I cut my eyes at him again, unsure of what I’d see—the trace of a smile, maybe, or a smidgen of quiet glee. Tim was downplaying the situation. A murder, even a missing persons case, on one of the islands was unheard of. McIntyre made that clear when she hired me. So I guess I thought Tim would be excited. I know plenty of cops in the city who’d get a big thrill from a case like this, in a place where they happen every day. If Tim was pumped, he didn’t show it. His expression was solemn, his lips a neutral line.
I turned the wheel, trading the easy swish of the highway for the hard crackle of gravel road, and there was the river. Damn, but the water was high. The summer had broken all kinds of records for flooding, the water level three feet higher than the norm. I’d read it hadn’t been like this since 1973. The damage was already bad, and now, with a nor’easter, it was going to get much worse.
I pulled the car onto a patch of grass waterlogged with rain and peered dubiously at the sky through the windshield one last time. Tim’s eyes were on the boat. The folks at headquarters, Tim included, had been more excited about the police vessel’s arrival than about mine. We came at the same time: the new plaything courtesy of a special fund administered by the U.S. Coast Guard, me courtesy of a fiancé and a need to get the hell out of the city. I guess I couldn’t blame them. Even I could appreciate the boat’s tantalizing, new-toy shine. When Tim saw the size of the waves on the river, the loving look on his face was replaced with a frown.
“Okay, then,” he said brightly while baring his teeth. “Ready?”
“Now or never,” I replied, and we stepped outside. Puffs of breath lingered ghostlike in front of us as we splashed toward the reedy edge of the St. Lawrence River, where the waves smacked the boat against the dock. The thing was small and exposed with a flimsy navy canopy—Tim called it a T-Top—that snapped in the wind. I pulled the hood of my rain jacket over my hair, kinky from the humidity. Acres of naked fields lay to the south of us, endless water to the north. The isolation of the place was jarring.
Upstate New York. I’d pictured it as nowheresville, a mishmash of farmers’ fields and dilapidated barns, and I wasn’t wrong. The towns are small, the people as down-to-earth as they come. It’s a patriotic part of the country, but every American flag looked as if it had been flying since the thirties, abandoned to the elements, bleached out and threadbare. Something about those flags seemed vulgar, like Lady Liberty’s been subjected to an upskirt. I keep that opinion to myself. Both Tim and my fiancé are locals, born and bred on the river, so I also don’t tell them it still comes as a shock when I wake up in the morning and find myself here. Instead of investigating homicides with the NYPD on the Lower East Side, I’m fighting crime for the New York State Park Police in a place where violent crime doesn’t exist. Until, one day, it does.
“Weekend on the river’s what the caretaker said,” Tim called from on board the boat. “They’re cutting it real close.”
Manhattan’s chilly in October, but I’d been told it could get arctic in the Thousand Islands. Even a weak fall system’s likely to be nasty. Past the boat the bay was the color of thunder, and rain ricocheted off the water’s surface with such fury I could barely make out Comfort Island a quarter mile away. It was the closest island to that part of the mainland, one of the few I knew by name. Comfort Island looked the opposite of comforting in the stormy morning light.
“Guess you wish you’d taken that trip to see your parents,” Tim said, exposing the boat’s controls and seat cushions, tucking covers into storage bins. Now that I was living closer to my home state, I’d been driving to Vermont on a regular basis. If not for the storm, I’d be there now.
“And miss all this?” I said as a gust of wind doused my face with cold rain.
Tim dug into his pocket and came out with a key attached to a red float. “Flip you for it.”
“Funny. The lines?” I knew what to do with those, at least. Tim started the engine as I waded across the dock, which was six inches underwater, and freed the boat from the cleats. I huddled inside the tiny console and stayed out of Tim’s way while he nudged us out of the slip. Only when we were off did I realize I’d left my gloves in the car. Rain hammered at the T-Top and stung my face as we lurched forward and sped across the water toward the island.
The very first thing my fiancé told me about the Thousand Islands was that the label’s a lie. There are actually 1,864 rocky patches of land along the stretch of St. Lawrence that divides Ontario from New York State. A century ago the area was as posh as the Hamptons, the go-to summer getaway for millionaire titans of industry and the upper crust of New York. Many of them still own property on the river. According to Carson, the proprietor of the Waldorf Astoria once commissioned a hundred-and-twenty-room mansion for his wife only to watch her die before it was done. If the legend’s true, the man never returned to it again. What strikes me isn’t that he lost his bride, but that he didn’t see that outcome coming. He named the place Heart Island. Some ironies are too tempting for the universe to resist.
It was rougher out than I expected, and I’d expected rough. Under the water, shoals lay in wait, their teeth big enough to tear through boats as if they were made of matchsticks. When we entered the channel I felt the current’s fierce pull. The channel was for freighters bringing Canadian wheat and iron ore from the Great Lakes over to Europe, but there were no tankers on the water today. No other boats at all.
We were halfway there before Tim revealed our destination. Tern Island, on the U.S. side. This island wasn’t open to the public like Wellesley (American) or Wolfe (Canadian), but privately owned.
“You told them to stay put, right? Not to disturb the scene?” I shouted over the shriek of the wind. In my old job, the scene of the crime was never more than ten minutes away. The fact that our cruiser could scream out of the parking lot and bully its way through the streets like a tank was a source of pride to me, but getting to an island isn’t something you can rush. Thinking about all the things the people on it could get up to before we arrived filled me with dread.
Tim laughed. “They’ve only got one boat in the water, and it’s a skiff—a little motorboat for getting back and forth from shore. It’d take three trips to transport everyone to the mainland, and they’d be crazy to do it now. Don’t you feel it? The swell of the water?” he said. “The currents are insane. Anyway, it’s just up here, past Deer Island.”
Deer Island. That was another one I’d heard about from Carson. It had once been a retreat for a Yale secret society called Skull and Bones; now its dense trees and derelict lodge made it look as sinister as a horror-movie set. A chill danced up my spine as we raced past it, but the landmass quickly disappeared, sucked back into the fog.
I’d been bracing myself against the knocks and jolts of our boat in the choppy water, but wasn’t prepared when Tim shouted, “Shit! Hang on!” He jerked the wheel to dodge a near-invisible shoal, and I barely managed to avoid tumbling overboard as a wave breached the gunwale, dousing me with icy water. The skin on my thighs burned and my pulse pounded in my ears. Along with the storm, the sound was deafening.