The Storm King Read online

  The bartender had a smile on her face, but when she turned to Nate, her body went rigid. Her open expression closed like a flower on the brink of night.

  “She’s in the back,” the bartender finally said after an uncomfortable pause. She barely looked old enough to tend the bar. “Want me to get her?”

  “Sure,” Nate said.

  In this town there was no point in wondering how a girl this young knew him by sight.

  The college guys paid no attention as Nate settled in a few stools away, but the locals in the back got quiet. Their curiosity pulled on his shoulders, a familiar weight.

  He heard Grams’s sure stride before she burst through the kitchen doors. He Skyped with her every Sunday but hadn’t seen her in person since her last visit to the city back in July. She’d been spindle tall and steely gray for as long as he’d known her, and she looked only a little more stooped than he remembered.

  “My beautiful boy,” she said.

  Nate bent to kiss her on the cheek and she pulled him tight.

  “I’d have met you at the green,” she said.

  “And abandon the place to this crowd?” His gesture encompassed the empty tables and half dozen patrons. “Can’t trigger a riot in my first ten minutes home. Got to pace myself.”

  She cuffed him on the shoulder. “Be good, you devil.”

  “What happened to the window?” he asked.

  “Oh.” She glanced at the front of the bar. The plastic sheet tensed with the breeze like an inflating lung. “That last thunderstorm. Fella keeps bringing the wrong size pane. We’ll need to plank it good and tight for the hurricane. You’re so thin, boy.” She poked him in the ribs. “I’ll bring you something.”

  When she disappeared into the kitchen, Nate’s phone buzzed with a new message. A pic of Livvy and her china doll grin ensconced in her grandmother’s lap. She and Meg had reached the New Jersey hills. They were safe.

  He tucked away his phone, and the girl behind the bar slid him a pint.

  “Looks like you could use that.” Perhaps it was an apology for her initial reaction. “This can’t be an easy place to come back to.” She was pretty, with her high cheekbones, green eyes, and porcelain skin.

  He nodded. Something he liked about the city was how so few of its millions knew or cared about his business. The beer gave him an excuse not to look at her.

  “I’m TJ,” she said. She bit one edge of her red lips, and Nate couldn’t tell if the flicker in her eyes was hospitality, curiosity, or something else entirely. He didn’t want to find out.

  “Nice to meet you, TJ,” he said. He rubbed his eyes as if he were tired, displaying the flash of his wedding band. Focusing on the static undersides of his lids, he wished for the girl to dissolve into the floorboards.

  The girl remained, but Grams returned from the kitchen with a grilled cheese and a cup of tomato soup.

  “Tommy know you’re coming up today?” Grams asked as she settled in next to him. TJ moved on to the college guys, who seemed happy to have her.

  “I emailed him and Johnny. I think we’re going to meet up later.”

  “He came in for lunch with the chief. The station’ll tell you where he is. Anyone else you want to catch up with?”

  “Maybe.” There were, in fact, a good many people he intended to renew acquaintance with. “I guess I’ll see people at the—you know, at the funeral.”

  He took a deep pull from his pint. The lager was a local microbrew. It tasted of the summer fields and youth, and in this moment these were painful things to be reminded of. The memories that kindled retracted the tendrils of his consciousness from Meg and Livvy. They pulled him away from Nia Kapur, the hospital, and everything else in his city life. But this was necessary. This was what he’d come here to do.

  He sensed Grams’s eyes on him.

  “I know nothing good brought you here,” Grams whispered. She kneaded his shoulder with a papery hand. “But it’s so good to see you.”

  He let his forehead rest against her bony shoulder and shivered with the chill of wet skin on a summer night. She placed her hand on the thatch of his head and leaned into him like they were back to being the only people in the world.

  Nate reminded himself that this was Greystone Lake. This was death and loss and secrets and lies and rage. But it was also home. For the next few days, he must make himself belong here again. This was the barest minimum of his debt.

  When Nate sat up, Grams’s gray eyes brimmed with tears.

  “Who loves you more than anyone, boy?”

  —

  AFTER EATING, NATE left the Union to take a look at the waterfront on his way to his grandmother’s house on Bonaparte Street. Grams had offered to drive him, but the pub was beginning to gather a crowd, and Nate didn’t mind stretching his legs.

  Despite the approaching hurricane, small craft still cut across the undulating plain of the lake. A group of swimmers broke the waves along the far shore. Nate knew the devoted tried the waters no matter the weather or season. The Daybreakers, a loose confederation of eccentrics, took their exercise by swimming a lap of the lake’s southern bulge whenever it wasn’t iced over. Each day, often at dawn, they let themselves be erased by the frigid water. Even after so many years, thinking about this still made Nate light-headed.

  He saw that a tourist storefront had sprouted between the pub and its back parking lot. GREYSTONE LAKE emblazoned golf shirts and sun visors, locally made ceramics and woodcarvings. Nate scanned the store’s wares for a plush toy he could take home to Livvy or a knickknack for Meg’s parents. He told himself he was shopping, but what he was really doing was stalling.

  Seeing Grams had been good. Livvy adored her great-grandmother, and Nate loved watching them together, but he’d enjoyed having Grams to himself this time. For a little while, it had felt just like the old days. But spending time with Grams was the only easy thing he had to look forward to during this homecoming. He’d need to see Tom and Johnny next. Like Nate, they’d been there from the beginning, when things began to go wrong.

  The shop offered towers of postcards: images of the lake in each season, time-lapses of the sky and shore. Some depicted the colorful wares of the weekend markets and the fall forests, but there were also black-and-whites from long-gone eras. During Prohibition, some resort towns withered while others blossomed. Thanks to its proximity to the St. Lawrence, Greystone Lake had flourished as a center for smuggling across the northern border. This was the Lake’s time of legend, when wealth and crime and giant personalities wrought stories equal parts myth and history.

  Nate was drawn to one such postcard. A staged photo of overall-clad men astride lumber freshly mounted above the waterline. The uninitiated might take this for a snapshot of the Wharf construction, but Nate knew otherwise. The stocky man in the center of the picture, dandy as a vaudevillian in seersucker and a straw hat, was a young Morton Strong. On the back, “1919” was printed right under a description: “The construction of the Greystone Lake Entertainments Pier, popularly known as the Night Ship.”

  The Night Ship.

  Until the development of the Wharf area in the 1950s, the Night Ship had been the center of Greystone Lake’s tourism industry. In its prime it featured restaurants, shops, and game rooms. It also included a nightclub, the Night Ship, from which the pier eventually took its name. During the sixties the tourist district consolidated around the Wharf, and the Night Ship found itself isolated in the residential part of Greystone Lake. It was bankrupted, condemned, and barricaded soon after. The town had tried to tear it down, but preservationists thwarted those plans.

  As a child, Nate had been glad it hadn’t been demolished. It was a ruin, but a spectacular one. While its boardwalks sagged and buckled, its graceful roofs and fairyland spires did not seem of this world. It was a relic of a more optimistic age—and like everything that old, it had a story all its own.

  Nate focused on the lines of Morton Strong’s face.

  He tried to pull meaning
from the pilings that struck up from the silver water, to discern intent in the arcs of steelwork in the background. He searched this moment of the Night Ship’s birth for any hint that the pier would come to shadow his life as it had.

  “Look what the lake dredged up.”

  Nate turned to see Tom in the shop’s doorway.

  “Deputy.”

  “Doc.”

  Nate’s oldest friend offered his hand, and Nate used it to pull him into a bear hug.

  “You look good.” It was strange to see Tom in a uniform, but it suited him.

  Tom laughed. “Look at you in here, browsing like a weekender. You want a ride to Bonaparte Street? I’ll run you up.”

  “Can we use the lights?” Nate had been about to buy the postcard of the Night Ship. A strange impulse. Instead, he returned it and gave the tower a spin to conceal his interest.

  Tom clapped him on the shoulder. “Even let you work the siren. You solo this weekend?”

  “Livvy’s got this ear thing again.” Nate followed his friend back onto the street. “Long drive for a sick three-year-old. Plus, there’s the hurricane.”

  “Believe me, I know. Been filling sandbags with the Kiwanis club all morning.”

  “Really? Sandbags?” The lake was tempestuous, but hardly the Atlantic.

  “Gosh, you’ve really gone full-tourist, haven’t you? A four-foot storm surge will swamp the embankment. You should know that!” Tom laughed. “A bunch of places got reamed by the last hurricane, so we’re going all out on prep this time.”

  “Got to keep the place pretty.”

  “Pretty’s what pays the bills around here. How does it look to you?”

  “The Lake? Fantastic,” Nate said, and it was the truth. The town’s storefronts and waterfront were exquisitely maintained, just as they’d been in their youth. The grandeur of the Lake’s vistas were also extraordinary. The peaks of the headlands. The rippling forests of the foothills. The way all of this beauty was doubled by the mirror of the lake.

  It was a storybook town, but as in any fairy tale, things were not as perfect as they first appeared.

  “Lots of improvements since you were last around. Johnny opened up that place last year.” Tom pointed to a tea shop down the block. Its windows were planked over in preparation for the coming onslaught, and its awning was being rolled up. “Desserts and pastries supplied by the Empire’s kitchen. Oh, and Emma runs it. That’s her right there. Want to say hello?”

  Emma Aoki, who’d once been their classmate, was the woman closing the awning. Her head was tilted to the surge of clouds whipping in from the south. She’d always been slight, but now she looked made of paper. Nate was a block away, but in the push of the wind, he saw that her dress hung on her as if from a hanger. She frowned at the weather, and then her eyes crossed the distance between them. Something in her expression changed, but the frown remained. More than a decade gone, but she knew him at a glance.

  “She looks busy,” Nate said. He waved to her, and after a moment she raised her hand to match his own. “Maybe later.”

  They turned down a side street to where Tom’s cruiser was parked.

  “Actually, I’d like to catch up with everybody at some point. Do you keep in touch with them?” Nate asked.

  “Mostly. Some more than others.”

  “And Emma? You see a lot of her?”

  “Sometimes.” He chucked Nate’s bag into the trunk. “Oh, like, date? Nah.”

  Nate got into the passenger side and let the battered seat mold to his body. “She’s very thin. Has she been sick?”

  “We’re not all your cancer patients, Doc. Not yet, anyway.” The cruiser lurched onto the wide arc of the Strand, the street closest to the shore.

  Tom himself seemed in good health. He looked like he kept in shape, but they’d reached the age where some men begin to fall apart. He had a touch more weight in the cheeks. A new groove in his brow. The angle between his chin and throat had begun to loosen to a curve. Nate wouldn’t have called his friend’s hairline receding, though he had more forehead than he used to.

  “Emma’s been having kind of a tough time, though,” Tom said. “She’s living in those apartments by the packing houses—they might be new since you left? Anyway, they had a sewage problem a week or so ago, and her place is on the ground floor.”

  “Shit.”

  “Exactly. I think she’s staying with her parents.”

  Grams’s street was named not for the French emperor but for a species of gull. If Greystone Lake were shaped like a boomerang lodged against the western shore of the lake’s southern bulge, then Bonaparte Street was laced through the center of its length, with her house located halfway between the town’s center and its northernmost edge. Imposing mansions built in the late 1800s glittered along the Strand, while more modest homes like hers sat farther inland. The center of town comprised the Wharf and tourist district. Fishermen, rundown work piers, and old packinghouses took up the bulk of the Lake’s southern wing. The Night Ship was a dark blade struck deep into the waters close to the town’s northern limit.

  Clouds now shrouded the sky, and the lake trembled in the growing wind. Nate guessed this would be the last of the sun they’d see for days.

  Tom pointed out some of the changes to the Lake’s homes and businesses as they traveled the few blocks to Grams’s place. Familiar houses had been painted in new colors. Yards had been landscaped. Fences had sprung up, and new expansions loomed just shy of property lines.

  These were all signs of a prosperous town, and this was good. A living place had to change. Families come, families leave, yesterday’s students become tomorrow’s teachers. This was natural and right, but heading toward his grandmother’s home, Nate found it wrenching. One day everything they did would be forgotten. One day everything they loved wouldn’t matter to anyone.

  They parked in front of Grams’s little yellow house. Tom turned to him when Nate made no move to exit.

  “Tommy, you know I’ve got to ask. I need to know what they know.”

  Tom cleared his throat.

  “Grams said hikers found her.”

  Tom nodded. “During a cloudburst. Picked their way through the rocks, trying to get out of the downpour, and there she was.”

  “What do they know?”

  “Dad’s not letting me anywhere near it. But she—her body—there wasn’t much left. Fourteen years, Nate.”

  A moment passed with nothing but the tick of the cruiser’s cooling engine to mark it. Nate had already known the scant information Tom gave him, but such conversations had to begin somehow. Easy questions blaze the path for the harder ones that must follow. Nate touched the glass of his window. Cold as the lake at dawn.

  “He wants to talk to you, you know,” Tom said. “My dad.”

  Tom’s father was Greystone Lake’s chief of police, as he had been for twenty years.

  “I’ve been thinking about her mother,” Nate said. “Is it better to know for sure?” Since Livvy’s birth, Nate wondered what he’d do if she ever disappeared. If she vanished and was never seen again. This fear was always with him. Even in his most euphoric moments, it waited like a rock under the waves. When Nate sang Livvy to sleep, he could never decide if closure was better than hope. “I keep thinking about what I’m supposed to say to her.”

  “Not to mention her dad.”

  Nate’s response was a sound, the noise of an old scar torn raw.

  “Grams must have told you.”

  Nate could only shake his head. The car’s close air felt too thick to breathe.

  “He’s been out for years. Parole. I thought you knew. I’d have told you if—”

  “It’s fine. Doesn’t matter.” Nate said this as calmly as he could. He unbuckled himself and pulled at the door handle. He had to get out of the car.

  He counted his breaths as Tom opened the trunk to pull out his bag.

  “You don’t have to talk to him.” Tom’s expression was the one he’d worn so of
ten when they were younger. A veneer of geniality over panic. “No one’d expect you to. Jesus, I really thought you knew.”

  “It’s fine,” Nate said again. The breeze from the lake was brisk, and standing in it helped. “You just took me by surprise.” He smiled and patted his friend on the shoulder.

  Nate took his bag, and they made their way up a short stretch of slate flagstones to the front stoop. Nate pressed the handle, but the door didn’t budge. He rammed his shoulder into it as if it might have warped in its frame. He’d opened this door a thousand times and never once found it locked.

  “Hold up, Doc.” Tom dug through his pocket and slid between Nate and the door.

  “She gave you a key?”

  “I’m very trustworthy. Got a badge and everything.”

  Tom unlocked the door, and Nate walked into the life he’d left behind.

  Dried hydrangeas on a console beside a pile of unopened mail. The scent of lavender soap behind a smell of wood polish. The shuddering of the floor under his feet as the furnace thrummed.

  He wandered the length of the foyer, looking around like a tourist in a museum. The colors of the place seemed to have faded. A wall he remembered as yellow was now cream, a forest green armchair toned down to olive. Though Nate was the same height he’d been when he graduated high school, everything seemed smaller. More delicate and somehow less real. As if the couch in the living room was more a concept of furniture than a place a person would actually sit.

  A mosaic of photographs cluttered the far wall. At the center, an old black-and-white of his father, and the rest rippled from it. Shots of Nate’s med school graduation, his wedding, Livvy with a grin as big as the world.

  “She’s beautiful,” Tom said.

  “Thanks, buddy.” Tom had visited them in the city just before Livvy’s birth, but their talk of additional get-togethers never panned out. It occurred to Nate that all his best friend had seen of Livvy came from holiday cards and the occasional texted photo.