The Storm King(4)

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.”