Chapter 1: The Last Day of Summer

Naomi Fisher came in at high tide on the last Sunday of August, still wearing the scorched blue dress she’d been murdered in. When the waves swept her up onto the grey beach beside the Abraboca Amusement Mile, she might have been mistaken for a deformed piece of driftwood or even an impossible tangle of seaweed. Of course the black, charred thing the ocean had belched up could not be a girl - that tattered mess could not be hair, those lifeless sockets could never have once been bright blue eyes, the ragged leather would never pass for a semblance of flesh. God, in His infinite mercy, would never be so cruel.

     The whole thing proved a disaster from the outset. From the moment the New Hampshire state police set up camp near the site where the corpse had washed up, the sad and tragic tale of the Burned Girl of Abraboca spread through the New England area like wildfire. The little boys with their scraped knees and crooked teeth stood on every corner shouting the news, passing out their penny papers, spreading the legend that had once been Naomi. One breath, you’re six years old with a heart full of wishes and a lifetime ahead of you; the next, you’re a lump of cooked skin that sells newspapers. Life in short.

     The call had gone out almost three weeks beforehand - a girl is missing, a girl is missing, a girl is missing. Vanished on the way back from school on a rainy day in the heart of August without so much as a bread crumb left behind, Naomi was a ghost in girl’s flesh: she had gone from the world like smoke, breath on a mirror. It had been nearly past midnight when the knock came to the door of my apartment near the beachfront.

     “Swansea,” I told him when he asked my name. “John Swansea.”

     A pause. Wide, leery eyes stared me up and down.

    “Are you from England, Mister John Swansea?” The skinny, bulbous-nosed man craned his head at me, as if a horizontal angle could give him a better glimpse. “I knew a fella from England not half a lifetime ago. Talked just as funny as you, if my memory serves.”

     “Your memory does indeed serve.” I ran a hand through my tangle of hair, trying to pass for a sober, responsible member of the human race. The stench of whiskey pumped through my breath like poison. So much for first impressions. “From London, actually. Just moved in.”

     “Pleasure to meet you, British John Swansea, new in town. I’m Leonard Lawson myself.” He held out his hand and I my own. If he happened to take notice of the fact that I was dancing with pink elephants, he didn’t let it show. “You got a moment? Neighborhood business, you see. Hate to wake you at stupid o’clock at night, but it’s urgent.”

     “Yeah,” I said, stepping aside and silently cursing every god in every heaven. “Come on in. It’s still a little messy, but -”

     “No need for that, sir.” He went on to tell me about Naomi Fisher, about her auburn hair and her freckles and her bright blue eyes and bright blue dress - missing, he said, never came back from school. He said that the local police were getting a search party together, that every moment counted, that every pair of eyes was welcome. “Of course,” I told him. I was ready, willing, and able.

     I spent that night skulking through the rain-swept mud behind Leonard Lawson and his dim, dirt-stained lantern with nothing but the stars and a crescent moon to light the way.  We split off from the rest of the group early in the endeavor, owing primary to Lawson’s insistence that any kidnappers worth their salt would head in the general direction of Rhode Island, because “that’s where all the a******s live.” And though we failed to pull any dead children out of the weeds that night, I found myself in the company of Lawson more and more in the weeks that followed. In all my haste to settle myself in and get my office set up, I’d never even bothered to acquaint myself with Abraboca, to which Lawson kindly obliged.

     Not that there was much to see. Abraboca was (and still is, I’d imagine) a small, Podunk town on the coast of New Hampshire, built along the beachfront like a lighthouse on rocky shore-side cliffs. The town itself consisted of a few shops and a sparse marketplace, along with the typical church, courthouse, and schoolhouse. Houses were scattered here and about, mostly along the beachfront out of the market area. Or maybe it was the other way around. Who knows? It’s been so long I’ve forgotten most of it.

     That said, I will go to my grave remembering that sky. The sea above Abraboca was dark and cloudy and musky, always rainy but never raining. I spent my first few weeks dreading some terrible oncoming storm only to realize that none was ever going to come. Local legend swears that you if you stand out near the water at night with the ocean licking your toes and your ears at attention, you can hear the ghosts of Abraboca past whispering with the waves. And you’d be like to believe it. The whole town is just too perfect - perfect little white houses, perfect little shops, perfect little beach along a perfect, crooked shore and a bleak, overcast sky to stare down at it all. It’s like a painting that’s a thousandth of a quarter of an inch crooked. You stare, you stare, and stare some more, but all you know is that something is wrong, that something is bothering you and there wasn’t enough time in all the stars and whirlwinds of galaxies to figure out what it was.

     The Abrabocan night life (and I use those last two words in the loosest possible sense) comprised of a tiny, wind-worn pub next to the Amusement Mile. Lawson and I spent most of our nights at the Dark Horse Tavern, which suited me just fine; he talked (mostly about President Harding) and I listened (except for the parts about President Harding).

     In between his rants about how the Republicans were the worst thing to happen to the world since Archduke Ferdinand got popped off, he finally asked what had brought me to the Greatest Country on Earth. “I’m writing a novel,” I told him, which was only half-true. Novels imply some level of fiction, while the contents of my book (which, at that point, consisted of little more than a few notes and a list of discarded titles) were most definitely the other way ‘round.

     “A novel?” He leaned in, interested. The thought that I was some foreign author he’d never heard of no doubt crossed his mind. “What’s it about, if you don’t my asking? Not romance, I hope. Can’t stomach the stuff. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

     “It’s not about romance,” I told him, and left it at that.

     I was with Lawson the day the Atlantic gave us back Naomi. His wife (the unfathomably lovely Mrs. Jane Lawson) had played matchmaker and set me up with her cousin, a freckled little thing with auburn hair and a gap-toothed smile that was more than a little adorable. She was cute, in her own way, but a little old for my tastes. Mrs. Lawson had made the understandable assumption that I was in my late thirties and made the match accordingly. If I’d told her I wasn’t even out of my twenties yet, she would have taken it as a joke, and who could blame her? It’s not a matter of vanity - I knew that my hair was greying, that my flesh was sallow, that my eyes were sunken and lifeless. The fact that I smoked two packs of cigarettes a day and routinely downed enough social lubricant to kill a pride of lions probably had something to do with that.

     It was the Last Day of Summer as far the Amusement Mile was concerned, so the bright, glittering stretch of Ferris wheels and carnival games celebrated with one last hurrah before going into hibernation. Children bustled around, screaming and laughing. Music played. Stars danced overhead even as the sun clung stubbornly to the horizon.  And when the littlest Lawson refused to return home with her parents, Angie (or maybe it was Amy) volunteered us to step in as chaperones.

     If there’s time for a confession, I suppose it’s now: I hate children. They’re loud, they’re sticky, and they have minor psychological breakdowns the moment they don’t get what they want. Parliament, basically. But Darcy Lawson, with her tiny gap-toothed grin and face that more freckles then skin, well, kids are rarely that bearable.

     Near the end, as the last day of summer whispered the last verses of its song under a twilit sky, Darcy happened upon what was labeled The Balloon Pump, a game where they attached a balloon to an air pump and gave you a guess at how many pumps a balloon could take before it popped.

     The vendor smiled as he slipped a bright green sliver over the tip of the vent and asked Darcy how many pumps she wished to bet. Darcy thought about it for a moment, grinned her gap-toothed grin, and said, “Halfway through the ninth pump.”

     And so it was that, just shy of nine pumps, the big green balloon became a lot of little green pieces. Darcy won a big stuffed bear for her troubles. She handed it to me.

     “Papa days your apartment doesn’t have any color, so you can have him. And I don’t like bears because I’ve heard they’re really serious about porridge. You can win me something else, if you want.”

     Walking along the damp pier with Amy (or maybe it was Angie) clinging to my arm and laughing and watching Darcy point out at all the colorful, stuffed prizes she wanted me to win, I couldn’t help but feel that strange, nagging suspicion at the back of my head that this - all this - was perfectly normal and that I was once again becoming an average, functioning member of the human race. All I had to do was jump continents and presto! Good as new.

     Understandably, that all came crashing down when they found the dead girl on the beach. A gaggle of children had broken off from the festivities at the pier and decided to rebuild the Alamo, this time with sand. From what I’ve heard, they’d finished half the north wall when Naomi Fisher crashed the party in her burnt blue dress. There was a lot of screaming, apparently.

     A small crowd gathered at the spot as soon as the yells and cries had started. The water had spat her up onto her back, leaving her face to gaze at the star-strewn sky she could no longer see. Amy clung to me, staining my shirt with tears. I realized all too late that Darcy was standing beside me, staring with wide, empty eyes that gave away nothing as she hugged the stuffed bear. Everyone else was yelling and crying and hugging each other and making such a commotion you’d think that the Atlantic had given us Christ Himself.

     Not I, said John Swansea. The cold, pale man from England just stood there, eyes fixed, voice silent. I stared at the body, trying to feel something, anything; disgust, despair, anger, sadness, regret. Nothing would come. My flayed excuse for a soul failed to dredge up any genuine reaction to the tragedy splayed on the sand in front of me. So I stood there, held Amy, and thought about Bernie Lutz.