by Jean Stone
Tiptoeing onto the porch, Annie didn’t see a stack of wood—reassurance that no one was there. Though the calendar was quickly turning to May, anyone who lived there would still need the woodstove.
She slipped her laptop and thermos under one arm and turned the door handle. It was locked.
“Damn,” she whispered. She jiggled it, then tried again. Still locked. Closing her eyes, she tried to let her wiles override frustration. One night, Francine had figured out how to bypass the lock; surely Annie could. Maybe there was a YouTube video to show her how. She reached into her pocket and pulled out her phone. Stuck to the back was Georgia’s laminated business card. Annie smiled.
You’re welcome, Murphy said.
Annie zipped the card between the door and doorjamb as if she were scanning her debit card at Cronig’s Market before they’d installed the chip readers. A soft “pop” heralded success, and she wondered if the charge of trespassing had now escalated to breaking and entering. Somehow, it didn’t matter.
As expected, the interior was chilly. It was also dusty and cobwebby, and she was pretty sure the small dark particles around the edges of the floor had been left by a family of winter’s mice. But the table and two chairs still stood in the kitchen area—the same table where she and Earl had shared countless mugs of steamy morning coffee and batches of homemade cinnamon rolls, and where she and John had savored scores of newly caught fish, island-grown veggies, and fresh-baked bread, but then had skipped dessert, choosing to make love instead. Next to the woodstove, she’d once set her rocking chair, where she’d sat for hours rocking Bella to sleep. It was also where she’d been living when she’d met Donna the first time, before Donna had been sick, or at least before Annie and Kevin had known that she was.
Annie teared up with nostalgia.
Then suddenly, from the rafters, came Murphy’s voice again: All this blubbering isn’t going to get Body in the Blue Room written.
Annie laughed. “We have to change the title,” she said. “You suggested that they only find a skull, remember?”
You’re the writer, not me.
“Some friend you turned out to be.”
But Murphy didn’t reply, and Annie knew she was gone. Again.
With a lingering sigh, she sat at the table, set down the thermos, opened her laptop, and got to work.
At first, the writing was slow and labored, her thoughts bouncing from Donna and the sudden way she’d decided she needed a “home companion”; to the skull and its pending peril for them all; to Kevin, Lucy, Jonas, John. Even Taylor. No matter how hard Annie tried to focus on her novel, she couldn’t unwind. She growled. She snarled. Then suddenly, a title flashed into her mind: Bedlam in the Blue Room.
Perfect, she thought she heard Murphy agree.
Annie went back to page one and inserted the new words that were so simple, it was annoying she hadn’t thought of them sooner. Then she returned to the page where she’d left off and moved fluidly into the writing zone, her fingers skating over the keys as if they were as lightning-quick as Lucy’s, and as if she’d known all along what the next chapter would reveal.
Several hours passed until late afternoon started to turn to dusk, and the chill inside the cottage began to permeate her bones. Annie finally snapped out of her daydream and realized it was past time to check on Donna. Glancing one last time at the screen, she saw that she’d typed fifteen pages while hardly paying attention. On rare days when a miracle like that occurred, she was reassured that leaving her third grade students had been the right thing to do.
But reality was calling. She checked her phone: no calls, though surely someone must have wondered where she’d gone. Especially since her Jeep still stood in the driveway next door, which, unlike her, was where it belonged.
Chapter 22
“It’s open,” Earl’s voice unexpectedly responded when Annie knocked on the cottage door.
Stepping inside, she was greeted by Restless, his tail wagging so fiercely that his rear end jerked back and forth. She bent down and patted his head, scratched his ears, and said, “I didn’t expect to see you here.” She slipped out of her sneakers, revealing her old socks.
“Lucy brought him for a visit,” Donna said from the rocking chair, as Lucy emerged from the bathroom.
“And I stopped by to get this young lady home in time to do her homework,” Earl added as he leaned, arms folded, against the refrigerator.
Annie glanced back at Donna, who looked rested. Her cheeks had a nice pink color as if she’d never been ill. Restless scooted over and settled at Donna’s feet as if that was where he’d been stationed when Annie had opened the door. It made for a sweet tableau.
“Did you have a nice visit?” she asked Donna.
“We did. Lucy brought us homemade date nut bread. And this little guy’s a gem.” She leaned down and ran a hand gently across the dog. “I love dogs. We never had one, though. Kevin is allergic.”
Annie refrained from mentioning that he’d told her that. “You’re really a good kid, aren’t you?” she asked Lucy, who responded by sticking her tongue out at Annie, a gesture that Annie had learned to consider a term of endearment.
Then Lucy laughed and said, “Nice outfit, Annie. Has my dad seen you in that?”
Earl let out a chuckle.
Annie looked down at her attire. She looked pathetic, right down to her socks. “I’m saving it for a special date. Like maybe if he takes me to the symphony. Or the opera.”
“Good luck with that,” Lucy said. “But you might at least make an appointment with Patti Linn for a cut and color. If she fixes your hair maybe the rest of you won’t be so . . . noticeable.”
Annie smoothed her hair behind her ears; she knew it had grown long and wasn’t short and neat, like Donna’s. Scruffy, her mother Ellen would have called it. “I’ll do that. And I’ll take good care of my outfit so you can wear it to the prom.” The ladies giggled.
Earl shook his head and stood up straight. “Time to leave. Get yourself together, granddaughter.” He turned to Donna. “It’s been a pleasure to see you again, Ms. Donna. I’ll stop by tomorrow after I run down to the boat.”
Though Annie had no idea what he was referring to, she didn’t ask. Donna must have asked Earl to pick up something in town, and, coupled with having enlisted Georgia whatever-her-last-name-was as a home companion, Donna certainly was entitled to manage her own life. As for Earl, God knew, he’d comply. Without his penchant to help others, Annie wasn’t sure how she would have navigated her first year on the island.
Then, as Earl zipped his jacket, he abruptly asked Annie, “How are things over at the Flanagan place? Was it unlocked or did you have to break in?”
Stupefied, Annie said, “I wasn’t in the main house.”
“Well, I didn’t figure you would be.”
“But how . . .”
Lucy laughed. “Your car was here, your keys were in it, so Grandpa said you couldn’t be far. It took him two seconds to find the path again. Then he saw your footprints on the ground.”
“Fresh prints,” Earl added. “It rained pretty hard last night, but you probably slept through it. If someone had left ’em earlier, they’d have washed away. I figured not many people either know about or would bother with that path. No reason to. Since no one’s around. Bet you never knew that my son gets his investigative skills from me.” He donned his baseball cap and tipped it toward Donna. “Have a pleasant evening.” Then he waddled out the door and into the waning sunset, with Lucy and the dog behind him, the teenager mimicking his gait, and Restless continuing to wriggle his backside.
“You broke into your old rental space so you could write?” Donna asked after they were out of sight.
Annie snapped on the light over the table and sat across from her birth mother, knowing she must look sheepish. She toyed with the buttons on her fleece. “I loved that little place. I wrote one of my novels there. It has nice memories.”
“Earl thought you were hiding from
us.”
The laugh Annie emitted sounded more like a sputter. “Earl likes to spin an incident into a tale. The longer you know him, the more you’ll get to hear. But if he drives you crazy, let me know. The whole first fall and winter I was here, he stopped by every day. He usually pretended he had something to do, like bring me wood or fix the door. After a couple of months I realized he was keeping a watchful eye out for me. In case anything happened, you know? Anyway, let me know if he gets to be a pest.”
“There could be worse pests to have around. And Lucy is delightful.”
Annie nodded. “That she is.” There was no need to fill Donna in on Lucy’s not-so-delightful antics. “So how was your afternoon? Did you get any rest before your visitors arrived?”
“I did. Georgia wore me out. She’s very nice but . . . perky. Perky people can be exhausting. Don’t you think?”
“You have plenty of hands around here who are willing and eager to help; you don’t have to hire more. Especially if they exhaust you.”
“No. It’s important to me that I take the burden off of you.”
“You’re not a burden, Donna.”
She laughed. “Maybe I haven’t been here long enough.”
“If push comes to shove, I’ll send Earl over more often. He never tires of being a do-gooder.”
“Let the dog come, too. I really like the dog.”
Annie smiled, stood up, and went to the kitchen to fill the kettle for tea. The day had been rather pleasant; despite the uncertainties in life right now, the good mood she’d had first thing that morning had been justified after all.
* * *
She stayed in the cottage for a while, fixing the leftover chowder for dinner; she and Donna ate it with Lucy’s date nut bread, because Donna said she had an appetite. They chatted about nothing and everything as the night grew darker and the clock ticked toward bedtime. And though Annie had elected not to bring up the issue of her birth father—yet—after she’d cleared the table and fixed tea, she introduced a prelude of sorts.
“Can you tell me about my grandparents, Donna? Your mother and father? Only if you want to. But I have been curious.” She’d once asked Kevin, but he’d said he didn’t remember much about them, except that they were nice to him.
Donna smiled. “I never wanted to force that on you. I thought that telling you might be presumptuous.”
“Presumptuous? Why?”
“That it might make you sad. For not having known them.”
“It won’t. At least I don’t think it will. And I’d really like to know. Were they originally from Boston? You grew up there, right?”
“Yes. In Dorchester,” she said. “My dad was a laborer; my mother, a homemaker. They were older than most parents of my friends. I was raised in a three-bedroom, triple-decker. I had a brother, but he was killed in a streetcar accident when he was twelve. His name was Donald.”
“Oh, my gosh. I am so sorry. How awful for all of you.”
Donna stirred her tea. “I cried for a while, but then, because I was a child, I moved on to other things. It wasn’t until after you were born that I was able to feel the sadness. That’s when I began to understand how hard it is to lose someone you love.”
“How did your parents handle it when you told them you were pregnant with me?”
A thin smile crossed Donna’s mouth. “It was difficult. As I said, they were older, nearly in their sixties by then. Their generation was much different from mine; they didn’t know what they’d done wrong to have raised a nineteen-year-old daughter who was going to have a baby, but didn’t have a husband.”
It was the perfect opening for Annie to ask about her birth father. But the words stuck in her throat and, she supposed, in her heart.
“They sent me to a home for unwed mothers right in Boston. I could have run away, but that wouldn’t have been right for you. So I made it work. The home was run by nuns, and, though my parents weren’t Catholic, they were God-fearing Anglicans. Scottish descent, you know?”
When Annie was a teenager, she’d daydreamed that Donna’s parents had comforted her and tried to talk her out of giving up her baby for adoption, that maybe they’d even considered trying to raise Annie as their own. She had been, of course, still naïve then.
“The ‘home’ must have cost a lot of money,” Annie said. “As a laborer, it must have been a hardship for your father.” She wanted to ask if her birth father had ponied up some of the cash, but hoped Donna would offer the information.
“No,” Donna replied. “The nuns were nurses—it was actually a nursing home. They only had two rooms allotted for ‘their girls,’ so they only took in four of us at a time. We worked for our room and board; we did the laundry and kept track of their patients. We took care of housekeeping duties too. It was a big old Victorian right in Back Bay. Not far from where I later opened my antiques store. And you . . . you were born there.”
So, Annie had been born in a big old Victorian in Back Bay. She wondered how many times she’d walked past it over the years, never having known its history or its connection. For the first time since they’d met, her defenses began to melt away. Donna was no longer the mysterious birth mother who hadn’t wanted her, but a young woman who’d been trying to do the right thing for her baby.
“Were you . . . scared?” Annie asked, barely above a whisper.
Donna let out a laugh. “Every minute of every day. I was scared and I was afraid—for you. I had no idea . . .” Then she started to cry. She hadn’t cried when talking about Kevin’s dad who’d left them, or when telling Kevin and Annie about the cancer. Nothing Annie had witnessed so far had stirred such feelings in her mother.
Annie stood up to go to her when suddenly, an insistent knock—one-two—rattled the cottage door.
It might have been Earl. Or John. Kevin would have walked right in, though Annie wasn’t sure if he could have handled the emotion in the room.
Donna wiped her tears. “You’d better get that.”
“They’ll leave.”
“They’ll know we’re here. The light is on. Whoever it is will worry.”
Annie smoothed her hair. “Okay. I’ll tell them to come back tomorrow.” With an aching heart, she toddled across the hardwood in her old socks. She turned the lock and opened the door. And came face-to-face with her ex-husband, Mark.
* * *
Annie stared.
He stared back.
It was dark outside, but the light from the living room spilled across his face. And the glow from headlights up on the hill beamed down at them, framing the frame that she remembered well. She grasped the door to stop from falling over.
“Annie?” he asked.
Panic surged.
Panic.
Fear.
Rage.
She slammed the door and bolted it.
She stood in place a few more seconds, trying to get her bearings. Trying to breathe.
Adrenaline kicked in. She raced from window to window, checking the locks, pulling the curtains. She flicked off the lights, as if that would fool him into thinking no one was home.
“Annie?” Donna called, but Annie couldn’t answer.
She grabbed her phone. She hadn’t realized until then that her hands were shaking. No, they were more than shaking. They had spasmed into tremors. She gripped the phone. She scrolled to the Chappy emergency alert and fumbled to touch the link. For added measure, she punched in 911. She said some words, but did not remember them. She didn’t even care if the first responder turned out to be Taylor.
She groped in the darkness for the chair, then flopped into it. She thought: What if he has a gun? What if he’d come to shoot her? “I’ll make a couple of calls,” Larry Hendricks had said. “If only to prove I’m not really an insufferable jerk.”
She pressed a hand to her chest.
Then she remembered Donna.
“It’s okay,” Annie whimpered. “John will be here soon.”
Donna didn’t answer.
Perhaps she’d guessed that Annie didn’t know if John would show up because she couldn’t remember if he was on duty.
Had her panicked message to the emergency line made any sense? If not, would the dispatcher have recognized her number and accelerated the alert? Annie didn’t know if GPS was working or if, that night, the signal was too weak. Was it foggy out? Wasn’t the signal worse when it was foggy?
What if they thought Annie had said she’d found another body—or the remains of one—and that her imagination had spun out of control? What if they thought that nothing—once again—was urgent? Like the boy who’d cried wolf?
Her thoughts zoomed around the room like a cloud of bats soaring, dipping, banging into walls, knowing they were trapped.
And then the knocking came again.
It was far too soon for John.
Besides, it was Mark’s knock. One-two.
“Help!” Annie wanted to cry out, but she could not. She didn’t want to scare Donna more than she already must have.
Suddenly, she heard sounds inside the cottage. Footsteps in the bedroom. Moving into the living room. She sat, frozen. Her heart thump-thumped again.
Then the front door flew open.
A shot rang out.
“Now get the hell out of here!” a woman’s voice shrieked. Donna’s voice. “Next time I won’t miss.”
Chapter 23
By the time the red and blue lights splashed across the lawn and the Inn and the sky, Annie had stopped shaking. She was still sitting in the chair; Donna sat nearby, holding Annie’s hand.
John blew into the cottage with more ferocity than a nor’easter in February. “What the . . . ? Annie? Are you okay?” Donna let go of her hand as John crouched down.
Annie reached for him. “I’m okay now. I am.”
