The Legend of Sleepy Harlow (14 page)

He gave me a sidelong look. “Are they friendly?”

“What, you’re afraid of birds?”

“Not afraid.” The way he twitched his shoulders told me otherwise. We watched the mass of birds swing out over the water, their weird, throaty grunts in stark contrast to the high-pitched screaks of the gulls that had followed us from home. Some of the cormorants dove into the water to fish. The rest of them swept back the way they came. They settled in the trees that blanketed the shoreline.

“There are an awful lot of them,” Levi said.

“Thousands.” I’d done my homework before I made arrangements to travel to the island. “They eat fish, not people. You’ve got nothing to worry about.”

Levi edged the boat to shore and turned off the motor. He hopped off the boat first and helped me down, his hands on my waist.

“They say Sleepy picked up his liquor here.” The second I was back on solid ground, I backed out of Levi’s reach and looked around the deserted island, because, let’s face it, ten feet of beach that was then swallowed by heavy vegetation wasn’t a more appealing sight than Levi’s gleaming blue eyes, but it was a heck of a lot safer to concentrate on trees and brush than it was to risk getting bewitched.

Apparently, Levi thought so, too. No sooner had I stepped away than he hooked his hands together behind his back.

“He bought the liquor from the gangsters here and brought it over to South Bass,” I continued. “From there, Sleepy distributed it to other gangsters on the Ohio mainland. Except”—I reached for my phone and checked the time—“Marianne’s manuscript talks about a trip Sleepy made over here and how he left Middle Island with a boat full of liquor at three in the morning. She says he never got back to South Bass until five. It sure didn’t take us two hours to get here.”

“More like twenty-five minutes,” Levi said. “And that’s in choppy water. What do you suppose it means?”

“Probably that I read the soggy words wrong,” I admitted.

Using the information I’d been given by the Canadian parks official I’d talked to, I’d sketched out a rough map of Middle Island. I pulled it out of my pocket, and together, we stepped off the sandy beach and into the undergrowth.

“Welcome to Canada,” Levi said.

Or at least that’s what I thought he said. No sooner had we moved toward the trees than the cormorants went up again. Their grunts were deafening.

“Maybe they’ll settle down once they get used to us,” I yelled.

“Maybe.” Levi ducked when one of the birds swooped a little too close, and we scurried farther into the undergrowth and away from the trees and the birds nesting in them. “So what do you want to see?”

Armed with my makeshift map, I led the way. Mobsters had romped around Middle Island in the ’20s, and after that, there was a hotel somewhere on the island that, up until the 1950s, hosted hunters and fishermen every year. Since then, the island had been allowed to revert back to nature. Stepping over fallen trees and through overgrown foliage, we followed what there was of a path to all that remained of the old lighthouse: a square of stones still blackened by the fire that had destroyed it.

I got out my phone and took some pictures, then walked the perimeter of the building, glancing from the structure to the lake.

“Let me guess.” Levi stood back to watch. “You’re imagining how Sleepy would have seen the lighthouse.”

“Like I said, Marianne talks about the time he left here at three in the morning. When you’re smuggling booze, I don’t imagine you work nine to five. It’s pretty darned dark in the middle of the lake in the middle of the night. Just think about him heading back to South Bass, watching the light of this tower get smaller and smaller as he got farther and farther away.”

“So what does that tell you?”

I’d been lost in the thought, and I shook it away. “That it takes nerves of steel to be a bootlegger, for one thing. That Sleepy must have been a decent sailor. That he was a man who was willing to take chances, and that he thought money was worth the risk. It tells me he had guts, even if his energy was misplaced, and it tells me he was tough. He must have been to deal with the kinds of mobsters who ran the liquor trade. It also tells me he was brave. I wouldn’t want to be out in the lake alone at night.”

“Only you don’t know if he was alone.”

“True,” I admitted. “But for the sake of Marianne’s book, we’re going to pretend he was. I don’t have the time or the patience to find out any information about anyone else.”

Done with the lighthouse, we found our way to the site of an old mansion that was said to have once operated as a brothel. Like the lighthouse, there wasn’t much left except stones piled here and there. From there, we set out to find what we could of the clubhouse built by the mobster who made a fortune supplying men like Sleepy with liquor.

We were nearly there when we were treated to another chorus of cormorant grunts and screeches. The sky above us grew dark with birds. They eddied, swooped, and turned toward the lake.

“Darn birds.” I pretended not to notice how relieved Levi looked once they were gone. “We’re not even over there by those trees where they’re nesting. Why do they care that we’re walking around way over here?”

“Just like they started flapping and squawking before we ever even got to the island.”

We stopped and looked at each other, and honestly, I’m not sure which of us spoke the words, I only know that as soon as they were voiced, ice formed in the pit of my stomach.

“We’re not alone. There’s someone else on the island.”

  13  

“C
ome on!” Levi grabbed my hand and pulled me farther down what there was of a path. I didn’t resist. Except for the raucous cormorants, the island was supposed to be deserted. In fact, the park supervisor I’d talked to the day before assured me no one had even called to ask about Middle Island for as long as she could remember.

There was something about knowing we weren’t alone there on that tiny spot of land in the middle of nowhere that made a funny sort of rhythm start up inside my rib cage. It wasn’t a steady beat so much as it was a clattering. Like a drummed message, a warning.

Or maybe I was just breathing so hard because Levi had long legs and ran so fast.

He stopped as suddenly as he’d started, and I stood beside him, fighting to pull in breath after chilly breath while I watched him scan our surroundings. From my vantage point, there wasn’t a whole lot to see other than the foliage that surrounded us, its dry and brittle leaves scraping together in the stiff breeze like skeleton fingers. But then, Levi’s a whole lot taller than me. He looked around, his head bent, listening, then pointed to his left. “Over there!”

A heartbeat later, hundreds of birds rose into the sky.

“That’s got to be where he is. He’s frightening the birds. Quick!” He took off running again, tugging me behind him. By the time we got to the trees, though, whoever we were trailing was long gone. Which didn’t make the cormorants any happier about seeing us. They circled over our heads like billows of black smoke. I have to admit, when I’d read about the call of the cormorant, I didn’t think a bird could possibly sound like a pig, but they did, honest. Their grunts and gulps provided a sinister backdrop to our rough breathing, like the uh-oh-don’t-look-now music of a spooky movie.

I put my hands on my knees and fought to catch my breath. “I’m not afraid of birds. I mean, not like you are.” Since I only did this to get his goat, I didn’t give Levi a chance to defend himself before I added, “But these birds, they’re like something out of a horror movie.”

“Yeah.” He managed a smile between deep breaths. “Like something your friend FX O’Grady might write about.”

“He’s not my friend,” I reminded him, and then, because I saw another black cloud of cormorants rise from their nests a few hundred yards to our left, I took off running and left Levi to follow in my wake.

But again, by the time we got there, whoever we were following was gone.

The breeze had picked up and brought an icy chill with it, but sweat tickled my collarbone, and I pulled off my sweatshirt and tied the arms of it around my waist. “Maybe it’s just a bird-watcher,” I suggested. “Or a fisherman who stopped for a rest. Or—”

From what sounded like a very long way off, we heard the roar of a boat motor.

Levi grumbled a curse. “Well, whoever it is, he’s gone.” He kicked a nearby clump of fallen leaves. “And if he was just here watching birds, you’d think he’d move a little slower and not cause so much commotion. This guy, he was moving awfully fast.”

“Like he knew we were following him.”

“Like he knew all along that we were here.”

Once again Levi grabbed on to me and we made our way in the direction of the sound of the boat, but by the time we got to the ribbon of beach, that boat was nothing but a speck out on the water.

His eyes shielded with one hand, Levi watched the speck get smaller. “Looks like a twenty-footer. If we’re fast—”

He didn’t have to tell me twice. I took off like a shot for our own boat, but even on an island that’s less than a mile wide, it took too long to get there. That didn’t stop us from trying.

Levi jumped on the
Miss Luella
and offered me a hand up.

“We’ll never catch him,” I said, standing at the back of the boat, my eyes riveted to that speck, watching it getting smaller and smaller by the second.

He raced for the controls. “That doesn’t mean we can’t try.”

Except he didn’t try.

One minute, and I waited to hear the sound of our own boat spring to life.

Another minute, and when nothing happened, I marched over to where Levi stood, his fists on his hips.

“What?” I asked. “Why aren’t we moving?”

A muscle bunched at the base of his jaw. “The battery’s gone.”

I heard what he said; I just found it impossible to believe. “Of course it isn’t gone. How could it be gone? It can’t be gone. Who could have—” I snapped my head around. The boat we’d seen leave the island was long gone.

And Levi and I were stranded.

*   *   *

By the time I had the vegetable soup in mugs I had found down in Luella’s galley, Levi had a small fire going on the beach.

“The Canadian Coast Guard says it will be a couple hours.” He tucked his phone back into the pocket of his jacket. “They’ve got a commercial fishing boat somewhere west of here that’s having serious problems. They’ve got to take care of that before they can worry about us.”

“Great.” I flopped down on one of the blankets Levi had folded near the fire and handed him his soup. “At least we’ve got food.”

“And warmth.” He poked the fire with a stick and it flared and shot sparkling embers into the air and toward the clouds that were getting thicker by the minute over our heads. “If it rains, we can hide out on the boat.”

While I was getting the soup, Levi had laid out the sandwich fixings. He heaped ham on bread, added swiss cheese and mustard, and took a bite, thinking. He washed it all down with a swallow of soup. “So you’re the one investigating,” he said. “Having our battery swiped, what does that tell you?”

“Not much,” I admitted. “I can’t imagine it has anything to do with my investigation, or with Noreen’s murder.”

He took a few more bites, leaving me to think about what I’d just said.

If I didn’t have a mug of soup in one hand and a half a turkey sandwich in the other, I would have slapped my forehead.

“The whole thing must have something to do with Sleepy! Someone was here checking out his old hangouts. If it were the ghost getters, they might have been here because they thought they could find some evidence that Sleepy’s still around.”

“So why work so hard to stay out of our way? Why strand us?”

This took more careful thought. While I was at it, I sipped my soup, grateful that I’d thought ahead when I was packing for a day on the lake. It was getting chillier by the moment, and the hot soup felt good going down. I scooted closer to the fire. “Maybe . . .” Maybe what? Since we couldn’t know for sure, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to play that
what-if
game I’d mentioned to Levi when we were on our way to Middle Island.

“What if the person who took our battery didn’t want us to find out he was here on the island?”

“The way he was moving, I’d say that was a given.”

“So what if he figured that when we heard his boat, we’d naturally follow the sound?”

“So we’d get to the beach—like we did—and watch him head south—like we did. What would make him think we’d care enough to jump in our boat and follow?”

I had no answer for this question, and I made a face and thought about it. It wasn’t until I finished my half sandwich, the pickle that went with it, and the handful of potato chips that I figured was my reward for running helter-skelter all over the island that the truth dawned. “We jumped onto the
Miss Luella
and tried to follow because we were curious about who he was and what he was doing here. He couldn’t take the chance that might happen. He didn’t want us to follow him. More importantly, he didn’t want us to see him. That explains both why he was running away from us and why he stranded us. He didn’t want us to see him because he knew we’d recognize him. It was someone we know.”

“And if it was one of your houseguests, I can’t imagine they’d care if we saw them or not,” Levi added. “If we caught up to them and questioned why they were here, they’d say they were on the island looking for Sleepy’s wandering ectoplasm. There couldn’t be any harm in us knowing that.”

“Which means whoever was here wasn’t here for a reason he could easily explain away.”

A blast of wind blew my words away, and I shivered.

Levi patted the blanket beside him. “It’s warmer when you add some body heat,” he said.

That was exactly what I was afraid of.

I hugged my arms around myself.

Levi gave up with a nod. “So what if . . .” He reached for another couple slices of bread and built another sandwich. Bread, cheese, ham. A whole pile of ham. He finished with mustard. “I don’t suppose you brought horseradish?” he asked.

“Next time we get marooned on a deserted island, I promise I will.”

Above the sandwich he was about to chomp into, his eyes sparked. “There’s going to be a next time?”

“I suppose if we keep getting mixed up in murder, there might be.”

“Promise?”

For one quick heartbeat, I actually wanted to.

That is, until I came to my senses.

“Look”—I brushed my hands together and set my mug of soup in the sand, the better to link my fingers and give Levi my full attention—“there’s something we really need to talk about.”

I’d hoped he’d pick up on the opening and do the talking for me, but instead, he fixed that intense blue gaze on me, chewed his sandwich, and waited for me to make the first verbal move.

“Last summer . . .” I felt my cheeks flush and told myself it was windburn. I mean, it must have been, right? “When you said it was a mistake . . .”

Levi swallowed. “You mean when I kissed you.”

My shoulders shot back. I didn’t mean to come across as so defensive, so I covered by inching closer to the fire. “That’s right. The thing is, we’ve been dancing around the subject since then.”

“And now you don’t want to dance.”

Another handful of chips gave me something to crunch into to release the tension that had built inside me. “I’m not much of a dancer,” I admitted.

“And I happen to be an excellent dancer.” He gave me a wink. “Fast on my feet.”

“You keep proving that.”

“A man’s got to play to his strong suit.”

“You keep proving that, too.”

“I’m glad you’ve noticed.”

How could I not?

Oh, he could dance, all right. He was dancing for all he was worth, right then and there. Not that someone who didn’t know Levi well would have noticed. And not that I knew him all that well. But hey, I’m pretty good when it comes to picking up impressions. Call it women’s intuition. Call it the product of a mind that far too often is lost in daydreams. Say that I’m always looking for motives behind peoples’ actions. Go ahead, say it.

It’s absolutely true.

I couldn’t help but notice the way his gaze couldn’t manage to focus on me. It darted out to the lake—and believe me, the gray and churning waves weren’t all that interesting. Neither were the cormorants who kept their distance at the same time as they kept an eye on us, circling overhead like vultures.

Levi was as nervous about the conversation as I was, and realizing it, my courage came back and brought my backbone with it.

“I’m sorry we’ve been so uneasy around each other since the summer,” I said. “I should have told you sooner. You were right.”

“Of course I was.” His smile faded and he eyed me carefully. “About what?”

“About how you kissing me was a big mistake. It was. A huge mistake. A colossal mistake. A ginormous—”

“Okay. All right. I get the message. So you’re telling me you didn’t enjoy—”

“Not what I’m talking about.” I held out a hand to stop his words in their tracks. It might have been a far more effective gesture if my hand weren’t coated with salt. I rubbed it against the leg of my jeans. “There may have been a certain . . . appeal to the situation,” I admitted. “But on reflection, it was a mistake. Yes, definitely a mistake. So”—I got up and grabbed both my mug and Levi’s to take them back to the boat—“I think the best thing to do is just forget about the whole thing, don’t you?”

*   *   *

It was nearly the end of October, and the clocks wouldn’t fall back to Eastern Standard Time until the beginning of November. Still, the sun set right around six, and with the clouds being so heavy, evening closed around us in what seemed like no time flat. When the last of our little fire splurted out in a blast of cold Canadian wind, we smothered it with sand and surrendered, gathering our blankets and the remnants of our lunch and climbing back aboard the
Miss Luella
.