Loo went back to folding napkins. She kept her head down and did her work while Agnes ate half the food she served and Mary Titus swooped in like a magpie, snatching any tips left behind on the tables. At the end of the night Principal Gunderson cashed everyone out and Loo left the Sawtooth with a roll of bills in her pocket. Her own money. It almost made her forget the smell of the apron, the frying oil she couldn’t get out of her hair and how bone-tired she felt at the end of her shift. It almost made her forget that the job had been her father’s idea.
When Loo got home she emptied her winnings onto her bed, a sea of fives and tens and ones, and then she counted and stacked, counted and stacked, and hid the money in a manila envelope in her underwear drawer, until the next morning at breakfast, when Hawley tossed the envelope onto her lap.
“You need to get better at hiding things. Top drawers are the first place that anyone would look.”
“You think someone’s going to rob us?”
Hawley pulled on the rubber boots he wore to go clamming. Then he took the .45 out of the breadbox and tucked it into the back of his pants. “Not today.”
Loo snatched up the envelope, and when she hid it again, she sealed the money in a plastic baggie and slipped it behind the insulation in the attic. Later, after Hawley had picked up his tools and driven off to dig some soft shells in Ipswich, she removed a twenty from the envelope for gas, put on her sneakers and jogged fifteen blocks to where she’d parked the Firebird.
Loo had not returned Mabel Ridge’s car, though the first few times she got into the Firebird it was her intention to do so. The day after the party she had traveled to Dogtown, then went right past Mabel Ridge’s house and down Route 127, a twisty road that hugged the rocky shore from Olympus all the way to Beverly, going faster and faster until her hair caught in her mouth, the danger of being caught filling her chest as she sat behind the wheel.
Now she unlocked the car with the key and turned the ignition. She needed time to think. After filling the tank, she took a left and went to the farthest point of Olympus, where the road turned from asphalt to dirt and then to sand and rocks until it simply stopped in a maze of thorns and blackberry bushes.
Loo parked and climbed out onto the beach. The waves roared and crashed against the shore and sent torrents of white spray in the air that landed with a loud clap into the tidal pools. She rolled her pants up to her thighs and scaled a sloping boulder slippery with lichen. The farther she went out, the wilder the ocean became. She could see the currents and whirlpools and the waves fighting against the undertow. She picked up a stone, flat and porous with flecks of mica that shimmered in the sunlight, hooked it with her thumb and sent it skipping along the surface, then watched as it was sucked down into the ocean.
Hiding an envelope of cash was one thing. Hiding a car was something else. If she couldn’t come up with a safe place to stash the Firebird, she’d have to return it to Mabel Ridge. But the thought of losing the freedom that flooded her body each time she slid behind the wheel made her want to run someone over with the car instead.
Loo covered her face with her hands. Made a mask like her father had taught her, blocked out the world and listened. Over and over the waves hit with a boom and then receded, sucking and pulling at the shore. It sounded like trees caught in a storm. Like an animal being slowly ripped apart. Loo spread her fingers, expecting her vision to focus. A direction to become clear. But instead she saw a splash. Something tossing in the water, thirty or forty feet from shore.
At first Loo thought it was a bit of wreckage. Then a head rose to the surface. Through the tunnel of her fingers Loo recognized the face, the one she knew only from the bathroom and the newspaper clippings she pored over each night. So many times she’d imagined Lily’s death, and now here it was before her. Black hair spread in the water. Eyes as green as the sea. A hand rose from the depths and waved at her.
Loo dropped the mask but the figure in the water remained. A tumbling in the eddy. The tide yanked the body under, and with a roar of foam, spit a tangle of legs and arms into the shallows. Only now it was no longer her mother.
It was Marshall Hicks.
“Are you all right?” Loo called down to him.
Marshall coughed and choked and sputtered, clothes plastered to skin, salt leaking from his nose, shoes digging ruts as he clawed away from the water. The boy shook his head in response before collapsing onto a mountain of kelp. He pressed his face into the rubbery leaves.
Loo scanned the horizon, then climbed down to where the boy was struggling. “Did you fall off a boat?” she asked, though Marshall was not wearing the right clothes for fishing. He was dressed as if he were going to church. His shirt buttoned to the collar. His leather shoes tied tight. A tie caught around his neck like a piece of rope. He turned and looked up at her. He touched her foot.
He said, “Your knees are dirty.”
Her knees were dirty, but it was only sand, stuck to her skin from kneeling on the wet beach. Marshall’s eyes traveled above the two dark circles to the pale skin of her thighs. For a moment he looked like he was still underwater, still being tossed in the roar of foam and salt water. Then Loo’s hands came down and brushed her knees, and the sand sprinkled across his face like sugar.
As she helped him over the beach, she remembered the beery taste of his lips, the sensation of him pressed against her in the dark of Dogtown. She had not spoken to him since the party in the woods. But she had seen him across the cafeteria, and once in the stairwell, and a few times when she’d peered through the window of the biology lab, wondering how this boy had managed to make her afraid again. Now she settled him into the Firebird, wondering if he remembered their kiss, too, but the only thing that Marshall seemed concerned about was his mother’s petition. He’d been sitting on the jetty, drawing in his notebook, when a rogue wave came and washed the clipboard into the sea.
“You went in after it?”
“The water didn’t look that deep, but when I got in I couldn’t get out.” There was a piece of brown seaweed caught around Marshall’s belt. His button-down shirt was so soaked it had become translucent, the color of his skin pressing through where the cloth touched his elbows.
Loo wrapped her fingers around the steering wheel. It was the first time she had driven with a passenger in the Firebird, and it changed things: the adventure suddenly magnified, the feel of the clutch, the grip of the wheels.
Loo glanced at the boy’s wing tips. “You didn’t even take off your shoes.”
“It was the only copy,” Marshall said. “All the names we’ve collected so far. I was supposed to be out knocking on doors.” He looked down at his pants. “I’m getting your seat all wet.” There was something pinched about Marshall’s face. His eyes were bloodshot and bleary, and there were lines fanning out between his eyebrows, as if he’d spent the past two months getting ten years older.
“Don’t take me home,” he said.
“All right,” said Loo, but she didn’t know where else to take him. So she brought him to her house instead.