2
“You’re in luck,” Regina told Gerard, leading the way around the side of the house.
She was a short, slender wisp of a woman with a nose so beakish she could’ve been mistaken for one of the island’s many cormorants.
Her hair was gray at the roots and red at the tips as if the color were waterfalling right off her head, and she had it styled short like an old-timey paper boy.
The temperature was only in the high sixties, yet she wore a stained pink tank top and plaid “shorts” that just barely cleared her scraped knees.
Her feet were bare and muddy, but she didn’t seem to mind as she clomped through the fresh dirt with a speed that implied a youth her wrinkled, mottled hands contradicted.
“My tenant up and vanished a few weeks back. Paid for the month, and then poof, disappeared,” she said.
“Disappeared?” Gerard asked, concerned.
She continued speaking, clearly not having heard him. “I liked the boy. Nerdy, perhaps a little rude but not in a mean way. I couldn’t picture him committing any crimes, but there was some trouble with the law around here. I think he might’ve run away,” she said.
“What sort of trouble?” he asked, louder this time. He was surprised at how easily she disclosed information after knowing him for all of five minutes.
“Theft mostly, and, well—” She paused. “You’ll see.”
Before they climbed a staircase sloped at such a steep angle it appeared to be rising into the ashen sky, Gerard pointed to a rectangular building with a row of tangerine doors brushing up against the beach but still on the property. “What about those? Are those for rent?”
“Those used to be nightly rentals. Nobody has stayed there in years. You won’t want to either unless you like wading through a pool of water to get back to the road every morning,” she said.
“I need to get someone out here to move that whole structure inland. If it’s even worth it with the time we’ve got left.
Maybe I’ll wait for the government buyout.
The tides are chomping away at our shorelines as they have been for decades.
I’m anti-wall, to be clear, but here? We need it or we’ll be swimming with the fishes sooner rather than later.
Do you think I could get gill implants?”
Uncertain if she was joking or not, Gerard didn’t respond.
Instead he left his suitcase and guitar at the bottom of the stairs and followed her up.
Regina was going to get splinters in her soles from the jagged, unvarnished steps, but if her feet were half as calloused as her hands, then she must not have needed to worry.
At the landing, Regina unlocked and opened the door. A wave of chemical stench smacked them both in the face. The odor was enough to knock Gerard back a step.
The apartment was a studio. One long, nicely appointed yet cluttered room. Every inch of free table space was covered with beakers, test tubes, and scales. Several lab coats and pairs of goggles hung from the brass-pronged coatrack. A stranger’s clothes remained in a heap on the floor.
“Tried to clean as best I could, but…” Regina seemed resigned. “The police took the blood, so at least I didn’t have to worry about that.”
“Blood?” he asked, alarm rising in his voice.
“Bagged. Barely any. Don’t worry. It wasn’t a crime scene,” she said.
The roof of the room slanted at an odd angle. The kitchen had high ceilings and a gorgeous skylight, but the bed couldn’t even fit a headboard behind it. Such was the way when an old house got converted into separate units. The apartment must’ve been the attic at one point.
“This was my husband’s childhood home. We moved his father up here in his old age, but he passed pretty soon after. God rest his soul,” she said reverently, bowing her head. Out of respect, Gerard did the same.
“Does your husband live with you?” Gerard asked.
“He’s gone, too,” she said.
“I’m sorry to hear that.” Embarrassed heat cropped up on his cheeks.
“Better him than me.”
At the bluntness of her statement, Gerard was unable to mask his shock.
“I loved the man. Believe me so. But he was older and more reliant on me, and he never quite got the hang of being nice to tourists. I don’t blame him.
They come onto your island, eat your crabs, drive your golf carts, and make fun of your accents,” she said, as if the list could go on forever if he’d let it.
“You don’t have an accent,” he pointed out, then feared he’d somehow offended her.
“I’m not an Ipinger by birth,” she said. “I married into the island. Into the house. I grew up in New York City. But I’m sure I’ve bored you already. Do you like the room?”
Gerard had stayed at the Ritz and the Plaza, traveled to Paris and Milan.
No matter how deep he dug, he didn’t think he could “like” this messy room in a creaking, crumbling house on the shore of a remote island, but after negotiating a monthly rent that even he found exceedingly low in the current economy, he couldn’t pass it up.
“What should I do with all this stuff?” he asked, eyeing the space warily.
“Clean it out or live around it, I suppose,” she said with a shrug.
“It’s not … evidence, is it?” he asked.
“The only thing this is evidence of, I fear, is a misanthrope being run off due to a misunderstanding.” A sadness percolated through her time-worn features before she left him.
He was surrounded by hundreds, if not thousands, of scientific instruments he didn’t know the names of and textbooks he could never understand.
It would take him all day to remove this stuff. Had he made a mistake running away?
No, he couldn’t think of that now. He’d done it.
And the sooner he got this done, the sooner he could face flop onto that questionable mattress in the alcove of windows and sink into deep, deep sleep.
The kind of sleep he had been promised over a year ago.
He shuddered with indignity before grabbing garbage bags and cleaning gloves from under the sink.
With his earbuds in, he got to work.
The liquids went down the drain. The solids went in the bags. And the unidentifiable substances were sorted separately by how messy or dangerous they appeared to be.
Box by box, he carted the gadgets and measuring implements down to the curb, sweat staining the underarms of his gray T-shirt. Regina had mentioned trash pickup was in the morning, so he didn’t need to worry about all this junk festering for long and creating rings on the grass.
Once the big items were gone, he tackled the papers.
So many papers. Some in notebooks. Some loose.
All with chicken scratch on them. At first, he thought they were scrawled in an invented language, but then known words and figures popped out at him.
Italian phrases. Backward numbers. Convoluted punctuation.
At one point, he took a notebook that said FROM THE DESK OF EMORY GRIFFIN into the bathroom and held it up to the mirror thinking he could Da Vinci Code the scribbled ramblings, but he had no luck.
Was this a puzzle? A cry for help? Should Regina have given this all to the police?
Though, from what he knew of this island, it was more of a one-guy operation. Only a sergeant, if that.
As he inspected the book, he got the distinct, uncanny impression he wasn’t alone.
When his profile started to rise, he’d honed a sixth sense that alerted him to the hawkish presence of another person when traversing the empty streets of a new city or returning to his apartment late at night.
His ears would perk up, the back of his neck would tickle, and his mind would supply the age-old question, Friend or foe?
But he looked every which way and saw nothing, no one.
Odd. He slammed the notebook shut.
One notebook wasn’t going to bother him, so he stored it in the drawer of a desk pressed up against the wall in case the previous tenant ever returned. Whatever was in there seemed important.
The kitchen items he left mostly untouched. There was no use wasting a perfectly good pan or plate.
The mahogany wardrobe was full of clothes, none of which were on hangers.
Dress shirts were balled up and wrinkled.
In the back corner, there was a heather-gray sweatshirt that said UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF MEDICINE he did the “finger test” on the bathroom mirror to make sure it wasn’t two-way.
If he was being surveilled, there were absolutely no signs of it.
Regina had said the house wasn’t even wired for internet, so why was he so paranoid?