Stone Cove Island Read online

  Copyright © 2014 Suzanne Myers and Soho Press, Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Soho Teen

  an imprint of

  Soho Press, Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Myers, Suzanne

  Stone Cove Island / Suzanne Myers.

  HC ISBN 978-1-61695-437-6

  PB ISBN 978-1-61695-575-5

  eISBN 978-1-61695-438-3

  1. Mystery and detective stories. 2. Islands—Fiction.

  3. New England—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.M9917St 2014

  [Fic]—dc23 2014019051

  Interior design by Janine Agro, Soho Press, Inc.

  v3.1

  For my mother, who always thought I should be a writer

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue: What Happened to Bess

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Acknowledgments

  PROLOGUE

  WHAT HAPPENED TO BESS

  It was my fault that she was murdered. The night Bess died, she left the bar at the marina late. She would have had a couple of drinks, not enough to get drunk. She would have danced, maybe with Jimmy, maybe with Nate, maybe with an older guy we didn’t know. She would have walked home alone. Unless I was sleeping over, she always went home alone. She was mad at me that night. I knew that, but I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t go out.

  I got into bed early but couldn’t sleep. My skin was itching and my ears were ringing. I was probably still awake while it was happening. Bess always told me to snap out of it, that it was just one of my moods and I needed to get hold of myself. But when I looked in the mirror, I saw black hollows that should have been my eyes. My skin was puffed and pale. I was so ugly. I couldn’t stand the idea of people looking at me. I needed to be alone, where no one could see me. So I couldn’t go to The Slip with Bess.

  The Slip was our diviest bar, and not the atmospheric kind of divey. There were wobbly plastic deck chairs, sticky folding poker tables. The finish on the floor had worn off, replaced with a years-deep varnish of soaked-in beer. Someone had strung some thick, knotted rope around the walls in a lazy nod to the nautical theme. It was gross, but they didn’t card there. In town, the bars had to protect themselves. They had the summer tourist business to worry about. It was way too risky getting busted for letting kids in. But tourists would never make it out to The Slip, so no one there ever paid attention.

  Sometime after midnight, Bess would have left.

  I went over and over it in my head, realizing I’d never know the real story. It wasn’t far to the bungalow she shared with her mom, halfway between the marina and East Beach. She might have had that lame Phil Collins song stuck in her head. We hated that song so much. We used to sing it to each other as a joke, howling into hairbrush handles and making gooney faces like we were in some lame romantic comedy, then collapsing in hysterics on Bess’s bed.

  Or maybe—and I preferred this version—she had been singing that Sinéad O’Connor song she loved. Bess had a nice voice. The song was everywhere that summer, about how all the flowers had died when Mama went away. Bess loved the way that “Mama” was wedged into the line like an upbeat afterthought. She thought it sounded like a bubble popping. She was good like that at describing things. After she pointed that out, I could never hear the song any other way.

  Bess had been too good a swimmer to drown. I don’t mean too good a swimmer to get caught in a riptide; she was too good a swimmer to go swimming alone on a moonless night in the remorseless Atlantic Ocean. She was smart and she was sensible.

  Her clothes were found in the lighthouse, covered in blood. Her killer had cut off all her hair. Some people said a huge anchor had been painted across the front door of her house. Others said that was only a rumor. I wouldn’t know; I didn’t go to her house again after that night. Her body was never found.

  Her mother, Karen, refused to talk about Bess afterward. She got rid of all her stuff. I wanted to keep something to remember her, but Karen said no. Maybe she knew what I knew: Bess had been scared before she died. She had shown me—just me, she swore—the letter.

  I only read it once. I didn’t copy any of it down. But I can still remember every word. “Uninvited guest,” it began and then later, “down came a blackbird and pecked off her nose.” The more I tried to push that line from my mind, the more fiercely it returned, and with it her face. I hoped he had not done anything to her face.

  I should have gone with Bess to The Slip that night. I should have told someone about the letter. But I never did.

  ONE

  Of course we knew that Hurricane Victor was going to be a big storm. But there hadn’t been a storm like this in anyone’s living memory, so we weren’t prepared for the damage it would do.

  I live on a small island a few miles off Cape Ann, about an hour north of Boston. Our closest mainland towns are Rockport and Gloucester. When you grow up on an unprotected island facing Atlantic storms, you’re supposed to know what to do when things get serious. But we’d had so many false alarms, so many calls to evacuate to the mainland, only to return to find no damage or, much worse, that thieves had taken advantage of a day they knew they could work pretty much undisturbed. No one on Stone Cove Island evacuated for a storm warning anymore.

  The morning after, I opened the front door to find a fifty-foot oak tree lying across our porch. I squeezed through the narrow gap the tree allowed and stood outside. Its trunk came up to my waist. The island was silent, as though all the sound had been sucked away by the force of the hurricane as it ripped through. There were no birds chirping, no insects. I couldn’t even hear the waves, though I could imagine how wild the ocean must be.

  I could hear my mom, banging pots and dishes inside as she worked herself into a panic, trying to figure out how to make breakfast in a kitchen with no power or water. She was the oatmeal-and-eggs type, not the cold-cereal type, and definitely not the roll-with-the-changes type. Dad was asleep. He’d been up all night, moving furniture up to the second floor as the water rose, trying to make extra sandbags out of freezer bags and flour, taping and re-taping the windows as the wind sucked the glass in and out.

  Who knew glass could bend like that? The porch light lit the pea-soup-green night, and the trees screamed as they blew sideways. No wonder the big oak had come down. It was amazing more trees hadn’t. I didn’t think I’d be able to sleep, but I’d finally nodded off on the floor in my room, well away from any outside wall. My bed and the rug in my room were soaked. The rain had poured under the closed bottom window forming a waterfall, as if someone was holding a hose to the glass. I was scared, but I knew my dad was busy doing all he could to keep the house together, and my mom would make me more freaked out, not less. So I just lay there, wai
ting for it to be over. I tried pretending it was tomorrow already, and that all this was behind me.

  “Eliza?” I could hear my mom calling me from the kitchen.

  “I’m out front, Mom. Just checking things out.” I didn’t mention the oak. My dad’s best at handling bad news with her. “I’m going to walk into town and see how everyone is. Maybe they have power. Do you want me to get coffee or anything if they have it? Or more bottled water?” She was a worrier, so bottled water was one thing I was pretty sure we had plenty of.

  “Eliza, no. I don’t want you going out there alone,” she called back. The clattering in the kitchen was getting more frantic.

  “It’s fine, Mom. The storm’s over.”

  “What if a branch falls? It’s not safe for you to be out there. Nate?”

  I heard my father’s exhausted voice from the next room. “Let her go. She’s fine. Eliza, walk down the middle of the streets, stay out of the park and don’t go near the water. Get extra batteries from Harney’s if he’s not sold out.” Then he rolled over and went back to sleep, or so I guessed. It was a familiar pattern: Mom, looking for a reason to panic; Dad, reeling her back in. I hadn’t figured out his magic formula. Usually my attempts to calm her down only made things worse.

  I turned my attention back to the oak and to how I was going to get off the porch. The trunk was wide and blocked my view of everything beyond it. I was dreading what I would find on the other side, but putting it off would only make my imagination run wild. It was better to face it, however bad things might be, then figure out what to do next.

  I threaded my way to the edge of the porch, grabbed a sturdy branch, climbed out and dropped to the ground. It wasn’t that difficult, but coming and going this way would not work with groceries. The bay window off the kitchen would have to become our temporary entrance, unless Dad wanted to get into it with the back door. Its seized-up lock hadn’t worked since I had been in fourth grade. I looked out at the formerly cozy little street, and felt like Dorothy landing in Oz.

  SUMMER IS OUR BIG season. Growing up on the island, you get used to the time before Fourth of July and the time after. It’s like living on two different planets. In the off-season, you can ride your bike across the whole island until your fingers are frozen to the handlebars and not see another person. There is only one school with about forty kids in each grade. We all go there, our parents went there, and mostly their parents did too. The ferry runs once a day and when the harbor is iced over, there are lots of weeks it doesn’t run at all.

  In the summer, crowds stream off the ferries hourly. They juggle beach chairs, umbrellas, Radio Flyer wagons packed with groceries for their summer rentals. The inn is full. People pack Water Street, the main drag that curves along the harbor, wearing bathing suits under their T-shirts and sundresses, licking their dripping ice-cream cones. By the way, don’t ever let anyone talk you into working in an ice-cream parlor as a summer job. It sounds fun, but it’s actually grueling, charley-horse-inducing work. I always go for day camp counselor: sailing, Capture the Flag, and campfire songs.

  You would think summer would be our total focus, that we would be holed up like hibernating bears waiting for beach weather, but it’s not like that at all. You get used to the silence and sense of belonging that we few residents have. It’s like throwing a party. You’re excited before, decorating and getting things ready. It’s fun while the party lasts, but eventually you just want the guests to go home so you can put on your pajamas and sit around the kitchen, rehashing the highlights.

  That morning, Stone Cove Island didn’t look like any version of itself I’d ever seen before, summer or winter. Our street was smothered with downed trees and broken branches. It would be a while before any cars could make it through. My dad had said to stick to the middle of the roads, but I had to zigzag around or climb over whatever blocked my way. I couldn’t choose the path. I turned down the hill toward Water Street, my breath catching in my throat. It felt like watching a movie about someone else’s ruined life. Houses were missing roofs, walls were caved in. In some cases, only the rubble of the brick foundation was left. Furniture, clothes and belongings were scattered everywhere.

  Those personal things tugged at me the most: the stuffed tiger that no doubt some toddler was unable to sleep without; the royal-blue leather family photo album, assembled over decades and destroyed in one night. I pulled my sleeves down over my hands and folded my arms across my stomach. It was cold, and I felt the chill in the small of my back. I wished I had not come down to face this alone.

  When I reached the harbor, normally the busiest section of town, I kept my eyes on the water. The beach had ugly, deep gashes in it, like a monster had bitten away hunks of flesh and left bleeding mud behind. I tried to put it back together in my mind to the way it was supposed to look, but I couldn’t. Tears began to sting my eyes. I felt the destruction, as though I was the one who had been hurt.

  Where the ferry came in—or used to come in—the docks were all but gone. The few weekend people who hadn’t made it over in time to prepare for the storm were rewarded by having their sailboats either washed up and overturned on the village green, a hundred yards from the water, or shattered into kindling-sized strips, floating beside the broken pilings they’d once been secured to.

  The village green was charred a yellow brown, the grass burned by the salt water that had flooded it. The shops that were on the bay side of Water Street were either gone or ripped open like dollhouses, their sun hats and saltwater taffy boxes floating in murky, possibly electrified standing water. Businesses on the up-island side of the street fared a little better. At least the water had receded.

  The whole island seemed to be without power except for the Picnic Basket, the sandwich and coffee shop on Laurel Lane. Nancy and Greg appeared to have rigged a generator. I could smell coffee brewing and theirs were the only lights glowing on the main street. So they’d been lucky too. I felt a quick rush of relief. If the Picnic Basket were dark, I would have panicked. Nancy and Greg were known to be the source of all news, official and unofficial, on the island. They prided themselves on always being first to know. They were also usually first to gossip. The Picnic Basket was probably the nerve center for Hurricane Victor information by now.

  I wiped my tears with the sleeve of my sweater just in time to hear my name.

  “Eliza? Is that you?”

  When I turned, Charlie Pender was standing behind me.

  What is he doing here? That was my first thought. Charlie had graduated from Stone Cove High last December, a semester early. I had not seen him since. I remembered that he was taking a year off before college to intern at a newspaper in Boston or Providence and wondered if he might be on some kind of assignment. He seemed taller, or maybe it was just because I felt so beaten down that morning. I saw that same feeling reflected in his eyes; they were faraway, cloudy. In fact, he looked like he was in the same state I was—dazed, distracted, his sandy hair unbrushed, dressed in dark jeans, a sweatshirt, and low-top black Converse. That was funny: we had the same shoes on. But I could feel the space he’d put between himself and the island. It made him seem like a stranger.

  Of course, there had always been some distance. While he and I were friendly, our families weren’t. That is, my mom and Charlie’s mom made clear their lack of interest in being friends. His parents owned the Anchor Inn, one of the oldest and definitely the biggest of the hotels. They lived by the success of the island as a summer destination. My mom thought Cat Pender was manipulative, a “climber,” she called her, always sucking up to the richest guests at the inn. I didn’t know what Cat thought of Mom, but I could easily project my own complaints: too nervous, too shrinking, too fragile. My dad and Charlie’s dad were neutral at best. As one of the few local contractors, my dad often worked on projects at the inn, but I don’t think they’d ever so much as shared a beer.

  “This is crazy, huh? Everyone okay at your house?” He sounded wired and a little scared, just like
how I felt.

  We hugged hello. I was glad for the company, even if he had almost caught me crying.

  “Yeah. Big tree came down on the porch. But everyone’s fine. This is unbelievable,” I said. “How’s the inn?”

  “It has some damage. That’s a pretty exposed spot up there on the hill. My parents are trying to make the best of it. They don’t want their guests to panic.”

  The inn sat on the bluff, perched above the harbor. Every spring it was repainted a perfect, gleaming white. Next door was the famous Anchor Club, known for its grass tennis courts and the croquet tournaments, where members dressed in the white, traditional clothes of the 1920s, when the club was founded. I pictured the howling winds I’d heard the night before, raking through the white clapboard walls, rattling the slate rooftops—as if fighting to tear apart the years of island history. I felt a sinking in my belly. Everything about my life on the island had seemed permanent until last night.

  “Are you here to do a story? You’re working at a newspaper, right?” I asked.

  “The Boston Globe. I don’t get to write much though. A little for the website but it’s mostly research and whatever anyone else doesn’t want to do. I was coming back this weekend to see my parents anyway, so I thought I’d stay in case it turned out to be big.”

  We both took in the mangled shore. It was big.

  “I feel bad,” he said. “I almost feel like I willed it. Looking for a story.”

  “Weather’s not that mystical,” I said, mostly to myself. “It’s just weather. This just happened. It’s not like we asked for it.”

  “Huh. You haven’t changed. That’s nice.” I felt a weird flutter as he said it. I didn’t know he thought of me as being any particular way. It was uncomfortable, the compliment amid the destruction.

  “Yeah, well, I’m still here,” I said quickly. “Things don’t change that much. You’re the one who left for the big city, right?”

  “True,” he said. He looked at me a minute, like he was going to say something else. “Should we go see what’s going on? Nancy and Greg have probably set up a war room down there.”