Hiders

by Meg Collett

  H I D E R S

  A Canaan Island Novel

  Meg Collett

  HIDERS

  A Canaan Island Novel

  By Meg Collett

  Copyright 2017 Meg Collett

  Cover Design by Najla Qamber Designs

  Editing by Arrowhead Editing

  Smashwords Edition

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by Meg Collett

  1

  Come here, my little spider. My little Violet.

  The voice of Violet Relend’s dead mother wove through the halls of her home like a will-o’-the-wisp. Sounds did odd things in the salty air up on the crumbling cliff where the house perched, the ocean below echoing noises between rooms as if there were conversations to be had with the dead. Violet traced the whispers down the halls and up the creaking stairs, her fingers trailing across the dust-covered wainscoting that crumbled beneath anything other than the lightest of touches. She imagined the wood grumbling at her, grandfatherly-like, grousing at her not to run, or slide down the banisters with her skirt flowing behind her, or slam the tenderhearted doors.

  The house, and her mother, often spoke to her.

  Come here, my little spider. Come see how the wind whistles across the bluffs. Look out at the ocean and watch for the mermaids playing in the surf. Just there! Did you catch the glimmer of a tail, Violet?

  Violet adjusted her course, bare feet kissing the well-trodden chestnut wood floors, her mother’s breath blowing the baby hairs around her temples to tickle her. She glanced back, expecting to see Mae Relend there with bright ribbons tied through her braided hair, but it was just the broken glass pane in the window letting the Atlantic Ocean air in through the boards Violet had tacked up.

  Violet smelled the first touches of fall riding on that breeze, but she also heard the faintest strains of laughter. The noise ricocheted over the bluffs, but Violet knew someone was close by the way the house tensed around her. Trespassers again, coming to make fun of the Ghost of Canaan—a name the less kind town citizens had given Violet because of how she looked. Maybe they’d come to throw eggs or graffiti rude words that Violet would have to scrub at for days, her fingernails snapping back into the quick, until the thick paint came off. Maybe they would prove to their friends that they were the most daring of them all by throwing rocks at the windows or pounding on her front door late at night.

  A tremble worked up her spine.

  Did you know spiders use their silk webs to play a song to one another? They pluck the tiny threads and send a million vibrations through the air. Listen closely, my little spider. Listen.

  Violet turned into her parents’ old bedroom and pulled the moisture-swollen door shut behind her to block out the laughter. She crossed to the balcony’s gilded glass doors, her pulse fluttering as it always did when she ventured this close—close enough to touch her fingertips to the whorled glass. The room leaned out over the bluffs due to the crooked tilt of the house. On the balcony, if a person looked down, they would see the ocean waves bashing against the bluffs, taking the ground out from under the house bit by bit and whisking it away. She only hazarded the balcony if she felt especially brave, usually late at night when the house kept her awake, as it had tonight. The stone tended to crumble randomly beneath a wrong step and tumble down into the ocean.

  It wasn’t particularly safe, same as most of the house. The house belonged in a nursery rhyme told to children to teach them not to venture into strange places or stray too far from their mothers.

  She might have risked the balcony, but the night was too bright beneath the full moon, and the laughing trespassers might see her in her white nightgown, her silver hair gleaming. Under the moonlight, they might notice her eyes, a blue so pale they were almost white, and imagine her a ghost. She eased back, footsteps silent, and crossed over the ancient, fraying rug to the canopy bed, its curtains pulled back, open arms inviting her inside. But she sat on the end of the bed, on the tattered bed sheets, her knees pulled up beneath her chin and her arms wrapped around her shins.

  Downstairs, the old turntable clicked to life as it often did if the breeze blew just right across the tonearm, dropping the needle onto the vinyl. Strains of The Temptations wafted through the house. Violet swayed to the music and hummed the notes softly, her mother singing in her ear.

  She remained there for a long time, long after the needle had lifted and the October night had chilled her bare arms.

  Tomorrow, she would need to ascend into the attic and pull out the house’s winter things. The wool socks for her blue toes, and the afghans for the couches, and the heavy drapes for the broken windows, and the stack of quilts for her bed.

  More importantly, it was time to chop the wood to feed the furnace.

  She wrinkled her nose. She’d put off the chopping for too long. It was her most hated task. She’d been twelve when her father’s spine couldn’t take the whacking blows any longer and he had handed her the heavy ax. Her father, Hayes Relend, had taught her how to swing it up and bring it down in a smooth motion.

  Gravity, he’d told her from his perch on the veranda, his legs covered by one of her grandmother’s blankets even though it was June and his face was grayer than the faded newspapers Mae had tacked up over the windows in his study. Let gravity do the work.

  Her grandmother Beatrice had moved into the house by this point, and her mother tended to hide upstairs, away from Beatrice’s cold, damning stares, as if Mae had caused the disease that ate away at Hayes’s spine.

  “I’ll start tomorrow,” she told her father and unfolded her legs one at a time, touching the floor with her toes first. “Promise. Promise. Promise.”

  Three times seals it in fate.

  At the door, she glanced back at her parents’ room, empty for years now, though she still felt them in there like she was eight again and they were building pillow forts during a storm. Ghost stories and candles and crispy marshmallows. She closed the door on the memories before they could suck her back in. Around her, as she tiptoed downstairs to the second floor, the house was heavy and alone.

  Her bedroom had a circular window in one of the many gables and a furnace she’d installed a few years back. She moved around her room by the moonlight trickling in through the window. Along the roofline, one of the stone gargoyles roosting atop the ancient guttering cast creeping shadows across her floor. She folded down the blankets on her bed and crawled on top of the feather mattress, the springs creaking beneath her. The house let out a long, shifting sigh.

  Her mother used to say the house spoke to them, but her father explained the odd sounds as the salt from the ocean affecting the air. Just science, he’d say, but her mother would wink at her once he had
turned his back.

  She fell asleep pretending to hold their hands.

  * * *

  Woomph. Thwack.

  Violet swung the ax back over her head and paused. The middle seam in the log blurred, and she had to strain her eyes behind her thick sunglasses to see the exact place she needed to hit with her ax. With a grunt, she heaved the ax forward. Woomph. The hit reverberated up her arms to the backs of her teeth. Thwack.

  The log didn’t split completely.

  “Son of a bitch,” she grumbled, rocking the ax back and forth, sweat dripping down her forehead and the small of her back. The long-sleeved shirt she wore to protect her fair skin was drenched. Her pants were tucked into her boots, a heavy rubber pair three sizes too big, but they worked well for falling logs that liked to find her toes.

  She finally pulled the ax free.

  Sitting the half-split log back up on the chopping block, she tried again. And again. And again. By the time she succeeded in cutting it all the way through, blisters within blisters had formed and popped, oozing sticky liquid and turning her hands into hamburger meat. She swiped a bloody print across her pants with multicolored patches on the knees.

  If the breeze blew just right, she thought she caught her father’s scent trapped in the worn fabric. But that was just crazy. She’d washed these clothes countless times since he’d last worn them.

  She would give anything to have him sitting in his chair right now, watching her and correcting her form as he sipped iced tea beneath the red umbrella her mother always propped up for him. She’d see regret and guilt in the fine lines of his handsome but tired face; he’d hated having her do this kind of work. Hated his body for being the betraying sort that had turned on him halfway through life. Back then, she’d worked to keep the strain from her face and made sure to shoot him triumphant smiles with every solid split. She’d wanted to do the work that her mother was too weak for and her grandmother too old. In truth, Violet thought she could save her father if she chopped enough wood.

  Now, she propped up another log. Her rick of cut wood was skeletal and lopsided. She’d never been good at stacking; by February, the pile would topple over, same as it had every year since her parents had died. At the rate she was going, she wouldn’t have enough wood for one month, and the evenings were already getting that nippy bite, that crispy promise that smelled of pumpkin spice and the copper tang of turning leaves.

  Woomph. Thwack.

  She got that one. The smile was already tossed over her shoulder before she could catch herself. No one was back there. She was just the crazy person smiling at ghosts.

  She tossed the split log aside and grabbed another, telling herself her body didn’t hurt. Her hands didn’t hurt. She was fine. As she spoke the words in her mind, she pushed her straw hat back on her head and wiped her brow with the back of her hand. She used the small break to rest her tired back.

  From the front of the house, she could see down to the southern part of the island. Through the thinning trees, she spotted the tops of the buildings in the heart of Canaan and the colorful houses lining the beach, though she couldn’t discern the blurry details. The ocean was calmer on the Southern side, more tame. That part of the island had never been familiar to her. But with an easy turn of her head, she saw the island’s lighthouse stretching up toward the clouds farther down her bluff’s edge, and it felt just right. Before her, the narrow, winding road leading up to her house was overgrown from lack of use and riddled with potholes and large rocks. She didn’t drive, never had.

  Cars were just something else on the list of Things That Scared Her. But she allowed herself this fear with little chagrin. Her parents had died in a car.

  She assumed the low rumble of a car grinding its gears to reach the top of her driveway was her imagination, until she spotted the puff of dust and spew of gravel. Then the gleam of metal blazed beneath the late-morning sun, and she recognized the white Buick of her family’s estate lawyer.

  She waited as the car trundled closer, bouncing over the ruts with bone-jarring jostles. After the car had parked and turned off, the engine clicking from overexertion, Gregory Perkins stepped out, his Santa Claus belly leading the way. He looked a little pale from the drive up.

  Violet didn’t say hello, but then Gregory knew her peculiarities by now. She sometimes wondered if he didn’t resent her a little for his burdensome ties to the Relend family that forced him to drive out to the house every few weeks to check on her in case she might be dead and decomposing. His eyes had that same wary look as he squinted up at her house, his hand shielding his eyes from the sun. He hadn’t seen her standing off to the side with an ax in her blood-dripping hands.

  “Gregory,” she said.

  He jumped, his sausage-fingered hand pressed to his heart and a yelp on his lips. “Oh dear,” he choked out, following her voice toward the side of the house. “You scared me, Violet.”

  She inclined her head in apology.

  He picked his way across the thorny ground with care. His slacks were professionally pressed and starched, his wingtip shoes glinting. He was the type of man who golfed on Saturdays and had family dinners on Sundays. He would be a grandfather come winter, and his youngest daughter was a junior at UGA this year. Violet figured she should appreciate his kindness more. There were worse lawyers.

  She still wasn’t particularly fond of him, if not for the bad news he always brought her.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked. His attention danced from the ax to her meager pile to her coarse pants. She let him figure it out.

  “Heavens,” he said, one of his favorite phrases since he was loath to take the Lord’s name in vain, “I thought after you nearly cut your hand off last year that you were going to hire someone to do this for you.”

  Violet sat the ax aside and turned her palms away from him. “Seemed like a waste of money.”

  Gregory tilted his ear toward her to catch the softly spoken words. He came a bit closer, looking slightly sheepish. “Good point. That’s actually why I came out here today.”

  Violet’s stomach twisted, but her grandmother had ingrained a grudging sense of etiquette in her. “Would you like to come inside for some tea?”

  Gregory peered up at her crooked house and scrunched up his pug nose. “That’s okay. I’m fine out here.”

  Though she was relieved not to have to entertain him, she was also peeved that he wouldn’t come into her house because he was afraid of it. Worried, perhaps, that it would fall in around him or sway too far out over the bluffs and topple into the ocean.

  Her lack of response filled the awkward beat, whereas normal people would have responded. Gregory limped around it.

  “I looked over your finances today. Doing my weekly check and all that.” He huffed, ready to scold her. “It’s not looking good, Violet. It’s not looking good at all.”

  Realizing she would merely stand there and keep staring at him until he explained, he continued. “Given the Relend wealth, your parents really didn’t leave you with much—especially after your grandmother took her share and spent it on all those infernal Beanie Babies.” Recalling her grandmother, guilt shone in his watery eyes. It was his fault Beatrice had swindled a chunk of Hayes’s patent money on stuffed animals without anyone noticing the money was gone from the accounts until it was too late. “There’s just . . . nothing left.”

  His shoulders slumped in defeat, and Violet told herself this was why she never tried too hard to scare him away. He’d worked tirelessly for her and her family. He and her father had been fast friends once, long ago.

  “What about,” Violet asked, her voice so soft that the wind cresting the bluffs almost carried it away, “the investments?”

  He looked at her with his crinkled, rheumy gaze. “They didn’t last as long as I had hoped. You spend a lot of money, Violet.” He looked around at her house, at her and her clothes, then at the state of the yard around them as he tried to fathom how she had burned through so much money. B
ut then, really, he knew the reason. “You gave away too much. You should have kept some for yourself.”

  “But they needed it so much more.”

  “What? Sorry, dear. My hearing and all that.”

  Her words slipped away on the breeze, out over the island the Relends had first settled centuries ago, and swirled around in eddies toward the ocean, mingling with the salt and seagull calls and the sun that had warmed her father’s fair skin as he sat outside, too weak to walk. She recalled the roads her mother had driven on that night, taking her father to the hospital, and how the rain had made the roads slick enough to send their car over the bluffs edge . . . No, the people of Canaan had needed her father’s money more than she had. The sick and lost. The ones who couldn’t pay the bills at the end of the month. She’d been there to help them, just as her father had when he was younger and able-bodied, his inventions spread across the island to make people’s lives easier or more interesting. Just as her mother had when she would bake for endless hours and take bread and soups and macarons to those on the island who needed a dose of kindness and kookiness to brighten their day. They could always rely on the Relends for that.

  Now, it was all gone according to Gregory, though Violet knew that wasn’t completely true. The accounts he saw might be growing empty, but her mother had always taught her to squirrel away some money for a rainy day.

  “All of it?” she asked, a little louder this time.

  “Nearly so.” Gregory suddenly looked pained. “You might have to sell.”

  “No.”

  Gregory had expected her answer; he’d been ready for it because he’d heard it countless times in answer to that very same question. “Rumor has it that a development group from Atlanta is looking to put in a high-dollar golf course and some fancy condos. They might be interested in your land.”