CHAPTER 17
Julie
On Wednesday afternoon, I drove down the shore. I’d told Ethan I would arrive at his house around four, and although it was little more than an hour’s drive, I left Westfield at one o’clock. I was afraid that once I reached Point Pleasant, it would take me a while to find the courage to drive to our old Bay Head Shores neighborhood. And I was right.
I found a parking place in the huge and crowded lot across from the Point Pleasant boardwalk, but it was a moment before I got out of my car. Even with the windows closed and the air conditioner blowing, I could smell the ocean. People, some of them sunburned or deeply tanned, walked through the parking lot in their bathing suits, carrying towels and beach chairs or pushing cranky toddlers in strollers. I looked straight ahead of me at the merry-go-round I’d ridden on dozens of times as a kid. It had been a ritual in my family to visit the boardwalk at least a few times a month during the summer. We’d go on the rides and eat sausage sandwiches at Jenkinson’s and frozen custard at Kohr’s. I’d lived for those family outings back then; now I was afraid to get out of my car.
Ethan had called on Monday afternoon. I was rushing in from the car, bags of groceries in my arms and dangling from my fingers when the phone rang. I saw his name on the caller ID and felt both relief and trepidation. Dropping the bags on the counter, I grabbed the receiver.
“Ethan?”
“You sound breathless,” he said.
“I just got in the house,” I said. “Any news?”
“A few things,” he said. “They’re really moving on the investigation. They interviewed me this morning.”
“Oh.” I sank onto one of the kitchen chairs. “What was it like?” I wondered how hard it had been for him. “What did they ask you?”
He hesitated. “They want to interview you next,” he said, not answering my question.
I shut my eyes. I supposed I’d been hoping the police would somehow be able to pin Isabel’s murder on Ned without the need to question me again.
“When?” I asked.
“This week, most likely,” he said. “And I was going to suggest you come here. Stay at my house. I have loads of room and—”
“Next door to the bungalow?” I asked, as though he’d suggested I sleep in a tree.
“Is that a problem?” he asked.
I was quiet for a long time. “I haven’t been down the shore since Isabel died,” I said. “I’ve avoided it. It’s painful to me to even think about being there.”
It was his turn to go quiet. “Are you saying that you haven’t been to the beach…to the ocean at all in forty years?”
“I’ve been to other beaches,” I said, thinking of my honeymoon in the Caribbean. Trips to California. “Just not the Jersey Shore.”
“Well,” he said, “you’ll have to come down here to talk with the police. Of course, you don’t have to come to Bay Head Shores or spend the night at my house, but I thought it might be good for us to put our heads together. There were questions they asked me about Ned’s old friends, you know, that sort of thing, that maybe we could help each other remember. You could stay in a motel somewhere and I could meet you for dinner.”
That sounded like an excellent compromise. “All right,” I said. “I’ll wait to hear from the police, and then I’ll make reservations and—”
“You’ll have to go inland,” he interrupted me. “The beach motels will be booked.”
“All right,” I said again. “I’ll see what I can come up with and get back to you.”
“Okay,” he said. “And another thing. My friend at the department told me they’ve been talking to George Lewis’s family.”
“Wanda?” I asked.
“I don’t know who, exactly,” he said. “I do know that Lewis always stuck to the story that he was innocent.”
“I’m sure he was,” I said. “I knew he didn’t do it. Have they talked to Bruno Walker?” I asked.
“My friend said they’re having trouble tracking him down.”
“Figures,” I said. “The one person who might know what really happened and they can’t find him.”
We talked for a few more minutes, and I was putting the groceries away when Lieutenant Alan Meyers called from the Point Pleasant Police Department. Apparently, they were wasting no time. He asked if I could come to the station on Thursday morning. I said I could, then got on my computer to find a motel in the area and instantly felt like a fool. Grow up, I told myself, and I called Ethan back to accept the invitation to stay at his house.
Now, sitting in my car in the heart of Point Pleasant, I wondered if I’d made a mistake. It had been so easy to be brave from the safety of my home. I took a moment to give myself an emotional checkup before I opened the car door: I was okay. I got out, merry-go-round music and salt air surrounding me, and joined the tourists heading toward the boardwalk.
On the boardwalk, I thought I saw Isabel everywhere. She was riding the Tilt-A-Whirl, centrifugal force pressing her against the shell-like back of the carriage. She was sitting on a bench next to a blond-haired boy, facing the ocean, her long legs stretched out in front of her, her feet propped up on the railing. She was walking toward me on the boardwalk in a green bikini, her body tan and hard, her head tipped to one side as she took a bite from an ice-cream-and-waffle sandwich.
I sat on one of the benches facing the boardwalk, peoplewatching and letting Isabel in. How would she have fit in with Lucy and me? I wondered. Would she have helped us pull weeds in Mom’s garden? Would our father still have been alive if he hadn’t lost his beloved oldest daughter at such a young age? Why was I torturing myself with unanswerable questions?
“Dear God,” I prayed, mumbling the words aloud, “help me get through this.”
I stood up and walked resolutely back to my car. It was still early, so I drove around Point Pleasant for a while. I spotted St. Peter’s, where I’d gone to church every Sunday morning during the summer and to confession every Saturday evening. I remembered one of the last times—possibly the last time—I’d gone to confession there. For some reason, Mom had not been in the car with us. Daddy and Isabel rode in the front seat on the way to the church, and Lucy and I were in the back, and we were talking about my upcoming confirmation. Isabel had her taken her shoes off and had her bare feet up on the dashboard, her skirt just covering her knees.
“So, Julie,” she said as she studied her stubby fingernails. She was a nail biter and she’d bought all sort of products to make herself stop, but none of them worked. “Have you decided what middle name you’re taking for confirmation?” Isabel had taken the name Bernadette as her confirmation name. It was a great name, long and elaborate, but I was not an elaborate person and had decided on my confirmation name a year earlier.
“Nancy,” I said.
“It has to be a saint’s name,” Isabel said with an air of authority. “I don’t think there’s a Saint Nancy.”
“Well,” Daddy said, and I knew just by the tone of his voice that he was going to take my side for a change. “I believe the name ‘Nancy’ comes from the name ‘Ann,’ and there certainly is a Saint Ann. She was Mary’s mother.”
Bingo, I thought. Not only had I picked a saint’s name, but a really important one at that.
“So she has to take ‘Ann,’ right?” Isabel asked my father. She sounded hopeful. She did not want me to get my way in this. “That would sound really stupid,” she added. “Julianne Ann Bauer.”
“I’m going to take Kathy,” said Lucy. She related strongly to the baby of the family on Father Knows Best.
“You two are missing the boat,” Isabel complained. “This is supposed to be serious.”
“Isabel’s right,” Daddy said. “But we can talk to the priest about whether Julie would have to take Ann or Nancy. And Lucy, there most certainly is a Saint Katharine. The important thing is for the two of you to learn about the lives of the saints you’re interested in before you decide to take their names, the way Isabel did.”
If he only knew about his sweet Saint Isabel, who was probably going all the way with Ned, I thought.
Daddy parked the car on the street outside St. Peters, and I suddenly got the jitters. That entire week, I’d lived in fear of dying because I had not confessed all my sins the previous Saturday and I knew I would go straight to hell if I died. I simply had not known how to tell the priest about the fantasies I was having about Ned Chapman. But now I thought I had it figured out. Somehow I’d come up with the term “impure thoughts.” I must have read it somewhere, maybe in the Catholic magazine Daddy wrote for. I also remembered reading that impure thoughts were a sin even if you didn’t act on them, and that’s when I realized I’d better confess them as soon as I could. I was afraid, though. I was used to confessing to my lies and my fights with Lucy and Isabel and my disobedience. This new sin had a completely different feeling to it.
I sat in the pew between Daddy and Isabel, waiting my turn. I watched Lucy go into one side of the confessional with her little eight-year-old’s transgressions. A woman came out from the other side, and Isabel took her place. Then Lucy came out, and it was my turn.
I could feel my heart beating against my ribs as I knelt in the darkness. I heard the mumbling of a male voice and knew that my sister had finished her probably inadequate confession and was receiving her penance. Then, before I was ready for it, the priest slid open the window.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” I said, making the sign of the cross. “It’s been one week since my last confession and these are my sins. I disobeyed my mother and father three times,” (the trips across the canal to fish with Wanda and George) “I lied to my little sister once,” (telling her there were no crabs in the Chapmans’ dock) “I had some impure thoughts, and I fought with my older sister two times.” There. I’d slipped it in perfectly.
“Tell me about the impure thoughts,” the priest said.
Oh, God. “I…I thought about the boy who lives next door to us,” I said.
“Often?” the priest asked.
I swallowed. “Yes, Father,” I admitted. Every waking moment.
“And have you committed the most grievous offense of masturbation?” he asked.
What was he talking about? I’d never heard the word before, but I guessed he meant intercourse. I couldn’t imagine what else he might mean.
“Oh, no, Father!” I said, so loudly my family probably could hear me in the pews.
“Good,” the priest said. “Be sure you never do.”
Never? I wanted to ask him if it would be okay to do it when I was married, but he sounded so stern and frightening that I didn’t dare.
“Yes, Father,” I said.
“For your penance, say six Hail Marys and five Our Fathers and now make a good Act of Contrition.”
The rote words spilled out of my mouth. All the while I was thinking that I’d gotten out of it easy. For a few extra Hail Marys, I would continue having impure thoughts about Ned. I wasn’t sure I could stop them even if I wanted to.