The Secret of Raven Point: A Novel by Jennifer Vanderbes

8/13/2019 The Secret of Raven Point: A Novel by Jennifer Vanderbes

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P R O L O G U E

THE GERMAN PUTS his hands behind his head, biting at his lowerlip, and gets down on his knees. He’s looking at the ground, andhis helmet tilts forward over his eyes, but he’s too scared to moveit. “Nicht schießen,” he says. “Nicht schießen.” He keeps repeatingthat in these short, stabbing whispers, like he’s talking to himself,talking to God. Sergeant McKnight’s watching him, kicking at thedirt, that vein in his forehead getting fat. He orders Rakowski andDufresne to take the Jerry to the rear, so they each grab an elbowand haul the German off the ground and start heading back toward

the wall. . . .McKnight’s looking at me. “Stop batting your fucking eyelashesat every Jerry,” he says. Just as Rakowski and Dufresne get close tothe wall, McKnight signals them to let go of the sniper. So the Ger-man’s standing there all alone, his helmet still tilted, and McKnighttrains his rie on him. McKnight’s just waiting, waiting for him tostart moving, and nally the Jerry takes one step, then another, andsoon he’s walking, walking faster, staring at the ground, breaking

into a run, and I hear a gun go pop.


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PA RT I

1941–1944


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C H A P T E R 1

WHERE HAD HER brother gone? wondered Juliet, staring out the window at the empty football eld.

It was a Sunday afternoon in early December, and Juliet Dufresne was alone in the school chemistry lab, preparing for the South Car-olina Science Fair. Tuck had been glancing up at the lab windowthroughout practice, awaiting her signal. But now the entire teamhad vanished.

The sky was pale gray, the window’s thin glass cold against herpalm. A late-autumn chill seeped through the bubbled cracks along

the windowsill, and Juliet crossed her arms for warmth. Beneath thepink pillowcase she’d fashioned into a lab smock, she wore a thickcream-colored sweater. Her black shoes were dusted with our.Tendrils of dark-blonde hair, having escaped her braids, clung toher safety goggles.

Well, he wouldn’t go far, she thought. She’d nd him in the lockerroom and tell him what he’d missed. She looked at her watch: timefor one more run-through.

Returning to her worktable, Juliet arranged her funnel of our,the white dust tickling her nose. She struck a match, lit her candle.Combustion, she thought excitedly. A complex series of chemicalreactions between a fuel and oxidant, creating heat or light. Inertelements, when combined, could generate a wilderness of power,releasing their full potential.

Full potential —Juliet grinned. Having taken second prize twoyears in a row, she was certain this experiment would win the blueribbon. She loved being in the lab. She loved the silence of the


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Jennifer Vanderbes4 |

corkboard walls and the cavernous aluminum sinks. She loved

the room’s glittering precision: tidy shelves of thick-glass beakers,rows of test tubes suspended in metal drying racks. Bright, orderly,the lab always had the feel of morning. Here she could do as shepleased without being shunned or gaped at.

For as long as Juliet could remember, the mauve birthmarkon her left cheek had rendered her something of an outcast. Themark wasn’t awful—the size of a strawberry, perhaps—and it hadfaded with time. But in the quiet southern town of Charlesport, ithad been enough to elicit exhaustive commentary from classmatesthroughout her childhood. Afiction, deformity. The words stillclung to her, although the remarks ended when her peers, struckby puberty, had themselves become pimpled and unpredictablypuffed. By then, Juliet had come to take comfort in seclusion. Shedevoted her time to Women in History biographies (having read theMarie Curie volume four times), to “boyishly unwieldy” chemistry

experiments, according to Mr. Licata, her favorite teacher (nowlurking supportively in his next-door ofce), and, late at night, shedisappeared into the delicious misery of Henry James’s heroines. Juliet’s sole condant was her brother, Tuck. “Tuck here!” hadbeen Juliet’s rst sentence, shrieked through the house, a toddler’sgarbled and passionate plea for her brother, two years older, toremain constantly by her side.

Glancing once more out the window, clouded with her hand-

prints—how could Tuck miss this?—Juliet gently hammered a lidonto the can. “Please be careful . . .” she whispered to the emptylab, “as you witness the power of combustion.” She blew into a rub-ber tube attached to the funnel, and a tremendous bang erupted.The can’s lid soared in ips and utters like a giant tossed coin. Per-fect! The judges would be dazzled. Tuck would love it.

Juliet mopped up the traces of our, gathered her things, andrushed down the dark back stairs, across the silent gymnasium. A weak band of afternoon sunlight lit the planks of the basketball


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THE SECRET OF RAVEN POINT | 5

court. At the threshold of the locker room she called, “Tuck? You

in there?”Heavy footsteps thudded toward her, and Beau Conroy

appeared, his hair wet from the shower, his face scrubbed a rawpink. Beau was the team’s linebacker. He had the shadowed, at-tened face of a boxer, and his hair had been shaved close to hishead. His eyebrows were thick and dark, his eyes a shade of greenthat Juliet, when rst meeting Beau at age ten, had told her brothershe thought looked like emeralds. A bright white T-shirt hugged hissloping shoulders.

“Tuck took off,” said Beau. “Everyone scrammed in some kindof hurry. Me? I like my showers. Here. He left you this.”

As he offered up the folded page of a magazine, Beau studied her.

J— Off to see Miss Van Efng!

Thanks!

Juliet sighed and slid the note deep into her pocket. This hadbeen happening quite a bit lately.

“This Van lady have a rst name?” Beau asked.She did not, because she did not exist. It was a code Juliet and

her brother had devised years earlier. To say Miss Van Efng meant,Help me, cover for me, tell Papa something to keep me out of trou-

ble. Juliet suspected Tuck had once again gone to hear the radiobroadcast at Sammy’s Soda Shop. Their father, who had served asan army surgeon in the Great War, forbade listening to broadcastsabout Hitler at home.

“You shouldn’t read private notes,” said Juliet.Beau smiled. “Then you gotta make them longer. I never read

anything long.” He lifted his gym bag. “You goin’ home? I’ll walkyou.”

“I’m perfectly able to walk home alone.”


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“Jeez, Juliet, why you gotta be so difcult?”

Juliet did not mean to be difcult. She liked Beau. She likedhis deep voice and his big-toothed smile. He lived alone with hisgrandmother and had even built her a special wheelchair. But shehad only ever seen Beau alongside Tuck. If they walked hometogether, what on earth would they talk about?

Beau blinked hard, his green eyes studying the rim of the bas-ketball hoop above, and Juliet wondered if he was having the samereservation. She inhaled the steamy traces of mildew and sweatseeping from the locker room. From the darkness beyond, a loneshowerhead hesitantly dripped.

Beau settled his bag on his shoulder. “You’re getting womanly, Juliet; I can see when it happens to the girls. First they get a fewpimples and pretty soon their heads start goin’ topsy-turvy. Everygirl needs a little something to calm her down. To get her on course.A rst kiss is like bourbon.”

Juliet stepped back, registering what Beau had said. Years ear-lier a friend of Tuck’s had suggested a game in their yard— Lastone to the tree has to kiss the sister! The sister. The boy didn’t evenremember her name. Juliet had forced herself to smile, and wouldhave stoically suffered the degradation of his game had Tuck nottold the boy to go eat his own crap.

Now, looking at Beau, Juliet straightened her posture. “Beau,I’ve kissed so many boys”—she worked her jaw in an exaggerated

ellipse—“my mouth is sore.”Beau laughed. “So, little Miss Difcult is a liar.”Did he actually nd her awkwardness amusing? Charming?

Juliet had read of such unexpected attractions but never imaginedherself a participant. Beau impatiently adjusted the strap of his bag,and Juliet realized she did not want to lose this opportunity. “Haveyou brushed your teeth?” she asked nervously.

Beau walked across the darkened gymnasium to the water foun-tain, gargled, and spit out an arc of water. “Will that do, ma’am?”


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Juliet felt her breath quicken. “Let’s go outside.” Taking the

stairs two at a time, she pushed the door open into the chill of theempty parking lot. She set her books on the ground and leaned backagainst the school, propping her foot on the wall—a pose she’dseen other girls strike. If she could only get still, Juliet thought, just arrange her legs and arms in some vaguely mature stance, she wouldn’t feel so ungainly.

“Listen, you won’t tell your brother . . .” Beau hesitated in thedoorway.

“Staring into a dozen barrels of the guns of a ring squad,” shesaid dryly, “I will not speak of this.” But there was nothing Julietdidn’t tell Tuck, and she was already wondering how she wouldrelate this incident.

Beau set down his bag beside her. “You know, Coach said wegot some college recruiters coming to see the state championships.I might get myself an athletic fellowship. Tucker tell you that?”

Juliet looked away and licked her mouth. Her lips gathereddelicately in what she knew was called a Cupid’s bow, but the airagainst them now made them feel enormous.

“Look, it’s like jumping into a pool,” said Beau. “You just gottaone-two-three- go. But turn your face in my direction.” He leanedinto her, and Juliet closed her eyes, her palms stiffening againstthe rough bricks behind her. The darkness comforted her; she wasnowhere, she was in outer space. She could smell Beau’s aftershave,

thick and lemony, and felt his hand on her chin. His mouth pressedinto hers and in a startled gasp, her lips parted. His tongue was warm and alive and insistent, a creature unto itself. She felt thesmooth edges of his teeth and worried at the sharpness of her own.Then his ngers, thick and strong, slid up her face, stopping tocover her birthmark.

She pushed him back. “Hey.”“Oh, come on, I thought it’d be nice.”“Nice for who?” she yelped.


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was right. She had died when Juliet was only three years old. Over

the years, she and Tuck grew accustomed to lying at the edge ofRaven Point, listening to the scratch of squirrels climbing the bluffoaks, talking into the early evening. It became their secret hideaway.Here they had shared their rst cigarette, sipped their rst bourbon.Here they had conjured up the ctional Miss Van Efng.

Miss Van Efng.As Juliet nally ascended the creaking white steps of her

house, she recalled her task: “Tuck’s practice is running late,” sheannounced, opening the door. “He won’t be home for a while.”

Pearl, having commandeered the dining table with cards andenvelopes, news clippings and pens, barely looked up. Their step-mother spent great portions of her days writing to politicians. Hav-ing once shaken the hand of Eleanor Roosevelt, Pearl prized morethan anything else the white glove she’d worn on that occasion,now wrapped in a red velvet cloth in her bureau. Never in the his-

tory of the world, thought Juliet, had a woman been so undeservingof a name: Pearl was short and bowlegged; her eyes were a luster-less gray. She was several years older than their father, and had mar-ried him that March.

Her father glanced up from the coffee table, where he played hiscustomary game of chess against himself. He slid forward a rook,and in his professorial baritone asked, “How was lab, Juliet? Didmagnesium and phosphorous behave today?”

Juliet considered conding everything about Beau. But it wouldonly sharpen her father’s guilt. He had always believed Juliet’s awkwardness stemmed from her mother’s absence, and tried to makeup for it by spoiling Juliet with the one thing he had in abundance:knowledge. At dinner, he bombarded her with elaborate explana-tions of the respiratory and circulatory systems. He sat beside herat her desk and talked her through the dissection of a bullfrog.She was given three stethoscopes, a microscope, a copy of Gray’s Anatomy, and a teaching skeleton. One evening, her father even


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launched into a cumbersome explanation of the monthly shedding

of the uterine lining, aided by a series of diagrams and charts—only recently, when Juliet woke in the night to a red streak onher underwear, did she realize he’d been describing the feminine“curse.”

“The experiment is stupendous,” Juliet answered, climbingthe stairs. “But I’m coated with baking our. Practically breaded.When Tuck comes home, would you tell him to come nd me?”

Juliet drew a hot bath and surrendered her legs, then torso tothe steamy porcelain tub. The water whitened with soap and our.She stared dully at a spidery crack on the ceiling, chips of plasterdangling precariously. Life suddenly felt impossibly long, impos-sibly dreary.

The feeling of Beau’s hand covering her cheek came back toher. How could she have been so stupid? So gullible? She slid hershoulders down until the water washed over her scalp. She wanted

to be swallowed, to be gloriously erased.But the probing softness of Beau’s tongue also returned—the warmth, the startling wetness, the momentary thrill of her partedlips. It was all so vivid, so confusingly tangible. The taste of him—salty? yeasty?—lingered on her teeth. Juliet drew in a mouthful ofbathwater, swirled it around, and spat it at the drain.

As she stepped from the tub, she studied herself in the mir-ror. You’re getting womanly, Juliet. In the past year she had grown

an inch, and the nipples that had once been mere insect bites hadacquired a sudden conical alertness. She thumbed them down and watched them spring back. Was she supposed to cover them? Weara brassiere? The esh on her hip bones, too, had risen, thickened,so that her hips sloped elliptically from her waist. All that trou-ble getting people to ignore her birthmark—and now this? Shecouldn’t very well expect people not to notice when she herselffound these eshy additions somewhat mesmerizing.

Leaving a trail of wet footprints down the carpeted hall, Juliet


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shoved closed her bedroom door. The room was an embarrassment

of pink. The princess wallpaper had, fortunately, been lost for yearsbeneath periodic tables and circulatory-system posters. The mauvecarpet was haphazardly tiled with textbooks and magazines.

Juliet threw herself onto her bed. It was Sunday, and the realiza-tion that she might see Beau in school the next day made her groan.From downstairs she heard her father and Pearl arguing, inter-spersed with the unusual sound of a forbidden news broadcast.What would Tuck think, coming home to hear the news blaring?Outside her window, wind rustled the massive dogwood and sweptcoolly into her room, ballooning the graph-paper calendar tackedabove her bed. Juliet stared at the Monday three weeks away—already circled with her blue pen—the rst day of eleventh grade.

At the suggestion of her teachers, Juliet was about to skip thesecond half of tenth grade. She was thrilled. She adored the prom-ise of a fresh start, sometimes reading only the rst chapter of a

book so that her mind could chart its own course through the draw-ing rooms of London or the dark, crowded streets of the FrenchRevolution. In this way the story never ended; the characters livedin her mind like the cat in Schrödinger’s quantum box, in a gloriousstate of perpetual possibility. Juliet would, years later, think that asshe lay there in her room that night, she, too, existed in perpetualpossibility. So much was taking shape around her but only touchedher once her door opened and Tuck, all hulking six feet of him,

stood in the threshold of her room. The moment she saw his faceshe knew that something serious had happened. He still wore hisfootball uniform, the knees grass stained, shoulder pads uneven.

“ Jules.” He walked to her bed and sat on the edge, raking hishand through his thick curls. The sight of him always dazzled Juliet.Where she was awkward and sinewy, her brother was muscular,vigorous. His face was broad and square; his dark-brown eyes wereset unusually far apart. He was not handsome in the classical sense,but his robust masculinity drew an endless stream of girlfriends. At


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seventeen, he was the captain of the football and basketball teams.

Walking, pacing—even waving good-bye—could be, for Tuck, anathletic display. He always made her feel safe, but something inhis expression at this moment made her heart constrict uncomfort-ably. While the sound of the radio drifted up from downstairs, hetwisted the corner of her coverlet.

“It’s the news, isn’t it?” she said. “What happened?”Tuck looked at her. “I don’t know what’s going on now. But ear-

lier today the Japanese bombed some American ships in Hawaii.It’s serious, Jules.”

“How many ships?”“Dozens.”“How many planes attacked?”“I don’t want to give you nightmares.”“Come on, Tuck. You should have seen me this afternoon. I’m

a maker of explosive devices. I don’t scare easily.”

“Hundreds. There were people on the ships, Jules. And nearby.A lot of people. Innocent people.” Juliet remembered an airplane accident she had once seen:

when she was nine, riding in the car with her father, a biplaneabove them suddenly growled and smoked and hurled swiftly, noserst, into the ground; it ipped several times, dropping two of itspassengers, and nally crashed into a barn from which people ranscreaming. Her father had instructed her to stay in the car while

he rushed to the aming debris, hoping to nd someone he couldsave. For weeks afterward, Juliet had trouble sleeping, recalling allthose shrieks for help.

“Are we part of it now?” she asked.Tuck nodded slowly. “The country is at war.”The words seemed to hang strangely in the air. They had dis-

cussed so many things over the years—their mother’s death, theirfather’s drinking, Pearl’s uncomfortable presence in the house—but nothing of this magnitude.


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Tuck tugged off his shoes and lay back beside her, sinking heav-

ily into the mattress. Juliet inched close. The radio downstairs hadquieted. Her brother breathed noisily, thoughtfully staring at theceiling.

“I’m sorry I missed the big experiment.”“It’s okay.”“Next Sunday.”“Next Sunday.”Outside the light was fading, and a wintry purple sky sprawled

beautifully behind the darkening treetops. For a moment the worldseemed utterly silent. Entirely peaceful. The thought of a bombing was wildly improbable. Juliet turned on her side, faced her brother,and drew her knees snugly to her chest.

“We’re at war,” Tuck said again, as though studying each word.He brought his hands together and slowly thrummed his ngers.His eyes narrowed and his jaw worked itself in a tense circle, and

she sensed in his expression something more than anxiety. It wasthe look he had before a big game: excitement. Juliet closed her eyes.

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The Secret of Raven Point: A Novel by Jennifer Vanderbes