When she was younger and they were on the road, living in temporary apartments, the first thing Hawley would do was unpack the shampoo and conditioner and put them on the edge of the bathtub. Then he’d wipe the bottles down with a towel and pack them again when they were ready to leave. The sticky gel inside was a pinkish color, and smelled of berries. Loo would stare at the bottles from underneath the water, to see how long she could hold her breath. She’d gotten better over the years. Now she could stay under for nearly two minutes before her lungs began to burn.
Loo heard Hawley coming up the front steps. She lifted her head, batting drops off her eyelashes. He set down something heavy on the porch. Then she heard him come inside and open the trunk and start putting away his guns. He’d taken the Colt and the long-range rifle, but it wasn’t until Loo heard the familiar chink of the Remington and the Winchester, too, that she wondered why he needed so many guns to go fishing.
“Loo?”
“I’m in the tub,” she called.
Her father stepped to the bathroom door. Loo thought of the night she’d locked herself inside with Mary Titus. The blood on the tiles. The bite mark on her palm.
“You all right in there?”
Loo squeezed her mother’s shampoo. “I’m fine.”
“Don’t fall down the drain.”
She heard him cross the floor and close the lid of the trunk. Then he went outside and she heard the sound of the new padlock unlocking and a rumble as the garage door opened and closed.
It had taken Hawley and Loo hours to make space for the Firebird in the garage. Now the car was nestled inside, between the lawnmower and a cord of stacked firewood. The time Hawley used to spend in the bathroom shut up with her mother’s things had shifted to the Pontiac, which he tinkered on for hours, even though it was never going to see the light of day again. As he dug around beneath the hood, Loo would stay inside the house, feeling jealous. For months the car had been hers alone, and she hadn’t realized how much she had needed it—a way to be close to Lily that did not involve Hawley and his endless grief.
The rest of the cars from the impound lot—the coupe, the BMW, the SUV and the hatchback—had been driven to Ipswich and abandoned on a dirt road near the bird sanctuary. It had been a long night, commuting back and forth. By the time they were finished, dawn was breaking and the robins and cardinals were chattering in the trees. Hawley had made a phone call, and an hour later, when they drove past again after eating breakfast, the stolen cars had vanished.
“Somebody owed me a favor,” was all her father said.
Since then there had been a shift in Hawley’s mood. He wasn’t happy, exactly—but he was content, as if the job had settled something. Once they emptied the garage and slid the Firebird inside, he’d carried the sniper rifle he’d used to the kitchen table, and showed her how to remove the serial number, just as he’d shown her which cables to pull and hit to spark a motor to life.
—
ON THE OTHER side of the bathroom door the phone was ringing. Loo waited to see if Hawley would answer. She wondered if it might be Marshall—and then she knew it must be Marshall—and she grabbed a towel off the rack and scrambled out of the bathroom and hurried, dripping, across the living room floor. She snatched the receiver and pressed it to her ear.
“Hello?” she said.
“Your mother’s car was stolen again. I thought you should know.”
Mabel Ridge’s tone was so cavalier, so unconcerned with all the trouble she’d caused, that Loo wasn’t sure how to respond. Ever since the arrest two weeks ago, she’d wanted to curse the old woman out. But now the words wouldn’t come.
“You gave me those keys,” she managed at last. “You told me I could take the car.”
“Not forever. Not to keep.”
Loo went to the front door and opened it, but there were no police cars, or any signs of anything unusual. Only Hawley’s plastic cooler set on the welcome mat. She dragged it inside and lifted the lid. On a bed of ice were two large fish, their eyes wild, their speckled brown-and- yellow coats gleaming.
“Well,” Mabel said with a sigh. “In any case, Lily’s car is gone now. The police say it’s probably gone for good. Chopped up into pieces and sold for parts. If you had come back to visit me, none of this would have happened.”
“I didn’t want to see you,” said Loo.
Mabel cleared her throat. “I suppose you think I’m a bitter old woman. I suppose you think I’m hateful. But I’ve got reasons for the things I do.”
“Like getting me arrested?”
“Like telling the truth,” said Mabel Ridge.
The fish inside the cooler had wide-open gills. Single stripes cut through their speckled skin, and beneath each pair of fleshy lips, a single barbel dangled like a lure. Atlantic codfish. Loo recognized them from the pamphlets that were now scattered all over Dogtown. She shut the lid and sat down on top of the cooler.
“Did you read the scrapbook I gave you?” her grandmother asked.
“There weren’t any pictures. You could have given me one, at least.”
Mabel Ridge sighed a great big bellowing sigh. “Your mother was a good swimmer. She could swim through open ocean, from the Point all the way through the harbor. That’s nearly five miles.”
“You said that before.”
“The day it happened, at the lake—the newspapers all wrote that it was perfect weather. No waves on the water. Like a mirror, one of them said. And the lake was only half a mile wide. Your mother never would have drowned in a lake.”
It could have been Loo’s own voice talking. Not now but twenty, thirty years in the future. She felt the towel brush up against the back of her knees. There was a puddle on the living room floor. She didn’t know if it was from her or the cooler of fish but she was standing in the middle of it.
“He killed her,” said Mabel Ridge. “Your father. I know it. And now you know it, too.”
Loo slammed the receiver back into the cradle. The phone slid away and let out an echo of a ring, as if someone had tried to call and then hung up before connecting. Loo’s hair was trailing rivulets of water, running like open faucets down her back. Her hand reached for the phone and drew it toward her. She picked up the receiver and slowly brought it to her ear again, listening to the steady hum of the open line, wanting and not wanting to know what came next.
When she glanced up, Hawley was standing in the doorway to the kitchen. He was so still he looked like a ghost.
“Who was that?” he asked.
“No one,” said Loo.
Hawley’s hands were covered in grease. She pictured the hood of the Pontiac propped open, her father feeling around all that cold metal, touching her mother’s car the same careful way he took his guns apart and cleaned them. He watched Loo now with the same kind of carefulness as she set the phone back down in the cradle.
“I’ve got some fish for dinner. Just need to gut them.”
“I saw,” Loo said. “They look good.”
Hawley walked toward her. It seemed like he was going to say something else. But instead he picked up the cooler, smearing grease across the plastic handle. “Twenty minutes,” he said. Then he walked out the door.