Useless Bay(7)

As soon as I got to my feet, Lawford had me in a choke hold, so I flipped him and went to see what Mr. Shepherd was doing at our house on a Sunday night. He should be gone by now. He and his family were weekenders. He owned all the land below our bluff, which included the lagoon and the bay. They let us walk around in it but made it clear it was his.

It was strange they were here. Especially since I knew Henry’s dad earlier had to take a helicopter back to Medina because he’d forgotten that he had a meeting with the Kid Trying to Save Africa with Electricity. Why had he come back, just to get on the ferry?

It didn’t make sense. Something was going on.

I joined Mom at the front door.

Mr. Shepherd was standing there in a thin Windbreaker. His hood was up over his bald head, which, even in this weather, he had to slather with SPF 50 because it was already covered with precarcinomas.

Next to him was Sheriff Lundquist, which was odd. I tried to think if we’d done anything more illegal than trespassing.

I’d done something wrong earlier, but at the time I hadn’t been sure of the right thing to do. I only knew it wasn’t what was requested of me. Besides, I’d fixed it, right? I’d brought him home.

“What’s happened?” I said.

Mr. Shepherd said, “It’s Grant, Pix. We can’t find him.”

Again, I didn’t understand the need for the law. Grant came here all the time on Sunday afternoons in an elaborate game of hide-and-seek, and Mr. Shepherd always came here threatening to fence our property and spoil our view if we didn’t hand him over right now. I didn’t blame Mr. Shepherd for being frustrated. We knew Grant probably didn’t want to face the school week. The kid was obviously ADD, and we guessed his grades were in the toilet. We felt sorry for him and played along, even knowing that it was an inconvenience—the Shepherds always had a ferry to catch and things to do.

But we didn’t have Grant that particular Sunday night.

Mr. Shepherd was calm and businesslike in his demeanor.

Which is how I knew this Grant thing was serious.

Behind them, in our driveway, Henry’s sister, Meredith, stood looking embarrassed, and Henry himself skulked beneath his hoodie. He hid the black eye he said he’d gotten when someone on his crew team accidentally smacked him in the face with an oar.

“You mean Grant’s not with you guys?” Lawford said.

My brothers lined up next to me. After all, we played basketball on the same team. We were quick to box people out—too quick, in this case. But I didn’t realize that until later.

Mr. Shepherd said, “What kind of dumb-ass question is that? If he were, we wouldn’t be here.”

Mom turned and glared at us. She packed a lot of expression into that glare. You have to when you’re a single mother and the smallest of your five children (me) towers over you at six feet two and three-quarter inches. “Well? What are you hoodlums waiting for? Get your gear. Go find him.” She smacked Frank with a kitchen towel.

“It’s not as easy as that, Louise,” Mr. Shepherd said. “Last time we saw Grant, he was out in the rowboat.”

One of us had the foresight to turn down Sinatra singing about having the world on a string.

I felt blood sluice through my veins. Something was definitely wrong.

Mom stared at Mr. Shepherd. “In this wind? What a stupid thing to do.”

“He probably wanted to pull up the crab traps.” I examined my fingernails. They were hard and jagged, like something that attached itself to hulls and had to be scraped off with carving tools and Tabasco sauce.

“He wasn’t alone,” Mr. Shepherd said. “Henry here says he saw one of yours with him.”

Mom whipped around and fixed us all with a glare. Not one of us dared look her in the eye. She was a foot shorter than her children but in some ways taller than the rest of us put together.

“Which one?” she growled. She looked at us, but she was talking to Mr. Shepherd. “Which one of you took a ten-year-old child in a boat with wind like this?”

“We don’t know,” Mr. Shepherd said. “It was dark. The only thing Henry knows for sure was that it wasn’t Pixie.” Mr. Shepherd nodded at me.

Next to Mr. Shepherd, Sheriff Lundquist chewed his gum ferociously.

In my defense, I was stupid, and my brothers and I didn’t know any better.

It was a reflex.

Twelve years of school. That added up to twelve suspensions, forty-six detentions. But not one expulsion, and not one of us ever—and I mean ever—took the blame for the crime he or she committed. Instead, we assigned blame based on a rotation chart taped to the back of the bunk room door.

Whose turn was it to be in trouble?

I mean, what’s the point of being a quintuplet if you can’t skunk people into thinking you’re not yourself? It was just a little harmless fun. Besides, we gave back to the community in so many ways. Cutting up and removing downed trees so Island Electric could fix snapped power lines. Applying tourniquets to victims of motorcycle accidents; sometimes even holding their hands as they died so the last face they saw would be a friendly one saying, “Good thing you’re tough.”

Until that weekend, we thought that we’d done it all and seen it all and that our identity pranks were completely harmless.

Dean stepped forward. “It was me. Like Pixie said, Mr. Shepherd, Grant wanted to check his crab traps. So I took him out. The traps were empty, so I dropped him off in front of your house. He was on his way up the walk, and I rolled the rowboat to the garage. Grant was wet but fine.”