“YOU GOTTA BE wrong!” Eddie roared.
Henry gave Eddie a hard look, then pulled out his beloved Banjo lighter and a cigarette and offered it to Eddie, who took it with hands that I suspected shook as much from being upset as from the cold. Henry lit the cigarette, then took out one for himself. Eddie still breathed hard, his nostrils flaring, but he was calming down.
“You know I’m not, Eddie,” Henry said. “You know I don’t make mistakes like that.”
There was a clear bond between these two men. I was fascinated, and curious. I glanced at Claire, hoping to read in her expression whether she was as surprised as I was by how Henry spoke so directly to Eddie, by how Eddie accepted his candor. But she was sniffling and rubbing her hands together, apparently not listening at all.
“And you know I need to see for myself, see if there is some clue to Rosita’s disappearance,” Eddie said. “We’ll take this speedboat around—”
“Not safe enough for all four of us, not in this weather,” Henry said. Under the force of the intensifying wind, the lake was wild and choppy.
Claire groaned. “Oh, please take me and drop me off at the mansion.”
I frowned. Henry was out of breath, unsteady. “Henry should go with—”
“It’s fine,” Henry said.
I longed to go with Eddie and Claire because I wanted to see for myself the cut rope. Would I be able to sense, after all this time of serving her, if Rosita had been the one to cut the rope? I shivered, not just from the cold, but also from thinking of the rope I’d cut between the bell in my room and the handle in hers.
But I could not bring myself to leave Henry to trudge back to the mansion alone. He seemed so tired, weakened even as we all walked carefully on the icy ground down to the southwest dock. How different the lake was this morning, just twenty-four hours since I’d swum and seen the Myra approaching. I wouldn’t dare get in the frigid, choppy water, even in my modified suit.
And yet I thought longingly of the treasure I’d found the day before, tying it up under the dock. My heart panged. What if it had somehow loosed itself? But I’d tightly secured the fishing net—hadn’t I?
“All right, get in,” Eddie gruffly ordered Claire as we stepped onto the dock. It swayed from the force of the lake. The water wasn’t quite frozen.
Eddie didn’t even bother to offer Claire a hand as she struggled to get into the boat. “Not a strong woman,” Henry said to me quietly. “Like you and Rosita. Losing a husband, losing a child.”
Eddie got in next. Then Henry knelt on the dock and began unwinding one of the ropes from its cleat, and I did the same at the other cleat. A pang of guilt washed over me, as cold and relentless as the wind. Henry and Maxine—everyone except Rosita, Eddie, and Cormac—thought I was a sad widow, a role I’d played for over a year.
What would the others think if they learned I’d made myself a widow by killing Pony?
After we finished, Eddie furiously yanked the starter rope, then finally got the engine started and took off, the boat chopping up and down on the rough waves.
As they disappeared into the whirling snow, I said cautiously, “Henry, you’re sure the ropes were cut on the boat on the north dock?”
He gave me a sharp look. “Yes. All three.”
“I believe you, just—why wouldn’t Rosita unloop the ropes?” Cutting through thick cotton rope would take more time, more effort.
“Maybe,” Henry said, “because a cut rope makes it clear the ropes didn’t just come undone. It was intentional—by her or someone else. I never knew Rosita to be impulsive. At least not at first, back in Toledo.”
As we worked on figure-eighting the ropes back in place on the dock cleats, I thought again of my treasure tied up below, and gazed at the water, where the speedboat had just been. Would Eddie or someone bring it back?
Desperation suddenly clawed through my heart, up my throat, at the notion that they might not. The boat could remain tied up at the north dock. If so, when the time came, I’d have to get my treasure out from under this dock, dry off, and trek across the island to the speedboat. Not far in good weather, but if I was chilled, and the weather was fierce, it would be miserable and long. And would increase the chance of someone seeing me as I tried to make my escape.
After Henry and I finished securing the ropes, we climbed the slope in silence, and soon entered the thicket of trees just yards from the lighthouse, following the shortcut Claire had brought me and Eddie on earlier. The path was a blur of white and gray. As I breathed in the cold and focused on Henry in front of me, I wondered if taking the perimeter path would have been wiser. It was longer, more exposed to the cold and wind, but offered fewer risks of tripping on a tree root or rock.
Yet, there was beauty in the frozen limbs and dizzying twirls of snow, in the bright red winterberries popping out in the underbrush in contrast against the white-limned branches and bark, in the smell of the snow and pines and fusty leaves and dirt, in the rare trill and chirp of woodland creatures and birds.
Soon my thoughts whirled like the snow.
I imagined Rosita in the early hours, making her way to the north dock, knowing the shortcuts even better than Claire would have. Getting in the boat. Pulling out a knife. Cutting the rope. I thought of the bell rope I’d cut in my room. Of how the rope up in Rosita’s bedroom had been left purposefully coiled like a nest.
I felt certain she’d meant for me to notice the carefully wound rope, so I’d know she’d been aware that I’d cut the tie to the bell in my room. Likewise, she’d wanted whoever went to the north dock to see those ropes had been cut.
Both of us literally, and figuratively, cutting ties.
And then my thoughts drifted back to what Henry had said minutes before.
I cleared my throat. “How did you and Maxine end up working for Eddie and Rosita?”
Henry gave me a sharp look, assessing. For the next silent moments, I thought that would be my only answer. Finally, he said, “Eddie and I met years ago on a Lake Erie freighter, the S.S. Martin, Eddie a deckhand, me the second cook.”
Henry fell silent, as if he was considering how much more to tell me. Then he shrugged. “Eventually, we went to work for Eddie and Rosita in their Toledo mansion. We got paid well. We were treated well. I didn’t have to take any shift I could get, and made enough that Maxine didn’t have to take in washing or mending.”
That was it? He’d just told me so much more about his past than either he or Maxine had ever alluded to, and yet he’d skipped over so much—how had he and Eddie become friends on the freighter? How had they reconnected, and why did the Carmichaels—such a sweet couple—throw their lot in with gangster Eddie?
As I was considering how to best nudge Henry to share more, a crashing sound made us both stop. Henry said softly, “Stay still.” Henry’s words wafted back to me on the wind as he slowly lifted his shotgun.
A black bear emerged onto the path, just a hundred feet or so in front of us. She rose on her hind legs. She looked emaciated.
My huffing exhale, my pounding heart, suddenly seemed dangerously loud.
I braced myself for the crack of Henry’s shotgun, for the horrific crash of the bear falling to the cold, hard earth.
But Henry remained still.
Finally, the bear went down on all four paws and lumbered away into the woods.
We waited in silence. Despite the cold, sweat ran down my neck, pooled in my armpits, beaded on my upper lip.
Henry moved forward cautiously but kept his gun at the ready.
“Bears were hunted out of existence in Ohio about eighty years ago,” Henry said. “Some still live in the Canadian woods, though.” He gave me a look. “I wonder if she knows she can leave when the lake freezes again. Or if she’s been stuck here so long that she’s afraid to leave. She’s in the wrong place, at the wrong time.”
I looked away from him, down at my dark boots rising and falling in the snow. I wondered if, when he talked about the bear, he was really talking about me. Or about all of us.
“Anyway, I don’t want to shoot her if I don’t have to. She deserves a chance to escape,” he said.
We didn’t talk the rest of the way back.
A SHORT WHILE later in the mansion’s foyer, we had barely started to shed our coats and warm up when Eddie stormed in and said yes, the ropes had been cut at the north dock; the speedboat was gone. He’d found no clues.
“But it could be a trick,” Eddie said. “It’s the kind of thing Rosita would do, to taunt me.”
So over the next two days, even as the weather worsened into a mix of sleet and snow, Eddie made all of us—except Marco and Joey—resume our search so long as it was daylight. The same places, over and over: the Myra, the spots on the island where Claire and Rosita had played as children, throughout the mansion. Eddie seemed to believe Rosita was shifting from spot to spot on the island, like a wraith, and we just needed to catch her at the right moment.
Sometimes, I’d think I felt Seamus’s gaze upon me, and sure enough, when I’d glance his way, I’d catch him looking at me with concern or curiosity. We’d exchange quick flashes of smiles and I longed to get him alone to ask him what he thought of what was going on, or better yet, ask him nothing at all, but just pull him to me as I had the night after Eddie and his entourage arrived.
At night, Henry, Maxine, and I cooked and served up meals that would have been tasty, if anyone had been focused on pleasure, but that were miserable under the pall of Eddie’s obsessive fury. Instead we ate only out of need and in exhaustion: Eddie, Marco, Cormac, Joey, Douglas, Dr. Aldridge, and Claire in the dining room. Maxine, Henry, Seamus, Liam, and myself in the kitchen. After dinner, Douglas played jazzy tunes, but with a flatness that showed his heart wasn’t in it.
It was clear to me, to all of us, that Rosita was not on the island. Only Eddie insisted she had to be on the island somewhere, that she was just hiding.