I couldn’t fathom it. It was too big. Too impossible.
That I could be the daughter of Dorothy Kitchens and Pete Darnell?
That I wasn’t Meg Ashley? That Frances had agreed to keep this secret from me all these years? I didn’t understand.
My breath hitched in my throat. I brushed away the sand and tears and blood from her face. Her eyes—filled with shame and fear—pleaded for belief, for acceptance. Absolution. I could feel her love for me—it was a palpable force in the air around us.
“Koa,” was all I said to her.
And “Yes,” her simple reply.
The two of us hoisted him together, and when our eyes met, I had only one thought.
I’ve found you.
KITTEN
—FROM CHAPTER 20
Fay thought back to the curio cabinet in the salon. The etching of Osceola, the great Seminole chief. She knew how Kitten liked to play dress-up. She felt cold with fear.
“Silly,” Kitten said. “You should’ve left the bowl in there, to burn with the house.”
Fay’s head was spinning from smoke and the fall. She felt separated from her body—like she’d left Bonny Island and flown someplace else.
Kitten crouched beside her. “Did you see Dr. Cormley?” She was talking in that bright, childish voice. “Did you see what I did to him?” She produced a knife, a strange curved knife Fay remembered from the curio cabinet as well. “I killed Cappie with the mico’s bowl. But I did better with Dr. Cormley. I killed him the Guale way.”
Ashley, Frances. Kitten. New York: Drake, Richards and Weems, 1976. Print.
Chapter Forty-Five
Back at the hotel, I stayed outside with Koa in the Jeep while Doro ran inside to retrieve my phone. I held my wadded shirt to Koa’s head. It was soaked through with blood, but he was still breathing, his chest rising and falling in short bursts.
A few minutes later she reappeared and tossed me the phone. “No cell service. And the landline’s down too. It does that sometimes, with the weather . . .” She trailed off, looking dazed. I hadn’t noticed any clouds when we’d been at the beach, but the air did have that crackly pre-storm feeling.
“Where does the line come in the house?” I asked her. “I’ll check it.”
She looked confused.
“Doro!” I barked. “We have to call an ambulance for Koa.”
It was getting late, and I could feel the panic rising in me. Billy was out there, in the woods, snakebit. Dead, maybe. Koa was dying too. We needed to call the paramedics, somehow. And the police.
“Maybe we should go to the dock and see if my phone works down there,” I ventured. “We should try to find Billy too.”
“No,” Doro said. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Let him stay out there, in the woods. That’s where he belongs.”
“Okay, well. But we have to help Koa. He’ll die without it.”
“It’s the honorable way,” she said quietly. “The Guale said the Maker of Breath sits on a hill and sends everything down to us—Sister Sun and Brother Moon, the rain, the wind, even storms. All those are gifts to us from the Creator. In special cases, the Maker sends Sint Holo, the horned serpent, as a gift to the wise ones.”
I chewed at a ragged nail, feeling the tingles gearing up. Her ramblings were starting to unnerve me. She was losing her shit.
“That snake, the one you saw that bit the foal, it was meant for Koa.” Her gaze drifted down to Koa. He was pale, but breathing steadily. “It was because he lied. Because Neal Baker hired him to come down here and pin Kimmy’s death on me.”
I blinked in surprise.
“I don’t know who did it—Billy or Frances or Kimmy’s mother—but I know I didn’t. I didn’t kill her!” Her face was red now, her eyes glistening.
“Doro, I know.” I rubbed my hands together, more out of habit than anything. “Nobody’s saying you did anything. Just calm down. What we need to do is head to the dock, okay? It’s getting dark.”
Suddenly, from somewhere inside the house came a loud crash like shattering glass. Doro whirled. I stiffened. She turned wide eyes on me.
“It came from the back of the house,” I said. “From the kitchen.”
I started up the porch steps, intending to head around to the back of the house, but she grabbed my arm.
“It’s Billy. He’s come back to shoot me,” she whispered.
It couldn’t be. He could barely walk when I saw him.
“Get the gun,” I said anyway.
She pulled the shotgun out of the Jeep. Propped the barrel over her arm. I glanced at Koa’s slumped form, then up at the house.
“Stay close,” I mouthed and motioned her to follow.
Around the back of the house, the row of kitchen windows was dark. The window at the very end was ringed with jagged shards of glass. We peered inside. The pantry door was ajar, and a sliver of light shone from it. The counter and sink were littered with broken glass.
I did a quick assessment. If Billy had managed to revive himself and come back to the house, he’d be desperate. Probably shoot to kill. We’d need to be nimble.
“We should get Koa out of here,” I said. “The dock.”
“The mission,” Doro said. “It’s the highest point on the island. We’ll be able to get a signal and call the police. And hide.”
Doro started back toward the front of the house, and I moved to follow her, then glanced back one last time through the broken window. Just inside the pantry, in the small wedge of light, I could see rows of empty shelves. A couple of cans lay on the floor, like someone had knocked everything off with a sweep of their arm.
We drove the two miles to the mission ruins as slowly and carefully as we could, right up into the chessboard of broken rock walls. We decided to leave Koa in the Jeep. While I arranged some extra towels I’d gotten at the house around his head, Doro found an extra lantern in the back, then started over the network of low walls.
“Meg!” she shout-whispered. “Come try your phone over here.”
She held up the lantern. Shadows on the jagged walls behind her as they blanched to a spooky gray. “It’s the highest point on the whole island.”
Reluctantly leaving Koa, I joined her in front of the open arch and held up my phone. No reception. Not even the hint of a network.
“Maybe we should wait here for a while,” Doro said. “See if some of the cloud cover will blow over so we can pick up a signal.”
I looked back toward the Jeep.
“Meg. I didn’t mean what I said before. I don’t like what he did, but I don’t want him to die. We’re going to get him help. He’s going to be all right. Okay?”
“Okay.”
She made me sit on a couple of logs that ringed the blackened fire site, then pointed up to a spot at the top of the main building. “The Jesuits built this place so the sun would shine as it set through the arched windows and down onto the altar, which was covered in gold. It would catch the sun and glow like it was on fire. Probably scared the living shit out of the Guale.” She rolled her eyes. “Exactly the way the Jesuits wanted them. Scared.”