That was when we heard a knocking on the screen door and I went to answer it. A smiling man of about my age stood there, wearing bathing trunks and an undershirt. “Dr. Hawthorne, you probably don’t remember me.”
“Well, I—”
“Raspin, Jerry Raspin. I was one of the trustees at Pilgrim Memorial Hospital a few years back.”
“Of course!” I told him, because I did remember him then. He had a real-estate business that had been fairly profitable before the war.
“Probably didn’t recognize me without my suit on. I have the cottage next-door.”
“Come in,” I urged, trying to make amends for my hesitation.
He followed me in, as Annabel hurriedly wrapped a robe around her bulging belly. “I hope I’m not intruding, Mrs. Hawthorne,” he said. “I’m your neighbor for the month of July. The wife and I have the next cottage.”
“How nice,” Annabel said.
“We may not be here the entire month,” I explained. “My wife is expecting our first child in a few weeks.”
“Well, congratulations! That’s great news.” He helped himself to a seat on our sofa.
“Do you take a cottage here each summer?” Annabel asked.
Jerry Raspin nodded. “The wife likes it, and there’s nowhere else to go with this gas rationing. I sure hope the war ends soon. My old clunker of a car won’t last much longer.”
“The news is pretty good,” I told him. “The Allies are advancing on all fronts.”
Raspin nodded. “We have a son who just got drafted. I’m hoping the war ends about the time he finishes his basic training.”
Annabel glanced out the side window. “Your cottage looks pretty much like ours.”
“They’re all about the same on this side of the lake. Yours has one distinction, though. The regulars here call it suicide cottage.”
“Why, for heaven’s sake?”
“Each of the last two summers there’s been a suicide here. In ‘forty-two it was an elderly man and last year it was a young woman whose husband had been killed by the Japanese in the Solomon Islands. A terrible tragedy!”
“I remember both of them,” I said, “but I hadn’t realized they were both in this same cottage.”
“I’m sure you two will break the jinx,” he replied with a smile, trying to make light of it.
Annabel snorted. “Two instances hardly qualify as a jinx, Mr. Raspin. I’d call it a coincidence.”
About that time he must have decided that his visit had been ill-timed. “I’d better be getting back. We’ll talk again.”
I saw him to the door and then returned to Annabel. “Can we stand a month of him in the next cottage?” she asked.
“I remember that his wife was nice. I met her once at a hospital function when he was a trustee.”
“All this talk of suicide—”
“There’ll be none here this month. I promise you that.”
On the night of July 4th the Chester Lake residents marked the occasion with a display of railroad flares that ringed the shoreline. A few cottages even fired skyrockets and small firecrackers, but these were hard to come by in our area. The following morning was a Wednesday that year, and the day dawned bright and sunny. Already before breakfast there were children splashing in the water. Annabel watched them fondly from our porch.
“One of those could be our Sam a few years from now. We’ll have to come back here again.” Later in the morning she even went wading herself, with me standing nervously behind her in case she started to fall.
We had a telephone in the kitchen and every morning I checked in with April at my office. But it was a quiet July and the most serious case she had to report was one of the Walker boys being stung by wasps. He was one of those kids who were always getting into trouble and I remembered last summer when he’d gone missing from his parents’ cottage and been feared drowned at Chester Lake. After a day of dragging the lake they’d found him hiding in a tiny crawlspace behind the kitchen sink.
The following Monday I drove Annabel in to see her obstetrician, our old friend Lincoln Jones, and he reported that all seemed to be going well. “Another two weeks at most,” he predicted.
Back at the cottage we became acquainted with another of our neighbors. Mrs. Spring was a petite woman in her late forties who'd been a nurse in Boston. She lived two doors down from us, in the opposite direction from Jerry Raspin and his wife. “I’m right next to Judge Hastings,” she told us, pausing in her stroll along the water’s edge to chat. “You know the judge, don’t you?”
I did know Hastings, a popular man around town, but hadn’t realized his cottage was next to ours. I’d seen no activity there since we arrived. After Mrs. Spring had continued on her walk, I said to Annabel, “If the judge is really next-door I should call on him to say hello. I’ll take a walk over there.”
At first I thought my knocking at the door would be met only by silence, but after the second knock I saw movement behind the curtains and Judge Hastings himself opened the door, as tall and formidable as he appeared on the bench. “Well, Sam Hawthorne! What brings you here?”
“Annabel and I have had the cottage next-door since the first of the month and I only now found out you were here. I didn’t see anyone around and assumed it was empty.”
He seemed hesitant about inviting me in, and finally compromised by motioning toward the porch chairs. “Maud hasn’t been feeling well,” he explained. “That’s why you haven’t seen us out.”
I chose one of the two Adirondack chairs and settled into it. “I hope it’s nothing serious. If she needs a physician, I’m right next-door.”
“No, no.” He rejected the possibility with a wave of his hand. “It’s not serious. Is this your first summer here?”
“The first since our marriage. I visited here years ago, but somehow with my practice I never had time for a real vacation till now. Annabel’s expecting our first child this month and I wanted to be with her as much as possible.”
“There’s nothing like a first child, Sam. I can still remember when Rory was born, though it’s close to thirty years ago now.”
“How's he doing?”
“Air Force lieutenant. We’re very proud of him.”
“You should be. He’s helping to win this war for us.”
The door opened, surprisingly, and Maud Hastings came out to join us. She was a decade younger than the judge, but just then she seemed older. She wore no makeup and she’d put on weight since I last saw her. I suspected her problems were more emotional than physical. “Hello, Doctor,” she addressed me with some formality. Perhaps she thought her husband had summoned me in my professional capacity.
“How've you been, Maud?”
“Better. I’m on my feet again, at least.”
Judge Hastings seemed as surprised as I was by her unexpected appearance. “Shouldn’t you be resting, dear?”
“I’ve had enough resting to last through the summer. I want to see what’s going on out here.”
“Nothing much. Sam and his wife have the next cabin.”
She glanced over at it. “Suicide cabin.”
“Didn’t know that when we rented it,” I told her.
Judge Hastings cleared his throat. “We were here last summer when that young woman took an overdose of sleeping pills. She couldn’t go on after her husband was killed.”
“How'd the first one die?” I asked. “The old man.”
“Shot himself. The place was a mess after that. Owner had to hire people to wash away the blood and repaint the living room.”
“Any doubt about either of them?” I asked, because that was the sort of question I always asked.
“Sheriff Lens was called out both times, but the cottage doors were locked and bolted from the inside.”