Boar Island Page 27

  “That I have. I’d been camping out in the old wing of the house, the one seaside.”

  “Walter was our ghost, remember, Mom?” Elizabeth asked.

  Heath nodded. A story Anna would have to hear later. Clearing his father’s name, and his own, to get his fishing license back might have struck Anna as a silly piece of teenage posturing in another place. In Maine, once the Whitmans’ licenses were suspended, their trap line would have been farmed out to another fisherman.

  Chances were good Walter had worked with his dad and granddad since he was old enough to mend traps. He’d probably apprenticed for two years under his father to get a license. Lobster fishing might very well be all he knew and all he wanted to know.

  “You’ve been living on Boar and watching the water at night?” Anna clarified.

  “That’s about it,” Walter said.

  “You were watching last night,” Anna said.

  “I was. I saw a boat I’ve seen before. A small dark-colored outboard. Both times before, I lost it. Weather once, and once it was just plain too dark to see where it went. It has no running lights. There are three green LED lights near the bow, but they’re no bigger than that.” With his thumb, Walter indicated the tip of his little finger. “And they aren’t bright. Decoration maybe. Whoever owns the boat dives at night. Robbing traps is my guess. Last night, there was some light and the seas were calm. I saw that same boat coming onto the line of traps, so I rowed out as close as I could without them noticing me.”

  “Muffled oars,” Anna said.

  “That’s right, and their engine noise to cover for me.”

  “More than one?” Anna asked.

  “This time there were two in the boat. Last two times just the one. I saw them throw something over the side. I figured they were up to something, so I pulled out what they’d tossed in.”

  “My exceeding good luck,” Anna said. “Which way did they go?”

  “They came from the north up by Schoodic, and headed down toward Somes Sound when they left.”

  “And you were stuck with a very strange catch,” Gwen said.

  “Odd things get thrown in the ocean,” John said.

  “Anna is an odd thing,” E said.

  “You put me on the lift?” Anna asked.

  “I knew the bell would wake up Elizabeth, and I knew her great-aunt was a doctor,” Walter said. “I suppose I could have stayed, but I couldn’t see what use it would be to anybody.”

  Anna thought about that for a moment. There was really no point in his staying. Her desire to dislike young Walter was slowly being overwhelmed by warm cozy feelings.

  “Why did you tie me down to the cargo ring?” she asked in a last attempt to find fault with the boy who stole Elizabeth’s heart—and kidnapped Wily.

  “So you wouldn’t fall off,” he said simply.

  The tail end of Anna’s dislike vanished like a snake down a hole. All in all, she was glad to see it go. Disliking people was labor intensive at the best of times, and today wasn’t the best of times.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  There had been little more either John or his grandson could tell them. Anna had been wrapped in black plastic—either a bag or a sheet. Walter had torn it open. The plastic had been lost at sea. If there was anything in the bag with her, he hadn’t noticed. Nor could he tell them any more about the mystery boat than he already had.

  The Whitmans left for Bar Harbor, promising to look for the dark boat on their way into town. Walter promised he’d call E in the morning.

  Elizabeth was positively wriggling with delight at having her beau outed and approved. Walter seemed as pleased as she to be out of the shadows. Another point for him.

  Anna held out no hope the Whitmans would find the runabout that had nearly served as her hearse. Not only had it been headed in the opposite direction—Somes instead of Bar Harbor—but there were coves and jetties, private boats and commercial, in a thousand places in the waters around Acadia. Small, dark-colored, outboard—didn’t narrow it down much.

  The lift bell had barely rung, lowering the Whitmans to the jetty, when Gwen had a blood pressure cuff around Anna’s upper arm. “A friend of a friend, a doctor at Mount Desert Hospital, was more than kind. She ran the tox screen on your blood. A heavy dose of Rohypnol and a muscle relaxant. You should be feeling better by tomorrow, almost your old self,” she told Anna.

  That was good news. Anna had been doped once, and once slipped LSD. By good fortune she’d never been given anything highly addictive or—so far—fatal.

  “I wish rufies were harder to come by,” Heath said. “If you pay attention to the news, it seems there are more date rape drugs than sex ed classes in most school districts.”

  “I’d hate to have a daughter in this day and age,” Anna said.

  “Ah, but you do,” Gwen murmured.

  That was another drawback when it came to children. One got fond of them, and then they went speeding away in a convertible with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and no seat belt.

  “Have you yet seen fit to share with Heath why you didn’t want the medical establishment or law enforcement called?” Gwen asked as she pumped the rubber bulb tightening the cuff.

  “She did,” Heath said. Heath was sitting in Robo-butt near the cold hearth, one hand idly playing with Wily’s right ear, the other holding a glass half full of bourbon-and-water.

  “Murdering me doesn’t make sense,” Anna said, feeling the slight claustrophobia the tightening of a blood pressure cuff always gave her. “I’ve been trying to work it in with the cyberstalker and/or the Duffy murder—not because either makes sense, but because they are the only items of interest I’ve been involved in since coming to Maine. I think I might have a better shot at getting to the bottom of it if I remain dead for a while.”

  “A hundred twenty over seventy. Better than most twenty-year-olds,” Gwen said, deflating the blood pressure cuff. “I can see wanting to stay dead—no one pesters the dead. But won’t the Acadia people wonder where you are? Aren’t you acting chief ranger?”

  “I called in sick, told Peter what I was up to. We argued. I won,” Anna explained succinctly.

  A cell phone played a few bars of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” “That’s mine,” Gwen said. “Would you get it, E?”

  Elizabeth picked up the phone. “It’s Mrs. Hammond,” she said, passing the phone to Gwen, who sat on a stool at Anna’s side.

  “Dez,” Gwen said into the phone. Her face went tight and tired. Without the burning energy within, her flesh pulled down. Pouches showed beneath her eyes. Shadows hollowed her cheeks.

  Shangri-La, Anna thought as she watched her friend aging in front of her.

  “Okay,” Gwen said. “Okay. Let me know if I can do anything. Soon as it comes in, I promise. No, I don’t doubt it either. It’s a crying shame, that’s what it is. Call me tomorrow?” Gwen pushed the OFF button but continued to stare down at the phone.

  “What is it?” E asked.

  Anna knew it was death. Death masks weren’t just for the dead. Many times she’d seen them slipped onto the faces of survivors. Gwen wore one now.

  “Chris died today, while Dez and I were in Bar Harbor,” Gwen said.

  Heath rolled over and put her arm around her aunt. E knelt on Gwen’s other side and laid her head in her lap. Gathering of warmth and strength, being enfolded in the arms of loved ones, Anna knew, was beneficial for most people, so she watched in respectful silence. Wily, probably feeling sorry for her because she was not exactly of the human race, jumped up beside her on the sofa. A pain-filled whine let her know what the thoughtful gesture had cost his old injuries.

  Gwen sniffed and rubbed her eyes. “It’s not as if Chris and I were close. For the past twenty years it’s been mostly Christmas and birthday cards, maybe a call now and then,” she said after blowing her nose. “It’s not a surprise. Chris—and Dez and I—knew she wasn’t going to live to a ripe old age. It’s just that the timing couldn’t be more tragic.”

/>   “Because she was so young?” Heath asked. To Anna she said, “She wasn’t even sixty.”

  “Fifty-seven,” Gwen said. “Had her first heart attack at fifty-four.”

  “Is that usual?” Anna asked.

  “More so now than it used to be, what with obesity, blood pressure drugs, and so on. Chris wasn’t obese. She had a weakening of the vessel walls in her heart muscles. Every doctor has a theory, but none of us agree—not that I know much about hearts over the age of ten.”

  “Is that what you and Dez met about? Ms. Zuckerberg’s health?” E asked. As for Anna, Chris was just a name to Elizabeth.

  “No. Worse in a way. Because we were out, Dez wasn’t with Chris when she died. That will be hard on her. They’ve been together over fifteen years,” Gwen said. Sighing, she moved from the stool to a comfortable armchair. “I could do with what you’re having, Heath.”

  “Anna?” Heath asked as she rolled toward the kitchen where the bourbon bottle lived.

  “No more drugs for me in this lifetime,” Anna said.

  “Lesbians?” E asked.

  “Why does everybody have to be a lesbian!” Gwen snapped. “They became friends when they were girls. Dez was the maid here when the babies were born. After Dez’s husband died, and Chris’s health started to go, she came to live here with Chris. Lesbians! For heaven’s sake. Can’t anybody just be friends with anybody anymore?” Gwen grumbled.

  Heath rolled back in with an obviously much-needed bourbon. Anna had never seen Gwen irritable. The pediatrician’s mood was always so bubbly Anna occasionally wondered if she prescribed a little something for herself.

  “This baby thing is new,” Heath said. “Until we got to Boar, I didn’t know Chris had children. I didn’t know she’d ever been married.”

  “You said she didn’t have kids,” E said accusingly.

  “So I did,” Gwen admitted. “That was an attempt to keep you out of more misery and keep Chris’s secret. I failed at both. It’s been a long day. Now that Chris is gone, I guess her old secrets can’t hurt her. Chris never married, but she did have children. Forty years ago—forty-two now, I guess—when Chris was fourteen, she gave birth to twin girls. Here on Boar Island. I was the doctor. It was my first paying job out of medical school. Her mother—a witch spelled with a b—didn’t want anyone to know her daughter had gotten pregnant. Because Chris was a minor, the witch didn’t need her consent to give the babies up for adoption—or so she said. There was enough family money to make her right, no doubt.

  “A few years ago a couple of things happened. First, Chris’s mother finally had the decency to kick the bucket—Chris had never gotten free of her, not really—and Chris had her first heart attack. That was when she decided to find her daughters if she could.”

  “Nearly sixty and still afraid to admit she’d had twins when she was fourteen?” Elizabeth asked. “People now would be going on talk shows and writing books about it.”

  “Not Chris. From age eleven to age thirteen, Chris was molested by their rabbi. When she became pregnant, she told her mother. Her father tried to beat the truth of who the real father was out of her. Her mother packed her off to Boar Island with only herself and a maid—Dez, all of twelve years old—for company,” Gwen explained.

  “Her own mother didn’t believe about the rabbi?” Elizabeth asked. “What a rat.”

  “Worse,” Gwen said. “Her father didn’t believe her, but her mother knew she was telling the truth. The rabbi was beloved and rich and the witch didn’t want to damage her own social standing by crying ‘Pervert!’”

  “Did she find her daughters?” Heath asked.

  “Three or so years ago she put an ad in the papers, you know the sort of thing—seeking identical twins separated at birth, would now be thirty-something, legacy involved,” Gwen said. She took a swig of bourbon and held it in her mouth for a moment before she swallowed. Anna took over the task of fiddling with Wily’s ears.

  “She didn’t get an answer to that ad, or the next one, or the one after that. Assuming the girls would have been adopted out locally, and quietly, and without any paper trail, Chris only put ads in papers around this area,” Gwen told them. “All of a sudden, last week, somebody answered an ad from a while ago. Chris was so excited. Not a good thing when your blood vessel walls are disintegrating. She insisted that Dez and I go meet with the woman—Dez to question her, me to get a DNA sample if the woman was willing.”

  “You’d have to,” Anna said. “The word ‘legacy’ should have brought out every greedy woman for miles. I’m surprised there were no responses to the first ads.”

  “Mainers are a decent people,” Gwen said.

  “When they’re not shooting each other for poaching,” Anna whispered to E, who’d joined her and Wily on the sofa.

  “I took the sample, a cheek swab, but Dez and I think she’s legitimate—”

  “Not literally,” Heath said.

  Gwen frowned at her, then went on. “Other than the bleached-out hair, she is the spitting image of Chris when she was in her early forties: same color eyes, same overlapping front incisors, same oval face and straight eyebrows.”

  The description tugged at Anna, but she let it pass. After being drugged, bagged, and dumped, a little paranoia was surely normal.

  “How did she know she was a twin?” E asked. “I mean if they were separated at birth and all that, you wouldn’t know, would you?”

  “That was the only fishy part,” Gwen said. “We asked her that same question—though believe it or not, neither one of us thought of it at first. She said she had recently found her sister, but she wouldn’t tell us who it was, or if the sister knew about our meeting—nothing. Though she seemed like a good woman, if on the naïve side, I couldn’t help but wonder if she planned on sharing the legacy with her twin, and of course she has to. Chris needs to give them both the news. Needed to.”

  The sun was low over Mount Desert, knifing into the room in a wedge of rich coppery light. Gwen squinted into the shaft of dancing motes for a moment. “Chris died. Damn. She will never get to see her daughters—not even one of them. It just makes my heart ache.”

  “What’s the legacy?” E asked. Anna had been wondering the same thing but had become too civilized to blurt it out at the graveside, so to speak.

  “Boar Island, this house,” Gwen said. “There isn’t much left in investments, but I imagine one could get a pretty penny for a private island off the coast of Acadia National Park. The historic value of the lighthouse would be worth something, I would think.”

  “Jeeze, yuh think?” Heath mocked gently. “I bet this rock would be worth millions of dollars to some rich New Yorker who wants a six-thousand-square-foot summer cottage to use for a couple of weeks each year. Not a bad legacy. Juicy enough to want to steal it from your sister.”

  “That’s the good news part of the legacy,” Gwen said, then sighed again, more deeply this time. “The bad news is that their biological father—”

  “The child molester the witch was so into protecting,” Heath butted in.

  “Died of Huntington’s disease,” Gwen finished.

  “Shit,” Heath breathed. Gwen shot her a reproachful glance.

  Elizabeth stared at her mother, then turned to Anna. “What’s the big deal? He was a pervert. Who cares if he died? It’s not like they’d want to look up dear old Dad for the holidays. I sure wouldn’t.”

  “Huntington’s is hereditary,” Anna said. “There’s a fifty-fifty chance the child will have the disease if one parent carries it.”

  “It is a terrible disease,” Gwen said. “Pitiless. It’s a neurodegenerative genetic disorder, which means the nerve cells in the brain break down. There’s a whole host of symptoms ranging from loss of motor control to severe psychiatric disorders and dementia.”

  “Gosh,” Elizabeth said. “You’d think they’d know they had it already.”

  “Most people start showing symptoms in their late thirties and early forties. Som
etimes it manifests earlier or later, but if you didn’t know your family history, you might not know what was happening to you,” Gwen told E. “That’s what Chris was worried about, that they wouldn’t get medical care if they had it, or that, without the money from the sale of Boar, they couldn’t afford it. A person with Huntington’s can live twenty or more years after the first onset of symptoms, getting progressively worse and worse.”

  “Is there anything you can do about it?” Heath asked.

  “Not much,” Gwen said.

  “Then who’d want to know they had it till they had it?” E asked.

  Anna suspected she wasn’t so much asking anybody in particular as demanding answers of the universe. Why would anyone want to get tested? A fifty percent chance of no longer worrying about it. Why would anyone who wasn’t worrying about it want to know?

  Gwen answered E’s question. “There are some drugs that show promise. There’s also the issue of safety to self and others.”

  “Driving,” E said.

  “Gas stoves, matches, babysitting, getting lost, knocking over hot coffee, the whole gamut of dangers, and we haven’t even gotten to psychiatric issues,” Gwen said. “At some point it becomes unsafe not to seek medical care.”

  “My biological father is dead and I don’t know his medical history,” E said. “Could I have it?”

  “You could,” Gwen answered slowly. “But you’re more likely to get cancer or pneumonia or hydrophobia. Huntington’s is rare. If you’re going to dwell on it, I’ll get you tested.”

  “You don’t have the gene,” Heath said. “Your father died in a motorcycle accident when he was fifty-five, remember?”

  “Right,” E said, sounding relieved rather than sad. Anna was unsurprised. E’s father had been absent since she was eighteen months old. “Did you tell her—the daughter?”

  “We didn’t. Chris wanted to do that,” Gwen said. “Now Chris is gone. I’m afraid the twins do have the gene. This poor woman seemed to have some cognitive dysfunction. We had to repeat ourselves. Sometimes she appeared confused, unnaturally docile.”