Stone Cove Island (22 page)

Willa Prynne.

I thanked her, turned and went off vaguely in the direction she’d pointed me, then looped around and back to Charlie, who was on the computer, working on figuring out a way back to Stone Cove Island.

“They haven’t posted updated ferry schedule information, just the old schedule. And we know that’s wrong.”

“I got it.” I grinned at him. I was proud. I couldn’t help it. “And you won’t believe the name she came up with.”

“That’s amazing! Now we can look up her address.”

“We don’t need to. We can just follow Mary.”

CHARLIE AND I HAD
zero experience tailing a person, but we didn’t need to worry that Mary would notice she was being followed. She walked (Bess must live close), listening to her iPod and singing along, stopping every few yards to say hello and chat with someone. The hardest thing was how slowly she went. It really was freezing. But the cold didn’t seem to bother Mary, whatever she had said inside. She must have just been making conversation, which, I now observed, was something she loved to do.

At last we turned onto a little street with brick sidewalks and pretty little clapboard cottages. They were small, but modeled after the grander versions I’d seen around town. Mary walked up the path to one, a cheerful little yellow house with window boxes filled with evergreen bows. When she knocked, the door was opened by a woman in
her forties with short, straight brown hair. “Mom hair,” I’d heard Colleen call it. It was something between a bob and a bowl cut. Even without the yearbook, there was no doubt it was Bess. That face was still beautiful, pixie-like despite the lines, and kind. But like my dad’s face, it had lost the hope it wore in those old yearbook pictures. Her eyes were soft now, without their former spark.

I elbowed Charlie, in case he hadn’t come to the same conclusion, but of course he had. Mary handed the books and files to Bess, who nodded thanks. From where we were squatting, behind a low yew hedge, it was impossible to hear exactly what she was saying. But as soon as Mary was safely back on the sidewalk, Charlie and I made a beeline for Bess’s door so we’d get there before she closed it.

“Willa!” I called, to keep her from turning back inside. It was super weird hearing my mom’s name come out of my mouth. Bess turned, saw us, and looked puzzled. Charlie and I kept striding toward the door.

“Yes?” she asked as we reached the threshold.

“I’m Eliza Elliot,” I told her. “Willa’s daughter.”

Her entire body stiffened. She stood, frozen, still as a statue. For an instant, the crow’s-feet around her eyes seemed to flatten. She was a frightened kid all over again.

“The real Willa, I mean.”

That seemed to break the spell.

“And I’m Charlie Pender, Jimmy’s son,” Charlie stated.

When Bess was able to breathe again, I glimpsed her search of our faces, looking for signs of our parents hidden there. Had she kept up on island lore? I wondered. Did she know which of her old friends had married each other?
She stepped back with almost the same gesture her mother had used to let us in. Sighing, she ushered us into a warm sunroom off the kitchen and offered us coffee. A shy smile tugged at her mouth. The spark I thought had vanished forever appeared in her eyes. I glanced at Charlie, who was clearly as baffled as I was. Was it possible she wanted to get caught? She looked more like a kid than ever.

“Well,” she said playfully. “How is your mother?”

“You took her name,” I shot back. This was no game. I needed to know what had happened that night before we could chitchat about how much time had passed.

Bess stepped closer to me. The crow’s-feet had returned. Her eyes were slits. “I took her name to honor her. I miss her. I thought of her all the time after I left. So when I came to Salem, I changed my name to Willa to remind myself. She was my best friend.”

“And Prynne from
The Scarlet Letter
.”

She looked away. “Yes.”

“Don’t people ever comment on your name?” asked Charlie.

She laughed emptily. “You would think. Once in a while at the library.”

“Willa’s not so great, so you know. You asked how she is. Not great. First of all, she’s spent her whole life blaming herself for your murder.”

Bess’s jaw went slack. Her lips trembled. “What? Why?”

“Because she didn’t help you. She didn’t tell anyone about the letter. She didn’t go to The Slip with you.”

“That’s ridiculous!” Bess cried. “I told her not to tell. And I told her not to come that night.”

“She remembers it differently. I have her diary. You can read your whole story, if you like. But right now she’s being held under suspicion of your murder.”

“We need you to come back. Show everyone you’re alive. Get Willa released,” said Charlie.

Bess’s entire body shook now. She collapsed into a seat at the kitchen table. “No. You don’t understand. I can’t. I can never go back there. Not even for Willa.”

“Bess, your ‘death’ almost killed my mom. Literally. And now it’s all happening again. You have been living with her name all these years. You have to help her. You’re the only person who can.”

Bess stared down at her feet, shaking her head in a rhythmic motion of,
no, no, no
. We heard the jingle of keys in the door.

“Mother?” a voice called as the front door swung open. It was the young librarian. When she saw us, she stopped, and we all stared at one another.
Mother
, I thought. I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all she had been the one to call Bess and warn her. She met my eyes and I could see her scrambling for something to say. Then suddenly, she seemed to give up the effort and threw a half smile, arching one eyebrow. It was the “Who, me?” expression I had seen on my father’s face a thousand times. Bess nodded for the girl to join us and said to me and Charlie, “This is my daughter, Natalie.”

I looked at the girl, unable to respond, then a single word left my mouth in a gasp, like someone drowning.

“Pearl,” I said.

“Let’s all sit down and talk about this,” said Bess, once the four of us had recovered enough to move. It was hard to know what to do next.

“Natalie,” I said. “As in Nate.” There was no point pretending the elephant in the room hadn’t pulled a chair right up at the table with us. Bess nodded.

“As in Nate,” she said. Natalie shot me an almost embarrassed glance. I couldn’t read how much she knew about all this.

“That’s why you left,” said Charlie at last.

“That’s mostly why,” said Bess.

“But why fake your death?” he asked. “There must have been a simpler way.”

“I was going to tell Nate,” she said. “Right until the night he took me to the lighthouse, I was planning to tell him. I didn’t expect him to do anything about it. I had already decided to keep the baby, but I didn’t expect Nate to marry me or drop out of school or anything. Then he took me down there and showed me where they met. He was so
proud. He and Jimmy had just been initiated. I made my decision then and there. But I didn’t want to get Nate in trouble.” Her voice faltered for a moment.

“You loved him,” I said.

She swallowed and nodded. “And once I understood that he thought it was wonderful rather than horrifying—manipulating people, threatening them, keeping out anyone who was different, getting rid of the ones that got in your way—I knew there was no point telling him. So I just decided to go. I thought the letter, plus the hair, and painting the anchor on the door would be enough to expose them without it falling on Nate. Or Jimmy.”

“But no one got the reference about the hair,” Charlie said. “And no one found the letter.”

Bess shrugged. “There was nothing I could do about that. I couldn’t go back. Partly I think Mom threw them off by painting over the door. She didn’t like that part of the plan, because she didn’t want people thinking our house had been targeted. It made no sense, since we weren’t staying, but she was sensitive after my dad was killed. About feeling like an outsider. She painted over the anchor in the middle of the night, after I was gone. We had a big fight about it later.”

Charlie and I exchanged a glance. “That’s why some people said there was an anchor.” I said. I turned back to Bess. “How’d you get off the island?”

“Fishing boat from Gloucester. Old friend of my dad. I won’t tell you which one, so don’t bother asking. It was easy. Nothing was going on in the marina that night. Everyone was at the fair or at The Slip. I kept waiting for something
to come out in the news about the letter. I guess I hid it too well.”

Nobody spoke.

“It’s amazing it never surfaced before now,” said Charlie.

“There wasn’t much of an investigation,” Bess said bitterly.

I found that once I started looking at Natalie, I could not take my eyes off her. I studied her, feature by feature. Was her nose like mine? Like my dad’s? Anything about her eyes? Her hands? Something about the slope of her shoulder? While I did this, she kept looking at me too. She would look away, and then look back. But at least she didn’t seem angry. Just curious.

I wondered if she had grown up knowing about me or had thought of herself, like I had, as an only child. I was not the kind of kid who had longed for a brother or a sister. I had never felt like my family was missing something. And if I had occasionally imagined a sister, while bored and playing alone in the woods or on the beach when I was really little, it would not have been this grown-up, fully formed
woman
. She seemed so alien to me, with her placid brown eyes, her rosebud mouth and polished nails. But then, every few minutes, I would catch the flicker of my dad across her face.

“Natalie as in Nate,” I repeated out loud. There was no need for Bess to answer this time. “Does he know?”

“No,” she said, sounding a tiny bit defensive. There was a long silence. Even Natalie, reserved until now, squirmed.

“Bess,” I asked finally. “When my dad showed you the Society’s meeting place, how did he explain it? What was he expecting to have to do as a member?”

Bess looked uncomfortable. “He didn’t tell me. He
talked a lot about tradition, the island’s heritage and the honor of being invited to join. I didn’t know what he expected. But I knew what happened to my father.”

“You knew? What did happen?” asked Charlie.

“My Uncle Paul saw him go out with Jimmy’s dad and a bunch of other guys, his friends. Dad called them the ‘Yankee good old boys.’ They went out together, in two boats, and only one came back.”

“Didn’t Paul tell anyone at the time?”

Bess shrugged. “Let’s just say … he’s an unreliable narrator. And my dad was just unreliable in general.”

“Did they send him a black anchor beforehand?” I asked.

“They drowned him with one,” Bess said, her voice flat.

“I understand why you left and why you did it that way. But it didn’t stop the Black Anchor Society. And my mom really needs your help now. Plus, my dad should probably meet Natalie, don’t you think?”

“I can’t go back,” she said. She watched my reaction and Natalie’s, gnawing at her lip until I thought she might draw blood. “I’d like to help Willa. But I can’t.”

KAREN KNEW THE FISHING
boats in Gloucester, but she also knew the freighters, the ones Stone Cove Island used to bring food and supplies over. She reacted without much fuss to Bess’s decision—concession, really—then got on the phone and made a few calls. They weren’t supposed to take passengers on the cargo ships, but by 5
P.M.
that evening, we found ourselves on the deck of one, the
Marie Louise
, in the dark, pulling away from Gloucester Harbor. I could
see how much Bess dreaded going back, but I couldn’t read Natalie. She kept the same even expression as she watched the wake roll away behind the boat.

I USED TO TOSS
around the phrase “my dad will kill me” the way another kid would. But I never would anymore. Jimmy Pender might very well want to kill me—I couldn’t predict what my mom or Lynn Bailey would do. I was pretty sure I was doing the right thing, but it was going to be hell. I tried to be as brave as Bess and Natalie were acting. There was going to be a lot of anger on the island, when we showed up. Even those who weren’t guilty of terrible things had been tricked.

Charlie stood at the railing with me, shivering. “You okay? You want to go inside?”

I shook my head. The wind whipping through my hair made me feel focused, alert. And oddly, the smell of the sea air and gentle heaving of the boat soothed my frayed nerves. “What do you think your dad will do?” I asked him.

“He always manages to work things out so they go his way. He’s going to be mad for sure, but I’m not going to stick around for much of that.”

He was right, I realized. He only had about six weeks before Northwestern started, and he could always go back to Boston early if he wanted to before that.

“You won’t go right away, will you?” I asked.

“Not right away,” he said.

I turned to him. “Are you upset that he’s in the Society?”

Charlie thought for a minute. “I’m not surprised. Even before I knew about the Society, I knew he was in something.
The night we were in the lighthouse, I didn’t recognize his hands in the photos, but really, I didn’t need to.”

“Do you think your brothers know? Are you going to tell them?”

“I imagine they’re already part of it. I’m the black sheep, remember?”

“Baa,” I said. But the joke sounded halfhearted, even to me.

“Meanwhile, you have a sister.”

“Yeah. I don’t know what my parents are going to do with that information.”

Charlie shook his head. “How could you?” he murmured, squeezing my hand. “Really adds a wrinkle, huh?”

WE THOUGHT OF GOING
to Officer Bailey as soon as we arrived, but instead, we ended up going to my house first. After all, we owed it to Natalie. Her Natalie story was even bigger than the Bess story. And my father deserved to find that out first, whatever it meant for our family. We were mostly silent on the way, walking up the hill through the dark streets, until Bess spoke up.

“Part of the reason I left Willa was because I knew Nate would take care of her. I knew she’d be okay.”