The weight of water - Anita Shreve [53]
“Yes. Then we went out and went into another room in the northward side, north-east of the house. We came in and there was some blood around, and in the bed-room we found another dead body.”
“Whose body was that?”
“That was Karen Christensen.”
“Did you notice any wounds upon the body of Anethe?”
“Yes; there are some scars on the head.”
“What part of the head were they?”
“In the ear most, just about the right ear. She had some scar in her face there.”
“Scar on top of the head?”
“We did not look much after that time.”
Yeaton then asked Ingerbretson some questions about the well that belonged to the house and its distance from the house, and whether he had disturbed any of the bodies. Ingerbretson said that he had not. Yeaton asked the fisherman if he had seen any tracks, and Ingerbretson said no, he had not seen any tracks. Before Yeaton dismissed the witness, he asked if, when he had arrived on Smuttynose that morning, there was any living person on that island.
“Yes,” the fisherman replied.
“Who was it?”
“Mrs. Hontvet and a little dog.”
“State condition in which you found her.”
“In an overbad condition. She was in her night-dress crying and halooing, and blood all over her clothes, Mrs. Hontvet’s clothes. I got her into the boat.”
“Do you know whether her feet were frozen?”
“Yes. I searched her feet right off and they were stiff. I carried her over to my house.”
Before a shoot, I will prepare the cameras — check my film and the batteries, clean the lenses — and I begin these tasks in the cockpit. Billie has gone below to wake Thomas. I can hear them talking and laughing, playing on the bed, although the wind, with its constant white noise, steals their words.
Adaline emerges from the companionway. She smiles and says, “Good morning.” Her legs are bare, and she is holding a towel around her, as if she had just stepped from the shower, although she is not wet. Her hair is spread all along her back in knots and tangles. I can see a small bit of red beneath the towel, so I know that she has on her bathing suit, and I wonder for a moment why she has the towel around her. How strange we women are in the mornings, I am thinking, this modesty, this not wanting to be seen. Adaline turns her back to me and puts her foot up on the cockpit bench, inspecting her toes.
“I hear Billie got a cut,” she says.
“Yes. She did.”
“Bad?”
“Not too.”
“I’m going for a swim.”
She lets the towel drop to the cockpit floor. She keeps her back to me, and I notice things I have not before. The plate-shallow curve of her inner thigh. The elongated waist. The patch of hair she has missed just above the inside of her right knee. I think about what her skin would feel like. This is painful curiosity. She steps up to the back of the stern, positions herself for a dive. She skims the water like a gull.
She does not come up sputtering or exclaiming from the cold, as I might have done, but rather spins in a lovely barrel roll and swims with an economy of strokes, her feet barely moving at all. I see wisps of red amid the chop. She swims for about ten minutes, away from the boat and back. When she is done, she climbs up over the stern with ease, refusing my outstretched hand. She sits opposite me in the cockpit and picks up the towel to dry herself. She is slightly winded, which is somehow reassuring.
“You kept your maiden name,” she says.
“Jean Janes had an infelicitous ring to it,” I explain.
I notice that the water beads up on her skin.
“It wasn’t for professional reasons then?”
“Not exactly.”
She sets the towel down beside her and begins to brush out her hair.
“Did I hear Rich say there might be a storm?” she asks.
“We may have to leave before this afternoon.” The thought of leaving the harbor fills me with swift, sharp regret, as if I had left something significant unfinished.
“Where are we going?”
“I don’t know. Portsmouth possibly. Or Annisquam.”
She bends her head to her knees, letting her hair fall forward to the floor. She brushes upward from the nape of her neck. She throws her head back and begins to brush from the