Mariah Stewart - Last Look

Dorsey had been nine, old enough to recall every minute that followed a neighbor banging frantically on their front door. She’d heard his breathless speech, watched her father run barefoot out into the snow and down the six blocks to the site of the accident. Dorsey had run, too, but had been stopped by one of her mother’s coworkers far short of the white sheet that lay on the ice-covered street.

The boy who’d been driving the car stood on the sidewalk ten feet away from Dorsey, sobbing loudly and inconsolably, his face blotched red from the cold and tears. Whenever Dorsey recalled that scene, what she thought of was bone-numbing cold and the tears of a stranger who had changed their lives, and her father yelling at the paramedics to do something, do something. The empty feeling of being abandoned would wash through her every time, choking her with the memory of her father scrambling into the ambulance with her mother’s body. He’d never looked back, never given a second thought to Dorsey, who’d stood forgotten and alone in the cold.

Years later, Dorsey had tried to rationalize, reminding herself that her father had been in deep shock. That maybe he hadn’t known she’d followed him from the house. That he hadn’t been thinking of anything at that moment but hoping to save the life of his wife, even though everyone there knew it was already too late.

That had been twenty-seven years ago, and her father had never remarried. So, Dorsey reminded herself as she returned to the kitchen, if her dad was dating more than one woman, he’s certainly entitled, and it was certainly none of her business.

She poured the rest of the soda into the sink and tossed the can into the recycling bin, then called her father’s cell phone again. Still no answer. She left the house the same way she’d entered it and locked the back door.

“Hey, Dorsey, is that you?” a voice from the next yard called.

“Hi, Mr. Genzano, how’re you doing?” Dorsey stepped across the stretch of grass that marked the property line to give her father’s elderly next-door neighbor a quick hug.

“Can’t complain.” Thin, weak arms encircled her and gnarled hands patted her back. Mr. Genzano was eighty-eight that year. Or was it eighty-nine? “No one cares if you do, so what’s the point?”

“You’re looking well.”

“I’m looking older than dirt, but nice try, Dorsey.” He beamed. “So, you thought you’d pay a surprise visit to your old man, did you?”

“And you know it’s a surprise because…?”

“Because if you’d called ahead of time, you’d have known he was at the beach house.” A bony elbow nudged her ribs. “You’re not the only one in the neighborhood who can put two and two together and get four, eh?”

“Anytime you want a job with the FBI, Mr. Genzano, you give me a call. I’ll put in a good word for you with my boss.”

“If I thought they’d give me one of those glockenspiel guns, I might consider it. I used to be quite the shot, you know, back in Double-u Double-u Two.”

Dorsey laughed. “You just say the word, Mr. Genzano. The Bureau can always use a good man.”

Mr. Genzano chuckled, then coughed. “Asthma. Gonna be the death of me. Gotta get back inside and outta the yard. Pollen everywhere.”

He shook his head and turned toward his house. “You tell your father to give me a call when he gets home, hear? We’re going to need to do something about that old maple out back. Split in half and ready to fall…”

He continued to talk as he returned to his own yard and up his back steps. Dorsey waited until he opened the back door, then waved. The old man waved back, and she sighed with relief that he hadn’t gone into respiratory failure right there in the driveway.

Dorsey crossed the street and opened the driver’s side door, leaning against the car momentarily, looking back at her father’s house. The last place they’d all lived together as a family-it held so many memories. She turned away abruptly and got into the car.

She checked her voice mail, then turned the key in the ignition. There was no point in returning to the airport. The beach house was less than three hours away. She might as well just drive down and see what her father was up to.

Had he already heard the news?

Part of her almost hoped he had, so she wouldn’t have to be the one to tell him.

She dialed his number again. This time she left a message. “Pop, I’m on my way down to the beach house. We need to talk. I should be there in a few hours.”

The drive to Hathaway Beach took longer than Dorsey had expected, due to road construction on Route 1 just south of Dover, then again on Route 36 going toward Slaughter Beach on the Delaware Bay. Hathaway sat midway between Slaughter and the Old Mispillion Lighthouse, at the end of a road that was newly paved. Dorsey could remember a time when the road was mostly sand and dirt going down to the beach, back before the old Delaware fishing towns had been discovered. Twenty years ago, when Dorsey’s grandmother had considered putting the house on the market, she could barely have given it away. Now, local realtors stuffed the mailbox with solicitations, dying to market the old place to the people driving by who’d love to call it theirs.

Well, it was a pretty fine house, Dorsey reflected as she parked at the end of the drive behind her Dad’s dark blue Explorer. Built in the late 1890s by her maternal great-grandfather, James Mills, the old clapboard Victorian stood tall and stately and tightly laced as a spinster, all by itself on a large lot smack in the center of Hathaway. Behind the house stood the remnants of the old carriage house, which her father insisted he would someday renovate, and the remains of her grandmother’s gardens, in which neither she nor her father had any interest.

The grass in the front yard grew in tufts through the yellow sand, and three old pines along the side of the house leaned westward, as if exhausted from having stood against the wind off the bay for so many years. Across the street, two more houses from the same era sat on either side of a large square building of block construction that dated from the 1960s. The newer structure housed not only the small two-room post office, but the general store, a luncheonette-the town’s only dining spot-and a newsstand as well.

Dorsey climbed the five steps up to the freshly painted front porch and pulled the screen door open. The inner door stood ajar and she called to her father as she walked through the downstairs and out the back door, which was unlocked as well.

She checked inside the garage and around the back of the carriage house, but her father was nowhere to be seen. There was only one other place he’d be.

Dorsey walked two hundred yards to the path leading over the dune. She slipped out of her shoes and tucked them under her arm, and walked toward the bay. The sun was dazzlingly bright off the water, the tiny waves of low tide rolling gently onto the sand with barely a sound. She shielded her eyes from the sun with her right hand and saw her father far down the beach, almost to the cove that led to the lighthouse.

She dropped her shoes and walked over the coarse sand, avoiding the jagged edges of crab shells and the driftwood that had washed up during the last storm. By the time she was near enough for him to hear if she called out, the dread that had begun as a tiny flutter swelled to fill every pore. The speech she’d practiced all the way down in the car began to fall apart, leaving her with facts but no coherent way of delivering them.

“Know who’s driving that boat?” He spoke without turning to her, but pointed out toward the bay and the ferry that ran between Lewes, Delaware, and Cape May, New Jersey.

“You mean the bow rider at two o’clock?”