WHEN ROSITA MADE Trouble Island her permanent residence, she tasked me with observing guests and reporting back. Sometimes she was indifferent, other times she’d grill me on every detail.
While I could never make out a pattern of what interested her, I soon became adept at finding tucked-away spots from which to spy on visitors: in corners, behind statues or topiaries, by the pool bathhouse. I came to know every inch of Rosita’s mansion.
Evocative of a French country manor, the mansion crowns a man-made mound of earth—it took thirty barge trips, Rosita once told me, to bring in that much dirt. It’s a three-story butter-yellow confection of porticos and verandas and tall windows and gray stone chimneys. Views from the front: the lake, immaculate lawn and gardens, a fountain pinned in place by a stone goddess, and on clear days, other islands in the Lake Erie archipelago plus the northern shore of Ohio. From the back: the pool and tennis courts and more gardens and then the rolling woods that make up the rest of the island. The small water tower that services the mansion is cleverly hidden by the trees from spring through fall.
The second-floor veranda wraps around the whole of the mansion, with access from all eight of the second-floor bedrooms. From the front, I could take in the labyrinth as well as the topiary- and rosebush-lined path from the dock to the mansion’s entrance, the croquet grounds. From the back, the pool and tennis courts and, less charmingly, the water tower. On the west side, the small cemetery and on the east, the kitchen garden.
After rushing away from my workmates, I grabbed my coat from my bedroom. Then I hurried down the hallway to the bedroom on the southwest corner and went out the sliding doors to the veranda. I hunkered down on the floor, conjecturing that Eddie would want to show off the grounds before his guests came into the warmth of the mansion and wouldn’t want to go out into the cold again.
It was an educated guess, for in the summer and early fall after my arrival, the McGees had visited several times, and I observed that Eddie couldn’t resist giving guests the same grand tour, always ending by the labyrinth, where he’d point out the statues of nude figures by the entrance, grinning smugly when women gasped and men chuckled. Imported from Italy, he’d say. Michelangelo’s David. And Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. He said the names carefully, as if afraid of mispronunciation. Reproductions, but aren’t they fine?
As I waited that morning, I stared up at common loons and elegant red-throated ones. Herring gulls and ring-billed ones.
I’d learned their proper names from books in the mansion’s library, and slowly fallen in love with bird-watching. The preoccupation helped keep me sane since I’d arrived.
I’d come to delight in the mergansers and goldeneye ducks—so goofy—and tundra swans—so elegant. I especially liked the long-tailed ducks, who dive as deeply as two hundred feet into the lake. Oh, and the purple sandpipers, nibbling up freshwater mollusks from the break wall around the decommissioned lighthouse and the adjacent cottage.
Each night in my bedroom, I made note of birds I’d observed, along with the weather conditions.
It had taken me a while to notice, what’s more, start to catalog, the island’s birds.
When I’d first come to Trouble Island, I didn’t think I deserved to live. Not on the island, not anywhere at all. It didn’t matter that Rosita had assured me that my stay on the island would only be temporary, a few months at most, that Eddie was working on a way for me to start over elsewhere with a new identity. I sought death by swimming too long, too far out, for I thought that was all I deserved after what I’d done.
But somehow, I always found my way back to shore, and as time passed, the island healed me of such dismal desire. Like a timid woodland creature, I began sniffing the air, became curious about the island itself, its deep, quiet nature, and about the island’s history. I wanted, after all, to live.
After a summer season of swimming and hiking and breathing in the deep, loamy scents of the island’s woods, I came to long for what Rosita had promised before sending me here: that my island stay would only be a stopover before a new life, a new identity.
But by then, I realized Rosita had no intention of helping me leave. I was to stay on Trouble Island, serving her, being her island confidante, indefinitely. I began to plan my own escape: slowly pilfer from guests a watch here, money there, a few pieces of jewelry. I had Henry show me how to use the boats, planning to eventually steal one of them and dash to the north coast of Ohio.
But then, Oliver died, and everything changed …
Suddenly Eddie’s booming voice—surprisingly big for such a slender man—carried up to me as he rounded the mansion’s corner. I hunkered down, hoping no one would look up and see me. I’d just say I’d been opening up the sliding doors to air out the rooms, if someone did.
“Imported from Italy … Reproductions, but aren’t they fine?”
“Sure, sure,” said another man, impatient.
It took me a moment to identify him, in his heavy coat and fedora: Marco Guiffre.
I recognized him from the newspapers, the leader of a rival gang. He’d been arrested a few times for violating Prohibition laws, his picture splashed across front pages as an example of the evils of bootlegging gang leaders. Suspected of being behind several gang shootings, but never arrested. Now, even from a distance, I could see he looked slightly green. The boat ride over must have been choppy.
Another man, scrawny and young, followed close behind him, a tommy gun slung over his shoulder. One of Marco’s bodyguards, I assumed. I didn’t recognize him, yet I shuddered, for his cocky, self-important swagger reminded me of my husband.
I wondered why Eddie would bring his biggest rival to his private island. Had they declared a temporary truce for some money-making scheme? But truces weren’t Eddie’s way—in business or in his personal life.
Two more men came into view. I shuddered at the sight of the ruddy face of Dr. Timothy Aldridge under his fur hat. The doctor not only knew me, he’d seen me in all my worst moments. Dr. Aldridge was quiet, harmless if you only read his surface, but nothing like the truly kind doctor I’d known back home in southeastern Ohio.
Ever since Rosita had ensconced herself in the third-floor suite, Dr. Aldridge had been coming to the island once a month from spring through fall, sent by Eddie to check on her. Rosita allowed him to attend to her, though she always insisted that I would be in the suite with them, and she never lifted her veil for him. You’ll just have to assume my temperature, vision, and teeth are fine, she’d snap at him.
Meanwhile, I avoided his curious gaze, answering the one time he’d inquired, How are you doing, my dear? with cold silence. He never attempted discourse with me after that, just trudged breathlessly up and down the stairs behind me.
I frowned. He’d just been to the island a month before. Why would Eddie bother bringing him? His shaking hands rose to adjust his cap, then his old-fashioned burgundy bow tie peeking above his coat collar. The tremor was always there, so this was not an effect of the cold or nerves, and yet, I sensed his unease, almost as noticeable as the white puffs of air as he exhaled.
Enough of Dr. Aldridge; my gaze next went to the man behind him, a fellow who was so relaxed as to seem almost bored. He was dashingly handsome—broad-shouldered, athletic, square-jawed. I gasped, recognizing him, too, though, as with Marco, only from photos. His mostly appeared in entertainment magazines. He was Douglas Johnson, yes, the Douglas Johnson, the actor and screenwriter, who, Rosita had told me, once played the piano for her and her cousin Claire Byrne when they sang in nightclubs. That was before he’d become famous, before I met Rosita and Claire.
Then, as if I’d summoned her with the thought, Claire herself appeared. She, too, looked bored by the tour, which she certainly didn’t need. After Oliver’s death, she’d returned from Hollywood to Ohio, probably living on an allowance from Eddie at Rosita’s insistence, and coming more often than the doctor to the island, but though she asked every time, she never received an audience with Rosita—and never failed to appear crestfallen by the denial. Maybe, I thought, she just wanted to be near her old friend, Douglas. Indeed, she trotted up alongside him, and looped her arm through his. He didn’t shake her off, but the flinch of his expression from bored to annoyed suggested he would’ve liked like to.
Claire looked so much like Rosita once had. Oh, there were differences; Claire was slightly taller and she did not have the distinctive beauty mark above the left side of her lip that on many women would seem a blemish but that on Rosita was alluring. They were first cousins whose fathers had been identical twins.
That morning, Claire was elegant in a bright blue wool coat with a fox collar, the creature’s mouth clamped onto its tail. A cloche hat, festooned with a sweeping macaw feather, covered her head. Disgust at the use of the fox’s body and the macaw’s feather made my face contort as if I’d bitten into a bitter lemon. How had I ever thought such ornamentation beautiful—or longed for it myself?
I wondered if Eddie saw his estranged wife in Claire’s features, and how doing so might make him feel.
More importantly, I wondered what the doctor, the loyal cousin, a famous actor, a rival gangster all had in common? And why Eddie had brought them here, at such a dangerous time for lake travel?
That accounted for five of the people in Eddie’s entourage. What about the sixth? Surely Eddie had brought his own bodyguard …
My stomach flipped. I swallowed back the hot spit rising in my throat at the realization of who that would likely be. The man in the hat on the dock when the Myra first arrived that morning. I’d been so caught up in the shock of Eddie’s arrival that I hadn’t fathomed the obvious.
I leapt up, heedless of whether anyone below would see me, for he was here. The man who loathed me more than anyone in the world. Who’d whispered in my ear on the morning he deposited me on the shore of Trouble Island: I wanted to kill you and have it over with. But the McGees are too soft. If I ever see you again, I’ll make sure you end up at the bottom of the lake.
My heart thrummed as I imagined going to my bedroom down the hall, grabbing a few things, racing down to the speedboat on the southwest dock, retrieving the treasure I’d only found right before spotting the Myra. Then I would … run.
I rushed inside the guest bedroom, slid the door shut behind me.
And when I turned, there he was, the remaining member of Eddie’s entourage.
Former cop-on-the-take.
Now Eddie’s right-hand man.
Cormac Herlihy.