“Yeah,” he said, his eyes as plaintive as his voice. “It does.”
And she heard it then. The wanting. Up until that point, she may not have understood anything about Anders. Why he was really on this island. Or so hung up on a podcast, of all things. But wanting. Well, that was something she was familiar with—something she knew down to her bones. And in that instant she made a decision. She knew Tom would tell her she was being too nice, but she didn’t care.
She nodded. “When you’re done here, meet me at my house.”
* * *
—
Forty-five minutes later, Anders stood on the top landing of Piper’s carriage house, wiping a sheen of sweat off his brow and inhaling through his nostrils in an attempt to slow his galloping heart. After Piper’s unexpected invitation, Anders had scrubbed that window at lightning speed, nearly forgetting his curiosity about Lady Judy’s strange room stuffed floor to ceiling with unopened boxes and packages on one side and a full wall of liquor and wine bottles on the other. Alcohol! On a dry island. He couldn’t think about it now, because Piper was finally going to let him interview her. He could feel it. He could also feel a slight pinch of conscience for allowing her to continue laboring under the belief that he was solely focused on climate change. But as quickly as that cropped up, he swallowed it down, burying it as deep as it would go. This could be it—the big break his podcast needed. The thing that would reengage his listeners. And if not, well—he promised himself this would be it. He would quit. Leave Frick Island and Piper and their collective strangeness behind.
“Oh! I didn’t expect you so soon,” Piper said when she opened the door. “Come in.”
Anders stepped across the threshold, as if he’d just been invited into the Sistine Chapel. His eyes quickly adjusted to the dim light, and he darted his gaze around, committing to memory every detail in the dollhouse-like room—the tiny table with two ladder-back chairs, the round-edged minifridge and mustard-yellow half-size oven in the galley kitchen, the pewter crab wall clock—so he could properly paint the picture of Piper’s house for his listeners. When his head panned to the wall on his right, he yelped, nearly jumping out of his skin.
Piper flicked her gaze to the literally hundreds of insects splayed and pinned under glass and hung on the wall, and then her eyes widened as if seeing them for the first time. “Oh. Guess I should have warned you about that. Forgot you don’t like bugs.”
Anders clutched his shirt, trying to slow his breath. When the initial shock finally passed, he cleared his throat. “No, it’s not that. I was just alarmed to find that we have the exact same interior designer.” He gestured to the bug displays, trying not to flinch. “She assured me my wall of dead insects was original and now I have to call and get my money back.”
He grinned, so utterly pleased with himself that he had finally—finally—come up with a witty retort on the fly in front of Piper, but when he glanced at her, she was just staring at him, solemn. His face fell for a beat, until Piper opened her mouth in a burst of delighted, albeit belated, laughter.
Anders’s pleasure at his cleverness returned twofold—or as pleased as he could feel in a room teeming with dead insects, anyway.
“Give me five minutes. I’ve got to go change.”
Anders watched her disappear through the only other door in the room, which he presumed led to a bedroom and bathroom. Then he shoved his hands in his pockets and purposefully strode forward, suppressing a shudder and giving the vermin morgue a wide berth.
He skirted the sofa and stepped right up to the floor-to-ceiling bookcases, books stuffed in every which way like a game of disheveled Tetris, except for one shelf that held a record player and about fifty LPs. He casually flipped through them, not recognizing nearly any of the obscure bands, and then moved on to the books. He often thought bookshelves could tell you more about a person than the inside of their bathroom cabinet. This one was no different. There were the expected dry science titles—like Field Guide to Chesapeake Bay Insects and Dragonflies: Behavior and Ecology—and heavy classics mixed in with paperback mysteries and romances.
Then Anders spied a spine that gave him pause: For Whom the Bell Tolls. He plucked it from the shelf and eyed the cover, thumbed through the worn pages. It was an old edition, one that had clearly been read multiple times in its life. He flipped to the famous epigraph penned by John Donne, knowing what he’d find, as he’d had to memorize it in his tenth-grade English class.
No man is an island. The email handle of the mysterious missive he’d received weeks ago.
“That’s one of Tom’s favorites.”
Anders jerked at the voice and looked up at Piper.
“I couldn’t get through the first chapter, I don’t think.”
He blinked, and glanced back down at the book. Tom’s favorite. Well, clearly he wasn’t the anonymous emailer. Unless he’d found a way to type from beyond the grave.
He slid the book back in its rightful place.
“Come on, let’s go.”
“Where are we going?”
Piper side-eyed him. “I know you’re a reporter, but you’ve really got to stop asking so many questions.”
And that was how Anders ended up on a dead man’s bicycle following Piper down the windy deserted path toward Graver’s Beach.
The cracked paved road was flat, flanked on both sides by seagrass as tall as cornstalks. And though Anders knew the island was only 1.2 miles long, the road meandered for what seemed like miles, an unending maze, until finally—after twenty minutes of pedaling—the seagrass gave way to flush marshlands. Anders, sucking in deep lungfuls of air and sweating liberally, opened his mouth to ask how much farther, when Piper stopped, dismounting from her bike in one swift motion and setting the kickstand with her foot. Anders gratefully followed suit, although with much less grace.
He followed her along a footpath, around a bend, until they were dumped out on a rock-studded sandy expanse of land, dwarfed only by the never-ending breadth of sea lapping on its shore. Piper kicked off her shoes and led him to the middle of the beach, where she sat on a flat cloud-gray rock and patted the space beside her.
Anders hesitated before sinking beside her. He didn’t know why they had to come all the way out here to do the interview, but Piper had told him not to ask questions and he thought it best to follow her directive, so as not to ruin his chances.
He waited for her to say something, but she just pleasantly stared at the water. So he took it as his cue to dig the recorder out of his pocket and set it discreetly between them, pressing the record button.
“I’m just gonna . . .” he said quietly, motioning to it.
She turned to look at him and then the recorder. She rolled her eyes before reaching for it and clicking the stop button.