Heroes Are My Weakness

  “What do you mean?”

  Annie told her what she’d found. And then she told her the rest. “Yesterday morning on my way over here, someone shot at me.”

  “Shot at you?”

  “The bullet barely missed. Theo found me right after. That’s why he didn’t come home last night. He didn’t want to leave me alone, even though I told him he didn’t need to stay.”

  Jaycie leaned against the wall behind her. “It was an accident, I’m sure. Some fool shooting at birds.”

  “I was in the open. It was pretty clear I wasn’t a bird.”

  But Jaycie wasn’t listening. “I’ll bet it was Danny Keen. He’s always doing things like this. He probably broke into the cottage with a couple of his friends. I’ll call his mother.”

  Annie didn’t believe the explanation was that simple, but Jaycie had already taken off down the hall, moving more easily on the crutches than she had when Annie had arrived. Annie reminded herself that Jaycie never had to know what had happened at the cottage. No one ever had to know. Not unless she really was pregnant . . .

  Stop! demanded Dilly. You are not going to think that way.

  I’ll marry you, Peter said. Heroes always do the right thing.

  Peter was starting to get on her nerves.

  LIVIA CAME INTO THE LIBRARY wearing her pink coat, crooked paper crown still on her head, and dragging Annie’s backpack. It didn’t take detective skills to figure out what she wanted. Annie closed down her laptop and went to fetch her own coat.

  The temperature had risen into the high thirties, and as they stepped outside, the gutters were dripping and the snow was beginning to disappear from all but the shadiest spots. As they neared the fairy house, she saw that an egg-size rock topped with a tiny carpet of green winter moss had appeared, a cushy perch for a tiny woodland creature. She wondered if Jaycie knew Livia had slipped out earlier. “Looks like the fairies have a new place to sit.”

  Livia leaned back on her heels to examine the rock.

  Annie started to reprimand her for coming out alone, then thought better of it. Livia didn’t seem to stray any farther than the tree. As long as Theo kept the stable locked, she shouldn’t come to any harm.

  Annie sat on the ledge stone and pulled out Scamp. “Buon giorno, Livia. It is I, Scamperino. I’m practicing my Italiano. That means ‘Italian.’ Do you speak any foreign languages?”

  Livia shook her head.

  “A pity,” Scamp said. “Italian is the language of pizza, which I simply adore. And gelato. That’s like ice cream. And badly built towers. Alas . . .” She dropped her head. “Neither pizza nor gelato is available on Peregrine Island.”

  Livia looked sorry about that.

  “I have a brilliant idea!” Scamp exclaimed. “Maybe you and Annie could make fake pizzas this afternoon with English muffins.”

  Annie expected Livia to object, but instead, she nodded. Scamp shook her head to fluff her orange curls. “The drawing you left for me last night was eccellente. That’s Italian for ‘excellent.’ ”

  Livia dipped her head and gazed at her feet, but Scamp wasn’t deterred. “I am exceptionally clever, and I have deduced—that means I’ve figured out—I have deduced . . .” She dropped her voice to a whisper. “. . . that the drawing is your free secret.”

  Livia’s small face tightened with apprehension.

  Scamp cocked her head and said softly, “Don’t worry. I’m not mad at you.”

  Livia finally looked at her.

  “That’s you in the picture, isn’t it? But I’m not sure who the others are . . .” She hesitated. “Maybe your mother?”

  Livia gave a tiny, almost indecipherable nod.

  Annie felt as though she were wandering through a dark room with her arms outstretched trying not to bump into anything. “It looks like she’s wearing something pretty. Is it a flower or maybe a valentine? Did you give it to her?”

  Livia shook her head violently. Tears sprang to her eyes, as if the puppet had betrayed her. With a hiccuping sob, she ran toward the house.

  Annie winced as the kitchen door banged shut. A couple of college psychology classes hadn’t equipped her to meddle in something like this. She wasn’t a child psychologist. She wasn’t a mother . . .

  But she might be.

  Her chest started to hurt. She put Scamp away and went back into the kitchen, but she couldn’t face another hour inside Harp House.

  The bright winter sunlight mocked the darkness of her mood as she left again. Shoulders hunched, she walked around to the front of the house and stood at the top of the cliff. The front porch stretched behind her. Below, the granite steps carved into the rock face led to the beach. She began her descent.

  The steps were slippery and shallow, and she held on to the rope rail. How had her life gotten to be such a mess? For now, the cottage was the only home she had, but once she got back on her feet . . . If she got back on her feet . . . Once she found a steady job, she wouldn’t be able to leave for two months to come here. Sooner or later, the cottage would fall back into Harp hands.

  But not yet, Dilly said. Right now, you’re here, and you have a job to do. No more whining. Nose to the grindstone. Stay positive.

  Shut up, Dilly, Leo sneered. For all your supposed sensibility, you don’t have a clue how messy life can be.

  Annie blinked. Had that really been Leo? The voices were getting mixed up in her head. Peter was her support. Leo only attacked.

  She shoved her hands into her pockets. The wind plastered her coat against her and whipped the ends of her hair from beneath her knit hat. She faced the water, imagining herself in command of the waves, the currents, the rise and fall of the tides. Imagining power when she’d never felt more powerless.

  Finally, she made herself turn around.

  A rockslide had covered the mouth, but Annie knew exactly where it was. In her mind the cave would always be a secret hideaway issuing its siren’s call to everyone who passed. Come inside. Bring your picnics and your playthings, your daydreams and your fantasies. Reflect . . . Explore . . . Make love . . . Die.

  A gust of wind tugged at her hat. She grabbed it before it could sail into the sea and shoved it in her pocket. She wasn’t going back up to the house today, not with this emotional tornado spinning inside her. She scrambled over the rocks and made her way to the cottage.

  Neither the Range Rover nor Theo was there. She made a cup of tea to warm up and sat at the table in the window, petting Hannibal and thinking about the possibility of being pregnant. If she were in the city, she could run to the closest drugstore and pick up an EPT. Now she’d have to order one and wait for the ferry to arrive.

  Except as she remembered the crates of open grocery bags being passed from one islander to the next, she knew she couldn’t do that. She’d spotted Tampax, liquor, adult incontinence diapers. Did she really want everyone on the island to know she’d ordered an EPT? She yearned for the anonymity of the big city.

  After she finished her tea, she gathered up her inventory notebook and headed to the studio. She’d needed to go through the boxes more methodically. She turned the corner and froze just inside the studio door.

  Crumpet hung by a noose from the ceiling.

  Crumpet. Her silly, vain, spoiled little puppet princess . . . Her head hung at a macabre angle, yellow yarn sausage curls flopping to the side. Her small cloth legs dangled helplessly, and one of her tiny, raspberry-pink patent leather shoes lay on the floor.

  With a sob, Annie rushed across the room and grabbed a chair to get her down from the rope that had been nailed to the ceiling.

  “Annie!” The front door banged open.

  She spun around and charged out of the studio. “You creep! You ugly, insensitive jerk!”

  He stormed into the living room like a lion after a wildebeest. “Have you lost your mind?”

  Unwanted tears sprang to her eyes. “Did you think that was funny? You haven’t changed at all.”

  “Why didn’t you wait?
Do you want to get shot at again?”

  She bared her teeth. “Is that a threat?”

  “Threat? Are you so naive that you think it can’t happen again?”

  “If it happens again, I swear to God I will kill you!”

  That stopped them both. She’d never imagined herself capable of such ferocity, but she’d been attacked at the most elemental level. However self-centered Crumpet might be, she was part of Annie, and Annie was her guardian.

  “If what happens again?” he asked in a quieter voice.

  “At first, all those positions you put my puppets in were funny.” She thrust her hand in the direction of the studio. “But this is cruel.”

  “Cruel?” He strode past her. She turned to see him peer into her bedroom and then advance toward the studio. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered.

  She went after him, then stopped in the studio doorway to watch as he reached up and pulled the piece of rope down. He slipped the noose off Crumpet’s head, carried her to Annie, and handed the puppet over. “I’m getting a locksmith out here as soon as I can,” he said grimly.

  Her gaze followed him as he moved to the corner of the room. She clutched Crumpet tighter as she saw what she’d missed. Instead of being on the shelf under the windows, her other puppets were stuffed inside the wastebasket, heads and limbs dangling over the sides.

  “Don’t.” She rushed to them. Sinking down on her heels with Crumpet on her lap, she took them out one by one. She straightened their clothes and their hair. When she was done, she looked up at Theo, searching his face, his eyes, seeing nothing she hadn’t seen before.

  His mouth tightened. “You should have waited at the house for the car. I wasn’t gone long. Don’t walk down here by yourself again.” He stalked from the studio.

  This was what he’d been so angry about when he’d charged in.

  She arranged Dilly, Leo, and Peter on the shelf.

  Thank you, Peter whispered. I’m not as brave as I thought.

  She wasn’t quite ready to abandon Crumpet, and she carried her into the living room where Theo was taking off his coat. “I don’t have money for a locksmith,” she said quietly.

  “I do,” he retorted, “and I’m having a new lock installed. Nobody is going to poke around in my stuff when I’m not here.”

  Was he really that self-absorbed, or was this his way of letting her save face?

  She slipped Crumpet on her arm. The familiar feeling of the puppet’s frilly dress calmed her. She raised her arm, not thinking anything through. “Thank you for saving me,” Crumpet said in her breathy, coquette’s voice.

  Theo cocked his head, but Annie addressed the puppet instead of him. “Is that all you have to say, Crumpet?”

  Crumpet took Theo in from head to toe. “You are smokin’.”

  “Crumpet!” Annie scolded. “Where are your manners?”

  Crumpet blinked her long lashes at Theo and cooed, “You are smokin’ . . . sir.”

  “That’s enough, Crumpet!” Annie exclaimed.

  The puppet tossed her curls, clearly in a huff. “What do you want me to say?”

  Annie spoke patiently. “I want you to say you’re sorry.”

  Crumpet grew petulant. “What do I have to be sorry for?”

  “You know very well.”

  Crumpet leaned toward Annie’s ear, speaking in a faux whisper. “I’d rather ask him who does his hair. You know what a disaster my last visit was.”

  “Only because you insulted the shampoo girl,” Annie reminded her.

  Crumpet’s nose went up in the air. “She thought she was prettier than I.”

  “Prettier than ‘me.’ ”

  “She was prettier than you,” Crumpet said triumphantly.

  Annie sighed. “Stop stalling and say what you need to.”

  “Oh, all right.” Crumpet gave a begrudging humph. And then, even more begrudgingly, “I’m sorry I thought you were the one who hung me from the ceiling.”

  “Me?” Theo was actually addressing the puppet.

  “In my defense . . .” Crumpet sniffed. “You do have a history. I still haven’t recovered from the way you made Peter look up my skirt.”

  “You loved that, and you know it,” Annie told her.

  Theo shook his head, as if he were clearing out cobwebs. “How do you know I’m not the one who hung you up?”

  Annie finally spoke directly to him. “Did you?”

  This time he remembered to look at Annie. “It’s like your friend here said . . . I have a history.”

  “And I wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d come home and found Crumpet and Dilly going at it in my bed.” She pulled the puppet from her hand. “But not this.”

  “You still have too much faith in people.” His mouth twisted unpleasantly. “It hasn’t even been a month, and you’ve already forgotten who the villain is in your fairy tale.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not,” she said.

  He stared at her, then moved past her to the studio. “I have work to do.”

  He disappeared without defending himself, without denying anything.

  THERE WAS NO COZY DINNER for two that night, so Annie made herself a sandwich, then moved some of the boxes from the studio into the living room. Settling cross-legged on the floor, she opened the flaps of the first box. It was full of magazines ranging from upscale glossies to long-defunct photocopied zines. Some of them contained feature stories Mariah had written or stories about her. Annie listed the name of each magazine in her notebook, along with its publication date. It seemed unlikely that any of these were collectibles, but she wouldn’t know until she checked.

  The second box contained books. She surveyed them for autographs and to make sure nothing important was pressed between the pages, then added the individual titles to her notebook. It would take forever to check all of this, and she still had two more boxes to sort through.

  Although she felt better physically than when she’d come to the island, she still needed more sleep than normal. She changed into a pair of Mariah’s menswear pajamas and pulled her sock monkey slippers out from under the bed. But as she stuck her foot into the first slipper, she felt something—

  She yelped and jerked her foot out.

  The studio door banged open. A shudder wracked her body. Theo barged in. “What’s wrong?”

  “Everything!” She reached down and gingerly plucked up the slipper between her thumb and forefinger. “Look at this!” She tilted the slipper, and a dead mouse tumbled to the floor. “What kind of depraved mind does something like this!” She threw the slipper down. “I hate this place! I hate this island! I hate this cottage!” She rounded on him. “And don’t think I’m afraid of a little mouse. I’ve lived in too many rat-hole apartments for that. But I didn’t expect some sicko to leave one in my shoe!”

  Theo slipped a hand into the pocket of his jeans. “It . . . might not have been a sicko.”

  “You think doing something like this is normal?” She was screeching again, and she didn’t care.

  “Maybe.” He rubbed his jaw. “If . . . you’re a cat.”

  “Are you telling me—” She glared at Hannibal.

  “Think of it as a love letter,” Theo said. “He only gives these special gifts to the people he cares about.”

  Annie turned on the cat. “Don’t you ever do anything like that again, do you hear me? It’s revolting!”

  Hannibal lifted his rear quarters in a long stretch, then came across the room and nudged her bare foot with his nose.

  She moaned. “Is this day ever going to end?”

  Theo smiled and picked up his cat. He put it out of the room into the hall and closed the door, leaving himself inside with her.

  She’d grabbed her robe from a hook on the closet door. As she wrapped it around herself, she remembered an incident she’d tried to forget. “You left a dead fish in my bed.”

  “Yes, I did.” He walked over to inspect the life-size mounted photograph of the carved wooden headboard that ser
ved as the real headboard of her bed.

  “Why?” she asked, as Hannibal yowled outside the door.

  “Because I thought it was funny.” He ran his thumb over the top edge of the photograph, giving it more attention than it deserved.

  She stepped past the mouse carcass. “Who else did you torture besides me?”

  “Don’t you think one victim was enough?”

  She upended a wastebasket over the mouse, then went to the door and let Hannibal back in so he’d stop yowling. She didn’t need a cozy chat with Theo tonight, especially not in her bedroom, but she had so many questions. “I’m starting to believe you hate Harp House nearly as much as I do, so why did you come to the island?”

  He walked to the window and looked out onto the bleak winter meadow. “I have a book to finish, and I needed a place to write where nobody would bother me.”

  She didn’t miss the irony. “How’s that working out so far?”

  His breath fogged the glass. “Not my best plan.”

  “There’s plenty of winter left,” she pointed out. “You could still rent a beach house in the Caribbean.”

  “I’m fine where I am.”

  But he wasn’t. She was sick of the mysteries surrounding him, sick of how powerless not knowing more about him made her feel. “Why did you come to Peregrine? The real story. I want to understand.”

  He turned toward her, his expression as cold as the frost on the window. “I can’t imagine why.”

  His haughty lord-of-the-manor act didn’t intimidate her, and she managed something she hoped resembled a sneer. “Chalk it up to my never-ending curiosity about the inner workings of a pathological mind.”

  He lifted an eyebrow at her, but didn’t seem overly offended. “There’s nothing more unpleasant than listening to someone with a big trust fund and a book deal whine about how tough they’ve got it.”