Heartbroken (42 page)

“Yes, you are,” said Roger. He pushed her gently toward John, who lifted her like a child and carried her to the boat.

“Put me down right now, young man!” said Birdie. Her indignation rang out, echoing over the other sounds.

Roger looked down toward the girl at his feet.
This
was the fugitive—this tiny, helpless girl? Her eyes were open but unseeing. She coughed, a horrible hacking sound, clearing smoke from her lungs. Then she turned on her side and started sobbing. He felt a tenderness for her, akin to what he might feel for a wounded animal.

It was then that he wondered how she had the same last name as the family who owned the island. There was more to this story than met the eye, he guessed. He hesitated before cuffing her; it was unsafe to have someone handcuffed in a small boat. She looked harmless enough. There were two people dead and a house on fire. She was the one left to answer for all of it. He closed the bracelets around her wrists gently and, with John’s help, got her on the boat.

“It’s gone,” she said as they pulled away. “It’s all gone.”

Roger Murphy heard her despair, her hopelessness, and it was a note he felt reverberate in his bones.

chapter thirty-six

B
irdie had no choice now but to watch Heart Island burn. The three of them sat on the police boat, wrapped in thick gray blankets, watching as the flames raged from the main house. The great plumes of water from the fireboat seemed to do nothing. Just when it seemed that one part of the fire had been extinguished, another leaped to life.

Birdie had never felt so powerless. She found herself holding on tight to Kate’s arm. Chelsea had buried her head in Kate’s lap and could be heard softly crying, as she had been since Lulu was taken by boat to a waiting ambulance. Chelsea and Kate would be following her soon.

Birdie didn’t cry; the tears she’d shed as she left the island seemed to have dried her out. She searched inside for some kind of emotion, but it was as if everything in her had turned to stone.

“It was him,” she said. She hadn’t meant to say it out loud, but the words escaped her mouth, and she was glad for it. She couldn’t have that thought knocking around inside her head; it would drive her mad.

“Who?” asked Kate. She wasn’t crying, either, Birdie noticed. Everything was suffused with orange light. The men calling back and forth in their tasks sounded like strange night birds.

“The ghost,” Birdie said. “It was Richard Cameron.”

“Mom.”

“I’m serious,” she said. She faced her daughter. “He was warning
me. I took what he loved the most. He took what I loved the most. Now we’re even.”

“You didn’t take anything from him.”

“Didn’t I?”

After that summer, the summer of 1950—the summer she’d seen her mother with him, the year Richard Cameron’s body was found—Lana was never the same person again. It was nothing that Birdie could point to, really. She was just
less
somehow. She said all of this to her daughter.

“Still,” said Kate. “It was Lana who chose. She chose Grandpa Jack and all of you.”

“But it was because of me, what I saw, that she had to choose,” said Birdie.

“No, Mom,” said Kate. “It was right that she chose. What she was doing was wrong; she was betraying everyone, even herself. Richard Cameron was violent, prone to depression, and an alcoholic. She never could have been happy with him, not truly.”

They were both quiet for a moment.

“She came back that winter,” said Kate. “That’s the picture in your album, I suppose. They must have put the camera on the porch rail and timed it to snap. It looks like that, doesn’t it, like they weren’t quite ready for the shot? I can’t think of anyone else who could have done it.”

“We did have a camera like that,” said Birdie. “Not many people had cameras back then. But we did.”

Kate drew and released a long breath. “In her journals,” she said, “she wrote down everything that happened after the night you discovered them. I brought them for you.”

“Don’t,” said Birdie. She lifted a hand. “I don’t want to know.”

“I need to tell you what happened.”

“Not now.”

“If not now, then when?”

“Maybe never,” said Birdie.

Kate stayed silent and looped her fingers through Birdie’s. Birdie squeezed her hand tight.

“He was a destroyer,” said Birdie. “This is his legacy. These are the consequences of infidelity, of betrayal. Everything burns.”

“Everything burns,” said Kate. “But most things can be rebuilt.”

They sat like that awhile more. Eventually, it seemed that the firefighters might be making progress, getting things under control from the barge circling the island.

Chelsea wanted to go be with her friend, who she knew must be afraid and needing her. Roger Murphy said they could take the cuddy when they were ready, as long as they stayed at the marina to answer questions. He’d moved their boat to the other side of the Crosses’ dock. It sat, ready to carry them back to the mainland.

“I’m going to take her, Mom,” said Kate. “Come with us. There’s nothing more to see here.”

“I can’t leave until it’s done,” said Birdie.

“Mom,” said Kate. She held out a hand. “Please.”

But Birdie turned back to the fire, watching the flames against the sky.

“W
hy does she always want to be left alone?” asked Chelsea.

Kate watched as her daughter undid the lines, steady even though the water was knocking the boat against the dock. There was no trace of fear in Chelsea. As Kate looked out at the dark water, the burning island, she was surprised that she didn’t feel much fear, either. Not of the boat, not of the open water, and not of life without Heart Island as she knew it.

Kate remembered that when Chelsea and Brendan were small, Birdie had insisted on being left behind on the island during the worst storm in a decade. Pulling away from her, Kate had been riven with anger and fear and sadness. Tonight she found she could accept
Birdie’s decision without any of that. A constant puzzle in her life, her mother suddenly seemed less mysterious. She was as lost as anyone, as tethered to the past, as clueless about the future as Kate herself. She, too, was struggling to find some modicum of control over the chaos of action and consequence.

“That’s just her way,” said Kate.

“It’s not okay,” said Chelsea. “She’s abandoning us for that place.”

“It’s not so cut-and-dried,” said Kate. She remembered feeling the same way so many times.

“Yes, it is,” said Chelsea.

“When you’re older, things don’t seem as black-and-white.”

“You always say that.”

Chelsea was crying in the stoic way she had developed as a teenager. As a toddler, she’d let out these earsplitting wails, releasing all the noise of her anger or disappointment or pain into the air. Kate had almost rejoiced at the sound, the fearlessness of it, the proof of life, of heart. She supposed everyone learned silence over time, learned to hold it all back, hold it in. All those powerful negative emotions leaked into their lives in other, less obvious places. You ate, or drank, or worked too hard, maybe you bullied others, maybe you had affairs, maybe you robbed and killed, went on the run from the law.

She pulled the boat away from the dock. In her boating lessons, she’d learned how to make mistakes and how to correct them. She’d learned how to clip the dock, to back up and try again. She’d learned how to avoid another vessel at the last minute and what to do if she couldn’t. It was in mastering the paralyzing what-ifs that she had found the courage to take the helm, to face the open water. She knew that if the worst happened, she could handle it—most of the time.

A good fire is like an exorcism, a cleansing breath from the universe. In nature, fire clears away old and rotting vegetation, allowing for regeneration as new seeds take hold and grow. Without fire, trees
can’t reproduce—the litter keeps new seeds from growing. It’s only the homes we build that are destroyed. But those can be rebuilt, too. In loss, there is renewal, the shedding of skin.

Maybe that was why Kate couldn’t shed any tears, why she felt only a low-grade sadness. Maybe it was shock—maybe the breakdown would come later. The grief, the residual terror of running from a predator, swimming for safety, keeping Lulu from drowning—maybe it would all hit her when they were on solid ground. But for now, as she headed toward the mainland, all she could think was that if ever there was a place that needed an exorcism, it was Heart Island.

chapter thirty-seven

T
he world was a foggy, nebulous place for Emily. She had a mask over her mouth, and she lay in the back of an ambulance. Two uniformed police officers stood outside. The EMT had asked them to remove the handcuffs, and they’d agreed. Maybe they sensed her inertia, or that she had nowhere to go, no will to go there if she did. She listened to the sounds outside—purposeful footsteps, shouts, the occasional whoop or a short siren. She heard police radios hissing, spitting out staccato words and numbers. All of it was a swirl of activity, like a swarm of bees around her. But she was the still center, void and hollow.

The FBI agent Eliza Griffin had finally left after asking a million questions that Emily somehow managed to answer. The other woman, small and dark-haired, hiding behind thick glasses, seemed so different from anyone Emily had ever known. She was all purpose, all self-assurance. She had a gun at her hip, a shield around her neck. She talked like a man.
Run it down for me, Emily. Tell me everything, from the beginning
. Emily had the vague sense that she should ask for a lawyer. Somebody had said something about her having the right to call a lawyer. But wasn’t that just something they said on television? Anyway, she wanted to tell the truth. So she did.

When she first saw him in the doorway, she thought it was Joe. She thought he’d come to tell her that the old woman had lied, that Emily was his daughter and always would be, and that starting now,
he would take care of everything. She should get some sleep, and when she woke up, everything was going to be okay. But it wasn’t her father. It was the man whose car they’d stolen. What was his name? She couldn’t remember. It seemed like so long ago. Had it been only a few hours?

“How are you doing, Emily?” he asked.

“I’m okay,” she said. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry for everything.”

Her voice was muffled through the oxygen mask, so she wasn’t sure he could understand her. Her words didn’t even seem like words, more like incoherent mumbles, like those of a grown-up in a
Peanuts
cartoon.

“Emily,” he said. He climbed into the ambulance and sat beside her. He was big and seemed cramped and uncomfortable in this small space. “You’re the only one left to take the rap for this. The other two perpetrators are dead. You need to get a lawyer, okay? Don’t say anything else to the FBI.”

Why was he telling her this? Wasn’t he a cop, too? Maybe it was some kind of trick. He was trying to get even with her for stealing his car. But no, he didn’t seem like that kind of man. He was good; she could see that in him. She started thinking about Dean again, lying there in a pool of blood. Once upon a time, she’d believed he was a good man. Maybe somewhere inside, he was. She thought about their baby, how she’d betrayed and let down her child long before he ever knew the world. The tears came then. There was an endless river of them. She didn’t think she would ever stop crying.

“You don’t know me,” the man said. “And I’m sure it’s hard for you to know whom to trust right now. You’ve made some questionable moves, done some bad things, so you need to get a lawyer, someone whose job it is to help you navigate what comes next. When the agent comes back, tell her that you can’t speak to her again without a lawyer.”

She nodded because she couldn’t find her voice or any words.

“Is there someone I can call for you?”

Was there? Dean was gone. Her mother would hate her forever. Joe Burke was not her father. For the flash of a second, she thought of Carol, whom she had betrayed and who was fighting for her life. Emily was almost crushed by the wave of regret and shame that followed. No, there was no one. She shook her head, and she saw that his eyes looked sad for her. She turned away from him.

He pressed something into her hand. “I don’t know what I can do for you, Emily. But if you need some advice, give me a call.”

She felt the vehicle buck as he exited. Someone outside said, “They’re going to impound your vehicle for evidence, Jones. You’ll have to ride back with me.”

The card in her hand was plain white with black type:
Jones Cooper, Private Investigations
. There was a number and an e-mail. She tucked it into her shirt. She didn’t know what anyone could do for her. But it gave her some comfort, however small.

B
irdie heard the creaking of the dock and saw John Cross making his way down to her. She’d thought he was on the mainland, for some reason. He came to stand beside the boat and looked out across the water. The fire was contained, though the main house and many of the surrounding trees had been destroyed.

“What a nightmare.” His voice was an awed whisper. “I’m so sorry, Birdie. What can I do?”

You can shut up
. That’s what she wanted to say. She didn’t want his pity while he stood on the safety of his own island, his home and life perfectly intact. Of course, she couldn’t say that. He’d pulled her daughter, her granddaughter, and the little trollop from the water. Not that they wouldn’t have made it on their own. But she supposed she should offer some gratitude.

“I’m not sure there’s anything we can do right now. But thank
you. Thank you for helping my family.” She thought it sounded sincere enough.

“ ‘My barn having burned to the ground,’ ” he said, “ ‘I can now see the moon.’ ”

Perfect. That’s just what she needed. Haiku.

On a whim, she reached down and picked up the photo album. She opened it and removed the photograph. She handed it to John Cross; she couldn’t say why. It was such a personal item, meaning so much to her. And she wasn’t one to share. He stared at it a moment, then looked at Birdie. There was some kind of strange light in his eyes.