Pieces of Hate (A Wendover House Mystery Book 4) (8 page)

“You’re being awfully quiet,” Bryson said. “This worries me.”

“I got some cognac for us,” I said as we climbed aboard. It wasn’t
actually cold, but I felt chilled and took a lap robe out of a locker and
spread it over my legs while we cast off. I kept well back from the gunwales
and did not peer into the water.

“Good. I could use it. This will be a hard week. Saturday folks will
be out decorating in the silent city and I shall have to be on hand to direct
traffic and keep the peace. Hopefully the weather will be clear by then or it
will be a muddy mess.”

“Decorating?” I asked. “Where is Silent City?”

“The cemetery.”

The silent city—right.
And he meant
putting flowers on graves and weeding and straightening tombstones that tend to
lean and topple over time. It was a local version of Tomb Sweeping Day, enacted
on the anniversary of some triumphal skirmish or other since the weather would
be too beastly for housekeeping tasks on the traditional date for funerary
maintenance.

Thankfully I was an islander. I didn’t need to care about this mainland
tradition.
Especially since I had real doubts that the body
in the mausoleum was actually my great-grandfather.

The Founders Day celebration was another matter. That was an island
affair and I would have to find time to work on my speech, since I had stupidly
failed to anticipate a cursed treasure washing up on my beach and promised to
give it.

The trip was utterly uneventful, discounting a few shrieking gulls who
decided to relieve themselves while flapping overhead. Neither bomb hit its target
but they drew frowns from both of us when they got too close. Perhaps because
Bryson sensed my uneasiness with the advancing hour and my prediction of a
storm, he did not really relax either and it was easy to read something into
the seagulls’ frantic screeching.

We got to the dock to find the boxes of groceries gone. Ben must have
come down during the day and collected them. He always did this if I didn’t
beat him down to the ferry. In some ways, Ben is very old fashioned and it is
amusing as well as flattering that he persists in seeing me as a delicate
female who can’t lift anything heavier than a purse.

Things were eerily quiet as we walked up the path and Bryson commented
on the strange seaweed that smelled so awful. It was much more dissolved and
disgusting than it had been that morning.

It was nice to have Bryson with me while I gathered up Barney from Ben’s
place. Ben was either still sleeping or so involved in research that he didn’t
answer my call. I knew he frequently left his front door open for air and so
didn’t feel alarmed to find it that way, but the emptiness of his cottage felt
strange. Usually there was some sign of habitation.

We went up to the house where my carton of groceries waited on the
stoop. I opened the door slowly. Kelvin sat in the middle of the foyer looking
at me with large eyes that were probably saying something though I couldn’t
guess what. He looked away only long enough for a quick nose rub with my
unusually subdued puppy.

Shaken and ill at ease, I poured out the cognac and suggested we be
comfortable in the parlor, since the groceries could easily wait to be unpacked,
but after a single drink Bryson admitted that he needed to be away and I was
actually glad to be alone with my thoughts. I was turning into a recluse just
like my great-grandfather.

The groceries were put up quickly and then I was left with nothing to
do except work on my speech or look at boxes of documents, tasks which needed
doing but for which I had little enthusiasm.

Kelvin indicated by the patting of my ankle with mostly sheathed claws
that he had been locked up indoors all morning and that he wanted to go out
back and survey his domain, and since he went out, Barney also followed though
hesitantly.

Kelvin took care of some important cat business and Barney followed
suit. It was convenient, if a little weird, to have a dog that buried his own
messes.

The quiet persisted. There was a wind but it was silent and even the
waves’ crashes were muted.

I noticed that the ground to my left seemed to be heaving and went to
investigate. I wasn’t happy to find ants on the move out by the sunflowers. To
begin with, one shouldn’t have ants on an island. But it was also annoying
because the dispossessed could easily decide to take up residence in the
kitchen while they were searching out new digs. And they were leaving their old
home for good—larvae, leaf mold, a giant I assumed was the queen, everything
was being disgorged from the ground.

But they weren’t headed for the house. Intrigued at the exodus and
wondering where they thought they were going, I followed them along the north wall
of the garden where they stayed about twelve inches from the foundation and then
up toward the hedge that ringed the cliff that housed the entrance to the
smugglers’ cave. They passed between boulders I was obliged to scramble over or
around, and I was necessarily slow since the rocks were not cemented in and it
was a long fall if something gave way.

Once over the rise and through the vines I forgot the ants, my
attention being wholly taken up with the horde of seagulls massing on the tiny
strip of steep, crumbling land at the top of the cliff. They huddled together
on the high ground, terrified into silence but unwilling to take flight. There
were also rodents and smaller birds bunching among them. It was as though they
had been driven to the cliff’s edge and could go no further without falling
into the sea.

My flesh began to creep. This was unequivocally abnormal.

Lightning crackled to the east and the sun began to plunge westward in
a sudden hurry to leave the darkening sky. I looked at my watch. It was later
than I had imagined.

“Come on, guys,” I said to Kelvin and Barney. “Let’s get some dinner
and then we’ll have treats.”

I hoped the birds and animals would be alright out on the ledge during
the storm but wasn’t sure what to do for them except leave the porch door open.
They were welcome to shelter there among the deck chairs and creepers, which
grew thick as curtains, if they were brave enough to attempt it. The living
drapery would keep out much of the wind and rain.

And ghosts?

I stopped, shaken by the thought. I had been worrying about a
nonspecific menace. Some aura of ill will that made it rain. But was this chest
attached to a specific entity? And if so, whom? Was it
Halfbeard
?
Or whoever—whatever—had sunk his ship?

I saw nothing
of distinctness there at the
margyns
, but the form
seemed
lythe
and it glistened green and the eyes
peered with malevolent intelligence of one whose rage had clotted and grown
hard
wyth
scars. I saw only one, but unless they be
chasing the
Calmare
then there must be more of them
abyding
in the deep.

—from the unbound journal of
Halfbeard

Sunset was a gray-green malevolence and I shut the drapes upon it and
made sure that flashlights were on hand. Just in case. Though not really cold
enough to justify it, I also had a fire in the library while I sorted through
more of the boxes of papers. Love letters, tax records, household hints. The
papers and parchments and ink had outlasted their makers and I didn’t know if this
was wonderful or a horrible comment on our mortality.

It wasn’t of the right period but I found a fascinating letter from
the thirties about an outbreak of hoof and mouth diseases somewhere in Vermont.
Apparently everyone leaving the infected area had to pass through a police
checkpoint where they were made to get out of the cars and walk through a
trough of disinfectant while their car was washed by a team of men who scrubbed
down the tires with some kind of carbolic acid. The disinfectant made leather
bleed and quite ruined the ladies’ delicate heels and bleached the hem of the indignant
gentlemen’s woolen trousers.

Though protected by the house I heard the heavens when they parted and
upended their flood upon the island. I did not peep through the drapery at the
rage outside, but knew that the water would be lashed into a white frenzy by
the wind and rain. I prayed that no one from the island was on the sea that
night.

Kelvin and Barney stayed close, my poor dog cowering under the
onslaught and shivering as I rubbed him with my spare hand.

Though I worked diligently at sorting papers, some limp with freckles
of mildew and some so crisp they would break if folded, the loneliness of the
island began to intrude on my reading and the awful feeling grew that it wasn’t
just the storm that was unnatural but that something malignant and wishing to
do harm was hiding in it.
Enraged, single-minded, coming
closer.

I stopped trying to sort papers and gave both hands to the task of
rubbing the dog as I listened, sure that at some level I heard strange rustling
and tapping just outside the house. The fire grew dull as I watched and waited,
as though slowly deprived of oxygen and guttering like a candle. The
electricity remained on but it, too, seemed
more feeble
and I began to feel a bit dizzy and started yawning, though I was too nervous
to be sleepy. Perhaps this was some atmospheric anomaly that accompanied the
storm.

Reaching a level of discomfort that bordered on fear and possibly
hysteria, I decided to try my phone. Ben was the logical choice since he was
nearest and my relief when he finally answered was profound. It wasn’t a good
connection though and I didn’t try to prolong the conversation when he began to
yawn between the pops and hisses.

Obviously Ben was not spooked—just unusually tired for a night owl.
So, probably, I was imagining the feeling that I wasn’t alone. Maybe it was
time to stop the foolishness and go to bed. Everything would be normal in the
morning.

I couldn’t resist a last look through the drapes though before
retiring. At first it was all just dark, the atmosphere so thick it was
palpable, but eventually I could make out lights at Ben’s and Mary’s cottages.
They were distant sparks, but comforting.

Of the sea I could see nothing except, maybe, a faint gray-green light
that seemed to bubble up out of the water. The lighthouse was surely working in
those dark hours, but the gloom was too thick for me to see or hear it.

Suddenly lines from Poe’s “The Raven” came into my head.

Once upon a midnight dreary,
while I pondered weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and
curious volume of forgotten lore,

While I nodded, nearly
napping, suddenly there came a tapping,

As of someone gently
rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

I glanced at my door, feeling dread even as I yawned again. It was
locked. And all the other doors were locked too. I had checked and double-checked.
The storm could knock all night but it would be in vain. I was letting nothing
in.

And then rationality came to my rescue. The reason that I was probably
feeling like I wasn’t alone in the house was because I had company. But it
wasn’t evil spirits or monsters or whatever I had been imagining coming toward
the house out of the darkness.

It was probably the birds and other creatures, sheltering on the back
porch. I had propped the door open with a deck chair. That’s all I was hearing
and feeling—birds and mice and other refugees from the storm settling for the
night.

Relieved, I crawled into bed.

*
 
*
 
*

The sunrise had been plagiarized from a Hollywood romantic movie
script. The sky was a mix of golden flowers and the flush of a newly wedded
bride as the groom pushed aside her wisps of veil. The blue of the sea as it
fell under the rising sun was a color so pure and astonishing
that sapphires
would weep.

But lower the eyes a bit more and you would think you were looking at
a disaster film.

Beside me Barney whined and wrinkled his nose.

The animals had indeed sheltered on the back porch and, perhaps
frightened by the intensity of the storm, had decided to use it as an outhouse
rather than risk the rain.

Beyond, the plants in the yard were laid low, flattened as surely as
if an army had marched over them. I would go ahead and cut the sunflowers. They
were too broken to save. I would also have to shovel more of that strange
seaweed away. It was rank when it started disintegrating in the sun.

A few seagulls
remained,
the last of the
crashers to leave the party. They were so nonchalant in their actions that I
didn’t bother to worry that they were grounded by broken wings or other
injuries. They had simply stayed to point and laugh at my dismay when I saw the
yard.

“Ungrateful beasts,” I muttered and went to fill a bucket with hot
water and to fetch the mop.

With the morning had come a return of the normal, and though I felt
pressure to do something about the weirdness around the island, to discover
some answers for the strange events overtaking me, the need to clean up the
back porch was overwhelming. The smell frightened and maddened me. I also tend
to get a lot of thinking done when I am doing housework. And I needed to think
about my Founders Day speech.