Yet Galen’s motivation has always been a mystery. He has appointed himself Lord High Protector of the Farallon Islands, and in keeping with such a weighty title, he has cut himself off entirely from the rest of the world. None of the others have taken their isolation to this extent. They still keep in touch with their families. They head home for big events. They take the time to return to normal life, however briefly.
Even I am not so far gone. I send the occasional postcard to my father. I write letters to you.
OVER THE LAST few days, Charlene and I have bonded. Entombed in a wasteland of rain and mist. Miles from the nearest Christmas tree. We have taken to huddling together on the couch, tucked beneath the blankets we have scavenged from the beds of the biologists now on the mainland. We will play double solitaire or flip through one of Lucy’s bird books, our heads close, trying in vain to glean the differences between the fourteen identical varieties of sparrow listed there. Recently, in a fit of energy, we even got out all the jigsaw puzzles hidden in the back closet. We took over the table, though it soon became clear that each puzzle was missing a significant number of pieces. Undaunted, Charlene and I worked on, overlapping the disparate images in a patchwork quilt — a dolphin’s tail next to a leafy stretch of forest next to a fragment of one of Van Gogh’s masterpieces. When Galen returned hours later, his nose and ears charred red from the chill, we presented him with a frenetic, disconcerting collage: an image put together by a madman.
Throughout the week, Charlene has been sad. I have heard a lot about her family. At Christmas, they chop down a tree together. There is popcorn to be strung, and eggnog to be spiked, and carols to be sung to the neighbors. Though Charlene and her siblings are all in their twenties now, they are still expected to leave out milk and cookies for Santa, which their father will sample during the night, leaving a few crumbs on the plate. Like me, Charlene is too broke to go home this year. As an intern, she can’t even send presents to her family, let alone manage a plane ticket. In my case, the income I have scrounged together has absolutely no wiggle room for luxuries. Room and board are covered, but vacations are outside my scope.
I don’t mind. The islands are where I want to be.
A few days ago, on an icy morning, Charlene and I decided to clean the cabin. Galen had disappeared right after dawn, throwing on a hat and fishing his binoculars out of the bureau. Charlene swept, and I mopped. She dusted, and I wiped down the windows. All the time, however, she was acting peculiar. As we beat the dust out of the rugs, as we scrubbed the kitchen sink, she kept turning to me, pausing, then moving away again. Clearly there was something on her mind.
The fourth time she did this, we were itemizing the contents of the bathroom cabinet. The trouble with having so many roommates is that nothing ever gets thrown away. Everyone assumes that a razor or bar of soap belongs to someone else. Over the seasons, the cabinet has become a museum of relics: moldy cotton swabs, fossilized tubes of toothpaste, empty boxes of dental floss. I tossed an entire collection of plastic combs into the trash. Charlene glanced at me and started to speak. Then she shook her head, frowning.
“Let’s take a break,” I said.
We headed down the stairs — which were gleaming, by the way — and sat on the couch, piling quilts over ourselves. Through the window, the sea had been churned into a mess of whitecaps, as frothy as whipped cream. Oliver’s aquarium appeared to be empty, but I knew better. He was biding his time, pretending to be pebbles and glass. The radiator clanked in the corner, trying in vain to cope with the breeze. Charlene’s brow was furrowed.
“Get it off your chest,” I said. “Whatever it is. You’ll feel better.”
“It’s nothing. It’s probably nothing.”
I waited. She glanced around, then leaned in. This amused me. It would be hard to find two people who were less likely to be overheard than we were.
“I know something,” she said softly.
“Oh?”
“It’s a little weird.” She paused, biting her lip. “It’s about Andrew.”
His name caught me off guard. A ripple of nausea passed through me. Blinking rapidly, I fixed my gaze on the window I had just washed. The glass glowed with a pale, crystalline light.
“The night he died,” Charlene said, “I heard something.”
I sucked in a breath, my eyes lifted. In the corner of the windowpane, I noticed a spider web I had unaccountably missed.
“My room is next to the front door,” Charlene said. “I hear all kinds of things. If anybody goes anywhere, I know about it. When I first got here — God! — I didn’t sleep at all. Lucy would be vacuuming until ten, and Galen would be at the table, writing in that little green notebook of his and clearing his throat constantly. When I finally dropped off, Forest would wake me at four in the morning. You know how loud he can be.” She sighed. “Four in the morning. Running down the stairs. Yelling at the top of his lungs. Slamming every door in the house.”
Still, I said nothing. The spider web swayed in a draft. The radiator clanked one last time, then fizzled to a halt, and the room was silent.
Undeterred, Charlene went on. “I can sleep through most things now, unless it’s unusual. If it’s a noise I’m expecting, like Lucy singing in her sleep or somebody looking for a book in the living room, I don’t wake up. I’m used to that stuff. But that night — the night Andrew—”
She broke off. In spite of myself, I met her gaze. Her face was suffused with color now, her cheeks burning. I swallowed hard.
“Tell me,” I said. “What did you hear?”
“I heard someone leaving,” she said. “Around eleven. I thought it was Mick and Forest. They do that sometimes. Go out together, I mean.”
Her gaze slipped to the side.
“Anyway,” she went on hurriedly, “I fell asleep after that. It gets a little confused. . There was something. A small noise, very soft. I might have imagined it. Or maybe it was an animal. I fell asleep again.”
That was me, I thought. Me leaving the cabin. I was the small noise. Charlene was fiddling absently with a lock of rust-colored hair. Her voice was low and musical, almost chanting.
“Then I heard Andrew,” she said. “I heard him go outside. I remember lying in bed, listening. Somebody was on the porch. I heard footsteps. It took me a while to be certain. He coughed. I knew Andrew’s cough. And then—” Charlene paused, eyes closed. “And then I heard voices.”
“Voices?”
“That’s right. Andrew was talking to someone.”
The full weight of what she was saying seemed to crash over me in a wave. No one should have been outside with Andrew. He had been alone on the grounds. He had lost his footing alone. He had died alone.
“I’m sure of it,” she said. “I know what I heard. Two voices.”
“But who was the other person?”
Charlene let out a long, slow breath. “I don’t know. I just know it wasn’t Andrew. He was out there with somebody else.”
21
YOU ALWAYS LOVED fairy tales. On quiet evenings, on lazy Saturday mornings, I was accustomed to curling up at your side with Hansel and Gretel or The Little Mermaid. You did not incline, however, toward the more modern interpretations with their happy endings, everything comforting and sanitary. You were not interested in a version of Little Red Riding Hood in which no one got eaten, or a variant of Cinderella in which the wicked stepmother and her daughters repented and were forgiven.