by Barbara Ross
The dinghy’s little motor would have been hard to hear over the rhythmic crash of the waves against the rocks, so I called from the dock, not wanting to take them by surprise. “Hello! It’s Julia!” The door to their house was closed and, in spite of the gloomy day, no lights shone. A drenched Le Roi ran up beside me and scratched at the door, meowing. He wanted to get inside, too.
I knocked and called a couple times. I turned the knob and pushed. It was locked. Strange. Through the window in the door, in the fading light, I could see into Gabrielle’s kitchen. It had been ransacked. Pots strewn across the floor, drawers of flatware emptied on the spotless linoleum. The shelves of her china cupboard stood empty, the shards of her dishes on the floor.
The scene in the kitchen panicked me. Had the mad man who’d killed Ray returned to the island? I was sure Sarah and Chris weren’t killers. Was it Jean-Jacques?
I banged on the door again hard and shouted, but there was no sign of Etienne or Gabrielle.
I returned to the dock, at a loss as to what to do next. Despite the long June days, night was going to fall soon. It would be a cloudy night, with no moon to guide me home. Something was terribly wrong.
I looked up at Windsholme. It stood silent as it always did. But it seemed like there was an eerie light in the center window on the top floor, the room where Binder and I had discovered the neatly folded clothes. But there wasn’t any working electricity in that part of the mansion, only in the two rooms on the first floor I’d had newly wired.
I took off up the hill. As I ran, I considered the alternatives. My cell phone? Useless. The radio? Locked in Etienne and Gabrielle’s house. I reached the front porch of Windsholme and threw open the double doors.
I considered for a moment what I might be rushing into. Jean-Jacques most likely . . . in the room he used when he was on the island . . . with some sort of lantern. Was he dangerous? He was a fugitive, someone who’d lived outside society for six years. What would happen if I cornered him?
I had to consider Etienne and Gabrielle. By the look of things at their house, there’d been a terrible struggle. What if Jean-Jacques was holding them, harming them? I had to help. No one is coming, I thought. There’s no one to do anything but me.
I started up the staircase, my heart pounding like the waves on the rocks outside. Not a panic attack, the product of an overactive mind, but real panic. I stood on the landing, breathing carefully, willing myself not to run away.
I climbed to the top floor and paused again, trying to stay in control. From where I stood, I could see the door across from the landing was ajar, light escaping onto the hallway floor. From inside the room came a terrible keening. Gabrielle! What was happening to her?
Keeping flat against the hallway wall, I slid forward in the shadows. I didn’t think Jean-Jacques would hear me over the racket his mother was making. About the only thing on my side was the element of surprise. I rushed past the partially opened door to the other side of the hall and peered in.
Gabrielle sat on the floor in the center of the room surrounded by a circle of lit candles. She cradled a grown man in her arms and moaned. “Mon p’tit chou, mon p’tit chou, mon p’tit chou.”
She’d called Jean-Jacques by that endearment when he was young and he’d hated it. But now, far from fighting her, far from the evidence of confrontation and mayhem I’d seen at their house, he was lying in her arms and allowing her to comfort him.
I took the chance of peering around the door frame, so I could see the other side of the room. What I saw made me clasp my hand to my mouth to keep from crying out. Etienne was tied to the bed, a gag in his mouth and a terrified expression in his eyes. He saw me in the candlelight and raised his great eyebrows at me, showing me the whites of his eyes.
I looked back at Gabrielle holding Jean-Jacques’s inert body. He was a big man the last time I’d seen him and it looked as though his wandering years hadn’t changed that. I pumped up and down on my knees a couple times and got ready to spring.
My God, what was I doing? Was I crazy? I couldn’t go through with it. But then I remembered. No one was coming. It was all down to me. I crouched down again.
“Kee-yah!” It was a weird, cartoony karate yell, but I figured noise would help me. I grabbed Jean-Jacques by the shirt and he flew from Gabrielle’s lap.
Flew? Jean-Jacques weighed next to nothing.
In the confusion, it took several seconds for me to realize it wasn’t Jean-Jacques at all, but a dummy dressed in clothes like the ones Binder and I had seen in the room. The moment I realized this, Gabrielle’s wiry arm closed across my neck and she dragged me to my feet, screaming in French at the top of her lungs. “Tu as tué. Tu as tué!”
“What?” My French wasn’t good but I got the gist, you killed him. “Gabrielle, it’s me. Julia. Let go. It’s okay.”
I slithered around to face her, her arm still around my neck. My back was to the doorway. Gabrielle let go, then put both hands on my clavicle and pushed. I thought I might go over backwards. I shouted, “No! Gabrielle! No!” and took a giant step back to regain my footing. She came after me again, and before I knew it, we were out in the hallway. I kept backing up in the face of her shoving, trying to fight her off without hurting her.
I screamed in English. “I didn’t hurt Jean-Jacques, Gabrielle! I would never hurt him. Please believe me. You and Etienne are like my own parents. Please!”
My backside hit the railing of the open balcony just as Etienne let out a sound so loud I heard it despite his gag. I looked back toward the doorway and saw flames. When I’d tossed the dummy into the air, it must have landed on the candles. Its clothes were a ball of fire and soon flames would reach the bed where Etienne was tied.
“Gabrielle, Gabrielle, let me go! We have to save Etienne!”
But the face that looked back at me didn’t care or comprehend. She was mad. She threw herself against me, bending me back over the rail. It came to me in an instant. Something like this had happened to Ray. It was how he broke his neck!
I screamed at her and pushed back with all my might, but physics was on her side. I felt sure I would topple over the railing. Smoke poured out of the room and swirled above us, collecting in the high, coffered ceiling. I pleaded, “No, Gabrielle, no. Please, please. It’s Julia.”
But she didn’t stop.
I couldn’t straighten up, so I grabbed Gabrielle and pulled her toward me, just as she moved forward for a vicious shove. I thought for a split second that both of us would go over the balcony, but her momentum carried her forward and she sailed by me, over the railing, screaming as she went down. There was a sickening thud in the hallway below.
I was so shocked I couldn’t move. Then, I looked over the rail and in the dim light made out Gabrielle’s broken body below.
Etienne was shouting against the gag. I ran to the door. The room was almost fully engulfed in flame. The window had exploded open, feeding oxygen to the fire. Flames licked toward the bedding. I had to get Etienne out.
I ran into the room, then retreated, coughing and sputtering. No one is coming, no one is coming, no one is coming. There was only one person who could save Etienne. I went in again, crawling toward the bed on my belly, breathing the freshest air in the room.
Etienne strained frantically.
“Keep still,” I hissed. I didn’t think I was going to get another chance. His arms were secured to the headboard by two short lengths of rope. Once I got him to lie still, the knots were easy to untie, despite my shaking hands. I didn’t even untie the gag. I put his arm around my shoulders and the flames chased us from the room.
At the bottom of the stairs, he stared at Gabrielle’s body. He made a mewling sound around the gag.
I pulled him from the house and fought to keep him outside. “You can’t go back in! Too dangerous.” Above us, flames leaped out of the fourth floor windows toward the night sky.
“The radio!” I yelled. “Etienne, we have to get back to your house.” I undid the gag
as he fought me off.
“Non, non, non.” He ran back into Windsholme.
I stood there for a moment, too shocked to move. No one is coming.
I charged through the door and was greeted with such a whirl of smoke I nearly ran out. No one is coming. I called to Etienne, but in the roar of the fire, I couldn’t even hear myself. I knew he’d gone to the bottom of the staircase where Gabrielle’s body lay. I fell to my knees and crawled toward the spot.
A loud crack sounded above and a long, flaming span of the banister careened down, nearly hitting me. I wanted to call out, but knew I had to conserve my breath. I crawled on in the dark and the noise, waving an arm in front of me with each movement. Just when I thought I would have to turn back, I hit something. Etienne’s strong calf. I pulled on his pants leg, shouting, “We have to go!”
With Gabrielle in his arms, he took a step toward me.
For a moment, I feared I’d gotten turned around in the fire and wouldn’t be able to find the door. I decided I had to back out on my knees, exactly as I’d come in. I pulled on Etienne’s ankle. Step this way, step this way. Slowly, so slowly, we moved back across the room. Etienne coughed continuously in the smoke-filled air. The moment my foot hit the threshold of the doorway, he staggered to a stop.
“We have to go!” I screamed. “We have to go out. Now.” I pulled myself up, hugging Etienne and the still body of Gabrielle. The stairs burned around us, flames leaping. I gasped, even the few feet I gained by standing made it more difficult to breathe. I put my arms around his waist and pulled him the last few steps out the door.
Outside, breathing heavily, I moved behind Etienne, pushing him down the steps and then down the lawn away from the burning building. Finally, when we were at the midpoint between the house and the pavilion, he laid Gabrielle gently in the grass and we turned and looked back.
The inside of Windsholme was an inferno. The stone walls that had protected the house from the porch fire now had the opposite effect. Inside, the flames built and roared as if they were in a giant, stone oven. As Etienne and I stood and watched, flames leaped out the windows toward the wooden gables and up into the roof.
“Is Jean-Jacques somewhere in there?” I asked Etienne.
He shook his head. “He never was. He never has been.”
A noise like a freight train barreling through the night sounded as a third of Windsholme’s roof caved in. Slates fell into the house and flames shot thirty feet into the sky.
Etienne fell over the broken body of his wife and wept.
I heard a shout behind me. It was Quentin Tupper, running up the lawn. “I saw the flames,” he panted. “From my house. The Coast Guard’s on its way.”
And soon they all were there. The Coast Guard, the Busman’s Harbor Fire Department, the harbormaster, along with Lieutenant Binder and Detective Flynn.
Chapter 51
When it was almost dawn, after we’d been questioned separately for hours, they loaded Etienne and me onto a Coast Guard ship. We sat together in the stern, both of us covered in soot. My eyes still blinked from the irritation.
Lieutenant Binder went off to attend to something, calling to Detective Flynn who’d been watching us. I had the feeling Binder left Etienne and me alone on purpose. It wasn’t like either of us could go anywhere, and there was so much to be said.
“Etienne, what happened?” I had to know. I wouldn’t be able to make sense of anything that had happened to us until I did.
Even through the grime, I could see his sadness. “Gabby did not do well with . . . with what happened with Jean-Jacques. You have noticed this?”
“Yes,” I said.
“No one has understood how badly it has gone for her. I talked to your father about it, back when it began. But soon, he was sick with cancer and had troubles of his own. Gabby just got worse.” Etienne was another person who was missing my father. His best friend, his confidant.
“But I don’t understand—”
“This spring, someone cleaned up the playhouse. I don’t know who it was. I thought perhaps Sonny had done it for the kids, but he said no when I asked him. Gabrielle took this as a sign Jean-Jacques was back. She became convinced he was living here on the island.” Etienne’s voice caught.
I attempted to imagine what he was going through at that moment, but could not.
“I tried to reason with her. I took her everywhere on the island. But wherever we were, she claimed Jean-Jacques was somewhere else. Gabby left food in the playhouse. She went into town and purchased the clothes you saw, which she lovingly washed and folded.” Etienne paused, then regained control. “I didn’t know what to do. I talked to her doctors. They prescribed medications. They said it was an obsession, but I knew it was something else. I believed she really saw and heard him.”
When Etienne saw the puzzled look on my face, he added, “In her mind, Julia. It was all in her disturbed mind.”
“Oh, Etienne.” I felt terrible about what he had been coping with. And how I hadn’t known. Because I hadn’t been there. And then, even after I returned, I hadn’t taken the time to see.
We stared silently back up the hill to Windsholme for a moment. The fire had almost died, but not completely.
“At some point, she became convinced he’d moved from the playhouse to Windsholme,” he continued. “She was worried to death about the work you had done there, the electrical work and so on. And the fact that you encouraged the bride to fix herself up in the house. Gabrielle believed if you could save the clambake, you were going to start using Windsholme as a part of it, and Jean-Jacques would have no place to go.
“She also worried about the island, if the clambake failed you would have to sell. I tried to keep the financial worries away from her, but she was always here on the island. She overheard a lot. Things you said. Things Sonny said.”
I’d never thought about the effect all our discussions that spring had on Gabrielle. I was careful around my mother, and around Page, but I never had been around Gabrielle. She must have been scared to death. “And then Ray came and said he and Tony wanted to buy it.”
Etienne closed his eyes, remembering. “Yes. He said he wanted to scout the island to set up a prank on his buddy the groom. I invited him into our house. I had no idea who he was or where the conversation would go. Right in front of Gabrielle, he talked about buying the island. She panicked, as I knew she would. But I was able to convince her you’d never sell.”
I nodded. “And then Ray arrived on the island on the night of his death to set up his trick on Tony.”
“He came out while Gabby and I were still in the harbor. When she saw the little boat tied up at the dock, you can imagine how excited she was. ‘He’s here! He’s here!’ she yelled. She ran straight up the lawn. Wilson had left the mansion door wide open.”
“He had the dummy in the camp trunk.” I had only just worked that out.
“Yes, and he was about to hang it from the landing. I suppose it was meant to be funny.”
A “you’re doomed” sort of message for Tony. Not funny at all. But those who’d hated Ray Wilson, and even those who’d loved him, had talked about his adolescent, frat-boy sense of humor. Ray Wilson had brought the rope he was hung with to the island as a joke.
“Gabrielle attacked him,” I said.
Etienne nodded that was true. “It was the last thing Wilson expected. A crazed woman running at him. She was furious, convinced he planned to hurt Jean-Jacques.”
I began to realize what had happened. Ray’s reaction times would have been slowed as a result of the alcohol and the drugs Sarah gave him, making it difficult to put up much of a fight.
“Before he knew what happened, before I knew what happened, she pushed him over the railing.”
“He broke his neck.”
Etienne nodded sadly.
“But why, Etienne, why did you hang him from the staircase?”
“Gabby insisted. And I did think it might accomplish what she wanted. It would get
you to stop renovating Windsholme and convince Wilson’s partner to stay away from the island. I wanted to go on as before.”
Instead, the effect had been the opposite.
“I was trying to do the best I could, to keep Gabby together. I knew she was mad. Maybe I became a little mad as well.”
“What did you do with the camp trunk—and the boat?”
“I filled the trunk with rocks, put Wilson’s jacket in it, towed his little boat out into the ocean, and sunk it all. I recognized the boat. He’d stolen it from one of the yachts by the town dock. I knew the owner wouldn’t miss it for months.”
“And the porch fire?”
“Gabby. By that point she was desperate for everyone to go away. She did not mean to hurt Windsholme. Not as long as she thought Jean-Jacques was living there. She knew the mansion wouldn’t burn.”
“But tonight, how did you end up tied up?”
“We’d been keeping vigil, waiting for Jean-Jacques every night this week. We hadn’t slept in days. I tried to refuse to let her go to Windsholme tonight. You saw what she did to our kitchen. Going to the mansion was the only way to calm her. I must have dozed off on the bed as we waited. I was so exhausted. Gabby had been paranoid for days that I would try to scare Jean-Jacques off, or turn him in. I think she tied me to the bed in order to make sure I wouldn’t interfere.”
Etienne put his head in his hands and wept. “She was completely mad at the end, Julia. Please forgive her.”
Chapter 52
Three weeks later, I waited on Morrow Island to greet our special guests as they disembarked from the Jacquie II. It was a beautiful evening for a clambake.
Livvie and Sonny had moved out to the island for the summer. Page could have the same island childhood Livvie and I had, and our mother before us. Sonny took over Etienne’s job as the bake master, which meant he and I had different spheres, different responsibilities, which cut down a lot of arguments. We’d both been reminded recently how critical our health was, physical and mental, and how important family was. It taught us to compromise when the situation called for it. Livvie loved being on the island and tended Gabrielle’s vegetable garden every day.
