When I finally get the chance to call Will back, there’s a hitch to his voice. “Sadie,” he says, and, from the way that he says it, I know that something is wrong. He stops there, my mind engineering scenarios to make up for that which he doesn’t say. It settles on Otto and the way I left him at the ferry terminal this morning. I got him there just in time, a minute or two before the ferry would leave. I said goodbye, my car idling a hundred feet from the waiting boat, watching as Otto moped off for another day of school.
It was then that my eyes caught sight of Imogen, standing at the edge of the pier with her friends. Imogen is a beautiful girl. There’s no rebutting that. Her skin is naturally fair; she doesn’t need to cover it in talcum powder, as her friends must do, to make herself look white. The piercing through her nose has taken some getting used to. Her eyes, in contrast to the skin, are an icy blue, her former brunette showing through the unkempt eyebrows. Imogen eschews the dark, bold lipstick the other girls like her wear, but instead wears a tasteful rosy beige. It’s actually quite lovely.
Otto has never lived in such close proximity to a girl before. His curiosity has gotten the better of him. The two of them don’t talk much, no more than Imogen and I speak. She won’t ride with us to the ferry dock; she doesn’t speak to him at school. As far as I know, she doesn’t acknowledge him on the commute there. Their interactions are brief. Otto at the kitchen table working on math homework last night, for example, and Imogen passing through, seeing his binder, noting the teacher’s name on the front of it, commenting:Mr. Jansen is a fucking douche.
Otto had just stared back wide-eyed in reply. The wordfuckis not yet in his repertoire. But I imagine it’s only a matter of time.
This morning, Imogen and her friends were standing at the edge of the pier, smoking cigarettes. The smoke encircled their heads, loitering, white in the frosty air. I watched as Imogen brought a cigarette to her mouth, inhaled deeply with the expertise of someone who’d done this before, who knew what she was doing. She held it in and then exhaled slowly and, as she did, I was certain her eyes came to me.
Did she see me sitting there in my car, watching her?
Or was she just staring vacantly into space?
I’d been so busy watching Imogen that, now that I think back on it, I never saw Otto board the ferry. I only assumed he would.
“It’s Otto,” I say aloud now, at the same time that Will says, “It wasn’t the Nilssons,” and at first I don’t know what he means by that. What does Otto have to do with the elderly couple who lives down the street?
“What about the Nilssons?” I ask, but my mind has trouble going there, because—at the sudden realization that I didn’t see Otto board the ferry—all I can think about is Otto in the single seat across from the principal’s office with handcuffs on his wrists, a police officer standing three feet away, watching him. On the corner of the principal’s desk, an evidence bag, though what was inside, I couldn’t yet see.
Mr. and Mrs. Foust,the principal had said to us that day and, for the first time in my life, I attempted some clout.Doctor,I said to him, face deadpan as Will and I stood behind Otto, Will dropping a hand to Otto’s shoulder to let him know that whatever he’d done, we were there for him.
I wasn’t sure if it was my imagination, but I was quite certain I saw the police officer smirk.
“The siren last night,” Will explains now over the phone, bringing me back to the present. That was before, I remind myself, and this is now. What happened to Otto in Chicago is in the past. Over and done with. “It wasn’t the Nilssons after all. The Nilssons are perfectly fine. It was Morgan.”
“Morgan Baines?” I ask, though I’m not sure why. There isn’t another Morgan on our block, as far as I know. Morgan Baines is a neighbor, one I’ve never spoken to but Will has. She and her family live just up the street from us in a foursquare farmhouse not unlike our own, Morgan, her husband and their little girl. Because they lived at the top of the hill, Will and I often speculated that their views of the sea were splendid, three hundred sixty degrees of our little island and the ocean that walls us in.
And then one day Will slipped and told me they were. The views. Splendid.
I tried not to feel insecure. I told myself that Will wouldn’t have admitted to being inside her home if there was something going on between them. But Will has a past with women; he has a history. A year ago I would have said Will would never cheat on me. But I couldn’t put anything past him now.
“Yes, Sadie,” Will says. “Morgan Baines,” and only then do I make out her face, though I’ve not seen her up close before. Only from a distance. Long hair, the color of milk chocolate, and bangs, the type that hang too long, that spend their time wedged behind an ear.
“What happened?” I ask as I find a place to sit, and, “Is everything all right?” I wonder if Morgan is diabetic, if she’s asthmatic, if she has an autoimmune condition that would trigger a middle-of-the-night visit to the emergency room. There are only two physicians here, myself and my colleague, Dr. Sanders. Last night she was on call, not me.
There are no EMTs on the island, only police officers who know how to drive an ambulance and are minimally trained in lifesaving measures. There are no hospitals as well, and so a rescue boat would have been called in from the mainland to meet the ambulance down by the dock to cart Morgan away for treatment, while another waited on shore for the third leg of her commute.
I think of the amount of time that would have taken in sum. What I’ve heard is that the system works like a well-oiled machine and yet it’s nearly three miles to the mainland. Those rescue boats can only go so fast and are dependent on the cooperation of the sea.
But this is catastrophic thinking only, my mind ruminating on worst-case scenarios.
“Is she all right, Will?” I ask again because in all this time, Will has said nothing.
“No, Sadie,” he says, as if I should somehow know that everything is not all right. There’s a pointedness about his reply. A brevity, and then he says no more.
“Well, what happened?” I urge, and he takes a deep breath and tells me.
“She’s dead,” he says.
And if my response is apathetic, it’s only because death and dying are a part of my everyday routine. I’ve seen every unspeakable thing there is to see, and I didn’t know Morgan Baines at all. We’d had no interaction aside from a onetime wave out my window as I drove slowly by her home and she stood there, thrusting the bangs behind an ear before returning the gesture. I’d thought about it long after, overanalyzing as I have a tendency to do. I wondered about that look on her face. If it was meant for me or if she was scowling at something else.
“Dead?” I ask now. “Dead how?” And as Will begins to cry on the other end of the line, he says, “She was murdered, they say.”
“They? Who’s they?” I ask.
“The people, Sadie,” he says. “Everyone. It’s all anyone’s talking about in town,” and as I open the door to the exam room and step into the hall, I find that it’s true. That patients in the waiting room are in the thick of a conversation about the murder, and they look at me with tears in their eyes and ask if I heard the news.
“A murder! On our island!” someone gasps. A hush falls over the room and, as the door opens and a man steps in, an older woman screams. It’s a patient only, and yet with news like this, it’s hard not to think the worst of everyone. It’s hard not to give in to fear.
