Читать книгу The Wild Child - Judith Bowen - Страница 8

WHERE WAS ANDY?

Eva released the handle of the pump that brought water into the house from the stone cistern and peered out the small square window over the cast-iron pantry sink. The donkey had to be okay. He’d been on his own for months and was hardly going to get into trouble a week after she arrived. She pumped again, filled a pitcher and put the water in the propane-fired refrigerator, along with the eggs, cheese, milk and two bottles of sauvignon blanc she’d bought at the Half Moon Bay Store.

Now, what for supper? Eva opened a tin of cream of mushroom soup and warmed it up on the ancient combination propane-wood range that stood prominently in Doris’s big country kitchen. She was saving the limited supply of propane for the refrigerator, so had kindled a fire in the old range.

How about a grilled cheese sandwich to go with the soup? Why not? She’d had some variation on soup and sandwiches nearly every day so far. Then, just to make a dent in the silence, Eva switched on the transistor radio on top of the refrigerator and rocketed around from cupboard to counter to table, getting out a plate, a spoon, a bowl, half dancing, half walking, until she felt silly and stopped.

A person could go a little silly here. Had Doris gone a bit weird living by herself on Liberty Island? Of course, she wasn’t alone all the time. As a younger woman, Doris had traveled for three or four months every year, usually in the winter. Then there were the many visitors she encouraged. Every summer, Eva’s family had spent several weeks on the island. She remembered her father holding forth in the porch swing, admiring the view, a bottle of rum on the floor and a thick paperback turned over beside it. Or, if the tide was right and he felt like it, he’d be out in Doris’s rowboat, fishing for sand dabs and rockfish.

Eva’s mother, Felicity, gossiped with her older cousins and whoever else happened to be visiting, pulled weeds in Doris’s garden, and, if they came in August, helped her pick blackberries and put up her garden produce.

Eva recalled helping her mother and Doris, or playing with her sisters in the treehouse behind the garden. Was it still there? When there were other cousins around, they’d played house and cowboys, pirates and princesses—

What in the world? Eva stopped at the window over the sink, spoon forgotten in her hand, dripping soup onto the old linoleum floor.

There in the distance, halfway to where the ground began to rise to Abel’s Peak, was a small child and Andy and—and some kind of enormous black dog!

Eva rushed to the door and flung it open. “Andy!”

She caught her breath, wishing she hadn’t shouted, not wanting to frighten the child but…there was no one there. She blinked and rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand, like a cartoon character.

No child. No dog. Just the old donkey clip-clopping over the rocky ground as he trotted toward the house.

EVA WENT TO BED that night thoroughly rattled. The wind had come up in the evening and she could hear loose shingles banging on the roof. She hoped it wouldn’t rain, and if it did, she hoped the leaks weren’t near her bed. If necessary, she’d move to the other bedroom across the small landing at the top of the stairs.

Eva had always prided herself on being a calm, sensible woman. She had grown up the unflappable one in a chaotic family. Her father, a professor of literature at the University of British Columbia, spent every spare moment on whatever boat he happened to own at the time, ignoring his wife and drinking too much. Felicity Haines, a sad, gentle person, had died of an aneurysm when Eva was twelve, and Eva still missed her desperately. Kate, her oldest sister and very much her father’s daughter, had sailed away on a tall ships adventure when she was eighteen, had settled in Africa and was doing something noble for world peace, Eva believed. She hadn’t seen Kate for three years. Her other sister, Leona, had married a farmer and now raised ostriches, organic field peas and children—five of them, at last count—in Alberta.

Eva, the youngest by six years, had steered a steady course, graduating from high school with honors, working in a doctor’s office for two years and then taking a degree in education. She’d just finished her first year as a substitute teacher in three different elementary schools in Burnaby. The two terms with grade one and two classes had convinced her she’d made the right career choice. She’d adored her little gap-toothed charges and was almost sorry when June was over. In the fall, she hoped to land a permanent job, preferably in the Lower Mainland or Vancouver Island and preferably teaching kindergarten, although it didn’t much matter, and she’d sent résumés all over the province.

It would be nice, though, to settle somewhere near her father, who was alone and sometimes lonely, she thought, retired and living on his houseboat on the Fraser River. Now that Eva was an adult and entirely independent, she’d grown fond of Jack Haines, willing to forgive him the excesses that had alarmed her as a child.

At twenty-five and a trained teacher, Eva Louise Haines was definitely not the sort of person who imagined things. She did not see dogs and children and then, the next minute, not see them. There was nothing wrong with her eyes.

The child had been there most definitely. Red shorts, a dirty once-white T-shirt, no shoes. Dark hair, lots of it, a large black dog. Maybe strayed from a party of picnickers that had landed on the island that afternoon while she was away? She’d been surprised to see that Andy was with them, especially considering the presence of the dog….

She’d seen them. Obviously, the child and the dog had run away before she could open the door to call the donkey. They’d disappeared into the Lord forest on the other side of the creek, not into thin air. Campers, picnickers, boaters, whatever—someone besides her was on the island. That little boy or girl belonged to someone.

Eva finally dozed fitfully, wishing yet again that she’d brought Freddie. First someone—or something—watching her. Now children and dogs that were there one minute and gone the next.

IN THE MORNING, Eva took a brisk walk to the western end of the island. She often walked that route along the shore, looking for things the tide had yielded overnight. Sometimes there was an odd-shaped bit of driftwood or an old running shoe or a clock, washed up from who knows where. Once she’d found a coconut. It amused her to imagine how these things had ended up in the water. That coconut—had it arrived at Liberty Island after months adrift from Tahiti or had it rolled off a yacht deck from a grocery bag? Often, sadly, all she found was garbage—soft drink bottles and plastic bags, chunks of Styrofoam and torn fish net.

This morning, what she wanted to find was evidence of whoever had brought the child and dog. But there was nothing. No spent campfires on the beach, no tracks in the sand, no dinghy pulled up on the beach or launch anchored offshore. The visitors had most likely left the island before nightfall.

Somewhat relieved, Eva spent the rest of the morning in the small parlor, sorting through stacks of music books and sheets of looseleaf with snatches of songs penned on them. Doris had been an accomplished musician in her youth. According to Eva’s mother, she was a fine pianist with a lovely voice, who’d had a brief career as a professional singer. Why had a woman as talented and beautiful and flamboyant, by all accounts, isolated herself on Liberty Island at thirty-six years of age, after her husband’s death? Eva wished she’d paid a little more attention to her mother’s stories.

By noon, Eva had filled only one box for the thrift store at Sechelt. She kept stopping to play one or another of Doris’s little songs on the ancient Mason & Risch piano, which, from the sound of it and the sticking E and F keys, hadn’t been looked after in years. By two o’clock, when she’d resolved to go for a swim, she’d filled three boxes to give away and another box of photos and personal items.

Funny how Jack Haines, who’d been so indifferent to his own wife while she was alive, was so solicitous of his wife’s elderly cousin now. Guilt, maybe? Her father’s lack of interest in his family had always hurt Eva. She was glad their relationship was steadier now. Of course, with Kate and Leona far away and their mother dead, who did Jack Haines have to neglect anymore? Just her. And, these days, he tended to lean on her instead. She didn’t mind.

Dependable Eva.

Andy accompanied her to the water’s edge. Normally, when the tide was out, as it was now, Eva would have gone to the pools on the other side of the island, a place mysteriously known as The Baths when she was a child. The pools were in a sort of no-man’s-land between the Bonhomme and Lord properties. After the strange experience of yesterday, plus the feeling she’d had that she was being watched, Eva didn’t want to walk through the tangle of dark woods between the house and The Baths.

Silly, she knew. As a result, she had to wade a considerable distance over rocks and barnacles before the water was deep enough to swim. Then she forgot all about Andy and his mysterious friends, putting in, first, her usual swim between the shore and Angler’s Rock, a large outcrop that marked the entrance to Doris’s little harbor even at high tide; then she spent a pleasant half hour climbing around, looking for the Coast Salish petroglyphs she remembered from long-ago outings. One day, before the summer was over, she intended to bring paper and charcoal and take rubbings of the figures, which were old, possibly ancient images pecked into the surface of the rock by Indians who’d inhabited the area.

Andy cropped the short grass just up from the beach as Eva swam in. She raked back her streaming hair as she emerged and, peering through the clear, green water to avoid stumbling, navigated carefully over the kelp stones and mussel-encrusted rock on the bottom of the small bay. There were very few sandy beaches in the Gulf Islands.

When she looked up, the visitors were back, regarding her from the top of a large boulder at the tide line, fifty feet from the old wharf. The little girl—or was it a boy?—had on blue shorts today and a red-and-white striped T-shirt. No shoes, as yesterday. The sudden appearance of the pair surprised Eva, but at the same time she felt huge relief.

So she wasn’t losing her mind. And the child obviously had someone taking care of her, providing clean clothes. The family must be camped on the other side of the island….

“Hello!” Eva called and waved. There was no response. She veered toward the boulder, still stepping carefully. He—or was it a she—couldn’t be more than four or five years old.

The big black dog bounded toward Eva then stopped stiff-legged and barked. It wasn’t a friendly bark, either. Andy butted his head comically against her left hip, nibbling at her swimsuit, seeking the treats she usually had for him. For once, Eva wasn’t amused.

“Hey!” she called again, waving her hand and smiling. “Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you.”

The child raised one hand in a hesitant response to Eva’s gesture and then slipped off the rock. Eva stumbled forward, cursing the pebbles that hurt her feet and slowed her progress. Where were they—behind the boulder? Across the creek? Into the woods on the other side?

If not, they’d vanished into thin air again!

Eva didn’t know what to do. This was just too strange. Who was this little kid, out yesterday and today just—just wandering! Where was the mother? The father?

She needed to get dressed quickly and do some exploring. Find out, once and for all, where these people were camped and why no one was keeping an eye on this child.

EVA USUALLY RINSED OFF in the small, cramped bathroom off the kitchen, the only one in the house. Doris’s bedroom had been downstairs, too, a more convenient arrangement for an elderly woman. Today, though, Eva just grabbed a towel from the bathroom cupboard and hurried up the stairs to her small bedroom under the eaves.

She stripped out of her bathing suit and toweled off, glancing out the small, paned window toward the sea. The rough, line-dried cotton almost hurt her skin. Andy had followed her and was grazing on the sparse grasses that grew between the house and the beach. No sign of the other two, though…

Eva’s heart was racing. Ordinarily, she was a person who very much minded her own business. Live and let live, was her guiding principle. It had helped her survive a difficult family, demanding employers and several classes full of fractious six- and seven-year-olds.

Doris Bonhomme owned half of this island. As her agent, in effect, Eva had a duty to make sure that everything was all right, and that included checking up on any small visitors who might be lost or need her assistance.

Even if she hadn’t been standing in for Doris, she would have wanted to get to the bottom of this.

Eva pulled on a pair of khaki shorts and a long-sleeved T-shirt and grabbed a tube of sunscreen from the top of the small antique dresser. She had sneakers by the kitchen door.

She paused before she left the room, catching a glimpse of herself in the spidery, ghosted mirror over the dresser—face hot, eyes bright, wet hair hanging in dark, thick ropes. She was actually going to the other side of the island….

The forbidden side.

Eva ran down the steeply pitched stairs in her bare feet.

“Hi.”

The child—a little girl—was in her kitchen!