When they had passed out of view, Anders stood, the muscles of his legs slightly shaking. He walked around the trash can and back into the road, staring at the backs of the three people, now walking in a line even with each other. He searched his head for any other explanation, but none came.
Just then, a little boy shot off the porch of the house they were walking past like he was being ejected from a slingshot. He threw himself at Piper, wrapping his tiny arms around her legs.
“Bobby!” she giggled, bending at the waist to squeeze him back.
It occurred to Anders as he strained to listen to the voices that this was the first young child he’d seen on the island.
“You coming to church this morning, Bobby?” Mrs. Olecki’s voice said.
“Yep! I just have to take this down to Lady Judy for my gran,” the boy replied, holding up a brown paper sack in his left hand. He turned toward Piper but directed his attention to the air beside her. “Tom, can I sit with you and Piper?”
Anders’s eyes nearly popped out of his skull. He gave his head a shake, wondering for an instant if he was the crazy one. But no. He was clearly looking at four people—Mr. and Mrs. Olecki, Piper, and a little boy. A man named Tom was not among them. Because Tom—Piper’s Tom—had been in a boat wreck and was most likely at the bottom of the ocean, never to be seen or heard from again.
“Of course. We’d love that, wouldn’t we, Tom?” Piper said. “Run along now. We’ll see you there.”
Anders stood there, his heart galloping, as Piper and the Oleckis continued on their way toward the church. The boy, meanwhile, came running directly at him, full speed. “Hey!” Anders said, just as the boy was about to veer around him. He stopped. Wide-eyed, he regarded Anders, and Anders regarded him. The boy, though curious, did not seem wary of him in the slightest, even though he was obviously a stranger.
“Ooh, is that a camera?” the boy asked, pointing to Anders’s chest.
“Yes,” Anders said, considering the best way to formulate his question.
“Can I see it?”
“Uh, sure,” Anders said. It was his personal camera, one he’d bought years ago and which was pretty much obsolete now, since the newspaper wanted him to use the new fancy Nikon that took far better pictures for print (heck, his phone took better pictures than this old thing). But when Anders didn’t have the work one, he carried this one around out of habit—or maybe to strike a more professional posture. He removed the strap from around his neck and handed the camera to the boy, who had put his brown bag on the ground and eagerly started inspecting it.
“When you were talking to Piper just now . . .” Anders said, as the boy looked through the viewfinder and then methodically began punching every single button. “Was Tom . . . with her?”
The boy glanced up at him and then back at the camera. “Yeah.”
Anders’s head felt light and floaty. “What? I mean . . . did you . . . You could see him?” he sputtered.
The boy didn’t respond immediately. He was clicking away, taking about twenty pictures in a row.
“Hey!” Anders said, and the boy gaped up at him.
“What?”
“You could see Tom?”
The boy cocked his head, as if he hadn’t quite understood the question, and then his nose scrunched up and his mouth dropped open, his expression denoting that Anders might be just about the dumbest person he’d ever run across. “Of course not.”
“But you . . . you talked to him, didn’t you, just now?”
“Yeah,” the boy repeated, nonplussed.
Hands on his hips, Anders stood staring, as his brain tried to sort out the confusion. “But he’s not there!” Anders said.
“Right,” the boy said, studying the camera once again.
Anders’s eyes bugged at the infuriatingly circular path their conversation appeared to be taking. He grabbed the camera out of the boy’s hands, shocking him with the abruptness of the action. Ashamed, Anders took a deep breath, in an attempt to keep himself from shouting at a child. In the middle of his exhale, he exploded anyway: “SO WHY DID YOU DO THAT?”
The boy, unruffled by Anders’s ire, looked back at the camera. “Hey—can I have that?”
“Oh, for the love of . . . YES!” Anders felt sure he had never met a more infuriating boy in his entire life. “If you answer my question.”
The boy’s entire face lit up, and then he cocked his head, as if trying to remember the question Anders had asked. Then he shrugged. “Ma says just because we can’t see him, doesn’t mean Piper can’t.” And he snatched the camera out of Anders’s hand, picked up the brown paper bag from the ground, and bounced off, leaving Anders standing there with his mouth gaping.
And Anders came to his second realization of the day: Maybe a woman thinking her dead husband was alive wasn’t the strangest thing in the world.
Maybe the strangest thing in the world was a whole town pretending they could see him, too.
And a shiver ran down his spine as he came to his third realization of the day: Perhaps he had missed the biggest story on Frick Island. But he was pretty sure he had found it now.
Chapter 9
Six Months Before the Storm
Standing at the tin basin that served as a sink in her tiny carriage house kitchen, Piper attacked the hardened traces of chocolate icing left in the mixing bowl with a sudsy sponge, but her mind was on caddis flies.
She’d been keeping an informal count of them a few times every year, since her mother first taught her how to identify their larvae—the way they were constructed out of leaf matter, sand, and sticks, some of them free-floating on the currents in the marsh. If you didn’t know what you were seeing, they just looked like any other organic debris in the water. The numbers always varied, went up and down, but the past few years they’d been steadily going down—and last week she hadn’t seen any at all.
An unexpected cold hand gripped her waist beneath her shirt.
“Tom!” Piper shrieked, nearly dropping the bowl she’d been rinsing under the torrent of water. “I thought you were sleeping.” He did that some afternoons. Not often, but just on those days when the early wake-up time caught up with him, and he was bone weary from pulling in nets and cages from the ocean’s bowels, beneath the tireless sun.
“Who can sleep with all the racket going on in here?” he said, his cold nose finding her neck beneath all her hair. It was late October, two days before Halloween, and fall had come raging through the island on a sharp cold breeze, chilling Piper to the bone. She shivered, and turned into her husband.