The Bay at Midnight

CHAPTER 19

Julie
Sometimes you could find yourself feeling very anxious about one thing only to discover that you should have been anxious about something entirely different. That’s what happened to me the morning of my interview by the police.
I’d awakened early to the sun-washed blue of Ethan’s guest room and the comforting scent of coffee. I longed to stay in that room all day. My head hurt a little and I thought of calling the police department, telling them I couldn’t come in, that I was sick. I did not want to go over what had happened in 1962, detail by detail, which is what I figured they would ask me to do. How would I be able to bear it? Putting the interview off until later, though, would provide only temporary relief, so I got up, showered, dried my hair, dressed in khaki pants and my red sleeveless shirt and walked downstairs. Ethan was reading the paper at the table on his sunporch, but he hopped up when he saw me in the kitchen.
“Eggs or pancakes?” He put the newspaper down on the counter. “I can go either way.”
“Toast?” I asked. “And bacon.” I motioned toward the plate of bacon he’d already prepared, although I wasn’t sure I’d be able to eat anything at all.
“Sit down and I’ll feed you,” he said.
I took a seat at the kitchen table, lifting up the tablecloth to admire what I knew would be beneath it—another of Ethan’s creations.
“How are you doing this morning?” he asked, putting two slices of bread in the toaster.
“I think I’m okay,” I said slowly, like someone who had just sustained an injury and was trying out the muscle to be sure it wasn’t sprained.
“Do you want me to drive you?” he asked.
“Just give me directions and I’ll be fine,” I said with false bravado. I liked the idea of him coming with me, but I was sure he had work to do.
He jotted a phone number on a slip of paper and handed it to me. “This is my cell number,” he said. “I’m stopping over at a job this morning, but let me know when you’re done and I’ll meet you back here.”
I nodded. The toast was ready and I carried it and the bacon onto the sunporch while he followed with two cups of coffee. The jalousies were wide-open, and the reedy scent of the canal, the swift current, and the boats cutting through the water all combined to take hold of my heart and squeeze. I nibbled at the toast, my appetite gone as I tried to carry on a conversation about the job Ethan had to check on that morning. I had made it through half a slice of toast and an inch of bacon by the time I needed to leave, and as I headed out the door, I wished that I’d accepted his offer to go with me.
The room I was taken to at the Point Pleasant Police Department was small and bare, and there was nothing to look at other than the faces of my two questioners. I sat on a hard, straightbacked chair across a table from Lieutenant Michael Jaffe from the Prosecutor’s Office and a very young, blond detective, Grace Engelmann, from the Police Department. They each had a notepad in front of them, and a tape recorder rested on the table between us, a thick file of papers next to it.
There was a little small talk at first, designed, I thought, to put me at ease.
“It’s changed a lot since you were a kid here, huh?” Lieutenant Jaffe asked after he’d introduced himself and the detective. He was a handsome man with wavy salt-and-pepper hair and a youthful face.
“Yes,” I said. “I haven’t been back since my sister’s death.”
“Really,” he said, as if that surprised him. “I didn’t come here until ninety-two myself, so I’ve only known it the way it is now. What sort of changes have you noticed?”
He had to know how the area had changed, whether he’d lived here or not, but I figured I would play along with the putting-me-at-ease game.
“Well,” I said, “there were a lot of summer people back then. And far fewer houses. The bulkhead is different. That new bridge wasn’t there.”
He frowned. “The new bridge?”
“Over the canal,” I said, and he and Detective Engelmann both laughed.
“We call that the old bridge now,” he said. “It really has been a long time for you, hasn’t it?”
I smiled. I could hear the tape running in the small machine resting on the table.
“You know,” he said, “my wife and I love your books.”
“Thank you.” I was tempted, as I always was, to ask which book he liked best, but decided against it, in case he was simply making conversation and had not read them at all. The last thing I wanted to do was make him uncomfortable. Detective Engelmann wrote something down on her pad. What I had said to prompt her to do that, I couldn’t imagine.
“How did you happen to go into mystery writing?” Lieutenant Jaffe asked.
I always got that question. I had a long answer designed for speaking engagements and a short answer designed for times like this.
“I loved Nancy Drew as a kid,” I said. “And I loved writing. So it seemed a natural fit.”
“Ah, yes,” he said, as the detective continued writing on her pad. “You know, I remember reading an article about you in some…I don’t know, probably some magazine or newspaper, where you said that when you were a child, you entertained your friends by making up mysterious events and pretending they’d occurred in your neighborhood.”
Were we still in the small-talk mode, or did I detect a subtle shift in the tone of his questioning? “That’s true,” I said.
“And then there was the real mystery…the ultimate mystery in your own family,” he said.
I was confused for a moment and must have looked it.
“The murder of your sister,” he said.
“Oh,” I said. “Yes.” I shifted in the hard, armless chair. I wanted to cut to the chase. I wanted to tell him and the so-far-silent Detective Engelmann that I’d always suspected Ned was guilty and that, in my opinion, that was what he’d been alluding to in his letter. But this was not my show, and I waited for the next question.
“What can you tell us about George Lewis?” he asked.
The thought of George brought an rueful smile to my lips.
“He was a teaser,” I said. “I spent quite a bit of time with him and his sister, Wanda. I don’t think he knew who his father was, and I’m not sure what happened to his mother. He and Wanda had been raised by a cousin, Salena. I think his family was very poor, but they were close to each other and there was a lot of affection between them.” I remembered the look of daggers George had sent my father the day Daddy came over to drag me home. “He had a tough facade and was probably pretty streetwise.”I added, “Although I’m only guessing. I never actually saw that side of him. It makes me so angry…so upset…to know that he went to prison for something he didn’t do.”
The lieutenant nodded. “I imagine the person who’s responsible for your sister’s murder carries a lot of guilt around for letting the wrong person go to prison.”
I didn’t miss the present tense in his sentence. “Well,” I said. “It’s my opinion that Ned Chapman was that person and that his guilt is what ultimately did him in.” I was hoping we could get down to the nitty-gritty now, but Lieutenant Jaffe folded his hands on the table and leaned forward.
“You understand,” he said, “that we have to look at every angle on this case. We have to start fresh. We have your statements from 1962, but it’s important for us to look at this case with a clean slate.”
I nodded, feeling uncertain. I wanted to get this over with, to review the statements I’d made as a twelve-year-old and get the recitation of those memories out of my way. That wasn’t going to happen though, at least not yet.
“Tell us about Isabel,” Lieutenant Jaffe said.
The question was so open-ended, I didn’t know quite what to do with it.
“She was beautiful,” I began. I wished the chair I was sitting in had arms. My hands felt heavy and awkward in my lap. “And she was rebellious. A typical teenager. She snuck out every night to meet Ned at the platform on the bay.” I was quiet a moment, trying to figure out what else I should say about Isabel. The only sounds in the room were the quiet whirring of the tape recorder and the tip of the detective’s pencil racing across her notepad. When she had finished whatever she was writing, she looked up and spoke for the first time.
“How did you know she was sneaking out every night?” she asked. She had rather amazing green eyes, the color of new grass, and I wondered if she was wearing special contacts.
“I knew because I saw her,” I said. “Because I was sneaking out myself.” Surely they already had this information in the old records of the case. But, as the lieutenant said, they were starting fresh.
“What was your relationship with her like?” he asked.
I looked away from him quickly, annoyed with myself for doing so. I did not want to talk about my relationship with Isabel, and I knew that my sudden inability to look at my questioners made me suspect in their eyes. That’s what this is about, I realized. They didn’t care why I thought Ned had done it. They wanted to know my role in Isabel’s death. My anxiety took a sudden, unexpected leap.
“We were close when we were young,” I said, lifting my gaze to look squarely at the lieutenant, then the detective. “But there were five years between us and we drifted apart as she got into her teens, which was only natural. We didn’t have much in common anymore.”
“Did you argue a lot?” Detective Engelmann asked.
“Bickered,” I said with a shrug. “Typical sibling rivalry.”
“And how about Ned Chapman?” the detective asked. “What was he like?”
I felt a hot flash start to prickle and burn on the top of my head. Damn. In two seconds, my face would be as red as my shirt. I did not look away this time, though. I held the woman’s grass-green gaze as I answered. “He seemed nice,” I said. “I mean, I’d known him all my life, since he lived next door to us during the summer. He was the lifeguard at the beach. But you can’t really know what’s going on inside a person. He was nice on the exterior, but who knows what was going on inside him.”
“You had a crush on him.” The lieutenant made it a statement rather than a question.
I shrugged again. “A typical preteen sort of crush,” I said. I was using the word typical too much and wondered if they’d noticed. I could barely breathe for the heat radiating down my neck and chest. I waved my hand in front of my face, looking apologetic. “Hot flash,” I said. “A nuisance.”
They smiled at me as if they understood, but given Detective Engelmann’s age and Lieutenant Jaffe’s gender, I was certain neither of them had a clue how I was feeling. I wanted to pick up the detective’s rapidly filling notepad to give myself a real fanning.
“Were you jealous of Isabel?” Lieutenant Jaffe asked.
My eyes darted away from him again. Damn it. What was wrong with me? I wanted to say, Of course I was jealous of her. Weren’t you jealous of your older siblings? Instead, I steadied myself and nodded. “In some ways,” I said. “I wished that I’d looked like her and that I was her age and could have the freedom she did.”
“Who knew she would be on the bay at midnight on August fifth, 1962?” Detective Engelmann asked.
“I did,” I said. “And Bruno—Bruce—Walker. And possibly George Lewis, although I was never sure of that. If he knew, then Wanda Lewis probably did, as well. And, of course, Ned Chapman.”
“Although according to the old report—” the Lieutenant fingered the file in front of him, although he did not open it to look at the pages “—Ned Chapman had asked you to tell Isabel that he couldn’t meet her that night.”
“Well, yes, but he later said he might be able to.”
“You were really known for your storytelling back then, weren’t you?” the detective asked me.
They were jumping from topic to topic so quickly that my overheated brain could barely keep up, and once again, I was not sure exactly what she meant.
“I read a lot,” I said. “I read Nancy Drew books aloud to George and Wanda.”
“But you also made things up, right?” she asked. “The way you made up stories about events in your neighborhood to excite your friends.”
I stared at her, uncertain how to respond. I felt something like hatred for her building inside me. When I didn’t respond to her question, the lieutenant spoke up.
“Let me try to summarize what you’ve told us so far,” he said. “There was some sibling rivalry between you and your sister. You were jealous of her. You knew where she’d be that night. You regularly sneaked out of the house.You had a crush on—”
“Stop it.”I stood up, the chair scraping the floor. “I didn’t come here for this,” I said. “I came to help in your investigation. I came to tell you what I remember, not to be accused of murdering my sister. I didn’t kill her, if that’s what you’re getting at. I would never have hurt her.”
“Please sit down again,” Lieutenant Jaffe said calmly, and against my better judgment, I did so. I sat on the edge of the chair, though, ready to make my exit.
“We have to look at everyone involved,” he said. “Everyone who could have been in the same place as your sister that night. That includes you.”
I held on to my anger. If I didn’t, I knew I would start to cry. “I didn’t kill my sister,” I said, slowly and deliberately. “I had nothing to do with it.”
The lieutenant suddenly looked at his watch, then stood up. “We’ll be talking with everyone,”he said. “And we appreciate you coming in.”
Was that it? I’d been expecting the handcuffs to be produced at any second. I was thinking about my lawyer, who’d never handled a criminal case in his life. But now, free to go, my thoughts shifted to my mother.
“Are you going to need to talk with my mother?” I asked, slowly getting to my feet. Detective Engelmann was still sitting at the table, still writing. She didn’t even lift her head from her work.
“Most likely, yes,” Lieutenant Jaffe said. “You don’t have a problem with that, do you?”
I shut my eyes, holding on to the back of the chair for balance. I felt a little dizzy, and my mind was slow and logy. If I answered yes to his question, it would look as though I was afraid of what my mother might say. If I explained that my family never talked about Isabel’s death, it would look even worse. I opened my eyes and spoke the truth. “I don’t want my mother to suffer any more than she has,” I said. “I don’t want her to endure…” I waved my hand through the air, encompassing the room, my two questioners and the entire situation. “I don’t want her to have to deal with all of this,” I said.
“We understand,” the lieutenant said. “And we’ll keep that in mind.”