Bob pointed at the five-pound Folgers coffee can that she had set on the plastic chair, behind the stack of spiral notebooks. “What’s that for?”
“The ashes.”
“Come again?”
“I’m performing a cleansing ritual.”
“A firebug I arrested ten years ago said the same thing.”
“This is different,” Abigail said, watching the pages blacken and burn. Once Bob left, she’d finish tearing up the last two notebooks, burn their pages, rid herself of their raw emotion.
Detective Bob O’Reilly of the BPD wouldn’t understand cleansing rituals. He had pale skin and freckles and red hair that was graying gracefully; only his cornflower eyes suggested the work he’d done for almost thirty years ever got to him. His second wife had walked out on him two years ago, telling him he was an emotional basket case and recommending therapy. Instead, Bob got drunk with cop friends, packed up his stuff, and, swearing off marriage forever, moved out, eventually buying the triple-decker with Scoop and Abigail.
“Is that your handwriting? The purple ink?” he asked.
Abigail glanced at a scrap that had just caught fire. “I used different colored inks depending on my mood.”
“How’s a purple-ink mood different from, say, a blue-ink mood?”
“I don’t know. It just is.”
“What are these, journals or something?” He seemed to have to struggle to keep the disbelief out of his tone.
“I started keeping a journal after Chris died. My therapist suggested it.”
“Oh.”
“She said to write stream-of-consciousness, without thinking, but to try to use all five senses and the present tense. She wanted me to write about our time together…what happened when he died.”
Bob scratched the back of his thick neck. “It helped?”
“I don’t know. I guess. I haven’t thrown myself off Cadillac Mountain.”
She grabbed the partially torn notebook and opened it up to the middle, tearing a hunk of pages, trying not to look at the words.
Chris leaves me with the ambulance crew, who will take me to the emergency room at the hospital in Bar Harbor. He doesn’t say where he’s going. He doesn’t promise to be back soon. He doesn’t promise anything.
I have no premonition of anything bad about to happen.
I just don’t want him to leave me.
Bob unhooked a pair of tongs from the side of the grill and stirred the blackened pages, rekindling the dying fire. “You never thought about killing yourself, Abigail,” he said, not looking at her. “Only thing you thought about was finding out who killed your husband.”
She flung more pages on the fire.
By nightfall, I’m worried. So are Doyle Alden, a local police officer, and Owen Garrison, Chris’s rich neighbor. I can see it in their faces.
Chris should be back by now.
“Abigail? You’re not breathing.”
She made herself exhale and smiled at Bob, who, initially, hadn’t even wanted her in the department, much less working at his side in homicide. Too much baggage, he’d told everyone, including her. It wasn’t just her husband. It was quitting law school, it was her background. She’d had to earn his trust. “I’m okay. I should have done this sooner. It feels good.”
“Why are you doing it now?”
“What?”
Bob wasn’t one to miss anything.
Abigail tore more pages, tossed them whole onto the fire, nearly smothering it.
I ignore warnings to stay inside—to rest—and instead put on my hiking boots and go off on my own into the unfamiliar landscape. Unlike Doyle and Owen and my husband, I don’t know every rock, every tree root, every snaking path through the woods or along the shore.
I’m not from Mt. Desert Island.
Bob watched her squirt more charcoal lighter fluid on her fire, the orange flames glowing in his face.
“The journals are emotional clutter—a drag on me.” Her words sounded okay to her, anyway. Plausible. “I’m heading up to Maine in the morning.”
“I see.”
“I need to do some work on the house.”
“Taking vacation time?”
“Some. Things are quiet right now. I have plenty of time coming to me.”
Bob poked at the fire with his tongs. He wasn’t by nature a patient man, but he had explained to Abigail, equally impatient, how his experience had taught him the value of strategic silence. She knew if she tried to fill the void, he’d have her.
The combination of the lighter fluid, the flames, the heat and the emotion had her eyes stinging. But she didn’t cry.
She’d never cried in front of Bob or Scoop, any of her fellow police officers.
I see Owen Garrison down on the rocks, near the waterline, below the skeletal remains of the original Garrison house, burned in the great Mt. Desert fire of 1947.
I can taste the ocean on the air and smell the acidic odor of the damp, peat-laden earth.
My mind doesn’t want to take in what I’m seeing.
The body of a man.
Owen tries to stop me from running. “Don’t, Abigail…”