“Did Tasheba Kent build this house herself?” Carlton Ji asked. “It doesn’t look like her style at all.”
“Tasheba Kent bought the house,” Lydia Acken said. “It was built by a man named Josiah Horne back in 1837. First he made a lot of money selling rum and slaves. Then he got religion and went running around the country preaching repentance and revival. Then he got an attack of the guilts or a case of clinical depression and built this place out here. He moved in and nobody saw him for twenty years.”
“They found him dead in there in 1857,” Geraldine Dart said cheerfully. “Been dead for a couple of years, too, and his body rotted and eaten away to almost nothing, sitting bolt upright in his best chair in front of the fireplace in the library. The place was filthy. He’d never let a cleaning lady in to do for him. He never let anybody in. He would never have been found at all, but some people from his church wanted to hold a revival and they didn’t have the money for it, so they came out here to see if he’d give them what they needed.”
“That must have been before born-again religion became a profit-making enterprise,” Carlton Ji said.
Hannah Graham was glaring at Geraldine Dart. “She’s just trying to frighten us again,” she hissed. “We shouldn’t let her get away with it. The next thing you know, she’ll be telling us the place is haunted.”
“It is haunted,” Geraldine Dart said calmly. “And I’m not making it up. You can read all about it in a book called Ghosts and Legends in Rural New England. We’ve got it in the library.”
“She’s making it up,” Hannah Graham snapped.
The boat was pulling closer and closer to the island. Gregor could see the dock jutting out from the rocks, and then a long steep flight of wooden stairs. Long and steep were the operative adjectives. The stairs were more like a ladder than like ordinary stairs. He wondered if that was the only way up to and down from the house. It seemed to be.
“I can’t believe Miss Kent and Mr. Marsh can handle those stairs,” Gregor commented. “I’m not sure I’m going to be able to manage them.”
Geraldine Dart was pulling the little boat up next to its dock. She had gone forward to throw her mooring rope around the post. She secured it there, then came back to the rest of them.
“Mr. Marsh handles the stairs all right,” she told Gregor, “but the next time Miss Kent gets off this island, it’s going to be in a helicopter or a coffin.”
CHAPTER 3
1
IT WAS TWO O’CLOCK in the afternoon, and Richard Fenster was sitting in a blue molded plastic chair in Logan Airport, fuming. All he could think of was how, if he had hitchhiked the way he had intended to, he would be in Maine by now. If he wasn’t, he would at least be moving. Instead, he was sitting here in this chair, and there was no relief in sight. The first of the bomb threats had hit at eleven fifteen, less than ten minutes before his plane was due to board. The all-clear had been sounded twenty-two minutes later, but it hadn’t done him any good. There had been another bomb threat, and another one after that, and another one after that. Every one of them had to be checked out. That meant closing this entire end of the airport and holding up all traffic until teams of guards could search through closets and bathrooms and utility spaces and even passengers’ luggage. That meant no planes taking off while the searching was going on. That meant more and more time wasted and more and more reporters arriving to look into it all. By now, the situation was reaching legendary proportions. It was going to be one of those things, like Woodstock, that everybody wanted to have been a part of. If Richard hadn’t been in such a hurry, he would have been enjoying himself.
The only other person in this small waiting room was a young woman in a very formal suit—navy blue raw silk with a short jacket; high-necked white silk blouse peeking up over the jacket’s plain round neckline—who kept pacing back and forth and staring at the clock on the wall above the check-in desk. She had a handful of sunflower seeds she seemed more interested in playing with than eating. She would move them from one hand to the other over and over again, then bump her elbow on a concrete post or one of the chairs. The sunflower seeds would scatter everywhere, and she would have to go back to her handbag to get another handful to play around with. Richard had tried a couple of times to talk to her, but she hadn’t been having any. Obviously, young women in raw silk suits didn’t fraternize with men in ragged jeans and cotton sweaters.
There was the sound of footsteps in the hall and they both looked up. This was the very last waiting room at this end. Nobody came down here unless they wanted to take a Maine Air flight to Portland or Augusta. Richard couldn’t remember where he was supposed to land to get to Hunter’s Pier. He watched the hallway carefully, and a few seconds later a man came striding down it, a beefy overblown man with too much color in his face who looked a little like John Forsyth. He was followed by a MaineAir reservations clerk who had to run to keep up with him.