AT THE DOCK—WHERE I’d first seen the Myra approaching, where I’d hid the treasure I’d found, where I thought I’d found Rosita but had actually found Claire—I stood in my full-body swimming suit. I placed my goggles over the top of my glasses. Together, we’d dragged Eddie’s body down to the dock, propped him up in the speedboat with wood from the side of the cottage. We buttoned up his thick coat, pulled his hat down over his eyes. From a distance, in the falling snow, it would be easy enough to assume that he was alive.
As Rosita had plotted, we’d tied the life preserver to a longer rope, and one end was lashed securely to the dock post. I got in the boat.
Our gazes locked for a moment, and now, looking back, I think I knew this was the last time I’d see her.
But she gave me a swift nod, somewhat impatient, hurrying me along.
I turned from her, pulled the cord for the motor, and after a few tries, it started up. I regarded the axe still wedged in the bottom of the boat, and calculated again that I could get around the bend and to the yacht, but not much farther before water began filling the boat. I hunkered down, steered the boat with the tiller at the back of the boat.
As I came around the bend, water already coming into the hull, I tossed the life preserver into the water. The speedboat rocked side to side on the thrashing lake, already about to tip over. I just needed it to stay afloat, moving forward until I made it around the curve, until the Myra was in view for me, and the speedboat—and Eddie—were in view for those on the Myra.
Moments later, I was around the curve. My heart fell; no one was watching from the side of the yacht. But then I saw Cormac, waving anxiously at Eddie.
This was the moment, before Cormac got suspicious. A wave knocked the boat to the port side, almost all the way over, and I threw my weight to the side. That was enough. The boat did not capsize, but Eddie went overboard, and I slipped into the water.
The cold stunned me, the water pulled me down. I couldn’t move. But then I came to my senses, kicked back up to the surface. I stayed behind the speedboat, watching the Myra through my goggles. Water was already freezing on the surface of the lenses. I forced my legs and arms to tread.
“Eddie!” I heard Cormac’s desperate scream. The horrified anguish in his voice.
He turned to the interior of the yacht, crying out. “He went overboard! We have to—”
But another figure approached. A woman. Maxine.
A shot rang out.
Cormac fell.
And Maxine was holding something protectively in her right arm, like a baby. Then she lifted something with a tiny light in her left hand, bringing it toward the item in her right.
A man rushed to her, grabbed her—Douglas? But no, this man was too short to be Douglas. Too broad. And the man cried out, “Maxine! No!”
Seamus.
In an instant, hope surged with a new plan. I could get on the boat. Return for Rosita. Take down Eddie’s organization. Maybe, just maybe, Seamus would not reveal me as Pony’s killer. Maybe taking down Eddie would be enough for him, and after that, he’d leave behind the law, and we could be together after all.
I swam as fast as I could toward the Myra, water sloshing into my mouth every time I rolled to get a breath, gagging me, the force of the waves trying to push me backward, away from the yacht.
But on I plowed, and by the time I got there, a ladder had been lowered for me. Holding it at the top was Douglas.
I climbed up, flopped onto the deck, assessed.
There was Cormac, alive, but shot in the leg.
And Seamus. Shivering, his right arm bare. He’d ripped the sleeve from his shirt and made a tourniquet for his left arm, where he’d been shot earlier.
And Maxine.
Crying. Holding a bundle of five sticks of dynamite. And Henry’s beloved Banjo lighter. She’d flick it, the wind would blow it out, but she’d flick it again. Eventually the lighter would run out of fluid. But all it would take was a split second for her to light the fuse, another few seconds for the fuse to burn down, and the blast would bring down the boat, and likely kill everyone on board.
I wanted to ask Seamus how … But there was no time to quiz him. I turned to Maxine.
“Maxine,” I said carefully, gently. I held out my hand, which shook both from fear and coldness. “Why don’t you hand me the lighter?”
“What are you doing here?” Maxine said, her voice stilted with shock. “Rosita said—she said if Eddie approached, that meant he’d killed both of you. That I should go to the bin—” She gestured with a nod toward a metal bin, opened, revealing a stack of tan bib-style life jackets. And something else that didn’t belong there. Fuel cells for the Delco generator. Maxine went on: “And get the gun and the dynamite—” She gazed down at the bundle she held in her arms.
“Why?” The question came out of me as a strangled cry.
“She said Eddie would never let me—any of us—out of his grip. That Ada would never be free. She whispered this to me when she came to say goodbye…”
I thought back to the moment when Rosita had said she needed to say goodbye to Maxine. My heart fell at the deception. At Rosita manipulating Maxine, who was out of her mind in grief over Henry, not thinking straight, worried about Ada.
Where had Rosita gotten another gun?
You don’t think I have hiding spaces in my mansion?
The dynamite?
The old sticks left in the cottage. She’d only taken a few.
The fuel cells?
From the mansion’s basement.
When had she placed these items in the bin of life preservers?
She’d had days and nights to do so, wandering freely as Claire. Maybe the same night—before “her” funeral—that she’d sabotaged the mansion.
It hit me.
Before I revealed her ruse showing that she was pretending to be Claire, Rosita had never meant to make it back to the mainland. If she couldn’t have the island, her mansion, then rather than face a life under Eddie’s control, she’d get on the Myra as Claire, and take her own life—and everyone else’s—by blowing up the yacht midway between Trouble Island and the shore of Ohio.
And she’d meant for me to be on the yacht with her when she blew it up.
But once I’d shown that she was Rosita, that her cousin was the one buried on Trouble Island, Rosita had quickly calculated that if she could make the right moves, she could take out Eddie, get me on the boat, and have Maxine, who in her grief and fear wasn’t in her right mind, take out me and everyone else.
Then Rosita would get to live after all and at last be alone on her precious Trouble Island. Free to calculate an explanation for why she’d survived and everyone else died.
Or free to leave and start over.
I only had seconds to talk Maxine back into being her practical self. I had to focus on the moment.
“But Eddie is gone now, Maxine.”
“He has other men, he has Cormac—”
“Seamus will protect you.”
Maxine laughed, a short, brutal choking sound, and glanced toward Seamus, struggling to hold Cormac down.
Douglas stepped forward. “Mrs. Carmichael, don’t do this, to yourself, to us…”
“I’ll be gone in an instant. Out of this pain,” Maxine said flatly.
“But you don’t really believe you’ll be gone,” I said softly. “You told me what you believed about the strobing light. The afterlife.” A look of confusion rolled over Douglas’s face but there was no time to explain. I focused on Maxine. “You believe in an afterlife, and how will you face yourself there, knowing you’ve killed all of us—”
“Knowing my Ada is free! As long as I’m alive, she’s tied to this corruption, this evil, this ugliness—”
With a great grunt, Seamus slammed Cormac’s head into the deck. But Cormac managed to fling Seamus off his back. Blood oozing down his forehead, into his eyes, Cormac staggered to his feet, pulled his gun on Maxine—
“No,” I cried.
Maxine flicked the lighter, and held it close, so close to the dynamite. One staggered step, one jostle of the boat on the water’s surface, and she could light it even if she didn’t mean to. There would only be seconds before the fuse burnt down and the dynamite exploded.
My cry caught Cormac’s attention, and he froze but didn’t lower his gun. His gaze flicked to me, and I saw his eyes glistening with emotion. “Eddie—what happened?”
“Rosita killed him,” I said flatly. “Just another gangster, gone.”
He turned his gun’s aim toward me.
Seamus rose up behind him. Staggering, hurting. For the briefest of moments, our eyes met, and in that sliver of time, the possibility of a life together flashed up in our gaze. Maybe the dream of getting off free and starting over with Seamus, away from gangs and lawmen and their chaos, could come true. But I also saw the determination in Seamus’s eyes and knew it couldn’t be. Seamus was a cop, first and foremost. If he let that part of himself go, he’d be betraying his dead wife and son. He couldn’t do that. He would have to take me in as Pony’s killer, as part of Eddie’s organization.
“Henry would not want you to do this,” I said to Maxine.
Maxine shook her head sadly. “Henry isn’t here. And he thought that serving Eddie and Rosita would keep Ada safe—but she’ll never be safe until all the connections are broken. With everyone here gone, Rosita told me, the gang will forget about Ada.”
Cormac rushed toward her, and that was enough for Maxine. I grabbed for the dynamite, but I wasn’t fast enough. Even as my hands touched the bundle, she lit a fuse.
“Seamus!” I screamed.
He stumbled toward us, and pulled Maxine from me, jerking her backward hard, so that now I held the dynamite with the burning fuse. I rushed toward the edge of the boat and caught Cormac out of the corner of my eye, about to shoot me. But Douglas suddenly tackled him from the side, and Cormac’s gun went spinning out of his hand as the boat rocked.
I didn’t have time to think or say anything or look at anyone. I threw the sparking bundle as far as I could from one side of the boat. I ran to the other side, and threw myself off of the Myra, as I’d longed to do just over a year before, on my way to Trouble Island.
I heard Seamus cry out my name as I went over.
I heard a faint explosion.
I hit the water with a smack.
I LET MYSELF sink, and then I began swimming underwater, away from the Myra.
I swam until my lungs began to burn and then I surfaced for just a moment to grab a sip of air. I heard in the distance behind me Seamus and Douglas calling my name. Ahead I saw the curve of the island.
I dipped under again, my arms straight ahead in glide position, my legs and feet beating rhythmically, kicking from the hips. I didn’t want my arms to lift above the surface. I wanted them to think I’d drowned.
When I popped up again, I saw the dock—but I did not see the life preserver bobbing in the water. Or Rosita on the dock. I saw the life ring on the edge of the dock.
I went under again, swimming as fast as I could, up again for air, hearing the sound behind me of the Myra, and the voices calling to me. Seamus’s most frantically of all.
Let me go.
I dove down, down, down, swimming downward, now dangerously far from the surface, but I didn’t want the Myra to run me over, and I feared that Seamus—thank God he was alive, that he sounded in charge—would come to the southwest dock to search for me.
I swam and my lungs and heart felt like burning balloons on the cusp of bursting.
FOR A SECOND, I saw them. The shadowy figures. Like a paper-doll chain, hand in hand, no definition to them, but there were five now. Father. Brother. Pony. Oliver.
Eddie.
They want me to join them.
Something bumped against me. A whitefish.
That meant I was too low under the surface.
I swam toward the shadowy figures, but they retreated.
As if luring me on.
Or—not wanting me to join them after all, for they disappeared.
Pressure built in my head, a hissing sound like a pressure cooker.
My lungs longed to convulse, my mouth wanted to open, to inhale.
Then I saw the sparkles. I was vaguely aware that I was no longer kicking. That I was going to drown.
And I did not panic. I felt oddly calm. At peace. I could just let go, be free in this way of all my panic and worry and foiled plots. Maybe, after running from the tragedy I’d experience in water in my childhood in southeast Ohio, this is what I’d been running to all along. Letting go of my life, after all, underwater …
But then a light strobed before me, in the murky water, ahead. It strobed again. My legs began moving as if of their own will. My mind wasn’t willing anything. I kicked and moved toward the strobing light of the lighthouse.
Impossible, but I saw it, as I had once before.
My legs kept kicking, and my fingertips stretched so long and far in front of me that my arms felt like they might pop out of their sockets.
Finally my fingertips hit something hard—a support to the dock. I was under it. I popped up. I barely had my nose and mouth above water. I was freezing. Water, a semi-frozen slush, sloshed under the dock in waves and I caught a mouthful, gagged and spit. I inhaled as the slush receded from me, exhaled when the water came over my mouth and nose. I could not feel my body. But I forced myself to keep treading. Right by the spot where I’d put the treasure box. Where I’d found Claire’s body, thinking I’d found Rosita.
I heard the Myra passing by. Seamus calling—“Aurelia!”—throaty and raw voiced.
But I would not let myself pop out. He had to think—they all had to think—I was dead.
Just let me go.
They had to think I was taken by the waves, by the lake.
“Goddamn it, are we going to get frozen in here for that stupid bitch? She’s drowned! And I’ll kill her anyway if not!” That was Cormac.
“Shut up!” said Douglas.
A cracking sound, a cry from Cormac. I imagined him bound up, Douglas cracking him on the head with the butt of a gun.
I focused on treading.
“Aurelia! Aurelia! I’m sorry!” Maxine cried.
“She’d come back to this dock, she’s a good swimmer—” Seamus, disbelief and shock shaking his voice.
“We have to go. I’m sorry. But we have to.” Douglas.
“Aurelia!” Another cry from Seamus.
And then the sound of the boat slowly leaving.
The voices fading.
Then nothing but the sound of the waves, no feeling but cold. Yet I kept treading.
And finally I could tread no more.
I sank under the water, but grabbed on to a dock post, and swung out from under the dock.
With bleary eyes through my goggles, the water on them quickly freezing, I gazed across the lake—toward the horizon, lost in the snow falling harder now. The Myra was gone. They could not see or hear me, nor I them.
My goggles froze over. I pulled them off and they fell from my numb fingers into the lake. I pulled myself up the ladder to the dock. I still had on my glasses but they quickly fogged over. Then I felt the dock surface and launched myself onto it like a fish being landed, heaving in great gasps of air.
I pulled off my glasses for a moment, wanting to be able to see at least shapes.
The first thing I noted was the life preserver and the neatly coiled rope.
Rosita had never meant to pull me in. She’d meant only to leave me to die in the explosion—or to drown.
Had she watched? Waited? Or left already? Gone back to the mansion?
But no. She’d have left from the north dock. Just like she said we would do.
I stumbled to my feet, willing myself to move, knowing I should get in the cottage, light a fire for warmth. But I stared at the top of the lighthouse, seeking that strobing light.
There was only snow.
I forced myself to climb the boat launch rise, keep going past the cottage, to the lighthouse, and in I went, climbing step after step, my lungs starting to burn as feeling returned to my limbs.
I got to the top at last and gazed through the telescope.
All I could see was snow. But then, for a moment, I thought I saw a shape like a boat, moving across the water.
Rosita.
She’d gotten to her hidden speedboat and was racing away.
In the next second I blinked and the dot was gone.
As I came down, something caught my eye. A piece of paneling pulled free.
I remembered when Rosita-as-Claire, Eddie, and I came here looking for Rosita. “Claire” had remained behind. This is where she must have left her red diary containing the information that would condemn Eddie. Rosita had come up long enough to get them.
Of course she’d want them. That way, if whoever took over Eddie’s gang tried to hurt her, she had evidence she could hand over to the Feds. Evidence that would condemn those who worked most closely with him.