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Coates Island, where Johanna lives, is a private island of mostly summer cottages. Johanna lives here year-round in the last house, she says, before they quit plowing the road. It’s a place she could never afford on her professor’s salary, but it’s been in her family for many generations. The only downside is that her big family of brothers and sisters and uncles and aunts descends on her all summer long.
Johanna’s place is just like her—funky and cottagey and filled with mismatched dishes and chairs, all bought at garage sales. But instead of looking tacky, it looks as if each piece has been carefully chosen from high-end antique stores. She has this way of assembling a bunch of disparate pieces into a charming whole, and that includes the clothes she wears.
As soon as I entered her house, she came right over and hugged me.
“Evan,” she said. “You have to tell me about Evan! You have to tell me everything!” She looked so cute this evening. Her thick hair was caught up in a scrunchie on the top of her head, like a cockeyed waterspout.
I dropped my jacket on the back of a wooden kitchen chair. “You could do a whole lot better than Evan Baxter,” I told her.
She stopped a moment in her table setting and raised her eyebrows. “What? What happened? What do you mean by that?”
“I just think you could do better than Evan Baxter. That’s all.” I was careful not to meet her eyes.
“Marylee, tell me what happened. Don’t leave anything out. Wasn’t he able to help you with your picture?”
“I need to talk to you about Evan.” I placed my pizza on the table. “This is really important. Evan? He’s the guy who winks at me in the coffee shop every morning. The very one.”
If I could have chosen all of the reactions on her part, I never would have chosen the one that she exhibited. Instead of looking horrified, her eyes opened wider and she leaned back against her counter and laughed. It was a gleeful, spontaneous laugh.
“Johanna?” I squinted at her over my glasses.
“Oh, Marylee!” She leaned forward and put her hand on my shoulder. “This is so funny, so totally funny. What a strange coincidence.”
“Well, yeah.”
“Now you know how cute he is.”
“Johanna, you’re not getting it. He’s irresponsible. He takes you out. Doesn’t call back. Winks at me, a total stranger.”
Her back was to me as she poured two Diet Cokes. “Let’s have the pizza,” she said.
She was hurt, I could tell. The laughter was just a cover-up, but I didn’t know what to do or say. Perhaps I shouldn’t have told her. But, of course I had to. Friends don’t keep stuff like this from their friends. We took our slices and Cokes into her front room overlooking the water.
She took a bite of the pizza, proclaimed it wonderful and then said, “Did you hear that Barbara’s son Jared is home from Guatemala?”
I knew she was changing the subject on purpose, but I had no desire to bring the subject back to Evan, so I said, “That’s all I’ve been hearing about.”
I took a long drink of Coke. Through the trees, the gray water of Malletts Bay looked as solid as iron.
Barbara’s eldest son had taken a six-month leave of absence from his police job to work on a mission project in Guatemala. Barbara and her husband, Harold, had invited some of the people his age from church to a supper where he’d be talking about the trip and showing pictures.
“I know Jared,” Johanna said. “You haven’t met him, but you’d like him. He’d be perfect for you.”
Clever ploy, I thought. Get me interested in Jared so she wouldn’t have to worry about Evan and me. I leaned forward and touched my friend’s arm. “Johanna, you don’t have to worry. I am not interested in Evan.” I’m not interested in that type of guy anymore—all charm and no substance, I wanted to add, but didn’t. “And I’m not interested in Jared either. I’ve had enough of men for a while. All men.”
FOUR
For the next two days I studiously avoided Evan. I went for my coffee a whole hour earlier. I knew this wouldn’t last. He had my photo and would be calling. But maybe the few days would give me time to organize my thoughts, and maybe my emotions. My problem was I’d let a morning wink take over my life. I seriously wanted to believe what I had told Johanna last night, that Evan held no attraction for me whatsoever, that no man did. But, unfortunately, I found myself thinking about him more, not less.
On the second day of not seeing Evan, Marty and Dot came in to buy a paint-by-numbers set. “It’s for Dot’s granddaughter,” Marty said. “It’s her birthday tomorrow.”
“How nice,” I said.
“There’s going to be a big party,” Dot added.
“Have a wonderful time.” I put their purchase in a bag and looked at Marty. The other day something about him had seemed strangely familiar. Today that feeling was gone. Today he was just an ordinary nice-looking older gentleman, obviously in love with his lady friend.
One the third day, Evan Baxter came into my shop. I was in the back unpacking boxes of yarn when I recognized his voice.
“Is the lady of the shop in?”
I held my breath.
“Just a minute,” Barbara said. “And you are?”
“Evan. Evan Baxter.”
“Oh yes, of course!” she exclaimed. “My husband, Harold, bought a camera from you some time ago, and talked about your lovely photographs.”
“I remember him.”
“Marylee,” she singsonged. “Someone here to see you.”
I wiped my hands on my Crafts and More apron and went out to the front. As soon as I got there I wished I’d had time to run a brush through my hair. Still, today it didn’t quite look as bad as it had three days ago. At least I’d been up early enough this morning to blow-dry some life into it.
“Hey,” he said. Then he winked at me.
“Hello,” I said.
“I’ve missed you in the mornings.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“Too busy for a nonfat latte?”
“I’ve been getting to the shop earlier.” I ran my hands up and down my apron. All of the sentences I’d rehearsed for this occasion had flown completely out of my head. Plus, Barbara was observing this whole conversation with amusement. Since she’d come to work for me, she’d been like a mother hen, trying to hook me up with every available guy she knew, especially with Jared. I hadn’t quite confided in her that since I’d been trampled on and tramped over by Mark, I was interested in no one. Not even her eldest son Jared.
“So, did you find anything about the picture?” I asked him.
He nodded. “You have time for coffee?”
“Right now?” I glanced at my watch. “I’m working now. There’s a lot to do.” I looked around me. The shop was dead. We hadn’t had a customer in half an hour and new boxes of fabric supplies were mostly unpacked.
“You go,” Mother Barbara said, shooing me out. “Have a coffee.” Then to Evan she said, “This young woman is working way too hard. And not sleeping. Plus, there are men outside her door.”
“Barbara!” I shrieked at her.
“No, what I mean is, she sees people smoking down in the street in the middle of the night, so she can’t sleep at night. That would be enough to put anyone off their Wheaties.”
Why, I wondered, had I shared that little tidbit of my life with her?
Evan raised an eyebrow and a worried look crept across his face. “People? Outside your house?”
“It’s nothing,” I said. “It was one night. A few nights ago when it was raining. Someone was in the bus shelter across the street smoking.”
“You said he? It was a man?” he said, looking worried.
“I don’t know. I couldn’t tell. But it was nothing. It was someone stepping outside for a smoke in the middle of the night. What’s so odd about that? Most people don’t smoke in their houses anymore, so what do you do when you want a smoke in the middle of the night? That’s all it was. I don’t even know why I brought it up.”
At the time I’d been so sure the person, either man or woman, had been looking up at my apartment, at me, even. But the more I thought about it, the more fanciful that idea became. I needed to steel myself against becoming like my aunt.
Evan and I went next door to the coffee shop. He ordered a house dark roast black and without even asking got me a nonfat latte. He also brought a huge, drippy cinnamon bun to our table with two forks. The two-forks bit seemed a little too chummy to me.
He paid for the coffees, which made me feel somewhat uncomfortable. I had hired him, so I should be paying, right? What does one do in these situations?
“Your sales clerk is an interesting woman,” he told me.
“She’s great. Although she says exactly what’s on her mind. Very blunt, as you may have noticed.”
“That’s refreshing, though. You’ve got a nice shop there. You’ve fixed it up well.”
“Thank you,” I said. I looked at his hands again as they deftly cut the cinnamon bun in two with a plastic knife.
“I was halfway interested in it when it went up for sale,” he said. “I pay rent in the spot I’m in now. It would be nice to own something outright.”
“It wasn’t cheap.”
“I know. That’s why I stayed where I am.” He grinned and I wondered what I was doing here making small talk with Johanna’s soul mate. I had a niggling fear that Johanna would walk in and see us like this. The thought made me uneasy.
He asked me where I was from and all I said was out west. He drank his coffee and said he’d grown up here in Burlington. I thought about the little note of surprise in his eyes when he’d seen the picture for the first time. Even though there was a part of me that still wondered if the picture was my parents, I needed a starting point. Were the couple in the picture connected to me? And why had my aunt lied to me—if she had?
I looked across at Evan and tried to guess his age. He couldn’t be much older than me. Would he remember the accident that supposedly took my parents’ lives? Should I ask him? I shook off that thought. I was beginning to realize just how big the city of Burlington was. I had no idea if I was even looking in the right section of town. Maybe I needed to be in Colchester, or Winooski, or Essex Junction.
He took off his glasses and cleaned them with an edge of the paper napkin. I watched him do that, wondering why his every little motion held such interest for me. I asked, “You said you have information about the picture?”
“I do.”
I waited while he put his glasses back on and placed the manila envelope with the photograph on the table. I reached for it at the same time he did and our hands touched. I pulled mine away quickly. For an awkward moment, neither of us said anything. I cleared my throat, and finally said, “So what did you find out?”
“I’m pretty sure it’s a composite.”
“Come again?”
“A composite. I’m thinking that the two people may have been superimposed on the backdrop of the lake. That was how they manipulated photos twenty-five years ago. Now, we have computer programs which do the same thing.”
“So, this might not be Lake Champlain? It might not be here at all?”
“It might not be.”
“How do you know that?”
He pointed. “I’ve enlarged this part of it. Do you see this bush in the foreground? Do you see the shadow it casts? It’s very subtle.”
I looked. “A bit,” I said. “Maybe.”
“Have a look at the couple. They cast no shadow. A computer-generated photo manipulation would have taken care of that. Or a good photo manipulator could manually add a very faint shadow here.” He pointed.
“But…But it looks okay to me. I mean they could be there, couldn’t they? By Lake Champlain?”
He put one finger in the air. “There’s more. Look at their bare feet. If they were standing on the stones like that, the feet of the man, of the woman, too, for that matter, would be making more of an impression on the ground beneath them. Plus, I can’t see people standing on stones with bare feet anyway. Can you?”
“But people could, couldn’t they?”
“Maybe,” he said.
“So, this is a fake?”
“Oh no, it’s not a fake. It’s a real photograph. It’s not some sort of a painting or reproduction, if that’s what you mean.”
That’s not what I meant, but I didn’t tell him what I meant because I wasn’t sure myself.
“What about these shadows along the side?” I asked.
“To me they look like some sort of building. I couldn’t figure it out, but Mose is still working on that.”
I took a drink of my latte. “I have to ask you something. When you first looked at this picture it was like you’d seen it before. Had you?”
He looked down at his coffee and shook his head.
“Then why did you flinch when you looked at it? I know I saw you do that.”
He looked at me. I hadn’t noticed before how blue his eyes were. “I didn’t flinch. I thought it was familiar when I first looked at it, but then I realized I was mistaken.”
“Familiar, how?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I’m not sure.”
“Were the people familiar? Did you think you recognized them?” My hands were clasped so tightly around my paper coffee cup that I was in danger of squishing the cup and spilling coffee all over us. I let up on my grip and repeated my question. “Do you know these people?”
He looked me square in the eyes. “No, Marylee. I don’t know who they are.”
I repeated my question. “Then why did you flinch?”
He shrugged and said, “I don’t know.”
I looked away from him. Unbidden tears threatened at the edges of my eyes. Finally, I turned back and said, “You mentioned stock photos the last time we talked.”
“Mose hasn’t found anything yet.”
