I felt sick to my stomach, my chest so tight I had trouble breathing.
Bruce pulled me out of the doorway and slammed the door shut.
Lori turned on him. “You fool.” Her voice was low and tense. “I told you to get a tree person out here first, to determine the sturdiest tree, but you couldn’t wait to get your new toy hooked up.”
Bruce hissed something back that I didn’t hear.
Meanwhile Jack was shaking the water off his arms and hands. He strode around the corner into the kitchen and over to the counter. I followed him.
He fiddled with the control on a large black radio. All I could make out was static, but he leaned in, his ear close to its speaker.
Bruce and Lori suddenly stopped bickering. They moved together to the kitchen doorway. Silence reigned, except for the static and mumbling coming from the black box and the sounds of the storm outside.
Jack straightened and turned to us. His face was a stone mask, except for a tiny throbbing in a vein on his temple. “This isn’t just some more thunderstorms. It’s the real deal. The storm has picked up speed and it’s grown. It’s half again the width that it was yesterday.”
My knees wobbled. Annoyed at my own weakness, I said, “But I thought landfall wasn’t until midnight.”
“It’s been moved up to eleven now,” Jack said. “And that’s when the eye crosses the coastline. We’ve got the front side of the storm to survive before then.”
My legs suddenly gave out completely. I grabbed for the table near me, to keep from falling to the floor.
Jack was next to me in an instant, sliding a shoulder under my arm to hold me up. His stony face softened some.
“We’re gonna be okay, Marcia.” It was the first time he’d used my name. He looked up at the ceiling. “This house, she’s built sturdy. She’ll keep us safe.” He spoke of the house as if it were a living thing. “Bruce’s father had hurricane anchors installed on the roof trusses,” he added.
The constriction in my chest eased. I had such anchors added to my own roof eighteen months ago, when I’d had to replace some of the trusses due to termite damage. The metal plates were bolted to the trusses and the frame of the house, making it much harder for the roof to be blown off.
His words had reassured my brain, but my legs continued to refuse to hold my weight.
“You should probably lie down.” Jack half carried me toward my room.
Heat flushed my cheeks. I felt like a fool.
But there was no point in resisting. Because my body was incapable of staying upright.
I had no idea how long I’d laid on my bed, on top of the comforter, staring at the ceiling—my body achy and my stomach queasy.
Long enough for my clothes to dry, while my mind went around in circles.
There was no way to find out for myself what the storm was up to. No way to connect with Will. Helplessness felt like a lead weight on my chest, sinking me farther into the mattress.
A soft whimper. Was it one of the dogs?
Buddy planted his front paws on the side of the bed and nudged me with his nose. The whimper had come from me. He thought I was having a nightmare.
I shook my head. “It’s okay, boy.”
What’s wrong with me? I wasn’t usually this big a coward. Nor did my emotions normally make my body weak.
I started to get drifty. Thank heavens. Maybe I could sleep through at least some of the storm.
A loud crack of thunder. The two lamps in the room flickered, then went out.
Crapola!
I sat up partway and fumbled on the nightstand for my flashlight. My hand connected with it and managed to knock it to the floor.
I slid off the bed and landed on Buddy’s rump. He yelped and slithered out from under me.
“Sorry, boy,” I said into the complete darkness.
For a moment, up was down and down was up, and I had a mini flashback to a few months ago, when I’d been locked in a wine cellar in the dark.
I took a deep breath and placed my hands on the floor to ground myself.
“Buddy?”
A solid weight landed on my thigh. I touched the silky fur of his head.
“Nugget? Where are you, girl?”
A second later, a warm tongue licked the side of my face. It tickled and I giggled a little.
That broke through the fear, and suddenly I was laughing at myself.
I felt around carefully for the flashlight and finally located it under the edge of the bed.
When I turned it on and a small beam of light shone across the room, I let out a sigh. My tense muscles relaxed some.
I had back-up batteries, now stashed in the nightstand drawer. As long as I had light, I would be fine.
The wind whistled outside. The house shook a little, as if putting the lie to my efforts to reassure myself.
The queasiness eased, suddenly replaced by a grumbling sensation. Lunch had been interrupted and my stomach was now realizing the deficit.
I used the bed to pull myself upright. My legs seemed a bit stronger. Flashlight in hand, I ventured across the room to the dresser. I’d designated the top drawer as my kitchen.
I pulled out the small plate, a hard-boiled egg and the salt shaker. Laying the flashlight down so it shone across the surface of the dresser, I peeled the egg and sprinkled it lavishly with the salt. For some reason, this salt was not as potent as most. It took twice as much to get the required result.
I put the salt shaker away, then moved the egg toward my mouth, my eyes half closed, anticipating the rich flavor.
My hand froze. The salt crystals reflected back the flashlight’s glare, but there were duller, yellow-white specks on the egg as well. A lot of them.
I raised the egg to just in front of my eyes. Could they be pieces of eggshell?
Licking my finger, I touched one of the dull flecks. It wasn’t hard. Not eggshell. It had to have come from the salt shaker.
I sniffed it. No odor. Whatever it was, I’d already eaten plenty of it by now anyway. One more fleck wouldn’t matter. I put it on my tongue.
No salty taste.
Egg still in hand, I stumbled over to the straight-backed chair and sat down. A few pieces fell into place. Ellie/Lori started getting a lot better after Bruce had banned salt from the table and she’d passed on the wheat bread for several meals running.
Someone had been slowly poisoning Ellie, doctoring the stuff that they knew Bruce wouldn’t touch. And since Bruce had been the one to get rid of the salt, maybe he wasn’t that someone.
And now the same poison was making me weak. I shuddered.
Knuckles against my door. I jerked in my chair.
“Sorry to disturb you.” Greta’s voice through the door. “Bruce vants everyone in the dining room for a meetink.” Stress had thickened her accent considerably.
I left the egg on the plate on the dresser, grabbed the flashlight and stumbled to the door.
Now paranoid, and for good reason, I took both dogs with me. My flashlight beam on the floor in front of us, we made our way to the dining room. My legs were still somewhat wobbly, but I got there without falling on my face.
Two battery-operated camping lanterns adorned the ends of the sideboard, giving the room an eerie glow.
Bruce stood at the head of the table, next to Ellie’s usual chair. She sat across from my seat.
Or was it Lori?
I pointed to the corner and both dogs went over and laid down. Then I sat in my spot and studied the woman across from me in the dim light. Shoulders slumped, face pinched. I was betting it was Ellie. Or somebody else, but not Lori.
Greta and Jack filed in and sat down, Jack beside me, Greta next to Ellie.
The meeting turned out to be about the electricity. Bruce informed us that the main generator had been shorted out by a lightning strike close to its shed.
Say what? I’d been assuming that we got electricity somehow from the mainland, maybe via underground cables. But of course, that would be one heck of a project, to run cables all the way from Dahlia to this outer-most island of the Nature Coast Keys. How silly of me.
“Lucky it didn’t blow the gas tank,” Jack mumbled beside me.
I flashed him a confused look.
“Big silver thing out back,” he said in a low voice.
I had noticed the tank yesterday but had assumed it was fuel oil for a furnace. Duh. The house didn’t have a furnace.
“So the gas cans yesterday were for the back-up generator?”
Jack nodded. “The main generator and its tank were put a ways from the house on purpose. In case they got hit by lightning. The back-up one’s in a small storage room off the kitchen.”
Bruce was tapping a finger on the table, his lips pinched together. He cleared his throat. “The back-up generator can only handle so much at once. To keep the food in the refrigerator and freezer from spoiling, I’ll turn it on for a half hour at a time, but the lights and the well pump have to be off while it’s on. Don’t open the fridge door. Everything we should need for the next twenty-four hours is in the coolers in the kitchen, right, Greta?”
“Ya.” She was hugging herself, even though the room didn’t feel chilly to me.
Was Bruce merely being a good captain of the ship, or was he narcissistic enough to be getting off on the role?
“We’ll do half-hour intervals until ten-thirty,” he continued, “when the lights will go out for the night.”
“Good that you’ve got a flashlight,” Jack said to me. “You got extra batteries?”
I nodded. Bruce glared at him.
Yup, he’s enjoying being the big enchilada, Ms. Snark commented.
“In case it gets cold tonight, Jack has laid out fires in your fireplaces.”
The one in my small room was about the size of a postage stamp. I doubted it would give off much heat.
But right now, I was kind of sweaty in the stuffy, closed-up house. Or was the poison I’d been sprinkling on my eggs and consuming with my sandwiches causing a fever?
My stomach clenched. What if I became truly ill, stuck on this island with no medical help?
I needed to tell someone about the poison, so they could at least try to help me if I started having convulsions or something.
While Bruce rambled on about how we needed to preserve the batteries in the emergency lights and our flashlights, I studied the faces of those at the table.
Ellie was looking down, plucking at a loose piece of skin by the cuticle of her thumbnail. Was she my best bet?
I glanced sideways at Greta. Her face was white as a sheet.
It would be easy for her to do the poisoning, but I couldn’t imagine what motive she would have. Nor could I think of a motive for Jack, although I didn’t know either one of them very well.
You can be rather naïve about your clients. Will’s voice, from a conversation a few months ago, when he was pointing out that just because they were veterans didn’t mean they were all good and trustworthy people.
Still, Ellie was the one I knew the best, and she was the one the poisoner had meant to go after. I was collateral damage.
I lingered when Bruce dismissed the meeting and Greta and Jack rose to leave.
Ellie put a hand on the table to push herself to a stand.
“Um, hang on for a minute. There’s something I need to talk to you about.”
She dropped back down. “Did you want to try to do some training this afternoon?”
With a start, I realized training was the last thing on my mind. Which was so wrong.
“No actually. This is about something else.” I leaned in. “You’ve been feeling so weak because someone has been poisoning you.”
She reared back in her chair and stared at me, her mouth hanging open. “What are you talking about?”
Maybe I shouldn’t have been quite so abrupt, but how does one gently introduce the subject that someone near and dear might be trying to kill you?
“When Bruce banished the salt, I stole a shaker from the kitchen before Greta could get rid of it. Today, I realized there’s some other substance mixed in with the salt. It might be in the wheat bread as well. The things that Bruce doesn’t eat.”
She shook her head vehemently. “You’re crazy. Bruce wouldn’t do something like that.”
“I’m not saying it’s him. The fact that he got rid of the salt and discouraged you from eating the wheat bread points toward it not being him.”
But that could be his way of throwing off suspicion. Maybe he’d devised a different plan for getting rid of Ellie.
“And then there’s the pirate ghost who isn’t really a ghost–”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
It was my turn to gape at her for a second.
Duh, Ms. Snark said. I resisted the urge to smack my forehead. I’d told Lori, not Ellie, about the pirate.
I repeated what I’d found snagged on the railing and rosebush but held back my observations that the fake ghost probably wasn’t Greta or Jack. Well, it could be Jack.
Ellie dropped her head onto her arms on the table and began to sob.
Crapola. Now what was I supposed to do?
I opted for nothing and waited her out.
Gradually the sobs eased, became a soft snuffling. She raised her head and swiped the back of one hand across her wet cheeks. “Why do you assume whatever you found in the salt is poison?”
“Haven’t you noticed how I’ve been getting weaker today?”
She looked away, toward the dogs snoozing in the far corner of the room. “I haven’t been arou… I’ve been sleeping a lot today. I hadn’t noticed.”
I opened my mouth to protest that she’d been sleeping much less than usual today, then caught myself. “Sleeping” was code for she wasn’t out, someone else was.
Lori had been the alter in control of the body most of today.
Ellie shook her head. Her eyes slowly shifted from cloudy with worry and wariness toward clear and sharp.
“Lori?” I said.
After a beat, she smiled. “I thought she’d never let me out. Thanks for saying my name. That helped with the last nudge.”
“I considered saying your name sooner, to see if I could get you to come out. But I didn’t know how Ellie would react to that.”
“She knows we have DID But she’s not as far along with ‘accepting the diagnosis’,” Lori made air quotes. “Part of the problem is that she thinks she’s the host alter. But she isn’t, I am.”
“I thought the host was usually the one who went by the person’s given name.”
“Key word is usually. And that’s part of the confusion. Even our therapist isn’t convinced yet that I’m the host. And another part is that I let Ellie marry Bruce.”
“What do you mean, let her marry him?”
Her eyes grew shiny. “Is what I say to you confidential, like with a therapist?”
“Well, I don’t know if I could refuse to testify in court, but I consider it confidential.”
“The pilot in that crash. I’d had an affair with him, six years ago. I knew he was married but since I didn’t particularly want to get married, that didn’t matter to me.”
She paused, took a deep breath. “But it mattered to him. He broke things off, and I went into a tailspin emotionally. One of the advantages of DID is that you can hide inside when you’re hurting and let others deal with the world.”
I’d never really thought about DID having advantages, but I guess that could come in handy.
“By the time I realized Ellie was falling for Bruce, it was too late. They were engaged. I thought about trying to sabotage the relationship, or even just flat out telling him about us. But he seemed like a nice guy and he’s good in the sack–”
I slapped my hands over my ears. “TMI, Lori.”
She snorted. “Sorry.”
But then curiosity got the better of me. I lowered my hands. “How’d you even find that out?”
Her mouth turned up in a smirk. “Thought it was too much information. Hmm, how can I put this delicately? Ellie has some issues that I don’t happen to have. She likes the cuddling, but once things progress beyond a certain point, she backs off and, well…” Lori wiggled her eyebrows up and down.
Heat crept up my cheeks. Curiosity may not always kill you, but it sure can be embarrassing sometimes.
“Anyway,” Lori continued, “the pilot and I, we managed to stay friends, and that’s the only aspect of the relationship that Ellie lets herself acknowledge. She was closer to him as a friend, even more than I was. I had to keep my guard up to a certain extent.” She looked away. “I think that’s why his death hit her harder—that, and I’d already done a lot of grieving for him before, when we broke up.”
She cleared her throat. “Did you say something about you getting weaker?”
Dang, here we go again, Ms. Snark commented.
I repeated to her my belief that the salt and wheat bread contained something poisonous.
She gave me a sad, half smile. “It did occur to me at one point that you were like my Dorian Gray picture. As you got weaker, I got stronger. But I had no idea it had to do with what we were eating. I’m so sorry.”
“Not your fault.” At least, I hoped it wasn’t some other part of her that was doing this. “But I wanted you to know what’s going on. Not only so you can protect yourself, but in case I get sicker. It’s possible that when we both stop eating the wheat bread, and with the salt gone, the poisoner will try something different.”
“Have you been feeling queasy lately?”
“Yes.” I stared at her, then understanding dawned. “You said your stomach had been upset, until you stopped eating the wheat bread.”
Lori nodded. “I’d thought it was part of the PTSD and depression Ellie’s been going through, but it’s gotten better the longer I’ve been off the salt and wheat bread.”
She gave a slight shudder. “I was willing to believe Bruce would play pirate to scare Ellie away, but poison…” She shook her head.
“It may not be him.” Again, I repeated the evidence that pointed away from him. Then I sat up straighter in my chair as another twist occurred to me. “Or maybe it was him and he started feeling guilty, and that’s why he got rid of–”
“Who’s feeling guilty about what?” Bruce came around the corner into the dining room.
We both jolted in our chairs.
But before either of us could offer a cover story, Bruce went off. “What are you doing leaving these lanterns burning, using up the batteries?”
It hadn’t even registered that the lights had come on while we’d been talking.
I glanced across the table at Lori. But she wasn’t there anymore.
“Sorry,” Ellie said, in a soft voice. “I forgot to turn them off.”
My only response was a growling stomach.