All the Blue-Eyed Angels (23 page)

“I just want to know what happened. The morning of the fire twenty years ago…” I prompted her.

“You mean when you and Adam were holed up in that hotel?”

There was no missing the challenge in her tone. She was standing on a stepstool, back to the wall, her eyes hard on mine. And like that, she was the adult and I was the child, caught in a lie I’d been keeping far too long.

“You knew he left me alone? How?”

“I saw him that day—early that morning. I got called in for an emergency at Ethan Diggins’ church.”

The church where my father had been heading that morning, according to Reverend Diggins.

“Who made the call?” I asked.

“The Reverend. Joe Ashmont had shown up on his doorstep—six sheets to the wind, beaten ‘til he was half-dead in a bar fight. The Reverend called me to come patch him up.”

“And you saw Dad drive in, just as you were getting there,” I guessed.

“He saw me and took off before we could talk.” She dropped her eyes for the first time. “I assumed he was going back to the hotel. If I’d known he wasn’t, I would have gone to the hotel to get you.”

“How did you find out he hadn’t gone back for me?”

She didn’t answer. This was the key—what I’d been looking for all this time. I sensed it, more from the way she wouldn’t meet my eye and the thick tension that filled the room than anything else. I sat down on a cardboard box and waited for an answer my mother couldn’t seem to give me.

“Did you see him go out to the island that morning?” I pressed.

She hesitated. The look on my face must have convinced her there was no putting the conversation off any longer, because she finally gave in. She sat on the stepstool, her legs crossed and her hands in her lap, the picture of composure.

“I didn’t see him. The others did, though—Matt Perkins saw him leave the town landing that morning, headed for the island.”

“
You
didn’t see him, though? Only Perkins?”

“Joe said he’d known Adam was going out there. And the Reverend said the same thing—said he’d sounded strange, desperate, on the phone. There was enough circumstantial evidence. Thirty-four people died out there; there wouldn’t have been an impartial jury, no due process. The press, the locals, anyone and everyone was ready to lynch the first likely suspect.”

“So, you just… What? Went out there and destroyed anything you thought might look bad, and created some fantasy story—”

“I don’t expect you to understand.” Her voice was dangerously calm. I did what I needed to do to keep your father safe. To keep you safe.”

“Because Dad did it—” I choked on the words. The images came back again: Isaac shouting, a child crying, my father… Where? When all of these things were happening on the island, when I was being dunked under frigid waters or watching Isaac dole out retribution to his congregation, why hadn’t my father intervened?

“Is that what you’re saying?” I continued, hating the weakness in my voice. “Daddy set the fire, killed all those people?
That’s
what you were protecting? What about the man I told you I saw out there? The one you and Dad told me I was crazy for mentioning? Or what about Isaac, for Christ’s sake? He was on the outside of the locked door, right? He could’ve done it.”

She didn’t say anything. Her eyes slid from mine to the floor, her hands twisting in her lap—the only sign that something might be breaking through that cool exterior. I stood so suddenly I knocked a pile of cardboard boxes to the floor. Einstein had been at my feet, but now he leapt up and skittered out of the stockroom like I’d made some physical threat.

“Finish up here,” I said. I did my best to force some strength back into my voice. “We’re going for a ride.”

“Where?”

“I’m going to prove to you that my father didn’t set that fire,” I said. “I’m going to prove the ghoul that chased us in the woods that day was real, and you’ll see for yourself exactly what you’ve been protecting all this time.”

It was tough talk since the truth was I didn’t have a clue what the hell I was talking about, but I didn’t care. There was one man who I suspected might be able to answer at least a few of my questions, and I was damned well going to ask them before something happened to him, too.

Since it was likely I would kill either my mother or myself—or some combination thereof—before the day was out, I left Diggs with our furry love child and vague reassurances that everything was under control. Einstein stood at the office door with Diggs by his side as I was leaving; neither of them looked happy to see me go. I could understand their concern.

At the town landing, I paid no attention to Kat’s protests as I took the helm of my trusty speedboat and we left Littlehope Harbor.

“I’m not high on Joe Ashmont’s list of favorite people lately,” she shouted to me above the boat’s engine.

“We won’t stay long.”

“If he even lets us come ashore.”

I shrugged. My mother wore jeans and an LL Bean jacket, her hair pulled back and her cheeks attractively flushed from the cold. Despite a few years of heavy drinking when I was a kid, good genes had paid off—at fifty-two, Kat had a toned, slender body that I imagined still turned men’s heads.

I, on the other hand, wore jeans that hung loose at the waist and sagged at the ass, along with Diggs’ too-large pea coat, since my own reeked of smoke. My tangled red hair was pulled back in a ponytail and topped with a baseball cap, and I still wore sunglasses to hide my bruises. I made sure my cell phone was on, just in case the producers of Project Runway were trying to reach me.

A relatively nice spring day had given way to a chilly evening, the sun low on the horizon, the wind rising from the east. I kept thinking of Ashmont at the fire the night before. He had wanted me to see him—I was sure of it. I couldn’t shake the feeling that somewhere deep down, Joe Ashmont wanted to tell me his story. I just hoped the desire wasn’t buried so deep he wouldn’t recognize it until after he’d blown my boat out of the water.

I navigated us through an inlet where jagged hunks of black rock waited just below the water’s surface, sharp enough to tear a hole in the hull and sink us both if I hit at the right angle. I eased back on the throttle as we approached the island Joe Ashmont had called home for as far back as I could remember.

Sheep Island was a tiny stretch of land marked by wind-battered evergreens and an unwelcoming shoreline of steep granite cliffs. I tied the boat off at a dock on the north side of the island, beside an old red skiff that I assumed belonged to Ashmont. Since Ashmont had seen fit to build his dock as far from his home as humanly possible, Kat and I were forced to climb steep ledges and fight knee-deep bayberry and juniper brambles to get there.

Ashmont’s house was surprisingly colorful, with peeling pink shutters, aquamarine siding, and a tarpaper roof. Buoys and lobster traps littered the overgrown front yard. A dog barked inside the house. Gulls screamed overhead. I thought I saw movement in one of the windows, but no one appeared. My brilliant plan was looking less brilliant by the minute.

Just when I had almost worked up the courage to knock on the front door, an explosion shook the ground beneath my feet. Kat and I stood there for a split second before she grabbed my arm and we ducked into a grove of spruce and pine.

I saw the muzzle of a shotgun before I saw Ashmont. He stepped outside wearing coveralls and his hunting cap, set far back on his grizzled head.

“You shouldn’t’ve brought her,” he said.

Kat looked at me. “I’m sorry, Joe,” she called out. “This was her idea.”

“Not you, you ignorant bitch. You’re not welcome here,” he shouted back. He was coming toward us, fast, his gun thankfully pointed at the ground. “I told you before, I never want to lay eyes on you again. I’ll talk to her—I won’t talk to you.”

Despite the big-ass gun Ashmont was holding, I couldn’t help feel just a twinge of satisfaction. I signaled for Kat to remain where she was and stepped into the clearing alone, my hands raised.

“You haven’t been all that keen on talking to me so far—I thought you might change your mind if she was here,” I said.

He stepped closer, until we were only a few feet apart. He hadn’t bathed since the fire—or possibly the Clinton administration—and his callused hands were black with grime, one curled around the handle of his shotgun while the other pushed his hat farther back on his head. He scratched at his ear for a few seconds before he fixed his gaze on me. His eyes were dark, the pupils way too large for someone remotely sober.

“You got questions she won’t answer?” he asked me.

I shook my head. “I think she’s told me what she knows.”

“That she fucked Hammond?”

I nodded. This appeared to surprise him. I heard movement behind me; before I could warn her to stay back, Kat joined me. Ashmont’s face darkened.

“I don’t want to see you,” he said.

“Well, you can’t always get what you want, Joe. You know that better than anybody. She just wants to know what happened.”

“You lied,” he said to her, shifting his focus back to me. “That’s what happened—she told every one of us a goddamn lie. She was the one who said to do it. Move the bodies, hide the evidence, make up the lie. Keep the secret.”

“She wasn’t the only one though, was she?” I asked. My voice was steadier than I’d expected. “You had your own reasons for burying the evidence. You called Reverend Diggins the morning of the fire. It was about Rebecca, right? Something happened—or something was going to happen. You were coming to get her. What changed your mind?”

I think I half-expected him to shoot me for asking the question. I’m not sure I cared. Instead of rage, though, Ashmont’s face fell. His eyes went glassy, but he wiped the tears away with a filthy hand.

“It was your daddy’s idea,” he said. His voice was little more than a growl now, and I know the words were meant to hurt me. “It was all Adam’s idea. You don’t know what he was dealing with—how scared he was of Becca. She was threatening him with something... He wouldn’t tell me what, but she’d turned his fuckin’ Garden of Eden upside down.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Kat asked. “Rebecca…?”

“My wife,” Ashmont said with a sneer. “You didn’t ask. You were so busy thinking you had it all figured out, trying to hide the truth when you didn’t even know what the truth was. You didn’t know shit.”

“Rebecca was on the island—I found her rosary,” I interrupted, before the conversation devolved into my mother and Ashmont beating the crap out of each other. “She died in the fire.”

Ashmont smiled at my mother—a greasy, trembling smile, but a smile all the same. “You got a regular Nancy Drew here, Doc. I was wondering why Becca ain’t been around to cook dinner the past twenty-five years. Shit, I thought she was out to the mall. Guess that’s one mystery solved.”

I ignored his disdain and tried to soften my tone for my next words. “And your son was in the fire?”

My tone had the opposite effect. Ashmont turned on me like a snake ready to strike. I took a step back.

“If he was even mine. That bitch screwed any man with a cross and a reason to use it from here to the Waldo county line.” He looked away, lost in the past. When he spoke again, resignation overrode the bitterness. “The goddamn kid never looked like me, anyway.”

“You said my father wanted her off the island—why? What was she threatening him with? Why would he want her gone?”

“I told you,” Ashmont said. “He wouldn’t say what she had on him—all I know is, it all went to hell once she got there.” His smile twisted cruelly at one corner. “Becca was a whore, but she knew what she liked. She’d spread her legs for any preacher she laid eyes on—only bitch I ever knew got wet during confession. Your daddy couldn’t take seeing Preacher Payson’s fall from grace.

“He was the one who called and told me she was out there—I never would’ve found her otherwise. So, Adam was gonna spend the day before with you,” he looked at me. “Then, that night we’d go out to the island. Me and Matt, your daddy, and Reverend Diggins. And we’d haul her out of there, one way or the other.”

“What happened to that plan? You were the one who called my father at the hotel that night, weren’t you?” I asked, only realizing it as I was saying the words. “Something happened—someone got to you, changed your mind about what you were about to do.”

“I changed my own mind,” he said. His eyes slid from mine. “That night didn’t have nothing to do with any of it—I just got to thinking, and then I called Adam and told him I didn’t want to do it. Payson could have Becca and the boy, I didn’t give a rat’s ass anymore. And I guess from there your daddy just decided he’d best take things into his own hands.”

“Bullshit,” I said, advancing on him so fast that he stepped back instead of shooting me where I stood. “Something happened. If you’d gotten that far with the plan, you wouldn’t have just changed your mind.”

He recovered more quickly than I’d anticipated. Before I had a chance to react, he dropped the gun and let it lay where it landed. With a single stride, he had his hand around my neck, pushing me backward until he’d slammed my back against a tree. He held me there, his face close to mine, his breath a rancid mix of whisky, stale cigarettes, and epically poor dental hygiene.

“Nothing happened. You hear me, you little bitch? I told you: I called your daddy, I told him it was off. I had a change of heart. He called Diggins, tried to get him to help change my mind. I knew he was on the way over, so I told the Reverend to call your mum. No way that pussy would show his face if the mighty Doctor Kat was there, no way he’d let on just how far things had gone. And I was right… She showed, he didn’t. Matt saw him leave for the island, and two hours later everybody out there was dust. You do the math on that one, and tell me if it adds up to anything other than your daddy going out there and torching every last one of ‘em.”

His hand held me still, but it didn’t tighten around my neck as he gauged my response—trying to figure out whether I believed the story, I knew. Before I could tell him I didn’t buy a word of it, a blast split the stillness, so loud that it rattled my teeth and left my ears ringing. Ashmont dropped his hand from my neck, his eyes wide. I waited to see if one or the other of us was dead. Neither of us appeared to be. Kat held his shotgun tilted toward the sky, her eyes pure iron.