16

12-26

Dear Sharon,

I’ve done something awful. I hardly know how to begin to tell you about it. Once you’ve heard, you will surely want to add this letter to your other documents, but I beg you to resist the temptation. Burn it, Sharon, the moment you’ve read it.

In my own defense I can only say that I have not been myself—a complication that you of all people are bound to understand. I don’t just mean since the day of the killings. As I explained in my two previous letters, for better or worse I fashioned a new skin for myself when I was forced to abandon the old one. And I was comfortable in it, more or less, until today.

Furthermore, I hardly slept at all last night. While the adults were up and about, it was easy enough to imagine that we would be rescued. But after I had finished your letter and then one other, and everyone, including Dad, had gone to bed, I began to feel certain that no one would come to rescue us, that we would die here, from starvation—or worse, by the hands of some pirates who may descend on the island in numbers too large for me to even consider holding them off with my acquisition, the nature of which there is no longer any sense in keeping from you. I have a gun, Sharon. And today I used it.

Ida awakened me very early, before the sun had quite risen. She must have had the same kind of night that I did because her little round face was full of misgiving and her eyes, which are generally bright, were dull. “I think we should go to the beach now,” she whispered, “to see whether there are any boats about.”

I reached into my bag, found my pad and pen, and wrote, Should we go to the sound side or the ocean?

She considered my question over the paper cup of orange juice which she had brought into my room with her. Finally she said, “We should probably awaken the others. Then some of us can go to the sound and the others to the ocean. We’ll have to take matches and gather driftwood, then make a fire and pray it can be seen at some distance.”

I followed her into the kitchen where we found Goliath rummaging through the cooler. She retrieved the remains of the chocolate cake, put it on the counter, and began to break off pieces with her fingers. She was dressed only in a T-shirt and black cotton panties. “I’m going to wake up Charles and Ed,” Ida announced. “I think we should get out right away to look for boats.”

Goliath shrugged and stuck a chocolate-coated finger into her mouth. Ida went to knock on Dad’s door. “Right there,” I heard him say in a gruff, startled, sleep voice.

Rousing Charles was not as easy. Ida stood at the door and explained about the watches in detail. I was still in the kitchen, so I couldn’t hear his response, but it must have been negative because then Ida went into the room and closed the door behind her and a muffled argument ensued. In the meantime, Dad came in, rubbing his eyes with his fists. When he saw Goliath in her underwear, he coughed uneasily. Goliath only turned her back to him and continued to pick at the cake.

Charles came in with his arms crossed over his chest and a sour expression. He took a good long look at Goliath’s backside. Meanwhile, Ida got down on the floor and used one of our cartons to draw a map of the island, as best she remembered it from our nautical charts, which had gone the way of our vessel. Some parts of the island, she said, were too dense with foliage to be gotten through, but about a mile to the north there was a break through which a few of us could gain access to the beach. The others, she thought, should go to the sound, not to the place where we had come in, but to a place west of it where there was a point extending out for some ways.

“I’ll take the ocean,” Goliath said, her back still to us. “The sound’s too smelly.”

“Good,” Ida said. “Ginny and I will go with you and the men can go to the sound.”

“Wait a minute,” Charles said. “Maybe I want to go to the ocean.”

“Oh, Charles, be gracious for once,” Ida snapped.

So the three of us took half of the sandwiches that Ida had prepared before waking me and walked to the ocean. We gathered broken branches along the way and had the makings of a good fire by the time we arrived. We prepared it, but Ida thought it best to wait to light it until we actually saw something.

We saw nothing, Sharon. The beach was quite beautiful, but I was in no mood to appreciate it and am certainly in no mood to attempt to describe it now. Goliath, however, was so thoroughly impressed that she left Ida and me sitting on the sand and went off to gather shells in the plastic bag that we had brought along to collect our trash. We watched her go, her legs long in her cut-off jeans and her gait as jaunty as a child’s. When she had almost disappeared from view, Ida turned toward me and said, “He did sound like a man obsessed.”

I don’t think she was actually speaking to me. I think she was speaking to herself and just happened to turn her head in my direction at that moment. Yet, she looked so tragic sitting there in her pale pink sweatsuit with her arms wrapped tightly around her chubby knees that I decided a response was called for and placed my fingers gently on her forearm. She looked at me, her features scrunched up miserably. “I want to go home,” she whined.

I nodded sympathetically and then we both turned our gazes to the horizon. In fact, we were so preoccupied with the hazy wavering line where we hoped to see a vessel appear that we failed to notice what was going on in the foreground. A returning Goliath informed us. “Look,” she cried. “Dolphins!”

There were several of them, and it was a curious thing, in view of the rising tensions, to see them churning through the waves so playfully. My inability to appreciate them (there was a time when I would have gone out after them) only further depressed me. Goliath, who had been running, was breathless. “Aren’t they magnificent?” she exclaimed. She put down her bag of shells, spread her arms, and twirled, closing her eyes and inhaling deeply. Then she plopped down next to Ida and put an arm around her. Ida scrutinized her. “He did sound like a man obsessed,” she declared.

Goliath seemed confused for a moment. Then she got it. “Oh, that. I was only kidding him.”

“No, but you were right,” said Ida, a stream of tears running down her glossy round cheeks. “I know Charles. He’s a very linear thinker. Very logical. He’s not creative. He’s not one to talk about abstract concepts. The way he went on and on about how Ed should make his pirate woman obsessed, the way he groped for the words to express the extent of the emotion he thought Ed should endow her with.… well, that’s so un-Charles-like.

“He said that Ed should make her unable to sleep, that he should make her toss and turn and wander about the decks. That’s just what Charles does lately. I wake up in the middle of the night all the time and find that he’s not in bed. It’s occurred to me before, during these last months since we started having problems, that he might be having an affair. Everyone I suggested that to said I was crazy, that Charles would never do that to me. Now I know I was right.”

“Did you tell Charles you thought that?” Goliath asked.

“Yes, I mentioned it a few times. He got very angry with me and said I had a suspicious mind. I thought he must be right and hated myself for having such a flaw. But now that I know that he really is … involved … with someone, it’s a relief. You see, I’m not crazy after all.”

“Oh, poor Ida,” Goliath whispered, pulling her closer.

“I don’t want to be like this,” Ida sobbed. She bent her head and buried her face in her knees. “I don’t want to be this weepy woman, this mushroom. I just want everything to be the way it was.”

“There, there,” Goliath cooed. “It’ll all work out.” Then she bent forward, so that she could see me. Mushroom? she mouthed.

I shrugged. Goliath smiled and I smiled back at her.

“I told him that once,” Ida went on. “I told him that my well-being hinged on his love, and do you know what he said?”

“What, darling?”

“He said, ‘Love, love, love, Ida. You have a beautiful house, a job you like, and two healthy daughters, and all you can talk about is—’”

“Shhh,” Goliath said softly. “Don’t get yourself so worked up. He’s not worth it.”

Ida wiped her tears with her sleeve. “I’m going to rinse my feet,” she announced, and she got up slowly and began to walk toward the surf. Goliath, meanwhile, scooted over, so that we were side by side. To my surprise, she put her arm around my shoulders and squeezed. “Marshmallow, she must have meant,” she whispered.

Though I knew the color was rising in my face, I turned to look at her. Her face was so close to mine that I could see a light spray of freckles, which I had never noticed before, parading across the bridge of her nose. She smiled a delightfully wide smile. “Your father’s lucky. You’re a beautiful girl, willful, and one day you’re going to be a fine, strong woman,” she declared. Then she kissed me quickly on the cheek.

I turned away, stiff and embarrassed, but Goliath only laughed. “Let’s go down with Ida and stick our feet in the water,” she cried.

Our plan, Sharon, was to meet the men back at the house in the early afternoon and report our findings. As we approached, we heard their laughter. We found them in the kitchen, sharing a bag of chips and drinking beer. “Ed thought he saw a mermaid,” Charles declared.

“There was something sizable,” Dad replied. “It moved the grasses in such a way that for a moment—”

“Did you see any boats?” Ida interrupted.

Charles leaned back against the counter. “Oh, didn’t we mention that?”

“You saw something?” Goliath cried. “Did you light a fire? Did you get their attention?”

“Two young fellows in kayaks,” Dad said. “They came down from the island just to the north of us. They’re out now on the point having their lunch and resting up for the trip back. They promised to contact the Coast Guard as soon as they get there.”

“We’re saved!” Goliath cried. “Thank God! I was afraid I’d run out of cigarettes before we got rescued!”

Ida clapped her little hands together. “Oh, this is good news.”

“We told them to tell the Coast Guard to wait until morning,” Charles said. “That way we’ll still get our two nights in just as we planned.”

“There’s still the matter of the boat,” Ida muttered.

Charles threw a hand out at her. “Don’t worry about the boat, Ida. I swear, you’re never happy unless you have something to worry about. The boat will be found. And if it isn’t, well, that’s what insurance is for. Our worries are over. Let’s all go to the beach and frolic in the sun for a while.”

“I’m going back to bed,” Ida replied. “I got up awfully early this morning.”

Charles looked at Dad.

“I think I’ll work for a bit,” Dad said. “I had a few insights last night, into what it must have been like to live in the pirate community on New Providence where Bonny lived for a time. I want to get them down before I forget them.”

“Ginny? Rita?” Charles asked.

I shook my head and faked a yawn.

“I was at the beach all morning,” Goliath announced. “I’m going to check out the island.”

“Fine, I’ll go to the beach by myself,” Charles said.

Goliath disappeared into her bedroom and returned a moment later with the same cloth bag that she had had the first time I saw her. She slung it over her shoulder, opened the cooler, retrieved a beer and a hunk of cheese, and went out the door.

A moment later Charles left, carrying a beach towel, another beer, and the rest of the chips. Ida went to lie down and Dad went into the living room to set up his lap top.

I continued to stand in the kitchen for some time. I opened the cooler, but I didn’t see anything in there that I really wanted. I went into my room, took out my writing pad, and began a letter to you, but I realized I didn’t have very much to say. I went through my duffel bag next and retrieved the paperbacks I had brought from home. I read the review excerpts on the back of all three of them, and although they had seemed enticing enough in the store, I found I had no desire to begin any one of them.

I was feeling restless, Sharon, incredibly restless, so much so that it seemed to manifest itself physically, in my back and neck and shoulders. I realized that what I was experiencing was a hunger, a longing, one that I had not felt in so long that I nearly failed to recognize it. I put the books away, stuffed a towel into my shoulder bag, and hurried out of the house.

What I wanted, Sharon, was Goliath …, Rita … I wanted her companionship, her friendship, her warmth, her ability to see in me things I haven’t seen in myself for so long. You must understand: I’ve been invisible. Perhaps you’ll say I did it to myself, by taking a vow of virtual silence. I don’t know; it seemed necessary at the time. In any case, with Mom so preoccupied with her own problems, Dad so preoccupied generally, and my newest friend having treated me roughly (a matter for another time), and you and Terri gone from my life, and not a friend, not a soul …

Then that moment on the beach, Sharon, when Goliath put her arm around me … she touched something in me, and for a moment I escaped from the bubble that I have been living in, the bubble that I’d devised to protect myself.

I ran along the dirt path, breathless with my longing, exhilarated with my youth, free at last from my bubble, wanting to be reckless, like Goliath, to experience whatever might come my way, even if it hurt as much as …

… As much as it hurt to be there that day in the diner.

I ran with my mouth open, swallowing air greedily. Tears of bliss flew from my face. I went through a tangle of trees and caught, between their limbs, a glimpse of the sound. A cloud of terns was flying low above the water, their beaks pointing downward, their wings silver when they plunged, simultaneously, to strike their prey. It seemed a miracle, a thing of such great beauty that I thought my heart would burst with joy. The world made sense again, and I felt my blood pumping. My willfulness, which Goliath had discovered, seemed to emanate from my skin.

I thought I knew how it felt to be her.

The path forked, and I stopped to consider my next move. I was surrounded by low trees and I chose one and climbed up, standing so that my head protruded above the highest branches. The forest extended perhaps another fifty yards and then gave way to high grasses which became low sandy dunes and then the sound. Off to the southeast, I saw the kayakers, two lithe youths in bathing suits and hooded sweatshirts. One was smoking a cigarette, the other pointing at something in the water. I dropped down to a lower branch to watch them.

It was then that I heard Goliath’s voice.

I turned quickly, eager to drop from the tree and run to her. But I heard a second voice, Charles’s, and I froze.

They were coming along the path that I had taken. Intermittently, I could see the tops of their heads through the branches. “So when was this?” I heard Charles ask with an edge in his voice.

Quietly, I moved to a limb on the side of the tree opposite the path. I squatted there, my body tucked into a small ball. They reached the end of the path. There were only a few trees between them and me. “Last week,” Rita answered. “I told him I’d think about it. Can you see anything?”

“It’s not that far,” Charles answered. “But we’ll have to go through this mess first.”

“Well, let’s start,” Rita said.

“We’ll get all cut up.”

“So?”

“So … if we both come back cut up …”

Rita sighed. “Well, maybe we should head back then.”

“Don’t do this to me,” Charles said. “You’re so mercurial. You were the one who suggested this trip. You said we’d make lots of opportunities to be together. I didn’t mean that we should turn back. I only thought … Why’d you tell him you’d think about it, anyway? Why didn’t you just say no?”

“Because I am going to think about it.”

“Great. That’s just great. And how long do you imagine it’ll take you to decide?”

“I told him I’d let him know in a couple of weeks. And lower your voice. I’m not your wife.”

“Rita, just tell him no. You know you don’t want to do it. You can’t. We can’t go on like this otherwise.”

“Why? What’s the difference?”

“He’s my friend. That’s what the difference is. It’s one thing with you seeing him a few times a week, but if you’re living with him …”

“Oh, that’s funny,” Goliath said, “coming from a married man. You can have it both ways but we’re not supposed to.”

“Rita, please.”

“Please yourself. I won’t have you telling me what I can or can’t do. I’m not Ida.”

“No, you’re certainly not.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing, Rita.”

“No, I want to know what you meant by that. Just what do you want, Charles?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know,” he said wearily.

“Maybe we should just cool it for a while,” Goliath said.

“Don’t do this to me, Rita.”

“Yes, Charles. That’s what I think we should do. A couple of weeks. Until I’ve decided. You’re driving me crazy. I can’t make a decision about Ed when you’re giving me a hard time.”

There was a long silence, very long, perhaps five minutes. Then Charles said, “Okay, okay, maybe you’re right. Two weeks. Decide what you want to do about Ed and then we’ll work out our own affairs.”

“Fine. Let’s go back. I’m not having fun anymore.”

“And don’t come to work.”

“What do you mean, don’t come to work?”

“I mean for the two weeks, because that would only make it hard—”

“Does that mean you’re taking me off payroll?”

“Payroll!”

“Yes, payroll. I have to live, don’t I?”

“Rita, with the money I’ve been paying you—”

“If you take me off payroll, then I have no choice but to move in with him. I can’t pay my bills, Charles!”

“Is that what this whole thing has been about? Money? I can’t believe this!”

“You can’t believe this! I can’t believe this! You’re threatening me, aren’t you? You’re forcing me to choose between Ed and my job.”

“You’ve got other clients.”

“You know I make peanuts off of them.”

“Stop! Stop! I don’t want to hear anymore.”

“I won’t stop.”

Charles must have turned and begun walking away because Goliath yelled, “Wake up, Charles. You must have realized from the beginning that I was never going to feel about you the same as you did me. I didn’t make any secret of it. I never exaggerated the way I felt!”

I dared to peek. I could see the top of Charles’s head at some distance. He was running now.

“If you take me off payroll,” she went on, shouting, “I’ll tell everyone. I’ll tell Ida and Ed everything! Better yet, I’ll put you in a position where you’re forced to tell them everything. I’ll make you sorry you were ever born!”

I heard branches snapping, and then Goliath appeared right beneath me, scurrying around trees, slashing at twigs with her hands, muttering to herself. When she cleared the trees, she stopped, and seeing the kayakers, began to run in their direction. “Hey,” she yelled, her arms flying. “Hey, you!”

They had just been sliding their boats into the water, but they heard her and looked up. When she got close, they pulled their boats back onto shore. Then the three stood conversing, Goliath turning to point inland, probably toward our house. The taller of the two men pointed at his kayak. Goliath went over to it, looked into it, and said something more. Then the young man shrugged and held his kayak steady while Goliath climbed in. He got in behind her, a snug fit, to say the least. Then the boats pulled away from the shore, the lone kayaker moving gracefully, swiftly, while the other, the one with Goliath, had to break his stroke continually so that the paddle could be lifted over Goliath’s head. Finally, she took it away from him and began to paddle herself.

I reached in my bag and took out the gun. You see, Sharon, in my mind, Goliath had not only betrayed Ida and my father, but me too, in some sense. I had counted on her to save me; I had thought that she thought me worth saving. But this was a woman who had flattered a man into paying her a great deal more money, apparently, than her work deserved. If she had flattered me, I realized, it was for a reason. After all, I’m not beautiful and willful, am I? I’m a skinny little girl who looks like an eigth-grader, friendless, loveless, and afraid of my own shadow.

I aimed the gun at her. I held it steady until she rounded the point and disappeared from my view. Then I lifted my arm, pointed the gun straight up into the cloudless sky, cocked it with my thumb, and pulled the trigger.

I was dazed, Sharon, lost first in the reverberation of the shot and then in the silence that followed. Somehow I managed to climb back down the tree. I started back up the path and was halfway to the house when I saw Ida and Dad running towards me. Dad’s eyes were moist, something I had never seen before. “Ginny! Thank God!” he cried. He lifted me off the ground. “We heard the shot from the house,” he said, his hands gripping my shoulders. “Do you know what direction it came from?”

For reasons unknown, I pointed toward the sound, to the place where we had come in on the boat. Dad turned to look. “Take her back to the house,” he ordered Ida.

“Be careful, Ed,” Ida called after him.

Charles was in the living room, sitting motionless on the edge of a chair. He looked at us when we came in. “Ed went to look,” Ida said.

Charles slowly turned his head away. Ida sat down and lit one of Dad’s cigarettes, something I had never seen her do before. None of us spoke.

Dad came back a hour or so later. “I didn’t see anything,” he lamented. “No boats, nothing. I walked all around the end of the island.”

“It must have been the kayakers,” Ida offered. “Maybe they shot at a duck or something.”

“It couldn’t have been them. If they shot and then jumped right in their boats and headed out, they couldn’t have gotten around the other side of the point in the time it took me to get out there. They’d have to have been in a speed boat to move that fast.”

“And no sign of Rita either?”

“No.”

“Oh my God. I hope she’s all right,” Ida cried.

“She has to be all right,” Dad replied. “I’m telling you, there’s no way that anyone could have left this end of the island without me having seen them. And if Rita had gone to the other end of the island, Charles would have seen her when he went to the beach. They left the house virtually at the same time.”

Dad sat down hard, in a chair and hung his head. “Rita has a gun,” he said softly. Charles looked up abruptly. “I have no reason to think she brought it here with her—she keeps it in her apartment, in case of burglars—but she may have. She may have taken a shot at some animal, though God knows why she would do that.”

We sat in silence, in the four chairs. My bag was on the floor, resting against my ankle. I imagined that I could feel the heat of my weapon on my skin. It made me uncomfortable. I got up, put the bag in my room, and returned to the chair again. “It’ll be time for dinner soon,” Ida mumbled. She forced a little laugh. “Knowing Rita, she’ll be back in time to eat.”

“You don’t know Rita,” Charles said slowly, cruelly.

Ida and Dad looked at him. Then they looked at each other. “Excuse me,” Ida said, and she went to her room and closed the door.

Darkness came. Dad took a lantern and went out to look for Goliath again while Ida and I started dinner on the hibachi out in the yard. We could hear him calling her name, more and more faintly as he moved farther from the house. Charles stayed in the house alone, in the dark. Ida had fed him a tranquilizer, to divert the anxiety attack that she feared was coming, and left a lantern beside his chair before coming outdoors, which he hadn’t bothered to light.

You may be wondering at this point, Sharon, why I didn’t just tell them, if not what I’d done, at least that Goliath had gone off with the kayakers. Had I been thinking more logically, I might have. But it was beyond my powers of reasoning at the time to see how things might turn out or to guess what was in Charles’s mind.

Dad returned and the three of us ate while Charles remained indoors. Ida said, “Suppose the person who shot the gun lives on the island? That would explain why you didn’t see a boat leaving.”

“I thought of that,” Dad answered. He put his arm around me and some of the juices from his hamburger dripped down onto my sleeve. He noticed and released me again. “It’s possible that someone’s been holing up here, a criminal, an escaped convict or someone, and that Rita saw him and he, thinking he’d been found out, took a shot at her. That’s possible.”

“Oh, God, Ed!” Ida cried.

“However, it’s not probable,” Dad said quickly. “Like I said, she has a gun. It’s more likely that she fired it and that now she’s hiding.”

“Why should she do that?” Ida asked in a shrill voice.

Dad stared at her, considerering his response. “I think the answer lies with Charles.”

“What do you mean?”

He leaned forward and placed a hand on Ida’s knee. “Ida, I don’t know how to say this to you—”

“Don’t say it then, don’t say it,” Ida cried. “I don’t want to know.”

Suddenly there was a scream, a loud bloodcurdling shriek. Dad jumped up immediately and ran to the house, with Ida and me just behind him. We found Charles in one corner of the living room, speechless, pointing towards the back rooms. Ida grabbed me and dragged me behind one of the chairs, pulling me down beside her while Dad made a quick search. “Nothing there,” he said when he returned. Ida exhaled deeply.

“It was her,” Charles cried. In spite of the tranquilizer he was quaking badly. “It was her ghost.”

“It’s time to talk, Charles,” Dad said.

Ida lifted her fists and ran at Charles, beating him on the chest. “Did you shoot her? Did you shoot her?” she cried.

Dad moved forward and took hold of Ida’s shoulders. Sobbing, she turned toward him and he wrapped her in his arms. Charles watched with something akin to horror on his face.

“Charles didn’t shoot her,” Dad whispered. “Remember, Ida? He was just coming into the house when we heard the shot? Do you remember that?”

Ida nodded. Dad waltzed her over to one of the chairs and made her sit down. Charles, in the meantime, was turning his head slowly from side to side, searching, I suppose, for Goliath’s ghost. A scampering sound came from the kitchen and Charles gasped. “A mouse, Charles,” Dad said disgustedly. “Now sit down.”

Charles sat. Ida put her arms out for me and I went and squeezed into her chair beside her. Dad began to pace. “What happened, Charles?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I was just coming in. You said so yourself.”

“What happened, Charles?” Dad said much louder. “There may be some kind of criminal on the island. Our lives may be in danger. Rita may be lying out in the forest somewhere, hurt. Or she may have shot off her gun because she was angry. You have to tell us what happened.”

Charles began to talk then, Sharon, with his head dangling, so that it took an effort to hear him over Ida’s continual sobs. Listening to him reveal his secret made me feel justified in having kept my own. How else would Dad have learned the truth about the woman he had intended to live with or Ida about the man she had married? Charles’s confession, reluctant, garbled, and veiled as it was (he mentioned nothing about Goliath’s salary), was an absolute necessity.

He concluded his story, and for awhile we all listened to Ida’s crying. Finally Charles whispered, “She said she would do something to force me to confess.”

“Well, Charles,” Dad responded, “I hate to offend you, but I find it hard to believe that a girl like Rita would shoot herself over you, if that’s what you’re thinking. I think it’s more likely that she shot the gun off to make you think she did and that she’s hiding somewhere now, perhaps in one of the other cottages, having a good laugh over what she imagines is going on over here. I can’t speak for Ida, but for my part, I’m glad all this is out in the open.”

Ida stood up so suddenly that I nearly fell out of the chair we had been sharing. “Let’s look for her. I want to find her and kill her. We’ll bury her here. No one will ever know.”

Before anyone could comment, she collapsed onto the chair again and resumed crying.

Later, Dad took a lantern and went to search the cottages. Charles, meanwhile, went to bed, and I sat up with Ida, who simply could not stop crying. When Dad returned, Goliath-less, of course, and saw the state Ida was in, he suggested she go and get one of Charles’s tranquilizers. Ida said she would rather die than go into his room. Hearing that, I got up myself, as I knew where the pills were. I had seen her fish out the one for Charles earlier, from a flowered case in her duffel bag. Supposing that Charles would be asleep after all this time, I didn’t bother to knock. He wasn’t asleep though; he was just getting up, and when I pushed on the door, we collided. I rushed past him and grabbed the duffel bag. As I was turning with it, he asked, “Did he find her?”

“No,” I said.

He put his hand over his eyes and returned to bed.

We put Ida to bed in Dad’s room, and Dad is on the second cot in mine. Since I don’t hear any snoring (I’m writing to you from the floor in the kitchen), I assume he is still lying awake. Charles is not sleeping well either. I know that because every now and then I hear him gasp. Once he even yelled out, “No!”

There is a part of me, although a small one, that feels pity for him. I know very well what it is to have your dreams peopled with demons and ghosts.

Why am I telling you all this? you probably want to know. Well, here’s what will be causing my nightmares tonight, if I ever calm down enough to go to sleep: Goliath will likely tell her escorts not to bother about the Coast Guard, that she’ll go and tell them about us herself. But will she? What’s to stop her from simply finding her own way home and forgetting all about us. She must realize that everyone here has turned against her. What has she got to lose? As we’ve already seen, she has no conscience, Sharon.

So I will go to sleep tonight, if I am able, with the same concerns as last night. We may starve here. You may never hear from me again. In the event that my letters are found, along with our bodies, and forwarded, you, at least, will know what really happened. Someone should know the truth. You, being its servant, are the ideal choice.

Lovingly,

G.J.

P.S. Tell my mother that I love her and that I forgive her for the way she treated me before I left.