At dinner at a bar in the little town, they ordered fried perch, onion rings, a Roy Rogers and a Shirley Temple with flashy swords in the maraschino cherries. Merle and Tommy said they’d heard the girl’s boyfriend had thrown her off the break wall, as a joke. When they were all in the car again, Rita, who had been uncharacteristically quiet—even then, Rita was not quiet—announced that the dead girl had been her; she’d seen the red of her hair. It was blood, said Thomas. It was me in the water, she whistled. Jane reached into the front to pull Edmund into the back, away from both of them, as Rita punched her husband and the car weaved on the curvy road. Merle, drunk but a mild-mannered man of science, offered that there couldn’t have been much blood left, because there wasn’t much skin left, and the water had washed the girl’s system clean.

But Polly remembered red. How could she not? Rita crammed the memory deeper later when she showed Polly the tubes of color in her painting box, the smears on her palette. She said that if she painted Polly’s portrait, she would use alizarin inky black for her hair. She told Polly that in the old days black paints had been made with wood soot and burned ivory and burned vines. When Polly said her hair was brown, Rita said, Well, of course. And I’d use a brown for your skin, too. Look at your wrist and my wrist. I’m pink. You’re the color of wood. Very pretty, but you can’t be pink like me.

That smile—Polly hated it, and later she would hate the memory of it, that beautiful silky red hair, the sandalwood haze on Rita’s skin, the green stripes on her low-cut pants. At some point during the summer, Rita did a painting of Polly and Edmund. It was not, as Dee put it, a good likeness—Rita didn’t make them pose for long—and they were each blurred, moving away from the center, or possibly away from the artist.

But before all this, at that Michigan beach, during the last week of July, in 1967: The next morning, while Jane scrambled eggs, they watched Rita walk straight into the water like the dog Lemon, moving forward until she was up to her neck and started to disappear. Thomas ran down and jumped in after her. Edmund went back to reading, and Polly, gathering that this was the way to handle such situations, did, too.