The Crossing

by Kathryn Lasky

  “So what is it?”

  “Well, it’s not the jam pot precisely but the note.”

  “Ah, the note!” Miss Goodfellow exclaimed, lifting one finger that was missing the tip and a bit more. “The one that condemned the girl.”

  “It did indeed, ma’am.”

  Miss Goodfellow’s eyes seemed suddenly to sparkle. “Would you like a cup of tea, Miss Plum?” No one on the entire island had ever called May Miss Plum.

  “Yes, that would be lovely.”

  Miss Goodfellow scuttled down off the high stool and went over to the smallest cast iron stove May had ever seen.

  “You found the note, didn’t you?” May asked urgently.

  “Indeed!” Miss Goodfellow’s eyes widened. “Someone had slipped it under the front door of the club.”

  “Did you read it?” It seemed that Miss Goodfellow was quite eager to talk.

  “Oh, ’course. It wasn’t in a sealed envelope, it was just a folded piece of paper. It seemed to be almost desperate to be read.”

  “Desperate to be read? Curious …” May paused and scratched her head lightly. “And what did you think?”

  “I thought the handwriting was odd.”

  “Odd in what way?” May felt a tremor of excitement. If anyone knew handwriting, it would be Miss Goodfellow, who had spent a lifetime poring over ledgers and account books.

  “It looked unnatural.”

  “Unnatural? How? In what way?”

  “You see, Miss Plum, as a bookkeeper I am paid to decipher handwriting. There are twenty captains in the sardine fleet. They write down the weight of their catch for each trip. So I know Captain Eaton’s hand from Captain Bunker’s and so on and so forth. And then there are supervisors. They supervise the floor, and under them there are ten teams of cutters and packers. Each of the supervisors and the cutter chiefs and packers has charts to fill out. Now, as you can see” — she held up her hand — “once upon a time I was a cutter and like so many lost a bit of myself in the process.” She gave a quick, tight grimace as if reliving the pain. “Most people here do. If they lose too many digits, they are put into noncutting jobs. I decided I didn’t want to have to lose all my fingers before I could get to that point of a noncutting job.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I took a correspondence course in bookkeeping and accounting. I became proficient not just in numbers but telling who wrote what. I knew a thumbless person’s writing from one who had just lost the tip of his finger. No one has to write that much. It’s mostly putting in a set of numbers and signing their names. But you learn. Little oddities stand out.”

  “What was the oddity about the note you found?”

  “Two things, really. The first was that whoever wrote it was trying to change the way he or she naturally wrote. There was a lot of physical effort involved.”

  “How could you tell this?”

  “When someone loses a finger here, they think they can fill in the charts the way they always have. But they can’t. They need more pressure in the beginning until they grow accustomed to the missing digit. You can see it. Indentations are left on the paper. Gradually, as they adjust to their handicap, no pun intended, it lightens — the pressure, that is. The paper has no dents.” She paused. “And furthermore, it was good paper. Expensive rag paper, not like the sort of pulp paper we use here. This was not office paper but that of a person of means. A summer person.”

  “And the second thing?”

  “There was a scent. A lovely, almost woodsy scent with a trace of pipe tobacco and perhaps a wisp of cologne.”

  May stared at her, puzzled. “How could you tell?”

  Miss Goodfellow smiled broadly now. “Training, my dear, training. You work all day in a place like this with its stench, well, your sense of smell can go to bloody hell.” May’s eyes flew open. This little mouse of a woman was the last person she would have ever thought of swearing. “So I make it my business to train my nose. In the summer especially I walk in the woods. I find every flower that grows wild in its season. I keep a diary of scents. No one realizes it but it’s not only the rose that smells sweet. Mosses also have very distinct odors. There is one oak moss. It has what I can only describe as a sharp, woody green smell but with an undertone of cinnamon. That’s what I noticed on the note you’re interested in.”

  “You mean the note writer sprinkled it with moss?”

  “Not intentionally. Perhaps he or she smoked a pipe while writing the note. But it was written in a place through which these scents swirled. A woodsy place.”

  “Did you tell the policemen about this?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “No one asked me. All they wanted to know was where I first found it. So I said under the door on the carpet of the entry foyer. You could smell that, too.”

  “But didn’t you think maybe you should say something?”

  “No.” She pressed her mouth until her lips were just a thin, pale line.

  “But why not?”

  Miss Goodfellow gave May a withering look. “When have men ever listened to women? Especially women like myself. Old spinsters. After a certain age you just become transparent to them.”

  May stared at her. She was right. Men rarely listened to women — except for Hugh — and Miss Goodfellow was as nearly transparent as anyone she had ever met.

  The moon was rising by the time May sailed back to Egg Rock. It was a nice night for sailing. She looked up at the stars and thought of Hugh. How could she not? For her, he was the stars. But was he slipping away from her just as the stars slid down into the western sky at night to be swallowed by a new day. How much longer would she have to wait for a letter? If Hugh were mer, would she feel this comeplete disconnect when he was away? Or would the salt that flowed through their veins bind them no matter how far apart they were? When she and her two siblings were separated, they could each slide into the sea miles apart and feel a deep visceral connection. Of course, before they had reunited, May, who had crossed first, had experienced a peculiar void on either side of her when she swam. She did not know that her two sisters existed, but it was as if there were pockets of air in the water waiting be filled.

  She tipped her head toward the hunter constellation rising in the east and, through a scrim of her own tears, saw Orion stumbling blindly. The stars of the Big Dipper began to reveal themselves in the darkening purple of the evening sky and burned with an unmatched intensity. They were like sparks struck from the anvil of a blacksmith. There was Dubhe, the Arabic word for bear, and one of the pointer stars of the Big Dipper. Golden almost in color and, according to Hugh, estimated to be one hundred and twenty light-years away. For one hundred and twenty years, its light had been traveling to Earth, a long flash in the universal night. Hugh had brought her all this, like riches from a far-off kingdom. The dark bowl of the night spilled precious gems that she had seen but never really knew. Not in the way she knew them now.

  She wondered if Miss Goodfellow had ever felt the embrace of a man. Had a man’s lips ever kissed her little face, grasped her tiny hand with its stub of a finger? Inhaled her scent, the one buried beneath the oily one of the sardines that must permeate her clothing and her skin? Did she brew the wildflowers she found — the woodsy mosses, the petals of roses — and bathe in them each night to erase the labors of the day?

  And just as she was thinking of these scents, the wind shifted to the land and brought with it that of the oak moss. It beckoned and, like iron filings drawn to a magnet, the skiff seemed to drive toward the shore. May was hardly aware of pushing the tiller. But she did and trimmed the sails, so the skiff began to heel slightly and headed into the cove of Otter Creek and the cave where she and her sisters had often met to tuck away the secret treasures they brought up from the seafloor. The scent of the oak moss was strong and seemed to tumble down from the top of the cliffs. The tide was dropping. May cast over the anchor. It wouldn’t take her long, but she wanted to swim. She stripp
ed off her clothes and slipped into the water, but instead of swimming into the cave she continued to the beach.

  The Snows’ cottage was set above the steep beach cliffs. It was the rectory for the visiting summer minister of the congregation of the Little Chapel by the Sea. May had hardly reached shore when she decided to turn around and swim back out. She wanted to know if she could actually see the cottage behind the scrim of pine and spruce trees. Barely. She swam back to the beach and sat on the sand, waiting for the tail to melt away and for her legs to return. Once they did, she scrambled up to the top of the cliffs. The moon beat a silver path across the water directly to the beach.

  May would never be sure how it happened, but she suddenly felt that she was standing in the same spot that Lucy’s mother had once stood, watching the daughter she had thought was human return from the sea. She was reimagining the scene as Marjorie Snow would have seen it with Lucy approaching the shore, swimming right up onto the beach. Her tail would still be glittering in the moonlight. She would roll over and sit on the beach for nearly a minute, possibly more, while her tail began to dry and the scales grew dull, turning into skin. Lucy might have taken off her chemise and wrung it out so as not to drip inside the cottage, leaving her nude. The flukes of her fantail would melt into feet, but until the tide came in, there would still be an impression left on the beach of the tail that had been. On a bright moon-washed night, Marjorie Snow would be able to see that impression clearly. This would be the incontrovertible truth: Her daughter was a monster come from the sea. And it was on that night, when Marjorie had already committed murder to protect the reputation of her daughter, that she decided to slay her daughter as well. She planted the evidence of the poison she had used to kill Percy Wilgrew, the Duke of Crompton, in Lucy’s pocket purse. Mrs. Snow would prefer to be known as the mother of a murderess than the mother of a changeling. A monster.

  “She saw her!” May said out loud, and in the same moment a scented wind thick with oak moss blew across her face. “She wrote the note. She killed Percy Wilgrew, the Duke of Compton,” May whispered into the yawning darkness. “She was the one who put the blame on Lucy.”

  THE NEXT MORNING the rain was beating down hard once again. May had been too agitated to sleep. She held in her hand a letter from Ettie she had received the week before, which must have been sent shortly after the verdict. She pulled it out of her satchel now and reread it, noting the tone of near hysteria.

  Dear May,

  What are we to do? I think I am going to go see Uncles God & Bark. Also, there is something seriously amiss with Hannah. Did you ever read that novel Trilby? It’s about this man who trains this young woman’s voice and controls her hypnotically. I think that is what this creep Stannish Whitman Wheeler is doing. He made her dye her hair, and honestly, I think she’s in some sort of trance! She is going to be completely useless in saving Lucy. As a matter of fact, it’s as if there are two to save at this point — Lucy and Hannah!

  Please come to Boston. I need your help!

  Love,

  Ettie

  What would Ettie make of what she had discovered? Not just what Miss Goodfellow had told her about the handwriting, but what she had reconstructed by imagining Marjorie Snow’s thoughts as she saw her daughter climb from the sea. Miss Goodfellow had said the note had been written by someone who obviously wanted to disguise his or her handwriting. Not only that, it had the scent of pipe smoke and the paper was expensive. The Reverend Snow smoked a pipe, and she was sure he wrote on fine paper. However, she doubted it was the reverend. She was almost certain it was Lucy’s mother. Lucy’s mother was a social climber. Her dream was for her daughter to marry a baron or a duke as so many of the young American girls were doing. Those girls came from families of great wealth. Lucy did not. But she was beautiful, so her mother still had hopes. But these hopes would be dashed if Marjorie Snow discovered Lucy’s true nature — that she was mer.

  However, before Marjorie made this discovery, she had learned of Lucy’s love for Phin. Percy Wilgrew himself had seen Phin and Lucy embracing in the woods and confronted Marjorie and Lucy at the Quoddy Club, threatening to reveal their tryst. This was what had turned Marjorie Snow from a mere social climber into a murderess.

  Suddenly she heard a loud pounding on the door. A visitor! Impossible. Even the mail boat wouldn’t be coming today.

  “May! May! Come down heah!” her father’s voice called up. “It’s Doctor Holmes.” May couldn’t imagine what he was doing here. He certainly hadn’t come for Zeeba, her adoptive mother. The doctor had visited two days ago to check her, although nothing really could be done for the woman since her stroke.

  May could not think of Hepzibah Plum as her mother. She had always been an embittered woman who’d resented May’s presence since the day Gar had brought her to the lighthouse as an infant. Zeeba had been in the midst of one of her frequent spells — bouts, afflictions, illnesses — there were not enough words for the devastating conditions she reveled in, as nothing made Zeeba happier than being ill. She loved the excitement, the attention. She had been a sly old fox, eager to get into the chicken house of diseases, and pursued them as eagerly as they longed to feed on her ripe and twisted psyche. She had no time for an infant.

  However, Zeeba was a sly fox no longer. She had at last gotten the big, fat hen of catastrophic illness — a massive stroke that had left her frozen into a speechless, infantile state, her eyes staring blankly out from a nothingness into a nothingness.

  May ran down the stairs to meet the doctor. “Zeeba’s fine!” she said, taking in the doctor’s drenched hair. “Just fine, but look at you, Doctor Holmes. You must take off your foul weather gear.”

  “Can’t. There’s a telegram for you. Well, he sent it to me for you. It’s from Hugh Fitzsimmons.”

  A telegram! A telegram had never been sent to Egg Island. Why now? Why would Hugh be sending her a telegram after the long silence? “Oh — oh, no! Something’s happened to him!”

  “No, it’s nothing like that. He wanted to arrange a time to speak on the telephone.”

  “He’s calling me on the telephone?”

  “Yes, the one at my office, at three o’clock this afternoon.” There were only perhaps thirty telephones in all of Bar Harbor, and half of those belonged to the rich summer people and were not in service during the rest of the year.

  “Hugh wants to talk to me on the telephone?” She felt her eyes filling with tears of relief.

  “Yes, come along. Grab a bag, for you can spend the night with me and Mrs. Holmes.”

  May ran to the room and snatched a few articles of clothing and toiletries and stuffed them into a canvas satchel. She looked around almost desperately. She had lived here ever since that day Gar found her adrift. She had imagined she would someday leave to be with Hugh. But was he going to end her dreams? She pictured that telephone wire strung from Boston to Bar Harbor. Little sparks flying off it as he spoke. She imagined the conversation. In a clear, logical voice, the one he used to explain declinations of the stars or the equatorial coordinate system. “You see, May, it is really quite easy.” He often began mathematical explanations with those words. But now it would not be about mathematics and astronomy. It would be about them. “Well, you see, May, it is really quite simple. We cannot marry. We cannot have a life together because due to your peculiar nature …” Would he call her a freak of nature? A freakish thing? No, he would never be that cruel. She felt a sob building in her as she gathered her things. And perhaps it was quite simple. Perhaps it was lose land or lose love.

  She fretted the entire way across the cove and out into the bay as they headed to Bar Harbor in the small cutter. What did Hugh want to tell her? What was Hugh calling about? Had something worse happened with Lucy? Or maybe he just wanted to say it was all too much for him. He would do everything he could to help Lucy, but they must come to their senses and realize that they could never really have a life together. It would be too much of a sacrifice on both their pa
rts and their children — how hard it would be for them. Yes, he must be calling because he wanted to “take a breather.”

  She walked dripping into the Holmes’s kitchen and peeled off her sou’wester. Mrs. Holmes sat her down in front of the old wood-burning stove with a mug of tea to warm her up. May tapped the rim of the mug nervously and scanned the room. “You have a phone here in your kitchen?”

  “Yes. You know if it’s at night and there is a medical emergency Doctor Holmes would never hear the phone in his office. But we sleep in the back just off the kitchen.”

  May stared at the phone and then at the clock. It was five minutes before the hour. Then it was two minutes. Then one. May smoothed back her hair and sat straighter. As if he could see me, how stupid! Mrs. Holmes had discreetly left the room. The hour hand was now straight up. Thirty seconds passed, but there was no ring. May felt a panic begin to stir. A full minute passed. Then two. She was about to get up and find Mrs. Holmes to ask if the clock kept proper time when there was the high-pitched trill of the phone. She leapt from her chair and grabbed the receiver.

  “May? Is this May?”

  “Yes! Hugh?” She nearly swooned. He began speaking very quickly about something he found in the library. It was in a book or perhaps an article in a journal that might help Lucy, and that May needed to come down to Cambridge.

  “Wait! Wait! You’re going too fast. Let me grab a piece of paper. I have to write this down.” The only paper she saw was a flattened brown bag. She began scribbling like mad. Excitement and relief coursed through her. Hugh hadn’t been calling to say good-bye — he’d been calling because he’d found something that might save her sister. She felt guilty for doubting him and wished she could reach through the telephone wire to stroke his cheek, just like she had the very first night he’d taken her to see the stars.

  Hugh had found an article by a Professor Lawrence — first name unknown — who’d found scientific evidence proving the existence of “mythical sea creatures.”