Heroes Are My Weakness

  Her nausea was back. She watched a spider creep across the dirty marble floor. He silenced the call. Through the open door behind him—the one that led to the library—she glimpsed Elliott Harp’s big mahogany desk. It looked unused. No coffee mugs, yellow pads, or reference books. If Theo Harp was working on his next book, he wasn’t doing it there.

  “I heard about your mother,” he said.

  Not—I was sorry to hear about your mother. But then he’d seen how Mariah had treated her daughter.

  “Stand up straight, Antoinette. Look people in the eye. How do you expect anyone to respect you?”

  Even worse, “Give me that book. You’re not reading any more drivel. Only the novels I give you.”

  Annie had hated every one of those novels. Others might fall in love with Melville, Proust, Joyce, and Tolstoy, but Annie wanted books that depicted courageous heroines who stood their ground instead of throwing themselves under a train.

  Theo Harp ran his thumb along the edge of the phone, the dueling pistol still dangling from his other hand as he studied her improvised bag-lady attire—the red cloak, the old head scarf, her worn brown suede boots. She’d fallen into a nightmare. The pistol? His bizarre outfit? Why did the house look as though it had regressed two centuries? And why had he once tried to kill her?

  “He’s more than a bully, Elliott,” her mother had told her then husband. “There’s something seriously wrong with your son.”

  Annie understood now what hadn’t been clear that summer. Theo Harp was mentally ill—a psychopath. The lies, the manipulations, the cruelties . . . The incidents his father Elliott had tried to dismiss as boyish mischief hadn’t been mischief at all.

  Her stomach refused to settle. She hated being so frightened. He transferred the dueling pistol from his left hand to his right. “Annie, don’t come up here again.”

  Once again, he was getting the best of her, and she hated it.

  From nowhere, a ghostly moan crept into the hallway. She whipped around to find its source. “What’s that?”

  She looked back at him and saw he’d been taken by surprise. He quickly recovered. “It’s an old house.”

  “That didn’t sound like a house noise to me.”

  “It’s not your concern.”

  He was right. Nothing about him concerned her any longer. She was more than ready to leave, but she’d barely taken half a dozen steps before the sound repeated, a softer moan this time, even eerier than the first moan and coming from a different direction. She stared back at him. His frown had deepened, his shoulders tensed.

  “Crazy wife in the attic?” she managed.

  “Wind,” he said, daring her to refute him.

  She curled her hand around the soft wool of her mother’s cloak. “If I were you, I’d leave the lights on.”

  She kept her head up long enough to pass through the foyer into the back hallway, but when she reached the kitchen, she stopped and hugged the red cloak around her. An Eggo frozen waffle box, an empty bag of Goldfish crackers, and a ketchup bottle were visible in the overflow of the trash bin in the corner. Theo Harp was crazy. Not the funny crazy of a man who tells bad jokes, but the bad crazy of someone who keeps dead bodies stacked in the cellar. This time as she stepped out into the arctic air, it was more than the cold that made her shiver. It was despair.

  She stood straighter. Theo’s smartphone . . . There must be reception in the house. Was it possible to get it out here, too? She retrieved her dinosaur of a cell phone from her pocket, found a sheltered place near the deserted gazebo, and turned it on. Within seconds, she had a signal. Her hands shook as she called the number for the island’s so-called town hall.

  A woman who identified herself as Barbara Rose answered. “Will Shaw left the island last month with his family,” she said. “A couple of days before Theo Harp got here.”

  Annie’s heart sank.

  “That’s what young people do,” Barbara went on. “They leave. The lobstering hasn’t been good for the past few years.”

  At least now Annie understood why he hadn’t answered her e-mail. She licked her lips. “I wonder . . . How much would someone charge to come out and help me?” She outlined the problem with her car, as well as her ignorance of how to work the small pellet furnace and generator.

  “I’ll send my husband out as soon as he gets back,” Barbara said briskly. “That’s the way we do things on the island. We help each other out. Shouldn’t be more than an hour.”

  “Really? That’d be . . . That’s really nice.” Annie heard a soft whinny from inside the stable. The summer she’d lived here, the building had been painted a soft gray. Now it was a dark maroon, just like the nearby gazebo. She gazed toward the house.

  “Everybody was sorry to hear about your mother,” Barbara said. “We’re going to miss her. She brought culture to the island, along with famous people.”

  “Thank you.” At first Annie thought it was a trick of the light. She blinked, but there it was. A pale oval gazing down at her from an upstairs window.

  “After Booker gets your car out, he’ll show you how to take care of your furnace and generator.” Barbara paused. “Have you seen Theo Harp yet?”

  As quickly as it had appeared, the face disappeared. Annie was too far away to have made out the features, but they didn’t belong to Theo. A woman? A child? The lunatic wife he’d locked away?

  “Only briefly.” Annie stared at the empty window. “Did Theo bring anyone with him?”

  “No, he came alone. You might not’ve heard, but his wife died last year.”

  Had she? Annie drew her gaze away from the window before she let her imagination take over again. She thanked Barbara for her help and started the return trek to Moonraker Cottage.

  Despite the cold, the pain in her lungs, and the eeriness of the face she’d seen, her spirits had lifted a little. Soon she’d have her car back, along with heat and electricity. Then she could start to search in earnest for whatever Mariah had left her. The cottage was small. It shouldn’t be that hard to find.

  Once again, she wished she could sell the place, but everything connected with Mariah and Elliott Harp had always been complicated. She stopped to rest. Elliott’s grandfather had built Harp House at the dawn of the twentieth century, and Elliott had acquired the surrounding property, including Moonraker Cottage. For some reason, Mariah had loved the cottage, and during their divorce proceedings, she’d demanded Elliott give it to her. He’d refused, but by the time the final divorce decree had been drawn up, they’d reached a compromise. The cottage was hers as long as she occupied it for sixty consecutive days each year. Otherwise, it reverted back to the Harp family. No breaks. No do-overs. If she left before the sixty days were up, she couldn’t come back and start again.

  Mariah was a city creature, and Elliott thought he’d gotten the best of her. If she left the island during that two-month period, even for a night, she’d lose the place forever. But to his consternation, the arrangement suited Mariah. She loved the island, if not Elliott, and since she couldn’t see her friends, she invited them to stay with her. Some were well-established artists, others new talents she wanted to encourage. All of them welcomed the chance to paint, to write, to create in the cottage’s studio. Mariah had nurtured the artists much better than she’d ever nurtured her own daughter.

  Annie huddled into the cloak and started walking again. She’d inherited the cottage, along with the same terms her mother had agreed to. Sixty consecutive days spent here, or the cottage once again belonged to the Harp family. But unlike her mother, Annie hated the island. Right now, though, she had nowhere else to go—as long as she didn’t count the moth-eaten futon in the storage room of the coffeehouse where she’d worked. Between her mother’s illness and her own, she hadn’t been able to keep up with her jobs, and she didn’t have the strength or money to find another place to stay.

  By the time she’d reached the frozen marsh, her legs were rebelling. She distracted herself by practicing variation
s on her eerie moans. Something almost like a laugh squeezed out of her. She might be a failure as an actress, but not as a ventriloquist.

  And Theo Harp hadn’t suspected a thing.

  BY HER SECOND MORNING, ANNIE had water, electricity, and a house that was chilly but livable. Thanks to Barbara Rose’s garrulous husband, Booker, Annie learned that the return of Theo Harp was the talk of the island. “Tragedy what happened to his wife,” Booker said, after he’d taught Annie how to keep the pipes from freezing up, operate the generator, and conserve her propane. “We all feel real bad for the boy. He was an odd one, but he spent a lot of summers here. Did you read his book?”

  She hated admitting she had, so she gave a noncommittal shrug.

  “It gave my wife nightmares worse than Stephen King,” Booker said. “Can’t imagine where he got his imagination.”

  The Sanitarium had been an unnecessarily grisly novel about a mental hospital for the criminally insane with a room that transported its residents—especially those who got their kicks out of torture—back through time. Annie had hated it. Theo had a juicy trust fund, thanks to his grandmother, so he didn’t have to write for a living, and in Annie’s mind that made what he’d created more reprehensible, even if it had been a best seller. He was supposed to be working on a sequel, and this one she definitely wasn’t reading.

  After Booker left, Annie unpacked the groceries she’d brought from the mainland, checked all the windows, shoved a steel accent table in front of the door, and slept for twelve hours. As always, she awoke coughing and thinking about money. She was drowning in debt and sick of worrying about it. She lay under the covers, eyes on the ceiling, trying to see her way out.

  After Mariah had been diagnosed, she’d needed Annie for the first time, and Annie had been there, even giving up her own jobs when it got to the point that she couldn’t leave Mariah alone.

  “How did I raise such a timid child?” her mother used to say. But at the end Mariah had been the fearful one, clinging to Annie and begging her not to leave.

  Annie had used her small savings to pay the rent on Mariah’s beloved Manhattan apartment so her mother wouldn’t have to leave, then relied on credit cards for the first time in her life. She bought the herbal remedies Mariah swore made her feel better, the books that fed her mother’s artistic spirit, and the special foods that kept Mariah from losing too much weight.

  The weaker Mariah grew, the more appreciative she became. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.” The words were balm to the little girl who still lived inside Annie’s adult soul yearning for her critical mother’s approval.

  Annie might have managed to stay afloat if she hadn’t decided to fulfill her mother’s dream of one last trip to London. Relying on more credit cards, she’d spent a week pushing Mariah in a wheelchair through the museums and galleries she loved the most. The moment at the Tate Modern when they’d stopped before an enormous red and gray canvas by the artist Niven Garr had made her sacrifice worthwhile. Mariah had pressed her lips to Annie’s palm and uttered the words Annie had yearned to hear all her life. “I love you.”

  Annie dragged herself out of bed and spent the morning digging through the cottage’s five rooms: a living area, kitchen, bathroom, Mariah’s bedroom, and an artist’s studio that had also served as a guest room. The artists who’d stayed here over the years had given Mariah paintings and small pieces of sculpture, the most valuable of which her mother had long ago sold off. But what had she saved?

  Nothing and everything jumped out at her. The tufted-back hot pink Victorian sofa and futuristic taupe armchair, a stone Thai goddess, the bird skulls, a wall-size painting of an upside-down elm tree. The hodgepodge of objects and furniture styles were unified by her mother’s infallible sense of color—vanilla walls and solid upholstery fabrics of periwinkle, olive, and taupe. The sofa’s hit of hot pink along with an ugly iridescent painted plaster chair shaped like a mermaid provided the shock value.

  As she rested over her second cup of coffee, she decided she had to be more systematic in her search. She started in the living room, listing every art object and its description in a notebook. It would be so much easier if Mariah had told her what to look for. Or if she could sell the cottage.

  Crumpet pouted. You didn’t have to take your mother on that trip to London. You should have bought me a new gown instead. And a tiara.

  You did the right thing, ever-supportive Peter said. Mariah wasn’t a bad person, just a bad mother.

  Dilly spoke in her usual gentle manner, which didn’t make her words sting any the less. Did you do it for her . . . or did you do it for yourself?

  Leo simply sneered. Anything to win Mummy’s love, right, Antoinette?

  And that was the thing about her puppets . . . They spoke the truths she didn’t want to confront.

  She glanced out the window and saw something moving in the distance. A horse and rider, stark against a sea of gray and white, tearing across the winter landscape, as if all the demons in hell were chasing them.

  AFTER ANOTHER DAY OF COUGHING spells, naps, and indulging in her hobby of sketching goofy-looking cartoon kids to cheer herself up, she could no longer ignore the problem of using her cell. More snow last night would have made the already hazardous road impassable, and that meant another trek to the top of the cliff in search of a signal. This time, however, she’d steer clear of the house.

  With her puffy down-filled coat, she was better equipped for the climb than she’d been last time. Although it was still bitterly cold, the sun was temporarily out, and the fresh snow looked as though it had been dusted with glitter. But her problems were too big for her to enjoy the beauty. She needed more than a cell signal. She needed Internet access. Unless she wanted a dealer to take advantage of her, she needed to research everything she listed in her inventory notebook, and how was she going to do that? The cottage had no satellite service. The hotel and inns offered free public Internet during the summer, but they were closed now, and even if her car could handle the trips to town, she couldn’t imagine randomly banging on doors, looking for someone who’d let her inside to Web surf.

  Even with her coat, the red knit cap she’d pulled over her rambunctious hair, and the scarf she’d wrapped over her nose and mouth to protect her airways, she was shivering by the time she hiked to the top of the cliff. Glancing toward the house to make sure Theo wasn’t in sight, she found a place behind the gazebo to make her calls—the elementary school in New Jersey that hadn’t paid her for her last visit, the consignment shop where she’d left Mariah’s remaining pieces of decent furniture. Her own shabby furniture hadn’t been worth selling, and she’d hauled it to the curb. She was so sick of worrying about money.

  I’ll pay your bills, Peter declared. I’ll save you.

  A noise distracted her. She looked around and saw a child crouched under the low branches of a big red spruce. She appeared to be three or four years old, too young to be outside by herself. She wore only a puffy pink jacket and purple corduroy pants—no mittens, no boots, no hat pulled down over her stick-straight light brown hair.

  Annie remembered the face in the window. This must be Theo’s child.

  The idea of Theo as a father horrified her. The poor little girl. She wasn’t dressed warmly enough, and she didn’t seem to be supervised. Considering what Annie knew of Theo’s past, those might be the least of his parenting sins.

  The child realized Annie had seen her and backed into the branches. Annie crouched down. “Hey there. I didn’t mean to scare you. I was making some phone calls.”

  The child simply stared at her, but Annie had encountered more than her share of shy little ones. “I’m Annie. Antoinette, really, but no one calls me that. Who are you?”

  The child didn’t answer.

  “Are you a snow fairy? Or maybe a snow bunny?”

  Still no response.

  “I’ll bet you’re a squirrel. But I don’t see any nuts around. Maybe you’re a squirrel who eats cookies?”
br />   Usually even the shyest child responded to this kind of silliness, but the little girl didn’t react. She wasn’t deaf—she’d turned her head at a birdcall—but as Annie studied those big, watchful eyes, she knew something wasn’t right.

  “Livia . . .” It was a woman’s voice, muffled, as if she didn’t want anyone inside the house to hear. “Livia, where are you? Come here right now.”

  Annie’s curiosity got the better of her, and she edged around to the front of the gazebo.

  The woman was pretty, with a long swish of blond hair parted at one side and a curvy build that even jeans and a baggy sweatshirt couldn’t hide. She leaned awkwardly into a pair of crutches. “Livia!”

  There was something familiar about the woman. Annie stepped out of the shadows. “Jaycie?”

  The woman wobbled against her crutches. “Annie?”

  Jaycie Mills and her father had lived in Moonraker Cottage before Elliott had bought it. Annie hadn’t seen her in years, but you didn’t forget the person who’d once saved your life.

  A flash of pink shot past as the little girl—Livia—ran toward the kitchen door, her snow-caked red sneakers flying. Jaycie wobbled on her crutches. “Livia, I didn’t give you permission to go outside.” Again, she spoke in that odd hiss-whisper. “We’ve talked about this before.”

  Livia gazed up at her but didn’t say a word.

  “Go take your shoes off.”

  Livia disappeared, and Jaycie looked at Annie. “I heard you were back on the island, but I didn’t expect to see you up here.”

  Annie moved closer but stayed in the shadow of the trees. “I can’t get cell reception at the cottage, and I needed to make some calls.”

  As a child, Jaycie had been as blond as Theo Harp and his twin sister were dark, and that hadn’t changed. Although she was no longer the skinny rail she’d been as a young teen, her pretty features had the same softly blurred quality, as if she existed behind a breath-fogged lens. But why was she here?