I FLED FROM Rosita’s suite. As I ran out of the stairway door into the second-floor hallway, I nearly collided with Claire, staggering out of the bathroom as if the island were a rocking ship on the lake.
Quickly, I shoved my fingers under my glasses and dashed my tears as Claire wobbled to a stop. Her eyebrows popped up and she stared at me, glassy-eyed. “Oh! Are you all right? Has Rosita been mean again—”
The smell of whisky wafted on her breath. Yet she sounded genuinely concerned, and I remembered that there were plenty of times when Rosita could be too sharp with her cousin, could bring her to tears with a barb.
“I’m just weary,” I said. “Good night, Claire.”
I waited as she opened the door to her guest room, the room next to mine, and staggered inside. When her door clicked shut, I entered my bedroom, closed my door, collapsed into the sitting chair, and stared around.
Over the past year and a half, I’d personalized my room. I’d moved the furniture so that the sitting chair faced the door to the veranda. I didn’t need much storage. I’d brought one suitcase I’d hurriedly stuffed with clothing, and I’d been issued two maid’s dresses. So I’d taken out the bureau and replaced it with a small writing desk and chair pulled from elsewhere in the mansion. I fitted one side of the large wardrobe with shelves for books I borrowed from the library.
On my desk, I’d arranged a few items I had collected on the shore of the island. Rocks. Feathers. I had two photos side by side in a silver frame: one of me and Oliver. One of me and Levi—my younger brother—from when we were children, on our parents’ southeastern Ohio buckwheat farm.
I’d left behind all my other photos, even my wedding photos—well, perhaps especially those. I’d never asked what happened to the items in our rented house in Toledo after I’d been whisked away.
It would only take a few minutes to pack. In my suitcase, I could easily fit the items I’d brought, the feathers and rocks, a few mementos, my bird-watching diary. The maid’s uniforms I’d leave behind.
I went to my desk and opened my bird-watching diary. I wrote the day’s date—November 18, 1931—and made note of the birds I’d observed while spying for Rosita. Common and red-throated loons. Herring and ring-billed gulls.
Then I stared at the small bell hanging over my desk. The bell was attached to a cord, which ran up the wall, through a small hole in the floorboards, and up the wall in Rosita’s bedroom to a lever alongside her bedside table.
Why couldn’t you just take getting smacked, now and again, like a good little wife …
The words twisted knifelike in my mind, and my temple throbbed.
I jerked open the desk drawer, pulled out my scissors, and cut the cord. The bell dropped with a ding onto my desk.
For a moment, I indulged in the notion of her regretting her harsh words, ringing for me so I’d dash upstairs so she could beg my forgiveness, worrying when I didn’t immediately respond as usual.
Well, now I wouldn’t hear her summons. And, I promised myself, I wouldn’t give in to the temptation to check on her.
I went outside onto the veranda.
I liked the numbing cold. I savored having to myself the enchanting view of moonlight glazing the water’s surface. The waves crashed loudly on the rocky shore, a sign that the lake was more restless than usual. The wind drove snow into my face. This squall was a surprise, but the weather on Lake Erie—the most dangerous of all the Great Lakes—could change in an instant, especially in colder months. Soon Lake Erie would freeze over, thick enough for people to take automobiles from the distant Ohio shore onto the lake for ice fishing or take out iceboats—narrow vessels on large skate-like blades, like the one abandoned by the lighthouse dock—across the ice.
And yet, I thought of my swimsuit, now dry on the back of my chair, and imagined waiting until the first light of dawn, then grabbing my suit and running down to the lighthouse cottage by the southwest dock.
As I stared at the lake, I wished that I could leave right then, but navigating at night in this weather in a speedboat would be foolhardy. Yet I stood transfixed by the lake’s breathtaking, deadly beauty, each wave a shivering pinprick of time, together forming a mirror of sparkling eternity, reflecting back to me my isolation.
I prayed that the storm would pass by morning. If I left at dawn, I’d have a good chance of making it to the north shore of Ohio in an hour. I could run down to the dock with my suitcase in the morning, quickly retrieve the lockbox, change into my dry clothes, and then take the boat.
The five hundred dollars or so I’d get for the bullion I had stashed under the dock would be more than enough for a train ticket, or even an automobile. Then I’d head south. I knew just where I wanted to go.
And this time, I’d use all I’d learned since running away from Copperhead Holler five years before. This time, I’d be smart in starting over. Third time lucky.
I went back inside and shut the veranda door. The room was already several degrees colder, just from the few minutes I’d left the door open.
I knelt by my bed and pulled out my suitcase. The one item I’d left in it rattled. I opened the suitcase and plucked out the cigar box.
It had been my father’s—a simple cedar box, hinged lid with a clasp, engraved on the bottom Escalante Cigars, New Orleans. Inside the lid was a painted picture of a lady in a wide-brimmed hat, trimmed with a black ribbon and a pink silk flower. She had a delicate face—petite features, curly brown hair, bow mouth, blue eyes topped by thin eyebrows. She wore a V-neck blue blouse, modestly covering her round, soft shoulders, but showing just enough decolletage to suggest that all of her would be just as soft and curvy. Nothing like me—with my thick wavy dark hair, wide mouth, dark brown eyes and glasses, bushy eyebrows, taller and broader of frame than most women, with shoulders made strong and square first by farm labor and then by swimming. Above her picture was the name “Aurelia,” a cigar brand.
But to me, Aurelia was the woman in the picture. A properly beautiful lady, leading a genteel, sophisticated life. A persona and life I instantly longed for, far from the family farm I was growing up on when, at fourteen, I found it on my father’s workbench in the shed, tucked away under a mess of hammers and screwdrivers, the box used to hold nails and screws. I was helping Papa with some repair on the farm; I don’t remember what now. Levi, ten at the time, had just been diagnosed with epilepsy and my parents had decided that meant he had to always stay close to one of us, but couldn’t do anything too strenuous.
I was fascinated by the cigar box, its provenance as mysterious as Aurelia herself. My father never smoked. So when and where did he get this box? I knew he used to make occasional fishing trip vacations to Florida with his brother, though he hadn’t done that in years, after my mother declared such trips too extravagant—meaning she did not like being left alone on the farm with her kids. Even before Levi’s diagnosis, we both knew we were great burdens to her.
I couldn’t imagine where else Papa might have gotten a box of cigars. I knew that my mother would have been enraged by it, especially with the picture of a soft, delicate lady, when my mother was all hard angles and furrowed lines. I loved that Papa had kept the box as a treasure, even if just for nails and such, where Mama would never venture. It told me he had a hidden side far more intriguing than suggested by his grim, resolute silence around my mother, my brother, and me.
After a while Mama said I had to be a lady, that I could no longer help Papa with men’s work, or go fishing with Papa and Levi. Both Levi and I were banned from swimming down at the river. I needed to act presentable, she said, try to be nice to the son of the preacher at the little church we attended. Mama saw this as an excellent match.
But I had not taken a fancy to the boy. I dreamed of flying far, far and wide, away from that farm. Of exploring exotic places like New Orleans or islands in the Caribbean or cities in Europe or even the Far East. Places I’d read about in books I got from the library and secreted away—my parents would not have approved of such books—just as Papa hid away his cigar box.
One Sunday, Papa took Mama’s side, and I cried myself to sleep that night, then woke up from a nightmare of being locked in a cellar that slowly crumbled in on me. I snuck out to the shed, found the box, dumped its contents in an old oil can, then hid the box in my bedroom. My father never said anything about missing it. I began to fill it with fanciful items. A ribbon. A pearl button, fallen from a well-off townie-girl’s sweater at church.
On Trouble Island, I added the items that I’d pilfered—paltry compared to the bullion I’d found, but why not take them with me?
That night, I opened the box and added in the feathers and rocks from my desk. From inside the desk drawer: a sapphire clasp earring, a hatpin with the face of an angel, a handkerchief. Bits shed from the women I thought of as sophisticated. Genteel. Superior to me.
Maybe collecting those things made me a magpie.
But if so, I was a magpie who gathered items that represented a different future.
A soft knock came at my door.
I sighed. Claire. I had no interest in seeing her, but neither did I wish to anger her.
I opened the door to Seamus.