The Summer I Dared: A Novel Page 2

  Those men set off within minutes, reaching the scene quickly enough to fish the first two survivors from the water before they were overcome by smoke from the fire or cold from the sea. The third survivor was picked up by another boat. None of the three suffered more than minor bruises, a true miracle given the fate of the rest.

  Chapter 1

  Julia Bechtel was airborne only as long as it might have taken had a large someone picked her up and heaved her high into the ocean. She went underwater in a stunned state, but she never lost her orientation. Even before her downward plunge slowed, she was clawing against the sea to propel herself back up. When her head broke the surface, she gasped for air. The waves rose around her, but she fought them. Focusing on that singular need to breathe, she used her arms and legs to create a rhythm matching that of the sea in an effort to keep herself afloat.

  Her breath came in shallow gasps, along with a creeping awareness of what had happened. She heard in echo the sound of screams, an impact, and an explosion, all drawn from immediate memory. Pushing wet hair from her eyes, she looked around, trying to get her bearings. The waves were littered with pieces of wood, ejected from the boat just as she had been, but where the rest of the Amelia Celeste should have been there were now flames furiously devouring wood and God knew what else, and the line between black smoke and white fog was lost.

  Instinct told her to move away from the fire, so she fought the tug of the waves and pulled herself backward. Her sandals were gone, as was her pocketbook, and when she felt the weight of the wet quilted blazer dragging her down, she slid her arms from that, too. She was trembling, though she didn’t know whether from cold or from shock. Fear hadn’t yet set in.

  “Hey!” came a shout from the smoky haze, then a head appeared. It was the man who had been with her in the bow. He was swimming toward her. “Are you hurt?” he called loudly enough to be heard above the roar of the flames.

  She didn’t think she was. Everything seemed to be working. “No,” she called back.

  “Hold on to this,” he said as he pulled forward what he’d been towing. It was a long seat cushion, clearly buoyant. “I’m going back in.”

  Grasping the cushion, Julia was about to ask if that was possible, when another staggering explosion came. She barely had time to take a breath when the man pulled her under to escape the falling debris. By the time they resurfaced, gasping and sputtering, treading water in the churn of the waves, the hail was done.

  Going back in was a moot point, then. The flames were louder, the smoke more dense.

  In obvious anguish, the man stared at the devastation. Seemingly as an afterthought, he tore his eyes from the smoke, looked around for the cushion, swam for it, towed it back. “Hold on,” he said, and when Julia complied, he dragged the cushion through the waves, farther away from the wreck. All the while he stared into the smoke and the flames.

  Suddenly, he did an about-face in the water and turned those anguished eyes in the opposite direction. “Hey!” he screamed in desperation toward what Julia assumed was the shore. “Get out here! Hey! There are people who need help!”

  Julia knew he wasn’t referring to himself or to her. They appeared to be unscathed, but there were all those others on the far side of the flames, who might have been hit by debris, knocked unconscious by the explosion, or burned by the fire.

  Incredibly, the man began to swim toward the smoke.

  “Don’t go!” Julia cried. She had visions of his disappearing and never being heard from again—or perhaps she just didn’t want to be left alone. The fog was thick, the fire close, and she had no idea how far they were from shore. For the first time then, with a marginal grasp of what had happened, she did feel fear. The ocean was a big place and she an infinitesimally tiny dot in its midst. Two dots were better than one.

  He kept swimming. After a minute, though, he stopped. He bobbed in place, staring at the flames, before recalculating and swimming to the left of the fire, but the waves fought him there, pushing him back when he might have moved on. So he let himself be carried back to where she was and, once there, grabbed hold of the cushion.

  “Did you see anyone else?” she asked. She was breathing hard, but nowhere near as hard as he was.

  He shook his head, then twisted it back toward shore again. It was another minute before Julia heard what he had, and another minute after that before a boat emerged from the fog. A working lobster boat, it was smaller than the Amelia Celeste and nowhere near as polished, but Julia had never seen anything as welcome in her life.

  In no time, she had been helped over the side and into the boat, wrapped in a blanket and settled in the small cabin under the bow. Once there, though, she began to shake in earnest, because not only were those sounds reverberating in her mind—screams, impact, explosion— but she could see it again: the sudden emergence of a huge purple point coming out of the fog, just high enough to start right over the side of the ferry, before crashing down in its midst.

  Unable to sit still, Julia went back up to the deck, where she stood, dripping wet and trembling under the blanket, now with a hand at her mouth and her eyes on the fog. The smell of smoke was overwhelming; she raised the blanket over her nose to diffuse it.

  The man who had been with her in the water was also aboard, but there was no blanket for him, no coddling. He and two others were leaning over the side, peering through the fog and smoke as the boat dodged its way along between pieces of wood, fiberglass, and miscellaneous other matter that Julia couldn’t identify. Some were burning, some were not.

  The ghost of another search boat flickered briefly in the fog before heading in the opposite direction. When a third search boat appeared, it drew alongside, and the man who had been with her in the water climbed into it.

  Julia didn’t ask questions, and he didn’t look back. He was clearly a local, known by the men in both boats, no doubt known by the rest who had been in the Amelia Celeste. He was worried.

  Feeling a deep sense of dread, she watched the third boat pull away. She followed the sound of it, struggling to see through the fog, until her own boat turned away.

  “We’re gonna get you in,” the captain explained as the boat picked up speed.

  “You don’t have to,” she said quickly. “I’m okay. Shouldn’t we stay here and help with the search?” She felt a need to do that.

  But the captain simply said, “I’ll drop you ashore and come back,” and sped on.

  Chilled as the wind whipped through her wet hair, Julia took shelter in the wheelhouse, eyes on the front windshield, waiting for sign of land. Within minutes, a darkness materialized, a body of land rising from the water, with a serrated skyline rising high above it. Another minute, and the mist thinned to reveal a small fishing village built into a hillside.

  The boat pulled up at the dock. Of the islanders already gathered there, one woman ran forward.

  Zoe Ballard was Julia’s mother’s youngest sister, a late-in-life child, barely twelve years older than Julia. That closeness in age alone would have been enough to justify the bond Julia felt. More, though, Zoe was interesting and adventurous, irreverent, independent. She was everything Julia was not but admired nonetheless.

  And now here she was, wearing a woven patchwork jacket and frayed jeans, her chestnut hair windblown, her features delicate like Julia’s, eyes filled with tears. But her arms were strong, helping Julia as she stumbled off the boat, then hugging her tightly for what seemed like forever. Julia didn’t complain. She couldn’t stop shaking. Zoe’s strength helped. She felt safe with her, safe on dry land, safe and alive— and suddenly terrified that others were not. She looked back at the boat in time to see it head out again.

  That quickly, the crowd closed in, and the questions began.

  “What happened?”

  “How many were on the Amelia Celeste?”

  “Have they pulled others from the water?”

  Not knowing where to look, Julia focused on Zoe. “A boat hit us. There were six, s
even, maybe eight others on the ferry.”

  “Did you catch any names?” Zoe asked and Julia understood why. Ferries like the Amelia Celeste were casual things. Tickets weren’t booked ahead; there would be no list of passengers. Any information Julia could give would be a help to the islanders gathered there.

  But she could only shake her head. The rest of her body continued to tremble. “I was in the bow. They were in the stern.”

  She tried to picture the group she had seen when she boarded the boat, but the image was vague. Running down that dock, she had been distracted and tense after a harrowing seven-hour drive up from Manhattan. It should have been an easy drive—would have been, had she left when she had originally planned. But her husband had given her a raft of last-minute errands, treating her as usual like a maid, something she had come to sorely resent. Driving out of the city, she had wallowed in that resentment, mentally arguing with Monte as she didn’t dare do in person, venting a frustration that had been building for years. Add to that the growing realization that she was late enough to miss the ferry she was booked on, that she didn’t know if there was another ferry that day, and that she had no idea where she would spend the night if she didn’t get to the island, and her level of tension had risen. She had driven above the speed limit much of the way, a problem in and of itself. She didn’t drive often, least of all on the highway. What she had hoped would be a pleasant drive had turned into a white-knuckle experience.

  The only good thing had been her luck in finding the Amelia Celeste ready to leave.

  Lucked out? Well, perhaps. She was alive and well. But others?

  “Her arm’s bleeding,” said a man who emerged from the crowd. He didn’t appear to be out of his thirties, though he carried an air of mature confidence. “Can I check her out?”

  Julia was startled to see the blood on the underside of her forearm.

  “He’s a doctor,” Zoe explained quietly. Stepping out of her clogs, she knelt to put them on Julia’s feet.

  Julia put a hand on her shoulder for balance. “Won’t a Band-Aid do?” she asked, because she didn’t want to leave the dock.

  “His clinic’s right around the corner,” Zoe said as she straightened. Sliding an arm around Julia’s waist, she guided her away.

  “Now you have no shoes.”

  “I have socks,” Zoe said, keeping her moving until a large man wearing a khaki uniform stepped in their path.

  “I have to talk with her,” he said.

  “Not now,” Zoe replied, clearly unintimidated.

  “Something happened out there. I’m opening an investigation.”

  “Not now, John,” Zoe repeated. “She hasn’t stopped trembling. She’s likely in shock. Jake is taking a look, then I’m taking her home.”

  Julia whispered, “I want to stay here.”

  Zoe ignored her.

  The police chief stepped aside.

  With Zoe holding her on the left and the doctor close on her right, Julia was ushered down the dock. When they turned onto Main Street, she saw little of it. Island store, tackle and gear shop, offices for newspaper, postal service, and police—all passed in a blur. She was barely over the threshold of the small clinic, though, when she balked. Something was starting to feel familiar—the same thing she was running from, the sense that she didn’t have a mind of her own.

  “I am not going home right now,” she told Zoe. She kept her voice low, just as her aunt had done with the police chief, but there was no doubting her determination.

  “You need to dry off and warm up,” Zoe said, albeit with greater deference.

  “I need to be down on the dock,” Julia insisted, and something about the sureness in her voice must have registered, because Zoe gave in.

  “Okay, then. Give me my clogs. While Jake checks you out, I’ll drive back to the house for dry clothes.”

  Only then did it strike Julia that she had none of her own. No clothes. No shoes, no socks. No makeup. No books, no camera equipment. All of the things that she had so carefully gathered—been putting aside for months, if the truth were told—for her two weeks on the island were gone. Same with her pocketbook, which meant she had no driver’s license, no credit card, no money. She had no cell phone, no picture of Molly that she kept in her wallet, no dog-eared photos that dated back to her own teenaged years and had been the object of so many dreams. Nor, it dawned on her, did she have any of those other personal papers that she had so painstakingly gathered.

  She was grappling with the realization of all that when Zoe slipped out the door. By the time she returned, twenty minutes had passed, and Julia had been judged in fine health aside from the jagged tear on her arm, which the doctor stitched.

  “A week for the stitches,” she heard him tell Zoe, while she pulled on the dry clothing Zoe had brought. “The shaking will stop. I offered her a sedative, but she refused it. She’s apt to feel bruised all over by morning. Call me if there’s pain.”

  Julia zipped the jeans, pulled a T-shirt and sweater on carefully over her bandaged arm, then wool socks and sneakers, and a fleece jacket, appreciating the warmth with each layer. She used Zoe’s blow-dryer for a minute, brushed out her hair, and pulled on a baseball cap that said Foss Fish and Lobster. Then she joined the others in the front room.

  “I’m ready,” she said quietly, and was grateful when—rather than tell her how pale she was, that she needed food, a hot bath, and sleep more than she needed to return to the dock—Zoe simply nodded.

  The three retraced their steps. The mist over the harbor had thinned some, and the visibility was improved, but what had been gained was being quickly consumed by dusk. Enough light remained to show Julia a maze of side docks meandering off the main. Empty slips, along with a dearth of lobster boats at harbor moorings, suggested that the entire local fleet had joined the search. As Julia approached, another pulled away from its dinghy and motored toward open water with its running lights on, spotlights blazing from the wheelhouse roof.

  The dock itself was lit by tall torches and crowded with people. The town had come out en masse, a throng of worried faces, watchful eyes, and joined hands.

  Holding Julia by the arm, Zoe waded right in. “What’s the word?”

  “Not good,” said a woman with a cell phone in her hand. “Rescue boats have come from the mainland. Emergency vehicles are waiting on that end.” She stopped short, but the look in her eyes went farther.

  “What are they expecting?” Julia asked, needing confirmation.

  “Burns,” the woman said, but again stopped short.

  Julia closed her eyes for only a second, but it was enough to be right back out there with the others in the ferry, enough to see that purple boat burst out of the fog, enough to hear the screams and feel the impact, enough to be thrown by the explosion. Body parts. That was what the woman hadn’t said, and suddenly Julia glimpsed the scope of the horror.

  Trembling head to toe, she wrapped her arms around herself and turned to the water, though there was little to see and even less to hear: the roar of flames, the rumble of rescue vessels, the sirens were gone. Except for the occasional low talk over a cell phone or radio transmitter, she heard precious little other than the waves that slapped pilings under the pier, rocked boats at their moorings, and broke resoundingly against granite boulders that lined the outer shore.

  Behind Julia, the conversation went on in hushed tones, muted by a fear that was heavy and stark. Glancing over the crowd, she could have picked those closest to the missing. They were at the center of each small group. By contrast, a gray-haired man stood alone at the very end of the dock. His hands were anchored in the pockets of a worn brown jacket that hung over loose corduroy pants.

  “Matthew Crane,” Zoe said, following her gaze. “The Amelia Celeste is his. He’s probably wishing he’d been at the helm himself, instead of Greg. Greg has a young family.”

  Julia was trying to absorb that information when the woman with the cell phone said on a note of accusation, �
�It was Artie Jones’s racer. They’re picking up purple debris.”

  Again Zoe explained to Julia, “Artie’s up from Portsmouth. He has a house down on the shaft. You remember.”

  Julia did. Big Sawyer was shaped like an ax. It was broadest and most densely populated at its head, which included the harbor, near the flat of the blade, the fishing village, which climbed the wooded hill, and, at the back of the head, viewing open ocean, the artists’ homes. The shaft, extending off to the southeast, was long and narrow. Seasonal residents lived there, putting a certain distance between the lavishness of their homes and boats and the down-to-earth functionality of the locals. The arrangement suited both groups just fine.

  “Artie made it big in the Internet boom,” Zoe went on, “and if he suffered when the whole thing went bust, you’d never know it. His house is huge. No expense was spared.” She caught a breath. “If it was The Beast, Artie was the one at the helm. No one else drives that boat. He’s out there, too.”

  “Is his family here?” Julia asked softly.

  “No,” answered the woman. “They don’t move up until the kids finish school. Artie comes alone to open the house and put The Beast in the water.” She looked past them. A boat had come in and was approaching the dock, drawing the crowd. “There’s the Willa B. Looks like she has someone.” She set off.

  That someone, Zoe told Julia as soon as she made the identity, was Kim Colella. She was standing on her own steam and appeared to be unhurt. Wrapped in a large towel with her hair soaked and her head bowed, she looked to Julia to be little more than a child, but when, in a voice tinged with horror, she said just that, Zoe was quick to correct her.