Boar Island Read online

  “We’re here.” Paulette let go of Denise’s hand. The connection broken, for a second Denise felt as though she were falling, falling and freezing. It was only a dream: the twin, her soul, the Acadian blond barfly. All of it. A dream. A wail rose in her throat, as lonely as the howl of the last wolf on earth. The sound of fumbling, the scratch of a match being lit, then a flame that, born into such a lightless universe, hit Denise’s eyes with the force of a supernova, aborted the cry.

  Her sister was there. No dream. Tears began to flow again. No paroxysms of grief or wrenching sobs, only warmth and joy in liquid form. Fleetingly, Denise remembered a self that was not given to emotion, a self made stoic by life. No more. In the past months emotions came in sudden overwhelming waves. These were the first that didn’t threaten to tear her apart.

  Paulette lit an old kerosene lamp she took from beneath a rusted overturned bucket, adjusted the wick, then handed the lamp to Denise to hold. They were standing at the door of a small shed. The eaves cleared Paulette’s head by less than six inches. They would have to stoop to pass through the door without banging their skulls.

  By the light of the lamp, Paulette found a short piece of dirty frayed string caught in a crack between two pieces of weathered siding. She pulled it out to reveal the key tied to the end.

  “There are so many park visitors, folks would be wandering in all the time,” she explained as she turned the key in the padlock that secured the door. “Visitors don’t seem to know what’s public land and what’s private.”

  “Or care,” Denise said.

  Paulette pushed open the door, stepped inside, took the lamp, and held it up so Denise could see the room. Bitterness vanished. Delight took its place. The room—the entire house—wasn’t more than a hundred and fifty square feet, roughly twelve by twelve, and the ceiling closer to seven feet than eight. On each of the four walls was a large many-paned window, the mullions, frames, and sills clean and painted white, the glass old, from back when glass had ripples and imperfections in it. The walls were painted soft gray, the color of a dove’s breast, and hung with pieced fabric stretched over wooden frames, the bright bits of cloth making flowers and mountains, trees and ponds.

  On the worn planks of the floor was a simple rag rug. A white crib with a small stuffed bear looking through the bars, a three-drawer chest painted China red, a round table with a lamp of the same color, and a rocking chair completed the nursery. Nothing fussy, nothing out of place, everything clean and necessary and beautiful.

  As Paulette closed the door behind them, Denise walked around the room. The windows weren’t windows at all. Frames with glass, sills, and half-pulled shades had been mounted on the wall. Behind them were paintings of a forest, much as it might look were the windows real and she was looking through them in the early morning. Shafts of sunlight slanted through dark trunks. The shadows of leaves dappled a small green clearing. Wildflowers surrounded a granite boulder. A bunny grazed fearlessly on new grass.

  “I didn’t dare make any changes to the outside,” Paulette said. “Kurt doesn’t come back here, but when people can look in, they can break in, and will. And if Kurt did come this way for some reason, I didn’t want to call attention to this old shed.”

  “He’d ruin it,” Denise said. It wasn’t a question. She knew he would as if she’d been with Paulette each time he’d made a wreck of what little beauty she’d managed.

  Denise reached over the bars of the crib and laid a finger between the stuffed bear’s ears. Though she’d never had much in the way of toys—at least not new ones—this one felt familiar to her.

  “Kurt’s a monster. A big fucking monster,” Paulette blurted out.

  At the outburst of obscenity, Denise turned to her sister.

  Paulette laughed and covered her mouth the way Denise had done until Peter told her it made her look childish. Childlike, she thought as she watched her twin. Childlike and charming. Another thing Peter had taken from her.

  “I’ve never said that out loud before. Awful as it is, it felt good to say it. Isn’t that weird?”

  Denise didn’t know what to say. It wasn’t weird. Not at all. None of this was weird. All of it was exactly how it should be. That was what was weird.

  Paulette sat in the rocking chair and let Denise explore the small ornamental boxes, the few books, the fabric art. “When I got pregnant the first time, I bought all these wonderful things for the baby’s room. Then, you know, I lost the baby. Kurt said I had to take them back if I’d bought them, or sell them on eBay or whatever if they’d been gifts from my mom and dad—they were still alive then. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I dragged them all back to this shed and told Kurt I’d given them to Goodwill. He half beat me to death for not getting any money for them. The second time I got pregnant, we got a few more things. Not as many. Mom and Daddy had passed. They were pretty old when they adopted me and died within three months of each other.

  “I did the same thing with the new stuff; told Kurt I’d given it away. After that, I used to come out here and kind of fix things up, thinking it would be a nice place for the new baby. I got my nursing degree and started working at Mount Desert Hospital with newborns and infants.”

  “A nurse!” Denise was pleased. Another thing they had in common: nurse/ranger. Both were jobs helping people.

  “When I found out there weren’t going to be any more babies,” Denise said with a shrug, “I just sort of kept on coming out here to get out of Kurt’s sty for a while and remember who I am.”

  It was easy to forget who you were, Denise thought. She’d forgotten. No, she and Paulette had not forgotten who they were; who they were had been taken from them and thrown into the garbage. Forever, Denise had thought. Now here it was, her true self, with her sister’s self, in an empty nursery in the woods.

  “Peter’s baby’s name is Olivia,” she said without thinking. “Olivia Barnes. The name I got was Castle. Now you’re Duffy. What was your name before that?”

  “Mallory, Paulette Mallory. The Mallorys adopted me. They were good people.”

  “Then when we’re together, I won’t be Denise Castle. I will be Denise Mallory,” Denise said, and they both smiled.

  Paulette stood, the chair still rocking as if her ghost remained behind, and walked over to a small painted table between windows half open on an imaginary forest. “I had time to get used to the idea of us, remember me saying that?” She didn’t wait for Denise to answer, as if knowing that, of course, Denise remembered. Miracles tend to stick in memory, and everything about finding a twin sister was miraculous. “I felt you, but then these started appearing in the newspapers in the personal ads. I’ve only found three. They could be in papers in Bangor and Portland and other places. We only get the local stuff. I’ve never bothered to try and do a search. I wouldn’t know where to begin. Here.” She handed Denise a clipping from a newspaper. It wasn’t much bigger than the slip of paper found in a fortune cookie. “That one I came across four years ago and for some reason just cut it out and kept it.”

  Denise turned the bit of newsprint toward the lamp and made out the blurred message. Seeking identical twins, female, born on the sixth of March and separated at birth. They would now be thirty-seven years of age. Urgent they contact me. Family legacy. If you believe you may be such a person send a postcard to P.O. Box 1597, Post Office, Bar Harbor, ME.

  “March sixth, our birthday,” Paulette said.

  “No name or zip code,” Denise said.

  “This one was from year before last.” Paulette handed her another scrap. The message was the same but, this time, included a zip code. Still no name. “And this is from January this year.”

  “The legacy,” Denise said. Her brain, unable to absorb so much so quickly, had slowed to a crawl for the moment. “It would be money, wouldn’t it?”

  “Or maybe a house or land, like that,” Paulette said.

  “Our birth parents, do you think?” Denise asked, not sure whether she would be overjoy
ed or furious if she were ever to lay her eyes on her birth mother or biological father.

  “Maybe,” Paulette said. “Or another relative.”

  “A lawyer,” Denise said, unwilling to have any more relatives at the moment, wanting to be just sisters alone in a magical cabin in the woods. “We’re the right age, aren’t we?”

  “And female and twins and separated at birth. How many can there be?”

  “You’d be surprised,” Denise said, remembering all the studies done on identical twins separated at birth.

  “Born on the sixth of March? Girls who would be forty-one years old now, thirty-seven when I found the ad,” Paulette said. “The babies must have been from around here, or who would run the ad in a tiny town like Bar Harbor?”

  Before Denise could think of another reason the ad wasn’t for them, the sound of sleigh bells or wind chimes leaked into the room, tinny and cheap.

  Paulette pulled a cell phone out of her pocket and looked at the face of it, then up at Denise.

  “It’s him!” she whispered with all the terror of a trapped bird. Denise could hear her sister’s frantically beating wings inside her own skull.

  “I have to answer,” Paulette said pleadingly.

  Denise nodded. Of course she had to answer. If she didn’t, Kurt would kill her.

  Denise sat on a tiny chair with a rattan seat and a cavalry trumpet carved into the top slat on the back, a perfect, plain, lovely chair for a child, and listened as her sister made excuses for not being in the house when her husband called the home phone; listened to her lie about where she was and who she was with; watched tears roll over Paulette’s cheeks, and the way her lips curved down as she rocked herself, begging him not to be mad, promising to be at the house next time.

  When she was finally able to hang up, she let the hand with the phone in it fall as if lifeless beside the rocking chair.

  “Kurt really is going to kill you,” Denise realized suddenly.

  Paulette nodded. “I’ve felt it for a while. He hasn’t said anything, and hasn’t hit me much, and not real hard. But I know he’s planning on killing me and burying my body under the house. When he looks at me I can see it in his eyes as clear as anything. I can see him thinking about how he’s going to get the shovel and hide it under the house so it will be ready.”

  Denise had spent her life in law enforcement. There was no evidence Kurt was plotting murder. He hadn’t said he was. He’d laid no concrete plan. Yet Paulette felt it, saw it in his eyes, and believed her husband was planning to murder her.

  Denise did, too. She, too, could see it.

  This seeing of things hidden wasn’t new. It had been growing for months. Change had crept into Denise around the time the park was informed Lily was pregnant with Peter’s child. Though subtle, creeping, the change was in both mind and body. Her body responded with small betrayals of the kind that had let the lobster escape. Her mind responded by focusing ever more sharply, by knowing—sometimes—what was in the minds of those around her, just as she now knew her sister believed Kurt would kill her, and knew that Kurt, her brother-in-law, did, in fact, plan to murder his wife.

  Paulette was her identical twin. Denise knew without asking that she, too, had come to see things that others had hidden in their hearts.

  “Kill him first,” Denise said, and was mildly surprised that the idea was not shocking. Killing Kurt Duffy was no more than a simple act of self-defense.

  “They’d know it was me. Everybody knows he beats me. Not that they care. They’d know it was me. I’d go to jail forever.”

  “Not if you had a solid alibi,” Denise said.

  NINE

  “Everything is so green and blue,” Aunt Gwen said for perhaps the third time. Her red curls as wild as Medusa’s snakes in the wind, she was yelling over her shoulder to Heath. Robo-butt, with Heath in it, and Wily grinning on her lap, was firmly lashed in the aft of a small outboard motorboat piloted by a gruff cliché of a New Englander. At least seventy, maybe older, he smelled strongly of tobacco and bay rum, had a couple of days’ worth of beard, squinted from a leathery face, and clenched an unlit pipe in his teeth. Central Casting couldn’t have done it better, Heath thought.

  Aunt Gwen sat in the seat next to him, no doubt charming the pants off Matthew. Luke? Something biblical and manly. Elizabeth, her back toward the rest of them, perched on a gunwale to Heath’s right, her mouth set in a rigid line that added years to her face. The rest of the boat’s limited deck space was piled with the women’s luggage.

  Anna had been sent to Acadia several days earlier. Left in Boulder, Heath felt childishly helpless and exposed without her friend. It was embarrassing. A big chunk of the eleven days since Heath found E in the bath with the Lady Schick had been spent getting ready for this trip. The other chunks had been spent watching Elizabeth turn from the compassionate, resilient girl she’d watched grow up to an angry, whining teenager, whom she felt like she didn’t know.

  Who she sometimes felt hated her.

  The change depressed and confounded Heath. E wanted to escape the bullying, yet seemed angry and afraid to leave it behind, as if, unattended, it would metastasize until the cancer destroyed her life. The promised solitude had gone from a reprieve to a prison sentence in the girl’s mind. In Heath’s as well, on bad days. Like this one. Only Gwen had maintained her optimism. It had been temporarily damped by the news of her old friend Chris’s heart attacks, and finally a stroke. The sadness was touched, Heath guessed, by a fear of her own mortality; Chris was sixteen years Gwen’s junior.

  No one was equipped to fight invisible monsters, Heath realized. Monsters of the Id or the Internet. The kind that worked in the dark, unknowable, motives as twisted and murky as eddies in a polluted river. Creeping poisonous fog that insinuated itself through the cracks of the mind.

  The kind Anna couldn’t shoot and E couldn’t run from.

  “That be Boar,” the pilot said. He lifted an arm and pointed with a hand that looked to be carved from an old oak tree. Arthritis bent his little finger at the second joint, poking it out to the side at an odd angle.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Elizabeth said.

  “It’ll be fun,” Heath insisted with more determination than faith. The island was right out of The Count of Monte Cristo, or some other nineteenth-century romance. It looked like a broken molar thrust a hundred feet up from the ocean’s surface. In the cavity of the jagged tooth, protected by a rugged cliff to the northeast, was the house they would be staying in for the foreseeable future. As luck—bad for Gwen’s friend, the island’s owner—would have it, it was unoccupied for the present. Chris was recuperating—or dying—in a medical facility in Bangor.

  Heath hoped the house would prove less forbidding than the land it rested atop, and their sojourn there more salubrious than that of the former occupant.

  The boat pulled neatly up to a stone jetty. The pilot turned off the engine, then, line in hand, jumped nimbly onto the jetty to tie the boat off. Wind keened around the granite base of the island. None of them spoke; Heath, Gwen, and E were staring up a fifty-foot cliff, steps carved into the stone.

  “John, are you sure this is the right island?” Gwen asked the pilot. John Whitman, Heath remembered.

  “Yup.”

  “This is not happening,” E said.

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” Heath asked.

  “Didn’t ask,” John said.

  “Anybody mind if I shoot your pal Chris?” Heath asked.

  “Ms. Zuckerberg is ailing.” John said with mild rebuke. He tied a second line to secure the stern of the boat. Wily hopped from the boat to the jetty. Not hopped—his hopping days were behind him; scrambled was more like it.

  John scratched Wily behind the ears.

  “I think I might be able to do the stairs on my butt,” Heath said. “Might” was the operative word. Leah had grudgingly given her permission to bring Dem Bones, but she was not to use it anywhere there was salt or damp. Not all that us
eful under the circumstances.

  “Slippery as eel snot if there’s any wind. And there’s always wind,” John said around the stem of his pipe, which he was lighting.

  “That’s insane,” Elizabeth said. “This whole thing is insane.”

  “You could lose your balance and be killed,” Gwen said.

  “That would take the fun out of it,” Heath admitted. She didn’t have the kind of money it would take to stay in a hotel. The airfare had just about cleaned her out.

  “Does this mean we get to go back to Boulder?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Can you spell ‘stalker’?” Heath wasn’t going to let E anywhere near anywhere until she found out who was stalking her. The police didn’t much care about cyberstalking—or, more probably, hadn’t a clue what to do about it. Private detectives charged a fortune, and Heath doubted they could do anything she couldn’t do if she put her mind—and Gwen’s and Anna’s—to it.

  All she needed was three things: to know E was safe, a Wi-Fi connection, and time.

  “This place has everything we need. I’ll just carry my butt up those stairs, and we’ll be moving in,” she said firmly.

  John puffed on his pipe and said nothing.

  Wily watched with the somber attention of a fan at a tennis match.

  “It’s too dangerous, Heath,” Aunt Gwen said.

  “Could we just not do this?” Elizabeth whined.

  “Can’t be as hard as it looks,” Heath said with the desperate good cheer she’d taken to injecting into the platitudes she seemed incapable of avoiding.