Annie didn’t wait to hear any more. She wrapped her coat tighter around her and jumped to the dock.
A man was scraping a boat hull. The fishermen floated their boats onto Christmas Beach at high tide, did their repairs, then pushed them back in the water when the tide ebbed. Island life was stripped down like that—dependent on tides and weather, on fish and the whims of nature. She wandered through town, feeling as empty and disconnected as the solitary lobster trap leaning against Tildy’s shuttered gift shop.
Her cell rang in her pocket. It was the dealer at the resale shop. She leaned against a weathered sign that advertised chowder and lobster rolls and listened, but what he told her was so incomprehensible, she had to make him repeat it twice.
“It’s true,” he said. “The money is outrageous, but the buyer is some kind of collector, and the mermaid chair is one of a kind.”
“For good reason!” she exclaimed. “It’s ugly.”
“Fortunately, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
Just like that, she had the money to wipe out most of her debt. With one phone call, she’d been given a fresh start.
THE CAR FERRY WAS DUE the next afternoon—Annie’s forty-fourth day on the island. She had to dash out to Harp House in the morning and pick up the things she’d left with Jaycie—her puppets, the rest of her clothes, Mariah’s scarves. After seven nights sleeping on the lobster boat, she was more than ready to live on dry land. She wished that dry land weren’t a couch in the back of Coffee, Coffee, but it wouldn’t be for long. One of her dog-walking clients wanted her to house-sit while he was in Europe.
A notice on the community bulletin board announced a town meeting that night. Since the issue of the cottage was bound to come up, she wanted to attend, but she needed to make sure Theo wouldn’t be there, so she waited until the meeting had started before she went inside.
Lisa caught sight of her and gestured toward the empty chair at her side. The seven island trustees sat at a long folding table at the end of the room. Barbara looked no better than she had the last time they’d been together: her blond hairdo still deflated, her makeup nonexistent. The other grandmothers were scattered around the room, some sitting together, others with their husbands. Not a single one made eye contact with Annie.
The business of the meeting unfolded: the budget, wharf repairs, how to get rid of the island’s growing supply of dead trucks. There was speculation about the day’s unusually warm weather and the storm that was supposed to accompany it. Nothing about the cottage.
The meeting was beginning to wind down when Barbara stood. “Before we end, I have some news.”
She looked smaller without her thick mascara and rouged cheeks. She leaned against the folding table, as if she needed the support. “I know all of you are going to be happy to learn that—” She cleared her throat. “Annie Hewitt has given Moonraker Cottage to the island.”
The room buzzed. Chairs squeaked as everyone turned to look at her. “Annie, did you really?” Lisa asked.
“You never mentioned anything about this,” Barbara’s husband said to her from the first row.
A trustee at the opposite end of the table spoke up. “We just learned about it ourselves, Booker.”
Barbara waited for the commotion to settle down before she went on. “Thanks to Annie’s generosity, we’ll be able to turn the cottage into our new school.”
The buzz started again, along with some applause and a whistle. A man Annie didn’t know reached around to clap her on the shoulder.
“During the summer, we can rent it out and add the income to the school budget,” Barbara said.
Lisa grabbed Annie’s hand. “Oh, Annie . . . That’s going to make such a difference to the kids.”
Instead of becoming steadier, Barbara appeared to be wilting. “We want our younger residents to know how much we care about them.” She gazed toward Lisa. “And how much we’re willing to do to keep them on the island.” She looked down at the table, and Annie had the unsettling feeling she was about to cry, but when Barbara lifted her head, her eyes were dry. She nodded to someone in the room. Nodded again. One by one, the grandmothers she’d conspired with rose to their feet and joined her.
Annie shifted uneasily in her chair. Barbara’s lips quivered. “We have something we need to tell all of you.”
Chapter Twenty-four
ANNIE’S UNEASINESS ESCALATED. BARBARA GLANCED helplessly at the others. Naomi ran one hand through her cropped hair, leaving a rooster tail behind. She took a step away from the rest. “Annie didn’t give up the cottage voluntarily,” she said. “We forced her out.”
A confused muttering rippled through the audience. Annie shot to her feet. “Nobody forced me to do anything. I wanted to give you the cottage. Now am I wrong, or do I smell coffee? I move to adjourn the meeting.”
She wasn’t a property owner, and she couldn’t move to adjourn anything, but her need for revenge was gone. The women had done something wrong, and they were suffering from it. But they weren’t bad women. They were mothers and grandmothers who’d wanted so much to keep their families together that they’d lost sight of right and wrong. For all their flaws, Annie cared about them, and she knew better than anyone how easily love could make people lose their way.
“Annie . . .” Barbara’s natural authority began to reassert itself. “This is something we’ve all agreed we need to do.”
“No, you don’t,” Annie said. And then more pointedly, “You really don’t.”
“Annie, please sit down.” Barbara was back in charge.
Annie slumped into her seat.
Barbara briefly explained the legal agreement between Elliott Harp and Mariah. Tildy gripped the edges of her scarlet bomber jacket and said, “We’re decent women. I hope all of you know that. We thought if we had a new school our kids would stop leaving.”
“Makin’ our kids go to school in a trailer’s a disgrace,” a female voice in the back called out.
“We convinced ourselves the end justified the means,” Naomi said.
“I’m the one who started the whole thing.” Louise Nelson leaned heavily on her cane and looked toward her daughter-in-law in the front row. “Galeann, you didn’t mind living here so much until the schoolhouse burned down. I couldn’t stand the idea of you and Johnny leaving. I’ve lived here all my life, but I’m smart enough to know I can’t stay without family nearby.” Age had weakened her voice and the room fell silent. “If you leave, I’ll have to go to the mainland, and I want to die here. That made me start thinking about other possibilities.”
Naomi shoved her hand through her hair again, pushing up a second rooster tail. “We’re all getting ahead of ourselves.” She took over, laying out what they’d done step-by-step, sparing none of them. She described sabotaging Annie’s grocery delivery, vandalizing the house. All of it.
Annie sank lower into her seat. They were making her look like both a heroine and a victim, neither of which she wanted to be.
“We made sure we didn’t break anything,” Judy interrupted, dry-eyed but clutching a tissue.
Naomi detailed hanging the puppet from a noose, painting the warning message on the wall, and finally, firing the bullet at Annie.
Barbara dropped her gaze. “I did that. That was the worst, and I was responsible.”
Lisa gasped. “Mom!”
Marie’s lips pursed into a buttonhole. “I was the one who came up with the idea of telling Annie that Theo Harp had been hurt in an accident so she’d leave the island with Naomi. I’m a decent woman, and I’ve never been more ashamed of myself. I hope God forgives me because I can’t.”
Annie had to hand it to her. Marie might be a sourpuss, but she was a sourpuss with a conscience.
“Annie figured out what we’d done and confronted us,” Barbara said. “We begged her to keep quiet so none of you would find out, but she wouldn’t promise anything.” Barbara held her head higher. “Sunday I went to see her to beg her again to keep our secret. Rig
ht then, she could have told me to go to Hades, but she didn’t. Instead she said the cottage was ours, free and clear. That it belonged to the island, not to her.”
Annie squirmed in her seat as more people turned to look at her.
“At first, all we felt was relief,” Tildy said, “but the more we talked, the harder it got to look each other in the eye, and the more ashamed we were.”
Judy blew her nose. “How were we going to face all of you day after day, face our kids, knowing in our hearts what we did?”
Barbara straightened her shoulders. “We knew this would eat at us for the rest of our lives if we didn’t come clean.”
“Confession is good for the soul,” Marie said sanctimoniously. “And that’s what we decided we had to do.”
“We can’t change what we did,” Naomi said. “All we can do is be honest about it. You can judge us. You can hate us if you have to.”
Annie couldn’t take any more, and she sprang up again. “The only person who has a right to hate you is me, and I don’t, so the rest of you shouldn’t either. Now I move to end this meeting right now.”
“Second,” Booker Rose called out, overlooking Annie’s nonresidency issue.
The meeting was adjourned.
Afterward all Annie wanted to do was get away, but she was surrounded by people who wanted to talk to her, thank her, and apologize to her. The islanders ignored the grandmothers, but Annie didn’t doubt that the worst was over for them. It would take the Mainers a while to sort things out in their own minds, but they were a tough lot who admired resourcefulness, even if it was ill-advised. The women wouldn’t be ostracized for long.
THE SEAS HAD GROWN ROUGHER by the time she returned to the boat, and a bolt of lightning sliced the horizon. It was going to be a wild night, a perfect bookend to the wildness of the night when she’d arrived. By this time tomorrow, she’d be gone. She prayed Theo wouldn’t show up to say good-bye. That would be too much.
A wave washed over the stern, but she didn’t want to seal herself in the cabin yet. She wanted to watch the storm roll in, soak up its ferocity. She located the boat’s foul weather gear. The oversize jacket smelled of bait, but it kept her dry to midthigh. She stood in the stern and watched the violence of the light show. The city isolated her from nature’s shifting rhythms in a way the island couldn’t. Only as the lightning came closer did she go below.
The cabin lit up, then darkened, then lit again as the storm attacked the island. By the time she’d finished brushing her teeth, she was queasy from the boat’s rocking. She sprawled on the bunk without getting undressed, the legs of her jeans still wet. She tolerated the roll as long as she could, but the queasiness grew worse, and she knew she’d throw up if she stayed down there any longer.
She grabbed the wet orange jacket and staggered back up to the deck. The rain blasted her through the open end of the pilothouse, but that was a price she was willing to pay for clean air.
The boat continued to pitch, but her stomach settled. Gradually, the storm began to move off and the rain eased. A shutter banged against the side of a house. She couldn’t get any wetter, so she climbed up on the dock to see if there’d been any damage. Branches were down, and a distant flash of lightning revealed dark patches on the town hall roof where a few shingles had blown off. Electricity was expensive, and no one kept their porch lights on, but several were burning now, so she knew she wasn’t the only one awake.
As she surveyed the scene, she noticed a strange light in the sky. It seemed to be coming from the northeast, near the area around the cottage. The light began flickering like a campfire. But this was no campfire. It was a real fire.
The first thing she thought of was the cottage. After everything they’d gone through, it had been hit by lightning. There’d be no new school. No summer rental money. It had all been for nothing.
She scrambled back on the boat to get her keys. Moments later, she was running down the dock toward the fish house where she’d parked her car. The rain would have turned the road into a quagmire, and she didn’t know how far she could get in her Kia, only that she had to try.
Lights had come on in more houses. She spotted the Rose pickup truck backing away from the house, Barbara in the passenger seat. Booker must be driving. The truck wouldn’t have any trouble navigating the road, and she ran toward it.
She slapped the side panel before they could get away, and the truck stopped. Barbara spotted her through the window, opened the door, and moved over so Annie could get in. She didn’t ask for an explanation, so Annie knew they’d seen the fire, too. Rain rolled off Annie’s jacket. “It’s the cottage,” she said. “I know it.”
“It can’t be,” Barbara said. “Not after everything. It just can’t be.”
“Calm down, both of you,” Booker ordered, turning out onto the road. “There’s a lot of woods over there, and the cottage sits low. More likely some of the trees were hit.”
Annie prayed he was right, but in her heart, she didn’t believe it.
The truck had lost its shocks long ago and wires gaped from a hole in the dashboard, but it navigated the mud better than Annie’s car ever could. The farther they traveled, the brighter the orange glow grew in the sky. The town had only one fire truck, an old pumper truck that Barbara told her wasn’t running. Booker swung into the lane that led to the cottage. The landscape opened up, and they could see that it wasn’t the cottage on fire. It was Harp House.
Annie’s first thought was of Theo, then of Jaycie and Livia. Dear God, let them be safe.
Barbara grabbed the dashboard. A shower of sparks exploded into the sky. They jolted up the drive. Booker parked the truck well back from the fire. Annie threw herself out and began to run.
The fire was ravenous, devouring the wooden shingles in snarling gulps, its hot claws greedy for more. The piles of newspapers and magazines stored in the attic had been the perfect tinder, and the roof was nearly gone, the skeleton of a chimney already visible. Annie saw Jaycie huddled near the top of the drive, Livia at her side. She raced toward them.
“It happened so fast,” Jaycie exclaimed. “It was like an explosion hit the house. I couldn’t open the door. Something fell and blocked it.”
“Where’s Theo?” Annie cried.
“He broke a window to get us out.”
“Where is he now?”
“He—he ran back into the house. I yelled. Told him not to go.”
Annie’s stomach pitched. There was nothing inside important enough for him to risk his life. Unless Hannibal was there. Theo would never abandon anything that was in his care, not even a cat.
Annie started toward the house, but Jaycie grabbed the sleeve of her foul weather jacket and held on tight. “You’re not going in there!”
Jaycie was right. The house was too big, and she had no idea where he’d gone. She had to wait. Pray.
Jaycie picked up Livia. Annie was dimly aware of more trucks arriving, and of Booker telling someone there was no saving the house.
“I want Theo,” Livia wailed.
Annie heard the shrill whinny of a terrified horse. She’d forgotten about Dancer. But as she turned toward the stable, she saw Booker and Darren McKinley already going inside.
“They’ll get him,” Barbara said, rushing up next to her.
“Theo’s in the house,” Jaycie told her.
Barbara curled her hand over her mouth.
The air was hot and full of smoke. Another beam fell, sending up a meteor of sparks. Annie watched numbly from the drive, her fear growing by the second, a filmstrip playing in her head of Thornfield Hall burning. Of Jane Eyre coming back to find a blind Edward Rochester.
Blind would be good. Annie could deal with blind. But not dead. Never dead.
Something brushed against her ankles. She looked down and saw Hannibal. She snatched up the cat, her fear escalating. Even now, Theo could be dodging the flames searching for him, not knowing the cat was already safe.
Booker and Darren struggl
ed to get Dancer out of the stable. They’d wrapped something around his head to mask his eyes, but the panicked horse smelled the smoke and fought them.
Another piece of roof caved in. Any moment now, the house could collapse. Annie waited. Prayed. Held the cat so tight it howled in protest and wiggled out of her arms. She should have told Theo she loved him. Told him and damned the consequences. Life was too precious. Love was too precious. Now he would never know how well he’d been loved—not with smothering demands or insane threats, but enough to be set free.
A figure emerged from the house. Hunched. Amorphous. She raced forward. It was Theo carrying something in each hand and gasping for air. A window exploded behind him. She reached his side, tried to support him. Whatever he was carrying struck her in the legs. She tried to take it away from him, but he wouldn’t let go.
The men came to his side, pushing her out of the way and dragging him to clean air. Only then could she see what he’d brought from the burning house. What he’d gone back inside to rescue. Not the cat at all. Two red suitcases. He’d gone back to retrieve her puppets.
Annie could barely absorb it. Theo had gone back into that inferno to rescue her silly, beloved puppets. She wanted to scream at him, kiss him until neither of them could breathe, make him promise never to do anything so foolish again. But he’d broken away from the men to get to his horse.
“My fairy house!” Livia screamed. “I want to see my fairy house.”
Jaycie tried to quiet her, but it had all been too much for the four-year-old, and she was past reasoning. Annie couldn’t do anything for Theo right now, but maybe she could help with this. “Did you forget?” She touched Livia’s flushed cheek and drew her face close. “It’s nighttime, and the fairies might be there. You know they don’t want people to see them.”
Livia’s small chest shook as she sobbed. “I want to see them.”
So many things we want that we can’t have. The fire hadn’t gotten as far as the fairy house, but the area had been badly trampled. “I know, sweetheart, but they don’t want to see you.”