What happened next might have been planned. But it took a small and random series of events to set it in motion.
Somebody, someplace in the bay, had thrown a beer bottle over the side of a boat. The bottle was carried by the tide to this beach. A little boy looking for arrowheads broke the bottle in the thoughtless way that little boys do such things. The glass worked itself into the sand. Carolyn stepped on it, and it sliced into her foot.
Time to be cool. He put an arm under her shoulders and helped her to the boat. She sat on a bow seat. He perched on the gunwale, her foot on his thigh.
Seawater. Best thing for infection. A clean bucket of seawater over the foot, towel it dry, two butterfly bandages to hold it together. “And next time, wear your shoes.” Very cool.
“You have gentle hands.”
Here the cool began to melt. He could not resist sliding his fingers up to the little gold chain around her ankle.
He was new to this—whatever this was—and he couldn’t tell from the look on her face if she was encouraging him or just counting style points. But she was in no hurry to move her foot.
Setup. This is a setup. She wants something.
But the flesh was weaker than he thought. He brushed his thumb across the pads of her toes. Her expression did not change, so he did it again. The toes were soft, the nails painted a subtle pink.
An outboard puttered in a distant channel, two terns squawked over the barrier beach, the tide lapped against the side of the hull… and the whole bay, for a moment, seemed to pivot around his thumb and the tips of her toes.
He traced a delicate line along her instep to her ankle. Still her expression did not change. Was she waiting for him to go further? Subtracting points? He let his touch travel the soft curve halfway to her knee. There he stopped.
If this was a game, she had to start playing. After a moment she slid her foot along his thigh, to the cuff of his tennis shorts.
Setup. This is a… the little voice in the back of his head faded like a Boston television signal. He leaned forward to kiss her.
And the first greenhead found them. This is a fly that breeds in the salt marshes. It is born with an enormous green head, a taste for salty flesh, and a sting like a hot needle. Geoff felt a small tickle at his ankle, a little pain, then a shock. But these flies would have had to be carrying knives to interrupt—
Slap! Carolyn nailed one on her neck.
He pressed his lips to hers, and another little green-skulled bastard landed on his ankle. It bit just as her lips parted, and it bit… and bit, and the sting traveled from his ankle right up his backbone. But he kept kissing until—slap—she whacked at another one on the side of her neck and hit him right in the jaw, which jolted his brain back into working order.
He sank into a sitting position on the deck. “If this is a setup, next time bring some Raid.”
“What?”
When he was at ease within his tennis shorts, he jumped up and started the engine. “You want as much from me as I do from you.” He turned the boat back toward the Portanimicut River and the museum. “We’re playing a game.”
“I’m a divorced woman who hasn’t been kissed in months.”
“I’m a sucker for nice legs.” He threw her her skirt. “And soft toes.” He picked up his sweat socks and threw her those, too.
The skirt she put on. The sweat socks she tossed over the side.
“Thank God for the greenheads,” he said.
“I agree.” She got very businesslike again, as though covering hurt feelings.
And she was good enough at it that he felt bad. Maybe he had been too harsh with her. Maybe she really did like him and couldn’t help herself. But remember, you’re married.
She limped over and took back the wheel. “You said you had some questions.”
“What do you know about a doctor from Hertfordshire?”
Her arm stiffened on the throttle and the boat jerked forward. “Who?”
“His name was Thayer, ship’s doctor of the Somerset.”
“He came from Hertfordshire?”
She was covering up. He could tell by the way she stared ahead with that neutral look on her face, the one she used when she turned on the tape recorder and waited for him to talk or when he touched her toes and she waited for him to touch her thigh. Go ahead, say a little more, do a little more before I reveal anything. A game.
Trade a little knowledge for a little more? “The transcript of your interview with my uncle mentions a painting called Voyage from Hertfordshire.”
She puttered back into the pond and headed for her dock. “He showed me all his Hilyards, the Pilgrim paintings, the House on Billingsgate studies. Are you saying there’s a connection?”
“Coincidence, connection… who knows?” He thought of another item on the list. “Considering that Tom Hilyard usually painted the Pilgrims, why would he paint something like Voyage from Hertfordshire?”
“Who knows? Why did he start painting the Billingsgate house? For the last years of his life, all he painted was the Billingsgate house, from every angle. He started off as a Howard Pyle rip-off, and turned into the forerunner of Edward Hopper? Why?”
Like a sphinx, he thought, a smart, beautiful sphinx. “You started all this with your questions, you know. Now my uncle’s dead.”
At that, she stopped the boat, right in the middle of Portanimicut Pond. “You were ready to climb into my bathing suit ten minutes ago. Now you’re saying what?”
“I’m trying to find the log. So are you. As for your bathing suit, that was a setup.”
She slammed the throttle forward. The boat lurched. And Geoff toppled over the side. “Swim to your car,” she shouted, “and don’t come around with any more questions.”
iii.
When he got home to Truro, he was still wet, soaked through with a miserable mixture of pond scum, guilt, and confusion that got worse when he found a letter taped to the door.
Dear Geoff,
It was true a hundred and seventy years ago, and it’s true today: there are no easy answers. Everything has a cost, and yours is getting higher by the day. Does your concern for a slash-covered island cost your professional future? My family’s future? Does your treasure hunt cost your family? I’ve tried to help you, but you are a silly, stubborn man. Only you can make your hard decisions. So make them. Read your broadsides, see your imaginary stalkers, watch the fog turn silver and float away. But remember that winter is coming.
I don’t like to do this. But there are times when a man has to be alone, hearing nothing but the sounds of his own heart and unspoken voice. And it is these isolated sounds, more than the happy din of a noisy household, that will make him understand how much he needs the gentle things, a loving woman’s voice or the laughter of children.
I’ll call day after tomorrow.
She didn’t talk like this. But it was her handwriting. Had the guys who followed him in the boat been here? Kidnapped Janice and the kids? But why this and not some kind of threat? Or had she, by some enormous coincidence, seen him in that boat with Carolyn Hallissey? Impossible.
He picked up the phone and called her father’s house.
Dickerson answered. The usual growl sounded soft and distant. “Hiya, Geoff. That bluefish was terrific. Had it—”
“Where’s Janice?”
“She says she doesn’t want to see you for a few days.”
“Where is she?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Tell me, or you’ll never get my land.”
“I don’t know.”
Geoff hung up and called their Boston home. No answer. That didn’t mean they weren’t there. It was eight o’clock. He could reach Boston in two hours and stop this before it did some kind of damage to the kids.
Sixty-five miles an hour all the way to Beacon Street. There was a light on. He let himself in. But the door wasn’t chained from the inside. The timer had turned on the light. The refrigerator was empty. He took a leak and
turned right around again.
iv.
It was midnight when he pulled up at Ma Little’s tiny house on Wakeby Pond. Maybe Janice was sitting at the kitchen table, complaining to Ma and Samantha about men.
He left his car on the road and walked up the dark driveway. He guessed he looked suspicious, and somebody agreed, somebody who knew exactly where to hit the back of his neck to knock him out.
The ammonia capsule woke him up like a cigarette burning his nose hairs. He heard the good-natured laugh of Ma Little, echoing in her own kitchen.
“You shouldn’t be sneakin’ up on somebody’s house like that, Geoff. Massy and the boys are a little jumpy.”
“What are they doin’? Strippin’ cars?”
“I only ever stole one car.” Massy, who wore a blue bandanna around his head, took the ammonia capsule and gave it a couple of snorts. “Pretty good.”
Ma slapped it out of his hand. “Somebody been snoopin’ around. We was at dinner. The boys down at the pond seen him.”
“Yeah,” said Massy. “He was dressed like some kind of jogger, man. Let himself in the house. Almost got his ass shot off.”
“I don’t jog.” Geoff rubbed his neck. “Is Janice here?”
“She left you?” asked Samantha.
“She says it’s time for me to make up my mind.”
“Her or the island?” Jimmy was wearing pajamas and a monogrammed robe, a very upper-crust Indian, his finger jammed into a copy of Presumed Innocent. “She knows how to reduce things to the simplest terms.”
“And Bigelows know how to hit below the belt.” Ma laughed. “You want us to go and occupy their real estate office till they give you your wife back? Or maybe we could occupy Jack’s Island when the Conservation Commission goes there. We haven’t done anything like that in years.”
“Like, a demonstration?” said Massy.
Jimmy said, “Stop worryin’ about demonstrations and get a job.”
“Fuck you, big shot.” Massy grabbed a beer from the refrigerator and stomped outside.
Ma filled the teakettle. “Sometimes I wonder how I got such a smart son with one husband and such a… normal one with the other.”
“That’s not fair, Ma,” said Samantha.
Ma looked at Geoff. He realized he had stumbled into a family squabble. Ma was mad about something. “They’re leavin’ on Friday, goin’ up to her family’s house in Pride’s Crossing. More comfortable in a fancy house on the North Shore than here at Ma’s.”
“That’s not true,” said Samantha.
But it was. It was a small kitchen in a small house beginning to feel smaller. The table was covered with a red-check vinyl cloth, the same one Geoff remembered from their college days. The linoleum showed wood through all the holes. A bungee cord held the refrigerator door shut. Rustic verging on poor. Jimmy had more refined tastes now. But Ma looked as if she could have gone into the woods, built herself a wetu, and raised a few more Wampanoag pinses or Harvard lawyers without a bit of help.
She put a cup of tea in front of Geoff. “Find your wife and bring her around for some smoked bluefish. The size of my house never mattered to her.” Ma gave a squint at her daughter-in-law. “Janice, she’s good people.”
Samantha pulled her robe around herself and went huffing off to the bedroom where she and Jimmy slept with their two kids. Ma and Jimmy were left glaring at each other—the old woman who hunted squirrels in the woods, just because her ancestors had done it, and the young man who was her greatest pride and damnedest disappointment.
Geoff had enough problems without sitting in the middle of this, so he drained his tea. “Janice might be good people, but she’s not doing anything good for me right now.”
“She’s just trying to make you see the light,” said Jimmy. “Your first responsibility is to your family.”
Ma laughed at that, and Geoff headed for the door.
“Don’t forget,” called Ma. “Us Indians, we know all the enviramentalist troublemakers around here. They trot us out whenever they need to get a picture in the paper. I can get a hundred of ’em at Jack’s Island day after tomorrow. Raise holy hell.”
“Rake might have liked that.”
“It’s not worth it, Geoff,” said Jimmy.
“Mother Earth gotta be worth somethin’,” said Ma.
v.
Geoff worried all the way to Barnstable. It was one o’clock now. He parked on 6A and walked through the opening in the fence of Agnes Dickerson Bigelow’s house. The night breeze had kicked up from the southwest. Hiram Bigelow’s shingle was making such an annoying squeak it was a wonder anyone could sleep.
From the window above the shingle, Janice watched him go around to the back. He was looking for the Voyager, but he wouldn’t find it unless he went to the neighbors’ garage. He slumped out of the barn and gave the house another long look. And she heard Hannah’s words to Sam in France: “You are a silly, stubborn man. You do not remain in France for the money, but for the principle. And principles get people killed…. Make sure they are worth your head.” Janice glanced over her shoulder at the portrait of Hannah that hung on the landing.
Geoff was too sleepy to drive to Truro, so he made Jack’s Island his refuge for the night. At the causeway, he stopped. How beautiful the marsh was, almost iridescent in the moonlight, just as it must have looked to men a century ago.
CHAPTER 26
July 1814
Huoyan Jinqang
Wisps of fog scudded past the moon like rags of raw silk. It was a full moon, what the Indians called the corn moon.
Though the man traveled most of the time by night, he had not been here in many years and was thankful for the light to guide him. At the end of the causeway, the road forked, but a path still wound through the cornfield to the house in the middle of the island. The house was not lighted, and the man hoped it was not deserted.
From the elevation of the moon he guessed the hour to be about midnight. He traveled late, but time no longer mattered, nor distance, nor the way he looked to the world. His shadow on the moon-yellowed ground was the only image he had of himself. It did not show the sunken eyes, the whitening beard, the layer of filth that clung to him like moss to a tree. It showed only his shape, a fishhook hunched over the box he held to his chest.
When he was close enough to see the dentil molding on the house, he nearly turned away. It had taken him many years to bring himself this far, yet the blackness still beckoned. It would be easy to retreat into it, as he had done so often before. He even took a step backward.
Then, from somewhere in the house, a baby cried, new life come to brighten the blackness, and he pounded at the door. But no lights came on.
A mourning dove mourned in a scrub pine near the barn. A windmill was spinning and squeaking down by the salt-works. On the bay, a ship’s bell rang out the hour. He pounded again. And he felt the gun press against his neck.
“Be gone. You and your friend both.”
“I brung no friend.”
“I told you last year and the year before that, my brother’s dead. He ain’t comin’ back.”
“I am your brother.”
“Sam?”
The man turned slowly, so he would not be shot. Then he opened his ragged coat. Beneath it was a filthy vest on which two dragons spit fire across his belly.
That night Sam Hilyard saw his infant nephew Isaac asleep in a shaft of moonlight. In five years of wandering, he had seen nothing as peaceful, nothing so touched by the hand of God, nothing, anywhere, that spoke so certainly for the goodness of life.
Over cups of steaming tea, he talked. Will and Mary sat a good distance from him, perhaps because he smelled stronger than sunbaked mackerel, and most certainly because they felt they were in the presence of an apparition.
Sam Hilyard had last been seen by honest men when the Dragon cleared Southampton five years before. Of his own volition, he had then descended into hell.
He had prayed that the boat carrying him from
his ship would become his coffin. But the swirling wind drove him into the eye of the storm, and by the time the blue sky had passed, his boat was run up on a deserted beach somewhere in the Leewards. He stayed there for many months, living on bananas and fish, before deciding to make for a larger island.
His travels took him to Jamaica, where he saw a bookseller and learned the value of his treasure. But unlike Solemnity Hilyard, he reaped no riches from the book, no earthly reward to compensate for his eternal damnation. In truth, he could not even bring himself to sell it.
He signed on with a coasting schooner, and when the work became familiar enough that his mind could once more dwell on the Dragon, he disappeared. He turned up in the French city of New Orleans and worked a Mississippi cargo barge, from which he disappeared six months later. In the village of Pittsburgh, he killed a man who tried to steal the box. And he disappeared again. Then from Baltimore, then Philadelphia did he disappear.
By now another war was begun with Great Britain. New England seafarers won glory for the fledgling navy, but New England politicians spoke of secession. In a newspaper, Sam saw a drawing of the king, sitting on a throne of blockaded goods, his arms outstretched to the four dithering gentlemen who represented the four seafaring states of New England.
Sam could not conceive of such an attitude among Cape Codders. But it burned there brighter than anywhere, because this new war had destroyed the commerce so painstakingly built since the Revolution. In a New York tavern, he met a Cape Codder and learned that once more, ships rotted in Cape Cod harbors while British men-of-war blockaded the coast.
“I heard things were bad, so I come back to help,” he said in the scratched-over whisper of one who seldom spoke.
“You’re nothin’ but another mouth to feed,” said Mary. “We got all we can do to keep the kids in cornmeal and clams.”
“Now, now,” said Will, “he’s my brother. Without him, we wouldn’t even own this island.”
“Can he work?”
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