Now
Detective Perez writes in her yellow legal pad and asks, “You think it was the beginning. The beginning of what?”
I look at her as if it’s obvious. “The end.” Her eyebrows crinkle. “All my life, there’d never been a murder on the island. The closest thing to crime we had was like, the occasional theft. Noise complaints, that kind of stuff. Maybe a fistfight. But in one day, three people were….” I couldn’t say ‘killed.’ That was too sterile, as if it had happened to someone else. It happened to someone I knew. Someone I had hugged. They were brutalized. Only later did I realize I saw more than I thought, as if my brain was trying to protect me. Blood on the floor. The walls. Things that should be inside a body and not out. “Who would do that to someone? To them?”
“You think there was a killer on the island?”
I nod. Though more—much more—happened on the island beyond what happened at the house.
“Who?”
I shut my eyes. I am stronger than my pain. I say, “We found out later it had been a murder-suicide. What they thought was a murder-suicide. They never really knew for sure.”
“Do you think he loved his children?”
“Of course. Just maybe not enough.”
The detective crosses something out on her pad. “Tell me more about this killer.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “The pain makes it hard to think.”
“Do you want me to call a nurse?”
I shake my head.
The pain is unbearable. Like a scab, I want to claw my face, if only to feel it bleed. To feel moisture of any kind.
Detective Perez reaches for her phone and dials. “Excuse me.”
I overhear her telling someone what I just told her. It’s weird to hear my story reduced to bullet points. When she returns, I ask, “Who was that?”
“My subordinate. He’s on the island.”
Of course, I think. “What has he found?”
“Nothing yet. There’s a lot of…damage. Are you aware of how much?”
I stare at her blankly and she hands me a remote. I slowly click on the TV. There, on screen, is a newscaster. I turn up the volume. She’s speaking about the massacre on Hemlock Island. They keep showing an image of smoke billowing over the town, little tendrils mushrooming into an ominous cloud of gray and ash. The helicopter shot zooms in and there are rows of structures on Main Street, burned to the ground. The structures are like some ancient city, long buried and then dug-up—bits and pieces of concrete that give shape to the town’s layout. Different angles show a massive tent in the town square with men in jackets emblazoned with government acronyms. From the helicopter, they look like ants roaming a barren landscape. I flip the channel. Another newscaster is reporting the same story. Another channel, same story. It’s everywhere.
Not just a story; the story of the century.
I think of all the dead. All my friends. The needless suffering.
I don’t feel anything on my face, but I must be doing something because Detective Perez hands me a tissue. I didn’t know I was crying.
I click off the TV, the ghost image of the burning island still on screen.
She asks me, “What happened on the island, Ruthie?”
I’m not sure she wants to know the answer.
Five Days Ago
Walking home, Max and I didn’t speak, lost in thought, lost in shock. People had died on the island before. Max’s brother. Old people. The rare boating accident. But never a murder and never, ever an entire family. I hated being on the island, so removed from the world, and yet, being removed made the island feel safe. All the terrible headlines I’d seen in the news, they seemed so far away. Anywhere, everywhere, but not here. All an illusion. No place was safe.
Evil or madness or maybe just reality had finally come to Hemlock Island. Like a cancer, I hoped it wouldn’t spread.
I thought of the family’s last moments alive. Their lives lived and then to just—end. Not in their sleep or peacefully, but in the worst way possible. Their last image alive was horror. Maybe the pain got so unbearable that death was a mercy. I felt tears in my eyes.
What had happened in that hut? What could’ve set them off? Why hadn’t anyone run for help? I played out scenarios in my head. None of them made sense. Either there was a murderer on the island who worked quickly and violently, or that family went at each other like savages.
And if there was a killer on the island, it probably meant he or she or them were still here. One of us. One of nearly 600.
Good, I thought. We’ll find you. We won’t let you get away with this.
We arrived at a fork in the road. Max’s house was down the way.
“Wanna hang out at my house tonight?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “Wouldn’t be right.”
Maybe it was my own selfishness in not wanting to be alone, but I pressed him. “What are you going to do?”
“Nothing. We mark his birthday. Not….”
“I wish there was something I could do.”
He looked like a man condemned. “You know what’s weird? When I saw that family, for a second…I was jealous.” He waited, maybe for me to argue. I didn’t. “No more resentment. No more disappointment.” He paused, considering. “That family’s at peace now.”
I didn’t know how to respond. “What’d you say to Dirk on the bus?”
Max squinted and looked up at the trees, seemingly hypnotized by the wind. “That if he ever talked about my brother again, I’d kill him.”
“That’s not like you,” I said.
“Maybe now it is.” He paused, finally looking away from the trees. “I woke up one day, maybe today, and thought—enough. I’ve just had enough.”
I wanted to say I’m sorry, but the words felt so useless. “If you need me….”
He smiled weakly. “Thanks, Ruthie.”
I watched him walk away, a solitary figure seemingly swallowed by the forest, and I wondered if we ever really know anyone as much as we think we do.
A few minutes later, I walked to where my mother lived. I refused to call it home. Some might call it a rambler, others a ranch. I called it Motel Six. My stomach tightened just looking at it.
I walked inside, greeted by a Home Sweet Home sign in the foyer. How ironic. I turned toward my room when Mr. Scronce appeared in front of me.
“No hello?” he asked.
This was Mr. Scronce’s house. His name was Greg, but I refused to call him by his first name. “Why did you give me a C?”
“You know why.”
He didn’t want to cause a fuss because he was dating my mother. No, that wasn’t right. It went beyond dating. We lived in his home, after all. My mother had refused to put a label on their relationship, deciding never again to define love after getting a divorce from my dad. My father lived in Seattle and my mother lived here. Our old house on the island still remained, but had since been sold.
I told you Mr. Scronce was a bigger part of my world than I ever wanted.
“Ruthie,” he said. “My house, my rules,” and he nodded toward my shoes.
I took them off before continuing down the hallway to my room. I heard him ask, “How was school today?” I could’ve told him about the dead family, about Max, about anything, but he was not my father and never would be. I would never replace my dad.
“You forgot something,” he said, and handed me a crumpled up piece of paper. It was my math test. I took it mutely and walked into my room.
It was recognizable as a bedroom, but beyond that, there wasn’t a single thing that gave it any character. No color. No posters. No mishmash of items or tchotchkes on the desk. Purely functional. I kept it that way on purpose. This living arrangement was temporary, or so I hoped. It was a motel room, nothing more. One day, I knew my mom would have a light-bulb moment and realize Mr. Scronce was Mr. Right Now and not Mr. Right and we’d pack our bags. For the longest time, I didn’t even unpack. Mother finally demanded I put my clothes in the drawers. Still, I kept my bags on standby—a bug-out bag if there ever was one.
The only thing of life in the room was a set of hamsters in a glass cage. Igor and Van Helsing. They lounged most of the day, rodents of leisure. But at night—watch out! They kept me awake with their constant cycling in their hamster wheel and I got an earworm stuck in my head, thinking the wheel on the bus goes round and round, round and round….
I loved them. I loved them even though their teeth would grow into their brains unless they gnawed on something. Nature’s weird like that.
They were a gift from Mr. Scronce. He knew I liked animals—sometimes more than humans. I didn’t even know they were a boy and girl until I woke up one night to a live demonstration of The Discovery Channel in action. Fast-forward to today and mama hamster, Igor, I guess, was big, fat and pregnant, ready to burst any day. I opened the lid taking in a waft of their cedar chips, watching them scamper, trying to scale the glass wall, and dropped in some food.
With a stroke of brilliance, I ripped up my math test into tiny pieces and dropped them like so much snow. Let the hamsters use it as litter.
A couple hours later, my mother came home from her job at the makeshift lab, built for recording the levels of contaminants still in the soil. She walked in the door and I saw a version of myself: same height, same hair color and style, same freckles. She was basically me in twenty years, and I guessed I shouldn’t complain. I would age all right.
I watched her from the hallway and she greeted Mr. Scronce with a lover’s kiss. She saw me from the corner of her eye. “Did you hear, honey, about the Solomon family?”
“I know, Mom. I saw it.”
“Saw what?” asked Mr. Scronce. “What happened?”
My mother explained what I already knew. A family murdered. No suspects and yet everyone was a suspect. The island on lockdown.
Mr. Scronce turned to me, confused. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I guess it was rhetorical, because he asked my mother, “What’d the sheriff say?”
They talked in low, urgent voices in the kitchen as Mr. Scronce cooked dinner. I never got over how strange it was to see my mother interact with someone not my father. All that history they had together, and suddenly he was swapped out and replaced, as if I wasn’t supposed to notice. That, of course, was what led to me going to therapy in the first place, as if talking to a stranger would help with the chaos of my own family.
Later, I found myself sitting at the dinner table eating a veggie burger with brown rice. Mr. Scronce might be a meathead, but he was still a hippie meathead. It was just the three of us, as Theo was out who knew where, doing who knew what, but being the older brother came with privileges. If it were me who missed dinner without calling, Mom would’ve sent for the Coast Guard.
“Until we know what’s going on,” Mr. Scronce said, “Ruthie shouldn’t be out by herself.” He spoke as if I wasn’t there.
“What?” I said. “I’m sixteen.”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“What about Theo?”
“Theo’s almost eighteen,” Mr. Scronce said. “He can take care of himself.”
“And I can’t?”
“I mean, in a fight. If it came down to it.”
“What ever happened at the Solomon’s,” I said, “was more than just a fight.”
Mr. Scronce didn’t debate. Like the equations he taught in class, some things were absolute.
I looked at my mother. She just sat there. I hadn’t even heard them discuss it. “You agree?”
“I do, honey.”
“How sexist is that? We live on this island to be free, isn’t that what you said, what you used to say all the time? To get away from all the –isms in the world? Yet, here you are, laying it down.”
“I just want you to be safe.”
“Ruthie,” Mr. Scronce said, “this isn’t a punishment—”
“It sure feels like it,” I interrupted. “I think this is your way of getting back at me for failing your test.”
“Wait,” my mother said. “What test?”
“Tell her,” I said defiantly to Mr. Scronce.
“Ruthie got a C.”
“I got an F.”
My mother shook her head. “It takes effort to fail. Why on earth would you try to get an F?”
I realized, for once, that I didn’t have a rational answer. Stated out loud it seemed ridiculous. Infantile. And I knew my guidance counselor had been right.
I asked, “May I be excused?”
Lying on my bed staring up at my popcorn ceiling, I waited until my mom and Mr. Scronce finally retired to their room. Later came the rumble of Theo’s car. The front door opened and closed and when I was sure Theo had gone into his room, I opened my bedroom window and snuck out. One of the benefits of a ranch is that everything’s on the first floor, so aside from some awkward straddling, coming and going was simple. A ninja couldn’t have done it any quieter.
After a ten-minute walk, there it stood: my old house. My real house. A simple log cabin made from locally sourced trees, a chimney and a stone pathway. Pastoral in every way. A storage shed out back would sometimes clank in the wind, an annoyance to everyone else. To me, it was like Morse Code. It meant: you are safe; you are home. This was my childhood, and everywhere I looked was laden with memories: trying to play matchmaker for the single ants I found; seeing how far I could blow the seeds from a dandelion; or collecting pinecones and using them as homemade birdfeeders, peanut butter slathered in their ridges. When I’d asked my mother back then, why they chose this island of all places to live, she thought a moment and said, “It’s got a quiet beauty, a beauty most people overlook. But it’s there if only people would see.” Sometimes I wonder if she was referring to me.
Interlopers now lived inside my ex-home. Trespassers.
Suddenly, a dog barked, rushing toward me, and as it approached it catapulted into me, tail wagging. He knocked me down on the wet grass.
“Hi, Robbie,” and I allowed the Golden Retriever mutt to cover me in doggie kisses. “Who’s a good boy? Who’s a good boy?” He needed a bath and he left a dull doggie smell on my hands, but I would’ve pet him forever.
Someone clapped nearby. “Robbie! Come!” It was Miss Lauer, the next-door neighbor, an older wisp of a woman with gray hair down to her waist. She’d taken in her niece and nephew, aged six and eight, something about a sister with drug problems back on the mainland.
Robbie didn’t move, staying with me, his tongue hanging to one side. “Sorry, Miss Lauer. I just wanted to see the place.”
Miss Lauer noticed Robbie’s affection. “Unconditional love, isn’t it the best? He sure does miss you.”
“It kills me every time. I wish we could’ve kept him.”
“I know, darling. I know. But he does pretty well here. He’s great with the kids.”
I was sure he was. He was great with me. Robbie used to be our dog. But after the divorce, my dad couldn’t take him, and Mr. Scronce was allergic to him. That’s how I got my hamsters. As if giving me a set of hamsters made up for losing Robbie. Luckily, Miss Lauer agreed to take care of him and allowed me regular visits to say hello. That’s the kind of neighbors you get on Hemlock Island.
“You doing all right, dear? I always wonder when you come by.”
“Nothing a good pet won’t cure.” I rubbed Robbie behind the ears. I wished I could be as happy as he was right then. “I didn’t mean to wake you up.”
“Oh, no harm there. Put my niece and nephew to bed. They’re up and down, up and down. Hell, I’m up most of the night now. Don’t know how parents do it full-time. Makes me want to drink.”
“I’m sure they’re the cutest.”
“You want ’em?” She laughed.
One day, I thought. “How are your chicks?”
“Funny you ask. Damnedest thing. They’re gone.”
“Gone?”
“Dead.”
She had purchased chicks with hopes of having farm-fresh eggs and an organic garden in the back. Last I heard, she was aiming to get a goat and sheep. “I’m so sorry. Was it a raccoon? I thought they were pretty well locked up.”
“No. It was Mario. My rooster. Woke up one morning to some horrible screeching and I go out there and my chicks are all dead. It was awful. Just awful. Mario was the only one left, covered in blood, strutting like the day is long.”
“I didn’t know roosters killed their own.”
“They don’t.”
Her story didn’t make much sense. “What’d you do with Mario?”
“I was so angry, so horrified.” She sighed. “You don’t really want to know. But he’s gone, too. Took ’em all out back in the forest. Dust to dust and all.”
There it was again—that feeling of darkness descending, the beginning of something gaining momentum, like a big inhalation before the inevitable exhale. A wave of queasiness passed through me and for the briefest moment, my head swam before I regained my balance. I said, “Thanks for letting me come.”
“Anytime, dear.”
Robbie reluctantly followed her inside, slowly and surely becoming less my dog and more hers. I walked home and the sky was darker, the moon hidden behind clouds, and soon enough, I was enveloped in pitch black.