2000
“Listen,” I say, standing up to face the room. “This morning the shoreline measured the same as it did last week and the same as the week before, but, back in April, we were losing ground. And the whole island, not just the sand but the forest growth leading up to it, was saturated. Like a sponge. And this was a mild winter with very little rain in the early spring. So, there is no logical reason for that extreme change, and please note that we have not gained any of the footage back. The island is smaller, drier, but not regaining size.” The room is focused on me.
Wally, who has only recently been asked to stay for the full council meetings, stands at the back. She looks even paler than usual, her red hair chaotic. I try not to notice the lean she takes in the doorway, her hip popping out, arms crossed just under her breasts.
I keep telling myself that my attraction to Wally has everything to do with her being the only other female in the room. But my palms sweat when she shows up. My words come out in a tumble as messy as her hair.
“Is it true she’s pregnant?” Jacob asks. He is in the third row and among the youngest in the room. He and his father run the only gas station, probably the most lucrative business on the island.
“Who?” I ask even though I know exactly whom he is asking about.
“Beatrice.”
“Yes.” I don’t look at him. “Early days but yes.”
“They stayed with me briefly,” Wally adds quietly. “Supernice.”
“It better be a boy,” Mr. Cooper says, straightening in his chair while his arm rests on his large belly.
I don’t like the suggestion that Beatrice is just a baby maker, so I say, “There is no need for a male heir. Not anymore. The land, the house was left to…” I pause because I realize I’ve almost said B.B., which would be a mistake since Carrie and Henrie still think the island was left to both sisters. I’ve been waiting for B.B. to tell the truth but she hasn’t. I don’t know why.
Wally raises her good hand and so my pause goes unnoticed.
“Wally?”
“I was planting herbs yesterday.” She lowers her hand and places it on her belly. “As I was root deep, I hit water. Just a big mud pool. Should I not be digging holes? Is it happening again?”
“I’ll need to come see.”
“So, did I do something? Break the island somehow?”
No one answers. We all feel bad for her, buying when she did.
“You need a history lesson. Come back with me after the meeting, and I’ll fill in the blanks.” My face reddens again, and I wait for one of the old men to make a snide comment, but no one does.
She nods her assent, and I keep talking, letting the blush settle down to my neck, then shoulders.
“Okay,” I say. “I think it’s safe for us to say that the island was sinking. Can we agree on at least calling it that?” I look out at general agreement. “I say we come up with a plan for evacuation in case it begins in earnest again.”
“I say we all leave now and just leave rowboats tied to the roofs of the buildings so the stupid tourists can survive if they feel like it,” Mr. Cooper says.
“Those stupid tourists are the reason you and your businesses have survived.”
“Whatever.”
“Well.” Mr. Weaver picks at something invisible between his teeth. “I say we keep watching the beaches. Check our herb gardens or whatever. When they disappear or fill up with water, we evacuate.”
“Islands don’t sink,” Wally says more to herself than to us. “Does this have anything to do with the missing girls?”
I look at Wally now. Really look. Her red hair a fire around her head and her hands tucked into her armpits. She looks back at me, and for a second I think she is taking note of me as well. My gut flips, a lovely somersault that I haven’t felt since Carrie.
No one answers her.
Wally has never been in the museum. After Millie left me the space, a dusty place made of piles and milk crates and scraps of molding paper, I fixed all its cracks, painted the walls, bought used display tables from Island Thrift, and even shored up the bell tower stairs. In my head, it still looks like that. Like a cared-for place with a new shine.
Wally will see something different. The spiderwebs in high corners and piles of books and clothes on the stairway to the loft. The cracked window—blue stained glass interrupted by a long-ago hailstorm—that has not been washed inside or out in years. I smell reheated salmon and onions. Vinegar and the lavender-scented spray I’ve used to cover it all. I’ve become more and more like Ms. Millie in the last decade and never even realized it.
“I’m sorry it’s such a mess,” I say, and find myself gathering things. Moving piles. It’s a useless effort. Clouds of dust erupt in the air.
“It’s fine,” she says mildly.
It’s strange to feel so nervous around someone yet have no impact on them. I set the pile of newspapers in my hands back on the ground. “There is a big table at the back. Let me grab stuff from upstairs and we can spread out there.”
She heads to the back of the museum, looking at the books and island maps and trinkets under glass. Her freckled face is placid. Her gray eyes darker than usual and her clothes baggy. It doesn’t look like she’s been eating. Maybe not sleeping. I shake off the worry. This woman needs information and nothing more.
I clomp up the stairs feeling as heavy as a horse.
“Tea?” I call down, then realize how dangerously close I am to becoming Millie. I shake off the feeling. “How about coffee?”
“Tea,” she says, bold certainty in her voice.
Surprised, I plug in the kettle and prep two mugs. The loft is more an apartment than a bedroom. My small kitchen is here, a woodburning stove, my bed. If not for the first-floor bathroom, I could hole up here and survive the flood, a thought I’ve worked through at 3:00 a.m.
There is something not right about all of them living at the house. A glazed-over joy that’s even impacted Wilderness. I tried to talk to Carrie about it first, saying, “This is unlike you.”
She looked puzzled, wrinkling her brow and her nose as if the word puzzled needed to be pieced apart and then back together. “It’s temporary. Besides, Henrie needs me.”
I walked away unnerved, as if I was talking to someone who remembers none of their emotional history. That’s when I started gathering information. Taking careful measurements of the island and rereading old material from Millie’s journals.
I carry two mugs down the stairs, steam in my face and papers under my arms. I have to make several trips back upstairs to gather the journals. Wally waits patiently, tea in front of her, as I dump the last pile.
“I was in love with this island for a long time.” She leans back in her chair, hands around her tea. “I knew Beatrice Volt before I moved here. Did she tell you that?”
Beatrice hasn’t said a word about knowing Wally—not even as the new innkeeper.
“She didn’t tell you, did she? I guess I should be grateful. B.B. is no gossip. We were lovers.”
“I had no idea.”
“The age difference isn’t that great.”
“Age rarely matters once you’re an adult,” I say and then duck my head. My mind immediately went to how old she might be compared to me.
“You’re shocked,” she says. Her voice is tired.
“I didn’t know you had a history with the island.” I realize I feel protective of B.B. and so don’t want to hear anything bad said about her, so I add, “I basically raised Beatrice for a little while. After her mom died and before Carrie showed up.”
“Ahhhh,” Wally says, as if she’s mistaken my tight expression for disbelief.
“Don’t be so quick to think it’s sweet. She hates me these days.”
“I doubt she hates you,” Wally says.
“Maybe. Maybe not. I count her as my own regardless.”
“Well, I’m the asshole in this story. B.B. was just being B.B. I met her at a coffeehouse. In Boston. She was on a date with some guy, but she looked over at me and rolled those strange blue eyes at me, as if she and I shared a secret. Anyhow, she stayed after he left, and I flirted hard. Did my best work, in fact, but, at closing time, we both went our separate ways.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“It’s pertinent, don’t you think? To why I bought the Island Inn and moved here and now walk around like a sad sack. And don’t you want to know how I lost my thumb? Everyone else does.” She tucks a mass of red behind her right ear; it does not stay.
“You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to tell me,” I say, but I want to know all of it. Every detail. I want to know you.
“You’re about to share island secrets with me, right?”
I nod my yes, tired of hiding my blush. I let it rage on my cheeks and neck.
“The next time I saw Beatrice we slept together, and I was smitten. In love. Completely heartbroken when she declared just a week later that we were going to be the best of friends. Thought I’d never recover, but then I met Emma.” Wally raises her injured hand as if introducing me to Emma.
“I don’t understand.”
“I know, you will. But I haven’t really told Beatrice all of this, and I’d rather you didn’t tell her. It would bother her.”
I laugh, a loud awkward bark. “B.B. doesn’t talk to me much.”
“Well, she used to talk about you when she talked about the island. Man, she painted an amazing picture of this place, although, now that I’ve been here and the island is—what did you say?—‘sinking,’ I can see that the charming stories she told were also rather inexplicable and dark. I thought it was just her sense of humor.”
“She should have warned you.”
“No. It’s my fault. Is and was. I didn’t tell Beatrice I was planning to buy here. Also, I’m the one who slept with Beatrice again when she showed up one day, sad, and come to think of it, I don’t even know what she was sad about. I just wanted to comfort her. At least that’s all I wanted at first.” Wally pauses. Her turn to flush with color. She touches the stump where her thumb should be. “Anyhow Emma found us together.”
“Wait. You mean you cheated on Emma with Beatrice?”
“I did,” Wally says, nodding as if this makes her the worst kind of person. “I cheated and got caught. My apartment—not mine anymore, mind you—had this old iron door, heavy as shit. Hard to open but quick to shut. So, I chased Emma out into the hall or tried to, but she pulled the door shut behind her, and it swung closed on my hand. Flattened my thumb. B.B. couldn’t get it open from our side. I had to wait half an hour for an EMT to show up and use the damn jaws of life.”
“That’s a horrible story.”
“Mostly just a stupid story. Emma and I were in love. We were planning a commitment ceremony. Anyhow, my thumb was smashed—bone dust and gushy blood stuff strung together with tendons. It hurt so fucking much to lose Emma that the pain of my thumb smashed in that door was a gift. So much easier to deal with. So much what I deserved.”
“You are being a bit hard on yourself,” I say, sipping tea. It’s hot and bitter but I swallow it down.
“I’d been listening to Beatrice’s island stories and had been here once or twice as a kid. When the inn came on the market, it felt like destiny. I’m thirty-two. I bought the place. Ditched my life.”
“Did you ever try to talk to Emma?”
“Of course. I called and called, but she never would answer. Eventually she changed her number. Just as well, I guess. She wouldn’t have taken me back, and how could I have respected her if she did?”
“Part of you must really hate her.” I’m thinking of B.B., and all the rumors about B.B. running wild on the island, seducing people then tossing them aside.
“I don’t hate anyone. Just myself most of the time. I deserve to die on this rock.”
I reach across the table and put my hand on her arm. She lets me.
“I stopped loving Beatrice in that way when I saw Emma’s face as she was seeing us. There is just something about Beatrice that makes me not right.”
I stare across the room. Light is catching the edge of a cobweb swaying in the window draft.
We sit quietly together.
Eventually I take my hand off her arm. “Thanks for telling me all that. You didn’t have to.”
“Well, if we get closer, not telling you would start to feel like a lie.” She takes a deep breath, sets her tea on the table, gestures at the piles. “What’s all this?”
I tell her the story of Seth Volt as Millie told it to me. The devil rising up. Promises made. A house built to look like home but act like a prison. I open my notes. Spread out the pieces of paper I’ve created. Each one belonging to a missing girl. I’ve listed the girl’s name, the date she went missing, the items found on the cliffs. I haven’t found all of them, but I have over two dozen, dating back to Elizabeth Volt herself.
“Holy shit.” Wally breathes in shallowly, then out with far more force. She pushes the pages around and begins to read a few aloud and in no particular order.
“That’s not even the half of it. There is a ton of folklore about Seth Volt. About the house and how Elizabeth sneaked around inside when Seth was gone, nailing shut the windows, bolting furniture to the floor. How she started talking to herself, always mumbling as if there were other people in the room with her. She liked to dig at the walls with her fingers. So much so that Seth had to call the island doctor at one point to bandage her hands—she’d lost fingernails—and when the doctor noticed a chipped front tooth, she confessed to eating the plaster. Her stomach full of lead paint and toxic dust, horsehair between her teeth.”
“Yikes,” Wally says.
“Fowler has its own rules. It makes people crazy in their own special way. I’ll tell you what the last Curator told me when I was still a kid.
“Long ago when Seth’s team started work on the quarry, all went well, the rock melting away like butter, until late in the night when the lake found the hole and started rising up. Out of the water crawled something thick and gray and green and slimy as moss on a stone. Its long fin of a tail grew into legs as it heaved itself onto land. By the time it got to Seth’s tent, it looked almost human. Its joints didn’t bend right, and it had scales covering its entire body. Oh, and it had grown tall! So tall! Big enough to hover over Seth’s tent and block out any light the moon was providing. It smelled like blood and sweat and dynamite. It was the smell that woke Seth. He stepped out into the night too damn stupid to be afraid. He demanded, ‘What do you want?’ The creature cocked his head and blood dripped from the shape that was his mouth. Still, that dumb-ass man was unafraid. Seth said, ‘I’m too tired for this. I’m going back to sleep.’
“Seth turned to go, and the creature stretched out his arm, and as it stretched out, it turned from an arm into something long and skinny and dead gray, a creature all its own. Where his hand had been, he grew two dark eyes and two rows of sharp, dark teeth. The eel curved around to look Seth in the face, then, before Seth could do anything, it pushed its way into his mouth. The creature took a tooth from each side of Seth’s dumb head, pulling them out and putting them into his own, crunching on ’em like potato chips.
“Seth, having regained the use of his mouth, screamed at the monster, ‘How dare you!’ He was angry, but he somehow thought he was gonna be fine. That’s how big his ego was. It went on like this all night. The creature reaching inside of Seth to take what it wanted. When Seth was just about empty, he sank to his knees and begged the creature to stop. Our island devil told Seth he’d give him everything he’d taken back except his heart on one condition.”
“What was the condition?” Wally asks.
“The devil stood tall and said to Seth, ‘If I can’t have you, I will have your women. Bring me the weak. The lonely. The ones who will not be missed.’
“Seth asked, ‘What will you do with them?’
“And the devil answered, ‘I will fill my belly, and when it is full, I will fill their bellies. They will birth my babies, who will walk the island as my own. Until then your firstborn son and their son and the sons of those children will live in the house you make and watch over the island.’
“In any case, Seth agreed, so the devil took all the bone and tissue and blood he’d eaten and barfed it up in one small nugget that he pushed back down into Seth.”
“What happened to Seth?”
“Well, the next day Seth woke up near his tent on the ground. His body sore but his vision for the island stronger than ever. He would need a son. He took Elizabeth from her sister that week, and they were married soon enough. She made him a boy, and the island has been passed down from one stonehearted son to another until James.”
“This is insane.”
“Millie has notes. Drawings, even, of the kind of demon she thinks lives under the island. She refers to him as the Devil—capital-D Devil—but I think of it as the troll in that fairy tale with the goats.”
“‘Three Billy Goats Gruff,’” she says, no spark in her voice.
“Yes. I think there’s always been something living under the island, and when B.B. and Henrie’s great-great-grandfather came along to colonize, one of the first things he did was blast a big old hole in the middle of it. That became the quarry pond. That troll or devil or whatever came crawling up angry and hungry as hell.
“These missing girls are all young women who have had to overcome something or get past something. And the island found them and ate them. This girl here.” I slide my notes across the table. “Off-island newspaper pieces about how, after she went missing, they blamed her boyfriend. He’d been hurting her, that’s what her friends said anyway, and I think she came to Fowler on the run. Another girl, Carmen, her mother had just died. Eighteen and she lost her mother. Claudia, here, was twenty-nine and had just been fired by a boss she’d accused of raping her.”
Wally sits back. “There is an island troll that eats young women. This is what you’re saying to me?”
I do not stop for her sarcasm. I can’t. I’ve never said any of this out loud to anyone, and now that I’ve started, I can’t stop.
“There is a hole at the bottom of the quarry pond that goes all the way to the lake. That’s fact. It’s not big—maybe twelve inches in diameter—but it’s there. And that story about Seth making a deal with the devil has got to have a little truth in it. He built that house so he could keep an eye on the quarry. Feed it, maybe. I don’t know.”
“The goats make it,” Wally says, her voice quiet, but then she sits up straighter, a smile brightening her gray eyes and pushing her freckles higher on her cheekbones. It’s so beautiful, it’s all I can think of.
“What?”
“The goats. They are a family, brothers maybe. They have to get across, and they outsmart the troll. All three of them. That’s what we’ll do.”
“You believe me?” I ask.
“I have nothing but that inn. Well, that inn and a whole lot of debt. And, when I broke my lover’s heart and mutilated my hand, I didn’t stay and deal with it. I ran. I ran to this stupid, fucking sinking island—no offense—and pretended I wasn’t chasing after Beatrice Volt for love or revenge. I need to stay here. And fight.”
Her assessment of herself is said with speed and humor and ferocity. I can see the hurt radiating off her, and I am suddenly scared for her. She is a perfect candidate for jumping.
She reaches her hurt hand across the table to touch me. The same gesture I offered just a little while ago.
“Early on, within my first month on island”—her voice is softer now—“I woke up standing above the quarry pond. I didn’t know how I’d gotten there, but I knew I was there to dive in. I’m not sure why I woke up and was able to walk away when so many other women didn’t, but I did. I can tell you that I felt something pulling at me. Like physically pressuring me to go over the edge, and that the water looked different. Full of something dark.”
“I had no idea,” I say. And, by this I mean, I’m sorry. All this planning and thinking and worrying about Henrie and B.B. and Carrie, and there is an island of other people that needed me to be paying attention.
“That night, the one when I almost jumped, there was someone else in the quarry. Up on that elevated rock that I’ve heard you call the Watch Tower. He was kind of standing there, arms crossed, waiting in the dark for me to jump. Like it was no big deal, but when he realized I was seeing him and not going to jump, I swear to God he snarled and dropped to all fours and leapt off that rock like it was nothing. He chased me. All the way back to the inn. I could hear him snarling and huffing. I don’t know how I ran faster than him, but I got inside the inn and locked the door. This was before I reopened, so I was all alone and, I swear to you, that thing sat on the lawn all night. Sat and paced and made mumbling, spitting noises as if trying to decide whether to crash through the front door and eat me. At some point, I fell asleep, and when I woke up, it was a sunny island morning, and he was gone. I lock myself in my room at night now. I have a system that isn’t perfect, but it would slow me down if I decided to wander again.”
“Has it happened again?”
“Oh, no. I’ve not even woken up trying to get out of my room or anything like that.”
“Did you recognize the man?”
“It was nighttime. And he was far away, but I ran into him later, and I know it was him. I don’t know how to explain to you why I’m certain, but I’m certain, and it makes sense in this fairy tale of yours.”
“Who?” I ask.
“James,” she says. “James Volt.”