Page 17 of The Gallagher Place
“I’m not a kid anymore; I’m almost sixteen.” Nate slouched in his chair. “Anyway, Tom swam all the time whenhewas a kid. If it’s such a big deal, I can get lifeguard training. Will that make everyone feel better?”
Glory laid down her fork. “You’re not swimming out there ever again, unless Enzo is present. And that’s final.”
A sense of relief spread across the room. Glory wouldn’t make them return to the city or stay inside the Gray House for the rest of the summer, as Marlowe had feared. This was just one more rule. And Tom had ended up bearing the brunt of her mother’s fury.
After dinner, as Enzo sliced into a strawberry-rhubarb pie, there was a tap at the front door. Tom Gallagher stood in the yard, his faded green hat pushed up above his damp sun-weathered brow. An iron tractor tire rim sat aloft on three bricks on the grass behind him. Frank reached out his hand, and Tom shook it in his own leathery paw and nodded at Glory before pointing at the tire rim.
“Makes the best firepit,” Tom said. “Figured the kids would like it.”
Glory thanked him with genuine glee, recognizing the gift as an apology. She said she remembered her father having the same thing behind his house. Marlowe was reminded that Tom had known Glory as a child. Her mother’s family had owned a nearby dairy farm, and Glory’s father knew the Gallaghers, running into them at least a few times a year at livestock and farm equipment auctions. Glory would forgive Tom for his part in the crime.
Enzo told Henry that the next day, he would show them how to build a fire and would go into town to pick up some good chocolate for s’mores.
That night, while Marlowe and Nora sat cross-legged on their twin beds, Nate and Henry tiptoed into the girls’ room.
“We’ll obviously still swim,” Nate declared. “We just have to stick together and make sure that Enzo doesn’t find out.” The Bend was too good a place to give up, and the four of them nodded in agreement. In somber tones, each of them vowed never to tell. It was a simple promise to make: If any of them were in danger, they would save each other.
SUNDAY
NOVEMBER 25, 2018
NINE
Marlowe carried Kat’s bag to the car, her niece trotting beside her, the pink pom-pom on her hat bobbing with each step. Her younger niece, Dolly, was already complaining about having to go back to school the next day. Nate and Stephanie were driving home to Hartford, and Henry and Constance were heading to the city. They would return next weekend, and the moment school let out for winter break, they’d all be back in the Gray House for the holidays—just like always.
Marlowe heaved the bag into the trunk. Stephanie rounded the car and adjusted the placement before quickly hugging Marlowe goodbye. Nate followed her with a longer hug and a few reassuring pats on the back.
“Don’t worry, this will be over soon,” he said.
Nate and Stephanie pulled away with the girls, while Constance was still buckling little Frankie into his car seat. Marlowe turned to Henry and gave him a brief embrace.
“Take care of Enzo,” Henry said. “I’ll be back later this week, as soon as I can get away from the office.”
Increasingly, Henry reminded Marlowe and Nate that they all needed to look out for the old man. He had lived on his own inQueens since moving to New York in his thirties, but after being hired by the Fishers, he spent most of his time with them, until he grew too old to work. Enzo visited the Gray House only during holidays now, and Henry worried that Queens was a harsh exile.
“Enzo will be fine,” Marlowe reassured him. “I’ll see you soon.”
And then they were gone. The Gray House was quiet except for Glory digging out the Christmas decorations and Frank puttering from room to room with a book. Enzo stayed in his room, resting.
Marlowe retreated to the basement. Instead of opening her sketchbooks, which would have been the sensible thing to do, she went online to check the local news. A more recent article about Harmon’s death had been posted, but it offered no new information. Still, she lingered over a line in the third paragraph:Harmon leaves behind a grieving mother, Layla Gallagher.Of course, she knew that Harmon’s mother had identified his body, but in her initial shock, Marlowe hadn’t given much consideration to who Layla was in relation to the Gallagher brothers. Marlowe read the line again, anticipating a ring of familiarity. She had never heard the Gallagher brothers mention Layla, and couldn’t recall ever seeing a woman visit their property. Without thinking, Marlowe opened a new tab and typed Layla’s name into the search bar.
Layla had lost her husband, Peter Gallagher, five years earlier. The cause of death was referred to as an unspecified illness in the short obituary. His friends called him Pete, and he had worked at a Tractor Supply Co. store a few towns over—a fact that was also unfamiliar to her, though she knew of the store. Harmon was Pete and Layla’s only child. How abandoned she must feel now. All alone, just as Marlowe assumed the Gallagher brothers had been.
Tom, Dave, and Leroy’s house had been bare when Frank ordered it torn down. Had Frank known that besides an empty house, the brothers had left people behind as well? Who was Peteto them precisely? Had they shared a great-grandparent? He wasn’t the relative who had inherited the property and sold it. Marlowe wanted to ask her father, but she knew her questions would upset him. He would tell her, as Nate had, not to worry about it. To get some rest. To work on her painting.
Marlowe paused with her hands hovering over her keyboard. Her half-hearted searches were fruitless. Tom, Dave, and Leroy had parents, and those parents must have had siblings. So Pete Gallagher was a possible cousin. Or second cousin. He would have been far younger, Marlowe thought. She pressed her fingers to her eyes as she realized she didn’t even have a guess at the Gallagher brothers’ ages. When she was a child, they had already looked old, but not decrepit—that was as much as she remembered.
Everything else she recalled felt flimsy, as if it couldn’t be trusted.
The Gallaghers had been nothing but kind to Marlowe and her siblings, even when they had been running wild all over their land. But they were strange. Perhaps stranger than she’d realized as a child. The way Leroy never talked but only stared—even Tom’s friendliness was warping in her mind. Why was he always showing them places on his land, giving them little gifts, asking about their games? As for Dave, she and Nora, with their overactive imaginations, had made up stories about him harboring a secret broken heart based on a rumor Nora’s father had told her about a long-ago engagement that was called off without explanation. They romanticized his past, crafting a tale of young lovers torn apart by cruel parents and interfering siblings, even searching the desk in the tiny barn office for hidden love letters that might have contained years of pining for a girl whose family didn’t approve of him. But what if the source of the rumor hadn’t been tragic, but sordid instead?
With a huff of frustration, Marlowe stood up and reached for her coat. She tugged on her boots and slipped out through the basement doors. A glance up at the windows as she rounded the corner of the house told her no one was looking out. Both her father and Enzo napped around midday, and Glory was probably taking advantage of the silence to read. Marlowe slowed after she crossed the road. She thought to go toward the Rise, perhaps head all the way out to the Flats once again, looking for what Harmon had hoped to find there in the darkness. But she stopped at the barn and placed one hand on the door, the paint faded and dull beneath her fingers. She had left too quickly to put on gloves, and the rough splintered wood dug into the bare skin of her palm.
Just above her was the dim loft where she and Nora had played. They had watched the Gallagher brothers push open the heavy sliding doors over and over with ease. Leroy was lean, almost scrawny, but Dave and Tom had larger, protruding bellies, markers of their age and poor diets. Beneath their thick coats and worn flannel shirts, all three of them had been strong. Tom would sometimes pat Marlowe or Nora on the head when they were little, and his touch was always gentle. She shook Dave’s work-worn hand once and was startled by his almost effeminate grip. Leroy had never touched her. Whether he was ill at ease around children or people in general, he steered clear of them. And yet Marlowe had seen him, countless times, tenderly patting the soft necks of his cows as he led them in from the fields.
She put her back to the barn and crossed the road again, but at a diagonal toward the path that led upward along the side of the North Field and eventually into the woods above. The trek up the hill was steep but short, and the view from the top was Marlowe’s favorite. She headed up there almost every day when she was at the Gray House, to think about a project or to daydream. When friendsor fellow artists she knew from grad school visited her, she always took them up to admire the vista of rolling hills, the farms in the distance, and the blue outline of the Catskill Mountains.
At the top, she took in the stunning view of the house and fields below her, but her mind was too busy to appreciate it. Instead, she wondered what the Gallagher girl had been running away from all those years ago.
