SEAMUS WAS CLOSE behind me as I rushed out of the library.
I stopped so suddenly, he nearly smacked into me. “Are you really going to follow me on Eddie’s orders?” I hissed.
He lifted his eyebrows. “I don’t have much of a choice in this situation.”
I started shaking. “You didn’t say anything at all to defend me. Coward!”
“It’s not cowardly to be afraid of snakes. Or men like Eddie,” Seamus said, his voice suddenly hard. I’d gone too far, calling him a coward, and I wanted to snatch back the word, beg his forgiveness, but I stared at him stubbornly. “It’s wise. And I didn’t defend you because I don’t know what happened to Rosita.”
My breath hitched in my chest as if he’d smacked me in the stomach. “You think I could do that? Kill her?”
The muscles in Seamus’s jaw tightened. “I don’t really know you at all, Aurelia.”
I’d been such a fool, thinking that what we’d shared was more than desire, that it portended anything beyond a night of pleasure.
He held my suitcase out to me. I took it, and for a moment our fingertips brushed. A desire to let that touch linger rose in me, but he abruptly stepped back.
“I’ll let Eddie know you are on your way up to your room,” he said, then turned quickly.
The suitcase suddenly felt like it weighed a hundred pounds. My whole body ached. But I started toward the staircase, blinking tears away.
Claire, though, popped out of the music room, teetering. She propped herself up with one hand on a display table that held an exquisite porcelain vase. In the other, she held an empty highball glass. She already reeked of whisky. I glanced at the grandfather clock at the end of the vestibule. It was nine in the morning.
Her eyes were watery. “It’s true, then? You found Rosita dead?”
“Yes,” I said impatiently. “Did you think I’d made it up?”
I immediately regretted my harsh words. The cousins had been close. I’d witnessed how much Claire adored, even worshipped, Rosita.
But in the next moment, Claire gave me a lopsided grin. She shook the empty glass in front of me. “Decanter’s empty in the music room. You need to refill it.”
I simply said, “No.”
She looked down at my suitcase in my hand, then studied me quizzically, her eyebrows arched. “Why—you goin’ somewhere in this weather? Got something better to do?”
“Because I don’t want to,” I said.
At that, Claire’s mouth dropped, and I walked away from her gaping stare.
Upstairs, I put my suitcase on the floor beside my desk, promised Largo seedcakes later, then donned my coat, boots, and hat.
When I came downstairs to the vestibule, Claire was gone, but Seamus and Dr. Aldridge were ready and standing to the side by the door, each carrying old-fashioned kerosene lanterns. Henry must have gotten them out of the basement storage room. The pool house was not on the mansion’s electric generator, and in the swirl of the snow, light would not filter through the pool house skylights.
I joined them, my gaze drawing to Seamus. “Why are you going?”
The guarded stillness of Seamus’s eyes cracked my heart. “I was a medic in the war,” he said. “I know a few things about wounds and injuries and death.” He cocked an eyebrow. “Cormac wanted to come, but I thought it might be better if I did.”
He did want to watch out for me a bit.
“So what is he doing?”
“Keeping an eye on Marco,” Seamus said. A glimmer of amusement brightened his eyes. “His favorite duty, I’m sure.”
In spite of the chaos around us, and the gruesomeness that awaited us, a slight smile brushed my lips.
Then we stepped outside into a blast of snow and icy wind. Winter had reasserted itself with revitalized force.
Earlier that morning, the door for leaving in fairly calm, safe weather had opened a crack. Now it was slammed shut.
THE POOL HOUSE is bigger than the entire bungalow I’d shared with Pony in Toledo. It’s divided in half, one side for women, another for men, a door for each side. On both sides, its walls are lined with narrow cupboards, in front of which are benches.
The last time I’d been inside was at the end of summer, after the season’s last guests had left, to help Maxine give both sides a deep cleaning before closing up the pool house for the winter. In the heat of summer, I’d hear laughter and chatter pouring from the building, and find myself longing to again be a part of that seemingly carefree, glittering world.
On that cold November morning, as I entered the women’s side of the pool house with Seamus, Eddie, and Dr. Aldridge, the two coal oil lamps provided scant, flickering light that made shadows twitch from corners. Each bench held a sheet-covered human form. Joey and Rosita.
The air was cold and dank. I tried to inhale, and for a panicked moment, it felt as impossible to breathe as if I were underwater. I could hear my heart thudding.
Seamus put his hand on my arm. “Focus on your breath,” he whispered, and nodded at the white fog of our breaths exhaling in the cold, mingling. My heart calmed. Then he held his lamp out to me and asked more loudly, “Could you hold this up for us?”
I nodded.
Eddie moved to a corner, leaning against the walls, as if trying to shrink from the light.
Dr. Aldridge put his lamp on a table that once held stacks of fluffy white towels, then moved to the larger of the two bodies. Seamus pulled back the cover, revealing Joey’s mauled body.
“From the spacing of the cuts, this was the bear Henry was worried about,” Dr. Aldridge said. “Either Joey antagonized it, or the bear found him after he was dead.”
Then Dr. Aldridge pointed to a stain of blood spreading in a circular pattern on Joey’s pants leg, on the top of his right thigh. “I need to see the wound.”
Seamus got a pocketknife out of his pants pocket, then slit the cloth, revealing Joey’s thigh. There was a deep jagged gash, still fresh, the blood only congealed because of the cold, but still a shiny red.
Seamus wiped off the knife with a handkerchief. “A wound like this is from a knife. A slash this deep would come from a bigger, sharper blade. Whatever it was, it hit an artery. Joey would have bled out in minutes.”
The light trembled in my hand but I willed my grasp to still. “I came to the southwest dock on the circular path, but after I found Rosita, I returned to the mansion on the shortcut Claire showed us. Joey was out of sight from the circular path at the dock, but close. He had to have been killed before I took that path.”
Dr. Aldridge said, “I didn’t observe blood on your swimming attire when you came into the dining room. Seamus, you gathered her clothes. Was there blood on them?”
“No,” Seamus said.
“An attack like this would have created a lot of blood spatter, impossible for it not to get on the killer,” Dr. Aldridge said.
Relief coursed through me. Did Eddie and Seamus understand what Dr. Aldridge was saying? I couldn’t have been the one who killed Joey.
“When he was attacked, he must have fought back,” I said slowly. “But I didn’t hear any arguments or cries of distress. How long, after an attack like this, would it be before he died?”
“It would take five minutes or so for him to bleed out,” Dr. Aldridge said.
“So he had to be killed at least a half hour before I came nearby on the path.”
“When did you near the southwest dock?” Seamus asked.
“About a quarter to seven,” I said.
“So at the latest, Joey was killed at a quarter after six,” the doctor said. “Maybe earlier, but not much earlier, because of the freshness of the leg wound.”
I looked from the wound to Joey’s shredded sleeves. Did someone emerge from the woods, surprise Joey? Or was the attacker someone who was with him?
In any case, I envisioned him falling, then staggering to his feet, either to try to get away from the other person, or to go after them. He reaches for his gun, maybe gets off a shot, but if so, his aim must have gone wide, for no one has been shot. Because he’s bleeding so profusely, and in such pain, he drops his gun, falls to the ground on top of it. Sometime later, the bear crosses his path.
Seamus pulled the sheet over Joey. “We can confirm he was attacked, and probably died from the thigh wound. It wasn’t an accident or a run-in with the bear.” He shook his head. “But that doesn’t get us any closer to narrowing down who or why.”
My heart clenched as I stared at Rosita’s sheet-covered body. The image arose of her body, tied up, mutilated by time, the lake, and its creatures, her nightgown floating in the water. Her torso, face, arms all bloated and milky like the underbelly of a fish, her eyes gone, part of her lip missing, her dark hair floating. I didn’t want to look again, to see her like that.
But I didn’t want Eddie to uncover her. Nor did I want Seamus or Dr. Aldridge to do so, who barely knew her.
I slowly peeled back the sheet. Part of me deliriously hoped that somehow she had reverted to look as she once did: beautiful, intact, smoothly carved as porcelain.
She was as I’d seen her underwater, though now her hair lay in two thick strands over her shoulders. I grabbed a handkerchief from my coat pocket and quickly laid it over her eyes.
Bile rose from my stomach to my mouth, and I felt as though I was again in the lake, swallowing the water, and I suppressed a gag, putting a hand to my throat.
I heard “Aurelia!” from a distance, as if I were underwater, and Seamus were on land, above the surface, calling my name.
I wanted to pull my gaze from the wrinkled, white, bloated flesh of her hands, her feet, her face, but I could not look away. I’d seen flesh like this before, waterlogged. I shook my head to clear the old memory.
Dr. Aldridge pointed to her neck, her ankles. Where the ropes had been were mottled red-and-purple lines. But there was something else—the beginning of a cut in her neck, on the right side.
“Help me turn her,” Dr. Aldridge said to Seamus. They gently rolled her corpse to the side. My hand shook as I held the lantern high. The garish light illuminated a slashing from the right front of her slender neck, around the side, just to the back.
Rosita’s neck had been cut before she was lowered into the water.
“A slash like this would leave blood, enough that it would be hard to clean up,” Seamus said. “Surely she would have cried out, someone would have heard if it had happened inside. She must have been murdered somewhere out on the island. By now, finding the exact spot will be impossible.”
As Seamus and Dr. Aldridge returned Rosita to her back, I pulled my gaze back to the bloated flesh. “She’s been in the water for at least two days. Maybe since sometime in the late hours of Wednesday night, or early Thursday morning,” I heard myself saying, my voice distant and flat. “But like Joey she would have bled out quickly. At least she didn’t drown.” Relief surged through me. I could not imagine a worse way to die.
Suddenly Eddie grabbed my arm, whirled me around. I nearly dropped the lantern as he shook me. “How do you know?” His coldness had broken, and he was screaming. “That she’s been down there—that it’s been two days? How can you know that?”
I couldn’t give him the full truth. I’d never told anyone since leaving my childhood home in southeast Ohio. Certainly not Pony. Not even Rosita, in our closest days. I could barely whisper the truth to myself, though the truth whispered itself to me night after night.
I offered a partial truth. “I—I’ve seen a person before, a few days after they drowned. They looked like, like—”
“Like Rosita!” Anguish twisted Eddie’s voice, his emotion at last coming out. His spittle hit my face as he screamed, but I dared not flinch or look away.
“Yes,” I said, my voice raspy. “But if she’d been alive when she was tied up, her hands free, she would have been grabbing for anything, the dock posts, the rope at her neck.” I looked at Dr. Aldridge. “Even after being in the water, wouldn’t we see scratches at her neck, splinters under her nails?”
“Yes,” he said quietly. “Warm water would decompose a body more quickly, but in this cold water, this is the expected state. Blood from the gash in her neck would have drawn the fish to her, speeding up the process, and—”
Seamus cleared his throat pointedly. Dr. Aldridge quieted. Eddie released me, turned away.
Eddie shuddered, but there was relief in his voice. “She didn’t drown. She … she always feared drowning. I used to tease her about that, about wanting to be on an island, when she wasn’t a good swimmer. And she’d say I didn’t understand, the fear keeping her on the island was part of the appeal … She was right. I didn’t understand…”
Eddie watched as Dr. Aldridge pulled the sheet back over Rosita.
“She was already dead, you know,” Eddie said wretchedly. “She died of a broken heart over a year ago.”