I was quiet. As I helped myself to more pasta, I wondered for the first time what had actually happened to Andrew. Oddly enough, this question had not occurred to me. I had been so overwhelmed by the shock of my reprieve that the reasons behind it had seemed unimportant.
His corpse had been discovered at eleven a.m., which suggested that he had taken a morning walk. It was unlike him to do so — but stranger things had happened. Perhaps he had headed off to do a little fieldwork for once. He might have been gazing too avidly through his binoculars, not looking where he was going. Nobody had been a witness to the accident, which was hardly surprising. Galen and Forest had been on the water that morning, Mick in the lighthouse, Lucy and Charlene near Breaker Cove. I had been in bed, asleep. It would have been a matter of seconds for Andrew to lose his footing, knock himself unconscious on the rocks, and drop into the drink.
After dinner, the two agents asked us to step into the living room. We distributed ourselves in our usual positions: on the couch, in the armchair, on a few ratty old pillows that were strewn across the rug. Both officers, however, stayed standing. I wondered whether this was intentional; we all had to literally look up at them. Hands on hips, the alpha agent launched into what sounded like a prepared speech, delivered many times before.
“You’ve all had a trying day,” he said. “I’m sorry for your loss. As you can imagine, we need to get as much information as possible before we head back to California. It’s our procedure—”
He broke off. A door had opened. I turned to see Lucy emerging from her bedroom. There were purple crescents beneath her eyes. A blanket was wrapped around her shoulders, trailing across the ground.
“Sorry,” she murmured. Her gaze lingered on the empty spot on the couch beside me, but after a moment she sank unsteadily to the floor, next to Forest. Her arrival had all the ceremony of a stage entrance. Everyone gaped at her. Even the alpha agent’s bureaucratic manner was momentarily derailed. He stood scratching his cheek before continuing, “Galen here — Mr. McNab, I should say — has offered to let us use his bedroom for our interviews. We’ll have a bit more privacy there. I’ll be asking each of you to—”
Galen interrupted. “Do you have a cause of death?”
“Beg pardon?”
“Cause of death.”
It was Dr. Alfred who answered. He was settled on a chair in the corner, and he looked up from his clipboard. “Drowning. Foam in the lungs. Petechial hemorrhaging. No question.”
Lucy gave a barely visible shudder. I saw Forest reach toward her. Then he thought better of it and withdrew his hand.
“The wound on the head?” Galen asked. “The broken ankle? It was broken, wasn’t it?”
“A fall,” the doctor said. “That’s what it looks like now. I’ll find out more at the autopsy.”
“There will be an autopsy, then?”
“Oh, yes.”
Once again, Lucy shivered. It was a convulsive movement, like a dog shaking off water.
“And the time of death?” Galen asked.
Dr. Alfred glanced at the alpha agent, who gave a barely perceptible nod. The doctor pursed his lips and said, “Between midnight and two a.m. last night, based on the liver temperature. My best estimate.”
In that moment, something happened to me. Even before I’d had time to process his words, I felt the room beginning to pivot. The floorboards swung under my feet. I gasped a little. I could not help it.
Someone was speaking — Forest, asking a technical question. Something else about Andrew’s ankle. Mick had his hand raised like a child in school. They were biologists, after all, unfazed by blood and injury, interested only in the mechanisms and specificities of death. They had spent years practicing this habit of mind. Clinical distance. Emotional detachment. Facts, not feelings.
My brain was in a tumble. Andrew had been on the grounds at midnight. I had been on the grounds at eleven p.m. I had lingered in the coast guard house for at least half an hour. In my wildest dreams, I had never imagined that my late-night trek could have had anything to do with Andrew’s demise. The two events had seemed entirely unconnected. I had gone to the coast guard house. He had gone for a stroll. Naturally, I had imagined a morning stroll taking place well after dawn.
Now my breath came strangely, stifled in my chest. When I had departed the cabin last night, during the witching hour, I had been aware that I was putting myself in a certain amount of jeopardy. I had been willing to risk losing my way, exacerbating my flu, even wrenching my bad ankle. Evidently, however, it had been a greater gamble than I knew. In a million years, I would never have risked seeing Andrew alone. We had been ships in the night, missing one another by minutes. My nausea returned, and for a moment it seemed likely that I would vomit on the beta agent’s shoes. But I controlled myself. I took a deep breath and sat up straight again.
“—definitely broken,” Dr. Alfred was saying. “The right tibia. It happened antemortem, but just barely. I would say the bone was fractured a few minutes before death. That would be consistent with a fall.”
“He had some scratches,” Forest volunteered. “What does that mean?”
“Oh, drowning victims usually do,” the doctor said. “The body floats facedown, and the arms are dragged over the bottom. It’s common to see many kinds of wounds. Those would be inflicted after death.”
At this point, the alpha agent cleared his throat.
“As I said,” he announced, “we’ve got to head back to the mainland soon. No time to waste. This is a bit unorthodox, you understand. Normally we’d do things differently. But here, on the islands—” He sucked in a breath, looking around with a pained expression. “We’ll be asking each of you to come up in turn.” He indicated Lucy, who was sitting with a blanket clutched around her shoulders. “Ms. Crayle, I guess we’ll start with you.”
OUTSIDE, THE SKY darkened by degrees. The clock ticked in the corner. A breeze rattled the panes and set the front door to rocking in an arrhythmic rattle. Ordinarily, we would have been preparing for bed now. There would have been the usual squabble over who would have the first shower before the hot water ran out completely. Forest might accuse Mick of swiping his toothpaste. Galen might settle himself at the kitchen table, chin on fist, flipping through the tidal chart.
Tonight, however, we remained cloistered in the living room. The mood was both listless and tense. The rumor of voices filtered through the ceiling. Normally, I was sure, the federal agents would have had hours, even days, in which to collect information. Normally they would not dine with their witnesses, then take statements in somebody’s bedroom. But the islands, as usual, had made everything more difficult. Time was precious; space was limited. The agents could not urge us all to stop by their offices when we were feeling a bit calmer. They could not plan to return for a chat. Unless they felt like commandeering the helicopter again — unless we felt like spending twelve hours on board the ferry, there and back — this had to be done now.
The tension affected everyone differently. Any conversation that might have arisen between us was constrained by the presence of the doctor, who had remained in his corner, scribbling away on his clipboard. Mick was at the window, peering out at the sunset. Charlene was on the floor, slumped against the wall, as pale as I had ever seen her. Her freckles stood out like chips of sand caught in ice. She had not said a word since dinner. Forest, on the other hand, was frenzied. He was pacing like an expectant father. His movements were so rapid that I kept thinking he would barge straight into the wall. Instead, he pivoted on his heel. I had never been able to get a handle on Forest. Clearly he was in the grip of some strong emotion, but whether it was anxiety, or anger, or ghoulish enjoyment, I could not tell.