‘Nothing. Just giving me a message from Elizabeth about the bake stall.’
Alexander was sitting out on the deck reading Scott Turow. The glittering bay and the island were a perfect backdrop. He put his bookmark carefully in place when he saw Spencer. ‘What happened?’
Spencer shrugged. ‘Still a blank. But there’s plenty of time.’
‘Ah. Elizabeth was out here looking for you five minutes ago.’
‘Thanks. I’ll go and see what she wants.’
The house was cool with blinds drawn against the sun. The scent of baking led him to the kitchen where Elizabeth was setting out trays of blueberry muffins. She was wearing an apron over one of her old-fashioned afternoon dresses and a complex of associations made Spencer suddenly feel a child again. He stole a muffin from a corner of one of the trays and bit into it as his mother turned and asked him, ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing. Hannah and Aaron Fennymore still being obstructive about the sale.’ He made a wry, appealing face.
The instant’s unpeeling of the years affected Elizabeth too. She put down her oven glove and hugged Spencer as if he were a little boy again. They almost never touched each other nowadays and broke apart quickly, without speaking. ‘I wanted you to drive me and the muffins up to the green, so I won’t have to search for somewhere to park.’
‘Of course I will.’
‘Marian’s already gone, so we’ll have to be quick. I saw Leonie driving her.’
Spencer helped her out of her apron and folded it over a kitchen chair. ‘Leonie?’ he murmured, remembering something. ‘What’s going on there, I wonder?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Guess what I saw?’ He described the brief scene in the car-park. Spencer had an eye for telling details.
But instead of responding to the titbit of gossip Elizabeth only hesitated, frowning. ‘Poor child,’ she sighed in the end.
‘Child? If Leonie Beam’s not a grown woman I’m Bette Midler.’
‘I meant the daughter. John Duhane’s younger one.’
Spencer had barely noticed May’s existence. ‘Why would it be a problem for her? Didn’t you say Duhane’s wife was dead?’
Marian was presiding at the stall. The church green was already thronged with people although it wasn’t quite noon and the Reverend Leavitt hadn’t declared the fair officially open. There were families with young children and weighty, meandering older couples, most of them wearing bermudas and peaked caps against the bright sunshine. It was one of Pittsharbor’s rare, truly hot days when even the breeze off the sea was stilled. Most of the younger visitors and townspeople were missing. There was a softball tournament starting up and a three-mile fun run was under way from Deer Hill to the finish point at the harbour car-park.
But May was there.
She hung in Marian Beam’s shadow, watching without seeing as Marian briskly laid out the baked goods.
‘You sure you know the price of everything, May?’ A tray of moist, glazed blueberry pies from Hannah’s kitchen took centre place. ‘There’s a list here, see, so you can always check.’ Marian rattled a canister with a secure lid. ‘And you give change from here, we’ll be needing a heap of quarters since Elizabeth insisted on pricing the pies at two seventy-five. Good, here’s Marty at last.’
Marty and Lucas unloaded the gas barbecue from a borrowed pick-up and hauled it into position under Marian’s directions. Unable even to look at Lucas, May stared dully at the grass. It was pocked with dusty hollows and coarsened with weeds.
‘Hi.’ His bare feet were planted in front of her. There were tiny tufts of bleached hairs glinting on each of his toes.
The diary. With the whaling book in her hand the sets of numbers had slowly but obediently yielded their meaning. 66 7 10, He. 146 12 2, touched. 67 10 9, me.
Doone’s words about Lucas crept in May’s bloodstream – or not the words themselves because they were so bare – but the thick, impassioned, glutinous intensity that was locked into the unravelled code.
Those coded parts of the diary were the most disturbing, yes, the hottest thing May had ever read. Once she had painstakingly picked them out she couldn’t get them out of her head. ‘Oh. Hi.’
‘How’s the hand?’
The knuckles were criss-crossed with surgical tape, but the shallow cuts were already healing. An accident, John had told everyone, even Ivy. May had tripped and stuck out a hand to save herself. Do you want to talk about what’s happening? her father had asked her. May had answered flatly, No.
‘Uh, it’s okay.’
May felt rather than saw Lucas shrug and stroll away, and all the time Doone’s obsession made her skin shiver as if she had a fever.
He touched me. I knew he wanted to. All the time he wants to, but his hands move nearby in the air instead. But today, after we swam in the sea, he gave me my towel.
‘Towel’ was one of those words written plain, because Doone couldn’t find it in the whale book.
Nobody was there. He dried me and lifted a coil of my hair between his fingers. Touched my shoulder with his finger, his eyes shut. Both of us shaking.
The very clumsiness of the available words, the make-do of the language, stirred a response in May. She closed her eyes and the scene made itself vivid. She saw Lucas bending his head, intent on drying the beads of salt water from Doone’s pale shoulders and the precise articulation of his finger joints as he played with the sticky curl of her hair. It wasn’t the same Lucas who fooled on the beach with the rest of the Beams, nor even the version of him who fondled and necked with Ivy. She never even named him in the scribbled pages but he was Doone’s alone, violently painted and coloured out of nothing with words that sometimes didn’t even fit together. And mine, May thought. Mine, too, because of her.
She opened her eyes, realising that she had been hugging herself so tightly that her fingernails had dug into her upper arms.
Marty Stiegel was looking at her. ‘You okay?’
There were already people standing in line for blueberry pancakes. A little girl held a balloon and her brother tried to grab it from her.
May nodded her head. ‘Yes.’
The blur of burning gas wavered and fined down into little blue points as Marty fiddled with the controls. ‘Right. We got customers, so let’s make pancakes. You want to take the orders and set out plates for me?’
‘Okay. Whatever you want.’
Marian was loudly giving instructions too, from behind the pies and muffins. It was very hot next to the barbecue and the crowd pressed all round them. Tom Beam was there and Elizabeth Newton in one of her ladylike dresses. May saw Leonie’s pale face swim out of the sea of all the rest and turned sideways so that her shoulder partly blocked the unwelcome view. She hadn’t seen her for two days, since the night of the broken glass. Lucas had gone, to play softball or to hang out with Ivy at the beach. She rubbed her forehead with her fist and tried to concentrate on what Marty was telling her to do.
Leonie thought May looked ill. It didn’t escape her notice that the girl wouldn’t meet her eyes.
Marian was rattling the tin of quarters to attract her attention and Tom moved to make room for his wife behind the makeshift counter. Leonie took her place obediently, with the heat of rebellion invisible inside her. She was thinking that nothing tied her here, to Tom or her mother-in-law or the Pittsharbor Day bake stall, and she had been wrong to bend her head to their demands for so long. If Tom and I loved each other, she thought. If we did, then Marian’s intransigence would be funny, and I would