The Language of Sand

by Ellen Block

  “Must seem kind of strange.”

  “No, no, it’s—”

  “I like it there. It’s quiet. No distractions. I can keep an eye on the place for Lottie, make sure the machines are running right.”

  “Lottie owns the laundromat too?”

  “Well, her and her husband. They own most of Chapel Isle, really. Since his accident, Franklin hasn’t been able to do much with the businesses, which is why Lottie runs them.”

  “Accident?”

  “Car crash. Three years ago, one of the summer people was driving drunk. Hit Franklin’s car and flipped him into a ditch. Broke his spine in three places. He won’t ever walk again. Got big bucks in the settlement, but Franklin didn’t need money. He had that in spades.” The story was a sore spot for Bert.

  “I retooled his electric wheelchair for him. Adjusted the wheels for an improved turning radius and rerouted the wiring so he could get more power. Franklin says it runs like a Porsche. Zero to sixty in six seconds.”

  Abigail had dropped her chin and let her shoulders fold, sympathy melting her stance into the posture of compassion. She’d seen people slide into it after they learned of her husband’s and son’s deaths. As she stood there in the darkened hardware store with Bert, Abigail knew what she was about to say. The words were already forming in spite of how she hated hearing them herself.

  “I’m sorry to hear about your friend.”

  “He’s a decent guy. Done a lot for this town. Everyone does what they can.”

  An unspoken bond existed between the residents of Chapel Isle. The island was the same as the nets its fishermen cast at sea, a tight lattice of people tied by lives lived closely, knotted by friendship. Being here meant Abigail could become a part of that net as well, which was a bit intimidating. The responsibility may have been more than she could be entrusted with.

  “So how’s it going at the lighthouse?”

  “Fine. Everything’s fine.” As often as Abigail said it, that didn’t make it true.

  “Nothing out of the ordinary?”

  “Oh, Bert, not you too? You’re a man of science. You can’t possibly have bought into this ghost story.”

  “Had to ask. Most people around here have heard about him. Some believe. Some don’t. Either way, Mr. Jasper took care of this island and its sailors for years. Guess he has the right to be here still.”

  Be it a right, a privilege, a curse, or contrivance, Wesley Jasper had become Abigail’s problem. She was lying that everything was fine while painting the caretaker’s cottage top to bottom and trying to appease a spirit she wasn’t convinced existed. If Abigail couldn’t shake the shroud of his presence—real, imagined, or mythologized—she would become known as the woman who lived in the haunted house. She wasn’t even okay being known as “Abby.” She couldn’t let this go any further.

  When Abigail got home, the cottage was brutally quiet. She couldn’t concentrate and craved a mindless activity to give her wits a rest. After wandering aimlessly around the living room, she stopped and stood at the window, staring at the ocean while waiting for inspiration to arrive. Minutes passed. She grew impatient. Her eyes drifted across the lawn to the station wagon. The grass was as high as the car’s headlights.

  “Lottie did mention a lawn mower.”

  A tarnished manual hand mower leaned in the corner of the shed, with a ragged-edged rake propped against it.

  “Couldn’t hurt to see if it works.”

  Abigail dragged the mower out for inspection. The blades were matte gray, so dull they refused to reflect the sunlight. She pulled the mower along the grass to test if the blades would cut. Much to her amazement, they did. The newly sheared patch of grass was a drastic improvement, incentive to forge onward.

  Progress was slow, each pass a struggle, but Abigail didn’t stop. The exertion drained her mind and burned off the angst that had clung to her since running into Bert at the hardware store. The smell of the fresh-clipped grass was a welcome distraction.

  Over the course of the afternoon, she worked her way across the yard, pausing occasionally to wipe her forehead with her sleeve. Her hair was soaked with sweat, as was her shirt. The sun was setting once she was through.

  The time had come to do Merle’s rounds. A bath would have to wait. Abigail packed a sandwich for dinner. There was one piece of bread left, besides the heel of the loaf. Her sandwich was a sad statement about how she’d been living. She used to love to cook. When she and Paul were newlyweds and low on cash, Abigail had embraced the challenge of concocting lavish meals on their shoestring budget, defying their circumstances with some ingenuity and well-chosen spices. She missed cooking, not so much the act, but the purpose—feeding her family and providing them with what they needed.

  Abigail stowed her dinner in the empty bread bag and took it to the car.

  Tonight the moon was high, making the street signs legible—that was if they weren’t obscured by branches or leaves. Abigail was still getting the hang of how the island was laid out, reading Merle’s map by her dashboard lights. The roads didn’t run on a grid pattern; quite the opposite. Each curvy lane unraveled of its own accord, unrepentantly irregular, like the rest of Chapel Isle.

  The first few properties were unchanged since the previous evening, not a hinge or windowpane disturbed. Abigail was thankful for that. Midway through her route, she took a break to gobble down her dinner. As she sat in the station wagon eating, headlights appeared, glowing in the distance. Then the lights began to flash. It was a police patrol car.

  “Uh-oh.”

  In her side mirror, Abigail saw Sheriff Larner climbing from the cruiser.

  “Evening, Abby.”

  “This must seem a little suspicious, me sitting in my car on a dark road, eating a sandwich by flashlight with a hammer in my lap.”

  “Not what I expected. Care to tell me what you’re doing?”

  “It’s kind of a long story.”

  “No such thing as a short story around here.”

  “I’m checking on Lottie’s rental properties for Merle because…uh, because I owed him a favor.” Abigail intentionally avoided the specifics of how she came into that particular debt.

  “Oh, right, the infamous fight at the Kettle.”

  “It’s infamous?”

  “Only to the people who’ve heard about it.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “So Merle sent you to…?” Larner expected her to fill in the blanks.

  “Test the doors and windows. See if any of the units have been broken into.”

  The sheriff cocked his brow. “Guard duty?”

  “Merle can barely walk and it’s basically my fault. It’s just for a week, until he’s better.”

  “A week, huh?”

  “I know, I know. I’m turning into a nuisance, what with starting that fight and the changes I’ve made to the caretaker’s house.”

  Her comment visibly caught the sheriff’s attention. Abigail presumed that whatever she did, whether buying a paintbrush or washing her laundry, somebody had already reported on it to everyone else. Wasn’t that how the grapevine worked? And wasn’t Larner the person who’d warned her about it?

  “What sorts of changes are we talking about?” he inquired coyly.

  Abigail’s defenses went up. She chose her answer prudently. “A little paint. That’s all.”

  “Paint never did anybody any harm.”

  “Let’s hope not,” Abigail said under her breath.

  “You almost finished with your security detail?”

  “I have some more houses to visit, then I’ll be off the streets,” she joked.

  “Be careful. We haven’t caught the guys responsible for those break-ins. Watch yourself with that hammer, ’kay? Lucky for you it’s not considered a concealed weapon.”

  “Okay. I mean, yes, sir.”

  With that, the sheriff rode away in his patrol car.

  Aside from the police cruiser, Abigail hadn’t seen anybody else drive by in t
he past two nights. There had been dozens of people at the bingo game. Where were they, she wondered.

  At home, she surmised. With their families.

  The children would be in bed. Their parents were probably watching television or washing the dinner dishes, getting ready to call it a night. Abigail envied them. She couldn’t see them, didn’t know who they were or where they lived, yet those nameless, faceless people had what she longed for. They would wake up the next morning and their lives would be the same.

  The last house on Merle’s map was a white bungalow with flowers blooming out front. Yawning, Abigail circled the building. She glanced at the windows and halfheartedly shook the doors until a set of headlights brightened the road.

  “Don’t let it be the sheriff again. I can only take so much humiliation per night.”

  The approaching vehicle was a truck rather than a car. Abigail stopped where she stood. She’d left the hammer in her station wagon. The lights grew closer. Whoever was driving would be able to see her shortly.

  It could be anybody. Including the thieves.

  Abigail hid. Kneeling behind the bushes, she peeked between the leaves. The twang of country music was coming from the truck, along with a woman’s giddy laughter. Two silhouettes hovered in the truck’s cab. The driver pulled to the side of the road, preparing to park a few yards behind her Volvo.

  “No, not there. Keep going. Keep going,” she whispered.

  The truck’s engine shuddered to a halt, the lights dimmed, and the giggling ceased as the two shadows melded into one.

  “Oh, jeez. I could be here all night.”

  She considered her options, most of which were mortifying. A woman wandering from the bushes of a deserted house was going to seem odd, and even if she could get to her station wagon without the two lovers in the truck noticing, they would hear her start the car.

  “Why do you care? Remember, you’re a badass. You’re infamous. You scoff in the face of adversity. You also talk to yourself too much.”

  Abigail emerged from the brush, intent on strolling to her station wagon in a composed fashion. Except her legs moved faster and faster until she broke into a trot.

  “Stop. I hear something,” the woman in the truck said.

  Two bewildered faces stared at Abigail from behind the steamed windshield. Mid-stride, she locked glances with the female passenger, a woman with wavy hair and wide, plaintive eyes. Abigail recognized her as one of the “hens” sitting with Janine Wertz at the bingo game. Behind the wheel of the truck was Clint Wertz, his arm slung over the woman’s shoulder, her blouse unbuttoned. Abigail jumped into her car and peeled out. She couldn’t tell who was more embarrassed. Her or them.

  Even in the dark, the caretaker’s cottage looked better with the grass cut. Abigail sat in the station wagon with the headlights illuminating the front yard to soak in her accomplishment while trying to forget about her awkward run-in with Clint Wertz. Ruth had been right about him. He was bad news, news Abigail would have preferred not to have firsthand.

  She got out of the station wagon and heard a crunch. Abigail scanned the ground and the car seat. There was nothing there. When she shifted her weight, the crunching came again. She dug in her pocket. It was the newspaper article from under the bed.

  “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” she said, feeling guilty for having crumpled that fragile slip of paper.

  She went inside, smoothed the clipping on the dining-room table, and reread its heading: BISHOP’S MISTRESS SINKS.

  The article was dated 1909. It was about a trade ship from Boston bound for Charleston that was caught in a hurricane that blasted the southern coastline. The storm wreaked havoc from Florida to Delaware. The ship met its end by smashing into a shoal in the Ship’s Graveyard, east of Chapel Isle. Fifty-nine men were lost. No bodies were recovered. The last portion of the article insinuated that the Bishop’s Mistress had gotten trapped in the graveyard because the lighthouse beacon hadn’t been visible to guide it safely into harbor. The final sentence read: A tragedy has befallen the Bishop’s Mistress, perhaps one that was avoidable.

  The question the last line raised lodged in Abigail’s mind. A sunken ship, drowned sailors, a spectral lighthouse keeper—the pieces were falling together in an eerie way. She fought the impulse to return to the basement and sort through the ledgers for an answer. Wesley Jasper had kept such precise notes, she was certain there would be some annotation of that night, some clue to the events that occurred.

  “Are you really in the mood to go snooping around down there in the middle of the night?” Abigail asked herself. She had grass stains on her clothes from mowing the lawn, scratches on her arms from doing Merle’s security route, and a battered ego from becoming “infamous” in town.

  “I didn’t think so.”

  novation (nó vā′ shən), n. 1. Law, the substitution of a new obligation for an old one, usually by the substitution of a new debtor or of a new creditor. 2. the introduction of something new; innovation. [1525–35; < L novātiōn– (s. of novātiō) a renewing, equiv. to novāi(us) (ptp. of novāre to renew, deriv. of novus NEW) + –ion– –ION]

  Like it or not, Abigail had to go into town that day for food and supplies.

  “Make a list this time,” she reminded herself as she sat at the dining-room table eating a bowl of mushy cereal. The dilemma was, she still didn’t have any paper, except for the crinkled article, which she’d covered with a cast-iron skillet to flatten the creases.

  “I’d put paper on the list if I had something to write it on.”

  She remembered she had the receipt from her first foray to Weller’s Market. On the underside of it, she wrote the items she needed from Merle’s shop as well as those she wanted to ask him to order, including a new medicine cabinet. She hoped he’d have drawer pulls in stock. The house remained in disarray because she hadn’t reattached the originals or put the dishes and dry goods in the cupboards.

  “This is definitely a work in progress.”

  Part of that progress would be to swap the current living-room furniture for the antiques in the basement, a transition she couldn’t make on her own. She doubted Merle could help her, which left Denny or Bert, neither of whom she wanted to spend hours on end with. No matter who gave her a hand, having the carved desk from the basement in the study upstairs was worth looking forward to. She hadn’t looked forward to much in recent months, so that made the desk, as well as the other furniture, a big deal to Abigail.

  The back door to Merle’s store was wide open, and he was standing at the sink washing out a bait bucket, his umbrella-cum-cane hooked on the lip of the counter.

  Abigail rapped on the door in an effort not to scare him again. “Up and about, I see.”

  “I’m definitely up. It’s the ‘about’ part I gotta practice.” He was favoring his good foot and leaning into the sink for support. “Glad you’re okay,” he said. “I was worried when I heard.”

  “Heard what?”

  “Another house got broken into.”

  “When? Where?”

  “Last night. Wasn’t Lottie’s. Privately owned. Six doors away from her cottage on Timber Lane.”

  “I was on Timber Lane. I didn’t see anything…. Wait. I did see something. I saw a couple—a man and woman—in a truck.” Abigail decided not to say specifically whom she’d encountered.

  “A couple? What were they doing there?”

  “What couples do alone together in parked cars.”

  “Oh, my. Well, you should tell Caleb Larner that. Might be…noteworthy.”

  Informing the sheriff was the right thing to do. However, Abigail had absolutely no desire to get involved in the Wertzes’ private life. She’d started one fistfight already.

  “Maybe I should have somebody else take the rounds tonight,” Merle suggested.

  “Why? Because I’m a woman? You think I can’t handle it?”

  Merle chewed his bottom lip, proving that was exactly what he was thinking.

  Infuriated, A
bigail said, “I’ll do the rounds. End of discussion. Here.” She handed him her list.

  “This is a receipt for groceries. You do realize this is a hardware store.”

  “The other side.”

  “Oh, right. I got most of this stuff. I’ll have to order you the mirror, though. Take three or four weeks.”

  “No problem. It’s not like I’m going anywhere.”

  “You sure about this, Abby? Sometimes change isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be.”

  Abigail folded her arms, sticking to her guns.

  “Okay. Okay.” Merle pretended to zip his lips shut and directed her to a shelf with a small assortment of knobs, then hobbled off to retrieve the items from her list that he had in stock.

  Given the limited selection, Abigail picked a simply styled round drawer pull with a pewter finish and counted out the number she needed. While Merle packed her purchases into bags, Abigail spotted him putting a new screwdriver in with the rest.

  “I don’t need that, Merle. I found a screwdriver in the shed.”

  “That thing’s half broken,” he told her, making it a present, his form of an apology.

  “Would you like me to pay my tab?”

  “What for? You’ll be back tomorrow with another list.”

  “True.”

  “Be careful tonight, will ya, Abby? I’m not being sexist. I’d say it to anyone. In fact, I’d say it to myself.”

  Be careful. It was the same advice Sheriff Larner had given her. None of Abigail’s recent decisions had been made with much care, an atypical departure from her typically logical self. She wasn’t being careful when she painted the house or when she agreed to do Merle’s rounds or even when she decided to come to Chapel Isle. She had thrown caution to the wind and gotten carried away like a kite in a gale. Abigail was still waiting to see where she’d land.

  Weller’s Market was Abigail’s next destination. She was not looking forward to it. Head low, she quickly pushed a cart through the store, grabbing an extra loaf of bread among other things because she’d gone through the first so fast. Abigail thought she might escape without running into Janine. That was until she rounded the produce aisle and nearly wheeled straight into her.