The version of the story she chose to accept didn’t lessen her anger toward her father, but it took the edge off.
Grey had already followed Salty up the ladder he’d set up and onto the deck. Pippin let go of her thoughts and followed. Once they were standing on the deck of the boat, it was clear that the coastal weather had taken a toll after so many years, leaving tears in the tarp that animals had managed to get through. Squirrels and rats had made their homes inside the boat. Pippin covered her mouth and nose from the smell of the mildewed seats and rotted carpet.
“Transom looks good,” Salty said as he looked at the stern of the vessel. “Still, bein’ trapped under the cover for so long didn’t do the boat any favors.”
The three of them poked around for a few more minutes. Jimmy and his wife had buckled their kids into their car seats. Four car doors slammed, and the motor turned over. They drove away, the kids bouncing in their car seats, waving to them. Salty laughed. He took his hat off and bowed to the boys. Behind the car windows, they broke down in giggling fits. In the front passenger seat, Jimmy smiled and waved as Camille carted them away.
“Cute kids,” Pippin started to say, but the words stuck in her throat as they made their way below deck.
“Oh, Christ!” Grey pulled the front of his shirt up over his nose.
“Smells fresh as a daisy down here,” Salty said to them over his shoulder, his meaning the absolute opposite. It was ripe and rotten, the farthest thing from a sweet-scented flower. They watched Salty as he walked between the facing seats of the dining area that doubled as sleeping bunks on either side of the boat. The table that would have been between the seats had been removed. Salty opened a door on the starboard side to check out the head. Turning to the opposite side with his back to the head, he looked in the small cupboards in the galley, then lifted the lid of one of the three long hatches build into the floor. “Oowee,” he said, giving a whistle. “Those rats have definitely been in here.”
“What about in the other hatches?” Pippin asked.
“I don’t reckon we need to check. They’ll all be the same,” Salty said, but Pippin already had her finger hooked into the stainless-steel flush latch of the middle floor hatch. She pulled, but the cover didn’t budge.
Following the other two down into the cabin, Grey had pulled open a hatch under the port-side dining area seat to reveal an empty but musty and rank hole.
Pippin braced her feet on either side of the stuck hatch, bent down, and gave another yank. This time, the cover popped open like the lid of a coffin. Pippin fell backwards with a thump.
Salty had been standing by the galley sink. He turned at the sound of her falling. “You okay, Miss Pippin?” he asked as he leaned forward.
Pippin started to scramble up and opened her mouth to say she was fine, but the words froze on her lips as she saw Salty’s frozen face. He’d started to move toward her but glanced into the open hatch, stopping short. “Christ almighty,” he muttered, stumbling back. He whisked his hat from his head and held it to his chest.
“What is it?” she asked.
Taking a step toward the bow, Grey grabbed Pippin under her armpits and helped her up before they peered into the hole to see what had spooked Salty. They stopped. Stared. The color drained from Grey’s face. Pippin staggered back into him, suddenly feeling lightheaded.
There, in the hatch, were the remains—the bones—of a dead body.
Chapter 6
“What is more important in a library than anything else - than everything else - is the fact that it exists.”
~Archibald MacLeish
“It has to be him,” Pippin said to Grey, but she didn’t have to convince her brother. Deep down, they both knew it was Leo’s bones in the hatch of the Cassandra.
Pippin couldn’t fathom who would have wanted to kill their father. The police hadn’t said it had been murder, but there was no other explanation for how Leo’s body ended up where it had.
She sat on the plastic Adirondack chair she’d dragged over to the boat, staring up at it. The vessel held a secret it would never reveal. The anxious tightening in her chest and the pricking behind her eyelids made her feel as if she was losing her father all over again.
Her father had loved books as much as her mother had despised them. They’d had no books in the house—with the exception of Leo’s study—and Cassie had rarely stepped foot in that private space.
Grandmother Faye’s house had had a library, the walls lined with walnut shelves, each filled with books, but the room was off-limits to the twins. As Pippin and Grey hit their teenage years, they’d become bold. They tried to startle their grandmother into revealing why the library in the house was restricted. They’d sneak into the forbidden room, take a random book from a shelf, and plant it right in the center of the kitchen table, or under the pillow of their grandmother’s bed, or beneath one of the hydrangea bushes on the side of the old house.
But Grandmother Faye never rose to the bait. The books Pippin and Grey placed for her to find would magically vanish, then reappear on the library shelf from which they’d been taken. The incidents were never spoken of.
At fifteen, Pippin and Grey moved from the forbidden library in their grandparents’ house to the library, then to the bookstore in town. Grey chose volumes he wanted to hold onto forever, to read under the sheets with flashlights, to love until the covers were tattered and falling apart, but Pippin chose books with illustrations, reading some of the words but getting more of the story from the pictures. An illustrated children’s edition of The Hobbit had been her favorite. After years of trying to elicit a reaction from their grandmother, they’d given up. Now they just wanted to escape into another world. To sneak into a secret garden, or slip through a wardrobe and experience the delights of a magical land, or skip down the Yellow Brick Road. Grey flew on spaceships to other planets, fought off the Buggers with Ender, and experienced World War II through the pages of the books he chose.
Pippin’s adventures were more limited. The words on the page were mysterious, their meaning elusive. The restriction from books had motivated Grey to become a good reader, but it had had the opposite effect on Pippin. She struggled, and eventually she gave up.
At seventeen, she bought copies of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. She couldn’t count how many times she’d had to explain her name. A thousand times over the years, probably. No one understood it. It wasn’t easy to tell the story of how her dad had been obsessed with Tolkien and that she and her brother had been named after two of his favorite characters. Not easy because by the time she wanted to ask him about it, he was gone. All she knew was that he had a passion for these books. They were too challenging for her, and the old directive from her parents, forbidding books, stayed with her, carving out a chasm between then and now, a chasm she couldn’t build a bridge between.
Her brother had gotten off easy in the name department. He’d been called Grey, after Gandalf. She’d been laden with Peregrin, one of Frodo’s loyal and best friends. Pippin for short. What kind of name is Peregrin? How is Pippin a nickname for it? Kids and adults alike asked her, but she couldn’t say. They’d both come from JRR Tolkien’s mind, and her parents had laid them at their feet, but neither of them were here to fill in the blanks.