“Now” was since our evenings had been filled with music. “Now” was since David and I had left the island in Sweet Pea to rescue the freighter. I was not worried; it was not unlike Emily to disappear for a short time. I proceeded to trim the wicks of the lamp and set it in motion, as I had so many times before.
The partridge was plucked and fried with a little salt pork and served with the new potatoes, boiled in their skins and slippery with butter. And still Emily had not arrived. I began to feel uneasy. The moon, not yet half full, peered in and out between clouds that scudded across the night sky, providing just enough light to find my way to the assistant keeper’s house. David grabbed his gun, and we began down the path that led to the boat harbor. I carried a lamp, but didn’t light it, relying instead on the faint illumination from above.
My eyes strained at every shadow, my ears started at every sound, and I struggled between anger, frustration, and worry. Emily knew this island intimately. She knew every beach, every path, every fen, and most of the trees and plants within them. And while the water fascinated her, she did not go into it. It was futile to call out. She would not answer. She never did.
There were no boats anchored in the bay or tied to the dock in the harbor. Only a few orange coals glowed in the fire pit, and an empty whiskey bottle was propped against a stump. Arnie and his cousins must have left hours ago, heading back to Silver Islet, to their warm beds, before darkness descended. I could see no one about. The wind rustled through the trees, causing them to whisper and sway, and I started several times at the snapping of twigs beneath real or imagined feet. It was not like me. David opened the boathouse, and I lit the lamp and trained the yellow light into the dark corners. They were empty.
We made our way across the clearing to the short path that took us to the beach across from Dreadnaught Island. As we stepped out of the woods onto the shore, I saw her, a crumpled mound of white cotton dress, her black hair, so like mine, trailing loose and free. She was lying on the ground, the moon an eerie lamp above her. She was not moving.
“Emily!”
I rushed to her, dropping to the rocky shore beside her limp form, my eyes taking in her torn dress, the gash on her arm, her bloodied face and swollen lip, her closed eyes. I cradled her head in my lap. “Emily!” I whispered, the tears already beginning to fall. “Emily, it’s me!”
David was beside me. I could hear him swear. He turned away and swore again, and I knew that rage boiled within him as strongly as guilt tore through me.
And then I heard footsteps. This time, it wasn’t the imagined tread of a hungry bear or the ghostly wanderings of transient souls. It was the steady footfall of a man walking through the trees and stepping on the loose lichen-coated rocks of the shore.
David heard them, too. He spun around and raised his gun, training it into the darkness. I saw it then, the canoe pulled up above the reach of the waves. I did not recognize it.
“Who’s there?” I heard the soldier in David’s voice. Authoritative. Demanding. But I also heard the tremor, the emotion that touched his heart and reached all the way to the tip of his finger, resting on the trigger.
There was no answer.
A dark shadow removed itself from the trees, and took the shape of a man. It paused for a moment before moving across the beach toward the canoe.
“I said, who’s there!” David cocked the gun. Emily stirred and opened her eyes, struggling to sit up.
The shadow reached the canoe and looked in our direction, hesitating. And then the world stopped spinning. The Lake sighed along the shore, barely making a sound as it tapped against the hull of the canoe. The trees held their breath while the moon slipped behind a cloud and then blinked out again on the other side, bright, illuminating. The shadow turned abruptly and came toward us. I saw a hand reach beneath a deerskin cloak. I caught a flash of metal; a blur of darkness, and then a shot rang out. It echoed against the trees, back and forth, trailing off into silence. The shadow merged with the ground.
Emily pulled herself from my arms and crawled over to the body that lay half in and half out of the water beside the canoe. She leaned over and traced her fingers along his creased and weathered face, the scars barely concealed beneath a full gray beard.
The shot had caught him clean between the eyes. Eyes that had looked at me through the trees while a pack of wolves disappeared across a frozen Lake. Eyes consumed with guilt, refusing to meet mine, over the pelt of Heathcliff. Eyes my father called haunted when he wrote about assistant keeper Grayson in his journal all those years before.
It was still clasped in his hand: a satchel. A satchel with a metal buckle that contained freshly gathered roots from the devil’s club, strips of willow bark, clumps of dried sphagnum moss. Medicine of the woods. Medicine for Emily. He had been trying to help her, to tend to her wounds.
David collapsed onto the shore beside them, his rifle cradled over his knees. “Oh god!” he whispered. “Oh god, what have I done?” He buried his face in his hands.
I touched Emily’s shoulder. She flinched, pulling away from my hand.
“Did he do this to you?” I asked. “Emily, did he hurt you?”
She looked up at me, her gray eyes so unlike my own. I saw in them fear and sadness and shame. She shook her head.
And then it came over me like a cold fever. He had been an obnoxious boy; had he grown into a vile man? Fueled by drink, had he wandered away from the fire, stumbling to the beach? She would have been vulnerable. She would have been alone. After all those years of festering hatred, he had finally found a way to get back at her.
“Everett.” I barely whispered the name. Emily dropped her gaze, pulled her legs up to her chest, and began to rock, back and forth, back and forth.
Everett.
David carried her home to the light and laid her in our bed. Her dress was torn down the front. I burned it, first stoking the fire until the flame blazed hot, spilling heat into the room. Angry purple bruises marred her face and breasts, and a deep wound ran ragged across her arm. It had been wrapped, tied off with a strip of cotton. I knew there would be a matching piece missing from Grayson’s shirt. By the light of a kerosene lamp, I bathed her, washing away the dirt and tears and the blood that ran fresh between her legs. I brushed her hair until it shone and sat with her until her eyes closed and she drifted to sleep, the light above turning, turning, turning.
Mother kept vigil in her chair. Every four hours she struggled up the wooden stairs to wind the pulleys and then returned to sit. We spoke not at all.
David appeared in the dark hours that stretch between midnight and dawn. I stood with him in silence, the moon having slipped below the horizon; our only light a projection of orange thrown by the open door of the cottage and the reflection of the beam, stretching out far across the night.
Crickets took up the conversation where our voices failed, speaking comforting nonsense in their familiarity.