Which was another reason she didn’t think he liked to lie with men.
When she got up with a stack of books in her arms to look at the shelf, she saw what’d happened. The shelf was the kind that screwed into the walls, and right on this wall a couple of those screws had come loose. The shelf must have fallen off. Screw-holes must’ve been stripped, and it must’ve fallen off. Probably happened while she was outside just now.
Probably the wind shook it down.
Janie set the books down on the floor beneath it, and tried to reset the shelf. She found the screws on the floor okay, and the bracket for the shelf, and after feeling around on the wall found the holes they’d come out of. But when she lined up the bracket and tried to push the screw in with her thumb it wouldn’t go. Even though it must’ve been stripped, the hole in the wood wasn’t big enough. It’d take a screwdriver to put the bracket back on. Just like it hadn’t been shook out at all — but unscrewed.
Janie punched the wall in front of her with her good arm, and even though she knew she’d likely be punished for it, she swore. What the hell was she worrying about the books for? Her Ernie’d gone off in his rented boat because he thought he killed her, and now there was a storm up on the Bay that’d swamp him in a second if he were out on it, and here she was stuck on an island with no phone or nothing. Mr. Swayze didn’t even keep a radio here. He said he bought the place a long time before anyone had a radio on these islands, and he liked the privacy — like his place in Fenlan wasn’t private enough. These days, Mr. Swayze had a radio in his boat, and he said another one here would just be a distraction.
“I’d welcome that distraction now,” said Janie. “Goddamned right.”
She giggled — let Ernie come and punish her now for Goddamn swearing — and felt bad about it almost right away. Then she took a breath, and felt her rib aching and her elbow starting to smart, and remembered the cut in her head, and thought about Ernie doing all those things for no better reason than because she was reading a story magazine… and she let herself laugh again.
“Let him,” she said. “Let him come.”
When she got to the kitchen, Janie wasn’t laughing any more. She went there figuring to empty out the fridge into the big cooler they’d brought with them, so that she’d at least have fresh food for a day or so longer. But the cooler was gone from where she’d put it by the stove, and when she opened the fridge, it was all empty — but for a little jar of French’s Mustard and a quarter stick of butter that’d gone rancid yellow where the wrapping didn’t cover it right.
The three steaks, the potato salad, the jar of pickles, the big jug of milk, two-dozen eggs and near a pound of bacon were all gone. She went and checked the cupboard next, and sure enough, the case of Campbell’s Soup was gone too.
Lord, Ernie must’ve thought her dead for sure — in his big panic to get out, he’d left nothing behind to sustain her alive.
Nothing but the butter and the mustard that was here when they arrived. Janie thought about making a meal of that — she was starting to get hungry despite all her pains — but no matter how you made it, a dinner of butter and mustard just wouldn’t taste right. Even Mr. Swayze, with all his kitchen smarts, wouldn’t be able to make much of that.
“Butter and mustard go on food — they ain’t food themselves,” she said, and the little window by the stove rattled in its frame, like it agreed with her.
Outside, something cracked — like a tree-stem breaking when Ernie’d bend it back over his boot. Janie didn’t look to see what it was, though. The wind would blow hard, and it would break things, and if you were fool enough to have a boat in open water, it would drive you to and fro and send waves as big as a house over your bow, and those waves would swamp you if your boat wasn’t a big one too. There was no need to look outside again, because whatever it was that broke, it would just be another bad thing Janie could do nothing about.
And anyway, Janie was already started through the rest of the lodge. She was pretty hungry all right — it felt like she hadn’t eaten in days — and she needed to do something for that.
But the lodge was picked clean of food — there wasn’t even any liquor on hand, though she managed to find quite a few empties stashed in the wood-bin.
Janie searched the three bedrooms, looked under the mattresses and in all the wardrobes. She found her clothes — Ernie hadn’t taken them with him, at least — and among them was her raincoat and boots. So after she’d satisfied herself there was nothing to eat inside, she pulled on her boots and did up her raincoat and went outside to see what was what on the rest of the island.
The wind was blowing worse by then. She had to lean against the door to make sure it’d open, and when she managed to get out it was a good thing she was wearing her yellow slicker and boots, because she would have been soaked to the skin if she weren’t.
It wasn’t raining. The water was coming up, not down, as it smashed against the high rocks on the edge of the little island and funnelled up through their cracks and bends in white fingers of spray. She squinted down to the dock, but she couldn’t see it for all the flying water. Ernie’s boat could be tied up there right now, and she’d never know it.
Janie didn’t go down to check it out, though — she didn’t think there was anything at that dock, and anyway…
She thought she’d figured something better. The lodge was on the lower of two rises on the island, built on the kind of bare rock that Ernie said made for bad land, and Janie thought she’d make for the higher one. At the top of that one, there were a few trees that’d managed to fight their way out between the boulders, and she knew that on some of these islands, you could find blueberry patches in such places.
And Janie did like her blueberries.
So although the rock was slippery most of the way and hard to see at times on account of the water, and although her arm was hurting and her rib still ached, Janie managed the climb. She was more than hungry now. She was starving, it felt like she hadn’t eaten in days, and it was like she could taste those blueberries already.
Janie got her foot into a crack in the rock, and found another crack higher up with her fingers, and then it was just one more pull, and she was up—
And over.
“Ow!”
Janie fell on her behind, which didn’t much hurt, but bumped her bad elbow on the way, which did. She could scarcely believe it, but the wind didn’t seem to get up here.
She’d gone over a kind of lip of rock at the top, and as she looked around she saw she was surrounded by rocks about as high as her neck, with a half-dozen tree-trunks growing up right at the edge. It was like she was sheltered in the palm of some giant hand, the trees were its fingers, all pointing upward. “Wonder if there’s blood drops on the fingertips,” she said to herself, and giggled again.
Then she remembered what she’d come for: the blueberries.
Janie got up off her duff and started looking for them. The palm of this great big hand was covered in all kinds of greenery, so it would take some searching. She walked bent over for a little while, but her leg started to hurt so she got down on her hands and knees going through the low greenery. For awhile, she wasn’t sure she was going to find anything — nothing but ferns and tiny little evergreens barely spawned from their daddies’ seed — but finally, in a little corner of the palm where maybe the thumb would crick out, she found a patch of them.