Page 35 of Dead of Summer
She tilts her head to read the top page. It is a nondisclosure agreement.
Faith has never seen one in real life. She scans the page until she gets to the bottom, where a name is signed in shaky blue ink.
Bernice Gallo
The page below it is another NDA. It reads the same. There is a whole stack of them there, all reading the same. Only the signatures are different. She looks back at the first one. The date next to the signature is the same, July 5, 2008.
Orla O’Connor
She is still trying to make sense of it all when more footsteps sound in the hallway. They grow louder and pause outside the door. She ducks down under the desk as the door opens. A throat being cleared. She can see a pair of shiny Italian shoes. They stop a few paces from the desk.
An incoming text dings loudly on her phone, and she quickly smothers it with her hand as though to shush it. Below the desk she freezes. She begins to panic, wondering how she could possibly explain herself. She watches the feet shuffle back and forth, then turn abruptly back to the door, tapping loudly as they disappear from sight. She hears the door as it closes again. Faith lets out a slow uneasy breath, unsure how she wasn’t caught. Faith slides the papers back into the drawer. Then she creeps sheepishly back out into the hall, run-walking away from the office door. She hears something mechanical as she walks down the hall, followed by a familiar beep. Faith is heavy with dread as she keeps going. She doesn’t need to look this time to know a camera is following her. It’s only once she is safely back in her room that she remembers the text and looks at her phone.
The message from Elena reads:Call me. But only when you are alone.
HENRY
Late in the afternoon there is an unexpected pounding on the screen door. Henry has spent all day dealing with a new crack that had sprung up overnight. It is common to have cracks in the walls; the pylons below the house tended to shift ever so slightly. But the night had been particularly windy, angry gusts rattling at the walls, and he awoke to the sound of splitting wood. Rushing into the main room, he found a new crack traveling from the floor up to the ceiling. Water was already leaking through, streaming down the walls.
“If you don’t fix that today it will grow,” Margie had said. Henry had sighed as he continued not wanting to face it. “It will spread and spread. This whole place could go down before you know it.”
Of course, Margie was right. A crack that big would need instant attention. Dismayed that he’d have to forfeit most of the day’s observation time to repairing it, he’d dragged supplies out of the closet and mixed up some plaster. Up close the wall was crisscrossed with a web of plaster lines from previous repairs, and he saw this crack was even worse than he thought. He’d swallowed anxiously as he took in the fissure, wider than any he’d seen before. The first coat of plaster sank into the crack, making multiple coats necessary. It was still a garish thing to look at, a wet river of gray that traveled in a jagged lightning bolt down the wall.
“Just a minute,” Henry calls loudly to whoever is banging on the door. Glancing at the logbook still open on the table, he rushes back and sloppily slides a large tidal chart across the top of it, smudging it with plaster. No one else needs to know about Matilda Warren’s trip down to the water in her bathrobe last night. He’d watched in shock as the octogenarian had slipped it off and dove into the waves completely nude, gracefully swimming out into the cove in the dying light. When he turns back, Jean hasn’t listened to him and has already opened the door. She barges inside. Her cheeks are red from the wind, her graying hair frizzled by the ocean air. This time she has no grocery bags.
“I need you to tell me what you know about Gemma.” The words fall out of her.
“Who?” Henry asks, trying to keep up. His heart thuds.
“Gemma,” Jean says again, impatient. “The young girl I hired at the Crab. The one who came to the house.”
“What about her?”
“She’s gone,” Jean’s voice crackles.
Henry’s chest seizes. “What do you meangone?”
“Just gone. Vanished. What else can I say?” She throws her hands up, her fingers stiff with frustration. “The police came by the Crab just after close.”
Henry puts his hand to his cheek, worrying his fingers up along the grit of his stubble. “When was this? What night?” Fear has started to gnaw at his insides.
“Last time I saw her was right after I was here with you.”
Jean paces in front of the windows. “I knew it. I thought she was a good worker. That she wouldn’t have gone and quit with no notice like this. But I called her mother, and she hadn’t seen her either. That stupid woman. I should have said something sooner, should have gone to the police. It could have been useful.”
Henry recalls the slim figure of a young woman cutting up Harbor Street and the man going in the other direction. How they’d disappeared behind the thicket of rose hips on the side of the road. He’dmoved his telescope, waiting for them to emerge, but they never did. He had brushed it off, assuming maybe they had met each other and gone off together onto the beach. He itches to page through his logbook, to be sure of the details. He would have written it down.
“What’s wrong, Henry?” Jean stops pacing and looks at Henry suspiciously.
She stands at the edge of his table catching her breath.
“Nothing, I—” Henry backs away. He wishes Jean would go. He needs to think, to look back in the book.
“You saw something, didn’t you?” Her face pales.
“Me? No! What would I have—” he starts feebly, glancing anxiously toward the table, hoping she can’t see the edge of the logbook peeking out from under the tidal chart. He darts toward the kitchen, where he keeps his back to her and fusses with the kettle. But Jean is relentless. She follows him.
“You did, didn’t you? What did you see?What did you see, Henry?” Her voice is coarse and desperate. It sends him stumbling back toward the kitchen island.
