Theo’s room was toward the back, next to his sister’s. She flung open the door. He lay on his bed, reading. The sight of her, with her matted hair, bloody scratches, and gashed calf brought him to his feet.
There were always bits of riding gear lying around his bedroom. She didn’t consciously snatch up the riding crop, but a force she couldn’t control had taken over. The crop was in her hand, and she was rushing toward him. He stood there, not moving, almost as if he knew what was coming. She brought up her arm and swung the crop at him as hard as she could. It caught the side of his face and split the thin skin over his brow bone.
“Annie!” Her mother, drawn by the noise, raced into the room with Elliott right behind. Elliott wore his customary starched long-sleeved blue dress shirt while her mother wore a narrow black caftan and long silver earrings. Mariah gasped as she saw the blood streaming down Theo’s face and then Annie’s condition. “My God . . .”
“He’s a monster!” Annie cried.
“Annie, you’re hysterical,” Elliott proclaimed, hurrying to his son.
“The dogs nearly died because of you!” she screamed. “Are you sorry they didn’t? Are you sorry they’re still alive?” Tears streaming down her face, she lunged at him again, but Elliott twisted the riding crop from her grasp. “Stop it!”
“Annie, what happened?” Her mother was staring at her as if she no longer recognized her.
Annie poured out the story. As Theo stood there, his eyes on the floor, blood running from the cut, she told them everything—about the note he’d written, the pups. She told them how he’d locked her in the dumbwaiter and set the birds on her at the boat wreck. How he’d pushed her into the marsh. The words rushed out of her in a torrent.
“Annie, you should have told me all this earlier.” Mariah pulled her daughter from the room, leaving Elliott to stanch the flow of blood from his son’s wound.
Both the gash in Annie’s calf and the cut in Theo’s forehead needed stitches, but there was no doctor on the island and simple bandages had to do. This left each of them with a permanent scar—Theo’s small, almost rakish, Annie’s longer but eventually fading more than the memory ever could.
Later that night, after the puppies were resettled in the stable with their mother and everyone had gone to bed, Annie was still awake, listening to the faintest sound of voices coming from the adults’ bedroom. They were speaking too softly for her to hear, so she crept out into the hallway to eavesdrop.
“Face facts, Elliott,” she heard her mother say. “There’s something seriously wrong with your son. A normal kid doesn’t do things like this.”
“He needs discipline, that’s all,” Elliott had retorted. “I’m finding a military school for him. No more coddling.”
Her mother didn’t relent. “He doesn’t need a military school. He needs a psychiatrist!”
“Stop exaggerating. You always exaggerate, and I hate it.”
The argument gathered steam, and Annie cried herself to sleep.
THEO GAZED DOWN FROM THE turret. Annie stood on the beach, the ends of her hair whipping from beneath her red knit cap as she stared toward the cave. A rockslide a few years ago had blocked the entrance, but she still knew exactly where it was. He rubbed the thin white scar on his eyebrow.
He’d sworn to his father that he hadn’t meant to hurt anyone—that he’d only taken the pups to the beach that afternoon so he and Annie could play with them, but that he’d started watching TV and forgotten about them.
The military school he was then sent to was committed to reforming troubled boys, and his classmates survived the austerity by tormenting one another. His solitary nature, preoccupation with books, and status as a newcomer made him a target. He was forced into fights. Most of them he won, but not all. He didn’t much care either way. Regan, however, did, and she staged a hunger strike.
Her boarding school was the sister institution of his former school, and she wanted Theo back. At first Elliott had ignored her hunger strike, but when the school threatened to send her home for anorexia, he’d relented. Theo had gone back to his old school.
He turned away from the turret window and packed up his laptop along with a couple of yellow legal pads he was taking to the cottage. He’d never liked to write in an office. In Manhattan, he’d traded his home office for a library cubicle or a table at one of his favorite coffee shops. If Kenley was at work, he’d move to the kitchen or an easy chair in the living room. Kenley had never been able to understand it.
You’d be a lot more productive, Theo, if you’d stay in one spot.