by Mara Webb
I looked down at my pale skin and saw that I already had a pink hue on my arms. I had gone from the airport to the bus, then from the bus to the café. How had I caught sunburn already? Effie reached into the apron she was wearing around her waist and pulled out a bottle of sunscreen to give to me.
“Consider this the lamest ‘welcome to your new home’ gift you’ll ever get,” she smiled.
“I appreciate it,” I smiled back. “You’re right though, a bit of time to take everything in would be great. I haven’t taken a vacation in years and this place looks like a paradise.” The last time I was here it had been one disaster after another. The rental car broke down, as did the replacement rental, out hotel room was infested with moths, every bar got our drink orders wrong and loud noises woke me in the middle of the night every night we stayed.
It might have been the ocean air scrubbing those memories out of my brain, but I was feeling optimistic all of a sudden and Effie was grinning at me so wildly that I couldn’t help but feel excited about what was to come.
“Paradise is not the word I would use, but hey, you’re here now and the planes don’t fly all that often,” she laughed. “You’re stuck with us until the next flight out at the very least.” I gulped, there was no escaping this new reality if I didn’t like it. I would have to suck it up if I realized this had all been a mistake. Happy thoughts!
A voice from the front of the café shouted for Effie and she gestured that she would be back in a minute. I leaned against the wall and looked around the kitchen I was standing in, the kitchen that I now owned. It was a mix of home baker and industrial restaurant. Stainless steel appliances intertwined with multicolored cupboard doors and pans hanging from the ceiling. It had personality, there was no doubt about that.
“Sorry, the coffee station had run out of sugar sachets and it looked like a fight was about to break out,” Effie apologized. “Why don’t you dump your suitcase by that door, and I’ll hunt for the key while you’re out. Head into town, grab a slice at ‘Pete’s Za’ on the main street and you’ll probably find my sister. She’s cool too.”
I dragged my suitcase to the door that I assumed lead into the house, then walked with Effie back to the front door of the café. Wes had gone at this point and his bus was nowhere to be seen. I could see an endless stretch of beach ahead of me and the town on my right.
“You literally walk that way and turn when you see a proper road. If you go too far you’ll end up at the harbor and it’s just all fishing boats and stench. People love seafood, not me personally, but most people. You’ll find your way easy enough, just make sure you put on sunscreen and don’t drink too much, the heat affects your alcohol tolerance, and I don’t want to have to haul you across the sand to bed tonight.”
I was about to explain that I rarely drank, but Effie was already back inside and serving customers. It wasn’t as humid as I had expected, but I was basing island living on the few hours I had spent here so far. I was pretty sure the café had air conditioning and the ocean breeze was keeping me cool as I walked across the sand.
It felt like there should have been someone at the airport back home that checked my ticket, realized where I was headed, and refused to allow me to board the plane in jeans. Was that criminal negligence or something? Didn't someone have a duty to tell me that this place was not denim friendly. At least my shirt was a light, flowing cotton that was stopping me from completely overheating.
Before I knew it, I had reached the turn from the beach onto the street. Had this been the way Wes had driven? I mustn't have been paying enough attention.
It felt like I had suddenly discovered where everyone else on the island was hanging out. The sidewalks were smothered in busy feet taking people from one store front to another, the beach had been disserted though. Did people not lay out in the sun anymore?
The irresistible fragrance of hot donuts hit me like a ton of bricks. I felt like a cartoon character that was lifted off the ground, floating on the scent as they followed their nose to the source. I had cash in the back pocket of my jeans and an insatiable hunger for sugary treats.
The interaction with the food truck owner was brief. No smiles were given by him, no eye contact and no parting words to enjoy my day. I checked my watch to see if I had caught him after his closing time and forced him to stay open a few minutes longer than he wanted, but I hadn’t changed to the current time zone and was all out of sorts. Some people just like to be left alone, maybe he was one of them.
Once the donuts were in my hands, the food truck immediately closed off the serving window. A metal panel rolled down and the engine growled as he began to drive away. Jeez, was it something I said? I looked back to the street and saw that the crowds had dispersed within a matter of seconds and I was now one of the only people on the sidewalk.
My body had been fueled by plane trays of dry chicken and stale bread, so the fresh food was a welcome change. I had bought three for the price of two and managed to polish off the lot in under a minute. They had been freshly cooked and the heat of them inside my stomach, in combination with the heat of the exterior of my body, was causing me to glisten with sweat.
I spotted ‘Pete’s Za’ up the street and prayed that it also had air conditioning to cool me down. As I stepped into the pizza place I was handed an iced lemonade by a girl that had to be Effie’s sister. Her hair style was the same, only her bangs were emerald green and the rest of her hair was black.
Were it not for the difference in hair color, the two of them would be completely identical. I wondered if they were twins. My hands were still sticky with donut sugar, but the smell of deep-dish pizza was getting my stomach ready for another round of island deliciousness. I took a sip of the lemonade and took a quick inhale of breath in preparation to speak. Effie’s sister spoke first.
“Hey, I’m Kate. Effie text to say you were coming and blah blah... no time for introductions. You need to get into our storm cellar!” she said, grabbing my arm and pulling me further into the building.
3
We walked through to the back door, out onto a patchy lawn and down through a hatch in the ground. Kate pointed to the ladder and had me climb down first, then as she followed, she reached up to bring the hatch door down over the entrance and sealed us both inside.
We weren’t alone down here. There was a light illuminating the shelter and padded seats around the edge of the small room. It reminded me of a holding cell from movies, the blank faces staring forward waiting for whatever was fated for them.
“Hey, this is Sadie. Y’all knew she was coming so don’t stare,” Kate announced. There was a wave of acknowledging groans as I smiled at everyone. I wanted to leave behind my old personality of shying away in the shadows and become more approachable. I had been almost cripplingly introverted back on the mainland, but this was a new start for me. A chance to be whatever I wanted.
“You’re weird, I dig it.” I turned to see a young guy in a sheriff’s uniform perched on the edge of one of the perimeter seats. He was distractingly attractive; it had made the breath catch in my throat. The sun had kissed his skin to a rich bronze and the seams of his shirt struggled to contain his muscular arms. I could only imagine that my gawping face was doing me no favors.
“Sadie,” I blurted.
“Yeah, Kate just told us,” he laughed. “I’m Miller.” I reached out a hand to shake his, then saw him pull back as he looked at my palm.
“I’m sticky!” I said. This was possibly the worst interaction with a guy I’d ever had. Miller seemed to find it amusing at least.
“You picked up a donut on the way, huh? We’ve all been there, am I right?” he asked the rest of the shelter gang. They nodded in agreement. “I take it you didn’t know there was a storm coming, most mainland folk have no idea about real weather.”
“No, I just allowed myself to be kidnapped by a stranger with lemonade. I probably should have put up more of a fight,” I smiled.
“You’re new, it’s o
kay. Most folk around here will have your best interests at heart. Especially the interests of an Alden,” he whispered. He spoke my last name as if it were a secret. I hadn’t told him my last name, neither had Kate. My face must have betrayed my confusion. “We don’t get a lot of people moving here so when we do it is big news.”
“Oh, well I just hope I live up to the hype,” I laughed.
“I’m sure you will,” he said. I felt the heat rise up in my cheeks and I was sure I was glowing like a traffic light. He was flirting, right? I hadn’t been in a flirty conversation in so long that I wasn’t sure I would even recognize the signs.
Miller leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. Was he taking a nap? I didn’t know where to look anymore. I turned back to look for Kate, the only other person who’s name I knew, and found her patting a space next to her on the perimeter bench.
“Don’t worry about that,” she said, nodding her head upwards to gesture at the sleeping sheriff. “There has been some really petty dispute over land ownership on the islands recently and he has been trying to reason with the unreasonable for, like, four straight days.”
“Oh?”
“I wouldn’t worry about it, not yet at least,” she winked. Was I supposed to know what that wink meant? “When you live in an isolated community like this it can put a magnifying glass on small problems, people lose their heads over the dumbest stuff. Don’t even get me started on the restaurant fire.”
“Your place was on fire?” I gasped.
“Another time,” she sighed. “You don’t have your phone, right?”
“No I left it with my suitcase. I haven’t got any signal anyway,” I explained.
“Well you are gonna need to sort that out. We all get emergency weather alerts through an app and it could save your life. If you die here, then it’s going to be really problematic.”
I chuckled and then locked eyes with Kate, quickly realizing that it wasn’t a joke.
“Y... yeah. I don’t want to die either, that would be problematic for me too,” I stuttered. She grinned.
“You really aren’t what I expected,” she said, looking me up and down as if assessing my size. I wasn’t sure what that statement meant. It didn’t feel like a compliment, but it wasn’t abrasive either. It was open to interpretation, maybe that’s why she phrased it that way.
A beeping echoed through the shelter, followed shortly after by a series of sighs from the group and then suddenly everyone rose to their feet.
“You all know the drill. Wait!” Kate announced. She had the same authority as her sister, one I didn’t dare question or challenge. Everyone sat down again, and Kate began to climb back up the ladder to unlock the hatch door. “Sadie, you’re with me.” I complied and scurried up the ladder after her, despite having no idea what to expect back on the surface.
I hadn’t heard any wild winds or heavy rains down in the shelter, but clearly both had happened. Miller had been distracting, sure, but enough so that a storm had passed me by unnoticed? Kate thrust a bright orange vest towards me, and I saw that she was already wearing one. Where had she just gotten this from? She couldn’t have had these in a pocket, and she didn’t have a backpack or anything.
“You’re with me for the foreseeable future,” Kate declared. “Don’t panic, it’s probably not going to take long. I am the head of the squad that checks for damage after storms and reports it to the right people. I need two pairs of hands and Miller is napping, so you’re up!”
“Oh, I don’t know how much help I can...”
“Let me cut you off right there,” she said. “First off, never downplay your abilities. There are plenty of people that will jump at the chance to doubt you, you shouldn’t be one of them. Secondly, I have to get you a sim card for your phone and get you hooked up to the island early warning weather system or you’ll get whipped off to the emerald city or something.”
That seemed fair. I donned the vest and fastened the Velcro straps to secure it. The ground was squelching under foot as the rain had soaked through the soil and created a dense mud. The sky was clear blue, I couldn’t even see clouds in the distance. I had thought that it would be all sun, sea and sand. I hadn’t been expecting to be wading through puddles.
“It’s not like this too often, honestly,” Kate laughed. “It keeps things interesting though, not that we need more interesting stuff to be happening. Hey, I guess this is going to be your introductory tour of the main island. Stick with me and don’t touch anything.”
I followed Kate through the back of ‘Pete’s Za’ and out onto the main street. It didn’t seem as though there was much building damage, or at least not damage caused by the weather. “What’s that?” I asked, pointing at a symbol spray-painted across a shoe store window. It looked like two small flags that were both blowing towards each other as if moved by opposing winds.
“Urgh, don’t get me started,” Kate huffed. She stopped walking for a moment and pointed at the spray paint markings. “This symbol is a sign that an ancient treaty is being shredded by the young’uns and somehow, in the middle of a storm, the priority was making sure this got drawn to send a warning to any passing folk from the Conerty family. This has ‘Davick’ written all over it.”
I didn’t understand what a ‘Davick’ was, or what treaty she was referring to, but she began marching off up the street again and I jogged to catch up.
“We are looking for roof damage, broken glass, trees that have pulled down power cables or corpses. Keep your eyes peeled,” Kate said.
“Corpses?” I gasped.
“Ha, it’s unlikely but now if we find one you can’t claim you weren’t warned,” she smiled. “Okay, so this is the main street, right? If you look down there you can see the turn off for the beach, we have most of the stuff on this island, so people from the other islands come here to shop, stock up on groceries and loiter.”
“Is there a place I can stock up on shorts?” I asked. The denim jeans weren’t feeling as restrictive now as the storm had taken some of the heat out of the air, but Kate was wearing a cool cotton jumpsuit and I wanted to be wearing that outfit instead of my own.
“Dude, we even sell shorts in the drug store,” Kate laughed. “Nowhere is going to be open for at least an hour. Folks will be heading home to check on their houses, then come back to get business up and running again. We need to head to the cemetery anyway.”
“Why?” I asked. It seemed like the last place anyone would want to go and surely everybody there was already dead, we wouldn’t be looking to call an ambulance for anyone, right? Kate was already marching us away from the main street towards a slope that curved downwards gently.
“Do you see all this water?” she said, pointing at a stream that was racing us along the edge of the sidewalk. I nodded. “For some reason our cemetery is downhill. This whole place is referred to as ‘the lower ground. A few weirdos live down here, I’d stay away if I were you. Anyway, the cemetery location wasn’t well thought through.”
“Would you rather people were buried on the beach?” I joked.
“We don’t really bury people anymore. About ten years back we started building above ground cemetery structures, I guess you’d call them tombs. With these storms, hurricanes or whatever, we can get some flooding in the lower ground, and obviously that’s a problem.”
“Oh, does it mess up the houses down here?” I said. Kate gave me a confused look.
“No, the houses have all been put up on stilts. The houses will be fine,” she explained. “Do you know what happens in a cemetery when it floods?” I shrugged, why would I know that? “It can wash away the dirt, make the coffins float about, and in some cases... the bodies get out.” She had leaned closer as if she were telling me a secret and my skin shuddered.
“Get out?” I repeated.
“Yeah, just a few people that need re-burying. All the newer bodies are in the tombs so they’re fine. As long as the coffins are intact, we won’t see anything freaky,” Kate sm
iled. I felt nauseous. I could see that the cemetery was surrounded by a metal fence and there were trees scattered across the space like green polka dots. It didn’t distract me from the flood waters though.
Kate was in water a few inches short of her knees. I couldn’t see any coffins so felt relief, but that didn’t mean that sticking close behind my unofficial guide was easy. I had to make the decision to stay outside the gate and risk being alone if more bad weather hit or follow her and wade out into the murky pond.
Kate screamed and I instinctively ran as fast as I could to get to her location.
“Sorry, it just caught me by surprise,” she gasped.
“What did?” Oh. There was a body floating in the water now and, despite this being the first time I had seen a dead body, I was calm.
“Sadie, this must be awful for you,” Kate said, wrapping an arm around my back and placing her hand on my shoulder.
“You too, right?” I imagined she must be alarmed by the sight as much as I was. “You said graves can wash up in the flood.”
“Well yeah, but that’s your cousin, Sadie. She isn’t buried here. She went missing recently.”
4
I perched myself on a mound of grass a little way back up the hill that gave me a view of the lower ground. Sheriff Miller arrived not long after and there was some sort of machine that pumped water out of the cemetery through a long pipe. I briefly wondered where the water was being taken to.
Kate had tried to talk to me about ruptured flood defense systems and her desire for sandbag walls around the older graves, but the damage was already done. There had been a flood and just one grave had been disturbed. My cousin’s grave.
I was raised as an only child with a single parent. My adoptive mother gave me everything I could ever want, I was loved and cared for, nurtured and taught well by her. Now I watched as an officer zipped a corpse into a body bag, and Kate had just told me that corpse was a relative of mine. Could that be true? Could I have more family out in the world that I never knew about?