Jane turned to run back to the house just as Phillip arrived breathless at the scene. The look on his face would stay with her forever; it was as if someone had ripped away the cold mask of indifference, leaving only raw horror and disbelief. Phillip, too, dropped to his knees in the gully, heedless of the standing water. Jane looked at the two men bending over Cissy's lifeless form and thought, She's dead. Can't they tell? She's dead. But she ran like the wind anyway, because that's what they wanted.
She had dialed 911 and was giving a brief description of the accident when she saw an ambulance turn off the road into the foggy lane alongside the house. "Wait," she said, confused, "it's here already."
The dispatcher said, "That one's for someone else. Stand outside the house if you can, and wave the ambulance in when it arrives. They're going to need help with directions."
Jane was absolutely traumatized. There was an emergency at Mac's, a death behind her house, and in the meantime she was expected to stand in front and direct traffic. She ran back through thickening fog almost to the footbridge before she could see them all. The two men were still bent over Cissy. Mouth-to-mouth, she thought. Her spirits soared. They must have seen something, some flicker of life that she'd missed. She turned and ran back toward Bing's house but stopped dead in the middle of the lane that led to Mac's place.
What about them? she thought wildly. What had happened to which generation under Mac McKenzie's roof? The sound of a siren cut short her speculation and sent her bolting for the road to intercept Cissy's ambulance. She waved it into the lane that ran between Bing's house and hers and ran after it, breathless with panic, her mind no more than a blur of disjointed thoughts.
By the time she caught up to the vehicle, which had pulled off the lane as far as it dared, Phillip was leading the ambulance team to the footbridge. Jane was tearing after them when she heard sirens again, whirled around, and saw the first ambulance racing away from Mac's place. It was impossible to tell who was inside. She prayed that it not be Mac, or Uncle Easy, or Jerry; but she knew that that prayer would go unanswered.
****
A short time later the medics stopped working on Cissy. Her body was wheeled into the ambulance and Bing, utterly in shock, climbed in after it. Phillip went home to get his car to drive to the hospital and Jane was left in a daze, standing at the footbridge. She wanted to go to the hospital, too, but not with Phillip or anyone else. She began to stumble back to Lilac Cottage, then on impulse detoured into the graveyard.
She went up to Judith's grave and stood there, her heart immeasurably heavy, her mind and spirit completely exhausted from the past twelve hours' events.
"Is this your work, Judith Brightman?" she asked in a low and angry voice. "Does it give you pleasure to punish the innocent?"
She kicked at the gravestone, furious that she could not rid herself, or the island, of the spirit that hounded them all. It was an unthinking thing to do; Jane let out a cry of sharp, awful pain.
Afterward she decided that it was the pain itself that had triggered the vision. It was the same vision that had flashed through her consciousness when she first saw Cissy in the gully, only this time it lingered, more brutally explicit: She saw, in perfect detail, a woman in a deep blue gown being dragged over the side of a small workboat by two strong-armed scallopers. The waterlogged gown made her heavy; Jane could hear the grunts of the fishermen as they strained to bring her body aboard.
"Oh, no, no, no," Jane said in a low wail. "Not that. Not that."
She fell to her knees beside the grave, bitterly disillusioned. All that love ... all that fierce passion ... and that's where it led her. Did she really believe she could be reunited with Ben that way? Jane remembered the calm and resolute look on the face of the apparition in her bedroom the night before. It was a strange kind of courage that had allowed Judith Brightman to walk into the sea; but it was courage, nonetheless.
So this is what they meant in 1852 by "fits": death by suicide — death, obviously, by reason of insanity.
That fierce will, so misdirected then — was it being misdirected once more? Jane rose quickly to her feet and sprinted home, in fear for everyone else's life now. She dialed Mac's number. Jerry answered. It must be Uncle Easy, then, she concluded. It couldn't be Mac; Jane believed completely that Mac himself was invincible.
"Uncle Easy had a stroke," the boy said excitedly, obviously unaware of what that meant. "It was all the stimulation from last night, Dad thinks. I think it was blowing out all those candles. They're at the hospital now."
Jane offered to take the boy with her, and before long they were joining his haggard and disheveled father in the waiting room. Mac was sitting in an armchair with his head in his hands when they walked in. He looked up and started; Jane flushed, remembering his impassioned embrace from the night before. She'd hardly allowed herself to think of it at all. She'd hardly had time to think of it at all.
He stood up when she walked in the room, which seemed endearingly old-fashioned of him. It seemed incredible to her that part of her could actually be charmed by part of him at a time like this. I'm in love with him, she thought, amazed that she was picking now of all times to admit it.
"How is he?" she asked, flushing more deeply than before.
"Unconscious — but that's not unusual," Mac added quickly when her face fell. "We have to wait and see. They can't tell us anything now."
"Jer," he said, turning to his son, "be a pal and bring us coffee." He gave Jerry directions to the coffee machine; when the boy left, Mac said quietly, "Harrow told me about Cissy. I'm sorry it was you who found her."
"We were all there," Jane said. "If I had been alone ..." Repressing a shudder, she shook her head. "I don't know."
"Harrow said she slipped off the bridge? How?"
"Phillip didn't tell you?" But then, you'd never ask him, she realized. "A handrail gave way."
"A handrail? There was nothing wrong with the handrails."
"Yes there was. I saw the one myself, lying underneath her." Jane stopped, closing her eyes, reliving it again, then pushed it away. "Is Bing okay?"
Mac shook his head. "He's taking it hard. He's convinced that Cissy's estranged husband is involved, and he's been going on about it. Apparently she left behind a suitcase, as if maybe she got called outside unexpectedly. I tried to slow him down, but .... There's going to be an autopsy, I'm pretty sure."
"This is unbelievable," Jane said, collapsing into a chair. "Last night everyone was so happy ...."
"Not everyone," Mac said in a low voice. His hands were in his pockets, his back to her, as he stared out the window at the thickening fog. "Obviously not everyone."
As usual, he was being ambiguous. She thought he was talking about himself and her, but she couldn't be sure. This time she decided to ask. "What exactly do you mean, Mac?"
"About last night ... "
She was right.
He turned to her, his eyes dark with emotion. "I ... look, I got carried away, all right? I said things —"
"Said things! What things? You never say things!" she said, exploding with tension. "That's the whole problem! A person has to be psychic around you! If you just once said how you really feel —"
"I'm telling you how I feel," he said, taken aback by her fury. His cheeks flushed with anger as he said, "I feel that that was the dumbest thing I've ever done."
"I mean how you really feel," she said, rejecting his answer. Whatever else it was, the kiss he gave her wasn't dumb.
She wasn't finished with him. "I can't imagine how those who love you can survive," she went on, frustrated beyond measure with him. "You're like a sun that won't shine, a fire that won't burn. Don't you see? A ... a boy needs to hear his father say he loves him!" she said, veering off and substituting shamelessly. "He needs it the way a tree needs water!"
"My dad tells me he loves me. All the time."
Jane whirled around to see Jerry, a cup of coffee in each hand, standing there with a look of deep offense i
n his young face. The look said that Jane had crossed a line, that she had stepped inside a circle she didn't belong. Oh, how she knew that face, knew that look.
Jane had shot from the hip many times in her life, but she'd never shot herself through the hip before. Truly mortified, she blurted, "I'm sorry. I shouldn't be here," and fled.
****
No heart can take such a pounding.
Jane was back at Lilac Cottage, nursing a massive headache along with her heartache. Still, she tried to put her pain in perspective. She hadn't lost the one she loved to sudden death or to a stroke. Mac wasn't even hers to lose. He'd looked her over and found her attractive, but not enough to make the leap over the chasm that he thought divided them. So that's that, she told herself — over, and over, and over.
But every time she pushed the thought of Mac away, the thought of Cissy returned to fill the breach. Someone so young, so sweet, so completely happy and alive — gone. Cissy, gone? It wasn't possible.
Jane was simply too numb to take it all in.
She dialed the number of the hospital reception desk another time and asked about Uncle Easy. When she wasn't calling the hospital, people were calling her; word had whipped around the island like the back end of a hurricane. In the meantime she watched for cars: Mac's, Bing's, even Phillip's. She never did see Mac return; but a little while after Bing pulled into his drive, she called him.
He was inconsolable, almost incoherent. "I'm going back to the City tonight," he said in a tense, distracted voice. "I know the Chief of Police. He'll get me satisfaction. I'm not getting anywhere at this end. The least they should do here is shut down the airport and outgoing ferries for a few days. But no; all they're doing is watching for Dave and his car."
Considering the circumstances, that sounded reasonable. But Bing didn't want to hear it. He hung up angrily; tomorrow he probably wouldn't remember talking with her.
Jane sighed and called the hospital again. Still no change in the patient's status. It was late. She hadn't the energy — and when it came right down to it, she hadn't the heart — to call Phillip and console him for his loss.
****
Overnight the fog moved on, leaving the island bathed in bright May sun. It was impossible not to think that things would get better — they couldn't get much worse — and when Jane called the hospital first thing, the news was good. Uncle Easy was conscious and in stable condition. That was all she knew until Billy B. arrived for work.
"It just goes to show," Billy said, shaking his head thoughtfully. He didn't bother finishing the sentence; presumably Jane already knew what it went to show. "But Dr. Braun does seem pretty optimistic about Uncle Easy, at least," he added.
"How do you know? They won't tell me a thing."
"My cousin works at the hospital," he said with a shrug. "So that's the good news. The bad news, though ... boy, she was young. Do you think there's something to this crazed-husband theory?"
"How do you know about that?"
He shrugged again. "Carol's uncle is a cop."
"I did see a squad car come through first thing," Jane mused. "They were back there a long time. They must be taking it seriously."
"Let's look around ourselves," Billy said with a gleam in his eye. "Who knows? We might find something."
"You can't go tramping through a possible scene of a crime," she reminded him.
"We can if it's not taped off."
It was taped off — at least, the immediate area around the bridge was. There were several possible reasons for it, but none of them mattered to Jane then. She was staring at the trampled wet grass where the two men had hovered over Cissy. She was seeing Cissy, reliving the horror. She started to walk away, then forced herself to come back. If this was Judith's work, then Jane needed to know.
She took off her shoes and socks and rolled up her pants so that she could walk the two giant steps through the gully to get to the other side of the bridge. Nothing looked criminal to her on that side, either. They waded back.
Billy stared over the tape at the fallen rail and said, "It looks like the bolt worked its way out of the upright. None of the bolts have nuts on 'em—probably never have had nuts. See how the bolts are rusted their whole length?"
"But you wouldn't use sideways force just to walk over the bridge," Jane said thoughtfully. "Someone would've had to push Cissy into the rail to make it come apart."
"A pissed-off husband, maybe," Billy suggested.
"Maybe." But Jane wasn't convinced. She'd never seen this mysterious Dave; he was even more of a phantom than Judith. "Come on," she said, "before we get caught."
****
In the next week Bing got the satisfaction he was demanding — more or less. The New York police hauled Dave Hanlin in for questioning, and Dave gave them an unshakable alibi: he'd been at a party, making a fool of himself in front of at least two dozen people. The autopsy turned up no evidence of rough play, only the single, hideously unlucky bruise to the head. The crime-scene tape was taken down from around the footbridge, and life on Nantucket began returning to normal.
Jane talked with Bing briefly in New York at the funeral. Still shattered, still inconsolable, he told her he was extending an upcoming business trip to Europe by a couple of weeks. He had friends in Rome, and he needed to be away. Jane's heart went out to him. Bing had tried to be mother, father, and brother to Cissy; when she slipped through all the love and care anyway, he took it personally. Jane held Bing close to her. Their parting was unbearably sad.
Now that she was off the island, Jane decided to visit friends who lived an hour north of the City. Hillary was rich and bored, the mother of two kids away in school and mistress of a big Greek Revival overlooking the Hudson River. Spring came early, almost excessively, to Hillary's valley. Riots of apple trees in blossom, acres of greening woods, stands of red-kissed magnolias — Jane had forgotten how lush a land could be. In Nantucket's grudging climate, only the salt-resistant survived on their own. Everything else was coddled by master gardeners and maniacs.
"And even then, one good nor'easter will burn every rhododendron on the island," Jane told her friend as they lingered over sundowners on her brick terrace.
"Enough about horticulture," Hillary said, amused by her urban friend's conversion to the green-thumb faith. "Will you sell, or will you stay?"
Jane sighed deeply. "A few days ago, I was hoping I could stay. I had the inspired notion that I'd help run this tree farm," she said, blushing at the presumptuousness of it. "But the owner's not interested."
"Have you had any offers on the house?"
"Right before I left the island, I got a call from a neighbor who's taken an interest in finding a buyer for me; I suppose he wants to make sure his new neighbor doesn't collect junk cars or anything. Anyway, he says he's putting together a deal I won't be able to refuse."
"Good!" said Hillary. "Then you can set yourself up in Connecticut, and we can go back to visiting one another without calling in the Coast Guard. You must be thrilled; you'll be your own woman at last."
"Yup. Just what I've always wanted."
****
Jane stayed less than a week, but by the end of that time she missed the island with an intensity that amazed her. She'd had enough of lazy, warm days in the valley. She longed for the moody, rugged side of Nantucket — the biting salt air; the cold and clammy fog; the pale, subtle hues of the heaths on the moors. She missed the reassuring intimacy of the walk around town, and the flowers jammed into every windowbox and pot. She missed the mournful sound of the foghorn on Brant Point, and walking on the beach with gulls screaming overhead.
She missed Mac.
She couldn't think of the island without thinking of him; they were as woven together as honeysuckle through trellis. Not that it mattered. It was obvious that her time on Nantucket was winding down. So she packed her bags and took the train back to New York, and a plane to Nantucket, and a cab to Lilac Cottage. Billy was outside scraping down the east side of the house,
getting it ready to paint. Jane was thrilled to see that he was alive and that the house hadn't burned down. Everything looked so normal; maybe that horrible morning had cleared the air once and for all of tragedy.
They went inside and had coffee, and Billy brought Jane up to date on events. The big news was good news.
"Uncle Easy'll be out of intensive care tomorrow. They've unhooked the tubes; he's eating on his own. He told Mac to bring in the cigars you gave him. His nurse overheard him and said no way. He told her to go to hell."
Billy chuckled and added, "He's a legend around here, you know. Everyone played in his homemade pool. My mother played in his pool. The townies called his place 'The Easy Living Country Club."
He held up his coffee cup in a toast. "Here's to Uncle Easy. He's dodged a bullet, and I for one am glad."
Jane clinked her cup to his. "I for two am glad," she said softly. They talked for a while, and then Jane asked casually, "How's Mac?"
"Busy. This is his big season, and instead he's been parking himself at the hospital where he second-guesses the physical therapists all day. They've thrown him out twice. You know Mac."
She laughed, but the fact was, she didn't know Mac. Everything she knew about him she'd learned from others, or by watching him furtively out of the corner of her eye. Mac himself had told her almost nothing about himself, and yet they had connected, in a very real way, more than once. Too bad she couldn't get him to admit it. Of course, that would require actual speech.
Billy went back to scraping, and Jane put on her rattiest workclothes and joined him. It was time for the big push. She couldn't hold out forever, waiting for some fairy-tale ending to the saga of Lilac Cottage. The tenant in her condo had moved out, which meant no more help with the mortgage, and meanwhile the spring real estate market was peaking. Lilac Cottage had to be sold, and soon.
So she and Billy shared the staging he'd put up, she at her end, he at his; and all day long, sun or fog, they scraped. Sometimes they played Billy's radio, and sometimes they talked, but all the time, they scraped. The paint came off in chattering, brittle showers, right down to the wood. They kept on scraping. On foggy days she bundled up. On sunny days she stripped down to shorts and a halter. Her limbs became deeply tanned, and her stamina improved. After a week, she stopped whining to Billy about how hard the work was.
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