Free Reunion at Red Paint Bay by George Harrar

want to know—what’s the proper sentence for a rapist?”
    Amy thought for only a moment. “Shame, Simon, and that man doesn’t have any.”

He sits on
the wide-planked porch of the Bayswater Inn watching rain pelt the water. At times the wind changes direction and blows the thick drops far enough sideways to reach him under the broad roof. He doesn’t stir, even when the inn’s owner, Peter McBride, approaches him with a mug filled with a brown liquid, topped by whipped cream.
    “Compliments of the house, Mr. Chambers,” the innkeeper says as he holds out the tall glass. “It’s the specialty of the inn—we call it the Tonic. My grandmother used to say if this doesn’t cure what ails you, nothing ails you.” The man takes the mug and paper napkin. “The secret is using Jameson whiskey anduntreated Vermont cream, no chemicals. Don’t stir it in. Drink through it.”
    He sips the sweet cream until the coffee pours through with a jolt of whiskey. He wipes his mouth on the napkin, leaving a dark smudge, which he folds out of view. “I’m not a coffee drinker,” he says, “but this is very nice.”
    The wind whips the halyard on the flagpole, making them turn toward the curving driveway. “I could listen to that all night,” McBride says. “I’ve always thought the best sounds on earth are a foghorn, a waterfall, and the rattle of the halyard against a flagpole.”
    “And the whistle of a train,” the man says, “one going away from you.”
    McBride moves behind his guest and takes hold of a large black handle, which he turns with some effort. The blue-striped awning begins rolling up, inch by inch. “Sorry,” he says, “can’t chance a gust ripping through it. You might want to move inside.”
    “A little rain never hurt anyone,” he says. But forty days and nights of it, that extinguished virtually every living thing. Six chapters after creation, God washed away humanity, repenting that He had made it. To whom does God confess?
    McBride leans against an empty Adirondack chair. “I’d sit out with you if I could, but we’ve got a lot of work to do before the school reunion here next week.Things get pretty chaotic for a few days. I hope you won’t be put out.”
    “It won’t bother me at all,” the man says, a most agreeable guest.
    He remembers the music
most of all—the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth, the strange meditation of violins and harp that always accompanied wakes at the Bays-water Inn. It seemed to him like music that didn’t want to end, as if the notes were bunching up at the edge of a cliff, refusing to be shoved over. He was the body watcher at so many viewings when he was a teenager that it took years to get the haunting melody out of his head. And now it has come back as he crosses the dining room toward the Viewing Room, a small outcropping off the west wing where the bodies of Red Paint’s most prominent citizens are laid out in their ornate coffins. He could have brought Jean here in her sleek bronze casket, surrounding it with large pots of white lilies. But what if no one came to her wake? What if no one remembered her at all?
    He pulls open the doors and sees two computers sitting on facing desks. He steps back and looks both ways to make sure he isn’t disoriented. The Viewing Room has apparently become a small media center, and where do people in Red Paint now go to say goodbye to their dead? He takes a seat at one of themonitors. The cursor blinks in the Google box, blinks and blinks, waiting for instructions.
    That evening he sits
in the library and prints a short message in his clearest hand, all capitals. He walks over to the reception counter where an older woman is making notes in a ledger, her head down. It’s the first time he’s seen her there, and he wonders what position she holds in the McBride clan. Sprawled next to her on the counter is a muscular gray cat with an enormous lionlike head.
    “Oh,” she says, looking up after a minute, “I