by Amanda Dykes
“The light is coming from his island. I can’t help it if my house faces it, but he can help where he puts his light.”
The room stirs awkwardly. No one wants to take the blind man to task for having a light on the end of his island. Ed stands, dignified. “Did you ever think I might have put it right there for a reason?” And without further explanation, he walks out, a cane of driftwood guiding him.
“Ed, where’s your real cane?” Arthur whispers, but it’s too late. Ed’s gone.
“That’s time,” Margie says to Sully. “And we’ll adjourn for the night if—”
“Wait!” Annie has been so caught up in the meeting that she’s nearly missed her chance. She springs to her feet, and for the second time that night, all eyes are on her. “Three-minute limit, right?” She smiles, rushing to the microphone.
But once she’s up there, all the words fly straight out of her head. What does she say to this apparently dying town that needs so much more than her nosy questions? She who is the grim reaper to dying villages, as proven at Alpenzell, but who might be able to help, if she could find the courage?
“Time’s going, Miss . . .” Margie narrows her eyes.
“Bliss. Annie Bliss.”
“Bob’s her uncle!” Arthur hollers, and the air turns compassionate.
“Great-uncle, yes. Which is why I’ve come to ask . . .” How does she put this? How does she ask about a literal box of rocks—boxes, actually—without sounding nosy and presuming? Is she just being nosy and presuming?
“Two minutes left, Miss Bliss,” Margie prods.
“Well, you see, I’m hoping the kind people of Ansel might be able to help me figure out something. For Bob.” Yes, that’s it. And the moment she speaks it, she knows it’s true. She wants, more than anything, to have something to offer him if—when—he wakes. If she can help with whatever these rocks are, surprise him by finishing whatever project they belong to . . . “I wonder if anyone knows anything about a number of boxes being delivered to Bob. It seems he has acquired quite a collection over the years, and I’d like to . . .”
Something shifts. Not a person in the room is looking at her. They’re looking at their shoes, or the wall, or the clock. Someone clears their throat.
“Thirty seconds,” Margie says.
What she’d give for Sully’s platter of scones right now, to extend her time. Too late, she remembers the pie, which she’s left out in the railcar.
“If anyone could help shed light on the rocks—”
A soft laugh comes from the knitting lady’s corner. “Your word choice, dear. It’s too ironic.”
“And that’s time.” Margie looks apologetic. “Meeting adjourned.”
Annie retreats in defeat, face burning as she slips into the dark railcar foyer and gathers up her pie. She can’t escape fast enough. But out on the green, she hears footsteps behind her.
“Is that the famous Bliss hazelnut pie?” Bess, capped in her red kerchief as always, her dark, tight curls trying furiously to escape, closes the distance between them.
“Bess.” Annie’s smile saturates her voice. “I didn’t know you were in there.”
“Only at the end,” she says. “I had to close up The Galley and snuck in the side door.” She chuckles. “Sometimes I’m in time to watch that Spencer kid dig himself deeper into his hole.”
“Yeah, well, he wasn’t the only one doing that tonight.”
“So I saw.” Crickets sing from the shrubs around the green. “A little tip?”
“I’ll take all the tips I can get.”
Bess stuffs her hands in her pockets, looks up at the stars. “All right, here’s two.” She holds up one finger. “One, next time bring that pie in. Savannah’s hazelnut pie will get you into any locked door. Two . . . if you really want to know about those rocks”—she looks conflicted—“talk to Ed.”
That’s right. Ed had left before she’d had a chance to sputter her request.
“I’ll do that. Thank you, Bess.”
“You bet. How’s Bob today?”
Annie tells of her visit this morning, how not much has changed but that the doctor had seemed reservedly hopeful.
“Good.” Bess nods. “I’m planning to get over there myself tomorrow.” She lifts her chin at something over Annie’s shoulder. “Looks like your ride’s here.”
Jeremiah is approaching, moonlight making him seem taller somehow. Like he’s a natural part of night, like it’s his homeland. Bess gives him a wave and walks toward her apartment over the shops.
“Hey,” Annie says. “How come you weren’t there?”
His eyes crinkle into a smile, though the rest of his face stays stoic. “The Keeping Society and I . . . we don’t quite see eye to eye.”
“I sense a story there,” Annie says.
“Yep. A story for another day.”
Mrs. Blanchard shuffles up to them, her knitting needles stowed in a quilted handbag. “Oh, Jeremiah, would it trouble you terribly to relight my pilot light tomorrow on your rounds? I hate to ask again, but—”
“Consider it done,” he says.
“Use Bob’s torch!” Rich approaches with his confident, khaki-clad walk.
Annie furrows her brow. “His torch?”
“Yeah. From the Sharper Image. I brought it for him last year. It’s for crème brûlée.”
Annie shuts her mouth around laughter. The mention of Bob in the same sentence as Sharper Image is two shades beyond ridiculous. She can just picture the way he would have screwed his face up at the gadget, like it was an alien spaceship in his callused hands.
Rich laughs, shaking his head. “He just pulled an old book of matches from his pocket and looked from that to the stainless-steel torch and back, like he couldn’t figure out why anyone would try and stuff fire inside a can when matches worked just fine. He uses the torch to cauterize ropes on his boat, though.” Rich turns to leave, still talking as he goes. “You should grab it. For the pilot light.”
Jeremiah leads the way to the Glad Tidings, docked at Joe’s Landing down the harbor road. Boats around them are chugging to life, carrying townspeople home from the meeting. Others are walking trails and roads to their harbor homes.
Jeremiah sets to work on the rope, untying as he whistles. He glances her way when she hesitates near the gangplank.
His stare just makes things worse, and she forces herself forward with feigned courage.
“Be right back,” he says. He disappears around the back of the small building on the wharf, returning with a bucket. Three long strides up the plank and he’s on board, headed her way, bucket in hand. She tries to step out of the way, but he follows her. She sidesteps again, and he does, too.
“What are you doing?”
“Would you stay still?” He moves to dump the bucket, and she jumps back, expecting water.
But it’s not water. It’s a stream of gravel and sand.
“What . . . ?”
He turns and, with no explanation, strides off the boat, resuming his work on the rope. Once the knot is loosened, he pulls the rope on board, hands her the end, and gestures for her to wind. She does, recalling how Bob taught her to loop it gently around forearm and shoulder.
He whistles on, as if he hasn’t just up and dumped a pail of earth at her feet.
“So . . . what’s this all about?”
“Dirt.” He shrugs, as if it should be self-explanatory. “Like Bob’s.”
“Bob’s?”
“For you.” He reaches behind his neck and scratches, trying to play it off like it’s nothing, but awkwardness is slipping through. She’s finding it rather . . . endearing. He finally stops and looks her straight on. “Like the dirt mat he made you to stand on.” He gestures an open palm at the pile.
And she cannot keep from breaking into a smile.
“Mr. Jeremiah Fletcher,” she says, “if that isn’t the most thoughtful thing—”
“What is it you do again, exactly?”
She clamps h
er mouth shut. That puts a damper on the moment. How to admit she’s a washed-up anthropologist who makes spreadsheets about buying habits all day? How to explain that she had an internship in the field straight out of college—one that her classmates would’ve done anything for—and that she’d ruined it?
“I’m a consumer insights analyst,” she says. Same answer as yesterday.
He moves into the cabin, starts checking devices on the bridge. “Ah,” he says. “CIA.”
“Pardon me?”
“You’re CIA.”
“Shhh!” Annie stifles a smile, eyes darting between the other boats. “I’m trying to earn people’s trust here. You aren’t helping.”
“Well, neither are you, looking over your shoulder every two seconds.”
Annie looks him straight in the eye. “Actually, my company is in the middle of a reorganization. My boss recently told me I will soon be a network consumer insights specialist.”
“Oh, yes.” Jeremiah turns his key, firing the boat to life. He narrows his eyes, as if pondering something weighty. “You’re right. NCIS. That’s much better.”
A second passes, and she doesn’t know whether to be furious or whether to laugh. His stone stare challenges her until she can’t keep in the rogue laugh that escapes.
The boat rocks, and Annie’s stomach drops. H2O, she reminds herself. These waves are just molecules. Do not fear the molecules.
She digs her feet farther into the sand, and Jeremiah watches. Is that . . . a smile she sees cracking through?
“Speaking of insights.” She clears her throat. “What do you know about Ed?” And the rocks? And the growin’s? And this key? The questions are piling up, and she can’t shake the feeling that they’re like a line of dominoes. If she can knock over one, the rest will follow.
Jeremiah looks sideways at her. “Not much. He’s hard to read. Surely you’ve figured that out by now.”
He turns his attention fully to weaving through the boats around them, and Annie assumes he’s hit his conversation limit for the night, but as they head to open water, he clears his throat. “How about you join me on my walking rounds tomorrow. You might find what you’re looking for.”
thirteen
That man is gone before the sun again, but this time he doesn’t return for her. He’d said he meant to start his rounds at eight, but when seven forty-five rolls around and there’s still no sign of him, Annie sets out on the harbor road to track him down. Maybe he’d meant for her to meet him at the post office.
The morning is dewy, lupines blooming as she passes the white steepled church and the footbridge over the creek. Smoke curls from a few chimneys to chase off the morning chill, and Annie pulls her cable-knit sweater sleeves down over her hands to do the same.
In town, she passes the landing, the green, The Galley—all with no sign of Jeremiah. The post office is empty, a sign scrawled in straight letters reading Mail’s coming. Just wait.
It isn’t until she curves around to where the harbor’s other peninsula arm begins to reach out into the sea that, through the light fog, she spots Jeremiah in jeans, a Carhartt jacket, and a baseball cap. Messenger bag slung crossways over his shoulder, he’s kicking pebbles as he walks toward the schoolhouse north of the harbor.
“Jeremiah!” Annie shouts. He doesn’t turn. Even at the sound of her mud-slogging footsteps along the shore.
Nearly caught up, she extends her arm like she’s coming in for the passing of the baton in a relay, touches his cold shoulder. He whips around, jaw tight. It isn’t anger she sees in those eyes but puzzlement.
“Annie?” He tugs headphones from his ears, looks behind her, then back at her. “What’s wrong?”
She’s winded but trying not to be. She tucks wild vagrants of hair behind her ears, as if that will do anything to tame the mist-born mess. “I thought we were meeting.”
He nods. “So did I, at the post office.”
“Sorry about that. I misunderstood. Is it still okay if I tag along?” She hopes so. She’s packed her canvas tote with a notebook, three sharpened pencils, a granola bar, and an apple. Oh, and three slices of last night’s pie, with hopes of coaxing Ed to share what he knows. “And do you mind if I ask a question?”
Without a word, he keeps walking.
She stops trying to match his lengthy stride, stops altogether. A few paces later, so does he. He turns and says, “No, and no.”
“Oh . . . okay.” He seems a different man this morning. “I’ll leave you in peace, then.” Her words sound as cold as she feels, and she can’t help leaving with a dig. “I’ll just ask at the keeping society instead.”
“No, I don’t mind if you tag along. And no, I don’t mind if you ask a question.”
She can feel her ears reddening. How could she misread one man so much?
“You think too much,” he says, lopsided grin dimpling. “Nice touch with the keeping society, though. You’re catching on.”
She matches his smile, making a mental note not to take this man as seriously as his somber façade would have her do.
They’re rounding the curve to where the opposite side of the harbor from Sailor’s Rest meanders out past the Weg von Blitz. Annie hasn’t been to this part of Ansel before and finds herself a bit disoriented when Jeremiah veers off to the right, out onto what appears to be a narrow strip of land connecting to an otherwise sea-locked island.
Jeremiah checks his watch and carries on.
“Making good time?” Annie tries for small talk. Which, as she’d learned, could sometimes lead to large talk. Which made the small talk bearable.
“You could say that,” he says.
They walk in silence, the path of damp earth before them dotted in slick rocks and barnacles. The wind is whipping the mist away and whipping more great clouds of it in around them, until they set foot on the land mass.
“Welcome to Long Island,” Jeremiah says.
Annie looks at the expanse before them—trees, boulders, granite, and more trees. Not quite the image conjured by a famous name like Long Island.
Jeremiah is drinking in the place like a man parched, and she gets the feeling he’s waiting for her to notice something.
“Long Island,” she echoes, and shields her eyes to search the horizon. “Yes, I see it now. There.” She points to a clump of pines hovering above them on an outcropping to their right. “Jay Gatsby’s house, right? Oh, and there.” She points to the rise ahead of them, where, in truth, she cannot see what lies beyond. “The Hamptons.”
Jeremiah lets out a low whistle. “Good one.”
“It’s not a good one if you have to say it’s a good one and you don’t laugh.”
This, he laughs at. “Come on,” he says. “Ansel’s Long Island can beat out that other one any day.”
They follow the sandy path up to where it curves into a forest dense and dark. A keeper of secrets, this place is. Her smile fades as they enter, and she feels as if they’ve just stepped into Narnia or Middle Earth or Sherwood Forest. This is a storied place—she can feel it straight through her. And when they round the next bend, she sees the proof.
A shanty of sorts, tucked into a clearing. Path lined with carefully placed rocks, moss hugging the cracks between. All this leading up to a structure that is as otherworldly as Narnia or any of the other legendary places of literature. Walls of horizontal driftwood, planked with their curves in a closeness that makes it appear someone has piped each one with an icing bag, one layer on top of the next, curving with and around each other tightly. The jagged edges of the interlocking sloped roof give the appearance of turrets topping this humble castle. A window has even been woven into the structure. Not cut square, like a proper cabin or fish camp, but formed from the poetry of the wood to create a lopsided porthole.
Who would build such a place? Could someone really live here? Surely not when winter blew in like ice.
Jeremiah is watching her, amusement on his face. “Go ahead.” He gestures toward the abode. “Take
a look.”
“Do you have a delivery here?”
“Not exactly,” he says. “Don’t worry. No one’s home.”
Curiosity piqued, she ducks through the low arched doorway, where inside, gray shafts of light filter in. A rough-hewn stool with three legs sits next to the porthole window. The room is as close to a perfect rectangle as it can be, a stone hearth tucked into one of the corners. In another corner, an old straw broom leans into a tangle of sparse cobwebs. Its presence is a puzzle, since the floor is just hard-packed dirt.
There’s a scuffing sound on that dirt behind her, and she turns to see Jeremiah leaning in the door frame. He’s stepped inside, and his tall form looks even taller beside the dwarfed entrance.
“Who lived here?” Annie breathes the question in wonder. She runs a hand over the stone mantel, her touch reverent.
“You’re the people detective,” he says. “What would you say?”
She plants her hands on her hips as gentle thunder sounds in the distance. She takes in the way the driftwood planks, in their multitudinous lengths and breadths, are stacked like layers of shale, perfectly level but for a few little wobbles and warps.
“Someone meticulous,” she says. “Probably someone who values order, detail. Values home, and all the things that seem right. Justice. Hard work. Art.” She gestures to the stones, and they beckon her back, tugging at the mystery she’s after. Could the stones in Bob’s closet and boathouse have something to do with this?
They seem to capture a ballad, but in a different key and cadence than the other rocks. These stones match each other well—gray with layers of white, every one. Not like the multicolored stones of the boxes.
Still, there’s something here. A mantel so permanent, here in the home built from sticks. She thinks of the three little pigs, how the house of sticks collapsed with a huff and a puff from one hungry enemy. But this . . . these sea-worn sticks rest against the hearth with permanency, even as the chill wind blows through the seams.
“Anyway. That’s all just speculation. I’m probably not even close,” she says.
The corners of Jeremiah’s mouth turn down as his eyebrows arc up and he shrugs. “Come find out,” he says, and departs.
