It struck me that I’d lost not only my mother but my father as well. No wonder I’d been willing to go along with the Worthingtons’ wishes for so long. As thin a connection as they were, they were all I’d had. Of course I cared what happened to Owen. I nodded and swallowed back emotion.
“Y’know,” he said, “if my dad hears about any of this, I’m sunk. After I drop you off, I gotta clear out the last few cases from the creamery.” He pointed to his face. “And I better come up with some kind of story to explain this—and the boat.”
“What about the truth?”
He laughed without conviction. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, why not try telling him the truth?”
He shook his head. “No. I don’t want him involved in this. He’s a good man. It was my stupid-ass idea, not his. I’m the one who has to straighten up the mess.”
“Well, then how about the storm? Your boat was battered on the rocks? It could have happened, right?”
“Brilliant. That’ll work.”
Chapter 25
Jonah in the belly of a whale—that’s how I felt, scrunched down in the bow—until Owen slowed the boat and we drifted.
His right eye was completely swollen shut. Once he returned the cases of whiskey to their rightful owner, I hoped he could walk away without any more injury.
“Sadie, there’s no dock on this side of their island, but you better hop out here anyway.”
I emerged as the boat bobbed toward an island’s rocky shoreline and the small log cabin, its cut ends painted apple red. A petunia-filled box hung beneath two paned windows, closed shut and curtains drawn. It was Trinity’s artist studio.
I hesitated. I didn’t really want him to leave me. I’d be stuck again.
“It’s just ’til you figure out what’s next.”
“As if I have a clear plan,” I said, trying to laugh.
He must have read the doubt on my face. “Listen, Sadie Rose, if . . .”
Then he craned his neck, looking back at the channel to the east, as if expecting someone to be following from the direction of Kettle Falls. He pivoted back, grabbed my hand, and tugged me close. I wondered if he was going to kiss me.
“If I spend any more time with you, I might be tempted to—”
“To what?” I asked, knowingly. Flirtingly. “To turn me over to the Worthingtons?”
“Never,” he said. His hair formed curls behind his ears and at the base of his neck. I felt the odd urge to reach out and touch his hair, to see if it felt soft or coarse. Heat rose to my cheeks as a boat motor sounded from the west.
He jumped to his feet.
“Okay, go,” he said, taking my satchel from me. Then he tossed it high over the bow of the boat and sent it soaring. It landed in a low-creeping juniper bush. “Hand it here,” he said, nodding at the quilt. “Sheesh. Why you want this—” He threw it as well, but it floated like a lily pad, until one edge dipped and it started to slip deeper.
“Oh no.” Then I half-crawled, half-walked over the bow and stretched my boot toward the nearest boulder. I teetered but managed to right myself. I grabbed a corner of the soggy quilt and tugged it toward me, and then pushed his boat away. “You’ll come back?”
“Of course,” he said. “Soon as I can. At least now I know where to find you. When you disappeared, I hated to think I’d never see you again.” He shrugged, then put the motor into forward, steered out into the channel, and shrunk on the horizon.
Scooping up water in my hands, I drank, satisfying my thirst. As his boat motored away without me, my heart buzzed like a trapped fly. What if Trinity wasn’t on the island? Perhaps the Bairds, for all I knew, had left to travel to Europe for the month. I stood there, staring at the cabin.
Just then another boat appeared beyond the bend, and I scuttled back into the undergrowth with my satchel and wet quilt. When it passed, I walked to the cabin. Unlike Bigby’s cabin, this one was built solidly atop four boulders, sitting high and dry off the earth, not growing into it. With Mr. Worthington’s advice to steer clear of the Baird family due to their social class, I knew there had to be more to their island than this small studio cabin. A cabin just for painting. Imagine.
I ducked down and hurried around to the cabin’s front. The windows were latched. The door, when I tried its handle, was locked.
And I was starving. I hadn’t had anything to eat since before my morning shift at the kitchen, which felt like ages ago. On top of that, I was utterly exhausted. Why had I thought I could set off on my own? My confidence dwindled. I sat on the cabin stoop, chin in my hands, feeling sorry for myself. “Stop it,” I finally scolded myself. “You’ll find a way.”
Before long, the sun would drop below the horizon and night would settle. As I debated within myself, mosquitoes found me and started to land on my arms, which were bare to my rolled sleeves. Another landed on my neck, and I swatted it. When I examined my palm, it held a bloody, thread-thin bug. “Yuck.”
I hoped Owen knew what he was doing, dropping me off here. He’d asked me to trust him. His rearranged face and news of bootlegging gave me reasons to doubt. But what other option did I have after fleeing Kettle Falls?
I left my satchel and the sopping, heavy quilt in the crook of two nearby moss-topped boulders. Then I followed the path away from the cabin, in hopes of finding Trinity. But the island was still.
Soft-sweeping white pine lined the path, as stately and towering as old presidents. If it were my island, I might name them Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson . . . I brushed the rough bark of their trunks with my fingertips as I walked along the needle-layered path. Soon I was standing on a small ridge overlooking the island’s horseshoe cove with a white-sand beach. A thin peninsula of sand connected two small islands into one. In the cove, a long dock held a fishing boat fast; the boathouse near shore appeared freshly painted in nautical red.
Floating within the boathouse, with its stern visible from my vantage point, a white boat—a small yacht, actually—boasted one word in golden scrolled letters, trinity.
Trinity Baird had a boat named after her? I couldn’t believe it.
We couldn’t have come from more different worlds. I pictured Bigby pulling my legs from the snow, my eyelashes frosted together. My mind raced over a collage of images and memories. Mama, with her chin tucked so tightly into the top of my head that at times it hurt. The smell of her dense perfume, which often made me sneeze. Franny’s words about Mama and Ennis, and the brutal fight Franny had overheard before Mama’s death.
Mama, I wanted to ask, why did you think you could bring me up in a brothel? Why—a prostitute? Didn’t you know, couldn’t you look ahead to see that it was a shackle I’d wear around my ankle?
I longed to talk with her, to shout, to scream at her. What were you thinking, Mama? Surely you could have found another way to make money. You could have tried. Did you try? Did you ever try to sew for people and mend their clothes? Or work packing fish in ice during the summer? Or help out at the general store? You had been married to someone you loved, so how could you then sell your body?
From my vantage point on the ridge, I looked down on the narrow center of an hourglass, where the islands were joined by a thin sand beach. To the west, the sun rode low on the water beyond Baird’s Island. Beyond Ranier and the river that led to the paper mill in International Falls, smoke and steam chugged in a pencil-thin cloud. I burst into tears.
“Mama,” I whispered. “You promised someday things would be better . . .” And look where I’d ended up. Without a home. Without a plan. Running.
Waves murmured softly in the boathouse below, echoing off its walls. I felt ashamed. Was I jealous of Trinity, that she had a boat named after her? Was that how simple-minded I’d become? No. I didn’t need wealth or a boat with sadie rose burnished across its stern. But at that moment, I didn’
t know what I wanted—my needs ran as deep and wide as an underground river.
I wiped my eyes and, pinching off one nostril at a time, blew my nose into the undergrowth. It wasn’t ladylike, but it worked.
I recalled Trinity’s words when she’d sat with me at Red Stone. “We could try our hand at friendship.” At least her words gave me momentary courage to search for her.
Beyond the boathouse, pines stood protectively above a scattering of cabins and a larger lodge. Waves lapped at granite boulders. Faint voices sounded from the direction of the larger building. Relief. Someone was around who might help.
I continued along the ridge, then down a few well-placed stone steps to the sandy shore, past the boathouse and cemented rock walls toward the lodge and its voices.
“Hello?” I called, just loudly enough so someone might hear. “Trinity?”
No one answered. Instead, the voices continued, back and forth—with moments of silence between.
At the base of the wide stone steps I cleared my voice, ready to try again.
But at that moment, the heavy wooden door opened. And clearly rattled, Victor emerged, his blue eyes focused somewhere over my head. He flinched when he saw me.
“Sadie Rose? I didn’t hear you—”
I flushed warm, certain that I’d just upset something romantic. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Owen dropped me off here, thinking it would be a good idea, and he didn’t think your island would be the best since—”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“I ran away from the Worthingtons.”
“You’ve been crying.”
“I’m fine,” I said, a lump returning to my throat.
He looked away toward the dock and boathouse. “Was Trinity expecting you?”
“No.” I felt stupid. Ashamed again. “No, she’s not.”
“Well,” he said, exhaling long and hard. “She’s . . . inside.” Then he ambled down the steps, patting me lightly on the shoulder as he passed. “It’s awfully good you’re here. She might need a friend.” And then he continued on toward the dock and his canoe.
“Sadie Rose?” A watery voice seesawed from inside. “If that’s you, just come in.”
I scaled the five stone steps and stepped into the lodge of massive logs. As I entered, I nearly tripped on a dustpan filled with shards of orange and pink painted glass. A broom leaned nearby, as if apologizing for not finishing up a task.
“Better keep your shoes on,” Trinity said. “Oh! I’m glad you’re here.”
Curled in a tight ball on a leather sofa, covered by a cotton blanket, Trinity Baird rested her head in the curve of her bare arm.
“Trinity,” I said.
I pictured again the man who’d found his way into my cabin, had crawled on top of me. But I couldn’t imagine that Victor . . .
“What happened?” My heart teetered, not wishing to have my admiration for Victor crash at my feet. I’d trusted him and felt so completely at ease in his company. Safe. I’d canoed out to his island with him. But then I had misjudged so much of the world around me.
Trinity wailed. “I want to hate him!”
I kneeled beside her on the braided rug. I waited for her to explain, if she was willing to.
She pulled the blanket around her and sat up on her elbow. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she repeated. Then she wheezed in a gulp of air. “Not that I care to have you see me this way, but I’m just feeling so terribly alone right now.”
“What happened?”
“Oh—this is embarrassing! You’ve seen how I’ve been throwing myself at Victor.”
I couldn’t deny it.
“My parents are away at a concert in Ranier. Some big fund-raiser for your father’s campaign.”
“Mr. Worthington,” I said. “He’s not my father.”
The campaign. How could I forget? In November he would be reelected, or voted out. I had always assumed he’d continue to be in office, year after year after year. But maybe that could change. Beyond worrying about me, he had to keep his reputation beyond reproach. He couldn’t afford to get caught up in accusations of murder.
Trinity continued. “I knew Victor wasn’t going to support Senator Worthington tonight, so I invited him here.” She rolled her neck, stretching. “Yes, well, that didn’t work. I thought Victor and I just needed some time alone. I know how things work. Men need to see what they want sometimes before they know.”
I nodded, though Trinity was surely ahead of me in such things.
“I surprised him, said I was going to get something from the game room,” she pointed to the open door. A long, green Ping-Pong table filled the window-enclosed room. “When I stepped out, I was, well, naked as a newborn baby.”
“You were?”
She sighed. “I was.”
“And? He did more than you wanted? Is that what that broken glass is all about?”
Then she laughed, a little too loudly, a little shrilly. “No! He looked, I don’t know, embarrassed. And confused. And the more I wore my heart on my bare ass, so to speak, the more he backed toward the door. ‘Friends.’ That’s what he said he only wished to be. I was so damn hurt, so humiliated—I threw the vase. Nearly hit him in the head. Wish I had!”
“Oh.” I’d overheard Darla say, “Men are simple. All they need is a good romp now and then, and they’re happy.” Were men all that simple? Victor wasn’t. Still, I couldn’t deny that plenty of men were willing to part with their hard-earned money for time with a woman. And the money, for the girls, as Meg had been quick to point out, was a hundred times better than what we earned in the kitchen.
Victor was passionate, but not in ways Trinity apparently hoped for.
“I just don’t get it,” she said. “I thought we were heading for something more.” Then she seemed to see me through her reddened eyes. “And what on earth are you doing here, anyway? I overheard a little of your talk outside.”
I explained briefly how I’d ended up on her island.
Trinity brightened and sat up, wrapping the blanket around her torso. “You can stay in my studio! It will be perfect! No one, but me, is allowed in there. Not even the maids. So you can hide there as long as you like. I’ll sneak food to you. It will be a wonderful diversion from my current state of rejection and utter despair.” She managed a wry smile.
I wanted to offer her words of comfort but wasn’t sure what to say.
“Thanks. I need to stay low until I can get out of town.” People, I didn’t add, seemed to disappear if they went up against Ennis and Mr. Worthington.
“Good,” she said. “Settled then.” Her chin quivered in her heart-shaped face. I thought of Owen. If Trinity stepped out naked for him, I was certain he wouldn’t be able to take his eyes off her. But I decided not to tell Trinity that. I didn’t want to give her any ideas.
With a burst of determination, she sat straighter, gripping the blanket fast, and then she stood. She laughed. “You certainly found me in rare form!” She wiped at the edges of her eyes. “Now I feel perfectly embarrassed and silly. I think I’ll get dressed.” Then she strode out like a Roman queen in a toga.
Chapter 26
The first night, Trinity pointed to the gray, wet mound outside her studio cabin. “What’s that thing? It should go in the burn barrel.” She pinched off her nose in disgust.
“It’s an old quilt,” I said, as she led the way inside the cabin. And then I explained the strange manner in which the quilt had reentered my life.
“Oh,” she said, nodding. “I’ll see that it gets thoroughly washed and mended. If anyone asks, I’ll say it floated up in the lake and I can’t possibly live without it.”
I squeezed her hand. “Thank you.”
Trinity took on her role of hiding me with the seriousness of
a headmistress. “We can’t let anyone know you’re here,” she said, “or the Worthingtons might send you off to the Bastille!”
“Well, probably not the Bastille—”
“Or like Marie Antoinette,” she whispered, leaning uncomfortably close to me as I sat on her painting stool. “They’ll—” She made a slashing motion with her finger across my neck.
She must have noticed my alarm.
“Oh, Sadie Rose. I’m just being dramatic.”
An easel sat in the middle of the room, with a half-finished oil painting. One glance told me who it was. The face weathered with sun and water and miles of canoeing, the light playing off hair and eyebrows the color of sand. Trinity wasn’t finished yet, but it was definitely Victor. I wondered if he had posed for this portrait, or if she’d painted from memory. Either way, she’d caught his likeness, including the shadows that lingered at the edges of his blue eyes.
Beyond the easel, a tall stone fireplace rose like a mast through the cabin. In its hearth, birch-bark logs were set, ready to be lit. Small sketches lined the mantel: the Eiffel Tower, an outdoor café, a stone archway, and another of the towering Wrigley Building in Chicago. I remembered being there with the Worthingtons when I was twelve, pleased with my cranberry dress and matching coat. I’d felt happy as we rode the clattering elevator clear to the top and scanned the shores of Lake Michigan and the city below, peppered with trees of red, yellow, and amber. I’d forgotten that memory and ached with something bittersweet.
The rest of Trinity’s cabin was amazingly bare: a chaise lounge and several hanging paintings, and more resting against the log walls and on the glossy maple floor. There was a floral arrangement of deep reds and purples. A small painting captured a young woman’s silhouette at the end of a dock, hands over her head, ready to dive into black water. Another caught a cheery blue ceramic pitcher and single lemon in a ray of golden sunlight.
Trinity’s skills put my own efforts at painting flowerpots to shame.
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