EPILOGUE

On the Jessica sailing spankingly to Chatham a week later, Bonnie Taylor was at the wheel under Captain Johnson’s fond supervision. The woman’s eyes were bright with the pleasure of handling the boat, but her mind would never be free of the remembrance of human vulnerability, and her heart never free of the soul-­reaching smile of Craig Soaras.

Elizabeth Carr and Dr. Peter Hubbard stood aft watching the bowler-­hat outline of Yarkie Island recede into the haze of the horizon. The sailing was pleasant, the ocean was as easy this day as it had been murderous during the northeaster. The open blue above seemed a lighter color than usual, as if the sky itself were drifting higher, upward into outer space.

Gazing back at Yarkie, the woman felt as if she were leaving another planet, returning to earth. It was a fearsome paradox that the island she had loved so deeply should now forever be an alien place.

Perhaps the harrowing memories would fade eventually, and Yarkie return in heart as in fact to the lovely oasis it had been with its fresh woods and pristine beaches. But now, though safe with Peter Hubbard’s arm around her still-­bandaged body, Elizabeth Carr shivered. As she faintly made out the bowler shape, she saw not High Ridge and its stately homes and bright flowers; she saw the slimy dome in the abominable cockroach cave, the detestable “brain” whose “cerebral cells” in the form of the tiny insects Peter was bringing back—oh, safely packed!—to Harvard.

The biologists of the world would come to understand what had transpired. They would bestow Latin names and learned theories to relate the freak cockroach colony to known natural developments. But for her the Yarkie aggressors would remain a black mystery of the impossible.

Elizabeth turned her back on the island in a gesture of finality. Her life was elsewhere. Secretly, she doubted whether she and Peter would even return for the wedding. She would do almost anything to please her grandfather, but there would be too many ghosts in that hall—the lost children off the Tub, Craig Soaras, Wanda Lindstrom, the Cannons, the Tintons, the Laidlaws, the unknowns. No, she wanted to dance at her wedding without tripping over phantoms, dance with the man holding her tightly and safely now.

She lifted her face for his kiss of promise. He gave it with a man’s love as full as her own.

From the wheel beside Bonnie Taylor, Elias Johnson looked back at the two and wiped a moist eye with a rough wrist. “Keep her straight into the wind,” he admonished Bonnie. “You’re kicking up too much spray!”

The first faint sight of Chatham caught everyone’s attention. Boston and Cambridge—the world—were close and real again. Life would resume.

None of the people on board saw the small blot that skittered on the Jessica’s scrubbed deck for a split second before disappearing in a coil of Elias Johnson’s neatly arranged rope.