“Not a great place to take a life if you hope to keep your freedom.” I dug my fingernails into the back of Tim’s leather seat. “Why here? Why now, when it’s so hard to get away?”
“You’re thinking suicide, then,” Tim said.
Like me, he was remembering the caretaker’s report. How the missing man’s family was tucked in bed all night. Now, I’m not prone to churning out conjecture like assembly-line muffins. I like my theories fully baked before I share them with a partner. But this guy’s disappearance, and the caretaker’s call, and the timing of it all was strange, and I wanted to know what was going on inside Tim’s head. “Stabs himself next to his girlfriend and stumbles over a cliff? It could happen,” I said.
“There are easier ways to kill yourself on an island.”
“And why risk alerting someone to your plan?”
“Unless he wanted her to know,” said Tim. “Who’s to say what kind of relationship they had?”
“Some people are messed up,” I agreed. “But the caretaker said murder.”
“And if they aren’t suggesting suicide, there’s a reason for that.”
“Eight people.” I rubbed my nose, numb now from the cold. “This is going to take some time.”
“We’ll have help,” Tim reminded me as the boat arced left. “We’ll need it. Made it. Whew.”
I didn’t know what Tern Island would look like. I wouldn’t have been able to find it on a map. When it finally emerged from the mist, it was like the peak of a mountain had busted through the water and rumbled skyward.
“Would you look at this place?” Tim said as we tipped back our heads to take it all in. Though he’d seen it a million times before, he was as awestruck as I was.
Tern was all jagged gray rock crowned by a massive Victorian house with a jumble of stories pockmarked by windows of various shapes and sizes. A turret thrust into the sky like a fist. The siding was forest green, as if the house was trying to blend in with the thick trees that surrounded it. As if it could. There was a matching boathouse at the river’s edge, and the entire island was bordered by a high stone wall that might as well have been painted with the words Keep Out. A staircase so steep it was nearly vertical extended from the boathouse all the way to the island’s summit. The house’s foundation was stonework, too.
A nor’easter was no match for this place. No storm was. Someone had invested a fortune in masonry work to make sure Tern Island could withstand anything. But from that house a man was missing, possibly dead. I wasn’t sure the island would withstand that.
TWO
There’s history here—real-life aristocracy. This is where America’s elite come to play.
These words, Carson’s words, swam to the surface of my memory as Tim navigated the boat toward the island’s shore. My fiancé hoped the romance of the place and its extreme wealth would woo me. He wanted to make sure I was on board with the idea of moving here, so he kept trying to convince me, even as I rode next to him in the rental van that contained everything we owned. “It’s peaceful,” Carson said, squeezing my knee and flashing a smile. When I twined my fingers with his he added, “You’ll love it, Shay. People come here to leave their worries behind. We can do the same. You’ll see.”
If only it was that easy. We’d been here a handful of months, he and I, and already I was causing Carson more consternation than I had throughout the whole of our relationship. If he knew what I was about to do, I thought as I craned my neck to see the house atop Tern Island, he might wonder if coming upstate was such a good idea after all.
A voice reached us through the wind in increments and I spotted a man in a heavy rain poncho standing at the end of the island’s dock. This dock was underwater, too—the whole thing plunged below the surface of the river, and the sight of him on its slick, algae-coated planks so far out in the river made me feel ill. One big swell and he’s a goner, I thought, but the man seemed surprisingly steady. He opened his canvas-clad arms, and for an eyeblink he was Christ the Redeemer guiding us to port.
“Looks like he wants us docked in the boathouse,” Tim said, wiping rain from his eyes with the back of his hand. “Should be plenty of room if there’s only the one other vessel.”
I looked to the left in time to see the boathouse doors lift and expose a cavernous space. My parents’ whole house in Swanton would’ve fit inside, with room to spare. There was an empty slip next to the skiff Tim said they used to ferry guests to and from the island. The little vessel looked toylike, way too small for a boathouse of this size. On the building’s interior wall I spotted a wooden sign decorated with curly gold script. It was the kind of thing you’d affix to the back of a yacht or a sailboat, the equivalent of vanity plates for your car.
“Loophole,” I read. “Either these people have a sense of humor or they found an awesome tax attorney.”
“I wonder where Loophole is now,” Tim said as he glided our boat inside. “The owners of this place come from old money. They’re what the guides on tour boats call a family of the Gilded Age. It’s weird all they’ve got is this puny skiff.”
Just as we were about to get out of the rain, one last manic gust of wind blasted me from behind. It was as violent as a shove. “What else do you know about them?” I lowered my voice before asking. In the shelter of the structure it was quieter, and the man in the poncho waited nearby.
“Not much, but this island’s always been one of my favorites. The house was built in the late 1800s, I think. I’ve seen old photos of it in shambles, but it was bought and fixed up in the forties. Far as I know, it hasn’t changed hands since. Islands rarely go up for sale,” Tim added. “When they do, it’s a feeding frenzy. Can’t wait to see what the house is like inside.”
I didn’t question Tim’s knowledge about an island he’d only ever seen from the water or the people he’d never met. Tim could tell you which Canadian newspaper mogul just embedded a man-made waterfall into his island’s cliff face, and which nineteenth-century tobacco tycoon’s family funded the expansion of the area’s most prestigious golf resort. Carson thought of himself as the authority on the region, but my colleague had him beat. Part of that’s because of Tim’s job: a small-town investigator gets around. The few times I mentioned Tim’s expertise to Carson, Carson got testy and changed the subject. Nobody likes being told they don’t know the lay of their own backyard.
Inside, the boathouse smelled of wet wood with an undercurrent of rotting fish. The thump of our fenders as Tim flipped them over the side of the boat, the slap of water against the interior walls . . . noises fell in a way that made me uneasy. The place was too empty, too quiet. Quickly, I disembarked.