by Lisa Unger
“I don’t have any money,” she said. “And neither does this foolish girl.”
He stopped for a moment. “Where is it?” he asked. His voice sounded like a growl.
“How should I know?” she said.
“I have it,” said Emily. “It’s here.” She pointed to a bag she had strapped around her body. Birdie hadn’t noticed it when she pulled the girl from the house. The girl opened the flap and found the canvas envelope inside. She took it and flung it at the man.
“How much is it?” Birdie yelled. “Was it worth all of this?”
She thought he’d take the money and leave them, try to make his escape. Anyone would have done that. But he kept moving toward them, leaving the envelope where it lay. Birdie warned him one more time. He didn’t stop coming. So she raised the gun, aimed center mass as he drew closer still and showed no signs of slowing. Finally, she opened fire.
Roger Murphy heard the shots ring out. The sound carried, echoing the way it did on the bay. He moved heavily over the rocks. His breathing was labored, and he refused to acknowledge the stitch in his side. He didn’t like to be reminded how out of shape he had allowed himself to become.
The Burke girl—she wasn’t a girl anymore—yelled to him from the Cross boat that her mother was on the island. She still looked like a child to him; he’d known her all her life. Just as he’d known her mother when she was a girl. But Kate Burke was a mother herself, and Birdie was an old woman. Everything had changed except the islands, which were the same as they’d always been. Except now they were occupied by the huge homes of the wealthy.
There had always been some resentment among the townies toward the rich people buying up the islands. Used to be when he was young that the islands belonged to whoever might land upon them. You could take your rundown old boat and have your choice of picnic spots or campsites. You could pitch a tent. All of a sudden, that was considered trespassing.
But he always liked to watch the summer people arrive. He’d see them come in the early days of summer, when they would arrive pale and tired-looking. Months later, they’d depart brown and smiling. He felt sorry for them, having to leave. He knew they felt sorry for him, having to stay.
The Heart girls were untouchable, the sun and the moon. But he watched them. He thought of the rumor again, that Lana Heart had been running around on her husband with Richard Cameron. Having read Cameron’s books, Roger felt sorry for any woman who was foolish enough to get involved with the author. The women in his books were all whores and murderesses; they were crazed and died violent deaths, were brutalized and raped. Richard Cameron was ghostly and strange, never smiled, came in early summer, left just before the cold settled. Until the year he didn’t leave at all.
Three more shots rang out. Roger’s radio crackled at his hip, and he heard the chief’s voice. “We have a body on the northwest coast of the island. The stolen vessel Serendipity is in distress, taking on water.”
Roger moved through the trees. He saw two forms on the ground and one sitting by the shore. He drew his gun. “Police,” he said. “Don’t move.”
His wife always said that his voice boomed. It didn’t feel like that now. The night swallowed it. Nevertheless, the seated figure stretched arms to the sky. “You’re a bit late.”
He recognized the voice.
“Birdie Burke?” said Roger. “Is that you?”
“Who else?” she said. “Watch your step. I think I just killed a ghost.”
Roger looked down to see a dead man at his feet. A large man with long hair, a battered face, and a chest full of lead. There was a horrible gurgling sound coming from the man. Roger had heard it before. It was the sound of the end, the death rattle. The man’s chest was black and wet in the moonlight. Roger had always heard that the Burke girls were dead shots. He knelt beside the man. As he did, the labored breathing came to a shuddering end. Roger put a hand to the man’s neck and felt no pulse; his skin already had a chill to it.
“Who’s that beside you?” he asked.
“A girl,” she said. “One of the intruders.”
Roger tried to take in the scene. Usually, on these calls out to the islands, you found some teenagers high and making love on the beach. Or maybe there was a vagrant taking up residence in the house. Tonight, a fire and dead people. Heart Island, which always seemed to him so idyllic. Not the biggest but somehow the most beautiful island in the area.
“Is he real?” asked Birdie. “That man there?”
It was an odd question, and Roger wondered if Birdie was going into shock. “He looks real to me.”
Roger approached and saw that she didn’t look well. She’d aged since he saw her yesterday. The smoke was blowing their way, and Roger found himself coughing.
“It’s time to go, Mrs. Burke,” he said, leaning down to help her up. “Fire department is on the way.” The girl beside Birdie had her eyes open but was staring blankly at the sky. “Can she walk?”
“I don’t know,” said Birdie. “I pulled her from the house and dragged her this far. Ask her.”
The roar of the fire was loud, its sound filling the night. The cracking and shattering of the building, the odd moaning sound that a burning structure made, was ghostly and strange. There was enough distance between the trees and the house that the fire was contained to the structure. But if the fireboat didn’t get here soon, they might be looking at a total loss.
He was about to radio for someone to bring the police boat around when John Cross pulled his vessel up as close to the shore as he could. He was alone on his smaller outboard craft. He hopped out with the line and splashed through the water, coming to shore.
“Let’s get Mrs. Burke on board first,” said Roger.
“I’m not leaving,” she said. Her tone was stubborn and imperious, but he saw that she was shaking badly and holding back tears. He felt a flash of pity for her, something he never thought he’d feel for someone like Birdie Burke. But there she was, as old and as alone as anyone else.
“Yes, you are,” said Roger. He pushed her gently toward John, who lifted her like a child and carried her to the boat.
“Put me down right now, young man!” said Birdie. Her indignation rang out, echoing over the other sounds.
Roger looked down toward the girl at his feet. This was the fugitive—this tiny, helpless girl? Her eyes were open but unseeing. She coughed, a horrible hacking sound, clearing smoke from her lungs. Then she turned on her side and started sobbing. He felt a tenderness for her, akin to what he might feel for a wounded animal.
It was then that he wondered how she had the same last name as the family who owned the island. There was more to this story than met the eye, he guessed. He hesitated before cuffing her; it was unsafe to have someone handcuffed in a small boat. She looked harmless enough. There were two people dead and a house on fire. She was the one left to answer for all of it. He closed the bracelets around her wrists gently and, with John’s help, got her on the boat.
“It’s gone,” she said as they pulled away. “It’s all gone.”
Roger Murphy heard her despair, her hopelessness, and it was a note he felt reverberate in his bones.
chapter thirty-six
Birdie had no choice now but to watch Heart Island burn. The three of them sat on the police boat, wrapped in thick gray blankets, watching as the flames raged from the main house. The great plumes of water from the fireboat seemed to do nothing. Just when it seemed that one part of the fire had been extinguished, another leaped to life.
Birdie had never felt so powerless. She found herself holding on tight to Kate’s arm. Chelsea had buried her head in Kate’s lap and could be heard softly crying, as she had been since Lulu was taken by boat to a waiting ambulance. Chelsea and Kate would be following her soon.
Birdie didn’t cry; the tears she’d shed as she left the island seemed to have dried her out. She searched inside for some kind of emotion, but it was as if everything in her had turned to stone.
“It
was him,” she said. She hadn’t meant to say it out loud, but the words escaped her mouth, and she was glad for it. She couldn’t have that thought knocking around inside her head; it would drive her mad.
“Who?” asked Kate. She wasn’t crying, either, Birdie noticed. Everything was suffused with orange light. The men calling back and forth in their tasks sounded like strange night birds.
“The ghost,” Birdie said. “It was Richard Cameron.”
“Mom.”
“I’m serious,” she said. She faced her daughter. “He was warning me. I took what he loved the most. He took what I loved the most. Now we’re even.”
“You didn’t take anything from him.”
“Didn’t I?”
After that summer, the summer of 1950—the summer she’d seen her mother with him, the year Richard Cameron’s body was found—Lana was never the same person again. It was nothing that Birdie could point to, really. She was just less somehow. She said all of this to her daughter.
“Still,” said Kate. “It was Lana who chose. She chose Grandpa Jack and all of you.”
“But it was because of me, what I saw, that she had to choose,” said Birdie.
“No, Mom,” said Kate. “It was right that she chose. What she was doing was wrong; she was betraying everyone, even herself. Richard Cameron was violent, prone to depression, and an alcoholic. She never could have been happy with him, not truly.”
They were both quiet for a moment.
“She came back that winter,” said Kate. “That’s the picture in your album, I suppose. They must have put the camera on the porch rail and timed it to snap. It looks like that, doesn’t it, like they weren’t quite ready for the shot? I can’t think of anyone else who could have done it.”
“We did have a camera like that,” said Birdie. “Not many people had cameras back then. But we did.”
Kate drew and released a long breath. “In her journals,” she said, “she wrote down everything that happened after the night you discovered them. I brought them for you.”
“Don’t,” said Birdie. She lifted a hand. “I don’t want to know.”
“I need to tell you what happened.”
“Not now.”
“If not now, then when?”
“Maybe never,” said Birdie.
Kate stayed silent and looped her fingers through Birdie’s. Birdie squeezed her hand tight.
“He was a destroyer,” said Birdie. “This is his legacy. These are the consequences of infidelity, of betrayal. Everything burns.”
“Everything burns,” said Kate. “But most things can be rebuilt.”
They sat like that awhile more. Eventually, it seemed that the firefighters might be making progress, getting things under control from the barge circling the island.
Chelsea wanted to go be with her friend, who she knew must be afraid and needing her. Roger Murphy said they could take the cuddy when they were ready, as long as they stayed at the marina to answer questions. He’d moved their boat to the other side of the Crosses’ dock. It sat, ready to carry them back to the mainland.
“I’m going to take her, Mom,” said Kate. “Come with us. There’s nothing more to see here.”
“I can’t leave until it’s done,” said Birdie.
“Mom,” said Kate. She held out a hand. “Please.”
But Birdie turned back to the fire, watching the flames against the sky.
“Why does she always want to be left alone?” asked Chelsea.
Kate watched as her daughter undid the lines, steady even though the water was knocking the boat against the dock. There was no trace of fear in Chelsea. As Kate looked out at the dark water, the burning island, she was surprised that she didn’t feel much fear, either. Not of the boat, not of the open water, and not of life without Heart Island as she knew it.
Kate remembered that when Chelsea and Brendan were small, Birdie had insisted on being left behind on the island during the worst storm in a decade. Pulling away from her, Kate had been riven with anger and fear and sadness. Tonight she found she could accept Birdie’s decision without any of that. A constant puzzle in her life, her mother suddenly seemed less mysterious. She was as lost as anyone, as tethered to the past, as clueless about the future as Kate herself. She, too, was struggling to find some modicum of control over the chaos of action and consequence.
“That’s just her way,” said Kate.
“It’s not okay,” said Chelsea. “She’s abandoning us for that place.”
“It’s not so cut-and-dried,” said Kate. She remembered feeling the same way so many times.
“Yes, it is,” said Chelsea.
“When you’re older, things don’t seem as black-and-white.”
“You always say that.”
Chelsea was crying in the stoic way she had developed as a teenager. As a toddler, she’d let out these earsplitting wails, releasing all the noise of her anger or disappointment or pain into the air. Kate had almost rejoiced at the sound, the fearlessness of it, the proof of life, of heart. She supposed everyone learned silence over time, learned to hold it all back, hold it in. All those powerful negative emotions leaked into their lives in other, less obvious places. You ate, or drank, or worked too hard, maybe you bullied others, maybe you had affairs, maybe you robbed and killed, went on the run from the law.
She pulled the boat away from the dock. In her boating lessons, she’d learned how to make mistakes and how to correct them. She’d learned how to clip the dock, to back up and try again. She’d learned how to avoid another vessel at the last minute and what to do if she couldn’t. It was in mastering the paralyzing what-ifs that she had found the courage to take the helm, to face the open water. She knew that if the worst happened, she could handle it—most of the time.
A good fire is like an exorcism, a cleansing breath from the universe. In nature, fire clears away old and rotting vegetation, allowing for regeneration as new seeds take hold and grow. Without fire, trees can’t reproduce—the litter keeps new seeds from growing. It’s only the homes we build that are destroyed. But those can be rebuilt, too. In loss, there is renewal, the shedding of skin.
Maybe that was why Kate couldn’t shed any tears, why she felt only a low-grade sadness. Maybe it was shock—maybe the breakdown would come later. The grief, the residual terror of running from a predator, swimming for safety, keeping Lulu from drowning—maybe it would all hit her when they were on solid ground. But for now, as she headed toward the mainland, all she could think was that if ever there was a place that needed an exorcism, it was Heart Island.
chapter thirty-seven
The world was a foggy, nebulous place for Emily. She had a mask over her mouth, and she lay in the back of an ambulance. Two uniformed police officers stood outside. The EMT had asked them to remove the handcuffs, and they’d agreed. Maybe they sensed her inertia, or that she had nowhere to go, no will to go there if she did. She listened to the sounds outside—purposeful footsteps, shouts, the occasional whoop or a short siren. She heard police radios hissing, spitting out staccato words and numbers. All of it was a swirl of activity, like a swarm of bees around her. But she was the still center, void and hollow.
The FBI agent Eliza Griffin had finally left after asking a million questions that Emily somehow managed to answer. The other woman, small and dark-haired, hiding behind thick glasses, seemed so different from anyone Emily had ever known. She was all purpose, all self-assurance. She had a gun at her hip, a shield around her neck. She talked like a man. Run it down for me, Emily. Tell me everything, from the beginning. Emily had the vague sense that she should ask for a lawyer. Somebody had said something about her having the right to call a lawyer. But wasn’t that just something they said on television? Anyway, she wanted to tell the truth. So she did.
When she first saw him in the doorway, she thought it was Joe. She thought he’d come to tell her that the old woman had lied, that Emily was his daughter and always would be, and that starting now, he would take car
e of everything. She should get some sleep, and when she woke up, everything was going to be okay. But it wasn’t her father. It was the man whose car they’d stolen. What was his name? She couldn’t remember. It seemed like so long ago. Had it been only a few hours?
“How are you doing, Emily?” he asked.
“I’m okay,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry for everything.”
Her voice was muffled through the oxygen mask, so she wasn’t sure he could understand her. Her words didn’t even seem like words, more like incoherent mumbles, like those of a grown-up in a Peanuts cartoon.
“Emily,” he said. He climbed into the ambulance and sat beside her. He was big and seemed cramped and uncomfortable in this small space. “You’re the only one left to take the rap for this. The other two perpetrators are dead. You need to get a lawyer, okay? Don’t say anything else to the FBI.”
Why was he telling her this? Wasn’t he a cop, too? Maybe it was some kind of trick. He was trying to get even with her for stealing his car. But no, he didn’t seem like that kind of man. He was good; she could see that in him. She started thinking about Dean again, lying there in a pool of blood. Once upon a time, she’d believed he was a good man. Maybe somewhere inside, he was. She thought about their baby, how she’d betrayed and let down her child long before he ever knew the world. The tears came then. There was an endless river of them. She didn’t think she would ever stop crying.
“You don’t know me,” the man said. “And I’m sure it’s hard for you to know whom to trust right now. You’ve made some questionable moves, done some bad things, so you need to get a lawyer, someone whose job it is to help you navigate what comes next. When the agent comes back, tell her that you can’t speak to her again without a lawyer.”
She nodded because she couldn’t find her voice or any words.
“Is there someone I can call for you?”
Was there? Dean was gone. Her mother would hate her forever. Joe Burke was not her father. For the flash of a second, she thought of Carol, whom she had betrayed and who was fighting for her life. Emily was almost crushed by the wave of regret and shame that followed. No, there was no one. She shook her head, and she saw that his eyes looked sad for her. She turned away from him.
