She toyed with a velvet tassel on a cushion.
“He used to take on this persona when guests were around . . . this meek, cowed man, like Herb Murphy in the book. He would skulk around the grounds, doing little needless repairs. Generally spooking people, which they loved, of course.” She sighed. “He used to hammer the hurricane boards into the windows. Totally freaked the guests out.”
“What about you?” I asked. “Did you ever play Kitten?”
“Not intentionally. But the truth was, it didn’t matter what I did. If I was quiet, they thought I was creepy. If I was friendly, they’d say I was manipulative. It was a game I couldn’t win. I didn’t really understand what was going on, not until I was eleven or twelve and I actually read the book.”
“Were you angry then?”
She looked thoughtful. “In a weird way, I felt honored. I know it’s messed up. But I didn’t have a mother, and I was a lonely kid. Being Kitten rescued me, in a way. It gave me an identity. Made me feel special. I had some fun with it too.” She laughed. “There was this one family, the Darnells. They had a son about my age. Pete. They came every summer, and Pete and I were friends. Or so I thought.
“The summer we were sixteen, he seemed different. Whenever we were around other kids, he made a big deal out of talking to me. And bringing up the book. It was like, in some twisted way, he was suddenly this big shot because we were friends.”
“Oh, Doro.”
“I thought he was different, but he was just like everybody else, and it made things strange between us. Not that it’s a federal crime, reading Kitten. Or even drawing certain conclusions about me.” She sighed. “But then he started in with the questions . . . about Kimmy, the Native American stuff. I was crushed.
“One day, I said I’d show him where Kimmy’s ghost walked around in the marsh. I told him he’d have to be there, waiting for me, at midnight. He had to be naked, though, because Kimmy could sense he wasn’t Native, like I was, from his white-man clothes.”
She sent me a rueful grin. I glanced at Koa, still sitting in the shadows of the room. He hadn’t moved.
“At that time of year, at midnight, the tide rises in the marsh like a freight train. Around one or two, Pete came dragging back to the hotel, half-drowned, covered in mosquito bites and mud. I know because I saw him from my window. He wouldn’t tell his parents where he’d been, he was so ashamed. But he was quite pleasant to me at breakfast the next morning. Didn’t ask me another thing about Kim.”
I nestled back onto the cushiony arm of the sofa. So Doro had learned the hard way to take care of herself. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised.
“Did the two of you stay in touch?” I asked.
She gazed past me. “No.”
“What happened to him?”
“He married, I think. Moved.” She twirled a strand of hair absently. “I spoke to him once after that. We actually . . .” She stopped.
I tried to keep my voice light. “You what?”
She fluttered her hand, as if to wave off the line of questioning. “Nothing. It was a bad idea, having any contact with him.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Anyway. That’s what really killed my father. The tricks. The harassment. Everyone coming to Bonny, expecting us to be characters in a book. To playact for them.”
She was staring at the floor, gone someplace else in her mind. “Sometimes, in our lives, we do what other people want us to. Simply because we can’t muster the strength to go another, braver way.” She dabbed at the corner of one eye. “My father wanted to return this island to what it had been, before the white man came. Before the missionaries, before the government. He wanted Bonny Island to be a refuge and a home for indigenous people. But he didn’t think he would be successful without the Cultists and their money. So he let them use him. And it killed him.”
I was quiet.
“It was heart trouble, that’s what the doctors said. And they were right. His heart was broken.”
“Was that when he brought the lawsuit against Frances? All those years after the book was published?”
Her head jerked up. “How do you know about that?”
“Asa told me.”
She bit her lip. “All those records were closed. Or they were supposed to be. There was a gag order.”
The air in the room had grown still and heavy. The sharp smell of must and mildew tickled my nose. The IV bag had flattened out, but Koa hadn’t noticed. He was hunched over his phone, engrossed in something.
“I respect that, Doro.” I looked down at my laptop. “But it’s part of what Frances did to your family,” I went on carefully. “It’s part of your story. I wish you would tell me.”
“Are you telling every part of your story in that book?”
I opened my mouth, then closed it.
“Exactly.” She leveled a look at me. “They don’t get everything from us, do they?”
I swallowed.
“So,” she said. “Tell me who else I supposedly killed.”
I looked down at my screen. She wasn’t going to budge. If I wanted to know more about the lawsuit, I was going to have to get it from another source. I might not put it in the book—in fact, I wouldn’t if it violated her privacy—but, chalk it up to morbid curiosity, I was itching to know what had happened.
“Meg?” Doro said.
I scrolled randomly across the site, my vision a blur. “Um. You killed a National Parks employee.”
“Not yet. But tomorrow’s another day.”
“Okay. Here we go. There also appears to be speculation that you killed Kimmy’s father, Neal Dwayne Baker.”
I was dimly aware, across the room, of Koa moving.
Doro snorted. “He abandoned his family when Kimmy was a baby. I don’t know where he moved, I don’t even think Kimmy knew where he ended up. My father said he was a bum.”
“So he’s still alive?” I tapped out a search.
“As far as I know, yes. I certainly didn’t kill him.”
“Okay. Here we go. Kimmy’s father . . .” My voice trailed off as the list of search results for Neal Dwayne Baker loaded on the screen. Out of the entire list there was only one headline that looked promising—a news feature written for a local paper on a new cancer facility in Corpus Christi, Texas.
Across the room, I sensed movement. I glanced over. Koa was staring at me with the most peculiar expression. A look of such intensity that my heart thudded. I dropped my eyes back down to my laptop screen. Silently scanned the article that had loaded:
Resident Neal D. Baker, 84, a retired chiropractor undergoing treatment for lung cancer, sings the praises of the staff at the recently opened Pine Grove Cancer Center. “I’ve met some of the most caring people in this place. I consider one or two of them family. Closer than family.”
My eyes slid back to Koa. He was still staring at me, his mouth set in a grim line. I stared back, my mind racing. Neal Baker, Kimmy’s father, was the man Koa had told me about that night in the kitchen. The patient at his facility, who’d inspired Koa to come to Bonny and turn his life around.