by Edwin Hill
“Quiet,” Lydia said, glancing toward the road, her eyes flashing with anger. “Trey could be anywhere. So could Oliver. And by the way, mind your own goddamn business.”
Rory kicked at a drift of daisies, uprooting a few and sending them flying. Lydia winced as though he’d hit her, and suddenly Rory was the one feeling small. He didn’t do those types of things, not to people he cared about, at least. Behind him, he heard footsteps followed by the opening and closing of the garden gate. But he couldn’t take his eyes off Lydia’s face.
“Things okay here?”
It was Vaughn, standing there in the gate, a bundle of buoys balanced on his shoulder. Like a model on the cover of a romance novel. “I was just out by the lighthouse,” he said. “I saw the woman looking for Annie. She’s asking a lot of questions.”
“Who cares?” Rory said. “This whole island knows about you two anyway.”
“Go away,” Lydia said quietly. She shouted over the perennials to Vaughn. “You too. Just leave me alone.”
She stormed into the bakery. From outside, Rory heard the slamming of pans and dishes into the sink.
Vaughn still hovered at the gate, one foot on the path, the other in the garden. Rory moved forward, and Vaughn backed away. “Hey, come on, man,” Vaughn said.
But Rory charged. Vaughn’s feet caught on the flagstones as he tried to retreat, and the buoys fell around him. Rory snatched at his sleeve, tearing the fabric on his t-shirt, and Vaughn spun, fists up. Rory imagined one well-placed jab. The satisfying crunch of bones and teeth. The end of Vaughn’s pretty, smug face. “I am going to kill you,” Rory said, lunging forward.
“Dunbar!”
The voice barely registered.
“Stand down.”
And then there were hands on his collar, a knee in his back, and dirt up his nose.
“Are you okay, sir?”
It was Barb, with her practical clothes and her practical hair. Rory tried to throw her off, and she dug her knee in further.
“It’s fine,” Rory heard Vaughn say, which only made everything worse. “It’s nothing. A little misunderstanding, right, Rory?”
Of course it was. They’d known each other for years. They used to be friends.
“Head off, then,” Barb said.
Rory heard Vaughn shuffle down the dirt path, and a moment later Barb released the pressure on his back and sat on the ground beside him. “That’s not what I meant when I told you to find your spine,” she said. “That’s the kind of thing that’ll keep you exactly where you are, or worse.”
“It’s not a big deal,” Rory said.
“You had your hand on your gun. One more move and I’d be writing up a report right now.”
Rory rested his forehead on his fists and stared into the dirt. His heart pounded. He remembered charging at Vaughn, and he remembered wanting to hurt him, to maim him, but he hadn’t reached for his gun, had he? He wouldn’t have done something like that.
Barb touched his shoulder. “I am so sorry about your brother,” she said, and the words struck Rory harder than he knew they could. In his rage, he’d forgotten about Pete for a moment.
“Nate and I’ll be out of your hair soon,” she said, getting to her feet. “Maybe we’ll work together again sometime. Till then, okay?”
He listened as she left, not quite ready to move. He heard the ferry in the harbor, blowing its horn. He should get up. He should get to the pier. He should find a way to keep moving forward, but somehow, right then, it all seemed too hard. He wanted to lie on the ground and look at dirt.
He heard the gate open and footsteps approach.
“Here, eat this.”
Lydia slid to the ground beside him holding a whoopie pie. Plain chocolate.
“I’m watching my figure,” he said.
“Eat it anyway.”
Rory rolled over and sat beside her. He split the whoopie pie in half, like an Oreo, though he barely tasted the sweetness of the icing.
“I’ll go with you to the mainland,” Lydia said. “To do whatever you need to do.”
“I’m on duty.”
“Get someone to replace you.”
“I’ll be off in the morning,” Rory said. “I’ll deal with Pete, with things on the mainland, tomorrow.”
“You should have let me know,” Lydia said. “You should have let me know it had gotten so bad.”
Rory stood, dusting the dirt from his pants. “What would you have done?” he asked, and when Lydia didn’t answer, he added, “You’d have done the same thing I did. Nothing. Now at least I’m the only one who needs to feel guilty about it.”
He walked to the pier. The ferry had already come into port, and the few afternoon passengers had disembarked. Zoe waved from the deck and made a heart with her hands and held it over her chest. He tried to smile and be gracious, but Zoe, like so many people in town, hadn’t cared enough in the end.
It didn’t take long for the ferry to load up and depart. Good riddance, Rory thought as he watched it pull out of the harbor. Barb would be gone soon, and the island would mostly be back to normal. Whatever normal might be.
Someone tugged at his sleeve. He glanced down to see the little girl, the one who’d come in on the ferry earlier that day, next to him. “Ice cream,” she said.
After a quick scan of the area, he saw the girl’s mother talking on the phone and watching them from fifteen yards away. This, at least, he could handle. He offered the girl a hand and walked toward the woman. Oh, and look at that. Now she’d started to run toward him, as if running would do her any good. She had the exact same look in her eyes that he’d seen practically every day of his professional career. People from away never quite understood that when the ferry left, it was gone till it came back. And now she’d be the one who’d pitch a fit. “Don’t look so panicked,” he said.
The woman leaned over her knees, gasping for air. She looked like she’d run a marathon.
“Did you find Annie?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“She’ll turn up,” Rory said.
The woman said something he barely understood. “What was that?” he asked.
“I found a body,” she said.
Rory swallowed. He tapped a pack of cigarettes, knocked one out, and lit it. Lydia used to get on him to quit, but that hardly mattered anymore. “What’s your name again?” he asked.
“Hester,” she said. “I was out at the lighthouse. By the Victorian. There was a knife.”
“That lighthouse is private property,” Rory said. “You aren’t supposed to go there. If they see you, they wind up calling me. Then it’s my problem to deal with. The owners are summer folk. Most of the time they don’t care. But when they do, they do.”
“I found a body,” Hester said.
This wasn’t what Rory needed, not now. “Yep, you said that already.”
“Do you care?”
“Doesn’t matter if I care,” Rory said, which was true. “I have to deal with it now no matter what you saw. It’s like chest pain. Never go to the doctor and claim to have chest pain unless you really, really mean it. They take it seriously.”
“This is serious.”
Rory held up his hands in surrender. This would be a distraction. And it would be good to be first on the scene. People would notice. “What you probably found is a junkie in the middle of OD’ing,” he said. A vision of Pete flashed through Rory’s mind, of frothing at the mouth, gasping for air. He pushed the image away. “One who won’t have the decency to die before I get there, which’ll mean I’ll have to radio to shore for a medevac. But I’ll go take care of it and you won’t. Understand? Don’t follow me. Don’t go anywhere near that lighthouse.” He pointed up the hill to Lydia’s inn. “Check in there, and I’ll come find you if I need anything.”
“The body’s in the water, and the tide’s coming in,” Hester said.
“If it washes away, then good riddance,” Rory said.
He ambled to the Jeep an
d drove away slowly, even tossing in a casual wave. It wasn’t till he’d crested the hill and headed down the other side toward Little Ef that he stepped on the gas.
* * *
Hester had expected a different reaction from Rory. A decidedly different reaction. She had to stop herself from asking Kate if they’d actually seen a dead body. She had. She knew that she had, and that she’d approached it and touched the rubbery skin to check for a pulse, which she’d have to remember to tell the police. Anyone who’d ever watched one minute of TV knew not to touch the body.
She thought about calling Morgan one more time but opted against it. He’d told her that he would rent a car and drive to Maine as soon as he finished work, and that he’d take the ferry to the island first thing in the morning. Hester had listened to his clipped words and ended the call as quickly as she could. In their years together, she’d learned to let him stew in his anger. Besides, she’d pushed him pretty far this time.
“Ready for an adventure?” she said to Kate. “We’re staying in a hotel tonight. But let’s pick up supplies first.”
A handwritten sign in the window of the General Store read, LIVE BAIT AND AMMO. A man with steely gray hair sat at the register in the dimly lit room, signaling that he knew Hester and Kate had entered the store, in the way he silently watched their every move. This store had aisles too narrow for a cart, and floor-to-ceiling shelves stacked with everything from canned chicken to Saran wrap to fishhooks. Hester found two toothbrushes, some toothpaste, and bags of snacks. As she piled the goods by the register to pay, a blond woman with a small boy in tow walked through the door and lingered in one of the far aisles.
“A fifth of Johnnie Walker,” Hester said.
The man reached for the bottle from the shelf behind him and added it to the bag without taking his eyes off the new woman, or carding Hester, which almost never happened. After Hester paid, he stepped from behind the register and into the store. Hester had grown up in a small town in Massachusetts with a mother who could barely get out of bed. The two of them had subsisted on a government check that arrived once a month. When the money ran out, Hester had done what she’d needed to. Even all these years later, she could spot fellow shoplifters, the way their hands darted from pockets, the way, like a magician, they distracted with the tiniest of movements. This woman wouldn’t have success today though.
Outside, Hester lingered till the woman backed out of the store, the boy clinging to her leg. “Well, fuck you too,” she shouted.
Hester caught Kate’s eye. “Don’t do it,” she warned.
“Well, fuck you too,” Kate said softly, which, Hester supposed, beat yelling it.
After the store owner had slammed the door, the woman crumpled to a picnic bench, her head cradled in her arms. He opened the door again and waved a broom at her, pointing at a sign that said “SEATING FOR CUSTOMERS AND SEAGULLS ONLY.”
“Move on,” he said.
“She’s with me,” Hester said.
The man harrumphed. “Don’t stick around,” he said, and went back inside.
Here, out in the sun, Hester could get a better look at the pair, and what she saw concerned her. The boy was rail thin, too thin, and wore clothes that hadn’t been washed in days. The woman’s skin was sallow and pockmarked. “What do you need?” Hester asked.
The woman glared. In that glare was a woman who knew exactly what had been asked and now teetered on the narrow edge between pride and necessity. Hester had been there.
“Dinner,” the woman said. “Anything they have. Ethan likes Dinty Moore.”
“Back in a few.”
In the store, Hester filled a basket with anything remotely healthy—beef jerky, canned green beans, mandarin oranges. She added four ice-cream sandwiches from the top-load freezer and ignored the tsk-tsk from the man at the register while she paid and slipped a twenty into the bag too. Outside, she handed out the ice-cream sandwiches and watched as both Kate and the boy gobbled theirs up. When they’d finished, she split hers in two and gave each of them half. “You live out at that house,” she said to the woman. “The Victorian. I recognize your son’s name. He’s the boy who went missing last night.”
The woman swept greasy hair from her eyes and wiped her hands on her jeans. She crumpled the ice-cream sandwich wrapper into a ball. “What’s it to you?” she asked.
“I’m looking for Annie,” Hester said.
The woman scratched at her cheek. “Annie left this morning,” she said. “Early. Really early. Right into the storm. Woke me up, slamming doors.”
“She left the house?”
“The island. She told me last night that it was time for her to go.”
“But the ferries weren’t running this morning.”
The woman shrugged. “She told me she was leaving. She left. I haven’t seen her since. Seems pretty simple to me.”
“You’re Frankie, right?”
The woman looked Hester over suspiciously before nodding.
“This is all for you,” Hester said, leaving the bag of food on the table. “I’m staying at the inn over there. Or at least I hope I am.”
Frankie seemed as though she might pass on the groceries but relented, reaching into the bag and holding up each of the cans. When she found the twenty, she folded it into a wad and stuffed it into her pocket. “Mandarin oranges?” she said.
“We can hit the bakery too,” Hester said. “Whatever you need.”
“We don’t need anything,” Frankie said.
“I do,” Hester said. “Five minutes?”
Frankie moved over on the picnic bench.
“I heard you got lost!” Hester said to Ethan, who pushed his face into his mother’s side.
“He wandered out to the lighthouse,” Frankie said, ruffling his hair.
“The lighthouse,” Hester said, stopping herself from mentioning what she’d found there.
“Thomas with me,” Ethan said, peeking from his mother’s side.
“Like the train,” Frankie said. “Thomas goes everywhere. At least in his imagination.”
“Not train,” Ethan said. “Tank engine!”
“Tank engine,” Hester said. “Thomas the Tank Engine was with you. How about anyone else?”
Ethan thought about the question. “Maybe Gordon too?”
“Another train,” Frankie said. “There are a lot of them, and he’ll keep going. They were probably all there.”
“Go play,” Hester said to Kate and Ethan. “Stay where we can see you.”
Kate took Ethan’s hand and led him toward a patch of grass. “Can you count to sixty?” she asked, and when he shook his head, she said, “How about a hundred?”
“What happened this morning?” Hester asked.
Frankie shrugged. “I found him sitting on the back stoop, soaked to the bone. He must have gotten trapped when the tide came in. I’m lucky a wave didn’t sweep him out to sea.”
“He’s seen a doctor, right?” Hester asked.
“Of course he did,” Frankie snapped. “And if you want to give me the third degree, I’ll get going.”
“Got it. Sorry to be nosy. Tell me how you know Annie. Then we’re done.”
“From the house. I saw her around Portland, too, before she left.”
“She lived in Portland? Do you know for how long? Or what she did there?”
“Not a clue. She probably did what I did, which was get high and steal things.”
Hester suddenly felt all the sleepless nights of the last year at once, and the drive to Maine in particular. She felt every favor she’d ever done for Daphne. But she also remembered the boat coming into the harbor earlier and scanning the line of people waiting to leave. She couldn’t have missed Daphne’s bright red hair. And even Daphne couldn’t have watched Kate getting off that ferry without coming forward.
“Did she say anything at all that might be helpful?” Hester asked.
“I’m telling you,” Frankie said. “You’re wasting your time. Annie left
the island as soon as she could this morning.”
* * *
“You’re back,” Lydia Pelletier said, from where she counted cash at the bakery counter. She took Hester’s tote bag from behind the counter. “I thought you might have left without this. I’m about to close, though.”
“I don’t need a whoopie pie as much as I need a room,” Hester said, glancing into the kitchen. She took Sebastian from the bag and handed him to Kate. “Where’s the kiddo?”
“He still takes naps, thank God,” Lydia said. “Missed the ferry? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve missed that damn ferry by ten seconds! Follow me!”
Lydia led Hester and Kate through a connecting door to the inn on the other side, an ancient house with low ceilings, creaking floorboards, and a fireplace in every room. A narrow staircase off the front foyer led up to a second-floor landing.
“This house is over two hundred years old,” Lydia said as she opened a door to a cozy room with sloped ceilings, flowered wallpaper, a rocking chair in the corner, and a window looking out over the water. “It was built when people were much smaller,” she added.
“Not smaller than me,” Hester said.
“Maybe not,” Lydia said. “The bathroom’s in the hallway. You’re the only ones here tonight, so you won’t need to share.”
Kate climbed up onto the bed and jumped on it.
“Can I help you with your bags?” Lydia asked.
Hester tossed the paper bag from the general store onto the bed along with the tote bag filled with Kate’s toys. “That about covers it,” she said. “How about a drink?”
“Let me get Oliver and I’ll meet you downstairs,” Lydia said, and a moment later Hester and Lydia sat on the inn’s front porch drinking beer from the bottle, while Oliver led Kate from flower to flower in the garden, arms spread wide. “What are you two doing?” Hester asked.
“We’re butterflies!” Oliver shouted.
“Bugs,” Lydia said. “Can’t get enough of them. How’d you miss the ferry anyway?”
Hester considered unburdening all of it, telling Lydia Daphne’s real name. Telling her about the texts and why she’d really come to this island. But she held back. “Who do I talk to about family services out here?”
