“Don’t push me, Lucy,” she said. “Let me do this on my own timetable, all right?”

“What is your timetable?” I couldn’t seem to stop myself.

“I don’t know.” She spoke slowly, teeth gritted.

“All right.” I gave up. “Sorry.”

“Thank you,” she said, as if I’d been holding her down on the ground and had finally released her.

“Can you give me…what’s his name? Tanner?”

She nodded and looked at me, curious to know what I was asking.

“Can you give me his Web site address?”

“Why?”

“So I can check it out,” I said, then added, “from the perspective of a former history teacher.”

“Are you going to write to him or something?” She looked suspicious.

I shook my head. “No.”

She hesitated. “You swear you won’t?”

“You have my word. I just want to…you know, get to know this person who’s so important in your life. I mean,” I added quickly, “get to know him by seeing his Web site, that’s all.” I thought I sounded guilty, as if I did have plans to try to reach him—which I did not—but Shannon tore off a piece of her napkin, pulled a pen from her pocketbook, wrote down the address and handed it to me. I slipped it in my jeans pocket.

“Thanks,” I said.

“It’s a cool site,” she said, that glowy look coming into her face again. “He knows everything about computers.”

Julie returned to the table and sat down again.

“Who knows everything about computers?” she asked. “Dad?”

“No,” Shannon said. “Just a friend.”

The waitress took our orders

“Any news from Ethan?” I asked.

“Who’s Ethan?” Shannon asked.

“Ethan Chapman,” Julie said. “Remember I told you about the visit I had from his daughter? How she—”

“That letter?” Shannon interrupted her.

“Yes,” Julie said. “Ethan took it to the police. They searched Ned’s—Ethan’s brother’s—house, but didn’t find anything. Or at least, they didn’t tell Ethan that they found anything.” Although what she’d said was not particularly good news, Julie was smiling. Something was going on. I swore I saw a little spark in her eyes when she said the name “Ethan.” I was sure now that she had a thing for him.

“He reminded me of the time Mom and Izzy and I floated to the bay on inner tubes,” Julie said to me. “Do you remember that?”

“To the bay from where?” I asked.

“From the bungalow,” Julie said. “You were there when we jumped into the canal and there with Grandpop when he came to the bay to pick us up.”

I shook my head. I must have been a space cadet when I was eight. I remembered so little.

“You floated on an inner tube?” Shannon looked at her mother in amazement.

“Yep,” Julie said. She leaned back as the waitress set our ice cream in front of us.

“I totally cannot picture you doing that,” Shannon said, lifting her spoon. “You’re scared to death of the water.”

“I wasn’t then,” Julie said with a shrug.

“Your mother did everything,” I said. “She was adventure girl. I was the chickenshit.”

“That would be cool,” Shannon said. “Floating down a canal on a tube.”

Shannon had never seen the canal and had only been down the shore a couple of times with friends, as far as I knew. Certainly Julie had never taken her.

“It’s probably not legal to do that now,” Julie said.

“It probably wasn’t even legal then,” I added.

We finished our ice cream, then drove to Glen’s town house. He waved from the front door when Shannon got out of the car, and I waved back. I didn’t know if Julie acknowledged him at all. I didn’t think they talked anymore. They’d been able to communicate about Shannon, though. They’d coordinated trips to colleges and actually went together to parent-teacher conferences, but I thought their relationship was truly over now. Most—although not all—of the pain and animosity seemed to have shifted to indifference, and I was glad of that. I knew from my own broken relationships just how comforting indifference could be.

“I bet she’s getting zero supervision over here,” Julie said as she pulled away from the curb.

The horse was long out of the barn as far as supervision was concerned, and I ignored her comment. “So,” I said, instead. “Do I detect some real interest in Ethan Chapman now?”

She might have blushed. I wasn’t sure. “It was good to talk with him,” she said. “He has the nicest voice.”

“So, he looks great,” I said. “He has an amazing body. Nice voice. Is good to talk with. What more do you want?”

“I don’t want anything,” she said. “If he weren’t Ethan Chapman, I might be interested,” she admitted. “But I certainly don’t want someone who lives in Bay Head Shores and is almost surely the brother of my sister’s murderer.” She was vehement and had a good point. I decided to change the subject.

“I remembered something when you were talking about floating on the canal,” I said.

“What?”

“I remembered Dad going over to the other side of the canal to get you when you were fishing with the Lewis family.”

“Oh,” she said, letting her breath out. “He was not pleased with me.”

“He was hard on you sometimes, you know?” I said. “I learned from watching you. I learned not to make waves around him.”

“He was never hard on Izzy, though,” Julie said. It was not the first time she’d said something like that.

“Did that bother you?” I asked.

“Not really,” she said. “I think I just had a way of doing things he couldn’t tolerate. Like hanging out with the Lewises.” She suddenly grew very quiet as she pulled up to the curb in front of my apartment house.

“Do you want to come in?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No. I’m tired.” She smiled at me. “It was a great concert. I love watching you. You have so much fun up there.”

“Thanks,” I said, but I felt worried about her. “Are you okay?” I asked.

She looked at her hands where they rested on the steering wheel. “You just got me thinking about George,” she said.

I touched her shoulder. “I’m sorry I brought it up,” I said.

She shrugged. “It’s just that…if I’d never gone over there to begin with, George would never have gone to prison.”

“Oh, Julie,” I said, leaning over to give her a hug. “I wish Ethan and his daughter had just dealt with that letter on their own and never let you know about it.”

She smiled gamely as I pulled away from her. “I’m okay,” she reassured me. “Honest.”

I opened my car door, then looked back at her.

“With regard to Ethan…” I began.

She waited, eyebrows raised, to hear what I was going to say.

“Grab some joy, Julie,” I said. “Grab it.”

Before going to bed, I spent an hour on Tanner Stroh’s Civil War Web site. It was undeniably excellent, a scholarly site overflowing with information and so little bias that I wasn’t able to tell if I would agree with his politics or not. By the time I turned off the computer, I had one overriding thought in my mind: maybe Shannon had actually found herself a winner.

CHAPTER 13

Julie

1962

Grandpop and I were in competition. We stood a few yards from each other behind the fence in our backyard, the morning sun in our eyes and our fishing poles in our hands as we waited to see which of us could catch the biggest edible fish. I was wearing my purple one-piece bathing suit and after spending a few weeks in the summer sun, my skin was as dark as my grandmother’s. Grandpop was still pretty pale. He never seemed to tan. He wore his usual brown pants—he must have had six pairs of them—and a white short-sleeved shirt and sandals. I’d never seen him go barefoot.

By the time we’d been out there for half an hour, I’d caught absolutely nothing, while Grandpop had reeled in two blowfish, which we considered less than nothing because they were too dangerous to eat. Their organs contained a deadly toxin, and after Grandpop tossed the second blowfish back into the canal, I came up with a plot for an intriguing mystery: The colored fishermen on the other side of the canal would begin dying, collapsing right there in the reeds, and it would turn out they’d been poisoned by the Rooster Man, who had fed them fried blowfish livers. I loved the idea and nursed the story along in my mind as we fished.

After what seemed like a very long time, I felt something good and strong tug at my line. I reeled it in, only to discover a hideous sea robin on my hook. Grandpop couldn’t stop himself from laughing. There was nothing uglier in the universe than a sea robin, with its long bony fins poking out all over its body. I grimaced, watching the fish sway back and forth on my line. I was not squeamish, but the thought of holding on to that spiny creature while taking it off the hook was not pleasant.

“I bet Ethan would like that sea robin,” Grandpop said, nodding toward the Chapmans’ yard.

I looked over to see Ethan sitting in the sand, a huge pile of mussels in front of him. I had not even realized he was outside.

“Hey, Ethan,” I called.

He looked up, the sun reflecting off his glasses so that I couldn’t see his eyes.

“You want this sea robin?” I held my pole in the air, the fish flapping its tail and winglike fins.

“Keen!” Ethan said. He picked up a blue bucket from the sand and walked over to where Grandpop and I were standing.

“You have to take it off the hook,” I said.

“Okay.” Ethan seemed undeterred. He took the rag I’d stuck in the chain-link fence, grasped the fish with it, and extracted the hook with an ease I couldn’t help but admire. He looked at me, grinning as though I’d given him a chocolate bar. “Thanks,” he said. He dropped the fish in his bucket and walked back to his yard.

Grandpop and I began fishing again. We were tired of standing, though, so we pulled two of the Adirondack chairs close to the fence and sat down. I put my bare feet against the fence and slumped down into the chair, feeling very comfortable and at peace with the world.

“Looks like we’re on the wrong side of the canal,” Grandpop said after a while.

“What do you mean?” I followed his focus across the canal to where the colored people were fishing.

“I’ve seen them reel in a few keepers over there,” he said.

“Oh, they’re probably just catching blowfish, too,” I said. “Daddy said colored people eat them ’cause they don’t know any better.”

My grandfather stared straight ahead, not speaking for a minute. “Charles said that, huh?” he asked finally.

I nodded. “He said they’re not as smart as us. And they’re poor, so they have to eat whatever they can.”

There was a long silence that I didn’t recognize as anything out of the ordinary until Grandpop spoke again.

“Did it ever occur to you that, if they do eat blowfish, which I doubt, it might be because they’re actually smarter than we are? Maybe they know how to avoid the poisonous part. Maybe we’re the stupid, wasteful ones.”

There was a serious tone in his voice that was rare for my grandfather. “I don’t think Daddy would agree with that,” I said.

“Did you know that I lived in Mississippi until I was your age?” Grandpop asked me.

“I thought you grew up in Westfield,” I said.

“I didn’t move to New Jersey until I was fourteen,” he said. “When I was a boy, we lived with my mother’s family in Mississippi. We had a housekeeper and she had a son my age. He was my best friend. Willie was his name, and he was colored.”

“Your best friend?” I said, amazed. I couldn’t imagine it. I had never even spoken to a colored person.

Grandpop nodded, smiling. “Willie and I had some good times together,” he said. “We lived near a lake and we’d fish and swim and explore. But he couldn’t go to my school because of segregation.”

I nodded. I knew what segregation was, even though it was easy not to think about it in Westfield, since every single person I knew there was white.

“His school was far inferior to mine,” Grandpop said. “Willie was just as smart as me—smarter in some things—but he didn’t have a chance. And here’s the worst thing.” He shook his head and I leaned closer to his chair, wanting to catch every word of the “worst thing.”

“One time he and I went into the town near our houses. We were only eight or nine and we decided we wanted to buy some candy. But coloreds weren’t allowed in the store.”

“That doesn’t seem fair,” I said.

“Of course it’s not fair,” Grandpop agreed. “So I went in the store—it was a general store, I guess you’d call it. And I bought a bag of candy for a few cents and took it outside and Willie and I sat on the curb and ate it. Then he had to go to the bathroom really bad. The store had a privy behind it. An outhouse. But there was a sign on it that said No Coloreds, so Willie couldn’t use it. So, I went into the store and asked the lady at the counter if she would make an exception, since he was just a kid and had to go real bad, but she wouldn’t allow it. We went to another store, and they wouldn’t let him use their privy either. He ended up wetting his pants.”