Loo thought of that first day they had driven to Dogtown and knocked on Mabel’s door. Hawley breaking the radio with his fist. The blood on his sleeves.
“But then you found me. All on your own. And you looked so much like your mother.” The old woman touched Loo’s arm, gently this time. Her fingers were thick, the skin chapped. “You’re grown up now, Louise. And you can make your own choices. You can be free of him.”
Loo’s tongue tasted of metal—as if she had bitten through a piece of aluminum foil with her teeth. She pulled her arm away from Mabel Ridge, swept the cup and saucer off the table and sent them smashing to the floor. Tea splattered across the wall. The cup flung itself apart in white pieces. Now all the thorns were gone.
“That’s not my name,” she said.
—
WHEN SHE GOT back home to Olympus, Loo started with the guns that she knew about. The derringers in the bottom drawer of Hawley’s dresser. The high-powered rifles he kept in the back of the closet. The snub-nosed revolver wrapped in a towel beneath the bed. The Beretta, the Smith & Wesson, the .38, the Ruger, each in its own special box inside the trunk in their living room.
The Colt was missing, which meant he had it with him.
Loo had handled these weapons hundreds of times. She knew them each by name. Laid out together, she hoped Hawley’s guns would create a map that she could make sense of and follow. Prove whether he was a criminal or a fisherman. A father or a murderer. She gathered the pistols and the automatics, the handguns and rifles, on the bedspread. Hawley had erased the past, both his own and his daughter’s. But there had to be some trace, some way for her to pull those lost stories into the present. Loo touched the cold metal. She closed her eyes and listened. But they would not give up their secrets.
Loo tied her hair back. And then she began to dig deeper. She searched underneath his mattress. She went through his sock and underwear drawer. She turned out the pockets of his jeans. She checked inside his boots. She put all the things she found on the bed next to the guns: six different kinds of hunting knives; brass knuckles; a box full of C rations; a spring-loaded pistol; a duffel bag stuffed with a change of clothes; ammunition stashed behind the laundry basket; a crank radio; a police scanner; a shillelagh. There was nothing surprising, not even a dirty magazine. If Hawley indulged in such things, he kept them out of the house.
Loo checked the back of the closet, then pushed aside Hawley’s shoes and tested for a loose board in the floor. She groped inside his pillows. She fanned the pages of his crime novels, looking for loose paper, and when she didn’t find anything she went into the living room and started searching through everything Jove had brought.
Jove was supposed to stay for only one night, but he had been with them for more than three weeks. His socks and Tshirts spread across the living room from the couch where he slept, along with piles of newspapers; a collection of half-full water glasses; the smell of aftershave, which he splashed beneath his arms instead of deodorant; and a dusting of small, white, downy feathers from a hole in his camouflage sleeping bag, patched on the outside with electrical tape, and quilted on the inside with images of ducks.
Each morning Loo would wake to the men talking and joking in the kitchen and cooking up enormous breakfasts—lobsters and steak and fried ham and even, one morning, a turkey, which Jove must have started sometime in the middle of the night. She caught him bent over the oven with a baster, sucking up the juice from the pan and spitting it out over the skin of the bird. “It’s like a baby in there,” he said with a sigh. “A little baby we’re going to eat.”
After breakfast the men worked outside on the new boat. Jove’s bag full of watches had been replaced by a wooden hull with a keel full of lead, resting on an immense trailer in front of the garage. There in the driveway the men scraped, sanded and recaulked. They worked until it was too dark to see, and then after dinner they turned on floodlights and worked some more.
After finishing a shift at the Sawtooth, Loo crawled out onto the roof outside her window and pretended to use her telescope, hoping to catch her father and Jove talking secrets again downstairs. But the men spoke only of Jove’s plans, unfolding maps and charting his trip, which now went from Olympus to the Hudson and all the way to the Carolinas, the Florida Keys and then to Cuba. Over the next few weeks, the men filled the garage with gear for the boat: a set of sails from the marine supply store; a fifteen horsepower motor that Hawley thought would be too slow but Jove insisted on keeping, to minimize drag; cans of gasoline; boat hooks; an anchor; life jackets; bailers; hurricane lamps; a flare gun and a navigation system.
That morning the hull had been dry and ready to go. The men hooked up the trailer to Hawley’s truck and drove off to the marina to get the boat into the water. It was the first time Loo had been alone in the house since Jove had arrived. She’d promised Hawley she’d meet them for the launch, waved goodbye from the porch, then opened the garage and jammed a screwdriver into the Firebird.
Now in the living room she shuffled through Jove’s meager belongings. Two packs of canceled playing cards from a Colorado casino; a pair of sneakers that smelled; some changes of clothes; a washcloth and a bar of soap in a baggie; a leather pouch full of receipts; two overdue library books—Great Expectations and David Copperfield—their plastic covers flaking at the spine, their pages stained with other people’s dinners; and a catalog for specialty clothes made just for boating, waterproof pants and scratch-proof sunglasses and captain’s hats with gold braid trim.
She took a closer look at the receipts. They were from gas stations and diners and motels, from bars and fast-food drive-throughs. Organized and filed by date, as if Jove were a businessman getting ready to file an expense report. She found a handwritten list of watch manufacturers, itemized like a grocery shopping list. She found a nautical map of the North Shore. And she found a ripped page from a motel Bible. Across the text in black marker was the name of the street where Hawley and Loo had left all of the stolen cars.