ROSITA’S DOOR WAS ajar.
Alarming.
For since Rosita permanently came to Trouble Island six months after my arrival, and ensconced herself in the third-floor suite, she always kept it closed. Locked.
Soon after, she ordered me to get a suite key from the groundskeeper, to keep the key safe, and to use it only in an emergency, though Rosita never defined what “emergency” might mean. Sometimes, especially in the middle of long, dark nights, my imagination conjured possibilities: fire, a horrific storm, Rosita falling or dying.
Our routine since Rosita’s withdrawal to the suite was simple: I knocked on Rosita’s door, she opened it, I entered. Everyone else knew never to come to the third-floor suite. Only I was to ascend those stairs. Only I was to attend to Rosita.
But that morning, I panicked and rushed in, crying out her name.
Her expansive suite filled the whole of the third floor. A master bedroom with a bathroom on the west end of the suite, mirrored by another bedroom on the east end that had once been a nursery and playroom but that was now shut off; shortly after Rosita arrived, she’d had a lock added to the door. She was the only one with a key.
In between the bedrooms, a sitting room that was larger than the main floor of the two-bedroom house I’d once shared with my husband in Toledo.
As I stood in that room, breathless, my gaze skimmed over ornate red velvet love seats, leather chairs, mahogany tables, Persian rugs. Then finally rested on Rosita, standing before the French door to the veranda, her slim back to me.
As always, Rosita wore a black mourning dress and veil and mules, her attire revealing only her slender ankles, her delicate hands and wrists, peeks of alabaster skin that evoked the white quartz headstone in the graveyard. Beside that headstone was a berobed, bronze angel, wings spread wide, gazing heavenward, a dove just starting to take flight from the palm of an outreached hand. Rosita stood just as still as that angel. As if perpetual mourning would somehow resurrect her son.
On the dining table just to her right, I spotted the tray I’d brought up much earlier, bearing her usual coffee and poached egg and dry toast—all untouched, by now cold. My own empty stomach flipped—guilt rather than hunger. Was Rosita’s disdain for her usual breakfast in response to my betrayal?
I scanned the table for the note I’d slid under Rosita’s door.
Dear Rosita, I’d written in the wee hours, I’ve become ill this morning and must take to my bed. However, I’ve prepared your breakfast and left it outside the door. My apologies for the coolness of the coffee. Ever faithfully yours, Aurelia.
I did not spot my note, but her red leather-bound diary caught my eye. Not having seen it since she came here, I’d assumed it had been left behind with so much else in her Toledo mansion. My eyes prickled at a brief flash of memory. She never let me read her diary, of course, nor did I try to get a peek. But she’d give a coy smile before closing it and putting it aside, and say, Just recording Oliver’s antics today! And then recount something cute or new or funny that the McGees’ son Oliver had done.
I hadn’t been aware that she’d brought the diary with her to Trouble Island. Why had she brought it out that morning?
But I didn’t spot the note. Maybe, in a moment of pique, she’d torn it up or burned it in the fireplace. I shook aside my fretfulness over how Rosita might judge me for breaking our routine and blurted out: “Eddie’s boat—it’s coming!”
“Rather late in the season.” Rosita’s voice dripped with bitter amusement. We were well out of the season for visitors.
“Not the speedboats.” Those brought legal whisky to this southernmost dot in Canada’s territory. Sometimes the bootleg bounty was deposited at the hidden dock in a cove on the island’s northern edge, the section of the island where the gravel path did not extend; other times, the speedboats came to the southwest dock, and the cases were stored in the old lighthouse cottage. Sometimes it was directly transferred onto one of the island’s two speedboats, which then sped off to the north shore of Ohio. There never seemed to be a pattern or set schedule other than that these operations took place at dusk or in the dark.
“The Myra,” I clarified, half whispering.
The Myra was Eddie McGee’s personal yacht, named for his mother, though Rosita had told me that Eddie was orphaned at a young age and barely knew his mother. Sometimes, though, we revere those who have gone before us, imagine we know who they would have been, how they would have felt about us, had they lived. May through October, the Myra brought people either indebted to Eddie, or those he was indebted to. People eager for a stay on Trouble Island. Or people like me.
“The blue flag is up,” I added through my chattering teeth.
Rosita stiffened further. “Well, then.”
The blue flag signified that one or both McGees were on board. It had not flown since the last time the McGees arrived on the island, thirteen months before, in October 1930, when Rosita made it clear she was staying for good. The hoisted flag could only mean one thing—Eddie was back.
Rosita turned. I could feel her gaze, even through the black veil. She gestured at me. Asked with only impatience—no concern or surprise—“Why?”
She meant why was I wet, shivering, barefoot, in my swimsuit and a man’s jacket? I wished I could see Rosita’s eyes, decipher why this, given my news, was of concern. Once, I could easily read her—or, at least, so I thought.
But I doubted I’d be able to read her expression. The last time I’d seen her face, I’d observed only a slack, dull canvas. Flat, deadened eyes.
I pushed up my glasses, sliding as cold water rolled down my forehead. In the warm mansion, my lenses fogged, and I longed to give them a good swipe with the hem of the jacket, but that would have exposed too much. My swimsuit was modest enough for being in the water, but vulgar in the mansion.
Instead, I carefully composed my face, certain that Rosita could still read me. That was one of Rosita’s greatest talents, reading in others what they thought they had hidden behind a careful smile, a forced laugh, an arched eyebrow. She’d taught me much of that art, but I will never become the master that she so naturally was, of showing little but seeing all.
I offered the whole truth with the fewest possible words. “I went down to the dock by the lighthouse. To swim.” Suddenly, my nose dripped.
Rosita retrieved a handkerchief—clean, neatly pressed, and folded, as I always ensured—from her dress’s cuff, and tossed it onto the table. It landed on the red leather diary.
“On such a cold morning? A man’s jacket as your only cover-up? Were you with Liam?”
I grabbed the hankie and shook my head as I wiped my glasses. I nearly laughed at the suggestion. Dear, glib Liam, who rarely spoke except to monologue about his archaeological explorations between his work duties, who otherwise whistled tunelessly. Then I patted my nose. I crumpled the hankie in my fist. I’d launder and press it later before returning it.
“Surely not Henry?”
“What? No!” I said. Henry was old enough to be my grandfather. Then I realized she’d shifted from shaming to teasing me—almost like she did in the old days. Before—everything.
“Oh, then Seamus, of course.”
My first reaction was to blush.
Seamus Grover, the newest bodyguard. He’d come to the island mid-September, a little more than two months before. We’d flirted from a distance ever since: lingering glances, quick smiles that hinted at possibilities.
But then, as I further considered Rosita’s suggestion, my eyebrows rose. Ensconced in her suite for the past year, seeing only me, Rosita could not have met the new bodyguard. I’d had no reason to mention him, and so I had not.
From the veranda, Rosita watched people, heard them call to one another. If only they would look up, they’d spot her standing there. People rarely did.
Maybe she’d noticed Seamus. Been drawn to his casual confidence, his relaxed good looks.
A flash of jealousy deepened my blush. Rosita moved swiftly to me, drew her forefinger down my cheek in a slow graze. “Oh, my dear. We’ve discussed this. Haven’t you learned not to put your stock in men?”
“I crossed his path on the way back from— Oh, what does that matter now? Eddie will be here in minutes! What do we do, Rosita?”
“First, get on a robe, lest you catch a cold.” Rosita impatiently waved toward her bedroom.
I hesitated. We were long past the days of sharing clothes. But she shooed me on.
In the bedroom, I took off Seamus’s black-and-red-checked wool hunting jacket and put it on the bed. I tossed the handkerchief into the laundry hamper, then stripped off my odd one-piece swimsuit.
I certainly didn’t pack a swimsuit before my rushed, last-minute transfer to Trouble Island. I’d found the black ribbed-wool suit left behind in the women’s bathhouse and took it for myself. I modified it so I could swim in colder months, treating the suit with linseed oil to make it stiffer and more water resistant, adding tight-fitting sleeves and legs from a black oilcloth table covering I’d found in the old lighthouse keeper’s cottage by the southwest dock.
That morning was meant to be my last swim of the year in the frigid lake water. The suit pulled at my skin, leaving red marks around my chest and at the top of my shoulders, and my skin itched miserably from having kept it on so long in the cold.
As I wrung the suit out as best I could in the sink, I glimpsed myself in the bathroom mirror—my wavy shoulder-length hair now in dark straggly strands grazing my collarbone, my brown eyes so wide they seemed to fill my black-framed, thick round lenses, my face pale from the cold, yet my neck and cheeks flushed bright red. I looked like a strange bird who’d fallen from the sky into the lake, then pulled itself out and flopped, bedraggled, onto the rocky shore.
I was tempted to grab Rosita’s brush to pull through my hair, or the bottle of Veronal, a sleeping sedative, to take one of the pills to calm my jangling nerves.
But Rosita had only given me leave to wear one of her robes. From the wardrobe, I selected an olive-green floor-length velvet. As I pulled it on, my body immediately took to its warmth, my skin remembering what such fabrics felt like during my brief years in Toledo. Fabrics I’d never known in my youth on a farm in southeast Ohio, which had offered up only rough cotton and burlap flour sacks, stiff and scratchy like my childhood itself.
I knew I should hasten back to Rosita, but as I rolled up my swimsuit in a towel, the frantic morning caught up with me. I deposited the swimsuit and towel next to Seamus’s jacket and then I wearily sank into the chair by the window and stared down at the cemetery, which held only two headstones. A shared one for Rosita’s grandmother and grandfather. A small one for little Oliver, the angel statue overlooking the spot where he’d been laid to rest at just five years old.
I’d never caught Rosita sitting there, but as I sat I realized that the rough-hewn spare chair from the kitchen was perfectly positioned for a view of the cemetery. How often had she sat there? I wondered. Why had she demanded a spare kitchen chair, though there were so many comfortably upholstered chairs to choose from? Did she prefer discomfort as she stared down at the cemetery? Was it enough for her to gaze at his grave? Or, I wondered for the first time, did she ever leave her suite to visit?
As far as I knew, she’d never deviated from the plan she’d put in place thirteen months before: she would remain in her suite, and only I was to attend to her.
With Eddie nearly upon us, I pushed aside those concerns. I rushed out to the sitting area. Rosita had flung open the French doors and stood out on the veranda. Cold air swirled into the suite, portending a bitter winter.
I jumped at a sudden caw—Largo, a lovely blue-and-yellow Hahn’s macaw who doesn’t like the cold.
I grabbed a throw from the divan and tossed it over Largo’s cage. I whispered, “I will bring you water and food later, good girl.”
“Good girl, good girl,” she mimicked.
Despite the fraught situation, I smiled. Largo is the only creature who has ever called me a “good girl.”
I went out onto the veranda beside Rosita. I nearly yelped from the cold of the floor against the soles of my feet. I stared past the fountain, down to the dock, and then beyond to Lake Erie, vast and sparkling under the midmorning sun.
For a moment, Rosita and I stood side by side, equals as we had once been.
No, that’s not quite right. We were never truly equals. But we had been something better. We had been friends. And then I’d fallen from my status as Rosita’s best friend and taken on the role of domestic servant nearly two years before. Yet, even after all that time, how easily, how foolishly, I fell back into that feeling of friendship.
“Rosita, let’s go to the north dock, take the speedboat up to Canada. Henry hasn’t put the boats in storage just yet. We’ll take Largo, of course,” I went on, assuming Rosita would want the bird that had been her son’s pet.
“I’m not running. Why would I? This is my island. My home.”
Indeed it was. Though Eddie used it for his own purposes, the island and the mansion were legally Rosita’s.
But the last time he’d been here, I’d overheard him say to her: I will give you time to return to me. But don’t try my patience. If I have to force you to come back to me, you’ll be sorry … “Tell Maxine and the others of Eddie’s arrival,” she said. “Do as Maxine instructs to prepare for his stay. Find out who Eddie has brought with him and report back to me.”
I said, “Yes, ma’am,” again the domestic servant.
“Inform Maxine that Eddie will not be staying in my suite. Make up a guest room.”
I shuddered, anticipating what it would be like to see Eddie again—the hard lines around his mouth, his stony eyes. How furious he’d be at this spurning.
“Eddie will demand to see me,” Rosita went on. “Tell him that I’m incapacitated.”
She’d been “incapacitated” for thirteen months. Eddie would not believe she still needed such tender consideration.
“He’ll be furious, but you must be resolute. When the time is right, I will come down.”
At last the Myra came into view. Such a lovely yacht. Modestly sized yet pristine and majestic. Riding high in the waters of Lake Erie, as if blissfully unaware of how quickly those waters could turn into icy, jagged danger.
Together we watched it slide alongside the dock. A man I couldn’t place—his hat was pulled low over his face—came onto the boat’s deck, then jumped out to the dock and tied up the yacht. He lowered the ramp.
Eddie emerged, alone. He strolled casually down the ramp as if on a lazy pleasure trip. He took a drag from his cigarette, then tossed it into the lake.
Then he looked up. Shoved his hands in his pockets.
Even at that distance, with his fedora cocked to one side, shading his eyes, I knew he didn’t see me. That he had eyes only for Rosita. That his eyes lit up at seeing her, even as his mouth curled into a cruel grin.