MalContents (11 page)

Sunny pulled up to the boathouse, a weathered but sturdy structure likely more solid than the houses rising through breaks in the trees at the far side of the road that used to be Weir farmland. She’d made her escape without so much as one click of the camera, and fate smiled down on her here as well, not a money-grubbing shutterbug in sight. She’d packed lightly. A few canvas shopping bags filled with the decadent essentials—lemons and limes, bottles of seltzer water, fresh asparagus and salad things—quickly filled the spaces between the seats where she and Grandpa Wally once sat in her sepia-colored memories.

Sunny started the boat’s motor. Since buying Foster’s Island, which could only be accessed by boat six months of the year, she’d conceded she was a passenger, not a rower, and headed out. She checked her cell phone. The two bars at the boathouse had dwindled to one halfway across the water. No coverage. No wireless internet. No distractions, like Joseph.

“Heavenly,” she said aloud.

Wind swept around her, carrying the earthy smell of the woods and water, the wildflowers growing in little sheltered corners of the island, and the late-morning sunshine. Such a sunny day, she thought with a smile. In more ways than one.

The island rose before her, three acres of former hilltop, studded with ancient sap pines, hemlocks, skeletal white birch, maples, and various wild berry patches—blueberry, blackberry, and raspberry. Over the past few years, the perennials she’d planted around the house became actual gardens. Even from the distance, vibrant pops of yellows and crimson glittered through the layered green foliage. The clematis had climbed partway up the side of the house, she saw.

The house was a two-story cottage, sitting atop a stone cellar. Gabled roof, brick fireplace, a wraparound deck complete with Adirondack chairs. One of Sunny’s favorite memories of growing up on the farm was the day the Indians came chugging down the road— it was a dirt road back then—in a big pickup truck whose bed was stacked full of Adirondack chairs. Grandpa Wally had bought three chairs, right off the back of the truck. Hell on the ass, they were, but Sunny loved the memory. Three new expensive ones out of the latest uppity Sonoma catalogue graced the deck.

Sunny killed the engine and floated up to the dock. Her arrival sent a sunbathing turtle scrambling into the water. Overhead in the branches, a blue jay bitched. A dragon fly darted past. She drew in a deep breath of the day’s warmth and glanced up. Not a single cloud stained the sky.

When Sunny woke up, it was raining. Not just raining, but a downpour drilled against the roof. The loud plunk of raindrops drew her eyes toward the windows. The sills were soaked and growing wetter.

In a fog, Sunny pulled herself out of the fetal curl she’d passed out in and stood. The room took a spin. Sunny wobbled. For an instant, she didn’t know where she was or how she’d gotten there. Then she recognized the antique brass bed with the headboard decorated in porcelain finials, and the Paul de Lonpré print of Cosmos flowers in the gold-gilt frame. Foster’s Island. The main bedroom.

And the rain was getting in.

Sunny shook out of her fugue state and hurried over to the windows, drawing both down. A few hours earlier, she’d opened every window on a cloudless day to air the place out, which she’d last visited with Joseph in late April. Before crawling into bed exhausted, the day had been dry and comfortable, picture-perfect. A wall of nasty, damp air slammed into her on the way to the next window.

The air wasn’t simply humid; it smelled putrid, like something dead was falling out of the sky, its decaying molecules contained within the raindrops. The stench triggered a memory still fresh in Sunny’s mind: that rotting odor of crab from Rona Bustamante’s fridge mixed with a liberal dose of the dead mushrooms in her pantry.

Sunny ignored the comparison and willed her twisting guts to settle. She closed the window in the bathroom before heading down the stairs and followed suit, in sequence, around the first floor, living room to back bedroom to kitchen. When the house was sealed up tight against the storm, she found herself struggling to breathe because, though now dry, closing the windows had also bottled the foul-smelling humidity within its walls.

Rain splattered the windows. The guttural cadence steadily crawled on Sunny’s nerves. Sweat blossomed on her upper lip, at her hairline, seemingly everywhere across her body. She walked down to the fridge and opened the door. Cool air spilled out, a temporary reprieve. She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, loving the citrus-tinged scent of the organic cleaner she used to wipe down the glass shelves.

The house had been wired for electricity years before Sunny bought the island; an underwater cable snaked out to the pole on the shore opposite the boathouse, out of sight and mostly mind. Sunny had installed satellite for the TV, which droned on in the background as she cooled off at the open fridge door and waited for the central a-c, another of her upgrades, to kick in. The reassuring hum of the unit whispered through the house. Sunny extracted herself from the refrigerator and poured a cold drink, seltzer with a wedge of lime.

She walked it back into the living room, where the television was tuned to YUM! and one of the lower-tier network offerings,
The Grossest Thing I Ever Ate
, one of those experimental attempts at programming designed to lure in the elusive male viewer. Her own lunch, a lightly grilled chicken breast with basil mayonnaise and slices of garden tomato, was starting to take on the distinction of the grossest thing she’d ever eaten while she waited for the a-c to still her heat-fueled nausea.

Robin Newmark, a ballsy young Brit with spiked hair and a smoky Cockney accent, was bouncing across the screen, blathering about Rocky Mountain Oysters while pulling a sour face. Sunny reached for the remote and was about to change the channel when the screen locked, paralyzing Newmark’s face in a slightly goofy yet undeniably sexy expression. Sunny sipped the refreshing water and studied the vision. He wasn’t quite the man Joseph was, but still oh so cute. The kind of one night stand you’d feel dirty and guilty about as soon as the deed ended, but would relive forever the moment you stepped out of the shower, she thought with a smirk.

Robin Newmark’s frozen face shorted out, replaced by a solid palette of cobalt blue. The lights on the box winked out in order, telegraphing that the satellite signal had been lost, which was to be expected in summer downpours and winter whiteouts, not that she’d ever braved the latter on Foster’s Island.

She waited. The signal didn’t come back, which was okay, she supposed. She hadn’t come to the island to lounge in front of the tube. She was here to finish the recuperation process. The body had healed. The spirit, too, mostly. Only the mind, the psyche, needed consoling.

Sunny needed to look within, decide about
Slice and Dice
, perhaps begin work on the next cookbook. There were vegetarian dishes she wanted to explore with greater urgency now that she’d been on the other side of the knife; now that she’d felt a pig’s, a cow’s, and a chicken’s slaughter so intimately.

Glass in hand, Sunny marched back up the stairs. It wasn’t quite five in the afternoon, but the storm had transformed the late day into a false dusk. The tight staircase took a turn to the right, toward the bathroom first and then the upstairs bedroom. The bedroom’s window faced the direction of the boathouse and, unavoidably, the neighborhood of houses where the Weir farm used to sit. Beyond the windowpanes, a golden streak shone down upon the distant rooftops. It was raining on the island, but sunny on the shore. A sun shower, she thought.

The cool billows of the central air conditioning were working magic in the upstairs. Sunny set the sweating glass down on the side table, atop a coaster—an official Sunny Weir coaster, beautifully decorated in a vibrant yellow lemon wedge pattern—and settled back on the bed, which bore the unpleasant mark of her sweat. While returning to match the position already sculpted into the bedclothes, she pondered the next few days. A new cookbook . . . she could assemble a proposal and pull together enough recipes to fill a book in a week’s time. The last cookbook, the one they’d been celebrating the night of the attack, had been a best-of, greatest hits collection from her TV show and had taken less time to pull together. Five days? Fast food, she thought with a chuckle. Only did she really want to bang out another cookbook this quickly after suffering the worst night of her life?

Sunny stretched out of her fetal curl. Maybe it was the perfect time to write her autobiography, using the attack as a jumping off point. After that moment of high tension, she would backtrack to her humble beginnings, the orphaned daughter of a single mom raised by loving grandparents on a farm in Massachusetts. She’d relate how she learned to make butternut squash pie in Grammy Rae’s kitchen for Thanksgiving, bright squash pie, the origins of her colorful cooking style. She’d turned sunny food into a career, a way of life, and a life story.

Energy surged through her. Saul would love it. So would Conelle. The readers, too. A celebrity bestseller, not that she needed the money, but the prestige would be great and a biopic deal would likely follow. She mentally cast Bullock in the role of Sunny Weir, borderline giddy at the possibility.

The book would open with the knife attack. She didn’t know how it would end, not suspecting as the rain fell, that the final chapter of this particular biography was far from written.

It was still raining the following morning. Gazing at the grimy bedroom windows, Sunny got her first inkling that something was seriously wrong. The landscape beyond the glass, the little she could glean, sat shrouded in mist. The outsides of both windows were caked in a layer of gritty gray.

Sunny padded into the bathroom and squatted. Her half-closed eyes drifted up to the lone window. Its pane, too, was stained.

“What the fuck?” she asked aloud.

Feeling desperately in need of a shower, she marched down the stairs. Every window she passed on the lower level looked coated in nuclear fallout. Sweat plastered the inside of the panes, an icy reaction to the humidity outside, cold and hot in collision. Inner Bitch banished the analogy because it belonged to the knife attack, to Rona Bustamante.

Sunny opened the front door. A wall of oppressively humid air billowed in, thick and chalky.
Chalk
, she thought, glancing out, into the mist. The deck and chairs were soaked. The water ran gray and gritty where it puddled. Not chalk, because chalk was white. Dust?

She stepped out onto the deck. It wasn’t until the gray rain was running down her hair and squishing between her bare toes that it struck her, and the reality made her retch.

Not chalk, not dust. Ashes.

A coincidence, that’s what it was, what it had to be. Maybe one of those big fires in Canada that sent billows of smoke down to New England had sparked and this was the next phase. Only she couldn’t shake Deschler’s words about Rona Bustamante, cremated and floating around in the clouds.

The clouds hanging over Foster’s Island continued to drop their toxic rain well into the afternoon. The TV was still dead, so she had no way of knowing what was happening in the outside world since leaving Boston. There was no internet, no cell phone reception, and her imagination started to wander.

In the later afternoon, the torrential downpour abated, leaving a muggy, misty haze sitting on top of the island. Sunny pulled on the old pair of sneakers she’d left during a visit some years earlier, her gardening sneakers now, and a light jacket, that only to cover her bare arms from mosquitoes and whatever fallout had come down in the raindrops. She pulled one of Joseph’s baseball caps off a peg on the hall tree and caught a hint of his masculine sweat. She loved Joseph. Granted, these days, she didn’t necessarily like him, but what she wouldn’t give to have him there because as much as she loathed admitting it she sometimes needed his strength, his ruggedness. Like when insane strangers came at her with carving knives.

Or when it rained ashes.

The silence didn’t strike her immediately; Sunny was halfway down the stairs, aware of the gritty crunch beneath her sneakers, when the absence of almost every other natural sound save for the
drip-plunk
of occasional raindrops sent a chill tumbling down her spine. Where were the squawking birds, the chattering squirrels and chipmunks?

The mist draped over the island was dense enough to obscure the canopy of the tallest pine branches overhead, creating an ashy gray filter everywhere she turned. But that impression wasn’t entirely illusion. Gray liquid dripped down trunks and ran over the ground. The dusty smell she’d noted earlier hung in the humidity and jagged on the nose. Something
had
come down in the rain.

The storm had laid waste to her clematis and Shasta daisies, leaving shredded blossoms and droopy stalks reminiscent of the palm trees seen in old nuclear test newsreel footage. The decimated gardens added another layer to the sinking feeling in her stomach. For the rest of the summer, the place was going to look like a bombed-out atoll even if she hired a landscaper to patch the place up with annuals.

She walked down to the dock slowly, careful of her steps. Sunny had traveled the short distance of the country path a hundred or more times with confidence, but now she moved as though she were navigating a nightmare, afraid that something might jump out at any second from a shadowy corner. Nothing did, but at the dock she had the overwhelming urge to get in the boat, start the motor, and zip across Foster’s Pond, which sat under a moody curtain of mist too thick to see through to the opposite shore.