"The parts are so tiny. How do you do it?"
"With great patience," he said laughing. "I renamed this Laura," he said and showed me where he had carefully engraved her name on the side. He held it a moment longer and then put it back lovingly on the shelf.
"I've got a lot more here: steamships, container ships, tankers, and of course, luxury liners. Know what this one is?" he asked, holding it up.
"I'm not sure," I said.
"It's the Titanic."
I shook my head in amazement.
"You know so much about ships, Cary. You should do better in history."
He grimaced. "One thing has nothing to do with another."
"Did you ever make a report on ships?"
"Yes," he said. "I got an A but I had so many spelling and writing errors, the teacher reduced it to a C."
He put the model back and went to the small window where he had a pair of binoculars.
"Laura and I used to spend a lot of time right here gazing out at the ocean," he said. He handed the binoculars to me when I stepped up behind him and I looked out at the ocean. Way in the distance, I saw a small light.
"What is that?"
"A tanker, maybe heading for England or Ireland. We used to love to imagine where they were going or imagine ourselves on them." He smiled to himself. Then he sat on the cot. "Laura and I spent a lot of time up here. She would lie on this cot and read or study while I worked on my models." He grimaced. "Then she stopped spending time up here after she started going with Robert Royce." His face grew angry.
"She just got interested in boys, C
ary. It wasn't weird for that to happen," I said softly.
"Yeah, well, he wasn't the right one."
"How can you be certain?"
"I just am," he said. He had his eyes squinted shut as if trying to drive out some scene scorched on his brain.
I turned to look out the window again. "Then why did you let them use your boat?" I asked with my back to him.
"Laura was a good sailor, almost as good as I am," he said. "She wanted it."
I turned around and looked at him.
"I never said no to Laura," Cary said sadly. "If only I had . . just that once." He looked at the floor so I wouldn't see the tear escape from his eye.
"I'm sorry." I was close to tears myself. I gazed at the ocean again. It could be beautiful and so deadly. "To lose her like that. It's as if she just disappeared."
"No," he said, so softly at first I thought I imagined it. But when I turned back, he repeated it. "No. It wasn't really that way."
"What do you mean, Cary?"
He stared at me a moment. "I've shared this with no one, not even my parents."
I held my breath.
"After Laura and Robert failed to return, I borrowed a friend's boat and went looking for them. I looked every day for nearly a week, combing the beach, getting so close to the rocks at times, I nearly crashed into them myself. Then one day something caught my eye."
"What?" I asked, my heart pounding.