Peter.
He knew Julie drank, had referred to it the other night at his grandparents’ house. Had the boy gotten away from his mother after school, somehow nabbed a bottle of scotch, or maybe had it in his backpack all day, and raced Julie back here? Depot knew Peter’s scent. He would’ve run eagerly into the kitchen in the hopes of seeing the boy.
The hopes. Depot had no room in his nature for how diabolical Peter could be.
A brand-new fifth of scotch was as much of a threat as the mutilated bird.
Julie took the porch steps at a jump, then gave chase.
Peter was dressed in dark jeans and a black oilcloth raincoat with the hood drawn over his head. A tall, skinny boy with long legs who knew this path better than Julie, had been venturing down the lane between the two houses his whole life.
Julie fought to match his pace, but he was outrunning her.
“Peter!” she cried. “It’s okay! I’m not mad! I just want to talk to you!”
The boy picked up speed, and Julie’s breath was stolen as she tried to keep up. She didn’t have the wind to call out again. The sea to their right moved frenetically, tide rising up the base of the cliffs. Depot appeared, big as a pony beside her. Forelegs and hind carried him along the grassy lane, his glorious coat of fur blurring with the speed he attained. Depot began to growl in a way Julie hadn’t heard him do since he was a traumatized puppy, lips pulled back to bare his fangs.
“Deep!” Julie panted. “It’s okay! It’s just Peter!”
Peter’s pace faltered ever so slightly upon hearing the dog’s snarl.
Just enough for Julie to catch up and plant her hand on the boy’s shoulder. Peter twisted and wrenched, trying to get out of her hold, and Depot skidded to a halt, clumps of grass and dirt torn up beneath his paws as he let out another menacing growl.
“Depot, cut it out!” A tone of voice she hadn’t had to use with him in years.
Julie turned Peter around, and his hood fell back.
The face beneath the slick fabric wasn’t Peter’s.
It was Ellie’s.
Chapter Sixty-Three
A tall, skinny eleven-year-old boy in a dark, hooded raincoat could be mistaken for a small, slight woman, especially running, and especially since Julie had already made the assumption that the deliverer of the threats and all the bad things that had assailed her and Depot since they’d come to Mercy Island was the same person as the child who’d reached out to his new teacher in such desperate need.
Julie backed away so swiftly, at such a stumble, that Ellie thrust out her arm, snagging Julie’s. Julie twisted partway around and saw how close to the edge of the cliff she had come. She took off at a run, and then it was Ellie chasing her, back up the lane.
“Julie! Please, wait!”
But Julie didn’t stop running till she reached her house.
Depot held Ellie at bay on the porch, jumping and nipping.
Ellie’s eyes pleaded with Julie, and finally Julie relented. “Okay, Deep, quit it.”
The dog quieted, although he continued to stand guard before the front door.
Words crowded Julie’s throat, a leaden, choking mass. Questions, accusations, demands that in the end boiled down to one word. “Why?”
Ellie’s narrow shoulders slumped. “I’m sorry, Julie. I really am. I didn’t want to.”
“The grandmother made you do this? Threaten my weeklong sobriety?” Betrayal slithered over Julie’s whole body. “Hurt an innocent bird?”
Ellie slapped her hands over her ears. “Stop it! Don’t you think I know how disgusting I am already?”
Julie’s tone was so scathing, it burned her throat. “Are you asking me for pity?”
Ellie’s pale eyes went lightless. “Do you have any idea how low my rent is? I couldn’t stay on Mercy if it weren’t for Mrs. Hempstead. And I could never live anywhere else. I don’t know how to live anywhere else. This island has a way of doing that to you once you’ve been here a while. It institutionalizes you, just like a prison, or a psychiatric hospital. Mercy ruins a person for life on the outside.”
Julie shook her head back and forth.
“Fine!” Ellie bit out. “Maybe that’s an excuse, I have a way of making them. You want to hear the truth, Julie? You want to know the real, ugly truth about Mercy Island and Mrs. Hempstead?”
Julie hesitated, and Ellie barged on.
“No, really. You kept asking and needling and wanting to know. All sorts of things that are none of your business. That’s the reason Mrs. Hempstead insisted I do what I did. To ensure you learned your place. To take you down a peg or two. To make you easier to control because that woman is all about control.”
The grandmother’s practices made a rotted sort of sense. She’d cut the same kinds of corners Julie’s uncles and grandfather had when they’d been in charge of Wedeskyull. A corrupt police department, a lawless aristocracy. Why deal with annoying resistance, pushback from people who had competing needs and desires, when you could bend them all to your will, make everyone do your bidding via favors, gifts, leverage, blackmail, threats, and in Julie’s family’s case and perhaps here on Mercy, too, crime?
“Mercy has always been ruled by an iron fist in a velvet glove.” Ellie’s mouth recomposed itself in a sneer. “So here it is. The real reason I did what Mrs. Hempstead said to is because she knows the smallest, ugliest parts of me—the smallest, ugliest parts of us all—and she uses them to convince us we’re not fit for any other sort of life. How can I live with the fact that my own mother let that man come to me every night he spent with us?” Ellie held her arms thrust outward, away from herself, as if she couldn’t stand to touch her own body. “I’m lucky to have this place. It’s the only one that would have somebody like me.”
Julie tried to shake her head in protest, but Ellie put up a hand.
“Oh, stop. You have your own shame, Julie. The grandmother used it against you too.” Ellie’s face and neck and hands, all her exposed skin, had gone ruddy and blotched. “But I was trying to resist her this time. Just this once. No way was she going to mess with our friendship. That was the reason behind my latest attempt at quitting. I figured I would need to be sober if I was going to stand a chance. Obviously I didn’t succeed. At either.” Ellie’s slim form turned and walked off, shielding itself in descending shadows.
Julie called out, her throat still raw with hurt and anger and unshed tears. “You kidnapped my dog! You could’ve gotten him killed!”
Ellie whirled around. “No,” she said. “I promise. Mrs. Hempstead wanted Depot to get used to listening to me, in case we ever needed him as leverage. So I had treats and food and I might’ve cowed him a bit, that first day we met, yelled at him a little. I gave him some cough medicine in the middle of the night when you slept over because he was so agitated. He’s so big, he probably didn’t even feel the dose. But I swear, I would never hurt your dog, and I didn’t lead him onto those cliffs.”
Depot’s long nap the other day in the schoolhouse. He’d felt the dose all right, although worry over Julie must have somehow delayed its effects. Tears sprang to her eyes. Ellie had lied about so many things—a stack whose height Julie couldn’t even begin to assess right now—that she had no idea whether to believe her about this. She turned and stepped past Depot, leaning around his big form to open the front door.
Ellie followed her. “Maybe no one took him there,” she said, appearing to think. “Mike Cowry has been keeping an eye on things here at the house—how you were settling in, if you were drinking—so maybe he came over that day and didn’t close the door all the way. Or maybe Depot ran him out. And then Depot could’ve followed your scent…you had just been on those cliffs at the party. I don’t think anyone wanted your dog to get hurt.”
The cold recitation of the facts of her stalking undid any relief Julie might’ve felt upon hearing this cla
im. “Were you at the schoolhouse that day before school started?” she demanded. “Did you come by and not answer when I called out?”
Ellie dropped her gaze. “Yes, that was me. But if it helps, I was just making sure you were there so I could send Callum over. I wanted you guys to meet.”
“Great. You massacred a bird on my doorstep and helped make a match with the first man I’ve ever really found—” Julie clapped a hand over her mouth. She wasn’t even sure what she’d been about to say, but she had no intention of saying it to Ellie. Not then anyway. Still, when Ellie looked at her and asked, “Really?” Julie whispered back, “I think so.”
Ellie gave her a small smile.
Julie turned and walked into the kitchen to finish serving Depot his missed meal. He looked from Ellie to his bowl and back again, torn between vigilance and hunger.
“It’s okay, Deep,” Julie told him. “Eat.”
Depot gulped down a mouthful. Ellie gave the dog his space, her hands held up in a gesture of surrender. “Mind if I use your bathroom?”
“All that running and chasing makes a girl have to pee, huh? Sure. Go ahead.”
Julie listened to Ellie trudge up the stairs, close the door, run the water. When she came back down again, Ellie sidled into the kitchen, stretching to lean past Depot. A thrum started low in the dog’s throat.
“I just—” Ellie’s voice faltered. “I was going to take that away for you.” She pointed to the bottle still standing on the counter. The scotch emitted a haloed, golden glow.
Julie shook her head. “You’ve done enough.”
Ellie’s pale skin flushed.
Julie walked by her and opened the front door. After a moment, Ellie went outside, and all sight of her was soon lost to the gloom of the oncoming night.
* * *
In the kitchen, standing some distance from the counter, Julie leaned forward on legs that already felt drunk and unsteady. She reached one arm out so far that the bottle nearly dropped when she snatched it up. Might as well do this outside, in a place that had come to mean something to her.
She walked toward the edge of the cliff, hearing the approach and retreat of the surf, the soft sough of the waves. Her fist choked the neck of the bottle, which dangled from her hand. She licked her lips, realizing that the skin on them was healing. Felt the slosh of liquid behind glass and imagined the gurgling sound that would accompany a long, deep draft.
Julie drew her arm back and gave a giant heave, a Frisbee throw that sent the scotch hurtling end over end where it landed invisibly out to sea.
Then she went back inside. Depot had gone to sleep by the wall of windows. Her dog had never been comfortable with Ellie, Julie realized, had been trying to caution her about her new friend’s dual nature since the very first day when they’d all met and Depot had sat so silently at the edge of the yard, then ran off alone in the woods.
That black goop on Depot’s nose after Julie left him alone with Ellie to go change for the Hempsteads’ party. Just a treat of some kind, or had it been something to make the dog sick, render him unable to go with them? Depot tended to pose a distraction, perhaps the grandmother wanted to observe Julie in her pure, unvarnished state. Julie thought of the times she had asked Ellie to watch Depot, or walk him home, with a queasy sense of treason. Depot hadn’t been trying to protect Julie from some outside threat that night at Ellie’s house. He’d been guarding her from the danger lying right beside her in the bed.
And Julie had thought Peter was the one she and her dog had to watch out for.
Did the boy really exhibit the twisted behaviors Chloe had described? Or had both she and Julie missed the fact that Peter himself was in jeopardy?
Try as she might, Julie couldn’t imagine a source for that potential peril, though. Everybody kowtowed to Peter. He was at the helm of the ship, or would be one day soon.
Julie trudged across the first floor. She felt as if the surface beneath her feet, whatever kept Mercy Island from simply drifting out to sea, had shifted. The extent of the grandmother’s intrusiveness and willingness to do harm was a difference in degree. As soon as Julie read that ledger, she’d been made aware of how the grandmother tampered with lives. But Ellie’s betrayal was a change in kind. In quality not quantity.
Julie sighed, giving her sleeping dog a last look as she started to mount the steps. Without Depot beside her, it was going to be a long, lonely night. Perhaps she would take the other half of her pill. Leave the bottle with a round number in it.
She went down the hall to the bathroom, but couldn’t find the vial in the medicine cabinet. Had she left it somewhere after taking her dose the other night? Julie walked into her room, checking beside Hedley’s photo and elsewhere on the night table. She looked at the dresser top, then in each drawer, and even flung back the covers on her bed.
Peter could’ve gotten his hands on these pills when he’d hidden in the house. Anybody could have; Julie had been a fool to leave them unsecured.
Then she figured out what must’ve happened, and she started to run.
Chapter Sixty-Four
Julie was scarcely aware that Depot had woken up and followed her. The sounds of his anguished yelps and skidding paws were muted by the roar in her head. Like the sea, endless, unbroken. Julie ran along the trail through the woods, heedless of roots and knolls that threatened to trip her. Her hands broke her fall when it happened, fingers scraped and knuckles bruised in the dirt, before she got to her feet and raced onward, breath coming in gasps that tore her throat.
The foursquare of cottages came into view, an aging gray sky for backdrop.
Julie fell against Ellie’s door, barging inside unannounced.
Ellie was slumped over, her head on the table, one hand on an empty bottle of wine.
Just one tonight. That was all Ellie had needed, given the pills.
Julie knew her friend was dead even before she touched her fingertips to her motionless body, felt the lack of a flutter in her throat and the white marble quality of her skin. As soon as she saw the expression Ellie had never worn in real life, the glazed look of peace in her eyes.
* * *
Julie called Paul Scherer, using Ellie’s landline, and trying to blind herself to the sight of the wine, the table, her friend. The constable didn’t pick up—it was after hours—but there was a machine on which emergency messages could be left, and Julie delivered the news in a sodden monotone of grief.
She knew what would happen next, and what her role should be. Julie retraced her steps to the front door, making sure not to touch anything on her way. Then she waited outside, no measure to the passing time, as long as this was going to take.
Depot wandered off into the trees, sniffing the ground, while Julie stood on the patch of sand and soil outside the cottage until the constable came walking along the road through town, the grandmother by his side, matching his stride.
She swept past Julie, entering the cottage to assess the scene. Scherer and Julie trailed her in, and the grandmother turned, confronting them both with her piercing gaze.
“How terribly, terribly sad,” she said. “Ellie Newcomb has been a tortured soul, ever since she was a child. Do you know, I once took her in?”
Depot came running back and Julie grabbed him, clenching his collar so fiercely that the leather dug a well in her hand. “Yes,” she said faintly. “I think I did hear that.”
“Ah,” the grandmother said. “The famous dog I keep hearing about.”
A rumble began low in Depot’s throat, building to an explosive bark. “Depot, no!” Julie cried. That made twice in one day she’d used that tone with her dog.
Depot’s head drooped so low that his snout grazed the floor. Shame was the emotion Depot had shown most often after being rescued, and a fuzzy haze of it enclosed him again now.
Julie despised this woman with a hatred she’d never
felt toward anyone before. But she couldn’t reveal it—had, in fact, to display the opposite. If the grandmother knew that Julie suspected she’d played a role in all this, then she would make good on the warning she had sent with Mike Cowry this morning. She’d already done it to Chloe.
And then Julie would never find out what the grandmother was intent on hiding from Peter, or why the boy might be suffering so.
They were talking about me, Ms. Weathers.
Julie’s body quaked with anger, causing Depot to whine and edge closer. Finding out the truth would mean playing the part of the woman Mike Cowry had spied on back in Wedeskyull. Meek, crushed by life, accepting.
The old woman offered Julie a condescending nod. “Word of largesse tends to spread. Or was it Ellie herself who told you of my efforts? I did so wish to help her. But some situations can’t be rectified, no matter how good one’s intentions or how much force is applied.” A deliberated pause. “Now, I believe you must speak to our constable?”
Julie gave a statement to Scherer, aware of the components it needed to contain—and all that it shouldn’t. Ellie had overdosed on prescription sleeping pills and wine. The meds she had taken belonged to Julie. Julie hadn’t realized they were gone.
She asked the constable if she would be needed for anything else that night.
“We’ll take it from here,” he told her, not unkindly.
The grandmother stood in the center of the room, legs spread wide, hands planted upon Ellie’s couch as if she owned not only the cottage, but everything in it, including the people, its history, the lives it used to and ever would contain.
“You may go, Ms. Weathers,” she said, with a curve of her outstretched arm. “On Mercy we know how to take care of our dead.”
* * *
In the middle of the night, guilt crept up on Julie like an old friend.
The Second Mother Page 32
