Annie didn’t blame the women who wanted to leave. Life on a small island was more romantic in concept than in real life.
Barbara toyed with her wedding ring, a thin gold band with a very small diamond. “I’m not the only one. Judy Kester’s son’s getting lots of pressure from his wife to move in with her parents someplace in Vermont, and Tildy—” She waved her hand as if she didn’t want to keep thinking about it. “How long are you staying?”
“Till the end of March?”
“In winter, that’s a long time.”
Annie shrugged. The terms of her ownership of the cottage didn’t seem to be common knowledge, and she intended to keep it that way. Otherwise, she’d look as if she were being controlled by someone else, just like one of her puppets.
“My husband’s always telling me to butt out of other people’s business,” Barbara said, “but I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t warn you that staying out here by yourself is going to be hard.”
“I’ll be fine.” Annie said it as if she believed it.
Barbara’s worried expression wasn’t encouraging. “You’re far from town. And I saw that car of yours . . . With no paved roads, it won’t be any use this winter.”
Something Annie had already figured out.
Before she left, Barbara invited Annie to the island Bunco game. “It’s mainly us grandmas, but I’ll make Lisa play. She’s closer to your age.”
Annie quickly accepted. She had no desire to play Bunco, but she needed to talk to someone other than her puppets and Jaycie who, for all her sweetness, wasn’t exactly a stimulating conversationalist.
A NOISE AWAKENED THEO. NOT another nightmare this time, but a sound that didn’t belong. He opened his eyes and listened.
Even through the fog of leftover sleep, it didn’t take long to figure out what he was hearing. The sound of the downstairs clock chiming.
Three . . . Four . . . Five . . .
He sat up in bed. That clock hadn’t worked since his grandmother Hildy had died a good six years ago.
He pushed back the covers and listened. The melodic chimes were muted, but still clearly audible. He counted. Seven . . . Eight . . . It went on. Nine . . . Ten . . . Finally, at twelve, the chimes stopped.
He looked at his bedside clock. It was three in the morning. What the hell?
He got out of bed and made his way downstairs. He was naked, but the cold air didn’t bother him. He liked discomfort. It made him feel alive.
The light from a quarter moon seeped through the windows and painted jail bars across the carpet. The living room smelled dusty, unused, but the pendulum of Hildy’s wall clock swung in a rhythmic ticktock, its hands pointing to midnight. The clock that had been silent for years.
He might spend his working life with time-traveling villains, but he didn’t believe in the supernatural. Yet he’d walked through this room before he’d gone to bed, and if the clock had been ticking, he’d have noticed it. Then there were the unexplained noises.
There had to be an explanation for all of it, but he had no clue what it was. He’d have plenty of time to think about it, though, because he’d never get back to sleep tonight. Just as well. Sleep had become his enemy, a sinister place inhabited by the ghosts of his past, ghosts that had grown all the more menacing ever since Annie had shown up.
THE ROAD WASN’T AS ICY as it had been eight nights ago when Annie had arrived, but the potholes were more pronounced, and it took her forty minutes to make the fifteen-minute trip to the village for the women’s Bunco game. She tried not to think about Theo Harp as she drove, but he was never far from her thoughts. It had been three days since their confrontation in the turret, and she’d only seen him from a distance. She wanted to keep it that way, but something told her it wouldn’t be that easy.
She was grateful for the chance to get away from the cottage. Despite her hikes up to Harp House, she’d begun to feel better physically, if not emotionally. She’d put on her best pair of jeans and one of her mother’s white menswear shirts. Pulling her renegade hair up in a messy, curly twist; slicking on some toffee-colored lipstick; and swiping her lashes with mascara was the best she could do with what she had. Sometimes she thought she should give up mascara to make her eyes less prominent, but her friends said she was too critical and that her hazel eyes were her best feature.
On the right side of the road, the big stone wharf jutted into the harbor where the lobster boats were moored. Enclosed boathouses had replaced the open sheds she remembered. If things were as they used to be, summer visitors still stored their pleasure craft inside, right along with the lobstermen’s traps and buoys awaiting fresh paint jobs.