Remy pulled the rope again and he landed in a heap inside her boat. Shaking. Waterlogged. In addition to the windbreaker, he wore black track pants and sneakers.
“Are you all right?”
Chattering teeth were the only answer.
She needed to get him warm and dry as soon as possible. Grunting, she dragged him away from where she’d sit to steer the boat and propped him against the bow.
Instinctively he drew his arms close to his chest.
“Was anyone else out here with you?”
No answer.
She scoured the view, 360. No one was calling for help and she saw nothing except a distant boat—little more than a miniature brown smudge—several miles to the southeast.
Remy sent the boat whizzing across the worsening waves toward home. Her urgency to save the life of her passenger distorted time, pulling the minutes unbearably long.
Gradually the façade of her cottage, covered in shingles that time had weathered to gray, drew nearer. She could make out Leigh’s stout, reassuring form waiting for her on the dock.
At last, she pulled even with Leigh, who helped her secure the boat. The older woman stepped aboard wearing a green plaid flannel, jeans, and rubber boots. She’d stuffed her three-inch-long ponytail through the hole at the back of a faded ball cap.
“He hasn’t said anything,” Remy told her friend. “He’s semi-conscious.”
“Hypothermia can mess with a person’s abilities. It mimics drunkenness.” Leigh hunched near the man. “There's blood at the back of his head.”
“What?”
“I think he has a head injury. Let’s lift him out, as carefully as possible. I’ll hold under his arms, you get his feet.”
Remy followed her instructions.
“One, two, three,” Leigh said. They heaved him onto the dock.
He groaned, shut his eyes, and rolled onto his side. His lean, muscular body rattled.
“I’ll get one side, you get the other.” Leigh braced him into a sitting position and settled one of his arms across her shoulders. Remy did the same, feeling the coldness of it through her jacket. The two women pressed to standing in unison, the stranger staggering between them, head lolling forward. He was over six feet tall and heavy.
They started up the stairs.
Unlike Remy, Leigh had been born and bred on Islehaven. She was forty-eight, with a face that looked a decade older but a body that had the strength of someone two decades younger. Her thighs were the circumference of office wastepaper baskets. Leigh didn’t stop to rest and so Remy didn’t stop either, despite that her limbs were screaming in protest.
“We can,” Remy said between gasps of breath as they pushed through the cottage’s door, “put him on my bed.”
“Ayuh, but not until we’ve gotten these clothes off him. Let’s lay him on the rug in your bedroom first.”
They did so.
Leigh unzipped his windbreaker to reveal a white T-shirt beneath. Remy got out her electric blanket, spread it on the bed, and turned it on high. Then she rushed to the linen closet and returned with clean towels.
Both of them worked to peel the clinging windbreaker and T-shirt from his body. Doing so revealed nasty red and purple bruises across his ribs.
Remy swallowed hard. What had happened to him?
Shivering miserably, he tried to return to the fetal position.
She pressed the towels to his hair and skin while Leigh made short work of his shoes and socks. They’d stripped him down to his track pants, a metal watch, and a platinum wedding band on his ring finger. When Leigh gripped his waistband in preparation to pull downward, Remy focused intently on his clavicles.
“Towel,” Leigh said like a surgeon asking for a scalpel. Remy passed her one, then prepared her bed by folding back the covers and stacking pillows so his head would be elevated.
