“Oh my God! Dean! Lawford! Frank! You have to see this!” Sammy yelled, grossed out but also excited.
Here was the story, the best we could tell: Hal Liston had an ex-wife. The ex-wife had a new boyfriend. The new boyfriend, for whatever reason (and I could imagine many, beginning with the grungy hair), did not like Hal Liston. The new boyfriend was in a rage when he left the apartment he shared with Hal Liston’s ex-wife.
She, worried about what might happen, called the police. The police went to Liston Kennels and found an empty house, with a rug missing from the living room. The hardwood floors where the rug had been were a lighter shade than the boards around them and smelled strongly of bleach.
Nothing else.
What the police did find two days later was the new boyfriend’s car, abandoned in a parking lot that backed out onto a particularly deep and swift part of Puget Sound. With the toilet-cleaner kind of current.
The trunk of the car did not smell like bleach. It was saturated in blood.
None of us knew how to make sense of the story. We’d seen the guy only twice in our lives—once when he picked up our dog, and then when he dropped her off. Only Patience knew Hal Liston, and she wasn’t talking.
Gradually, over the years, the incident morphed into a pickup line my brothers used on girls. “Did you know that our dog was trained by a murdered man?”
But I could never bring myself to think of it that way. Every time I opened my mouth to talk about it, I felt like someone had thrown a noose around my neck and pinched me speechless.
I will never forget the smile on Hal Liston’s face when he told me to stay.
And he was never found. His body was still out there, somewhere in Puget Sound.
Useless Bay, where we live, on the southern half of Whidbey Island, is where the saltwater current vomits up what it doesn’t want. After a high tide, the saltwater lagoon below our bluff is always littered with broken Frisbees, pieces of a Styrofoam cooler, deflated Mylar balloons, and signboards for fishing companies that have been out of business for twenty years. And the rest, the rotten and stinking: corpses of harbor seals, corpses of halibut with two eyes on one side of their heads, corpses of sailboats that haven’t been moored properly elsewhere.
I don’t believe in predetermination. I don’t believe in ghosts. I don’t believe that certain people are “susceptible” to messages from the other side.
But every night before something disastrous has happened to me, I’ve dreamed of Hal Liston smiling his troll smile. Only, in my dreams, the salt water has had its way with him. His eyes are black holes from which hermit crabs crawl. His stringy hair is green kelp. There are Penn Cove mussels growing on his bones. He creeps ashore, and his fingertips look like tentacles, grabbing hold of everything they touch. He gnashes his teeth and whispers, I’m not done training you yet, and he’s not talking about our dog. He’s talking about me.
With one tentacled hand, he reaches for Patience, and then he crunches down on her with sharp barnacle teeth. He spits out her bones. And then he reaches again.
I am next.
Like that day on the driveway, I’m too afraid to run or fight back.
He grabs me with a slimy tentacle, dragging me toward his open mouth, which smells of bleach and dead things and abandoned hope.
Dean is the one who wakes me up on nights like this. Sometimes he slaps me; sometimes he dumps Clamato juice on my face. His methods aren’t subtle, but they work. He looks down at me, thrashing on the bed, and says, “You’re howling again. Why do you howl?”
Because something is coming, I want to say. But I never do, because that would mean admitting to fear—something my brothers and I never did.
I dreamed of Hal Liston the night before I met Henry Shepherd and his little brother, Grant.
I dreamed of Hal Liston the night before, six years later, the Shepherds came to our door and Grant wasn’t with them.
two
HENRY
The ferry slump,” Meredith and I used to call it. Even though it wasn’t the ferry slumping—it was my father’s shoulders.
If you keep up with your financial news, you know that Dad, the bazillionaire venture capitalist, is a decent guy. My sister and brother and I will have to work for a living, and the rest of his money Dad’s going to give away to make the world better.