Lucy: Daughters of the Sea #3 (18 page)

I
T WAS DONE
.
They could return to New York. The little contretemps with Prissy could be smoothed over, given time. The dream of Stephen becoming bishop would have to be set aside.
Set aside
, Marjorie thought. She liked those two words. There was the tincture of hope about them when linked together. She could still hope, just a bit. She was sure that if she could just get Lucy away from this island, she would forget that ridiculous boy.

It was well past midnight, but Marjorie could not sleep. There was no breeze, and the night was unusually warm. A mosquito had slipped into their bedroom, and its persistent droning had driven her from the bed. She put on a wrapper and walked out onto the porch. The water, untouched by wind, stretched like a dark enameled sea. A nearly full moon poured a path of silver almost directly to the beach below the cliff.

Lucy had spent so much time at the top of those cliffs, painting the view. Her daughter’s watercolors were really exceptional. Perhaps they should consider having her take some lessons. There must be some place where she could be taught that would not … not … not be so full of artists! Lucy might even become a teacher herself for some well-off family. Then, for some unexplainable reason, Marjorie was taken with the notion of walking down from the porch, which she had not done all summer, for a better view of the scenes Lucy had painted.

She stood with her hand resting on the slender trunk of a birch tree and peered out at the sea. Clouds brushed across the moon, temporarily dappling the gleaming path of its light, but she spotted something flash where the silver had been. Something that appeared like a glittering rainbow bursting from the sea.

“What in the world!” she murmured and dared creep closer to the edge. The water near where she had seen the flash seemed to radiate with a dazzling array of colors. Something was swimming toward the beach, but she could not tell what it was. There was glitter beneath the surface, and a palpable energy emanated from the water. She felt it approaching, and a deep fear rose in her, but she was as rooted to the spot as the birch trees that surrounded her. A head broke through the surface. Sleek with water but a familiar shape. Though the hair was wet and dark, a sudden blast of moonlight ignited it like flames as she swam into the path of silver. “Lucy!” Marjorie Snow staggered slightly.
Work of the devil? A changeling!
Lucy dove, and the magnificent tail lifted into the night.
No, not my daughter. Never was. Never will be.

Neville Haskell, the longtime manager of the Abenaki Club, for a third time read the note he had found slipped under his door. “What the devil!” He stared at the telephone on his desk, one of the few on the island. He had cursed the day it was installed and looked at it now as one might regard a caged animal. It rang so incessantly between eleven and one o’clock in the afternoon with bookings for tea that he actually would evacuate his office and have Miss Goodfellow sit at his desk and take the reservations. But now he picked it up and pressed the lever rapidly.

“Molly!” he rasped into the receiver.

“Yes, Mr. Haskell,” Molly Whelan, the town’s operator answered.

“Connect me to Constable Bundles.”

“Homer?”

“Ayuh, he’s the only constable I know on Mount Desert.”

“Certainly.”

There were a series of bleatings in his ear.

“Constable Bundles heah,” the thick Maine accent honked through the receiver.

“Homer, it’s Neville down at the Abenaki. You still working on that murder?”

“’Course I am. Biggest thing ever happened on this island. Got a reporter coming up from the
Boston Globe
.”

“Well, you better get over here. I got a lead for you.”

L
EAVING
.
Never had the word been so ominous, but never before had she feared leaving a place. She felt as if she were about to be torn from everything that had any meaning for her. She was leaving Phineas, leaving her two sisters, leaving the sea.

Despite being lost in her own thoughts, Lucy could not help but notice that her mother seemed extremely nervous this morning and rather distracted. She kept glancing toward the door as they ate their breakfast.

“Do you want some more tea, Mother?”

Marjorie seemed to wince. “No, nothing.”

Not “nothing, dear,” not “nothing, Lucy.” Lucy supposed that since the incident of the cursed pink pearl button, she was no better than a slattern in her mother’s eyes. She wanted to say something reassuring. She wanted again to try and explain that Phineas Heanssler was a decent, honest, hardworking young man. But she knew it was futile.

Lucy had hoped to see Muffy. She had wanted to tell her that it might be best if she did not serve as her bridesmaid. She was fairly sure that Mrs. Forbes would see to it that she did not but thought, for the sake of her own dignity, it was better for her to go and withdraw.

“Mother,” Lucy began, but Marjorie still would not raise her eyes from her breakfast plate. “Mother,” Lucy began again. “I have been thinking that perhaps it might be best if I called upon Muffy Forbes and offered to withdraw as her bridesmaid.”

“Oh, Lucy dear,” her father interjected, “I don’t think that is necessary.”

For the first time, Marjorie seemed to lift from the despondent vale that had enshrouded her all morning.

“Oh, Stephen, I feel it is very necessary. Most appropriate.” The muscle near her left eye began to flinch. There was a sharp rap on the door.

“I’ll get it,” Lucy said, eager for an excuse to leave the table.

“No, I will. Sit down!” Marjorie snapped.

Two uniformed men walked into the small dining room with Marjorie Snow.

“What’s the meaning of this?” Reverend Snow stood up.

“Constable Bundles, sir.” His words took on an odd life of their own. Lucy stood transfixed and yet was aware of every little detail, from the motes of dust circulating in a shaft of sunlight that fell on the breakfast table, to the cold metal as the constable’s deputy fit the handcuffs around her wrist. She could see a distorted reflection of her own face spreading out across the polished surface of the cuffs and wondered if they shined them up just for her.

“Wait! Wait!” Her father was breathing heavily. “You say she poisoned the duke?”

“Innocent until proven guilty, Reverend. She is merely a suspect.”

“A suspect!” the reverend roared.

Her father was a tower of rage, a foil for the absolute stillness of her mother, who stood like a figure carved from granite. Her eyes empty, oddly colorless, and staring at Lucy as if …
As if
, Lucy thought, and then it all came together for her,
as if I am a freak … a freak of nature. She saw me swimming.

Lucy looked over at her mother as they led her toward the door.

“Take your shawl, dear.” Her mother spoke mechanically. The word
dear
was as cold as the metal cuffs around her wrists. She could not reach for the shawl because of her bound wrists. Her father stepped over to the hook where her shawl and small, embroidered handbag hung. He removed first the bag and then the shawl.

“What’s this?” The reverend looked down as a dusting of powder fell from the handbag.

“Don’t touch it, Reverend,” Constable Bundles barked.

“What is it?”

“Poison, possibly. Rat poison.”

Lucy looked directly at her mother. “You did this!” she seethed. She caught a glint of cunning light in her mother’s eyes. Marjorie Snow’s face was immobile, void of visible expression, yet there was the barely discernible shadow of a bland malignancy. For lurking beneath the implacable mask was the face of a savage.

“H
EY
, M
ISS
S
NOW
,
you made it into the
Ellsworth American
and the
Boston Globe
— all the way to Boston, how about that! You’re putting us on the map, de-ah.” Mr. Greenlaw, the prison guard, sat in a room next to where his only prisoner was incarcerated.

Lucy was unsure how long she had been in the jail in Thomaston, Maine. It could have been just a few days, a week, a month. What did it really matter? She had quickly learned to close her ears to his seemingly continuous narration. She stopped listening when he had tried to recall when the last hanging in the county had occurred — was it ’70 or ’71? He was fairly sure it was when his father had been the guard.

“You don’t mind, do you, if I bring my grandson by to meet you?” he had asked one day. Lucy had said nothing, and he had obviously taken her silence as acquiescence. So a short time after this latest news bulletin, she was surprised to hear a child’s voice coming down the corridor and the light skipping of his feet on the stone floor. The two sounds were so incongruous to the setting that she was immediately alert. Soon a little face was pressing against the bars. “That her, Grandpa?”

“That’s her, Joey. That’s Lucy Snow. The poisoner.”

“Can you get her to come closer?” the child asked.

“Miss Lucy, would you be kind enough to walk a bit closer? My grandson Joey here, he ain’t really ever seen anybody in the cell ’cept for the town drunks. Would you kindly walk up to the bars and make a little boy happy?”

Kindly
, Lucy thought. Why would the man bother with such a word? But she rose from the stool and walked a few steps toward the bars.

“Look at that, Grandpa, look at those sparkly things floatin’ round her feet.”

Until that moment, Lucy had not realized that her skin felt different. She was suddenly overcome by a fierce itching and a feverish heat. She stopped and looked at her hands. They appeared red. She remembered Hannah’s story about being put on an orphan train that took her far from Boston, far from the sea to the middle of the country — Kansas. Her skin had seemed to dry out to the point where she was shedding what she later realized were scales. Lucy stopped walking.

“I am feeling quite feverish. Perhaps I should not come any closer. I wouldn’t want to infect the child.”

Hannah slammed down the
Boston Globe
on the counter. “She didn’t love him. She was not
jilted
by him.”

“Now, Hannah, how would you ever know?” Mrs. Bletchley, the cook at Gladrock, said as she beat the batter for the blueberry muffins.

Hannah had said too much. She had to think fast. “I — I saw them at the Fourth of July party here. I could just tell that she didn’t like him, but he was pursuing her — madly.”

“Well, maybe she got fed up,” Mrs. Bletchley offered, “and decided to do him in. Poison. Imagine that! However did she get the poison into those jam pots over at the Abenaki?”

“Exactly! How?” Hannah stood up. Her cheeks were flaming.

Mrs. Bletchley looked at her with alarm.

“Hannah dear. You’re quite upset. Perhaps you want to take the afternoon off. No one’s coming for luncheon today. I’m sure Mr. Marston wouldn’t mind.”

“What wouldn’t I mind?” Mr. Marston, the Hawleys’ butler, walked into the kitchen.

“Hannah’s feeling a bit out of sorts. This murder and all.”

“Oh, yes, terrible thing. Makes one rather nervous, doesn’t it? Imagine having to check your jam pot every time you want a popover. I understand the Abenaki is closing for the summer. No, Hannah, I wouldn’t mind. Take the afternoon off.”

“Thank you, sir.” Hannah curtsied and left the kitchen.

She had to get in touch with May. They had been meeting almost every night since Lucy’s arrest. But it wasn’t night now; it was broad daylight. She couldn’t exactly swim out to Egg Rock Island and appear at May’s door at the lighthouse. What would May’s father say? She heard Ettie out on the porch, arguing with Miss Ardmore, her governess. “Why do I have to sit here on a beautiful day and learn irregular French verbs. It’s a crime!”

“Now, Ettie. We’ve had enough real crimes on this island. So please, dear, don’t be hyperbolic.”

“I don’t believe for one minute that Lucy Snow murdered that stupid duke.”

Hannah froze in her tracks. The intensity in Ettie’s voice cut like a hot blade through the air. She walked out onto the porch.

“Miss Ardmore, forgive me for interrupting Ettie’s lessons. But those hair ribbons that you were so certain you had lost forever and ever, Ettie — guess where I found them.”

What hair ribbons?
Ettie thought. Her brow crinkled. It suddenly dawned on her that Hannah had heard what she’d just said about Lucy. The hair ribbons were a complete ruse.

“Please, Miss Ardmore, let me take Ettie for just a minute so I can show her exactly where they were and how silly she is not to have seen them. They would have bitten her on the nose.”

“Of course. I think perhaps we should give up for now on the irregular verbs.”

As soon as they were in Ettie’s bedroom and Hannah had shut the door, Ettie blurted out, “Hair ribbons? Now really, Hannah, what is this all about?”

“It’s about my sisters,” Hannah said. Tears quivered in her eyes, turning them into huge green pools. Hannah fell to her knees and embraced the small girl. “Ettie, we need your help. You must come with me to meet May, my other sister. May Plum, the lighthouse keeper’s daughter.”

“I’ll do anything, Hannah. Anything to help you. To help Lucy. We’ll think of something, somehow.”

“I can trust you. I can trust May.” And she thought to herself she could trust Phineas Heanssler.

“Can you trust Stannish Whitman Wheeler?”

Hannah was taken aback by Ettie’s question. “So you know about us?”

Ettie avoided her eyes. “I just … I just had a suspicion, back when we had to pose for the portrait. I saw how he looked at you. Can you trust him?”

“I’m not sure, Ettie.”

“He’s one of you, isn’t he?”

Hannah was shocked. “How did you ever know?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe it was his eyes — the green. There was just something about him that made me feel that he was … was …”

“Mer,” Hannah said softly.

“Yes, mer,” Ettie replied.

“He was. However, he’s made his choice. But right now you need to meet my sister.”

Ettie felt a deep thrill course through her. “Will we swim?”

“No, dear. We’ll take the mail boat and walk right in through the front door of the lighthouse.”