Downstairs, Gracie looked like she was out for the count. ‘Go to bed,’ Abby yelled in her ear. No reaction. ‘Say good night, Gracie.’ Her father’s old joke. Still no reaction. The hell with it. Abby sat on a kitchen chair and pulled on her ice cleats over the Nikes. The last thing she needed was to slip on the ice and break something. Finally she put on her black Gore-Tex jacket and her fanny pack with a mini flashlight and her meds already inside. She clipped a key ring to her belt. It held thirteen keys. One for the back door of the Crow’s Nest. One for each of the twelve summer cottages Abby kept an eye on while their owners were away. Her jogging route took her past all twelve. Easy work. Easy money. More important to Abby, it proved that a whole bunch of people could trust her with their expensive homes.
The thermometer nailed to the tree in the yard read twelve degrees. There was no wind. Abby figured that’d change when she hit the backshore and the open ocean. No worries. She was prepared for the cold. She took off and broke into an easy jog. Hard-packed snow crunched under her feet. A full moon lit her way. A moon made for creatures of the night. Weirdos and werewolves and crazies like her. She followed the dirt track that led for about a half mile from her house to the backshore. The ice cleats slowed her down some, but that was okay. They made her feel sure-footed climbing the icy rises.
She passed the Healys’ log cabin. One of her houses. Only deer tracks marred the crunchy layer that covered the snow, and she ran on. Watching the cottages involved little more than keeping an eye out for storm damage or signs of a break-in. Nothing much ever happened. One time she did notice a broken window at the Morrisseys’. A B&E, the cops called it. Breaking and entering. Turned out vandals had spray-painted dirty pictures all over the walls. Men with big dicks and dangling balls banging away at bent-over women with huge boobs. Some stuff was stolen, too. A flat-screen TV, some stereo equipment, and, according to Dan Morrissey, three bottles of Kahlúa. The cops thought stealing Kahlúa was weird, but Abby knew lots of island kids who loved the stuff. Shit, why wouldn’t they? It not only got them drunk, it tasted like dessert. The cops never caught anyone. Just wrote up an incident report so the Morrisseys could file an insurance claim. That was the cops for you. Do-nothing assholes.
One other time Abby saw a light flickering from one of the bedrooms at the Callahans’ place. She went in and found Marie Lopat and Annie Carle, stark naked and going at it hot and heavy on the Callahans’ bed. She told them to get dressed and go home before she called their parents. Abby never figured Annie and Marie for lesbos, but hey, whatever turns you on.
She emerged from the woods and turned left onto Seashore Avenue. A cold wind from the northeast smacked her right in the face, but thanks to her Blue Lightning mask she barely felt it. Big breakers slammed into the rocks below the road, creating plumes of spray twenty feet high. The full moon glittered on the water. There were now even more stars than before. Abby felt good. She was running. She was laying off the beer. She was on the meds. The Voices were mostly quiet. She was even starting to feel good about herself as a woman again, the way she did seven years ago at Portland High and for two years after that at USM. That was before the Voices invaded her head. Before she tried to shut them up by jumping off the rocks at Christmas Cove. Not once but twice. That was before the two years locked up at Winter Haven, and a chunk of another year living with a bunch of runaways and druggies at John Kelly’s halfway house in town. Now she was home, but not home free. Abby knew from experience she had to be vigilant. The Voices lived. Meds or no meds, it could all come crashing down.
She picked up her pace on the paved, nearly level surface. Most of the houses were newer and bigger on this side of the island, none of them owned by island families. About half belonged to rich retirees from away. They mostly left for four months in Florida right after New Year’s. The other half belonged to even richer summer people who spent most of the year in places like New York or Dallas or L.A. One couple even came over from London and built a McMansion right on the water near Seal Point. Probably cost two million bucks. More money than most islanders made their whole lives. And they used the place all of four weeks a year. The other forty-eight weeks it was locked up and empty. There had always been summer people on Harts Island, but never people rich enough to live like that. The island was changing, and Abby was sorry about that. She liked it better the way it was when she was little. She wished the Londoners would just go home to London and take their big fat house with them. Or let it float out to sea. Yes, they paid her to watch the place, and yes, she liked getting the money. Still, she wished they weren’t here.
A hundred years ago, most islanders would never have dreamed of building anything more than a fishing shack out here on the open ocean. Even twenty years ago when Abby was a little girl there were only a few houses on the backshore, and most of those were pretty modest. It was too damned cold and the nor’easters too punishing. People today had no problem coming to the island, changing the place, pushing real estate prices and taxes ever higher and challenging nature in ways that seemed to Abby arrogant and wrong.
If Abby had been running a step or two faster, if she’d rounded the bend at Seal Point a second or two sooner, or if she’d just been looking out to sea when the match flared in the second-floor window, she never would have seen it. In this, however, as in so much else in her life, luck didn’t fall Abby’s way. The match flared. She saw it. Then it was gone. It happened so fast, she wasn’t sure it happened at all. She stopped running, then stood and looked at the window where it had been. Todd and Isabella Markham’s house was a large, gray-shingled, neo-Victorian designed in what Isabella liked to call ‘the island vernacular.’ It was built high up on about ten truckloads of fill to give it an even more commanding view of the ocean. It had a triangular front roofline with a rounded turret on the right. A dozen steps led up to a large, open wrap-around porch. Abby stood in the shadows, gazing at the window and wondering if she’d just imagined the whole thing. Then, just as she decided that maybe she had and was about to resume her run, another match flared. Whoever lit it must have used it to light a lantern or a candle, because this time the light stayed on, flickering dimly.
Abby wondered if the Markhams might be on the island. They lived in Boston, and they sometimes came up in winter, but Isabella always called a day or two ahead and asked Abby to open the house, turn up the heat, and leave a few lights on. They wanted everything warm and cozy when they arrived. Besides, if it was the Markhams, why didn’t they just turn on the electric lights? Why bother with candles?
The idea of candles suggested romance. Were Marie and Annie playing house again? Or some other island teenagers? Abby tried to remember if she’d ever seen Kahlúa in the Markhams’ liquor cabinet. She hoped she wouldn’t find dirty pictures painted on the walls. Either way, the Markhams paid her to watch the place, so she’d have to check. They didn’t pay her much, but she took the money, and they trusted her to do the job.
If she’d brought her cell phone, she could have called the police. Or maybe Travis. But cell phone service was hit or miss out here at Seal Point, and the police would just give her a hard time. As for Travis, if he wasn’t home sleeping, he was probably busy trying to get into some other girl’s pants. He’d see Abby’s name on caller ID and not pick up.