Page 57 of What You Never Knew

Halfway to the boathouse, my phone rings. It’s a local number that I don’t recognize, but I answer it anyway, thinking it might be Ezra from a landline. Before leaving, he told me that reception would be spotty where he was going.

It’s not Ezra; it’s animal control. Apparently, he gave them my name and number when he took one of the dead birds in for examination.

“The bird was poisoned,” the woman on the other end of the line says, wasting no time. “Probably rat poison, but it’s hard to say if that’s the thing that killed it,” she goes on to explain. “Due to the fact that it had also been frozen at some point, which may have been the cause of death.”

It takes my mind a few seconds to compute what she’s saying. I stop in the shade of a tall oak so I can concentrate better. “So, it definitely wasn’t natural causes?” The question sounds stupid as soon as it comes out and hangs there between us.

She chuckles a bit. “Only if the bird ate a pile of rat poison and then flew itself into a freezer.”

“There were twelve of them,” I say, ignoring her poor attempt at a joke. “Twelve birds dead on my doorstep.” I appreciate the stunned silence I get in return.

I hear her readjust the phone and then clear her throat. “Well then, miss, it sounds like a case for the police rather than animal control.” I tell her I’ve told the police and that they’re looking into it. She says she’ll give them a call to provide more details on the situation. She wishes me luck, which I suddenly feel I’ll need, and then hangs up. It takes a lot of maliciousness on someone’s part to poison birds and then freeze them so they can be placed on a verandah. I’m not sure even Leslie Swann would have been up to that task, even if she had been in town the night it happened.

It’s cool inside Ezra’s place. It smells like him too—woodsy and clean, which would normally be comforting, but right now it’s not. Learning that someone put those birds on the verandah on purpose, systematically killing them first, combined with all the negative talk from the neighbor, has truly fucked with my head. I don’t feel safe at Avril Island, and now, thanks to Judy, I’m finding it hard to feel safe here at Ezra’s. I really don’t know who to trust anymore.

Deciding I have no choice but to make myself at home, I plug my phone into Ezra’s stereo to play some music. There are too many voices and questions in the silence. I find some burgers in the freezer and a lone beer, a perfect dinner for one, so I busy myself preparing that, taking it out to the deck to eat when it’s ready.

As I sit outside with the sun slowly beginning its descent, it feels like nothing could be wrong in this world. Could I actually do what I told Judy I’ve done, leave the past in the past? Could Ezra and I just focus on each other and the future we could have together? It’s not such an easy question to answer after hearing about so many things that he neglected to tell me. Withholding the truth is as good as lying, Leo used to tell the girls whenever they wouldn’t admit to a wrongdoing. I always disagreed, thinking it wasn’t quite as bad as a lie—until now.

It’s only nine thirty, and I’ve run out of things to do. I hung out on the deck until the bugs arrived, then cleaned up the kitchen, called the girls, and watched some crappy TV. As I sit now in stillness on the couch, the question I’ve been avoiding all evening refuses to be ignored—How well do you know Ezra, really?

It’s just light snooping to begin with, pulling open some drawers to see what they hold, going through the pile of bills on his counter, looking at what’s in the medicine cabinet. As I go, I convince myself that I’m just getting to know him better. That if he’d had anything to hide, he certainly wouldn’t have invited me to stay over for the night without him here.

I wander down the hallway and into his office. It’s meticulous, just like the rest of the place. Going through the filing cabinet, I find nothing other than well-kept records on work he’s done at local cottages and tax documents. The desk doesn’t hold anything of interest either. Could the man literally have nothing to hide?

There’s an antique wooden trunk sitting in the corner of the room. I try to open it, but it’s locked. I look around the office for the key but don’t find one, so I decide to move on to the bedroom.

Nothing but clothes and shoes occupy the closet; pens, half-finished crosswords, and a broken Fitbit rest on the bedside table. It’s a disappointing search, and I’m not ready to give up just yet. I return to the trunk in the office. It’s the only thing that’s locked in this whole place. Why?

I go to the key rack in the front hall, but there’s nothing there that would fit such an old lock. So, I head into the kitchen to find something I can use to jimmy the lock open. Determination to get inside that trunk has eclipsed any guilt I might have had over snooping.

With metal skewer in hand, I head back into the office. It takes a little finagling to find that sweet spot that releases the lock, but eventually I hear a pop and am able to lift the lid and reveal what’s inside. A pile of yearbooks, some baby clothes, an old Boy Scout uniform, a collection of wood carvings that I’m sure he made with his dad, and an old cigar box. No body parts or drugs or guns, just life stuff collected over the years.

I flip through a few of the yearbooks and find Ezra’s class photos. It’s exactly the boy I remember, only a little bit older. He played football, was on the debate team, made the honor roll, won medals in track. A pretty upstanding high school career, considering his dad had taken off when he was twelve. I certainly got into more trouble than he seemed to.

Putting the yearbooks back, I reach for the cigar box next. The scent of stale tobacco wafts free when I flip open the lid. The box holds a mess of photos. As I lift the top one out for a closer look, confusion and surprise knot together in the pit of my stomach. The photo is of me when I was little. I remember the dress made of thin red corduroy with yellow flowers on it. I’m holding a pink balloon in one hand and a half-eaten banana in the other. Flipping the photo around, I see my mother’s familiar handwriting: June 3 years old at cottage.

There’s another photo, a close-up of my mother holding a baby that I’m pretty sure is me as well. I flip the photo over, and sure enough, in my mother’s handwriting, it says June 6 months. There’s also a photo of May and me in matching bathing suits on the dock at Avril Island. The back reads May 10 and June 7 at Avril Island. There’s a photo of Ezra and me fishing off the end of the dock. The last one is a close-up of me at around age eleven, just my face while I look off into the distance. I remember May taking a bunch of these photos, telling me to ignore the camera and look deep in thought.

Sitting among the photos is a poem about summertime. I don’t remember writing it, but it’s signed at the bottom by me and looks like it was ripped right from one of my notebooks. There’s also one of my old rope bracelets and a thick lock of dark-brown hair tied with a ribbon. I have a pretty strong suspicion that it’s my hair and drop it back in the box with a shudder.

Ezra must have stolen the photos from my cottage, and the poem and bracelet, and god knows how he got a chunk of my hair. I pile it all back in the box and place it in the trunk before slamming the lid down. Pushing myself up off the floor, I return to the living room, where I come face-to-face with May’s photos of Ezra and me at Avril Island. Did she actually send those to him, or did he steal them like the other items in the cigar box?

I wrap my arms around myself and sink down onto the couch. I don’t even know what to feel—anger, flattery, fear. Why would he want those photos of me and the poem and bracelet and hair? Judy said he was angry at my family after everything that happened, so why keep souvenirs of one of us?

No matter how I frame it, the whole thing feels insidious. Not wanting to be here, not wanting to be at Avril Island, not wanting any of this, I pull a blanket off the back of the couch, slide a pillow under my head, and curl up right there, wishing it would all go away. But with every breath, I breathe in the scent of the man I’ve accidentally fallen in love with. The man who in an instant has become unknown to me, who has an unhealthy obsession and an agenda that I just can’t figure out.

MAY

The cottage is dark and quiet when I arrive. I can tell without looking that nobody is here. It’s the first time I’ve arrived in the living realm without anybody being there. Am I no longer attached to June? Has she left Avril Island, leaving me in the process?

I float up to the second floor and am flooded with relief when I see her belongings still scattered about the room. Why, then, am I here? Floating from room to room, I search for the point of my presence here, in the shadows and in the light that comes in from the moon.

I glide through the tunnel-like darkness of the stairwell, but something stops me at the bottom, as though I’m here in the flesh and my dress has gotten snagged on a nail, holding me in place. It’s not a nail, though, that I’m caught on; it’s another bit of memory dislodging from deep down and floating to the surface, tethering me to the spot where it happened.

It was the night that I left June upstairs so I could secretly listen in on my parents’ fight. My father’s arrival on a Wednesday was too unusual, too disruptive to not investigate. So I ordered June back to her room, promising I’d be back soon with an update, then went downstairs and tucked myself into the shadows on the second-to-last stair to listen.

The memory is fuzzy; I can’t remember what my parents were even arguing about. All I do know is that my plan had been to go unnoticed, to simply collect information and then return it to June. But what I heard caused me to rise up out of hiding and charge out into the bright light of the living room.