3
By morning, everything was back in the apartment.
Every chemical, beaker, substance, substrate, scale, dropper, ruler …
Gerard wiped the sleep crusts from the corners of his eyes and pinched his cheeks. He was awake. There was no denying that.
Heart rate picking up speed, he slid off the bed, changed into fresh clothes, and marched out to the curb.
At only 6 AM, the island had obviously been alive for hours. Boats bounded across the waves. Horns blared in the distance.
There was nothing beside the trash bins. Not a bag, box, book, or piece of broken furniture.
Gerard was losing his mind.
He’d run away from his life, his obligations, and this was the price he’d pay. His sanity.
“James? Something the matter?” Regina called out from the porch.
Gerard didn’t respond immediately. Nobody called him by his middle name.
Except that was the name he’d given her yesterday when he’d arrived on her doorstep asking after lodging.
He couldn’t risk his identity and location being compromised.
Not that a woman in her late seventies who owned a shuttered inn on a disconnected island posed much of a threat.
“James?” she called again.
Rational thought kicked back in, and Gerard wrenched himself out of his confusion. “Yes?” he responded.
“Everything all right?” she asked from her spot on a white-painted porch swing, holding a steaming mug the shape of a crab in one hand and a folded newspaper in the other.
Careful not to disturb the paltry Halloween decorations she had staked in the squelchy lawn, he marched over and asked, “Did you see me bringing stuff down to the curb yesterday?”
“’Course I did. I don’t miss much around here,” she said. “Guess you changed your mind?”
He furrowed his brow, thought really hard. “No, I—”
“It’s all quite interesting, ain’t it? The nuggets left behind by a scientific investigator,” she said almost wistfully. “At least that’s what he told me he was, and I believed him. I’m usually good at sniffing out a liar.”
Gerard swallowed and hoped there hadn’t been an audible sound. Were her eyebrows raised because she smelled deceit wafting off him or because he was asking after the vanished tools?
“My tenant was a smart one, that’s for sure,” she concluded.
“Emory Griffin?” he asked, remembering the name on the notebook.
“That was him. He had gone to school for physi— No, was it pharm— I can’t remember.
Some kind of medical science,” she said.
“He worked under a friend of mine named Joe for a time. Apparently, he was a no-fuss hard worker with a lot of perceptive ideas about the bay’s weather patterns influencing their crabbing spots.
Joe said he was the biggest help he ever had on the Susanna, which is why I couldn’t believe for a second that he was some sort of criminal despite all that banging around at odd hours.
It didn’t bother me much. The banging around, I mean.
I liked the sounds. Not the cursing, mind you.
He had a sailor’s mouth even before he worked on the Susanna.
That I could’ve done without, but he was reclusive.
For the past several weeks, I’d have sworn he was still living up there by the way the floorboards creaked and the doors banged. Wishful thinking, I suppose.”
Gerard processed none of that information. He was too busy juggling the fragmented logic of how the items had gotten back inside his apartment. “You’re sure he’s gone?” he asked.
“As sure as I can be,” she said.
“Do I have the only key to the apartment?” He’d locked the door last night.
“I have one, too,” she said, which should’ve been obvious.
“Then did you bring the stuff back up last night?” The air felt thick and impossible to inhale.
“Heavens, no. Why would I? How could I? I didn’t have the strength to get it down, howdja think I’d have the strength to carry it back up?” she asked.
“Sure. Sorry,” he said, still uneasy.
“Maybe you sleepwalk?” she said.
“I never have before.” He paced the front path with his hands on his hips. “Could there be…? No.”
“Could there be what?”
“Ghosts? Or, a ghost?” He heard distinctly how foolish he sounded.
A ghost would have to be mighty powerful to perform telekinesis across dimensions.
Regardless, he didn’t even believe in ghosts aside from the Holy Ghost he’d learned about in his Catholic upbringing, and even that belief was growing fuzzier by the day.
“Funny you should say that. We’ve been having a lot of unexplained phenomena here on the island lately.” She sipped from her mug.
“Such as?” he asked.
From her pocket, she wrestled out her phone and squinted at the screen.
“Somebody posted in our community forum that they saw a golf cart driving itself the other morning and a half-eaten apple floating midair. Half the town said it was a ghost, and the other half said the guy hit the bottle too hard the night before despite this being a dry island. I don’t know which half I fall into, given the other reports on here, but this house has been standing in one form or another almost as long as the US has been independent.
I would be shocked if there wasn’t at least one ghost puttering around,” she said, setting her newspaper on the seat beside her. “When’s the last time you ate?”
Involuntarily, he clutched his empty stomach. “Lunch yesterday.”
She waved him quickly inside, and before he could say anything else, she was frying bacon in a pan and cracking eggs into the cut-out centers of pieces of white bread.
She poured him a cup of the worst coffee he’d ever tasted, and she only had whole milk to sweeten it, but the care she displayed for him—a virtual stranger—settled his body into stasis.
Thoughts of ghosts and intruders and sleepwalking abated.
“Where’d you travel from, James?” Regina asked once she’d fixed them both plates and turned off the rattling stovetop fan.
“New York City,” he said with his mouth full. He’d never had a cowboy egg before. That first bite awoke the ravenous hunger inside him. Sticky yolk rivered down his chin.
“Fellow New Yorker?” she asked. He’d forgotten she’d said she was from there originally.
“No. Jersey. Close.” It was hard to get words out while he shoveled the delicious food into his face. She made bad coffee but really good breakfast.
“Saw you with a guitar case yesterday. You a musician?” she asked, still working on the same super-crispy piece of bacon.
“Yes,” he said automatically without realizing what he was disclosing. It was just that nobody ever referred to him as a musician anymore, given all the other titles he’d picked up along the years. Immediately, he pivoted the conversation. “Was that you I heard playing the piano yesterday?”
“Yes. I tickle the ivories. Did I bother you?” she asked.
“Not at all. It was lovely. What was it you were playing?”
“It’s something original I’ve been toying with,” she said, voice taking on an almost singsong quality.
“You’re a songwriter?” he asked, taking a tiny fortifying sip of the sludge coffee for the caffeine boost he needed. He swallowed quickly so as not to have to taste it.
“I was. Ages ago. Now I’m a landlady and a former innkeeper and a church volunteer and a sometimes cook.
How was it? Guess you liked it because your plate is clean,” she said with a tinkling laugh.
He wondered how she afforded to live on the island without operating her business.
His rent alone couldn’t sustain her. “Seconds?” she asked.
“No, I couldn’t pos—”
“Nonsense. Let me refill your plate, and you should take the leftovers. Lord knows I won’t eat them myself.”