The Tale of Halcyon Crane (10 page)

Richard, who in many ways was still my closest friend despite everything, was back in England by now, so there was nobody, not even a pet, whose life was hanging on my return. It seemed unbearably sad, sitting there in Will’s damp buggy, that I could have reached a certain age without accumulating any tethers.

I decided, right then and there: “I’m going to stay awhile, at least for a couple of weeks.” Madlyn’s house—my house now—was a tether, after all. I was tied to this place, if not by a living person then by her memory, and the memories of all the people who had lived here before. Including me.

“That’s great.” Will smiled sideways at me. “It’s been nice getting to know you again today. I’m glad you’re not going to hurry up and leave.”

I was glad too, suddenly.

“Since you’ll be staying a bit, we should talk about the issue of telling everyone who you are,” he said.

Ah, yes. I had forgotten, for the moment, that he had specifically warned me about revealing the fact that I was Madlyn Crane’s long-dead daughter. What had he said in that first phone call? There was a “situation” concerning the disappearance of my father and me, something islanders still remembered.

“I ran into a group of locals at the coffee shop today who gave me a less-than-royal welcome,” I admitted. “It was freaky. They looked at me as though I were a ghost.”

Will nodded his head. “Considering the resemblance, can you blame them? There’s something else, though. I’ve been wondering all day about how to bring this subject up. I should’ve said something earlier, when we were at the house, but I didn’t know how.”

The air between us thickened. “People aren’t going to welcome me with open arms,” I said. “I get that.”

Will shook his head. “It’s not that, not at all. They’ll welcome you just fine. It’s just . . .” He hesitated. “I’m having trouble finding the right words.”

“You’re starting to scare me a little, Will. What could be so bad?”

He stared straight ahead. “I think islanders are going to have some trouble digesting the notion that not so much
you
but your
father
was alive all these years.”

“You mean, because he . . .” My words were falling apart before I had a chance to say them. I tried again. “Because he took me away from my mother? I know she was a well-loved person here. They’ll be—what—outraged on her behalf? If that’s what it is, I can understand it, I guess. I agree with them, actually.”

Will shook his head. “No, that’s not it. Not all of it. I mean, people will certainly feel that way, sure. But what I’m talking about is something else.”

Silence, then. I felt a very sharp pain in the pit of my stomach that made me want to jump out of that buggy and run the other way. I almost did it, but I had nowhere to run.
I had to sit and listen to whatever horrible thing Will had to tell me.

“What kind of father was your dad?” he asked me finally.

“The best father anyone ever had,” I said, perhaps a bit too defensively. “Okay, all right. I know he
abducted
me. I have no idea why he did what he did, but I’m sure he had his reasons. And I’ll tell you this: He gave me an idyllic childhood. He worked hard to be both mother and father to me. I loved him more than you can imagine and, not incidentally, so did everyone he ever met in our town. He was a teacher at the high school. Three hundred people came to his funeral. I have enough casseroles and banana bread in my freezer from the wake to feed me for a year.”

Tears stung my eyes at the thought of my dad. Suddenly, I missed him so much. I had been focusing on my mother during this whole trip and had forgotten how alone my dad’s death—and, indeed, his illness—had left me. I turned my face away from Will.

“I’m sorry, Hallie,” he said. “I’m glad to hear you had such a great father, I really am. And, for the record, I never quite believed what people were saying about him. It just seemed wrong to me.”

“What people were
saying
? It was thirty years ago. How could it possibly still matter to people now? I mean, come on. Thirty years is a long time to hold a grudge.”

“Not about the murder of a child.”

“But I’m
not
dead, Will. Everyone will see—”

“Not you, Hallie,” he said softly. “Somebody else. Another child died just before you left the island. She died at your house. You obviously don’t remember any of it.”

For the rest of my life, I will be able to feel the physical impact those words had on my body. My senses went into overdrive. I became aware of, and felt swallowed by, the intense darkness outside the buggy. I heard the footfalls of an animal creeping its way through the nearby marsh. I could smell the dusty perspiration of the horse in front of us, mixed with the mossy, rainy air. And my whole body was tingling with dread.

I managed to croak out, “What did you say?”

Will sat staring straight ahead, holding Belle’s reins and shaking his head. “This is really hard. Even for a lawyer.”

I couldn’t respond. I was just hoping he would go on anyway. Thankfully, he did.

“Better you hear it from me, right? Better you know everything.”

I nodded, staring at him, wide-eyed.

He took a deep breath and cleared his throat. “Okay. I’m just going to say it. A girl died—was murdered—at your house, and all the evidence pointed to your father’s having done it.”

That’s impossible! It’s patently false. My dad didn’t even like to kill spiders, for God’s sake; he’d never kill a person, let alone a child.

He went on. “She fell from a third-floor window.”

An image began to form in my mind. A girl with long braids. A white dress. An open window. I was leaning out of it, looking down at the ground. I saw a body there, below. I didn’t tell Will about these images, or memories, or whatever they were. I said, “She fell? An accident, obviously. Why did people think it was murder?”

“The police found signs of a struggle in the room she fell from: lamps knocked over, the dresser pushed onto its side, things in disarray. The girl’s dress was ripped. And they found your dad’s fingerprints on the window and frame and his footprints around the body. And—” He stopped abruptly.

“What?”

“There were marks on her neck consistent with strangulation.”

I digested that remark in silence. It was impossible, all of it. My father might have faked our deaths, he might have abducted me and moved me halfway across the country, but he was no child killer.

“People think my father killed this girl?” I couldn’t believe I was even saying the words. “That’s ridiculous.” I was talking louder than I meant to. “Is that what she died of, then? Strangulation? Or did the fall kill her? Because there’s no way my father would strangle a child and throw her out a window. It had to have been an accident.”

“The fall killed her.”

I stared at him silently. He went on. “The police were about to arrest your dad when you two . . . went missing.”

I knew by his expression that there was more to the story, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear it.

“Most people here on the island thought he killed himself
and
you,” he said finally. “The way they saw it, his suicide was an admission of guilt.”

“Who was the girl?” I managed to say.

“Her name was Julie Sutton,” Will said quietly. “She was playing with you at your house that day.”

I could feel my lungs expanding, but I couldn’t get any air.
Julie Sutton
. The sound of her name created a deep black hole in my mind. I knew I should know her, remember her, but the hole swallowed up any memories that might have been there.

“She was a friend of mine?” I whispered.

Will nodded. “And mine.”

“Were you there, too?”

He shook his head. “I was on the mainland with my parents that day, or I certainly would have been with you.”

“But . . .” I couldn’t formulate words for what I was feeling.
A child killed at my house? A friend of mine? I was there?
I managed to say it: “Did I see it?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Nobody knew exactly what happened, where you were or where your dad was. But everyone assumed that, yeah, you witnessed the murder.”

I shook my head in disbelief. It couldn’t be true. It just couldn’t. Not my dad.

“Her parents still live here on the island,” Will continued. “They, like everyone else here, blame your father for Julie’s death. So now you can see why people aren’t going to be exactly thrilled to learn he escaped justice for his crime and went on to live the rest of his life in a little town north of Seattle instead of in prison.”

We rode in silence for a few minutes. I thought of one Halloween when my dad dressed up like a cowboy to take me, Annie Oakley, trick-or-treating. I thought of the concern in his eyes on the humid night I showed up on his doorstep, suitcases in hand, after I left Richard. I thought of his vacant stare the last time I saw him. And then I thought of my
mother, living on this island all these years with neighbors who believed her husband was a murderer.

“How did they treat her? My mother, I mean. After we were gone.”

“Truthfully, Hallie, I don’t know,” Will said to me. “I was just a kid myself. But she stayed, didn’t she? It probably has a lot to do with her long family history here. She was an islander. If I had to guess what happened, I’d say that people came around to believing she was just as much a victim as you were.”

My stomach contracted suddenly. “Stop!” I cried. “I have to get out. I’m going to be sick.”

As Will pulled on Belle’s reins, I leaped out of that ridiculous contraption onto the muddy road and ran, blindly, into the dark. After a few steps, I leaned over and vomited, my body shaking with the force of it.

And then Will was there, offering a handkerchief, saying a string of what I presumed to be kind words, but I couldn’t hear him. I sank onto the wet grass. My body physically couldn’t handle the possibility that my father might have killed that girl and then fled to escape prosecution. I thought my chest might actually rip open, that I might break in two. This is what it is to die of shock, I thought. I’m going to have a heart attack right here.

But I didn’t, of course. Will led me back to the buggy and helped me climb in. “Let’s get you back to the inn,” he said.

I didn’t want to go back to Mira’s prying questions. I knew she’d be curious about my meeting with Will that day. But I
didn’t want to go back to Madlyn’s house, either. I didn’t want to be anywhere on this island. Maybe my coming here was a mistake. I wanted to be the woman I was before this all began. I wanted to be Hallie James, daughter of Thomas James, the best father in the whole world.

H
e did take me back to the inn, of course. I had no other place to go.

“I’m sorry about all this, Hallie,” he said, as we pulled up outside the inn. I nodded. I hadn’t spoken during the rest of the ride home. “For the record, I never believed your father killed that girl. I knew your dad. I don’t think he had it in him.”

I didn’t know what I believed. I had been searching for a reason for my father’s taking me away from here, and now, by God, I had one. It made a disgusting sort of sense. And yet it just didn’t connect with the man I knew.

I climbed out of the buggy and stumbled on shaky legs. Within an instant, Will was at my side. “Let me help you inside, at least,” he said, wrapping a strong arm around my waist.

I leaned into him and put my head on his shoulder, allowing him to take me up the steps toward the front door.

“Have dinner with me tomorrow?” he asked. “And call me in the morning? Or come by the office. I really want to know that you’ve gotten through the night.”

“Okay,” I whispered, and tried to manufacture a smile. I don’t think it came off too well.

Will enveloped me in his arms, then, and I sighed into his embrace, closing my eyes and resting my face on his chest. He smelled of rain and kindness. “This is going to be okay,” he promised. “You’re in a hell of a spot here. People will be shocked, sure. But I’ll be by your side, standing between you and anyone on this island who tries to say one word against your father.”

I sighed again. Had I ever had as good a friend as this man I barely knew?

“I mean it, Hallie, I want to hear from you in the morning,” he said, and went off in his buggy, after waiting on the porch until I was safely inside.

Through what I fully believe was an act of God, Mira was not at home, so I did not have to face the questions I knew she would ask. I found a note saying she had gone out for the evening. The house was blissfully empty. Even nicer than that, a roast was warming in the oven.
Help yourself! See you at breakfast!
God bless her. I was starving. It was just after six o’clock, but it seemed much later. It occurred to me that I hadn’t eaten much since breakfast, only the scones and popcorn that we had had at Madlyn’s, which had ended up on the ground. I still had a metallic taste in my mouth. Suddenly, dinner sounded like a wonderful idea.

I went to the kitchen, made a sandwich from the roast beef in the oven, and took a bag of salad out of the fridge. Blue cheese dressing, perfect. Then I found a tray. I didn’t want a chance meeting with the returning innkeeper, so I decided to eat in my room. I teetered my way up the stairs, hoping I wouldn’t drop anything.