Dagger Key and Other Stories

Over the next two days Shellane was kept busy in detailing a new passport, setting up bank accounts on-line. Twice he caught sight of Grace walking along the shingle and considered calling to her, but her air of distraction reinforced his belief that she was a woman with time on her hands. Such women had a need for drama in order to give weight to their lives—he did not intend to become the co-star in her therapy. But he continued to speculate about who she was. He remembered no wedding ring, yet she displayed a kind of cloistered unhappiness that reminded him of married women he had known. Perhaps she removed the ring to give herself the illusion of freedom.

Around noon on the third day, he took a couple of beers, a sandwich, the new James Lee Burke novel, and went down to the shore and sat with his back against a boulder that emerged from the bank, a granite stump scoured smooth by glaciers and warm from the sun. He read only ten or fifteen minutes before laying the book aside. If he had done crime in Louisiana, he thought he might have stayed with it. The players there were more interesting than the Southie ratboys he’d crewed with in Boston…at least if he were to trust the novel. Burke might be exaggerating. Crews were likely the same all over, just different accents. He stared out across the sunstruck lake, watched a motor boat cutting a white wake, too far away for the engine noise to carry over the sighing wind and the slop of the water. He half-believed nothing bad could happen here. That was ridiculous, he knew. Yet he felt serene, secure. It seemed the landscape had adjusted to him, reordered itself to accommodate his two hundred and twenty-six pounds, and settled around him with the perfection of a tailored coat. No way he could hack it here for three years as he had in Detroit. But the fit felt better than it had in Detroit, and he could not understand why this was. He stuck out in Champion. There was no cover, no disguise he could successfully adopt.

He finished one beer, ate half the sandwich, and went back to the book, but his attention wandered. Wind ruffled the long reach of the water, raising wavelets that each caught a spoonful of dazzle, making it appear that a myriad diamond lives were surfacing from the depths. The trees stirred in dark green unison. The shingle was decorated with arrangements of twigs, matted feathers and bones, polished stones. Mysteries and signs. Shellane closed his eyes.

“Hello,” said Grace, and his heart broke rhythm. He let out a squawk and sat up, knocking over his freshly opened beer.

“I’m sorry!” Her chin was quivering, hands upheld in a posture of alarm.

“I didn’t hear you come up,” he said.

She relaxed a little, but still seemed wary, and he had the idea that she was used to being frightened.

“It’s okay,” he said. “No big deal.”

She had on jeans, the plaid jacket, and a T-shirt underneath—black with sequined blue stars. Her hair, loose about her shoulders, shined a coppery red under the sun. All her being was luminous, he thought. It was as if a klieg light were trapped in her body.

“Did you eat yet? I’ve got half a sandwich going to waste.” He held out the baggie containing the sandwich.

She stared at it hungrily, but shook her head. The wind lifted the ends of her hair, fluttered the collar of her jacket.

The depth of her timidity astonished him. Broillard, he figured, had a lot to answer for.

“What are you reading?” she asked.

He showed her the book.

“I don’t know him,” she said.

“It’s detective fiction, but the writing’s great.”

She cast an anxious glance behind her, then sank to her knees beside him. “I mostly read short stories. That’s what I wanted to write…short stories.”

“‘Wanted to write’?”

“I just…he…I couldn’t…I…”

She stalled out, and Shellane resisted the impulse to touch her hand.

“I wasn’t very good,” she said.

“Who told you that?” he asked.

As he spoke he recognized that he was casting aside his resolve and making a choice that could imperil him. Something about Grace, and it was not just her apparent hopelessness, pulled at him, made him want to take the risk. Her face serially mapped her emotions: surprise and alarm and fretfulness. Green eyes crystalled with reflected light.

“Your husband,” Shellane said. “Right?”

“It’s not…” She broke off, and glanced off along the shore road. The blue Cadillac was slewing toward them from the direction of Broillard’s cabin. Grace scooted behind the boulder. As the car turned onto the access road, Shellane saw that the brunette from the tavern occupied the passenger seat. The Cadillac skidded in the gravel, then sped off among the evergreens.

“Did he see me?” Grace emerged from behind the boulder. “I don’t think he did.”

He ignored the question. “He brings ’em home? His fucking bimbos? You’re there, and he just brings ’em home?”

Her nod was almost imperceptible, hardly more than a tucking in of the chin.

“Why do you put up with it? What does he do? Does he hit you?”

“He never…No. Not for a long time.”

“Not for a long time? Terrific!”