Adrian paused, and she thought he might be smiling.
“There was a blues club twenty miles down the river, just an open-air shed, really. He’d have to hitch to get there, but there were women at the club, women and liquor and reasons to fight. Every time he’d scrounge a few dollars he’d disappear for days, then come back hungover and bruised and smelling of strange women. His father wasn’t like that. He was a hard man, practical and unforgiving. They argued about Eli’s choices, and it got violent at the end. When Eli left for the last time, he was twenty years old, broken and bloody and stripped down to nothing. You’d have to know him like I did to understand how strange that image seems. He had this stillness about him, this quiet.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because Eli came back one more time. It was sixteen years later. His father was dead or gone—he never knew for sure—but he came back that last time. Right here,” Adrian said. “Shot twice and half dead, but here for a reason.”
“What reason?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” He looked at the mill, then up the length of the creek that fed it. “Let’s take a walk.”
“Are you joking?”
“It’s not far.”
He set off along the creek, and Elizabeth fell in behind him. They clambered around the impoundment and circled the pool, pushing into the forest as the mist thinned and the swamp fell away. They followed the creek for half a mile, then came to a fork where two smaller streams joined at a rocky outcrop. The waterfall was not big—maybe four feet tall. That’s when Adrian told her the rest. “In 1946 Eli Lawrence was a young man living on the coast. He was a hustler, a two-bit crook, and like everyone else in that world he dreamed of the big score—him and his friends—of the one job that would put them on easy street for life. In September of that year, Eli thought he’d found it.”
They were following the right-hand stream, the bank falling until mud sucked at their shoes. “They had inside information on an armored car running from a bank at the docks in downtown Wilmington. They knew the routes, the times. Nothing they’d ever done, though, prepared them for that kind of job. Both of Eli’s friends died in the shoot-out. One of the guards was killed. The other took three bullets, but lived. Two different bystanders were shot. It was a bloody mess.”
“What happened to Eli?”
“He escaped with a hundred and seventy thousand dollars, and two thirty-eight-caliber slugs in his back. He made it here without seeing a doctor. How he managed, I don’t know. The wounds were infected by then, the bullets working around where they shouldn’t. When he finally went for help, the doctor patched him up and turned him in. Eli got life without parole.”
Elizabeth stepped across a gulley. Adrian stopped and pointed. “Does that look like an island to you?” He waded in without waiting for an answer. The water rose to his waist, and then he was out on the other side. “Are you coming?”
Elizabeth stepped in and felt water in her boots, then higher. She pulled herself up the opposite bank, and they picked their way through brambles and scrub until they reached the center of the island and the tree that dominated it. The tree was massive. Its gnarled limbs spread out, some dipping low enough to touch the ground. Age blackened the trunk, yet it rose tall and gnarled, a giant above roots so thick they buckled the earth. “What is this place?”
“All I know is that Eli played here as a boy.” Adrian touched the trunk and circled to the other side. “And that after sixty years in prison, it was the only place in the world he ever truly missed. Just this island. Just the tree.”
“I’ve never seen a tree like this.”
“He said that from the top he could see the ocean.”
“That’s eighty miles.”
“He wasn’t much for exaggeration. If he said he could see it, he probably could.”
Elizabeth craned her neck but couldn’t see the tree’s crown. It rose, enormous and ancient. She tried to imagine a boy climbing it, then perching high enough to see a gleam of ocean eighty miles away.
“What are you doing?” Elizabeth circled the tree and found Adrian on his knees, digging in a hollow spot where rot had long ago invaded the trunk. She watched him scrape in the loose soil, and it felt wrong: the place, the reason. “Please tell me this is not about stolen money.”
“Yes and no.”
“What does that mean?” He said nothing. “Can you just stop for a minute?”
Adrian rocked back on his heels. Soil stained his hands and left a smear on his face when he wiped sweat from his eyes. “It’s not about money or greed, but about the warden and the guards and a man I loved more than life itself.”