by Jen Blood
“I need to get back.”
When you’re interviewing someone for a story, there inevitably comes a point when you hit a wall. At that point, no matter how much you plead, how often you rephrase the question or bribe or cajole, the interview is over; your source has dried up. After fifteen years as a reporter, I’d learned to recognize the look in someone’s eyes when they hit that wall. That was the look in Hammond’s eye. Short of handcuffs and water boarding, there wasn’t a thing I could do to get him to stay put and keep talking.
I pushed away everything but the cold, clean air around me. Silence reigned on deck for another few seconds before Diggs spoke up.
“All right—so, we have the story… A very small part of the story, but it’ll get us started. Now what?”
“Now, I find out what really happened,” I said. Hammond wouldn’t meet my eye. “And we start on the island.”
The boat rocked on the waves. Payson Isle was closer to me than it had been since I was a teenager, fog blurring its edges, a study in gray landscape and blue-black sea. Wind-worn evergreens and birches lined the granite shore. From where I stood, just above sea level on a boat that was not my own, the island forest looked impenetrable.
I turned my back on Diggs and Hammond and wrapped my hands around the cold, steel boat railing. The water below was too dark and too deep to see anything in its depths. It made me think of sea monsters and shipwrecks and hauntings—all those things I’d left behind when I graduated high school and abandoned Littlehope. I was older now, ostensibly wiser, but it turned out those superstitions hadn’t completely released their hold on me.
Diggs and I transferred Einstein and my things to the speedboat, and Hammond pulled up anchor and piloted away.
From the mooring, it took Diggs and me all of five minutes to reach Payson Isle. We tied the boat off at the neglected dock and climbed wooden steps that had been driven into the side of the island’s rocky ledges back when my father still called this place home. It was an easier climb than I remembered, and a newly liberated Einstein scrambled past us. Another few yards of rocky terrain and we reached the top, where I found myself at the foot of an overgrown path leading into the woods.
I stood at the top of the cliff looking down at the ocean below. It was just after one o’clock. The sun appeared as a distant white haze behind the fog. Einstein reclaimed his position at my side, while Diggs forged ahead. I had the feeling that he wasn’t satisfied with the answers he’d gotten from Hammond. More than that, though, I knew he was pissed that I hadn’t told him sooner about the pictures—about the real reason I was here. I let him go, hoping he’d burn off some of his anger before our inevitable discussion about all the ways I’d shut him out of my life in the past few months.
The path steepened as we continued our journey. The boarding house that had served as home to the Payson congregation had been built at the highest point on the island, to take advantage of a million-dollar view of the ocean below. The old three-story barn that had doubled as the Payson church, on the other hand, was built with good old-fashioned common sense in mind. It sat in the valley below, where it had been sheltered from high winds and torrential rain for over one hundred years. Its placement, combined with heavy rain the day of the fire, was the only thing that had saved the entire island from going up like a tinderbox.
We were on a dark path, thick with sharp-needled pines and scrub-brush, when Diggs slowed his pace. I could tell he was cooling off when he took the time to hold branches out of the way for me. Einstein had his nose pressed to the back of my knee, and showed no inclination to stray. I was trying to see up ahead. Trying to focus. The deeper we got into the woods, the harder the simple act of breathing in and out became.
It wasn’t until we reached the rusted, wrought-iron fence at the head of the boarding house path that our situation sank in. The gate couldn’t have been six feet high—smaller than I remembered it as a child, but still impressive enough to inspire dread. It didn’t close all the way anymore; rather than trying to force it from the mud and partially frozen ground, Diggs and I just squeezed through the opening.
Once we were on the path to the house, Diggs actually tried to start a conversation a couple of times. I wasn’t in the mood for talking, though. I just wanted to move—to feel my legs, burn my lungs with the cold. Shut off my brain, even if it was only for a few minutes. There was a change in the air as we trudged up the steep incline—it seemed warmer, less biting somehow. I chalked it up to the physical exertion and the thick stand of pine and birch shielding us from the wind. Ignoring memories of ghost stories I’d been taunted with as a school kid (There’s a madman on Payson Isle who talks to God and lives with ghosts…), I finally stopped to catch my breath.
I set my pack down and paused on the trail, doubling over at the waist with my hands on my knees. Diggs turned back when he realized I was no longer behind him. The bastard wasn’t even winded.
“So, I guess you won’t be joining me in the Littlehope Iron Man this year.”
“Not unless you’re carrying me.”
“And you’re smoking.”
I met his gaze with a hard smile. “And apparently you’re not. I’m thirty-three, Diggs. That’s a decade older than you were when you first took me under your well-muscled wing at the Trib. And maybe while I’ve been married you’ve forgotten the places we went and the things we did before I ambled down the aisle, but I haven’t. Don’t play big brother with me.”
My words hit their mark. Diggs’ blue eyes flashed and his strong jaw tensed as he worked to recover his cool. He closed the distance between us. “I haven’t forgotten a thing, ace,” he said quietly. There was something dangerous about the way he looked at me. Despite the cold, I felt my blood begin to warm. I looked away, a dozen memories running in a loop through my mind. Almost none of them were fit for underage viewers.
As though sensing my train of thought, Diggs took a step back. “Hammond’s pictures—those are the reason you went off the reservation three months ago?” he asked. “The reason you and Michael hit the skids?”
“Michael and I hit the skids because he was sleeping with every doe-eyed coed in greater Boston.”
“Okay,” he conceded. A hint of anger slid across his face. Diggs always hated Michael. “But the other stuff—the not sleeping and the not eating and the...thing I’m not supposed to talk about. That was because of the pictures?”
“I don’t want to do this now.”
“But you know we’re gonna do it sometime, right? Come on, Solomon. Twenty-three years, and nobody ever hears about a fairly obvious padlock on the scene of one of the biggest tragedies in Maine history? I’m not a paranoid man, but if that doesn’t scream conspiracy, I don’t know what does.”
I pulled out one of the cigarettes Hammond had grudgingly loaned me before he left, lit it, and inhaled deeply. Diggs was watching me.
“We should get up there,” I said, avoiding his eye. “I don’t want to waste anymore daylight.” I shouldered my pack and hit the trail. I could practically feel the frustration rolling off him when I left him behind. We walked on in silence.
Chapter Three
It was rough going from there, in every way. The road leading up to the house was no more than a swath cut through the trees, buried beneath years of fallen branches, new tree growth, mud, and ice. Diggs fell behind after our exchange, either brooding himself or giving me space to do the same. I pushed his questions to the back of my mind and focused on my surroundings.
Like most Maine islands, Payson Isle is predominantly granite, the source of the original settlers’ livelihoods as early as the 1820s. Back then, the islands of Maine were worlds unto themselves, complete with bars, bowling alleys, and dance halls. When the market for granite was displaced by cheaper, more accessible concrete, those same islands became ghost towns. Isaac Payson’s grandfather bought the eight-hundred-acre island for the grand sum of six dollars and twenty cents, back in 1928. He abandoned the granite quarry on one en
d of the island, kept up a couple of outbuildings for hired hands, and turned the place into a breeding farm for prize-winning quarter horses.
I was so caught up in the history of the place that I didn’t notice that the trail had gotten darker, the forest quieter. Something stopped me mid-step. A whisper of remembrance curled like a ribbon of smoke around my throat.
“Were Jack’s magic beans yellow or green?”
A greenhouse that smells like soil and sunlight. My father: red hair, like mine. Quick wit, clear eyes. And me, always with the questions.
“Maybe they were both magic,” he suggests.
“They could have been black beans. Or lentils. Jesus didn’t believe in magic, you know. Only miracles,” I tell him.
“Sometimes miracles are magic. Sometimes magic is a miracle.” I roll my eyes. They are green, like my mother’s. I know this only from the pictures in our room—at six years old, I have no memories of her. At six years old, my world is still my father. The church. This island.
“You can’t have both,” I say. “You have to choose. Isaac says magic is a trick of the devil. Miracles are the work of God.”
He puts his arm around my shoulders and pulls me close. My hands are dirty, my jeans wet from kneeling in soil all morning. My father smells like he always smells—like hard work and damp earth and laughter and home-baked bread. My father smells like home.
“I think you are magic,” he whispers to me. It is a secret, I know. “And a miracle. Not even Isaac can change my mind on that one, baby. You’ll always be my magic bean.”
“Solomon? You okay?”
The boarding house stood just twenty yards from us, but I was focused on the overgrown path at my feet. Diggs had rejoined me somewhere along the line. I’d forgotten about my cigarette, the ash now almost as long as the remaining filter.
“What is it?” he asked.
I indicated the path. “That’s the… That’s where he died.”
“The greenhouse?”
I nodded. Like that, the anger was gone from Diggs’ eyes.
“We could go back to my place. Come here tomorrow instead if you want.”
I tried smiling, but my lips were dry and stuck to my teeth. “Will something change between now and then?”
“Probably not,” he conceded.
“Then I guess we should do it now. If I can’t even get in the house without losing it, what are the chances I’ll be able to spend all day every day putting the pieces together out here?”
I whistled for Einstein, who’d decided it was a great time to tour the grounds. We were at the top of the island. In the valley below, I could just make out the remains of the burned-out Payson Church. That would have to come later, though—for now, I focused on the massive old boarding house that I had once called home. I had to start somewhere.
The original boarding house was a simple three-story saltbox design, with a one-story ell that members of the church had added on the north side. The windows were boarded with sheets of weathered plywood, and the white house paint had long since peeled away, leaving bare clapboards gone gray with age.
Before we set foot inside, Diggs and I teamed up to remove the plywood from the downstairs windows. He photographed the perimeter. I tossed a stick for Einstein. Eventually, we ran out of reasons not to go inside.
I fished the key the lawyer had presented to me three months earlier from my backpack and went to the side of the ell, leading the way to the kitchen entrance. The granite step leading up was split down the center from too many seasons of extremes, slick with moss and rain. I stood to the side and jammed the key in the old, rusted lock, jiggling it back and forth until it finally clicked.
I glanced at Diggs before I stepped past the threshold. “You want to go first?” I asked.
“I could.” There wasn’t a lot of confidence behind that statement.
“Forget it. Just be prepared to get out of the way if any hobgoblins jump out at us.”
“If any hobgoblins jump out at us, the last thing you’ll have to worry about is me getting out of the way, ace. Trust me.”
I gave him a shaky smile, wet my lips, and gave the thick, oak door a final push.
Despite having removed plywood from the large window over the kitchen sink, decades of grime ensured that little light made its way inside. Diggs and I stood in the entryway squinting as our eyes adjusted to the dim room. Faded linoleum flooring had curled up at the edges, the vintage 1970s pattern obscured by layers of grime.
“Brady Bunch meets Amityville Horror,” Diggs said. “Nice.”
“Payson redid the kitchen in ’76, when he first started the church,” I told him, recalling another of the litany of random facts I’d learned about the Paysons over the years. “What you’re seeing was haute couture during the Carter administration.”
We were whispering. Einstein had taken off yet again, but I could hear him barking in the distance—which meant in all likelihood he was tormenting the island squirrels. I kept the door open for him to come and go as he pleased and walked deeper into the kitchen. There were rodent droppings and a fossilized mouse in the double sink, and the sideboard looked like it could crawl away of its own free will. I moved on, past the kitchen and through a narrow corridor with a steep staircase off to one side.
The cold settled somewhere deeper than my bones, but the chill I felt had nothing to do with the weather. I stood at the grand arch that opened into the Payson meeting room. This was where it all began, and two and a half decades hadn’t done much to brighten the bizarre living area at the heart of the Payson boarding home.
A shaft of light cut through the dirt on two picture windows, a door centered between them. I snapped a couple of pictures, then Diggs went over to pry one of the windows open and get some air flowing. Six picnic tables dominated the expansive room, placed in pairs end to end. An antique hutch against one wall had fallen victim to dry rot, its shelves buckled and its contents—mismatched dishes of all shape and size—scattered on the floor.
“You think this is really how they left it?” I asked.
Diggs looked over his shoulder at me. He had one foot up on the windowsill for leverage, trying to drag the swollen old pane up.
“I don’t know. If anyone has been here in the past twenty years, they sure as hell were lacking in the housekeeping department.”
“Malcolm Payson’s lawyer said he didn’t let anyone in,” I said. “Once the investigation was closed, he hired my father to watch the place. I doubt Dad ever came here after everybody was gone, though.”
“What about after your father died? Who watched the place once Adam was gone?”
He finally got the window up with a screech of wood against wood that set my teeth on edge.
“Malcolm paid some of the local fishermen to keep an eye out—paid them well, too, from what I heard,” I said. “They took the job seriously. Guns and ammo have never been in short supply around here; you know that.”
“So, no keggers, make-out parties, or Ouija fests on the hallowed grounds?”
I looked around. No beer bottles, cigarette butts, used condoms. Not so much as a stray Little Debbie wrapper.
“Doesn’t look that way.”
Diggs abandoned the window and came to stand beside me, surveying the room. “So, this is where you lived. For how long again?”
“Nine years.” It felt stranger than I’d expected to be back, trying to reconcile everything I’d known with the reality of what it was now. “I would’ve been here a lot longer if my mother hadn’t come out and dragged me back to civilization.”
“That’s one way of looking at it.”
I looked up when I realized he was staring at me. “And what’s the other way of looking at it?”
“That your mother got you out of here before the shit hit the fan. If she hadn’t, you and your father would have died along with everybody else.”
I didn’t have a response for that. I thought back to those years on the island with my father—the
best years of my childhood, in most ways. Diggs wouldn’t understand that, though. Hell, I didn’t understand that. Before he started psychoanalyzing my early years, I went off in another direction.
“There are cabins here, too—half a dozen or so, I think, on the other side of the island. The families in the church stayed there. Isaac shared the top floor of this house with his wife and kids.” I went through the house in my mind, trying to remember the layout. “My father was the only man who lived here at the house, besides Isaac. The rest of the bedrooms were for the single women and their children.”
Diggs nodded. I knew what he was thinking: Isaac had set it up so he’d have ready access to any of the women or children he wanted, on any given night. I didn’t say anything. I wondered what kind of salacious hell he thought I’d lived through out here, before my mother swooped in and took me to the mainland.
While I went through the meeting room, Diggs excused himself to take a tour of the grounds. He said it was to get a look at the place, but I knew he was just giving me time to adjust to my haunted homestead. Either way, I appreciated the gesture. Without Diggs and Einstein on my heels, I continued exploring.
Isaac and his wife had been responsible for the interior decorating, though they could have used some pointers from the good folks at HGTV. There was the standard, Western ideal of Christ with lamb in his arms, brown eyes soft and forgiving, and another of the same Christ, a halo just visible through flecks of mold and mildew. A two-foot-tall, moth-eaten satin cross embroidered in gold with the words “Jesus Saves” hung by the door. Then, there were Isaac’s personal touches: oil paintings done by the preacher himself, mounted in handmade frames throughout the house.
The painting above the fireplace was five feet across and maybe three feet high. I could remember standing in this spot when I was a kid, mesmerized by the scene Isaac had created: an ethereal Christ on the cross, a Mona Lisa smile on his wasted face, while in the background a thousand warriors burned. Their bodies were twisted and bloody, their eyes black with agony. The frame was partially rotted away, and the painting itself was stained in places and barely visible in others. It didn’t matter, though—I still remembered every grotesque detail. Long before the fire, it had been the centerpiece in more than one childhood nightmare.