“Hey, what’s wrong? Didn’t you hear me?”
She looked up at him wordlessly and handed him the picture. “This guy,” she said, in a toneless voice that didn’t sound like her own.
“What? What about him?”
Diana got to her feet. “That’s Poe,” she said. “That’s the guy from that summer. The guy who raped me.”
Michael stared at her, face slack and startled, hands hanging by his sides. “That’s him!” Diana screamed. She jumped to her feet, stalking toward her husband. “Whose house is this? Do you know his name? Did you know that he’s been here this whole entire time?”
She felt Michael’s hands on her shoulders; heard his voice coming from what sounded like very far away. When he tried to pull her against him, Diana shoved him back, hard.
“What’s his name?” she asked again.
Michael pulled off his baseball cap and raked his hands through his hair. “The man who owns the house is Vernon Shoemaker,” he said. His voice was low, and steady, maddeningly reasonable. He pointed at the picture. “I’ve never met this guy. Never even seen him. My guess is that it’s his son. Mr. Shoemaker has two sons, and they both spend part of the summer here, I think. I really don’t know a lot, though. Mr. Shoemaker is the only one I’ve met. He’s the one I deal with. This guy I don’t know.”
Diana stared at her husband for a long, silent moment, her chest heaving, her hands clenched into fists. Then she shoved her way past him and went stalking down the hall, looking for more pictures, more evidence, a name. After all these years, finally, a name.
In the living room she found two more pictures, one of the man on a sailboat, beside someone who had to be his brother, a slightly older, slightly fatter version of him. The second was a wedding picture, where the man she’d known as Poe seemed to be in his mid-thirties, and his wife, a young woman with wide eyes and dark hair, half-swallowed by an enormous pouf of a white dress. She stared at the two faces, first the man, then the woman, running her fingers over the words monogrammed at the bottom of the picture frame: Henry and Daisy Shoemaker, June 9, 2001.
“Diana?” Michael had come up behind her, moving carefully, the way you’d approach a skittish, feral cat.
“I’ve seen her,” she said. Her voice was faint. “Jesus, Michael, I’ve seen this woman, in the post office, and Jams, and in the Wellfleet Market…” A memory was surfacing. She’d been at the market, picking up hot dog buns, and this woman, Daisy, had been right beside her. Diana remembered that her brown hair had been drawn into a loose ponytail, and she’d said something, Hi, or Perfect beach weather, isn’t it, or… “Lucky,” said Diana. Her voice was hollow. “She said how lucky we were, to be in a place like this.” Diana’s heart was thumping, her brain spinning. She felt like her windpipe had narrowed, like she couldn’t take in enough oxygen. When she shook her head, there was a ringing in her ears. “This guy, the guy who raped me, he comes here every summer, him and his wife and his d-daughter…” She swallowed the scream that wanted to escape, and when Michael tried to take her hand, she said, “I can’t be in here anymore,” and walked, then trotted, down the hall. Right by the front door was a half-moon-shaped table, with more framed pictures, and a glass jar of seashells. Diana picked it up, hoisted it over her head, and sent it smashing down to shatter on the tiled floor before running out the door.
* * *
She tried to forget. She tried to put the knowledge of Henry Shoemaker’s face, of his presence in Truro, into the farthest reaches of her mind, walling off the new knowledge the way she’d walled off Corn Hill Beach, long ago. I’m not going to think about it, she would tell herself, but that promise just turned out to be a guarantee that she was going to think about it, all day long, at work, at home, painting in the shared studio space at the Castle Hill Center for the Arts, where her brushes sat with paint drying on the bristles, and her half-finished canvases were stacked facing the walls. On and on, her brain churned, like a washing machine stuck on “agitate,” with one simple phrase, two words, pounding like a drum: he’s here, he’s here, he’s here. She resisted, until one day she couldn’t stand it anymore, and she did the thing she’d been keeping herself from doing since that Saturday morning with her husband. She went to the Truro library, sat down at one of the public terminals, and typed “Henry Shoemaker” into Google, because she couldn’t stand even the idea of typing his name into her own laptop at home.