Bleak Harbor by Gruley Bryan

Author:Gruley, Bryan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781503904682
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Published: 2018-11-30T16:00:00+00:00

Her computer screen is blinking blue and black and red again, as it was when she’d left earlier. Michele sets her phone aside and clicks her mouse. The blinking stops.

The screen goes gray, then black, before unfurling the image of a boy in a hard-backed chair. “Holy shit,” Michele says. It’s Danny Peters, blindfolded and wearing a single high-top sneaker. His legs are secured to the legs of the chair. There’s a shadow on his cheek.

“Fuckin’ A,” comes the voice from behind Michele. She spins to see the Grasshopper looking over her shoulder.

“That the kidnapped kid?” he says.

“What are you doing? Get out.”

“That’s goddamn cool.”

“Do I need to call the police?”

“They’re pretty busy. But I might have something you’d be interested in.” Canting his head, he gives Michele a smile that probably works on the bimbos he chases at Tuesday night happy hours. “About that kid on your computer.”

“Uh-huh,” Michele says. “Wait outside. We’ll talk in a minute.”

He leaves, and she returns to the computer. Danny has vanished from the screen. Another image, a rectangle of white and black and gray, is slowly coming clear, a ghost emerging from shadow. As it sharpens, Michele thinks it could be something scanned from the files at the city library.

Centered at the top of the rectangle is the familiar Light logo. Beneath that is the date: Friday, May 18, 1945. The lead story on the page concerns two local soldiers returning from France after V-E Day. The story that catches her eye runs down the right side of the page in a single column:

Inquiry Concludes Drowning of Young Bleak Accidental

Teenager’s ‘Eccentric’ Character May Have Contributed to Death

What is going on? she thinks.

Her phone buzzes. There’s a new text from Gatti:

how bout a pic of someone in a d-fly hat on home page?

Michele ignores it and returns to the 1945 Light story: A fifteen-year-old boy, a great-grandson of the town’s founder, died that May 1 in a sailboat on Lake Michigan. His name was Jeremiah Estes Bleak.

The story describes him as “ornery, unpredictable, and barely manageable from the day he was born.” He was on the boat with his father, James Estes Bleak, and his brother, Jonathan Estes Bleak, known as Jack. The Jack who’d been married to Serenity until he died last Thanksgiving.

Something about the story feels familiar. She can’t come up with it just yet. She reads on.

A squall rose up out of nowhere on that May afternoon. “As the waves crashed like thunder and the boat tossed about, young Jeremiah, who had inexplicably doffed his life jacket, pitched into the swirling waters,” the article says. “His father, Mr. Bleak, almost drowned as he heroically tried to save his son.” In the penultimate paragraph, an unnamed law enforcement official suggests the boy may have intentionally thrown himself into the lake. “Nevertheless,” the story’s final line says, “police were unable to definitively conclude that it was suicide.”

Nevertheless. Definitively. To Michele, they’re winks and nods that would nudge readers to the suspicion that the “unmanageable” boy had in fact flung himself to his death.

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