“And he was how old? Twenty? He really was a peach, Mom.”
“Yes, like I said, Bill was always calming people down. He’d had plenty of chances to perfect that trait in the last couple of years, with his brother and his dad being at odds, and his mom caught in the middle. A bad situation.”
“I heard a few things about that.”
“Anyway, Bill and I left the party. We went out to our regular parking place, which was behind the big shed at the McKay cottage.”
“Bill’s father was the caretaker, right?”
“You knew that?”
“I found out accidentally.”
“The cottage hadn’t been opened that summer, so the property was secluded and . . . well, we parked there.”
“Naturally, Mom.”
“I said your generation wouldn’t be embarrassed by what happened. But, remember, I was still a virgin. Here it was the night before our wedding, and we’d never actually ‘done it,’ as the kids said. But a couple of things had changed. First, I’d gone to the doctor the month before, and I was now on the pill.”
Mother turned toward me. “I went without consulting my mother. Would you believe it? She didn’t think a young girl needed to have a pelvic exam before she got married. And she knew Bill and I didn’t want to have kids right away, but she wouldn’t even discuss birth control with me. Or sex, for that matter. I got a book from the library.”
“You did much better with me, Mom.”
“If I did, it was in spite of her, not because of any lesson I learned from her.”
“You said two things had changed. What was the second one?”
Mom thought about it a moment. “I guess the second one was Mother’s unfortunate remark.”
“That she didn’t need to worry about your getting pregnant?”
“Yes. I finally rebelled.”
“A lot of kids would have rebelled a lot earlier.”
“Bill had always gone along with my decision, bless him, but he was just a regular twenty-year-old guy. When it became clear that I’d changed my mind from ‘slow down’ to ‘go ahead,’ he reached in his pocket and came out with a key. ‘Let’s not stay here, in the car,’ he said. ‘Let’s go someplace special.’ I said I’d be afraid to go to a motel, but he grinned real big and said that wasn’t it.
“Bill got a flashlight out of the glove box, and a blanket out of the trunk. Then he led me onto the back porch of the McKay house. The key he had was to the back door. He’d snitched it from his dad.
“I was nervous—fearful, but excited. I said, ’What if some of the McKays come?’ But Bill said the father and stepmother were in Europe, and that Quinn was in Chicago.
“The electricity was off, but Bill used his flashlight to show me the kitchen, which was small, and the living room, which was nice, but not elegant. Antiquey. Then he said, ’This is what I wanted you to see,’ and he took me into a bedroom that was right off the living room. And it
was
elegant, but with a rustic twist. Polar bear rug. Mink bedspread. Stone fireplace. Fourposter bed carved to look like tree trunks. Heck, those posts looked like
redwood
trunks, real heavy.”
“It doesn’t really sound like a lakeshore cottage ought to look, Mom.”
“Thinking back, I’d say it was in the worst possible taste. But Mr. McKay—he was always bringing home a new wife, and that’s what the current one had wanted, I guess. I remember that the windows had heavy drapes with elaborate wooden cornices.” She laughed. “It was really something, a sort of a Victorian brothel. Anyway, it didn’t take long for Bill to spread his blanket on the bed—we weren’t so passionate that we forgot that we didn’t want to leave a mess—not even dirty sheets. And—well, we took our clothes off and got on that fancy bed.”
She quit talking, and I didn’t say anything either.
“We got pretty involved with each other, but before anything had actually—well, happened!—this blinding light began flashing around the living room.”
She turned toward me and put her hands to her head in a frantic gesture. “Lee, if I live to be a hundred, nothing will ever scare me like that did.”
I didn’t know if I should laugh or cry. The thought of the innocent almost–bride and groom—ages eighteen and twenty—getting caught in a fantasy bedroom in a lonely cottage was right out of a sex comedy. But what might have been funny in the movies would not have been the least bit humorous in real life.
“How awful!” I said. “So you weren’t as alone as you thought. What did you do?”
“I slid off the bed on the opposite side from the door. Then I crawled around to the foot, trying to find my clothes while not making a single sound. Of course, Bill was doing the same thing on the other side of the bed. We might have been able to hide—get into the closet or something—except that Bill stepped on my hand, and I yelped. Oh, it was a scene from a smutty comedy. A nightmare.
“Somebody out in the living room said, ‘What’s that?’ and came to the door and flashed the light around the bedroom. Bill and I were spotlighted—both of us still stark naked.
“I was sure, of course, that it was Bill’s dad. After all, he was caretaker for the place, and they’d had some problem with prowlers, so I thought he’d come around to check. So I was embarrassed, but not frightened. Then the person laughed! Laughed!
“Bill said, ‘Ed?’ I thought he was talking to his dad. At first I couldn’t figure out why he was calling his dad by his first name.”
I gasped. “Ed? Was it Bill’s brother? The one who had gone to Canada?”
“At the time, I couldn’t figure out who it was. Bill told me to get dressed, and he grabbed his clothes and took them out into the living room. He left the flashlight, but he closed the door behind him. And I began to try to scramble into my clothes.”
“I’d have been shaking too hard to button a button.”
“I was wearing some sort of a granny dress, I think. I managed to get it on backward, I remember, and had to take it off and try again. And one of my sandals was under the bed. I had to get under there with the spiderwebs to find it. I finally managed to get everything on, and then I sat down at this weird dressing table—carved weirdly, I mean. I swear it had gargoyles on the legs. I sat there and cried.”
“You were just a kid!”
“I was really too young to be getting married, though I did love Bill. But right at that moment I was so embarrassed and terrified I could have died. And the noises coming from the living room didn’t help.”
“What was happening?”
“Let’s call it raised voices.”
“Bill and Ed were arguing?”
“Bill and Ed and someone else. There was another voice. They were all talking at once. This strange voice yelled. ‘Just go outside!’ The voice sounded kind of familiar, but I never have been able to figure out who it was. Once Ed yelled, ‘Shut up, Ratso!’ I remember that—because of that movie with Dustin Hoffman. Then I heard Bill yell. He said, ‘You’ll go to jail, and they’ll throw away the key!’ I remember that. And Ed—I guess it was Ed—yelled back. ‘I guess you want to turn Lake Michigan into a sewer!’ ”
“That was an odd thing to say, in the circumstances.”
“Not if you knew Ed. He was absolutely fanatic on stopping pollution. Definitely a Greenpeace type. Militant. He turned every argument into something about the environment—no matter what the topic started out as.”
“What finally happened?”
“I sat there, scared and crying, and I decided that I had to get out of there, one way or another. And I didn’t want to go out through the living room, where the argument was going on. So I began to explore around the bedroom. Looked at all the windows and such.”
“Since the shutters were up, that wouldn’t have been a very easy way to get out.”
“Actually, there was an outside door. Of course, I’d known it was there, because Bill and I had hung around the house a lot that summer. I should have thought of it immediately. It led to a deck outside the master bedroom. And the deck was an extension of the porch that went all around the house.”
“The door wasn’t shuttered?”
“No. It was a heavy, solid door with a deadbolt, and it wasn’t shuttered like the windows were. Of course, right at that moment all I wanted to do was disappear. That door looked like the door to heaven.”
“It didn’t have a key lock?”
“Yes, it did. I was still exploring around with the flashlight, and I found the key to the house where Bill had left it on the bedside table. And it worked the deadbolt lock. In fact, I think the lock had just been lubricated, and it opened very easily—didn’t make a sound. So I opened it and ran outside—and that’s when I had the worst shock of the whole ghastly evening.”
“What else could happen, Mom! A dinosaur or something?”
“Worse. I slipped out, flashing my light around, and that light hit the face of a strange man!”
I gasped, but I must have rolled my eyes at the same time. This whole tale was worthy of the plot of some sort of romance novel. Absolutely crazy. I would have thought Mom made the whole thing up, except that she’d never displayed that sort of imagination before.
“A strange man?” I’m afraid my voice showed my skepticism.
“Actually, after a moment I realized that I knew who it was. But it was still an awful shock.”
“Who was it?”
“It was Quinn McKay.”
“What was he doing there?”
“I didn’t stop to ask. I screamed the house down.”
“I can imagine.”
“Bill began to yell. ‘If you guys have done anything to hurt Sally, I’ll kill you!’ And other stuff like that. He was coming around the back of the house, and I ran that way. We whammed together on the side porch, and I screamed again. Bill grabbed my hand, and we ran for the shed and Bill’s car. We jumped in. Ed had followed us. He came up to Bill’s window and was beating on it. His hair was flying, and he had a lot of hair. He looked like a madman. Bill started the motor, and we dug out of there.”
Mom gave a sort of sob. “Bill told me to make sure no one was following us—we were going through some sort of a back road that really needed a Jeep, and we didn’t have one. But nobody came after us. So Bill drove me home.”
“When did he send you to Chicago?”
“As soon as we got to my house. We sat in the drive a minute, and he asked if I could get my clothes out of the house without waking my mom up. I said that was easy—she’d been taking sleeping pills. But I didn’t understand why he wanted me to. That’s when Bill said he had to go back to the McKay cottage and ‘take care of things.’ ”
“What things?”
“I couldn’t get him to explain. But he was absolutely insistent that I leave. Right that minute. I was to go to Chicago, but I wasn’t to go to the apartment we’d rented. I was to go to the hotel where we’d stayed on our senior trip and wait until he contacted me. He gave me all the money he had on him. It was three hundred dollars.”
“Not much to run away from home on.”
“It was nearly thirty-five years ago, Lee. Money went farther. And Bill assured me he’d be in contact with me within twenty-four hours. Then he took me to South Haven and left me at the all-night gas station out on the interstate. He told me to take a cab to the bookstore—that’s where the bus stop was—at six a.m. The bus would come through before seven.”
“So you did what Bill said.”
“Right. I got to Chicago by noon, and I went to that hotel and checked in. Then I waited for Bill to call.”
“But he didn’t.”
“No. I sat there all day, afraid to even go out and buy food or a magazine. I kept remembering he’d promised to call me within twenty-four hours. But twenty-four hours went by without a call. Forty-eight hours went by.”
“What did you do?”
“Finally I decided I simply had to call him. So I got a lot of coins, and I went to a pay phone, and I called the Dykstras’ house. Mrs. Dykstra answered. I could tell something was wrong as soon as I heard her voice.”
“Did she tell you Bill had committed suicide?”
“She didn’t use that word. I’ve always remembered that. She told me he was found dead on a back road—it was nowhere near the McKay house—and that the sheriff was investigating. I was shocked, but I told her Bill had sent me away and that I was sure he hadn’t committed suicide.”
“What did she say to that?”
“She said for me not to come back. She asked if I had enough money to stay a few days. When I said yes, she said for me not to tell her where I was, but to call her at the end of the week. If things hadn’t been settled, she said, she’d send me more money.”
“That is so strange! You should have been asked about what happened between Bill and his brother.”
“I know. Even then, young and dumb as I was, I knew I needed to tell the law enforcement officials what had happened.”
Mom took a deep breath. “So, the next day I called the sheriff.”
“What! You called Van Hoosier?”
“Yes. I just felt that I had to.”
“Did you tell him the whole story?”
“I left out the part about being naked. But I told him all the important stuff. About Ed being there. About seeing Quinn McKay.”
“You were an important witness. Why didn’t Van Hoosier come to pick you up?”
“I have no idea, Lee. I’ve never had any idea.”
“What did he say?”
“He told me that Bill had given me exactly the right advice. He said I should stay away. He told me to move to a different hotel and not tell anyone where I was.”
“That’s crazy!
Mom wiped her eyes, crying openly now. “Lee, he told me never to come back to Warner Pier under any circumstances, or I could wind up either dead or in jail!”
Chapter 18
I
was so outraged I couldn’t speak. I took ten deep breaths before I could get a word out. And when I did speak I was completely incoherent.
“If somebody hadn’t killed that creep before I met him,” I said, “I might have done it myself. To run an innocuous—I mean an innocent!—an innocent girl out of town like that. It was, it was . . .” My vocabulary failed me, but I finally went on. “It was
immortal
! I mean, immoral!”