CHAPTER 5
Julie
The sunburned waitress poured more iced tea into my glass, and I interpreted the look she gave me as sympathetic. This is why I don’t date, I thought. It was the waiting, the wondering, the analyzing. Why was Ethan late? Was he stuck in traffic? Had he forgotten we were to meet for lunch? Or had he simply been annoyed that I’d twisted his arm to talk with me? I wanted to explain to the waitress that, although I was meeting a man here, he was not a date. Not a romantic interest. But then I realized that the waitress probably saw me as too old to be dating, anyway. She was in her mid-twenties; most likely I reminded her of her mother.
The Spring Lake restaurant was barely ten miles from Bay Head Shores, and that was closer than I’d been to our former summer home since I was twelve. When I’d gotten out of my car, I could smell the salt from the ocean a few blocks away. I was surprised that the scent elicited not only the discomfort I’d expected, but also a longing, as though a tiny piece of me was still able to remember the good times I’d had down the shore in spite of all that had been taken from my family there.
The waitress stopped by my table again on her way to another. “Can I get you a roll or something to munch on while you wait, hon?” she asked. It felt so strange to be called “hon” by someone half my age. Better, though, than ma’am.
“No, thanks.” I smiled at her. “I’m fine.”
It was warm in the restaurant, or at least I was warm. I had on cropped black pants and a sleeveless red top cut high on my shoulders, but I noticed other women in the restaurant were pulling on their sweaters. I didn’t even bother carrying a sweater since menopause hit me a year ago.
I’d taken a table at the front of the restaurant so I would be able to see Ethan when he walked in. I wasn’t sure I’d recognize him. Through the window, I studied the men walking by, searching for lanky academic types. I watched people entering and leaving the little shops on the other side of the street. A young man stood directly across the street from me, rubbing lotion on a woman’s back. I watched the two of them until a pack of bicyclers sped by, blocking my view.
I looked at my watch. Twenty minutes late. Maybe he wasn’t going to show up. He certainly had not welcomed my call.
“I’m sorry Abby disturbed you with this,” he’d said, once I’d identified myself. He had a soft voice, exactly the sort of voice I would have imagined him having, and he did not sound irritated or angry. Just tired.
“She had to.” I was on the phone in my office, staring at the words Chapter Four on my computer screen. The rest of the page was still blank. “She was right to,” I said. “And she and I agreed that the situation needed looking into.”
He was quiet. “I’m not sure that I agree,” he said finally.
“We’re talking about a serious injustice,” I said. “A man served time in prison for something he didn’t do. And we’re talking about my sister.” Along with the old sense of loss I felt at the mention of Isabel came the suddenly realization of my insensitivity. “I’m sorry, Ethan,” I said quickly. “I didn’t even offer you condolences. I’m very sorry. I know what it’s like to lose a sibling.”
I heard him sigh. “Thanks,” he said. “Ned…I don’t know what happened to him. He had some sort of breakdown in his late teens and early twenties. He became…I don’t know how to describe it. He was just existing. Not really living.”
Don’t you think that suggests he was carrying a guilty secret? I wanted to ask but decided against it. This wasn’t the time.
“How bad was it?” I asked. “Was he able to work?”
“Oh, yeah,” Ethan said. “He wasn’t that bad off. He spent time in Vietnam, which didn’t help his condition, and he was eventually discharged for a sleep problem. Then he got his degree in accounting and worked for a plumbing company, doing their books. He never got married. He dated a little, but never anything serious.”
“Abby said…or rather, implied, that he had a drinking problem.”
“Yes, he did,” Ethan said, “but he wasn’t a sloppy drunk. It didn’t get in the way of his work or anything. Just kept him numb. We tried to get him help, but he would never admit to having a problem.You can’t change someone who doesn’t want to change.”
I had many more questions but felt anxious about asking them over the phone. I was afraid if I probed too deeply, he would hang up on me.
“Can we meet?” I asked. “I’d like to talk to you in person about this. About the letter.”
There was a silence so deep and long I had to ask him if he was still on the line.
“I’m here,” he replied in that soft, soft voice. “And yes, I’ll meet you. Where are you living?”
“Westfield,” I said. “How about you?”
“On the canal,” he said, and I doubted that he knew how those three words stopped my breath. “We winterized the summer house years ago,” he added.
“Do you live there with…”I wasn’t sure who else might be living in the Chapman’s old house with him. His parents? His wife?
“Alone,” he said. “My wife and Abby used to live here, too, but I was divorced five years ago and Abby’s out on her own now, of course. She has a daughter. My granddaughter. Did she tell you that?” There was pride in his voice. I could hear the smile.
“No,” I said. “That’s wonderful.”
“Do you want to come here?”
“No,” I said, nearly choking on the word in my rush to get it out. There was no way I was going to Bay Head Shores. “Maybe we could meet halfway.”
“Well,” he said. “I have to be in Spring Lake Friday. If you want to meet me there for lunch, we can do that.”
It was more than halfway, but that was all right. I needed to see him face-to-face to persuade him to take Ned’s letter to the police.
A man carrying a soft-sided briefcase walked through the door of the restaurant and I looked up expectantly, but the red hair and glasses were missing and I gazed out the window again.
“Julie?” I turned to see the man standing next to my table.
“Ethan?” I queried back.
He nodded, his smile subdued, and held out his hand. “Sorry I’m late,” he said. “I got stuck in beach traffic.”
“That’s okay.” I shook his hand, and he sat down across from me.
“I would never have recognized you,” I said, then wondered if that sounded rude. The truth was, age had done him many favors. His red hair was now a gray-tinged auburn, thin at his temples. He wore no glasses. The freckled skin of his youth had weathered into something kinder and he’d put on weight in the form of muscle. He was wearing a cobalt-blue short-sleeved shirt and his arms were lean and tight. The nerdiness from his childhood was gone. Completely. “You look great,” I added.
“And you look wonderful,” he said. “I would have recognized you anywhere. But of course, your face used to be all over our house on the back of your books.”
“Used to be?” I asked.
“We both read them, but my wife got custody of the books,” he said. He glanced down at my bare ring finger. “You’re married, right?” he asked. “I recall something like ‘the author lives with her husband in New Jersey’ or something like that from one of your book jackets.”
The waitress appeared at our table, pad at the ready. “How’re you two doing?” she asked.
I looked up at her sunburned face. “He hasn’t had a chance to look at the menu,” I said.
Ethan handed the waitress his unopened menu. “Just a burger, medium well,” he said. “And lemonade, please.”
I ordered the shrimp salad, then returned my attention to Ethan. “I’m divorced,” I said. “Two years.”
“Children?”
“A daughter. Shannon. She’s seventeen. She just graduated high school.”
“College plans?”
“The Oberlin Conservatory of Music,” I said. “She’s a cellist.”
He looked impressed. “Wow,” he said.
“What kind of work do you do?” I asked, then held up my hand. “Wait. Let me guess,” I said. “You teach marine biology.”
He laughed. “I’m a carpenter,” he said.
“Oh.” I nodded. That was not what I’d expected. If anyone had told me skinny little Ethan Chapman would end up working with his hands instead of his head, I never would have believed it. I thought of his ambitious father, Rosswell Chapman III or whatever he had been. The summer I was twelve, he was chief justice on the New Jersey Supreme Court and he later ran unsuccessfully for governor. I wondered if he’d been disappointed to see his sons turn out to be an accountant and a carpenter rather than follow him into law or politics.
“I wasn’t the least bit surprised you turned out to be a writer,” Ethan said.
“No?”
“Your family was so artsy. Your mother painted, right?”
“That’s right. She was a teacher, but she painted as a hobby.” I’d almost forgotten how my mother loved to set up her easel on the bungalow porch.
“And your father was a doctor, but wasn’t he a writer, too?”
“A columnist for a magazine,” I said.
“You’ve got a daughter who plays the cello,” he continued. “And your little sister, Lucy, used to play that plastic violin.”
“What?” I laughed. “I don’t remember that at all, but you’re probably right because she does play the violin now. She’s in a band called the ZydaChicks.”
He smiled. “There you go,” he said.
I took a sip of my iced tea, wondering if Isabel would have shown any special talent if she’d been given the chance to grow up.
Ethan was still smiling at me, his head cocked to one side.
“What?” I asked.
“You really, really look terrific,” he said.
I felt myself blush. “Thanks,” I said.
“I mean it,” he said, then leaned back in his chair with a sigh. “Well, I guess we’d better talk about what we came here to talk about.” He lifted the briefcase from the floor and pulled out an envelope. “Abby told me she showed you a copy of the letter,” he said, handing it to me.
I studied the envelope. Unlike the typed letter, the address of the police department was handwritten, printed in precise, slanted letters.
“Why haven’t you taken it to the police?” I asked, shifting my focus from the envelope to his eyes. They were a clear, deep blue. I’d never noticed their color behind the Coke-bottle glasses he used to wear. “I mean, it’s obvious that Ned wanted them to have it.”
“No, he obviously had second thoughts,” Ethan corrected me. His voice might have been gentle, but the words carried their own force and, although I didn’t agree with him, I liked how he stood up for himself. Glen always allowed people to steamroll right over him. “The letter was dated a couple of months before he died,” Ethan added.
“But he didn’t throw it away,” I said.
Ethan sighed. “Julie, if I take it to the police, they’re going to assume Ned did it. They’re going to start asking questions. I don’t care what they ask me, but my father is elderly. I don’t want his last years to be spent thinking that his son murdered someone. I have a buddy at the police department and I ran this by him, in a hypothetical sort of way. He said they’d open the case up again. They didn’t do much with forensics back then, so they’d be looking at the evidence from a new perspective now. But they’d almost certainly want to talk with my father. I don’t want to put him through it.”
I saw genuine concern in his face and couldn’t help but be touched by his reasoning. I hoped I could protect my mother from ever knowing anything at all about the letter, no matter what the outcome. I wasn’t sure I would be able to, though. I knew from the sort of books I wrote that Ethan’s friend at the police department was right. It didn’t matter how old the case was, the police would reopen it. Start fresh. I just prayed they could leave my mother out of it. Ross Chapman, though, would certainly be questioned, since he was the person who’d confirmed Ned’s alibi. “Is your mother also still alive?” I asked.
The waitress arrived with our food before he could answer, and we fell into small talk with her about her sunburn. She’d fallen asleep on the beach, she said, pressing her hands to her crimson cheeks once she’d set our plates on the table.
“I’m in agony,” she said, with a flair for drama.
Ethan reached into his briefcase again and pulled out a tube of lotion. “Here,” he said, handing it to her. “Put this on the burn. It takes the sting away instantly.”
She looked surprised. “Thank you,” she said.
“You can keep it,” Ethan added.
“That’s so nice of you,” she said, slipping the tube into her apron pocket. “Don’t worry about a tip.”
Once she’d left our table, I turned to him. “Do you always carry sunburn cream with you?” I asked. I liked that he’d talked so easily to the waitress. Glen would have looked right through her. Why did I keep comparing him to Glen?
Ethan shrugged. “I love being outdoors,”he said, “but two minutes in the sun and I’m burned. I have to work up to it gradually.”
I smiled. I could still see the delicate little kid in him, hiding behind a much manlier facade. I watched the muscles in his forearms shift as he lifted the hamburger to his mouth. The triangle of skin in the open collar of his shirt was the same ruddy tan as the rest of him, and for a moment, I got lost in the shallow valley at the base of his throat. The muscles low in my belly suddenly contracted. It had been so long since I’d experienced that sensation that it took me a moment to recognize it as desire.
Oh, I thought, this is very strange.
“I was asking about your mother,” I said, returning to the relative safety of our conversation.
“Right,” he said, swallowing a bite of his hamburger. “She died last year. And that’s part of why I’m concerned about my father. He was broken up about Mom, and Ned’s death really hit him hard. I’m trying to get him to see a counselor, someone who works with the elderly, but he won’t accept help any more than Ned would.” He lifted a French fry to his mouth, then set it down again. “I actually think he wants to die at this point.”
“Is he ill?” I asked.
“Not ill. Just old. Just old and very sad. He lives in an independent-living residence in Lakewood. I mentioned that I was having lunch with you today, just to test his reaction. He seemed surprised, but that was all. It’s like he didn’t really get it. Didn’t understand who you were.” He ate the French fry. “Are your parents still living?” he asked.
“My father died of a heart attack two years after Isabel was killed,” I said. I didn’t need to add that the stress of losing his favorite daughter had taken a terrible toll on my father. “My mother still lives alone and is doing very well. She works at McDonald’s.”
He managed a laugh. “She always was a pistol,” he said.
I nibbled at my shrimp salad. “I think,” I said slowly, “that in addition to your father and my mother, we also need to consider George Lewis’s family, don’t you?”
He pressed his napkin to his lips. “Of course,” he said. “And I don’t feel good about that. But Lewis is dead and—”
“That makes me so unbelievably sad,” I interrupted him, shaking my head. “I always knew he was innocent and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.”
Ethan fell silent. Slowly he lifted his hamburger and took another bite.
“Did Ned ever say anything to you that might make you think he knew more than he was letting on?” I asked.
Ethan shook his head as he swallowed. “We never talked about it. Early on, I remember my parents attributing the change in him to what had happened to Isabel, but he and I never spoke about it at all.” He moved the straw from one side of his lemonade glass to the other. His fingernails were clean and short, his hands nicely shaped. “Ned and I were really different,” he continued. “Our interests were different, and…our philosophies on life. I tend to see the glass as half-full, while Ned was usually pretty down.”
“How about your father?” I asked. “Did he ever change his story on where Ned was that night?”
Ethan leaned back in his chair again, narrowing his eyes at me. “Julie, please don’t play Nancy Drew with this,” he said. “Don’t think about this as a plot in one of your books. This is real life. You’re talking about my father and my brother.”
His words took me by surprise and I felt anger rise up in me. “What about my family?” I asked, trying to keep my voice as calm as his. I recognized the power in his quiet demeanor. “I don’t want to deal with this either, Ethan. Do you think I want to relive Isabel’s death all over again? I don’t. The idea terrifies me. But we need to know what really happened. All of us. And if you don’t take the letter to the police, I have no choice but to send them the copy Abby gave me.”
Other diners were staring at me, forks halfway to their mouths, and I knew my voice had not been as quiet as I’d thought.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re right. Both our families are mired in this mess. And you’re also right that the authorities need to know about this. But would waiting a bit longer matter that much? Please.”
“I don’t want to wait, Ethan,” I said. “Your father could live another decade.” I felt cruel, but my family had lived with Isabel’s loss for forty-one years. George Lewis and his family had endured his unjust imprisonment. I hated to think that he might still be alive if he hadn’t served time for a murder he didn’t commit. If a terrible mistake had been made, it needed to be set right.
“You think Ned did it,” Ethan said.
Slowly I nodded.
Ethan closed his eyes and let out his breath. “All right,” he said, opening his eyes again. He looked out the window instead of at me. “I’ll take the letter to the police.”
“Why?” I asked, mystified by his change of heart.
“Because,” he said, looking me squarely in the face, “I need to know that you’re wrong.”