by Edwin Hill
She ran along the pier, emerging from the dark, taking Oliver, kissing Rory, hugging him close, tears of joy streaming down her face. He kissed her back, holding her tight, not ever wanting to let go. And the words came out, before Rory knew he’d even said them. I love you. More than anyone I’ve ever known. I love you so much. Those words you can’t take back.
Her face collapsed. “Not now,” she said, as other people began to arrive, and the celebrating began. They lit off the fireworks, the same fireworks that had been cancelled for the search. The jazz band played. People danced all along the pier.
Even Trey had congratulated Rory that night, into a bullhorn, no less. “Let’s give a round of applause to the deputy,” he’d said, Lydia on his arm, Oliver asleep against his shoulder, “our local hero!”
The crowd had cheered, but Lydia, at least in Rory’s memory, hadn’t even been able to look at him. And the next day, the whispering began. Quiet at first. Rory, they said, had given Oliver a sleeping pill. He’d used the distraction from the near ferry accident to sneak the boy onto the yacht. He’d purposefully searched the boat on his own so that people would call him a hero. By the time the rumors got to Rory, they were whole and indisputable even though Rory had been on the pier waving people to safety. He’d been doing his job, for all the world to see. Trey had been there with him. But time lines warped, and memories changed. Someone saw him scurrying away, Oliver’s hand in his.
“That didn’t happen,” Rory said, the first time he heard the rumors.
But the denial had only made him sound guiltier.
“Mind your own business, Gus,” Rory said. “And don’t open that bridge again.”
* * *
Back up on the road, Rory turned the crank till the green metal bridge slammed into place. The bridge, which was barely wide enough for the Jeep, connected two steep cliffs that ran down to a fast-moving channel below. Rory almost flipped off Gus as he sped across the bridge.
About a square mile in area, half the size of Big Ef, Little Ef was nearly a perfect circle of wooded granite with nothing on it but trails, cottages, and coastline. “Town” hadn’t yet extended here. Since Finisterre didn’t allow cars besides a handful of service vehicles, the little road that did exist on this island rarely saw anything larger than a wheelbarrow. Rory drove with caution as he wove along the shoreline, into the trees, and back out to the water. Most visitors to the island, especially this late in the season, understood how things worked, so Rory waved to the people he passed as they cheerfully headed to the ferry on their own.
About halfway around, on the leeward side of the island, the trees opened to a coastline dotted with seaweed and tidal pools. A red and white lighthouse perched on a circle of stone about a quarter of a mile from the path, and the low tide had exposed a sandy spit connecting the lighthouse to the shore that would soon be swallowed by the sea. The lighthouse had been built at the turn of the eighteenth century and almost immediately had become a popular subject for landscape painters, appearing in hundreds if not thousands of paintings, from masterpieces to decidedly amateurish renderings. Like nearly all lighthouses, this one had been automated decades ago, and the structure, along with the keeper’s house attached to it, had been unoccupied ever since.
Today, despite the storm, no fewer than six painters stood at easels as they captured the darkening sky and boiling sea. Rory stepped from the Jeep and watched for a moment. Then he spoke into the handheld on his dash, his voice booming from a speaker as he announced that the ferry would leave in exactly twenty-five minutes. “It’s the last one before the storm,” he added, watching as the painters packed up and scurried off to their homes.
Some people never learned. It was the same thing every day, even without the storm. The ferry came, the ferry left. Most people made it, a few didn’t. And no matter what, Rory had to clean up their mess. He watched the sea for a moment, trying to push away thoughts of Lydia. He and Lydia had grown up next door to each other, roaming the woods and the rocky shores and attending the one-room schoolhouse through eighth grade with the few other children on the island. Afterward, they’d taken the ferry to the mainland every Monday to attend high school during the week, where they’d been “islanders.” Weird and inbred and outcast.
Inseparable.
There had never been a time in Rory’s life that he didn’t remember yearning for Lydia, but it wasn’t as though he hadn’t tried to escape her pull. He’d gone to college in Portland, sharing an apartment with four other guys, living the big-city life, and dreaming of making it work far away from this place. But circumstances had pulled him back in. His parents had died, and Pete, still a teenager, had needed him. Then Lydia, who’d gone to Orono to college, had moved home one day, surprising everyone with a new husband. An off-islander. Trey.
Someone tapped on the window of the Jeep. Pounded really, and Rory came out of his reverie half expecting to see one of the painters on the road demanding a ride to the ferry. Indeed, a woman danced from foot to foot, a suitcase beside her, its contents sprawled across the path. She was frantic.
Everything on this island ran on ferry time.
“You have twenty minutes,” Rory said, rolling down the window and summoning a smile from somewhere. “Plenty of time to make it.”
The woman gasped. She pointed up the path and finally found her words. “There’s a man,” she said.
“Yep,” Rory said. “Does he need a ride?”
“In the road. Around the bend. He has a knife.”
Rory’s training kicked in. Call for backup (scrap that, what backup?), clear the area, isolate the problem. “Run,” he said, his voice a whisper of a growl. “To the bridge. Tell anyone you see to clear out. And keep moving, whatever you do.”
The woman stared at him, frozen.
“Now!”
She stumbled over her own suitcase and fled. Rory radioed into dispatch on the mainland as he swerved around the corner on the path, and nearly collided with a man swinging a cleaver over his head at something only he could see. He was bleary-eyed, stumbling, naked as the day he was born. Rory slammed on the brakes and jumped from the Jeep.
“Dammit, Pete,” he shouted. “Put that knife down.”
Rory’s younger brother had once been muscular and handsome, but now he barely had an extra ounce to him, and his body—on full display—was covered with track marks and scars. “Faggot, faggot, faggot, queer, faggot,” Pete said, swinging the knife as he spoke.
“Jesus Christ, what are you on this time?” Rory said, which focused Pete’s rage.
He lunged, knife slashing, his wiry frame flailing in every direction. But Rory had spent a lifetime tussling with his younger brother, a lifetime making the kid feel small. He regretted that now. He stepped aside, avoiding the cleaver, and Pete sprawled onto the ground into a puddle, his naked ass shining toward the sky.
Rory tossed the cleaver into the bushes, dug his knee into his brother’s back, and slapped a set of cuffs on his wrists. “Sorry, guy,” he said.
Pete was six years younger. Unlike Rory, Pete had barely made it through high school and had only been a kid when first their mother and then their father died. While Rory had left for college and joined the police force, Pete had taken a job running the ferry to the mainland, a job their father used to have. Pete had liked the job. He liked being in charge and feeling the comfort of the familiar. He liked the girls and the beer that crossed on the ferry every day. And most days, especially during the summer, the job was easy. But drugs had crept onto the island and into Rory’s family, taking each person he loved one by one. It had started with his mother, who’d taken Oxy as cancer had spread through her body. It moved to his father, who’d slipped pills from her prescription to deal with pain from an old injury. The two of them had found doctors to keep the prescriptions going. Rory’s mother died from cancer seven years ago. His father overdosed a year later. And now Pete.
Pete started stealing pills from both his parents and selling them in h
igh school. Rory knew but didn’t know, turning a blind eye to what he didn’t want to see, which was something he’d live with for the rest of his life. Since the ferry incident, since Pete had lost his job and been given a suspended sentence for using, things had gotten worse. Rory wondered now when, not if, he’d have to use one of the vials of Narcan he carried everywhere to save his own brother. He’d certainly had to use them plenty of other times on the island.
He hauled Pete to his feet, who snarled and tried to bite his hand as Rory shoved his brother into the back of the Jeep and tossed him a blanket. “Cover yourself up,” he said. “That shriveled little thing won’t help your reputation.”
This, being high and naked and waving a knife out in the woods, was a clear violation of Pete’s probation. Maybe the time had come for Rory to report his brother. Rory couldn’t protect him forever. But jail, where it was easy enough to get drugs, wouldn’t solve any of their problems. It would make them worse.
Rory suddenly felt exhausted. The ferry left in ten minutes, and he should be there to see it off. He should do one more sweep of Little Ef to catch any stragglers. He should also get his brother dressed, take him to the mainland, and turn him in to the local sheriff. As an officer of the law, that’s what he’d do if he was doing his job. But what was his duty to family? Besides, he needed to be here tonight. He needed to ride out the storm with the rest of the islanders and make sure they made it through safely.
“Faggot, faggot, faggot,” Pete said, banging at the windows in the Jeep.
“Stop,” Rory said. “Please,” he added, his voice faltering. But it seemed to connect somewhere in Pete’s mind. His brother smiled, softly, and closed his eyes. “Hey, bro,” he mumbled.
Triage.
What was most important?
Family came first. That’s what his mother had always said. It was what Lydia said too.
Rory started the engine. Eight minutes till the ferry left. The last ferry till morning. Eight minutes to decide.
Up the road, a few hundred yards away, Rory saw another woman running toward him. He nearly drove off. Anyone late for the ferry would usually be on their own now, but something about the way she ran made him stop. She stumbled, sprawling into the dust, scrambling on all fours. She didn’t have a bag or a cart, and her blond hair flew around her face in greasy tendrils. He recognized her as one of the squatters from the run-down Victorian, though she’d been on the island only for a week or two. The house sat in the woods around the bend. Rory didn’t doubt that whatever Pete had taken, he’d scored it there, and he wished, not for the first time, that he’d taken a match to the old house. Too many strangers on the island. Too many people from away trying to take advantage of anyone they could.
He turned to Pete. “Do you know her?” he asked. His brother just stared ahead, eyes vacant.
The woman screamed, but Rory couldn’t make out the words.
He waited. Assessing. Checking for weapons. And he could see now the panic in her face. The tears. The sweat. And Rory remembered. The boy. Dark hair. Sad eyes. The morning they arrived, a crisp, fall day. He clung to his mother’s leg as they departed the ferry and trudged up the road with nothing but a dirty green duffel bag between them. Rory had nearly followed them that day, knowing they’d wind up at the house, a place no child should ever see.
* * *
A moment later, Rory sped toward the pier. Four minutes. Gus had better have left that bridge in place.
“This is your lucky day,” Rory said to Pete.
Because the thing with being the only deputy on duty was that sometimes Rory had to choose. He switched on the siren and lights. Somehow, he had to stop that ferry from leaving.
CHAPTER 3
Morgan Maguire ran his hands over the cocker spaniel’s belly. Rufus. Rufus was fifteen years old. His black fur had begun to mat and fall out in places, and he was covered with benign moles, but besides that, he was healthy. His owner, a man named Ervin, clutched at the arms of a chair as Morgan went through a routine exam.
“I brought in a fecal sample,” Ervin said.
“We can test it,” Morgan said. “But I don’t know what for. Nothing’s wrong with Rufus besides the indignities of age.”
In a year or two, the conversation would be a different one, a much more difficult one. One that Morgan wondered whether Ervin would be able to handle. Ervin brought the dog into the vet office in Cambridge’s Central Square practically every week and had for the past two years, ever since his wife had died. He had to be in his late seventies and had begun to look like the dog, with his own moles and thin hair. Morgan imagined the two of them, at home alone, on the sofa, watching Jeopardy!. He imagined their walks around a neighborhood that had transitioned as friends moved away. He lifted the dog to the ground. Rufus found his footing and walked gingerly over to Ervin, who scratched him behind the ears.
“I worry,” Ervin said.
“I know,” Morgan said. “Come in whenever you want.”
Morgan had months worrying, even since he’d walked into that hospital room in New Hampshire and seen Hester’s broken body. They hadn’t been the same since, not the two of them. They couldn’t be, really, not with Kate living with them or with Daphne off doing whatever she was doing. A part of him had wondered if Daphne would contact him today—it was their birthday after all, something they’d hated sharing as kids but had grown to love—but most of him dreaded hearing from his sister too. Morgan and Hester needed to find a way to heal, and Daphne would only make that more difficult.
“You take really good care of Rufus,” Morgan said, hating the platitude even as he said it. What Ervin wanted, and what Morgan couldn’t give him, was to go back to a time when his wife was healthy, his children were young, and Rufus’s belly was pink and translucent. He wanted a time when life was happier.
It was the same thing Morgan wanted.
Now, as he walked Ervin and Rufus to reception, his phone rang. He took the call, and when he was done, he made another call.
“I need your help,” he said. “Tonight.”
* * *
Annie grasped the lobster boat’s washboard, waiting for the next trap to emerge from the roiling Gulf of Maine. She wore yellow oilskins and thick rubber gloves to keep the lobsters from snapping at her fingers as she worked the lines off the coast of Finisterre Island, with nothing but gray water between her and Ireland.
“Hey, Red. Keep moving.”
Annie turned to the boat captain, Vaughn Roberts, who had an eye toward the dark western sky. His black lab, Mindy, wound her way across the deck, nosing at Annie’s gloves. Annie hated being called “Red,” a name that brought up memories of playgrounds and mean girls who mocked her red hair and fair skin, but she reminded herself that Vaughn was the boss for the day and being nearly homeless meant even worse humiliations. Besides, Lydia Pelletier had gone out on a limb to get her the job, and Annie couldn’t afford to lose the money she’d earn, or the sole friend she’d made all summer living on the island.
“Got it, Boss!” she said.
As the hauler lifted the next trap from the water, Vaughn cut seaweed off, using a six-inch knife with a blue hilt. While he moved down the line, Annie worked methodically, reaching into the trap to pluck out one of the writhing creatures. Its claws snapped helplessly as she measured the carapace at three and a quarter inches, the smallest length possible for a legal catch. A fraction of an inch shorter and the lobster would have gone back into the gray waters for another day, but luck wasn’t on its side. Annie tossed it into a waiting tank and flipped through nine more lobsters, discarding six, including one female, whose tail she notched. When they finished the line, Annie banded the claws on the catch while Vaughn maneuvered the boat through the waves, Mindy standing on the bow, her black ears blowing in the wind. “Think that storm’s coming?” he asked. “We need to clear these traps in case it does.”
“Who knows?” Annie said.
“You never do,” said Vaughn, who was salty
and windblown, what Annie expected in a lobsterman, even one as young as he was. But Vaughn also had a soft mouth made for talking and a Down East accent he worked hard to tame. “How do you know Lydia, anyway?” he asked.
All day, he’d peppered Annie with questions that she’d managed to parry away. “I don’t really,” she said. “How about you?”
“You know everyone when you’ve spent your life on an island like this one,” Vaughn said. “Everyone except who you don’t. But Lydia and I, we grew up here. Took the boat to the mainland to go to high school during the week. Even went to the same college. Now we both wound up back on the island, for better or worse. We can’t seem to get away from each other. You must know Trey, too, her husband.”
“Why would I?” Annie asked, realizing too late that she sounded defensive.
“Why wouldn’t you?” Vaughn said after a pause. “When everyone knows everyone? Where are you from, anyway?”
“By Dog Cove,” Annie said. “On Little Finisterre. There’s an old Victorian out there.”
“That dump by the lighthouse?” Vaughn said. “Most of the people who squat there have BO worse than five-day-old fish guts. I’m glad you don’t. You living off the grid for a while?”
Most everyone who lived in the house was off the grid. They didn’t have a phone there, let alone Internet service. Let alone anything else.
“Only the two of us out here,” Vaughn said when Annie didn’t respond. He steered the boat through the choppy surf. “How about trying? You know, I ask where you’re from, you tell me. You ask me the same question, and I tell you I’m from here, that I got away for a few years and moved to Portland, but now I live on the island because my ex-wife banished me from our house two months ago, and you say, how can a handsome guy like you possibly be single, and I say I’m not handsome, and you say, yes you are, you really, really are. You know, that kind of thing.”