Still Water by Stuart Harrison Read Free Book Online

died last winter.”
    “I’m sorry.” There was sadness in her eyes, but something else too, something he couldn’t interpret. “What happened?”
    “There was a big storm. His boat was wrecked and he drowned.” He thought she might add something else, then whatever it was, she let it go. “Shall we sit down? I hope you like beef.”
    “Beef is great. To be honest I thought we’d be eating lobster. The truth is I’ve never really liked them.”
    “Me either,” Ella confessed. “When you make your living catching them, they kind of lose their appeal.”
    “I guess so.”
    “You know,” she said hesitantly. “I remember you coming here for the summers. Your family had a house on the point. Pointers.”
    Matt was surprised that she’d known him. “Pointers?”
    “That’s what we called you summer people.”
    “We had a name for you too. Lobbies.”
    For a second she looked affronted, then she laughed at herself. “Actually that’s good.” She hesitated. “I wasn’t going to tell you this, but the truth is I had a crush on you when I was a kid.”
    “You did?” He was frankly amazed. She was maybe thirty-one or two now, which made her four or five years younger than him. The last time he’d been on the island he’d been approaching twenty, so she would have been fifteen or sixteen. He couldn’t believe he wouldn’t have noticed her even then. She laughed at his expression.
    “I won’t be offended if you don’t remember me. I looked different then, and when we mixed with you pointers it was usually to fight.”
    He looked back at the picture then, at the child he’d mistaken for a boy, and a memory stirred. “That’s you?”
    She grinned, obviously enjoying herself. Matt thought maybe he did remember her after all. An image came back to him. A girl around thirteen years old. Short, sun-bleached hair, her fists clenched at her side and her face set angrily. Some kid in the dirt at her feet, wiping blood from his lip with a stunned look on his face, wondering how come a girl had put him on his ass. Other kids had looked on, and suddenly aware of them all, a flash of uncertainty and confusion had leapt in the girl’s expression.
    “That was you?” he said. “Short hair, skinny?” She nodded, smiling at the look he wore as he tried to reconcile past and present.
    Now he’d placed her he recalled other incidents. Passing her on the street once and as she hurried by Paulie shook his head. Thin in her jeans and looking like a boy with her chopped hair and a smattering of freckles on her nose. Weird kid, he’d said. Mostly, though, Matt remembered seeing her on the dock, helping someone he guessed was her dad as they unloaded a day’s catch from a boat.
    “I wouldn’t have known it was you.” He tried to recall if he’d ever had an inkling that she’d had a crush on him, and was certain he hadn’t.
    “Ella was a tomboy then,” a voice said.
    Matt rose as a woman appeared in the doorway. She walked with a limp, and held her left arm awkwardly in the manner of somebody who’d suffered a stroke. He recognized Ella in her immediately, though their colouring was different. The older woman’s hair was almost entirely grey, but it was streaked with remnants of the black it had once been, visible in the picture on the wall. The most obvious similarity between them was a sense he had of inner strength and he saw where Ella got her spunk. From the slight accent in her speech and her features Matt guessed she was of mid or south European heritage. Greek maybe.
    “This is my mother, Helena.” Ella introduced them. “This is the man I told you about Mom. Matt Jones.”
    He shook her hand. She was thin, and frail, her skin dry textured, but she gripped his hand firmly, if briefly. Her smile was like her daughter’s. It transformed her.
    “I’m very pleased to meet you Mrs. Young.”
    “Please, call me Helena.” She looked fondly at Ella. “You know I don’t think she wanted to be a girl