Blue Water Read Free Page A

I’d done in high school: keeping his books, doing his taxes, helping him with the charter fishing trips he ran on summer weekends aboard his boat, the Michigan Jack . But since Mallory’s letter, I’d kept my distance—from the fish store and, now that I was driving again, from Toby, too—and, at any rate, I wanted to move forward in my life, not step back into the past.
    My mother invited me to Florida. “A change of scene,” she said. She’d stopped asking if I’d seen Toby lately; like my father, she’d decided to ignore the rupture between us. After years spent building Hauskindler Stone and Brick, they’d sold out to a Chicago-based firm. Now they devoted the same fierce attention to retirement that, once, they’d devoted to the family business. Throughout my childhood, they’d worked twelve-hour days, leaving Toby—ten years my senior—to fix my supper, help with homework, read to me, tuckme into bed. He’d been more like a parent to me than a brother. More like a parent than my parents had been. Until recently, I’d never felt this as a loss.
    â€œRex could come, too,” my mother said. “We’d take good care of you.”
    I told her I’d think it over.
    But Rex was a partner at his firm; he couldn’t take time now, after all he’d already missed. And I was afraid to leave him on his own, picking at frozen dinners, flipping through channel after channel on TV. Shortly after the criminal verdict, we’d filed a civil suit against Cindy Ann, as well as the city of Fox Harbor, the police department, Officer Randy Metz. This triggered a new round of letters to the editor, fresh arguments at the Cup and Cruller, where everyone, Rex said, fell silent now when he stopped in for his usual to-go. Because this time, he’d hired Arnie Babcock, a friend of a friend, an attorney who was known far and wide for exacting extraordinary damages. In the past, Rex and I had both referred to attorneys like Arnie as ambulance chasers, opportunists who lined their pockets with other people’s grief. Now, Rex called Arnie a genius, and the first time I’d looked into his broad, handsome face, I, too, found myself feeling as if we’d finally found someone who cared about us, who’d fight for us, someone who understood.
    Cindy Ann Kreisler, Arnie said, had robbed our home like the worst kind of thief. We couldn’t ask an eye for an eye, but we could demand her assets, teach her to regret what she’d done. Of course, Arnie understood this wasn’t about money; still, why should Cindy Ann continue to enjoy a comfortable life while we, the innocent party, were left suffering, uncompensated, forgotten? We could donate any funds we received to charity. Or, perhaps, start a scholarship in Evan’s name. Only then would we find some kind of closure.We’d finally begin to let go. We’d come to accept what had happened at the intersection of the Point Road and County C, where Evan’s teachers and classmates had erected a small, white cross.
    At last, I thought, we were getting somewhere. We had a plan in place. There would finally be justice, resolution, just the way Arnie promised.
    And yet, instead of feeling better, Rex and I only felt worse. Night after night, he muttered, twisted, unable to fall asleep, while I sat reading the same page of the same book over and over again. That none of Cindy Ann’s three girls had been injured! It was just so unbelievable, Rex said, so ironic, so goddamn unfair. Even if she lost her house—and she would, Arnie had promised us that—she’d have those girls long after she’d forgotten about us, and she would forget, Rex was sure of this, he dealt with people like Cindy Ann all the time. She was a drunk, she’d had those girls by different fathers, she probably hadn’t even wanted the last one anyway. On and on he went, rising to pace between the