“Oh, yeah,” Ethan said, a little of the lecher in his voice. “Hard to forget her. She never came back to the shore, though, after that summer, but I still remember her.”

“Down, boy.” I smiled. “I didn’t know you had any interest in the opposite sex back then, except as something to study under a microscope.”

He returned the smile. “The geeky thing was just a facade,” he said.

I laughed.

“Who was the other girl Isabel hung around with?” he asked.

“Mitzi Caruso,” I said. “She lived on the corner. Right down there.” I pointed in the general direction of the Carusos’ house.

“I vaguely remember her,” Ethan said. “I think she came back a few more summers, but I couldn’t really say for sure. There were a couple other guys Ned hung around with, but I’m completely blank on their names. Summer kids. Do you remember any of them?”

I shook my head. The rest of those teenagers from Izzy and Ned’s crowd were as faceless to me as they were nameless.

Ethan looked at his watch, then stood up.

“Listen,” he said, “it’s a gorgeous evening. Let’s go out in the boat, and then we can make dinner—I picked up some flounder—and talk some more.”

I glanced toward his dock. “I don’t do boats these days,” I said.

“Really?” He looked puzzled. “When I picture you, it’s in that little runabout of yours. Out there by yourself on the canal, twelve years old, zipping around like you owned the water.”

It was hard to believe I’d ever been that child. “I haven’t been on a boat since that summer,” I said.

“Come on.” He held out his hand to me. “Let’s go. We can head toward the river if the bay upsets you.”

He didn’t understand. There would be no pleasure in it for me, only a sort of panic. “I don’t want to, Ethan,” I said.

He saw that I was serious and gave up. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll skip the boat ride and go right to dinner, then. Are you hungry?”

I helped him cook, although he was at ease in the kitchen. Watching him, I realized he was a man at ease, period. And lying here now in his handmade guest-room bed, it occurred to me that he had always been that way. Even when he was a nerdy little kid, he hadn’t cared what others thought of him. He’d been comfortable in his own skin. I hadn’t expected to find myself admiring him any more than I’d expected to find myself attracted to him. And yet I was both.

CHAPTER 19

Julie

Sometimes you could find yourself feeling very anxious about one thing only to discover that you should have been anxious about something entirely different. That’s what happened to me the morning of my interview by the police.

I’d awakened early to the sun-washed blue of Ethan’s guest room and the comforting scent of coffee. I longed to stay in that room all day. My head hurt a little and I thought of calling the police department, telling them I couldn’t come in, that I was sick. I did not want to go over what had happened in 1962, detail by detail, which is what I figured they would ask me to do. How would I be able to bear it? Putting the interview off until later, though, would provide only temporary relief, so I got up, showered, dried my hair, dressed in khaki pants and my red sleeveless shirt and walked downstairs. Ethan was reading the paper at the table on his sunporch, but he hopped up when he saw me in the kitchen.

“Eggs or pancakes?” He put the newspaper down on the counter. “I can go either way.”

“Toast?” I asked. “And bacon.” I motioned toward the plate of bacon he’d already prepared, although I wasn’t sure I’d be able to eat anything at all.

“Sit down and I’ll feed you,” he said.

I took a seat at the kitchen table, lifting up the tablecloth to admire what I knew would be beneath it—another of Ethan’s creations.

“How are you doing this morning?” he asked, putting two slices of bread in the toaster.

“I think I’m okay,” I said slowly, like someone who had just sustained an injury and was trying out the muscle to be sure it wasn’t sprained.

“Do you want me to drive you?” he asked.

“Just give me directions and I’ll be fine,” I said with false bravado. I liked the idea of him coming with me, but I was sure he had work to do.

He jotted a phone number on a slip of paper and handed it to me. “This is my cell number,” he said. “I’m stopping over at a job this morning, but let me know when you’re done and I’ll meet you back here.”

I nodded. The toast was ready and I carried it and the bacon onto the sunporch while he followed with two cups of coffee. The jalousies were wide-open, and the reedy scent of the canal, the swift current, and the boats cutting through the water all combined to take hold of my heart and squeeze. I nibbled at the toast, my appetite gone as I tried to carry on a conversation about the job Ethan had to check on that morning. I had made it through half a slice of toast and an inch of bacon by the time I needed to leave, and as I headed out the door, I wished that I’d accepted his offer to go with me.

The room I was taken to at the Point Pleasant Police Department was small and bare, and there was nothing to look at other than the faces of my two questioners. I sat on a hard, straightbacked chair across a table from Lieutenant Michael Jaffe from the Prosecutor’s Office and a very young, blond detective, Grace Engelmann, from the Police Department. They each had a notepad in front of them, and a tape recorder rested on the table between us, a thick file of papers next to it.

There was a little small talk at first, designed, I thought, to put me at ease.

“It’s changed a lot since you were a kid here, huh?” Lieutenant Jaffe asked after he’d introduced himself and the detective. He was a handsome man with wavy salt-and-pepper hair and a youthful face.

“Yes,” I said. “I haven’t been back since my sister’s death.”

“Really,” he said, as if that surprised him. “I didn’t come here until ninety-two myself, so I’ve only known it the way it is now. What sort of changes have you noticed?”

He had to know how the area had changed, whether he’d lived here or not, but I figured I would play along with the putting-me-at-ease game.

“Well,” I said, “there were a lot of summer people back then. And far fewer houses. The bulkhead is different. That new bridge wasn’t there.”

He frowned. “The new bridge?”

“Over the canal,” I said, and he and Detective Engelmann both laughed.

“We call that the old bridge now,” he said. “It really has been a long time for you, hasn’t it?”

I smiled. I could hear the tape running in the small machine resting on the table.

“You know,” he said, “my wife and I love your books.”

“Thank you.” I was tempted, as I always was, to ask which book he liked best, but decided against it, in case he was simply making conversation and had not read them at all. The last thing I wanted to do was make him uncomfortable. Detective Engelmann wrote something down on her pad. What I had said to prompt her to do that, I couldn’t imagine.

“How did you happen to go into mystery writing?” Lieutenant Jaffe asked.

I always got that question. I had a long answer designed for speaking engagements and a short answer designed for times like this.

“I loved Nancy Drew as a kid,” I said. “And I loved writing. So it seemed a natural fit.”

“Ah, yes,” he said, as the detective continued writing on her pad. “You know, I remember reading an article about you in some…I don’t know, probably some magazine or newspaper, where you said that when you were a child, you entertained your friends by making up mysterious events and pretending they’d occurred in your neighborhood.”

Were we still in the small-talk mode, or did I detect a subtle shift in the tone of his questioning? “That’s true,” I said.

“And then there was the real mystery…the ultimate mystery in your own family,” he said.

I was confused for a moment and must have looked it.

“The murder of your sister,” he said.

“Oh,” I said. “Yes.” I shifted in the hard, armless chair. I wanted to cut to the chase. I wanted to tell him and the so-far-silent Detective Engelmann that I’d always suspected Ned was guilty and that, in my opinion, that was what he’d been alluding to in his letter. But this was not my show, and I waited for the next question.

“What can you tell us about George Lewis?” he asked.

The thought of George brought an rueful smile to my lips.

“He was a teaser,” I said. “I spent quite a bit of time with him and his sister, Wanda. I don’t think he knew who his father was, and I’m not sure what happened to his mother. He and Wanda had been raised by a cousin, Salena. I think his family was very poor, but they were close to each other and there was a lot of affection between them.” I remembered the look of daggers George had sent my father the day Daddy came over to drag me home. “He had a tough facade and was probably pretty streetwise.”I added, “Although I’m only guessing. I never actually saw that side of him. It makes me so angry…so upset…to know that he went to prison for something he didn’t do.”

The lieutenant nodded. “I imagine the person who’s responsible for your sister’s murder carries a lot of guilt around for letting the wrong person go to prison.”

I didn’t miss the present tense in his sentence. “Well,” I said. “It’s my opinion that Ned Chapman was that person and that his guilt is what ultimately did him in.” I was hoping we could get down to the nitty-gritty now, but Lieutenant Jaffe folded his hands on the table and leaned forward.

“You understand,” he said, “that we have to look at every angle on this case. We have to start fresh. We have your statements from 1962, but it’s important for us to look at this case with a clean slate.”