Strangers She Knows

by Christina Dodd

  Rae chided, “Mommy, Luna’s not a thief. She simply likes to be comfortable with us.”

  “Right.” Luna bumped Kellen’s hand with her nose and on demand, Kellen scratched her neck.

  “Luna would like fireworks,” Rae said.

  With awesome patience, Max said, “We don’t have any fireworks.”

  “Could we shoot off guns?” Rae asked.

  Kellen put down the stress ball. “Guns?”

  “Isn’t that why we shoot off fireworks? Because it’s like the Revolutionary War, all shooting and stuff?” Rae was pretty glib for a kid who’d never fired a weapon.

  Kellen was glad she was honestly able to say, “There were no firearms in Morgade Hall when we arrived. Right, Max?”

  Max straightened up. “No. No firearms here when we arrived. Which is weird, because a big tough guy like Morgade should have firearms all over his house. And animal heads mounted on his walls.”

  “Daddy, that’s gross!”

  “Yeah, it is. Anyway, no firearms when we got here.” He gestured to Kellen. “Would you try to start the truck?”

  “Sure.” Kellen jumped down—Luna remained comfortably relaxed on the bench—climbed into the driver’s side, turned the key in the ignition, then pushed the starter button.

  The starter moaned, but the engine didn’t turn over.

  “Are you sure you’re doing it right?” Max asked.

  Kellen got out, walked around to the front of the truck and looked at Max. Just looked at him.

  “Yeah. I guess that was stupid.” Max wiped his greasy hands on a rag. “I feel like I’m not getting anywhere with this thing. The damned truck should start!”

  Kellen affectionately watched him scratch his head and smear grease on his forehead. The first time they’d come out to work on the truck, Max had aired up the low tire.

  Since then, like his optimism, it had slowly been deflating.

  Rae frowned darkly into the depths of the engine compartment. “Daddy, the spark plugs are groaty. What would happen if you took them out and cleaned them?”

  Kellen gave Rae a nod of approval.

  Max viewed his little girl with suspicion. “It’s worth a try.” He glared at Kellen.

  She shrugged. She hadn’t told her. Rae had thought of that on her own.

  “Okay. Smart kid.” He beamed, and asked Kellen, “Will it work?”

  “Good chance.”

  “Rae, hand me a spark plug socket wrench.” He started removing the spark plugs.

  Rae leaned on his shoulder and watched. “Be careful getting those out. We don’t have any wires if you break them.”

  Right in that drawer, wires and new spark plugs, too.

  Keep your mouth shut, Kellen.

  She hadn’t yet investigated the contents of the old white refrigerator. She suspected it hadn’t run for a long time, and she rather feared she’d find the first caretaker’s lunch in an advanced state of petrification.

  She opened the door.

  Petrified food wasn’t what she found.

  It was worse than that.

  Hastily she shut the door.

  Holy smokes. How long had all that been in there?

  She must have squeaked, because Max pulled his head out of the engine compartment. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” She caught sight of a movement just inside the door.

  Mara.

  No. Not Mara.

  Dylan Conkle, grinning guiltily.

  “Dylan. What are you doing?” She rested her cool gaze on him. It wasn’t the first time she’d caught him sneaking around to listen to their conversations.

  “I, um, came up to mow the lawn and I brought the food basket.” He put it down in the corner and sidled farther into the garage. “What’re you doing? Trying to get the old truck running?”

  Rae answered. “We’re not trying. We’re going to do it.”

  “Right. Sure.” Dylan’s voice had that patronizing tone people got when talking to kids. “You’re daddy’s little helper, aren’t you?”

  He got close enough to the truck that Max, who had been watching him, asked, “What have you been drinking? Have you been making your own liquor?”

  Dylan reversed his path, backing slowly away. “Not really. I mean…yeah, maybe. It’s like a craft beer thing only with grains. Very respectable.”

  “Don’t drink that stuff until after you’ve delivered the basket.” Max looked him right in the eyes. “You don’t have a tough job. You might want to keep it.”

  Dylan’s smile faded. He turned and scurried away, and his departure left a profound silence in the garage.

  Max grimaced. “He’s going to kill himself or get fired, and I don’t know which will come first.”

  One thing Dylan’s sudden appearance had shown Kellen—although Mara had not been a continuous, sentient fear, her subconscious had been on the lookout all the time they’d been here. She looked at the refrigerator, then at the empty doorway where Dylan had stood. Picking up Ruby’s diary, she asked brightly, “Want me to continue with Ruby’s story?”

  “Yes!” Rae said.

  “Go for it,” Max said.

  Kellen read, “‘My brother is dead.’”

  “Oh, no. Poor Ruby!” Rae sounded sad for the woman she had never met.

  “Poor brother,” Max said.

  Kellen started again…

  13

  My brother is dead. With his bullying and his demands for perfection, Father drove Alexander away. Alexander joined the Navy and Father cut him off without a dime. He has been writing me and my dear Hermione has been gathering the letters before Father could confiscate them.

  Kellen stopped reading.

  Rae craned her neck around to look at her mother.

  “What?” Max asked.

  “Ruby didn’t like Hermione,” Rae told her father.

  “Something must have happened.” Kellen hooked her finger in the diary. “We can be sure no one likes Mr. Morgade, so Hermione wouldn’t, either. Ruby sounds charming, and she and Hermione are close to the same age and the only young women on the island—”

  “There had to be staff,” Max pointed out. “Maids to do the cleaning and stuff.”

  “Yes, but they would be working all the time. All the time. I’d guess Ruby and Hermione bonded, and I mean, really—if Mr. Morgade is gone most of the time, how would he know whether all his instructions are obeyed?”

  Rae grinned at Kellen. “I like Hermione!”

  “Me, too.” Kellen sobered. “Although she’s taking a terrific chance. If Morgade finds out, he’ll toss her aside the way he did Miss Harriman. She might never work again. A single woman on her own could starve.”

  Rae took a long, frightened breath. “Read more. Read faster!”

  Alexander went through training and he was happy. He shipped out to Hawaii, and he was happy.

  Three days ago, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. We heard many brave men were killed. President Roosevelt declared war on Japan. Mother is devastated. She cried because her people murdered so many. Then this morning she got the news about Alexander.

  He was in a hangar preparing a plane to take off when a Japanese fighter dropped a bomb and demolished the building. He was my next oldest sibling, twenty-one years old, and he’s dead. My heart is bleeding.

  Father said he deserved what he got for disobeying him.

  I hate Father so much. Now there is only Bessie, married and living on the east coast, and Larry in Britain, at Oxford, where it is not at all safe. The Blitz targets all historical buildings, and I fear for him.

  Then there’s me, here on this horrible island, learning the correct way to pour tea and direct servants while the world goes up in flames.

  Father went to the mainland to deal with the news stories.
I sent him a message, begging him to return. Mother isn’t well. She isn’t crying now. She sits and stares.

  He hasn’t come.

  He won’t.

  He doesn’t care. We’re Japanese. We’re liabilities now.

  Father is incensed. The Navy has come to Morgade Island. They arrived without warning, presented Mother with papers and began construction on a structure that looks to the west.

  Men are swarming everywhere.

  All the time, dynamite blasts shake the ground. Ships are bringing materials.

  Men everywhere. Handsome men. In uniform!

  Father is nowhere close to here. He has written Mother and told her to tell the Navy to get off. Which is laughable. Then he wrote to explain he had no choice because if he hadn’t yielded to the military’s demands they would have moved Mother and me off the coast and into an internment camp.

  The nasty old man made this occupation our fault. Even Mother is rousing from her sorrow about my brother… We got his body back, and buried him here on the island.

  Father came. He’s in a cold rage, seeing the men on his island. Morgade Island. The Navy calls it Isla Parai’so, which is what it was called before Father bought it. That makes him angrier. He hates seeing men here who are young and handsome, who use slang and don’t care who he is or whether he’s important. He hates having no power.

  He tells me to speak only to the officers. But they’re old. Most of them are over twenty-five. I met one private first class named Beaufort Rash. He has a southern accent, he’s cute, and he’s twenty. He worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad before he joined up. He joined on D-Day, but he promises he doesn’t blame me for what the Japs did. I looked him in the eyes. I told him my brother died that day, because my brother joined before it was glamorous. I was proud of myself; I didn’t ask Beaufort if he’d yet lost any relatives, and he shut up.

  Hermione laughed when I told her, then told me not to take it to heart. She said most men like that have been spoiled by their mothers and sisters, and don’t realize they should be careful what they say. She says I taught him a lesson, and good for me.

  Today I got a letter from my sister. Bessie heard about the Naval occupation of the island and writes to warn me to take care, for all these soldiers and sailors wanted only one thing from me, and that was my virtue. I wrote back and told her I had so concluded. I am not as stupid as everyone seems to think.

  But there is one boy…

  “What? A boy?” Rae’s eyes were shining.

  The spark plugs were laid out on the workbench, cleaned and polished. The wires were straightened and inspected. Luna rested her head against Kellen’s thigh. Rae was sitting on the F-100’s fender. Max leaned against the grille. They were both listening raptly.

  “Is this boy going to rescue Ruby from her wicked father?” Rae asked.

  “Listening to Ruby’s story, I think she’s going to rescue herself.” Max gathered the spark plugs, muttering, “I’ve got to re-gap these.”

  “Yes!” Rae pumped her arm. She wasn’t talking about the thrills of re-gapping.

  Kellen rustled the pages of the diary. “I think we’d better stop here, or we’ll be here until evening and Olympia will be furious. Also—” She rocked on her bottom, numb from sitting, and winced. “Rae? Would you take this basket to Olympia?”

  “Sure.” Rae was not enthused.

  Kellen suggested, “Maybe you can help her make sandwiches for lunch.”

  “She doesn’t like my help.” Rae took the basket and dragged her feet toward the back door.

  “I wish you would help her. I’m starving.” It was true, Kellen realized. All that running…she was starving.

  As if Kellen’s words reminded Rae of food, her eyes got round and her step got enthusiastic. “Me, too.” She raced out the door.

  “That kid. When she’s hungry, we’re all in trouble. She’s enough to make a bull elephant tremble.” Max extricated himself from the engine compartment. “Is Rae unhappy here?”

  “I don’t think so. Not exactly. But she only has us. Olympia doesn’t like kids. Jamie doesn’t like anybody.”

  “Then why did you send her away?” Max was darned observant…for a guy.

  She placed her hand on the old refrigerator. “Max, you’ve got to look at this.”

  “What is it?” He walked over and opened the door.

  Stacked inside were explosives: military dynamite and rolls of cable.

  Max shut the refrigerator door. Fast. “Holy shit.”

  “Yes. Exactly.”

  He opened the door again. “These are leftovers from…?”

  “I guess from World War II when the Navy occupied the island.”

  He shut the door again as if shutting it could make it disappear. “Do they still work?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “You were in the military.”

  “We had current munitions!” She took a breath. “The Army fed us rations packaged in the Vietnam War, but the artillery was up to date!”

  “Right.” He leaned a hand against the refrigerator, then hastily pulled it away. “Dynamite shouldn’t have an expiration date, should it? It’s a chemical compound set off with a blasting cap.”

  “The blasting caps are in the vegetable crisper.”

  “Of course they are.” He was trying to reason his way through this. “As long as the chemicals are kept dry and in a stable environment, as they have been, then we have really good explosives.”

  “I believe you’re right.”

  “What do you do with dynamite?”

  “You blow things to kingdom come. I currently haven’t got a reason to do that. Do you?”

  “Not currently.” His brown eyes glowed as he got an idea. “Hey, if Mara shows up, we could run one up her ass and light the fuse.”

  “Max!” Shocked and unwillingly amused, Kellen laughed.

  “You have a problem with that?”

  “No.”

  “Anything else good in here?” He opened the door and looked into the tiny freezer compartment at the foot-long metal cylinders. Gingerly, he picked one up and read the label. “Flares. We’ve got flares. Military flares.”

  “Flares, illumination, hand held, star cluster, white, green and multi-color.”

  “I always wanted to shoot one off. In the Army, did you shoot one off?”

  He didn’t very often look at her with a reverential gaze, and she could not lie—she liked it. “In Afghanistan. You bet. For illumination. Parachute flares, too.” She took the flare out of his hand and examined it. “This is vintage. It’s different than the ones I used. This flare opens like a sardine can. But after that, the theory is the same. Remove the firing cap, place it on the bottom of the tube, align it correctly, aim and strike it sharply on a hard surface. Your palm, if you’re steady, but there’s a recoil, so I prefer to use the ground. They go up as high as seven hundred and fifty feet before the star cluster ignites. The star cluster lasts six to ten seconds. At least…the flares I used did.” She handed it back to him. “I don’t know about the old ones.”

  “And what could we do with them?”

  “Well, we could…” Kellen shook her head. “No, we couldn’t.”

  “What? Shoot them off tonight to celebrate the Fourth of July?”

  Great. They thought alike. One of them had to be mature. Didn’t they? “The grasslands are a tinderbox out here. A flare would set the whole island on fire.”

  “Come on, honey.” He wrapped his arm around Kellen. “Rae deserves a treat.”

  “Don’t try to blackmail me with my daughter. Although…”

  “Although?”

  She experienced the same feeling she had known those times in the military when her platoon waited and waited and waited for an attack, and finally got wild and rowdy in their need to blow off
some steam. “Rae’s right. We could shoot them off over the ocean. We’d set nothing on fire.” Really, it wouldn’t hurt.

  “Right! And look.” He pointed toward the corner of the garage. “Big old washtubs, right there. We’d take the washtubs down to the beach with us. If anything happened, like some sparks blowing back at us—”

  “—or the flare failing altogether?”

  “—we’d be ready to put out the fires.”

  “Max, you’re crazy. I’m crazy. That would be wrong. What if we didn’t succeed and the whole island went up in flames?”

  “There is nothing you and I can’t do when we try.”

  * * *

  That night a flare lifted off the beach at Isla Paraíso and lit the sky over the Pacific with a blast of multi-colored lights.

  Just over the horizon, Mara Philippi stood on the deck of a yacht, and caught her breath in surprise and pleasure. “Look, Owen.” She spoke toward the chair at the stern. “They’re welcoming us to Isla Paraíso! How unexpected—and charming.”

  14

  Olympia delivered her usual English country house breakfast to the dining room: bacon, sausages, eggs prepared two ways, wheat toast, white toast, French toast, a bowl of oranges from Jamie’s orchard. Kellen thought how lovely it felt to be waited on in such palatial splendor.

  Unfortunately, after she placed the dishes on the table, Olympia didn’t leave. Instead she stood, stern and sour-faced, hands wrapped in her apron.

  Max was reading his backlog of wine studies and paying no attention. Rae was eating a little of everything. Which left Kellen to ask, “What’s up, Olympia?”

  “There are rodents in the kitchen.”

  That got Max’s attention. He lifted his head and stared, transfixed, at their cook.

  “Some large thing has been in the pantry, moving things around, polishing off the leftovers of yesterday’s cake.” Olympia looked sternly at Rae, who was still eating French toast and bacon with total concentration.

  “You don’t think… You’re not saying that she…” Kellen was shocked.