“No, you didn’t!” she snapped with sudden vehemence. “That can’t be. It must have been your imagination. It must.” And with that Dolly Seymour turned on her heel and darted out the door to her own house, leaving him utterly confused.
It was not his imagination. Someone had purposely locked him in down there. He’d heard the footsteps. This was a fact. But who, some kid? There were no kids on Big Sister. So who, then-Tuck Weems? Was this his way of telling Mitch he wasn’t happy to have him living there? Why had Dolly gotten so upset when he mentioned hearing footsteps? What was up with that?
Mitch didn’t know. But he did have his first nightmare that night.
He dreamt that he was down there in the crawl space, only now it felt as if the whole weight of the carriage house was pressing down on his chest. Pressing down on him so hard that he could barely breathe. He was all wet, too. Water was seeping down through the floorboards onto him. Only when he tried to wipe it from his eyes he discovered it wasn’t water. It was the blood of Roy and Louisa Weems. And it was all over him. In his mouth. In his nose. In his…
He awoke with a yelp, heart racing, his body drenched with sweat. As he lay there, panting, Mitch heard something-the crunch of footsteps outside on the gravel path. And he wasn’t dreaming now. This was real. Someone was out there… Mitch tiptoed over to the staircase. Slowly, he descended into his moonlit living room. He paused, listening. Hearing the blood rushing in his ears. Hearing the waters of the Sound lap against the rocks. Hearing more footsteps. There was an outdoor light over the front door. He flicked it on. He threw open the door…
And he came face to face with two deer who were munching on the azaleas planted next to the house. Startled, they went galloping off, hooves clip-clopping on the gravel.
Mitch let out a huge laugh and shut the door and went back to bed. He lay there, breathing in and out. Through the skylight over his head, the moon was full, with a pearly ring around like in The Wolfman. As he lay there gazing up at it, Mitch ached for Maisie’s presence next to him in the bed. A person wasn’t gone if she lived on inside of you. And Maisie did live on inside of Mitch. He could still hear her. He could still see her.
The only thing Mitch could not do was hold her.
In the morning, he decided he simply could not put it off any longer. The house was in decent shape. It was time to tackle his book. He had a ton of good material. A collection of hidden treasures like Silver Lode, the much-overlooked 1954 Allan Dwan Western in which John Payne uttered the immortal lines: “If you can kill one man the second one’s not so hard. The third one’s easy.” He had a salute to the largely forgotten exploits of the Three Mesquiteers, a trio of thirties Republic Pictures sagebrush cutups-dim-witted Ray Corrigan, daffy Max Terhune (a ventriloquist who rode around on horseback with a dummy) and handsome young John Wayne. Not many fans knew about this particular chapter in the Duke’s early film career-his Three Mesquiteers roles were usually not included in his filmography. Just the sort of thing Mitch loved to unearth and write about. He made himself a fresh pot of coffee. He sat down at his desk in front of the windows. He juiced up his computer. He got started.
And he got somewhere. He was focused. He was passionate. He was in the groove again. As Mitch’s fingers flew over the keyboard, his brain leaping from one sharp observation to the next, he came to the happy realization that it was finally happening:
He was healing.
After a couple of good, productive hours he got up and punched the power button on his stack, feeling the blue Stratocaster come to life in his hands, its six silver strings humming. He closed his eyes. He played. Good hard chops first, laying down Stevie Ray Vaughan’s “I’m Crying.” Then, when he was in there, Mitch started riffing off of it, bending it, soaring way, way up there where it was sweet and fine. Fingers squeezing out the notes. One set of toes curled around the wa-wa pedal, the other around the tube screamer. Mitch Berger was not gifted. He knew this. But he had the love and the hurt and the power. Oh, God, he had the power.
He didn’t realize he had company, too, until he opened his eyes and discovered Dolly standing there, looking positively pie-eyed. “My Lord,” she exclaimed. “I could not imagine what that noise was.”
“I’m sorry if I bothered you,” Mitch apologized. “I’ll turn it down.”
“No, no. It’s quite all right. That’s not why I’ve come,” she said hurriedly. She was in a dither of some sort. Positively rattled. “Oh, dear, I do hope I am not annoying you, because I know how you writers need your privacy and ordinarily I would not intrude. But, you see, there’s this fox in my rose garden. And it’s, well, quite dead. And I simply don’t know what to do about it. I tried phoning Tuck but he’s not answering his phone and every other man on island is gone for the day so I was wondering if you would be so kind as to…”
“Yes, of course,” Mitch said quickly. “I’ll take care of it right away.” He put on his shoes and grabbed his work gloves and followed her back to her garden, stopping to fetch a shovel from the barn.
Dolly had a lovely garden. There were peonies and foxgloves, wild geranium, irises, bleeding heart. Everything was in bloom at once. It was an explosion of controlled chaos. Her rose garden was set apart by low, carefully cropped boxwood hedges. A brick path crisscrossed it and a copper birdbath anchored its center. Next to the birdbath lay the dead fox. It was red. It was staring right at him. Flies were buzzing around it, but it did not smell too bad yet.
“It must have been searching for water, poor thing,” Dolly said hoarsely. “It’s probably been living in our woods.”
That was where Mitch buried it-in the wooded area between her place and the big summer house. He dug two feet down in the soft soil and slid it in and covered it over, tamping the soil down with his feet and laying a flat, heavy stone over it to keep other animals out.
Dolly was so grateful she invited Mitch over for a drink that very evening to meet his fellow islanders. “It’s the very least I can do,” she said. “It would be terribly impolite of me not to.”
Mitch politely declined. He ranked among the socially lost even when he was at his best. Right now he was far from his best.
But Dolly would not take no for an answer. “You must get out and meet people, Mitch,” she clucked. “It’s not healthy to spend so much time alone. You will come. I insist. It’s casual.”
Casual, on Big Sister, turned out to mean blazer and no socks. Mitch got it backwards-he wore socks and no blazer. He was also, seemingly, the only guest who arrived at Dolly’s cocktail party sober.
He had not been inside her house before, aside from the laundry room off of the garage. He’d been expecting an interior to match the old house’s immaculately restored exterior-a house filled with cherished antiques and family heirlooms, floors of wide-planked oak, walls lined with oil portraits of departed pilgrim ancestors. Such was not the case at all. Dolly’s parents had rebelled and gone contemporary in the fifties. Laid down harvest-gold shag carpeting over the old plank floors. Thrown coat upon coat of paint over the paneled walls. Converted the fireplaces to gas logs. Hung gold lame drapes over the old casement windows. Installed a breakfast nook in the kitchen of avocado-colored vinyl. Most of the furniture, which was newish, was covered in persimmon-colored chintz.
Dolly, who was drinking martinis, seemed as giddy as a little girl on roller-skates. Bud Havenhurst was downright jolly, too. It was Bud who tended the bar, which was set up on a sideboard in the study, complete with ice bucket and tongs. It was Bud who made the introductions.
The first islander Mitch met was Bud’s tall, young tennis-playing wife, Mandy. Mitch found her to be even more striking upon close encounter. Mandy Havenhurst had long, creamy blond hair, big blue eyes, lusciously plump lips and a dazzling smile. Her short, sleeveless white linen dress handsomely offset her tanned, toned arms and legs. She was not fashion-model pretty. Her jaw was a shade mannish, her nose rather broad and flat. But she was a very attractive woman, and certainly no older than thirty.