When Evie was sixteen, her mother showed her a large framed portrait that was still dusty from being kept in storage in the attic. It was of the little girl with the bow mouth, the girl Evie had drawn that day, the girl sitting with such confidence on the plush seat of the Kaiser. It was a portrait of Rosemary Ann Cooper. Her ringlets were tightly wound and framing the oval face. Her eyebrows were curved like thin rainbows over the dark eyes, which peered up at Evie in defiance, still mimicking. “She was your sister,” Evie’s mother said. “She died of a ruptured appendix, long before you were born. We put her between us in the car, Daddy and I. We were trying to get her to the hospital, but we didn’t make it. It was on Main Street, in front of the movie theater.”
After her parents died, Evie Cooper tried to leave the faces of the dead behind her. There was too much sadness in the eyes that appeared on her sketchpads, too much pain on the faces. So she moved from Pennsylvania to the bustle of New York City, hoping to find a certain peace. But the dead followed her. The dead aren’t bothered by distance, or road signs, or mountain ranges, or boundaries on maps. The dead pick up and travel. By the time Evie left the city and settled in Bixley, Maine, by the time she met Henry Munroe, she was making good money in tips at Murphy’s Tavern as a bartender. But she couldn’t live on that income alone. So, she eventually put a sign up on her front lawn: Evie Cooper, Spiritual Portraitist. By then, it seemed to Evie she was finally settled down. She was getting her life in shape. She had even told Henry Munroe that their affair was over. It had been a mistake, and now she was moving on. And she had held to that decision.
It had been twelve long months since the morning Evie heard the news, when Andy Southby stopped by the tavern and announced it to the regular customers, as if it were nothing more than the results of a ball game. Henry Munroe, dead at forty. “This is gonna kill Larry,” that’s what Evie thought. And then, the sadness hit her, right in the solar plexus, that spot that picks up the dead so sharp and so fast. Evie assumed Henry would stay close by, turning up behind Larry’s shoulder every time his brother came into the bar. But in the twelve months that he’d been gone, Henry never once bothered to peer at Evie through the veil that separates Bixley, Maine, from the other side. Not once. And Evie Cooper knew why. Henry was still mad at her.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Author photo by Doug Bruns
Cathie Pelletier was born and raised on the banks of the St. John River, at the end of the road in northern Maine. She is the author of eleven other novels, including The One-Way Bridge and The Funeral Makers. As K. C. McKinnon, she has written two novels, both of which became television films. After years of living in Nashville, Tennessee; Toronto, Canada; and Eastman, Quebec, she has returned to Allagash, Maine, and the family homestead where she was born.
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