted and suddenly closed. How strange to have someone home in the middle of the day, but of course, the children were on Christmas break. Perhaps they had witnessed the white man, too. Tim turned his collar against the wind and walked over to the neighbors’. Behind the front door, their dog barked madly. He listened for the approach of someone coming to calm him. Staring him in the face was a brass door knocker in the shape of a humpback’s fluke, covered in a pale green patina and pitted with salt. Three knocks until one of the twins answered through a crack no wider than her face. She kept the dog at bay with one firm leg against its chest.
“Howdy,” he said to the child.
“Nobody’s home,” she said. “My mother went out.”