“Did you put this here?” I yelled, getting to my feet, marching in his direction.

He held his hands up in the air. “Don’t look at me,” he said. He was trying not to smile.

I knew he’d done it, and I knew Isabel must have told him about the box. How else could he know?

“Don’t you ever touch my things again!” I said, a fury in my voice that I was not truly feeling. I was secretly thrilled by his attention. I thought of asking him if he’d been out on his boat with Pam Durant, but I suddenly realized he couldn’t possibly have been. He would have been lifeguarding at the Baby Beach. George had probably made the whole thing up just to tease me.

It was still light out, so I sat on the bulkhead with a book. I was there about fifteen minutes when Isabel came out into the yard. She walked beyond the fence and sat down on the bulkhead a few feet away from me. She had the giraffe towel knotted around her waist and she was staring at me, no expression on her face whatsoever.

“What?” I asked.

“I know what you’re doing,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I was doing so many things I wasn’t supposed to be doing that I didn’t know which one she was talking about.

“I mean, I know you’ve been going out in the boat at night,” she said.

I tried to put an expression of confused disbelief on my face. “What are you talking about?” I asked.

She leaned down to scratch her calf. “I happened to go outside the other night and I noticed the boat was gone,” she said. “I knew Grandpop hadn’t taken it because I could hear him snoring practically from the yard. I went upstairs and saw your bed was empty.”

I dropped my attention to my book again, as if I could possibly read after hearing what she’d said. “So?” I asked.

“Where are you going in the middle of the night?”

“None of your business.” She’d used that line on me so often it felt good to be able to say it back to her.

“Look, Julie,” she said. “You’re only twelve. I’m afraid you’re going to get in big trouble.”

“I can take care of myself,” I said.

“Either you tell me what you’re up to,” Isabel used her bossiest tone, “or I’m going to have to tell Mom what you’re doing.”

I looked at her sharply. “Go ahead and tell her,” I said. “And then I’ll tell her where you go in the middle of the night.”

She didn’t budge from her seat on the bulkhead, but I could see her face blanch beneath her tan.

“How would you know where I go?” she asked, some of the bluster gone from her voice.

“I have my ways,” I said. “Just…you just keep what you know about me to yourself, and I’ll keep what I know about you to myself.” I had the upper hand with her for the first time in my life. It was an extraordinary feeling of power. I could tell she was struggling with a response, and that pleased me. “By the way,” I added, “was Ned at the beach today?”

She looked confused. “What does that matter?”

“Just, was he?”

“No,” she said. “He had errands to run.”

My heart twisted a bit in my chest. I’d thought it would give me pleasure to imagine Ned cheating on her, but pleasure was not what I was feeling. I was about to ask her if Pam had been at the beach that morning, but she spoke first.

“I’m so in love with him, Jules,” she said. She looked out toward the water, a smile growing on her lips. “I know it’s hard for you to understand, but someday you will. It’s amazing to feel this way. To love someone so much and to know he loves you back.”

What could I say? That I was in love with Ned, too? That I understood how that half of the equation felt?

Suddenly she moved closer and put her arm around me. I stiffened, but it felt so soft and warm that my shoulders relaxed. I couldn’t remember the last time Isabel had touched me with affection. “Julie,” she said, and her voice was very quiet, so quiet that I had to look at her to truly hear her. Her face was very close to mine. Her eyes were like something edible, like chocolate pudding. I could imagine how Ned felt when he was this close to her. “Listen to me, Julie,” she began again. “I’m seventeen years old. What I’m doing may not be right, but it’s my business and I’m old enough to take care of myself.You’re not. I’m worried about you. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

The surprising tenderness in her words, the love behind them, stung my eyes. “I’m okay,” I said, my voice small now.

“Tell me you won’t do it anymore.” She squeezed my shoulders. “Whatever it is you’re up to. Tell me.”

“I won’t,” I said, although I knew I was lying. My sister and I had both turned into liars this summer.

And we would both pay.

CHAPTER 21

Julie

I hadn’t intended to call Ethan after I got out of the interview. I was certain I’d cut into his work time the day before and didn’t want to take up any more of it, so my plan was to drive back to his house, leave him a thank-you note, and head home. But as I pulled away from the police department, still shaken from so many unexpected questions, the memories churned in my head and I felt lonely with the weight of them. George. Ned. Isabel. They were all I could think about, and I hadn’t said anything I’d wanted to say about them to the police. I’d screwed up the interview, letting my interrogators rattle me. I needed Ethan. I needed to talk. To vent. I swerved over to the side of Bridge Avenue, stepped on the brake and grabbed my cell phone. I had to dial three times before I managed to tap out the right number.

“Julie?” Ethan answered the phone. “How’d it go?”

I started to cry, unable to find my voice.

“Meet me at my house,” he said. “Are you okay to drive?”

“Yes,” I managed to say. I felt such relief at reaching him.

His truck was already in his driveway when I arrived at his house. I walked inside without knocking and he greeted me in the hallway, pulling me into a hug as he had the day before, but this one was not a surprise and it felt natural and welcome to me. I pressed my forehead into his shoulder, my hand against his back, clutching the fabric of his shirt.

“Shh,” he said, as if comforting a child in the middle of a nightmare. “It’s going to be okay. It’s all going to be okay.” He took a step away from me. “Do you want to sit outside or on the sunporch?”

I thought of the neighbors in my old bungalow, possibly sitting on my old screened porch, watching me fall apart in Ethan’s backyard. “Sunporch,” I said, already walking toward the back of his house.

I sat on the white wicker love seat facing the canal, and although there were other seating options available to him, Ethan sat down next to me. He’d been working outside; the skin of his arm was hot against mine and I could smell the scent of sun and soap on him. I was glad he was there with me. We were on different teams in the investigation, wanting and expecting different outcomes, yet I knew he would understand how I felt.

“So,” he said, “what got you so upset?”

“They questioned me as if I were a suspect,” I said.

We were sitting so close together that I couldn’t really look at him, but I felt him nodding.

“I was afraid of that from some of the questions they’d asked me about you,” he said. “I’m sure they don’t really suspect you, though. They just need to rule you out. They have to look at everyone who was involved at the time. They asked me some tough questions, too.”

“I just never expected it,” I said. “I’d never thought about the case from the authorities’ perspective. I do look guilty. I had the motive. I knew where she’d be. I was there at the same time.” I shook my head. “I understand why they’d have to look at me that way. It’s just that it took me completely by surprise. And I got angry and said I had nothing to do with her murder, but of course…” My voice caught in my throat.

“Of course what?” Ethan asked.

“Of course I did have something to do with it.”

“Julie.” He took my hand and held it on his thigh. “You were only twelve. You were a child.”

People had said that to me before. Friends. Therapists. But Ethan had been there. He’d known me. He’d known the sort of person I was. The words meant more to me coming from him.

“Thinking about everything made me remember…caring things about Isabel,” I said. “We didn’t get along that summer, but I know deep down we cared about each other. I know I loved her.”

“Of course you did,” Ethan said. “Ned thought I was a jerk and treated me accordingly back then, but I still know he loved me. And,” he added, “I also know he loved Isabel. That’s why it doesn’t make sense that he’d kill her.”

I watched a sailboat make its graceful way toward the bridge. A child wearing a life preserver was on board with her two parents, and it looked like her father was trying to teach her to dance.

“I’ll tell you what I told the police,” I said, my thoughts returning to Ethan’s comment about Ned. “I told them that you can never really know another person.You don’t know what was really going on inside of Ned, Ethan. No one could.” Glen had provided my unhappy introduction to that theory. “I thought I knew my ex-husband as well as I knew myself,” I said. “I thought he was so in love with me. I thought he was honest and honorable. But while I was thinking all those things, he was having an affair.”

“Oh.” Ethan rubbed the back of my hand with his thumb. “I know what that’s like,” he said. “So did Karen. My ex-wife.”

“Really?” I wondered how similar our experiences had been. “Did it go on a long time?”

“About a year.”

“Glen’s, too,” I said. “At least I think it was only a year, but like I said, I didn’t really know him. How did you find out?”

“She told me. She was in a play with the local community theater and she came home one night and told me she was in love with the director of the play and wanted a divorce.”

“Wow,” I said. I tried to imagine the scene. Which room of this house had they been in when she told him? Had he slept in the guest room that night? Or had she? Glen had slept on the sofa in the family room; our guest-room bed had been covered with boxes of my books. “Were you devastated?” I asked.

“Completely,” he said. “I’d never pictured myself getting a divorce. It wasn’t a word in my vocabulary. My parents were married nearly sixty years, and they were excellent role models on how to run a marriage. They had good communication and a lot of love. I thought my marriage was the same way, but I was wrong.”

“That’s what I mean,” I said. “You have this illusion of what someone is like.You assume that if the marriage is great for you, it’s great for them, and unless they speak up, you don’t have a clue.”

“Your husband didn’t speak up?”

I shook my head. “No, and guess how I found out?”

“How?”

“The woman called me. She said she knew Glen was struggling with how to tell me, so she decided to tell me herself.”

Ethan laughed. “Well, you know who wore the pants in that relationship,” he said.

“I thought it was a cruel hoax,” I said. “Maybe one of Glen’s co-workers was angry with him and trying to hurt him. But when Glen came home that evening and I told him about the call, he started to cry…and that was the beginning of the end.” I let out my breath in a long stream. “It was so incredibly painful to imagine him with someone else.”

“Oh, yeah,” Ethan said, and I knew he understood. “Did he end up marrying her?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “They broke up right after he and I separated.” I looked down at our hands where they rested together on his thigh. His skin was a ruddy color, his beautiful fingers smooth on top, rough on the bottom where they pressed against my skin. There were tiny, nearly microscopic, lines everywhere on the back of my own olive-toned hand. My hands were turning into my mother’s. “It was partly my fault,” I said. “The end of our marriage. I was a workaholic.”

“Are you still?”

I had to laugh. “Well, I was, until this whole thing with Ned’s letter came up. I haven’t written a word since then. At least not a word worth publishing.”

“I try not to think in terms of fault,” Ethan said. “I know it sounds trite, but Karen and I just drifted apart. She got very involved in her theater work and it was new and exciting for her. She got more and more into it until she said she wanted to move to New York to have a better chance at acting.”

“Really! Is that where she is?”

“Uh-huh. She married her lover, but she’s not acting, ironically. She’s still teaching, just as she was here. I think she’s happy, though.”

“You don’t sound angry,” I marveled.