Beyond the Bright Sea

by Lauren Wolk

  In the past, I’d always peered into the case of chocolates and pointed out my choices so he could pluck them from their little paper nests and wrap them up for me.

  Instead, today, I went straight to the big jar of jelly beans on the counter by the till, took off the top, reached inside for the scoop, and measured out my own candy into a paper sack while he watched.

  I handed it to him. He put it on the candy scale.

  “You must have quite a sweet tooth,” he said. “Cost you a nickel. Or I can put some back.”

  I was so startled that I just stared at him for a long moment before I held out my dime, warm from my pocket.

  “Shall I not put it on Osh’s account, as usual?” he said.

  I shook my head. “I want to pay for it myself,” I said.

  So Mr. Higgins handed me the candy, took the dime, and gave me my change. Then he ran his hand over his face. “Awful hot it’s getting to be,” he said.

  “It is,” I said, nodding. Said good-bye. Left the grocery. And headed back toward the bass stands, eating the jelly beans as I went, so lost in thought that I almost tripped over Mouse, who lay sunning herself on the path.

  “Mouse,” she said, which I took to mean What’s the matter?

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  I thought back to how people always stepped aside when I passed them on a path or the boardwalk. And how I sometimes stepped aside for them instead.

  I thought about how people seemed always to keep their distance. And how I always made sure to keep mine.

  The schoolmaster, Mr. Henderson, had sanitized the door latch I’d touched. And Mr. Johnson, the postmaster, had wanted to sanitize my letter before he handled it. Two people slow to change. But the others?

  “I suppose I ought to think about them one by one,” I said to Mouse. But she was too busy chasing a fly to answer.

  “What’s the matter?” Osh asked me when I crossed to the island and he saw the look in my eyes.

  “I think I’ve been wrong about some things,” I said slowly.

  He was getting the skiff ready to pull lobster traps. “Like what?”

  “Like people,” I said.

  He huffed. “Easiest mistake in the world,” he said. “Go get the basket.”

  There was a bit of chop offshore, plenty of wind, and it was difficult to navigate our way from buoy to buoy. A struggle to hang on to them while Osh pulled the lobster pots. The skiff wanted to break free, the buoy ropes were slick with weed, and my knees and ribs were sore after just two pots.

  “Couldn’t we have waited for a calmer day?” I groused as we sailed to the next pot in the string.

  Osh shook his head. “Don’t like to leave the lobsters in those traps any longer than I have to,” he said.

  Which made no sense to me. “You think they’d rather be up here, on someone’s dinner plate?”

  Osh sailed alongside the next buoy. “They’re going to end up in a kettle, sooner or later,” he said. “Or bait for a striper. No point in spending too long in a trap beforehand.”

  I snagged the buoy and tied up the skiff as he put it into irons, the sail luffing as it relaxed, some spray coming over the bow.

  If I’d been out of sorts before this, I was worse now. “I never looked at it like that,” I said. “Makes me feel mean.”

  Osh laughed a little as he hauled the trap up and into the boat. On a day as windy as this, I kept a post at the buoy rope, making sure it held fast, while Osh emptied the pot. “Not mean,” he said as he added another lobster to the basket and replaced the lid. “Just human.”

  My climb to watch for the Shearwater that evening was a relief. I found it hard to be bad tempered on the top of a hill with ocean all around, the western sky like a painting still wet, the wind soft and warm.

  Looking for the schooner had become one of my best habits, since it took me up closer to the sky and reminded me that one of my finest days—when I would meet my brother for the first time—was still ahead.

  Had I turned to go home just an instant sooner or had I been facing east instead of west, I would have climbed down that hill full of peace and comfort.

  Instead, with my last look out toward Penikese, I saw a sail.

  A small one.

  A skiff, probably.

  Leaving Penikese Harbor.

  I wondered who it was.

  No one from the Elizabeths bothered with treasure hunting anymore. But the skiff was headed for Cuttyhunk as darkness came quickly on. In fact, it seemed to be making straight for me, and I felt my skin tighten.

  I watched until it was too dark to see the boat any longer. And then I went home, thoughtful but not yet scared.

  Fear came later that night.

  Chapter 33

  We were sleeping when Mr. Kendall found us. That man who’d left Mr. Sloan to die a slow death for no reason at all.

  Had it been a cold, windy night, our windows shut, we might not have heard him.

  Had he been more clever, anchoring his skiff in the water, we might not have heard him.

  Had we been in a noisy city, we might not have heard him.

  Had it been a cold, windy night, had he been clever, had we been in a city, I might have woken to find him leaning over my bed, more terrible in moonlight than ever before.

  But it was a warm, still night, and he was a clumsy lout, and we were on an island so small and familiar that we knew he was there as soon as he beached his skiff.

  Mouse knew first.

  She sat up suddenly, her eyes wide and gleaming in the moonlight flooding the house.

  I sat up, too, and turned my head, listening.

  From his bed, Osh whispered my name.

  “I know,” I whispered back. “I heard it, too.”

  Next, the blunt jangle of a sail settling down.

  Osh slid out of bed and along the wall to the window facing the beach.

  “It’s him,” he whispered. “Kendall.”

  We had no attic, no basement to hide in, and but one door.

  “Osh,” I whispered, pointing at my window, which led out the back of the house.

  He crossed quickly and opened the old screen as quietly as he could, put Mouse out first, then handed me through, and followed quickly.

  Just before he closed the screen again, I grabbed the cinnamon box from the windowsill and pushed it into the sand.

  “Hide,” I whispered to Mouse, and she slipped away and disappeared into the darkness as if she were made of it.

  And then Osh and I crept through the grasses and into the sea, and I clung to him and he to me as the current carried us along the Cuttyhunk shore until we finally broke free of it and struck out toward land, dragging ourselves, gasping, onto the rocks.

  “Are you all right?” Osh asked.

  I told him I was, my voice shaking. “Are you?” I asked him.

  “Come on,” he said, pulling me to my feet. “We have to get to Miss Maggie’s. Someone told him where to find us.”

  “Not her,” I said. “She wouldn’t.”

  “No, but maybe they told him where to find her, too.”

  And we stumbled together up the bluff and across the moor toward Miss Maggie, who woke at our pounding and came to the door, wild eyed, and took us straight in.

  After we locked the door and told her what had happened, Miss Maggie made a pot of hot tea while I put on some of her shearing trousers and a shirt she wore for gardening, all the cuffs turned back twice.

  Osh had to wrap himself in a summer blanket while his clothes dried.

  “You’ll stay here until morning,” she said, “and then we’ll call over to Falmouth and tell the police that Mr. Kendall has turned up again.”

  “For all the good that will do,” Osh said. “He’ll be long gone by then, empty-handed. Maybe convinced once an
d for all that he won’t find any treasure here.”

  I thought about the coffee tin. The keepsakes inside it. What they would mean to Mr. Kendall if he found them: the exact opposite of what they meant to me.

  I imagined him finding that tin, prying it open, spilling its treasure onto our table and figuring all that it would buy him. The thought made my heart twist. So did the suspicion that he would not be satisfied with such a small amount of treasure. That he would know there was much more, hidden somewhere else. What if he came back for it?

  “I kept some on the island,” I said in a small voice.

  “Some what?” Osh said.

  “Some of the treasure. In that old tin you use for seeds. Just a few pieces, before we hid the rest.”

  “But why?” he asked. “And why didn’t you tell me?”

  I could hear it in his voice. He was hurt. Sad. And I couldn’t have that.

  “I wasn’t trying to hide it from you, Osh. I promise I wasn’t.” I looked him straight in the eye so he’d have no doubt about it. “I was going to tell you. I just . . . wanted some of it close by, and you wanted it off the island, and, Osh, I just wanted to make sure I had a keepsake. Something she touched.”

  “Like the ring you already had? That wasn’t enough?”

  “No,” I said. “It wasn’t. If I lost it? If someone stole it? There’d be nothing else.”

  He shook his head. “You’re wrong,” he said.

  And I knew I was. And I knew I wasn’t.

  “Even so,” I said in a voice that made me cry when I heard it—though I almost never cried, and never before for such a reason—and Osh scooped me up and held my face against his neck until I settled down and sat back, drying my eyes with my hands.

  “And there,” Miss Maggie said. “Another good reason to call the police first thing. If he’s stolen what you set aside for yourself, Crow, he’ll need to answer for it.”

  But Osh shook his head. “We won’t tell them a thing about that,” he said. “They’ll catch him soon enough, or he’ll finally run.”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” she said. “You can’t mean that. He’s a criminal. You have to tell them.”

  But Osh would not be swayed. “How do we accuse him of taking something that’s not rightly ours?” he said. “We won’t get it back. And they’ll look hard at us, Maggie. You know they will. And maybe punish us for taking what wasn’t ours to take.”

  “But it was hers,” I said. “My mother’s. And she left it for me to find.”

  Osh sighed. “I know that. But I also know how things work.”

  Miss Maggie looked sad but she did not argue with Osh about that. “He’s right, Crow. They won’t see it the way you do,” she said. “Penikese is state land.”

  “But that’s not fair,” I said, sounding younger than I felt.

  “Come on, now,” Miss Maggie said. “None of us are going to sleep another wink tonight, but we ought to try. It’ll be morning soon, and you’ll be no good for anything if you don’t get some rest now.”

  She was right. I didn’t sleep at all. But I did rest, tucked into her trundle bed, and thought about lots of things as night slipped toward morning. The treasure still hidden, some of it not far from where I lay. My brother, out there somewhere. My parents in their graves on that sad little island. And Osh, lying on the rug in front of Miss Maggie’s door, keeping watch even as he slept.

  I was so afraid of losing what I had, not sure what I could both cling to and still reach for. Not sure what I could reach for without losing my hold.

  I tried to understand what was really mine to keep or give. Or lose. Or trade away. Or leave behind.

  Not so very long ago, I had wanted nothing more than what I already had and, beyond that, only to know where I had come from.

  Now, I had much more than before, but I felt most keenly the things I didn’t have, especially the parents I’d never known and the brother I did not yet know.

  I was stricken, too, by the thought that Mr. Kendall might have found the bit of treasure I’d kept back for myself.

  But it wasn’t until morning, when we returned to our island, that I understood what he’d taken.

  Miss Maggie wouldn’t let us leave until she’d fed us a breakfast of dried apples and flapjacks topped with a little honey and cane sugar, and coffee for both of us, which sharpened up our dull edges.

  “Our clothes?” Osh asked when we’d eaten all we could.

  “On the line,” she said, “and still wet.”

  “Go fetch them,” he said to me.

  “Stubborn man,” she muttered.

  “The pot calling the kettle black,” he said.

  I remember smiling as I went out to the line to fetch our clothes. I remember forgetting, for that moment, why we had come to Miss Maggie’s in the first place.

  Dressed again in our soggy things, we walked bowlegged down to the bass stands and across toward our cottage.

  From the beach, it looked much as it always had.

  I suddenly realized that he could have burned it to the ground, and I felt sick. But I was grateful for the thought, since it reminded me that things could have been far worse than they were.

  But they were bad enough.

  The door was open, and for a moment I wondered if a huge, angry wind had come through while we were gone.

  Nearly everything in our house had been smashed or tumbled. Tables and chairs lay helter-skelter, our dishes broken to bits, everything we owned scrambled and strewn across the floor.

  I didn’t care a lick about any of that.

  That, we could clean up or replace or mend.

  But the coffee tin was not on the shelf where I’d left it.

  Even worse, even more like a hand on my throat, was how Mr. Kendall had slashed the paintings I’d loved too much for Osh to sell. As if a clawed creature had been here, raging.

  And the paints that Osh had so carefully brewed were now splashed across the house in mad streaks, his beautiful clean paper in shreds, the legs of his easel broken.

  Osh turned and left the house without a word, but I stayed and stared and felt something begin in my chest.

  I’d never hated anyone before.

  And I’d never felt so small.

  I found Osh sitting in the sand, staring at the ocean, Mouse in his lap.

  I sat next to him and waited quietly.

  He was still for a long time, not moving except to run his hand down Mouse’s back again and again.

  Then he said, “None of this is your fault, Crow. But it has to stop.”

  “I know,” I said. “And I’m sorry. I never imagined—”

  “Don’t,” he said. “Not a word. You haven’t done anything wrong. But we have to make sure he never comes here again. Ever. Do you understand?”

  I nodded. “How do we do that?”

  Osh shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  Mouse turned suddenly, staring toward Cuttyhunk, and there came Mr. Johnson, the postmaster, hurrying down the path to the bass stands and waving at us from across the shallow divide. The tide was nearly out, the channel little more than a stream, but he waited on the far side, gesturing for me to come across.

  “I have a message!” he called.

  We had known from the start that Mr. Kendall was as dumb as he was mean. But we didn’t know how dumb until Mr. Johnson delivered the message he had just received on his telegraph machine.

  When I crossed over to meet him, he hesitated for a moment and then handed me the slip of paper, curiosity and excitement plain on his face. “Is this about the man from Penikese, who pretended to be the bird keeper?”

  I read it, smiling. “Yes,” I said.

  He nodded thoughtfully. “He was here, wasn’t he?”

  I looked up at him, startled. “How did you know?”

&n
bsp; “Someone was at the inn last night, late, banging on their door, wanting to know where you lived. And they told him. Scared not to. And then they woke me to send a message to the police. Which I did. But then I got to worrying they wouldn’t come, or at least not fast enough, so I ran down here and looked across last night, but nothing seemed amiss.”

  It was a lot to take in, but one thing was clear. Mr. Johnson. His face in the sunlight. The worry in his eyes.

  “He’d come and gone by then,” I said. “And I’m glad you didn’t find him still here. He was very angry.”

  “But you’re all right? And Osh?”

  “Yes,” I replied. “And Mouse, too.”

  He waited, hopeful, and I realized that he had questions he was trying hard not to ask.

  “We ruined all his plans,” I said. “We went to Penikese and ruined all his plans. And set the police on him.”

  “And made him mad,” Mr. Johnson said.

  “Very mad,” I replied.

  He nodded, once, and said, “But all’s well now and off I’ll go.”

  As he turned to be on his way, I said, “Will you tell people about the telegram please?” And he said he would, as soon as possible. “Otherwise I might burst.”

  “Better that people know about him,” I said. “In case he ever comes back.”

  “Not likely now,” he said as he headed back up the path and disappeared over the rise.

  Chapter 34

  I crossed back over to Osh with a glad heart. Mr. Johnson had spoken to me as he would have to anyone. And he had come closer than he ever had.

  My head wondered why I cared what he thought or said or did.

  But I liked the idea of forgiveness and, by the time I reached our island, dripping with my cold Atlantic wash, I felt lighter than I had in a long time.

  “What did he want?” Osh asked.

  I read the telegram to him: KENDALL ARRESTED PAWNING JEWELRY. COME TO ASH STREET JAIL, NB, SOONEST. KELLY. STOP.

  “Well, that’s something,” Osh said. “The man’s a fool. Pawning those things right off like that. With the police looking for him.”