Mortar and Murder (31 page)

“Something in my food,” Irina said. “When I woke up I was in Mr. Eagan’s house.”

The same sort of tranquilizer the girl in the water had been given, maybe.

“That’s too bad.” That Irina hadn’t seen anything to pinpoint where she was held, I meant. But it was certainly understandable. If these people had sold her to some abusive lecher wanting a house slave, they’d want to make damn sure she wouldn’t know where to find them later. Just in case she got to a point in her life—like now—when she was no longer afraid to tell people what had happened to her.

“You said you recognized someone’s voice,” I added after a moment. “At Shaw’s Supermarket.”

Irina nodded. “I have no idea who the man was, though. When I turned around, Mr. Heyerdahl was there, and I thought it was him. Now I don’t know who spoke.”

Figures.

“What happened when you got here on Friday? To Gert’s house? You didn’t say.” And although I wanted to yell at her for being so stupid—to follow a man she thought was a human trafficker to the place where he lived—I held back.

“I told you,” Irina said, a little defensively, “I wanted to help Agent Trent. And if Svetlana was here, I wanted to find her.”

“But you never saw either of them. Right? And instead you ran into Gert.”

Irina nodded. “I took the ferry out and came to the house straightaway. I didn’t see anyone. Not until I was looking through the windows—the tall ones next to the door . . .”

“The sidelights. Right.”

“And Gert . . . Mr. Heyerdahl came out and saw me.” She blushed. “As soon as I heard him speak, I knew he wasn’t the man I had heard three years ago.”

That made sense, up to a point. At least it explained why Irina hadn’t been afraid of him. “What did Gert think when you showed up on his doorstep?”

“I realized she might be part of what I was investigating,” Gert said over his shoulder. “I recognized the Ukrainian accent. We got to talking, and she told me the whole story. I stumbled over what I thought might be smuggling last year, when I was doing research for the next Mischa Nemov thriller.”

“Your book?”

Gert nodded. “I spoke to a few of the locals last summer about Rowanberry’s history and smuggling up and down the coast and got the idea that something might still be going on. I had no idea it was human trafficking, though. I figured it was drugs.”

“Any locals in particular?” It might be helpful to pinpoint who Gert had spoken to, who had given him the idea.

But Gert shook his head. “The ferry crew, the guy at the general store, a few of the people in the village when I’d run into them . . . It wasn’t anything specific, or even definite, just a general sense of secrecy, of people sticking together against the outsider.”

I nodded. Made sense.

We reached the little saltbox house a minute or two later, stopping to catch our breath just at the end of the path. The house itself looked eerie, like something out of
Sleeping Beauty
, all shuttered as if sleeping, overgrown and wreathed around with fog. That mournful sound of a foghorn came again, and I shivered.

“I didn’t even know this was here,” Irina said.

“I’m not surprised. Apparently it’s been in the same family—Lon Wilson’s—since time immemorial, so it’s never been on the market, and it isn’t like it’s marked or anything. Or even visible from the water, all overgrown like this. Mr. Wilson must like his privacy.”

“I don’t think Mr. Wilson has been here for a couple years,” Gert said over his shoulder. “At least I haven’t seen him. He retired to Sarasota. Came up in the summers for a while, and then stopped.”

“Do you know him?”

He looked at me. “Well enough to know that he wouldn’t be a part of something like this. If someone’s been using his house, it was without his knowledge.”

“So you were here the same day you were at Mr. Heyerdahl’s house?” Irina asked.

I nodded, wondering why she called him Mr. Heyerdahl and not plain Gert. True, he hadn’t told me to call him Gert, so maybe she was just too polite to use his first name without being told.

“Can we get inside?”

“Lonnie keeps a key around,” Gert said. “Once in a while he’ll call and ask me to go check that everything’s all right. It’s right here.” He reached up and fumbled along the top of the pediment above the door. After a second, he came away with a key. A big one, skeleton type. That was all that was on the door, a big, old-fashioned lock. No Yale locks, nothing newer than 1950.

“Not very concerned with security, is he?”

Gert glanced at me as he fitted the key into the lock. “There’s nothing here worth stealing. Lonnie would come out here to get away from civilization, to rough it, and only when the weather was good. There’s no electricity here, there’s only cold water—anything warm would have to be heated in the fireplace—and there’s no TV, no cable, no telephone, nothing at all to remind him of the real world.”

“Lord,” I said. Last summer I’d been feeling like living in Aunt Inga’s house without a shower for a month was roughing it.

Gert nodded. “Maybe not so strange that he’s not making the trip up here anymore, after all.” He pushed the door open. It creaked, of course.

Irina and I looked at each other. One of us would have to go first; Gert was holding the door open and obviously waiting. Irina looked apprehensive, so I took the first step across the threshold.

“Lord!” I said again as I looked around. I’d thought our house was basic; this was barely more than a shack.

All right, so it had floors. Not all houses of that vintage did, or so Derek had taken great pains to tell me. Some were built straight on the ground with rushes or sand covering the dirt. This place at least had rough planks. But beyond that, it was dismal. The walls were leaning, the ceilings were low—Gert, though not overly tall, had to duck his head to avoid braining himself on the cross beams—and the windows were minuscule. Everything was dark, with all the shutters closed, and of course there were no lights, as Gert had already warned us. I turned on the flashlight and shone it around.

No, I didn’t blame Lonnie Wilson at all for preferring to stay in warm and civilized Sarasota. Not if this was what he had to look forward to on Rowanberry Island. And it was equally obvious why he didn’t bother installing better locks or a security system. Nobody in their right mind would try to steal any of this stuff.

The furniture was mismatched, thrift-store pieces mixed with what were probably Lon’s own furniture from childhood. Most of it looked to be at least fifty years old and not in good shape. The kitchen, in the lean-to part of the house, looked worse than Aunt Inga’s had when I first inherited my house. I’d told Derek at the time that my aunt’s kitchen cabinets looked like they were made from driftwood she’d picked up on the beach. I’d been exaggerating, of course: They were fifty-year-old cabinets, crooked and worn, but they weren’t that bad. These were. They really did look like they were made from driftwood, weathered and unpainted, open shelves with no doors and a half-circular sink on the wall where all the water came out rusty. And cold. The kitchen counter was Formica, the original, with a stainless-steel edge, and there was no stove, no fridge, no microwave or dishwasher, or any of the other things we’ve pretty much come to take for granted in our day and age. It was like being back in the Stone Age.

There were two rooms on the first floor, plus the lean-to with the kitchen, and two more upstairs. Tiny rooms under the eaves, each with barely enough room for a twin bed and a chest of drawers. The drawers were empty, and the beds inexpertly made, with blankets tossed over the mattress and no apple pie corners in sight. The sheets smelled musty. Someone had been here recently, though: The dust on the floor was scuffed, even though it was impossible to make out individual footprints.

“Help me to look around,” Irina said. “In case there’s something here.”

“Something . . . ?”

“I don’t know. Just something.” She started looking.

I shrugged and did the same, although I had no idea what I was looking for. Or if I’d be able to recognize it if I saw it.

We spent the next two hours meticulously going through the house, checking the pockets of every pair of pants in the drawers and every coat and jacket in the closets. We stripped all the beds and turned all the mattresses over. We opened every door to every cabinet in the kitchen and bathroom. We checked the inside of coffee canisters and medicine bottles, as well as inside the toilet tank. Gert, who had given some thought to weird places to hide things, given his profession, helped out by knocking on walls and stepping on loose floorboards.

In the end, we found . . . nothing. Nothing at all to indicate that Svetlana, along with Katya and Olga, had ever been here.

“Maybe it was just a coincidence,” I offered. “The fact that the girl chose that particular night to try to get away. Maybe it wasn’t because she saw me or heard my voice.”

Because if she hadn’t been here, and she hadn’t been at Gert’s house, then I had no idea where she’s been.

“Or maybe they were here, but whoever removed them just did a fine job of making sure there were no clues,” Gert added.

I nodded. That was possible, too. There
had
been that sharp bang the day Derek and I had been here, as if someone was trying to get our attention. “So what do we do now?”

Irina looked exhausted. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I hoped we would find something here. Maybe even Svetlana.”

“Maybe we should check the village,” Gert said.

I nodded. Irina had said she’d been held in a basement. If she’d been on Rowanberry Island, the village was the only place where such a thing might exist. Not down here on the south end. “Why don’t we take a walk in that direction? I’m gonna have to go there anyway to catch the ferry. The two of you can walk me there, and maybe you”—I looked at Irina—“will notice something familiar.”

Irina looked game, if not exactly hopeful.

Walking across the island in thick fog was a trip, and I mean that in every way. We couldn’t see more than a few feet in front of us, and if the person on point—Gert—didn’t keep his eyes on the ground, we’d wander off the path in no time. Once or twice we ended up staring at a tree that had suddenly materialized directly in front of us. And then we had to backtrack, to figure out where we’d gone wrong and try to pick up the path again and hope we were going in the right direction. A walk that would normally have taken twenty minutes took close to an hour. We didn’t meet a soul along the way; although then again, someone could have passed us just a few feet away on either side, and we wouldn’t have known it. Not only couldn’t we see, but it was even difficult to hear with the fog, since everything sounded sort of hollow and it was hard to determine where any sound originated.

Eventually, we made it through the woods, across the meadow, and into the village, where things were even more freaky. The fog lay so close to the ground I felt I almost had to kick it out of my way when I walked. And poor Irina, who desperately wanted to look around to see if there was anything here she recognized, couldn’t see a blessed thing. Houses rose up on both sides of the cobblestoned street, but we could barely see them as we stumbled along.

“The ferry’s probably stopped running,” Gert muttered.

I turned to him. “Excuse me?” Surely he hadn’t said what I thought he’d said?

He glanced at me. “The fog’s too thick. Most likely they’ve canceled departures until the fog lifts.”

I looked around. “How long will that be?” This soupy mess certainly looked like it had settled in to stay.

He shrugged. “Could be later tonight or could be tomorrow. You’re welcome to spend the night with us. Me.” He glanced at Irina and then away, quickly.

I glanced at Irina, too. Was something going on between them? I hadn’t picked up on anything like that, not in her behavior, but it sure sounded like . . . I mean, “us”? And look, she was blushing.

“Thanks,” I said, “but . . .”

No thanks. And not only because I didn’t want to interrupt anything, but because I still wasn’t a hundred percent sure I trusted them. Either of them. Together or separately. I wasn’t worried right now, awake and upright, in the middle of the day and with people around—even if I couldn’t see any of them, they’d hear me if I screamed, or if, God forbid, Gert shot me—but if I went to sleep in Gert’s house, I might never wake up, and that’d be sort of bad. Derek didn’t even know where I was, and I had no way of calling him, with the cell phone signal missing out here in the middle of the ocean.

“There’s a lady here somewhere who has rooms for rent,” I added, looking around at the fog. “I’ve seen the sign before. It was here somewhere. . . .”

“Who’d run a guest house on an island like this one?” Gert asked. “Monhegan is one thing—they get a lot of tourists—but whoever comes to Rowanberry? There’s nothing here.”