The story was pure seventies horror, and—also classic seventies, I thought ruefully—bordered on racist. Nothing like kicking things off with the murder of a brown female to get your story really rolling. The character of Cappie Strongbow was your basic stereotypical Native American—no tribe mentioned or specifics about her family. Even her name sounded like it might be a white person’s invention.
But the era-specific, tone-deaf elements aside, I was intrigued by the character of Kitten. The way she manipulated her less-privileged friend. And blithely appropriated her Native American culture. It was surprisingly astute.
I had to hand it to Frances. If I was reading this right, she’d attempted something incredibly daring. She’d zeroed in on the era’s obsession and fetishizing of the Native American figure and was obviously condemning it. I’d never considered my mother especially sensitive to other people and cultures, but maybe I’d missed something.
Susan Doucette had meticulously underlined a bunch of random passages throughout the first chapter, fewer in the following ones, but I couldn’t find any connection between the marked-up passages. Mostly they were just sentences referencing Cappie’s murder and her bodily injuries—nothing that made any sense to me. I wondered what had motivated Susan. I couldn’t imagine annotating a novel at twelve just for the heck of it.
But that was the Kitty Cult for you. Bunch of unbalanced creepers.
For decades, these people had mobbed Bonny Island, taking the forty-five-minute ferry ride from tiny St. Marys, Georgia, to the twelve-mile-long, three-mile-wide stretch of sand, marsh, and forest privately owned and operated by the Kitchens family. Guests stayed at Ambletern, the creepy Gothic-mansion-turned-hotel that presided over the southern half of the island. From what I could tell, it was the only operational building on the island, and I noted that Frances hadn’t even bothered to change its name in the book.
Under the care of their hosts, Kitten enthusiasts would troop around to the iconic sites of the novel—the moss-draped ruins of the Catholic mission, the tumbledown slave cabins dating from the time when the island was a family-owned plantation—taking pictures and whatever other kooky fan activities they did.
But I could see the appeal of the isolated, windswept setting.
At any rate, I didn’t have time to fangirl. I had a book to churn out . . . in sixty-one days. According to Asa’s plan, I was to send the chapters as soon as I wrote them. It didn’t have to be art, Asa assured me. Nothing literary or groundbreaking or even all that good. Just get it on the paper, he said, and the publisher’s vast team of editors would clean it up on their end.
We had to work fast, but he assured me Pelham Sound would rush the book through typesetting and design and whatever else to publication. Kitten’s fortieth anniversary was six months away, October 15, right before Halloween. If all this worked, my book would be jammed right up next to Frances’s on bookstore shelves that very same day. Sales would be astronomical.
At least that was the hope.
Before I left New York, I withdrew as much money from my trust as I could, cashed in a handful of random investment accounts, and moved the entire sum to a different bank. I went through Frances’s apartment and collected the few things that were mine, rented a safe-deposit box at the new bank, and dumped everything inside.
I packed up my old life to make room for the new. Whatever that new life turned out to be, it had to be better than what I’d experienced thus far. On the way back, I called Aurora to tell her what I was doing, but ended up leaving a vague message on her voice mail. I hoped she would understand when I finally got the chance to explain my reasons. But even if she didn’t, I knew I was going through with my plan no matter what.
The ferry captain coughed behind me, and I nearly jumped out of my skin.
“You know anything about Bonny?” Captain Mike was rotund and grizzled, a fisherman’s cap jammed down over his head and a pair of sportsman sunglasses on the tip of his nose. Santa Claus: the sea-captain version. A speck of food, roast beef it looked like, fluttered with the wind in the corner of his beard.
“A little,” I lied. “Just from what I could Google.”
“Sixteen major barrier islands string down Georgia’s coast. Pearls in a necklace.” He jerked his thumb to the right and grinned. The roast beef dislodged and went flying. “That’s Florida, right over there.”
I nodded.
“They were plantations, cotton mostly, then became playgrounds for the rich and famous. Every family had their own. The Carnegies had Cumberland, Rockefellers had Jekyll, and R. J. Reynolds, Sapelo.”
“Who owned Bonny?”
He lifted his cap and scratched his head. “Well, now, there’s some debate over that. But the Kitchens have it now.” He eyed me. “Your family know where you’re going?”
I pulled a rogue strand of hair out of my eye. “Excuse me?”
“Cell service on the island is spotty,” he said. “Same with Internet. Landline’s mostly reliable, on and off.”
On and off. Which meant, by definition, unreliable.
“Good to know.”
“I’m not running every day no more, now that Doro shut down the hotel. Just bring the mail and take the cook into town for supplies once a week. Sometimes you can reach me for a quick-over, if the phones are working.” He grinned again.
“There aren’t any shops on the island?” I asked.
He laughed. “There ain’t nothing on Bonny but the old home place and a few broken-down buildings. That’s it. If you want to see a movie or grab a pizza, you’ve got to give me a call. Or paddle yourself over.”
“Got it.”
“You’re staying a spell, right?” he asked.
“A month or so.”
“Reporter?”
“No.” I shook my head. “I’m working on a book.”
“Somebody already wrote a book about this place.” I couldn’t see his eyes for the bush of eyebrows that covered them. But they seemed to be looking toward the island, a long bony blot on the horizon.
I faced back into the wind. “You’re talking about Kitten,” I said.
“Wasn’t my thing. But some people were just wild for it. Used to come from all over to see the real place. They had these murder-mystery parties. Dress up like the characters in the book. Got up to all kinds of mischief, drinking and carrying on out at the middens and the mission. A couple of times they set fires. One fella came out here and tried to kill himself by jumping off the roof of the hotel.”
I made a face. “Jeez.”
“People couldn’t accept it was a made-up story. They wanted to figure out how much of it was real life.”
“One of the murders was real. Right?”
He nodded. “An Indian girl was murdered, yes, ma’am. Back in ’74.”
I wondered if I was just dealing with a politically incorrect old-timer or a full-blown bigot. I couldn’t seem to get my bearings down here. I was out of my element. Far, far out.
“She was murdered,” he continued, “but it didn’t happen like in the book. Some of the facts were right. But a list of facts isn’t the same thing as the truth.”
Exactly. Just what I’d told Asa. Maybe Captain Mike was one of the good guys, after all.