Chapter One
Felicia: It’s such a dark and stormy night.
It wasn’t dark, though, or stormy, or night. I deleted the line and sighed, staring out my kitchen window. I’d moved my laptop in here because the room was brighter and cheerier than the little bedroom I’d designated as an office, but the writing wasn’t going any better in here.
I got up and poured another cup of coffee and brought it back to the table, so I could stare out the window a little longer. Outside was an icescape, brilliantly beautiful, lethal. Which didn’t stop a small cottontail rabbit from hopping across the moss “lawn,” pausing to nibble here and there. Something startled him; he darted away, showing me a flash of white tail as he went.
Felicia: I don’t know how to untangle this mystery. I want to go to bed and pull the covers over my head.
Delete, delete.
I sipped my coffee and watched the rabbit cautiously edge his way back over the frozen moss. Didn’t he freeze his little paws? Probably everything he was finding to eat was crunchy. It had been below freezing here for nearly a week, starting right after the . . . eventful . . . Thanksgiving weekend. Right after everyone left. Leaving me here, alone in a three-bedroom guesthouse behind an I-can’t-count-that-high-bedroom mansion owned by my employers, the Brixtons.
Well, at least it wasn’t raining. But it had been so very, very cold. I was entirely out of my meager supply of firewood, and praying for the power to stay on so that at least my central heating would remain operational. After a hair-raising trip to town the first day, I hadn’t dared to drive on the ice again.
I wasn’t going to starve, though. The Thanksgiving leftovers would keep me going for another week, easy. Even without all the extra food that my parents and Kevin had brought.
Kevin . . .
Felicia: I think about my ex-boyfriend only very occasionally, and only when I’m unfortunately reminded of his existence. I simply do not have time for such nonsense, because I
Ugh. Delete, delete, delete.
I took another sip of coffee and stared at my silent cell phone beside the computer. Sooner or later, I was going to have to call my friend Jen. My former new best friend who had taken off with my ex-boyfriend, Kevin, in his Intruder . . . nope, not going there. Not yet. Kevin and I were done. He and Jen . . . it hurt, but I was okay. I wished them well.
I really did.
But it made it awfully quiet around here.
But quiet was good! I had a play to finish writing, and by “finish” I meant “write the second and third acts and revise the first act.” The long (cold!) dark nights and short (cold!) days of winter should be giving me plenty of time to work on it.
Instead, I was writing—and deleting—stupid lines and pointless stage directions and basically diary entries, knowing even as I wrote them that they were not part of this story, but the words bubbled out all the same. The wrong words. So many wrong words.
I got up and paced around the house, checking the thermostat as I went through the living room, inching it up another degree. Gazing sadly into the empty, dark fireplace. Jen was going to help me find seasoned firewood—seasoned, that meant old and dry and long-dead, not fresh-cut, not rain-soaked. Not frozen solid. See how much I was learning about rural life already?
James glanced up from where he’d been sleeping on the couch, gave me a half-heartedly inquisitive meow, and returned to slumber. He’d been much more of a homebody since everyone had left. Or maybe it was just the cold snap. I think he did like the quiet and solitude, though; or maybe he was just growing up. Though he had a ways to go. He was barely the equivalent of a teenager, in cat years. All legs and mischief and appetite.
I paced back into the kitchen. My blank screen, ACT TWO in bold and Italics at the top of it, stared back at me.
Felicia: I must get out of this house, or I’ll go stark raving mad.
Delete. Delete. Delete.
“Okay, Cam,” I said to myself, as I stood in front of the open fridge that I had no memory of opening, much less walking over to. “I don’t know about Felicia, but you are not cut out for the cabin-fever lifestyle.” I had to go to town, to see another human being, to do something. After all the drama and intrigue and madness since I’d arrived here on Orcas Island, to have had everything suddenly go so quiet and peaceful . . . it was intolerable.
But I couldn’t drive on that ice. My little Honda just couldn’t handle it, even with the chains I didn’t really know how to put on.
And I had nobody to call for help.
I hadn’t realized how much I’d relied on my little community of friends and neighbors, until they’d all vanished. My family, of course, had only been visiting for the weekend, as had the Brixtons (and their . . . interesting . . . children, JoJo and Clary). But my island friends . . . Colin, who’d taken a contract job in San Diego for the winter, taking his boat and sailing away. Lisa Cannon, also off-island, tending to mysterious business in Seattle. Jen . . . yeah, Jen.
And Kip. I supposed Kip was a friend, no matter that he’d confused me so terribly right when it all went down on Snooks’s boat. Kip, San Juan County Deputy Sheriff, who I had last seen being hauled off in handcuffs by a very impressive FBI agent—and, if that weren’t enough, a Canadian Mountie as well.
I still couldn’t quite get my head around the fact that Kip was a crooked cop. He was the most straight-laced guy I knew, with rugged good looks and that mellifluous voice. But I couldn’t deny the evidence of my own senses. Kip had waylaid me and tried to drag me off to the strange, abandoned boat, all the while accusing me—vaguely—of being somehow behind all the intrigue Orcas had been experiencing of late. Of harboring secrets.
Well, that last part was true, a bit. But they weren’t my secrets, and they really shouldn’t have been the cause of any of our handful of dead bodies.
Felicia paces the stage, out of her mind with boredom.
Felicia: Maybe if I just drive really slowly and carefully, I can make it to town and back without sliding off the road and into the sound. It’s movie night at the Seaview, after all; and I’m nearly out of cream.
Delete, delete, but I wasn’t wrong, was I? The sun was already setting, I’d gotten no writing done today, the icepocalypse was never going to melt, and semi-first-run movies played only two nights a week here. I’d missed last night, being too scared to drive. If I didn’t go tonight, I’d not get to see the new Marvel release at all.
Unless I went to the mainland—“America.” Not likely.
So that’s how I found myself bundling up against the cold, preparing to crunch across the frozen driveway to my iced-shut car. I wound a plaid muffler (a Pendleton, a real thrift shop score) over my head and around my neck, and put on my wool peacoat. That would do it, yes? I’d be protected by all this wool if I slid off the road and landed in the ditch and it was too icy to walk out for help and no one passed my car for hours because every other resident of this icy, remote island was too sensible to leave home on a night like this?
What was I thinking?
I was thinking that I was going stir-crazy. And needed diversion and human interaction. Like, you know, a normal person would. And that a movie would be good for me. It would take me out of my own head, which was preoccupied with personal disappointment and the strange goings-on that I had no real explanation for. Like Sheila, and how she’d come back from the dead. And Lisa’s binder, and how strange it was that she’d been desperate for me to find it, but completely unconcerned about getting it back from me.
And those strange gifts at my back door, where I heard a knock. A knock?
Company, in this weather?
I headed back through the house to the kitchen, where I opened the door to the most peculiar old woman I’d ever seen. She was tall, though she’d clearly been even more statuesque when she was younger (like, less than eighty-five); and she was swathed head to toe in turbulent, dramatic colors. I think it was a coat, once; now it was an assortment of fire-engine red boiled wool underneath; patches of purple and green on the sleeves; a black-and-white polka dot belt, eight inches wide at least; and what could only be epaulettes on both shoulders. Epaulettes that didn’t match, even sort of: a tight military braid on one side; a tasseled, hand-sewn number on the other. She had hair white as snow (but had she cut it herself? Oh please no), milky blue eyes, and a strong mouth adorned with lipstick to match the first layer of her coat.
This vision held out a gallon-sized jar of clearly homemade pickles, in a hand that did not tremble. She must be way stronger than she looks, I thought. “Hello, dear,” she said, in a clear, forceful voice. “I thought it was about time I introduced myself. My name is Paige Berry, and I find myself in a bit of a pickle.” My eyes dropped to the jar of pickles in her hand; she raised a white eyebrow and lifted her lips in the ghost of a smile. “Yes, I know, a pun of an introduction, isn’t it? But I’m talking about a real pickle. I find myself in a serious situation, Ms. Tate.”
Another situation? My heart sank. “How serious?”
“Very serious.” Her pale blue eyes fixed mine with an oddly commanding stare. “I’m hoping you can help me with it. I understand you have a way with mysteries.”
“They seem to find me,” I blurted. “Well—come in,” I added. We were both heavily bundled up, but I could still feel the iciness colonizing my house.
“Thank you.” She thrust the pickle jar at me; I took it, needing both hands for the weight. “From my garden,” she said, as I wrestled the jar to the counter and set it down. No wonder she’d needed such a huge jar; these had been made from the biggest cucumbers in creation. “I’m out of the fresh stuff, but I had time to put up a few dozen jars before the deep freeze.” As I closed the kitchen door, she glanced around appraisingly, her eyes lighting on the coffee pot. “Well, well. Pour me a cup, and get comfortable. This may take a while.”
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