Sea Mist on the Graves of Bell Island

Chapter 1

“It’s a death party … get it?”

Harper buried her head in her hands, her headache only growing in intensity.

“Yes, I get it. And if they didn’t already have an opinion of me, they do now.”

“Relax. All things Victorian are new again, it’ll be fun. I’m also handling the food, and Cesar is going to bring his truck, but get this—only black food, black everything.” Carli looked at Harper expectantly, a half grin on her lips.

“I thought death parties served only white food?” Harper rubbed her eyes and sat back, envisioning all-black tacos and tortas.

“Traditionally yes, but white doesn’t feel near spooky enough. Besides, I’m the only historian in your crowd. Your friends can lecture me on the mating habits of flounder all day, but they don’t know Victorian customs from their elbow.”

Carli looked very satisfied. The invites had already been sent, the party was happening whether Harper approved or not, and truth be told, she did very much approve.

She was leaving the loft in Jamaica Plain that she’d shared with Carli through five years of grad school at Okeanos Marine Research Center at Boston Scientific Institute.

Harper would board the ferry bound for Bell Island on Monday.

The research fellowship had happened fast, so fast Harper had hardly had time to think it through.

It had been a long shot; the project, funded through Okeanos, would be the closing note to her PhD, the last study she needed for her thesis. And she was leaving on Monday.

“Alright, so I know you don’t like surprise parties, which is why you get to know about it now. You have exactly five hours to come up with a costume. Everything is set, you just have to enjoy yourself and let everyone drip envy all over you.”

Harper snorted in response. “More like they’ll be buttering you up for my room. You have another year on the lease, you’ll have roommates lining up. You can make some bank on this if you play it right.”

“I admit there are ulterior motives, but I’m in no hurry really. You’re the only roommate for me, although I can charge double what you pay if you keep your trap shut.”

“Consider it sealed.” Harper sighed and stared out the industrial-size floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked Stony Brook Park.

She had met Carli in the dorms junior year at BSI, she was the human equivalent of an electric shock.

Her head was in a thousand different places at once, a thousand ideas always brewing.

Her thesis on Victorian death rituals had overtaken the loft, and Harper didn’t mind a bit—the black lace curtains, the ornate flower arrangements that showed up from time to time, the elaborate vintage furniture that was patched together with duct tape and hope, all scavenged from estate sales and front yard throwaways.

Harper suddenly realized how much she would miss it.

She kept her own space austere, blank. You could call it minimalist, but in truth it wasn’t that.

Harper had lived her life with a sense of waiting for the next thing to happen, compulsively never allowing herself to set down roots, or create a space for herself.

She was sure there was a psychological reason, but that was a science she had little interest in.

Her heart was lost to all things that lurked far below the water’s surface.

“I’m off! Text me if there’s anything you need—otherwise, get creative!”

With that, Carli was gone, and Harper was alone in the loft.

A wave of nerves washed over her and she realized that she was terrified.

Six-month minimum with potential for more.

Bell Island, where her mother was born, twenty nautical miles off the Boston coast, ferry in and ferry out—no other way on or off the island.

She would be heading a skeleton crew of a research team to study a thing that could only be described as impossible.

Her chances of success were minimal, and extremely likely to be panned even if the research showed her what she hoped to see.

It was either brilliant or career suicide.

Harper had been at BSI since she was eighteen, the same age that her mother had been when she left Bell Island for the University of Iceland.

And like her mother, work study and scholarships pulled Harper through the undergrad years, and cephalopods had taken her the rest of the way.

She was supposed to have finished her PhD in microbial biology a year ago, but she’d stalled.

Her advisor had told her she had one last chance before the current grant she was riding would be pulled.

So this was it—the one last chance. And there was a certain irony in returning to an island that her own mother had left as soon as she was able.

A nagging whisper in the very back of her brain reminded Harper that it was also where she’d lost her parents all those years before.

She pushed it down, silencing the memory.

She focused her thoughts on the fact that she’d be living on an island that had made Carli, a few months from finishing her own anthropology PhD, squeal.

“Bell Island? Lady Loreana Bell? Bell Fucking Island???” Carli had screamed when Harper had read her the email from Okeanos.

“Do you have any idea what you’re getting into?

” Harper had only patchy memories of stories her mother had told her when she was little.

Stories that were made for a child, more fairy tale than reality.

Carli could hardly contain herself as she gushed.

“The whole island is thought to be haunted for one, but the more likely and historically accurate fact is that Bell Manor was built by spiritualists, who have an actual séance room in the manor, like real-life séances, that they say is still used today.”

Harper swallowed a laugh. “That I will never see from the lab. They can summon all the spirits they like.”

Carli gave her a look of mock frustration. “Regardless, it’s wild. Who has an actual séance room?”

“The Magic Lab out in Roslindale, remember we went to that bachelorette thing last year? Very spooky.” Harper sat back, greatly amused at Carli’s excitement.

“I’m talking real séance room, not one decorated with burlesque Ouija boards.

Plus, you have to appreciate the history of the place.

It was a way station in the 1840s and ’50s for the Underground Railroad, like escaping slaves from the south would hide away on ships in crates and boxes and shit, and end up on Bell Island, where they’d catch a freight to England, or some people say they just stayed on the island and never left and the whole place is peopled by the descendants of slaves.

But not just that, other people escaped to Bell Island too. ”

“That is actually interesting. And I’m certainly glad that Bell Island landed on the right side of history,” Harper said sincerely.

Her mother hadn’t talked of Bell Island much, at least when it came to her childhood on the island.

As Harper had grown older, she’d only heard her parents discuss the research they were conducting off Bell’s coast. Her mother had presented a very clinical view of her hometown.

Harper felt her mind wandering, searching for what she had sliced out of her patchwork memories.

Carli, who was about to burst from excitement, broke her reverie.

“Not just that but all the way back to the Salem witch trials. There’s even a story of a woman who was accused of murdering her husband in, like, 1820 who disappeared right out of the jail cell and then later, some sailor said she was on Bell Island, but Lady Loreana Bell refused to let the police search for her.

There’s this super epic story about her standing up on the rocks outside of the harbor at like ninety years old all ‘You will not pass!’ like Gandalf or some shit. ”

“Take a breath.” Harper had laughed. “I’m living in the village, not at the haunted manor, with three other strangers.

I will be on a boat, listening to ultrasound waves at coordinates that were documented fifteen years ago and taking water samples for DNA analysis.

From what I hear, the locals really hate this, and I will likely not be welcome at the one, yes, one pub on the island or at the one, yes, one, movie theater that shows one, yes, one movie.

That is one thing my mother talked about—the movie theater showed Die Hard for a solid year. ”

“Your mother had to have told you more than that about Bell, at least a little, right?” Carli grinned uncertainly. She knew the uneven terrain that was Harper’s memories.

“I was really young. I don’t remember much beyond a few stories and knowing intellectually that was where she was from. She had pictures, I remember those, but they didn’t look dramatically different from the island I grew up on.”

“There is absolutely nothing you can do to make this any less amazing than it actually is,” Carli said with undeterred enthusiasm.

That had been Tuesday, and every day since she had been planting new and interesting facts about Bell Island for Harper, in hopes that her nerves would turn to excitement.

Now it was Saturday and evidently there was a going away/Victorian death party happening in just a few hours.

Harper pulled herself off the couch and went to search for a costume.

How was she most likely to depart this world?

Carli’s macabre sense of humor was the opposite of Harper’s dry, and even cynical outlook; she would miss it.

Funny how even from the moment she opened the acceptance note, she felt like this was a final goodbye.

Not a temporary assignment, not a footnote, but a final note, a closure.

It was her nerves, she thought distractedly while looking around her space for anything that could be turned into an impromptu costume.

By all logic, she would be back to defend her thesis and by this time next year—bam, doctored and done.

But this felt different, it felt big. She’d told Carli as much, and she’d leaned in and whispered, “Maybe you’ll run off to Bell Island and become one of the lost island spirits, like The Tempest. … ”

Harper had laughed. “That was a shipwreck for one, and you know how I feel about small towns.”

“Yep, Shirley Jackson creepy. Your mother must have told you something about growing up there? School? Trouble she got in? And your parents were there for research together, right? On Bell for about a year?” Carli had asked.

“They went back and forth from the research center on Vestmannaeyjar to Bell for a couple of years. I remember their research more than anything about the island itself. I just don’t remember a lot of details.

She might have shared more, but I was young, and …

” Harper trailed off, the gaps in her memory blocking any memories that might exist.

Carli had nodded empathetically. “I know, I get it, I don’t mean to push.”

Harper shook her head. “You’re not, really it’s okay, I just don’t remember much.

I know I was in boarding school in Grindavik while they were gone, and then after everything happened.

… But when I had the chance, I don’t think I ever asked, I was a kid.

” Harper had found herself lost in the fog of her Icelandic childhood, a faint memory of the chill of the air and the ferry through the Westman Islands.

But now Harper found herself thinking back on that conversation.

Even though she would be realistically a ferry ride away from Boston, there was a finality to this that she could not explain.

She could probably even get her room in the loft back at the end of all this, but a persistent nagging at the back of her consciousness kept whispering that this was the last time she’d live here, the last time she’d live in Boston proper at all.

She had no one to say goodbye to, just Carli and the others from the bio department who were theoretically coming to this party tonight.

Her parents had been gone for years now.

Harper had been an orphan for all of her adult life, no ties and no complications.

It was exciting, she supposed, yes, exciting, not terrifying.

How was she most likely to depart this world?

Harper sat on her platform bed with its plain white comforter and looked around her space.

The only indulgence she had allowed herself in terms of décor were the cephalopod models and stuffies that lined a single shelf, keeping space next to academic books and notebooks.

“It’s not unlikely,” Harper whispered to herself, and got to work.