Freelance and Fishmaids is a supernatural novella, serialized in twelve episodes. This is Episode Eight. Start Here.
Previously, Reyville learned of a deeper threat building on the island, and Caroline began to face her own ghosts.
In this episode, Reyville and Caroline follow their lead to the mysterious Brack, where trespassing comes with dire consequences…
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For more tales set on Ferris Island, check out the Ferris Island Index.
Caroline waited at the cabin door in her pajamas and a thick sweater, feeling the deck of the Princess of the Weathers shifting, creaking softly under her feet on the never-sleeping waves, the swelling moonlight bathing her shoulders. The rope tethering the boat to the slip shivered on its cleat, tautening, loosening.
Every nerve in Caroline’s body was screaming at her to turn around, to go back to the cottage, and yet she stood firm, still feeling the tingle of her knuckles knocking against the cabin door. Aunt Ida’s thin arms were wrapped around her neck, riding on her back like a child—weighing nothing at all!—whispering in her ear across the distance from Denver to Seavend. Caroline waited.
A dim light turned on behind the curtained porthole windows, and a shadow shifted across them, heading for her. For the door.
It’s not too late, Caroline. Leave now, before he sees you.
But she didn’t move. She waited.
The cabin door opened, the amber glow of the light within spilling out across her face, the deck, the dark water below them.
“Caroline?” Reyville said, too surprised to be formal.
She looked up, and Aunt Ida’s thin arms tightened around her throat, and she found that she couldn’t use her voice. Could only whisper, “May I come in?”
And though his face was full of questions, he did not hesitate, but stepped back from the doorway and let her enter the snug nighttime warmth of the Princess of the Weathers.
Reyville started making tea immediately, as though it was the logical thing to do, and Caroline sat down on one of the bench seats under the porthole windows, hugging her arms around herself. The little woodstove was spitting and chatting with a fresh log between its teeth, and the thick curtain hiding Reyville’s bed at the far end of the cabin was slightly askew, revealing a book sitting on the pillow, the blankets messed.
It was only then that it occurred to Caroline that he might have been asleep, or at least getting ready to go to bed, when she arrived. He was dressed in soft pants and one of his old cabled sweaters, thick wool socks and no shoes. The sudden shock of seeing him without his usual fisherman’s hat and pea coat felt all too intimate, and she began to tremble anew.
Why did I do this?
He stole a glance in her direction and, wordlessly, took a throw blanket from a shelf where he kept his linens and brought it to her, draping it over her shoulders. The act broke whatever spell Aunt Ida had over her, the tightness around her throat dissipating, and Caroline blinked up at Reyville as he continued to make the tea.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know this is…I know it’s late.”
He shrugged, smiled over at her, gently. “It’s always a pleasure to see you, no matter the hour. Is everything…are you all right?”
She sighed. The kettle began to hiss, then whistle, and Reyville poured the hot water into the teapot.
Caroline swallowed. “I spoke…with my aunt, tonight. For the first time in a while.”
Reyville waited, letting her take her time.
“There’s a lot I’ve wanted to ask her,” Caroline continued, slowly, looking down at her palms open on her lap. “Too much. There’s never enough time.”
Reyville’s expression shifted subtly at this, but he stayed silent for her. She took his silence for the invitation it was, and went on.
“My mother and I were…not close. It wasn’t the fault of either of us, I don’t think, but I don’t…I don’t know. We were just very different. And there was so much about her that I didn’t understand. Which is…I mean, it’s maybe a little on-the-nose that I became a journalist. I’ve only ever wanted to know everything. And maybe all this time, I just wanted to know more about Mom. I probably could have saved myself a lot of trouble just going to a good therapist, instead of spending all that money on university and moving out as far west as I could go.”
Caroline laughed in spite of herself, then, a humorless sound. Reyville quietly poured tea into two mugs, handed her one, and then took his own mug to sit beside her on the bench seat, giving her respectful space.
“What did your aunt say?” he asked.
Caroline looked at nothing, eyes distant. “She told me a story. One I hadn’t heard before, about a cross-country family trip they all took when my mom and Aunt Ida were little. They had to use a special guidebook to get around, because back then…it wasn’t safe for folks like us, back then. Driving around. Staying in hotels.”
She cleared her throat, but Reyville’s face was still wide open, ready to receive her.
“One night, they were looking for a place to stay, and their guidebook led them to this farmhouse on a hill, somewhere in Iowa. An old place. Aunt Ida doesn’t remember where, she was pretty little. But something…happened, there. And ever since, my mom claimed that she saw a ghost that night. She told everyone at her school about it, everyone in the neighborhood, everyone at church, talked about it all the time, the way kids do. But no one believed her. Aunt Ida didn’t see it, wasn’t sure what she thought about it, couldn’t back Mom up. After years passed of telling people about the ghost and being slapped down for it, my mom just…stopped telling the story. Kept it to herself. Kept everything to herself.”
Caroline turned to look at Reyville, truly seeing him for the first time all evening, the mug of tea hot in her trembling hands, the old blue boat swaying softly beneath them, the woodstove muttering over its mouthful of embers, and she said, “I wish to God she had told me her ghost story, Reyville. I would have believed her.”
The moment her own words passed her lips, becoming real and alive and witnessed by the Captain and the woodstove and the steam rising from the mugs of tea, the weight of it shoved down like the full force of gravity.
And Caroline wept.
*******
A seagull screamed the morning awake, and Caroline opened her eyes in an unfamiliar place. Clean blankets and a deep quilt, and the swaying, the soft swaying beneath her…
And then she realized. It was Reyville’s bed in the cabin of the Princess of the Weathers.
She lay for a while in the swaying darkness, silently, listening to the cackling of the gulls outside. There was a smell of toast and coffee and something else cooking—eggs?
She was more than a little surprised at herself, and embarrassed. Not since the fragile days of college had she stayed over at a man’s place, simply because she felt like it, lover or not. Those were simpler, more emotion-driven times.
But the other side of the bed looked untouched, cold; Reyville had not slept beside her.
She lifted herself up, rubbed her eyes, and pulled aside the curtain. The cabin of the Princess was flooded with winter light through the uncovered portholes, and Reyville was in the kitchen, relaxed and assured as if all was normal.
“Good morning,” he said, from the small galley stove.
She replied, swinging her legs down onto the floor, “Good morning. I…uh…”
He waved away whatever she was going to say, which was remarkable because she hadn’t even settled on what it was going to be, yet.
“You don’t need to say anything,” he said. “Are you feeling any better?”
“I’m…yes, I’m feeling better.” Caroline wandered down and sat on the bench seat, tucking her feet up and hugging her knees. The bench opposite was made up like a bed, with a spare pillow and a nest of blankets.
Caroline felt the shame rise in her all over again, for making the man sleep on the proverbial couch in his own home while she slept her grief away in his bed. She said, “You’re a perfect gentleman, Reyville. Thank you.”
“Perfect, no.” He didn’t look up from the scrambling eggs, a twinkle in his eye. “But a gentleman…perhaps. Hard-learned over a lot of confusing and confused years. In my experience, both on land and at sea,” here he did turn, with that frank gaze that always left her so unsettled, “no wise choice is ever made in the darkest part of the night. Always best to wait for the clarity of daylight.”
She thought, for a fleeting moment, of their experience after the fishmaid rescue, standing at her car. The freefall. The almost.
Funny how the veil of night makes everything feel like a good idea.
Reyville poured a cup of coffee for her from the pot and brought it over. “Regardless, always happy to be a safe port.”
She took the coffee, looked up at his face, but he did not return her gaze before heading back to the stove to shuffle the cooked eggs onto a plate and pop the toast.
Caroline sipped from the cup, glancing over at the table nearby where a piece of paper sat. It was the contact that the old man had given Reyville at the hospice, the person on the Brack that he could speak to…though not without trespassing in an area sworn off to outsiders. The name “Stella Whitman” was written in Reyville’s careful script, along with what looked like coordinates.
“What’s the plan for this?” Caroline asked, taking up the paper.
Reyville slid a plate of eggs and toast onto the table beside her elbow. “You told me not to make a plan without you, remember?”
His voice was guarded, but there was a hint of his usual humor in it.
“True. But I assume you’ve given it thought.”
He nodded, sitting on the opposite bench with his own plate. “Yes, I have. O’Connor told me that this Stella Whitman was a former liaison for the Brack and still lives there. Her house is easily accessible by boat and she lives alone, so we should be able to get in and out undetected by the Brackers. She and the old man always had a good professional relationship, solid, and he assured me that if we had questions, she would answer them.”
Caroline chewed on this information. “What do the Brackers do to trespassers? I mean…surely they can’t…hurt anyone?”
Reyville winced. “I’ve heard stories. Unpleasant ones. Some are true, though I’m sure some are just exaggerations, which I imagine the Brackers don’t mind. Reputation is better than reality, most of the time, if you can swing it. But the truth is still brutal enough. There are a lot of rules giving the Brackers carte blanche over their private property. The island government can’t interfere.”
“But why?”
“The Orchard,” Reyville replied. “You wouldn’t believe how much money the Brackers bring into the local economy through the sale of their proprietary fruit and products through the Orchard. It’s pretty astonishing. Besides…there’s history. A lot of history. Too much.”
Money. Of course it all boiled down to money, and nothing so mysterious as that. Cult or secret society or whatever they were, with enough money you can do anything.
Caroline frowned. “So if you’re caught…”
“That’s just it. Can’t get caught.” Reyville winked. She still wasn’t sure whether she liked that, perfect gentleman or not. “But,” he continued, “if this Stella Whitman is in the spot that I think she is and if I remember my map right, which I believe I do, then we should be in and out without any trouble.”
For the first time all morning, the penny dropped. He had been saying “we”.
She looked at him. “You said we.”
“Eat your eggs,” he said. “They’re getting cold.”
“Reyville, you said we.”
He shrugged, sipped his coffee for a long moment—letting the quiet stretch—before he said, “We both know how this is going to go, Caroline Phelan. You’re going to convince me to let you come along, no matter what very good and practical arguments I put up. I’ll always say yes, because every time we work together we always manage to make magic out of a mess. I thought this time I’d get ahead of it and let it be my idea.”
She smiled in spite of herself, a silent thanks.
“Now,” he said, mock-serious. “Eat your eggs.”
*******
The plan was simple: they would wait for nightfall—still winter-early—then make their move under the cover of darkness.
It was Saturday, and Caroline had to work while Reyville needed to check in with the Harbormaster. So, after breakfast, Caroline left the Princess to walk back to the cottage in her pajamas, ignoring the curious and bemused expressions of the live-aboards in the Seavend Marina, and prepared herself for her normal shift.
Tables to clean, the kitchen to mind, the store to open. Helping Noah clean out the big refrigerator. Restocking the shelves. Muscle-memory took over, thankfully, while her mind wandered. Standing with her feet in the store and her mind in the clouds, traveling. Out to the suburban streets of Denver, away to a haunted hillside in Iowa she had only seen in dreams, back to the shadowy paths of the Brack and landing on the deck of the big blue boat, weathered and welcoming.
While she served coffee and pie and chowder and rang up purchases at the till, she thought about her mother. About June’s ghost story. About the great tragedy of never being believed, of carrying something so big inside of you for years and years until it rots.
And while the grief still sat heavy on her back, Caroline realized something, during that shift at the General Store, floorboards creaking beneath her feet and seagulls screaming outside the window: in some small way, she knew her mother better than anyone else had. She knew what it felt like to be haunted. She believed June Phelan’s ghost story.
And maybe, just maybe, that meant something.
********
Nightfall arrived soon enough in the early evening, and so did the Princess of the Weathers, returning from her daytime duties to the usual slip to wait for Caroline.
This time, Caroline had come prepared: dressed warm and practical for the journey, curls tied up away from her face, Scully safe in her bag, and phone charged, despite knowing that electronics had a funny way of going dead on the Brack. The General Store would not be open the next day, so she was ready for whatever the night would bring.
At the slip, she unwound the rope from the dock cleat and threw the line aboard before climbing over the gunwale, as Reyville had shown her that morning. She did not knock, but opened the cabin door and climbed up the short staircase to the pilothouse where Reyville was already seated, Oasis playing softly on the CD player in the boat’s dashboard.
“We’ll make a sailor out of you yet,” Reyville said. “You ready?”
Caroline took the co-pilot seat, setting her bag on the floor. “Ready,” she said.
And they were underway.
The night was clear and crisp, a bright moon just past half shining down on the waves, the stars free of their veiling clouds for the first time in a week and running naked in the black meadow overhead.
Reyville was the first to break the quiet. “How’s your cottage ghost? Get a shot of it, yet?”
Caroline shook her head. “It’s a slippery one. Camera-shy.”
“Is that normal?”
Caroline smiled dimly. “I still haven’t figured out what ‘normal’ means, when it comes to Scully and…all of that. But, no, it’s never happened before. Not like this. Usually I can get something, but not with this one. Not yet.”
The Princess slid easily through the tide, heading away from Seavend east toward the strait. They rounded the headland and the strait yawned out beside them on their starboard side, a chill, vicious wind whipping down through it and beating the side of the old trawler with a fury of ineffectual fists. But the Princess stayed her course, passing the strait, the dark line of the Brack visible ahead.
Caroline always felt that the Brack was like a crouching animal on the horizon, dark without the usual electric pinpricks of light one expected to see. The only light was the glow of the streetlights at either end of the old bridge, but beyond that…nothing. Just darkness, shielded by thick walls of trees.
“Have you been there?” Caroline asked, staring at the dark land as they passed it, rounding the top of the smaller island.
“To the Brack?” Reyville sat on this question for longer than she expected he would before responding, “No.”
“That was a suspicious pause.”
“My life is full of suspicious pauses.” A joke. Caroline didn’t laugh.
“But, no,” Reyville added. “In the strictest sense, I have not been to the Brack. I have sailed around it many a time, and there are certain corners of it that I know about, like the cove where we found the Shag. I’ve spent a bit of time around Brackers, when they visit. But I have attempted to honor their rules as best as I can, while keeping an eye on things. I think it’s best to treat them respectfully.”
“Are they a cult?” Caroline asked.
Reyville grimaced. “You know, it always grieves me when people think that. It’s not a kind word, Caroline, for a community who just want to be left alone. The Brackers are strange, yes. Deeply insular. But I think ‘cult’ is dismissive. They’re just odd, and they have their reasons.”
Caroline wasn’t sure how hard to push, but she said, “I mean…there’s odd and insular, and then there’s making enough money to push around the local government and hire a liaison to make sure nothing sticks. That’s…that’s something more than odd. Right?”
By the set of Reyville’s jaw, Caroline could tell that there was plenty he wasn’t saying, and plenty he wanted to say. But he let her words land between them and crouch there, hunched and croaking like a tenuous prophecy.
The Brack—long and narrow—stretched beside them like a bank of dark clouds, and at some point clear to Reyville and no one else, he turned to Caroline and said, “I need you to go down into the cabin and turn all of the lights out. Every single one you see, and close the curtains in the porthole windows.”
Caroline nodded and stood, while Reyville busied himself at various switches on the instrument panel. In the cabin, Caroline turned off every lamp and light, closed all of the curtains—realizing, as she looked out of the portholes, that Reyville was turning out all of the boat’s running-lights—and when all was dark, she picked her way carefully back up into the pilothouse.
“Closest thing to a cloaking device I can think of,” he said, as she regained her seat. “Look there, on that bluff. That’s the house. Stella Whitman’s.”
Caroline looked, and sure enough, there was a big old brick house halfway up a rocky bluff. There was no dock or harbor nearby, but there was a short length of rocky beach at the foot of the bluff and a winding, switchback staircase leading up to the house’s rear yard.
“How are we getting over there?” Caroline asked.
Reyville threw a switch, the whirring and rumbling below them a signal that the anchor was descending, and he said, “Can you swim?”
Caroline opened her mouth, speechless, but Reyville laughed.
“We’re taking the dinghy,” he said. “Let’s go.”
*******
The water was choppier on this side of the Brack, but Reyville rowed them steadily to the small beach, the unlit Princess nearly vanishing behind them in the dark. Caroline didn’t relax until the small white dinghy hit the rocky shore with a scrape and a hiss. They both climbed out, and Reyville pulled the little boat up the beach a bit, away from the grabbing tide.
They began the climb up the old stairs, clearly not used or maintained often, silver with weather-wear and frosted with patches of mildew and lichen. Caroline stole glances up to the house, amazed at the size of it. It was an old brick fortress, an architectural style lost to time, evoking a grandeur that no longer existed…and maybe never had, at all.
It appeared dark, from a distance, but as they drew closer Caroline realized that the only glow from within the house was coming from candlelight, too weak to pierce through the gloom.
Reyville had said that Stella Whitman lived alone. If that was true, then Caroline couldn’t imagine it, in such a huge house.
At the top of the stairs, a stone path led them through an overgrown patch of garden to what was likely the back door, or even an old servant’s entrance. The house was surrounded by crowds of black, wind-weary trees.
As they approached the door, Caroline felt as though their footsteps were louder than usual. The Brack was eerily quiet, as if the same force that kept electronic devices from working here left an unnatural hush behind in its wake.
But Reyville knocked confidently at the door using the rusted antique knocker—a thunderous sound, in the silence—and they waited.
The silence waited with them, eavesdropping.
And then, the sound of locks being shunted aside, ancient bolts moving, and the door opened the tiniest crack, a gaunt woman’s face hovering there in the gap over a candlestick she held in her clawed hand.
“Who are you?” the woman said, softly, her eyes wide and alien in the candlelight.
“Are you Miss Stella Whitman?” Reyville asked, tapping the brim of his cap before removing it.
“I am.”
“We were sent here by Seth O’Connor, ma’am. Former Harbormaster of Port Salish. Do you remember Seth?”
Stella nodded. But when she spoke again, her voice was thin and strange, like she was speaking only to herself. “They won’t like you being here, you know.”
“We aren’t staying long, and we certainly don’t mean to bother you,” Reyville said. “We just have a question or two to ask you, and then we’ll be on our way.”
Stella pulled away from the door for a moment, looking over her shoulder as if listening to someone calling her name from a distant room, before she stepped back and opened the door for them.
“Come in,” she said. “Any friend of Seth’s is a friend of mine.”
The sentiment was said with such a lack of warmth that Caroline almost smiled at the absurdity of it, but she quelled the urge and followed Stella Whitman into the big house, Reyville behind her, the door closing after them on suspiciously quiet hinges.
Stella climbed a flight of stairs up to what was likely the main floor, and Caroline was grateful for Reyville keeping step with her. The house was mouldering away, all pockmarked wallpaper and eerie shadows, furniture covered in white sheeting, cobwebs dancing erratically in the drafts seeping in from the sea. It had once been grand, certainly, but no more.
After winding through a labyrinth of ancient halls, Stella Whitman entered a doorway into the warmth of a lit fire and a handful of candles, and as they followed her in, Caroline realized that this was probably one of the only rooms the woman ever used on a regular basis. It was a parlour, cozy enough on its own if you ignored the context of the rest of the old house, walls lined with leaning bookshelves, an old brocade settee and leather chairs huddled around the hearth against the chill.
Stella gestured for them to sit. They sat, and Caroline took the measure of her for the first time, in the relative light of the parlour: a slight and pale woman, draped in some kind of flowy black thing—a caftan, was the word Caroline conjured up from somewhere—her gray hair a frizzy halo around her crown, and her sharp features set off by large, round turtle-shell glasses.
She wasn’t wearing the Bracker green and gold. In fact, she didn’t seem like any of the Brackers Caroline had ever seen.
“I’m sorry I don’t have any refreshments to offer you,” Stella intoned, softly. “My cook doesn’t work after dark.”
“That’s quite all right, ma’am,” Reyville said, turning on the old-world charm he was good at, dialing up a softer, more BBC-approved version of his accent. “We’re here because a poacher was recently caught in Port Salish, trying to smuggle a fishmaid away from the island, and his operation was traced back here, to the Brack. Evidence points to there being…quite the network of smuggling, through here.”
Stella blinked behind her glasses, pausing for a disconcertingly long time before murmuring, “There is a liaison currently working, isn’t there?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Then why do you not bring this to them?”
“We have. He is not being…cooperative,” Reyville said, trying for diplomacy. “Tight-lipped, is the word. Seth O’Connor told us that you and he had a longstanding professional relationship, and that you could answer our questions. Any information you could give us—”
But Stella gestured sharply, slicing the air with her flat hand, tilting her head as if listening.
Caroline felt a chill run down her spine. There was no sound to hear. Nothing, except the wind moaning in the chimney and the popping of a spark in the fireplace. But she got a creeping feeling, something inexplicable, that the room felt…crowded.
After a moment of this, Stella spoke again, and a change was unmistakable. Her voice was deeper, had a growling quality to it. A man’s voice.
“The poaching isn’t new,” Stella said, in this new tone. “They must just be getting sloppy. Never used to get caught by you Ferris folk. But they come over here from that place, that laboratory, to do their dirty work.”
“RUMOR?” Caroline knew that Reyville wanted to take the lead on the questions, but her astonishment outweighed her ability to keep quiet. “Do you mean RUMOR?”
“RUMOR, yes.” Stella’s voice had changed again within a moment, took on a nasal quality, a slightly different inflection. “Whenever those eggheads want a specimen smuggled or have some shady business they don’t want to lead back to them, they handle it through here. Through the Brack. It’s an extra step, but there are no records of the transaction, and no one gets caught. Usually.”
Reyville’s brow furrowed. “And the Brackers allow it?”
“Allow it!” Stella’s eyes glinted dangerously in the light from the fire, and her voice had shifted again once more, a throaty woman’s voice, aged and crone-like. “Never allow it! But we do not always catch it. The laboratory hunters are clever. They snatch up creatures and rare plants, even take our folk when they can, use them for tests, spit them out to wander lost. They know that they can do this without recourse, because your laws are not our laws. But,” and here, Stella smiled a wicked smile, “when we do catch them, we deal with them. In our own way.”
The idea of the RUMOR laboratory snatching up Brackers and using them for testing had sent Caroline’s mind reeling. A vision of Andy’s laundry room ghost at the clinic—the girl in the dirty shirt—fluttered through Caroline’s mind, along with the man who had taken the little Bracker girl to cast her into the sea. Was there any connection? How deep did this go?
The idea—the unanswered questions—chilled her to the bone.
But Stella’s attention, or the attention of whatever was using her as a puppet, was now drawn to Reyville, peering at him through the gloom of the parlour. “I know you,” she said, still in that crone’s voice. “I know you, don’t I.”
It was not a question. Reyville’s face betrayed nothing.
“The Captain,” Stella spat, a hint of triumph on her face. “Yes, the illustrious Captain. Captain Nestor. I remember you.”
Caroline looked at Reyville, but Reyville was staring at Stella, face blanching.
“Oh.” Stella shook her head, glanced between Reyville and Caroline. “Oh, I see. You’re a liar, too, as well as a thief.”
That suffocating feeling that the room was full, full to bursting, had become almost unbearable. Caroline’s heart was racing, feeling like she was surrounded, but there were only three of them in the room, only three.
“As I thought,” Stella said, when neither Caroline nor Reyville spoke, and suddenly her voice sounded closer to the way it had been when they first met her, the eerie effect wearing off like paint peeling away. “They are not pleased that you’re here.”
Stella rose from her seat, crossed to the place where the logs for the fireplace stood in their brass tub, kneeling to put another piece of firewood in, and Caroline slowly reached into her bag and drew Scully out. Reyville was still watching Stella, pale and drawn, and did not seem to notice Caroline’s action.
She turned on the camera, aimed it at Stella where she knelt by the hearth, and snapped the shutter.
Snap!
Quickly looking at the photo she had taken, the skin of her face tightened, a bone-deep chill running through her.
The room was cluttered with an innumerable crowd of ghosts of all ages, filling the room, some of them leaning down to whisper into Stella Whitman’s ear, others watching Caroline and Reyville with hollow and hostile eyes.
One old woman, standing at Stella’s shoulder, was pointing at Reyville. Pointing, and angry.
“We need to go,” Caroline whispered. “Now.”
But Stella stood and turned to them, shaking her head. “You don’t understand,” she said, in another voice that did not sound like hers. A borrowed voice. A ghost’s voice. “The liaison serves as the voice for all Brackers, the living and the dead. This is her role forever, until the day she dies. Set aside, yet never alone. Never alone, surrounded by the dead. And the living are standing now, at the door.”
Somewhere beyond, the front door of the big old house creaked open, footsteps resounding in the entryway, upraised voices.
Somehow, she—or the spirits she served—had summoned the living.
Within moments, the threshold of the parlour was crowded with Brackers bearing lanterns, and in the chaos that ensued rose the shrill sound of Stella Whitman laughing, laughing, laughing in her house of ghosts.
*******
Darkness. Waiting in the darkness, sitting against a rough, cold wall. Stone?
She didn't dare to speak, didn't dare to ask any questions. Whispering of voices around her, hostile and unintelligible. Sitting, waiting, time ticking by. How long? Hours? She couldn't be sure.
All was darkness, and the itch of burlap against her cheeks, the tightness of rope around her wrists. Someone had taken her bag. Her phone was in it.
But this was the Brack. It wouldn't matter. Phones don't work here.
Suddenly, hands yanked her upright to her feet, pushed her from behind so that she stumbled down an uneven path she could not see.
The rush of panicked blood in her ears made it impossible to hear anything else, and Caroline prayed to Aunt Ida’s passionate God that Reyville was still somewhere nearby, and unharmed.
The Captain, she heard Stella say, in the voice of a bitter ghost. Captain Nestor.
She walked for what felt like an eternity in the dark, tripped up a short flight of wooden steps, and then a heavy shove from behind dropped her to her knees with a grunt, the burlap sack pulled abruptly from her head.
Caroline blinked in the sudden light, looked around.
She was in a large room, like some kind of old meeting hall or church sanctuary, well lit with kerosene lamps. The old wooden chairs and tables had all been pushed to the edges of the room, leaving plenty of space for whatever was about to happen. There was an assembly of Brackers all around her in a circle, a tall old man standing in front of her, and dogs. Dogs with too-smart eyes and dark, shaggy coats, peppered among the gathered people.
Reyville was kneeling beside her, his hands also bound before him, and when she turned to look she realized that at some point he had clearly struggled against his captors; his cheek was bruised and his lip was cut and bleeding, a slim dark line in his golden beard.
He met her glance with his own, and something in his eyes—those eyes—snapped her heart in half.
Regret. Guilt. I brought you here. This is my fault. This time, it was my idea.
But the old man spoke, drawing Caroline's attention back to the front of the room, and his voice was strangely lilting, an accent she couldn’t place. “Trespass on this island is a punishable offense, strangers. Especially by those who seek to act under cover of darkness, stealing secrets from our shores. But I expect you know that.”
Reyville lifted his eyes to the old man, his voice sincere but a subtle fire in his gaze.
“Please,” he said, “let her go. She was my passenger. I am the one responsible.”
The old man shook his head. “Passenger, perhaps. But not innocent. Your passenger is responsible for what she brings with her.”
He lifted his hand. In it, he held Scully.
Caroline swallowed.
“Is this not yours?” he said, to Caroline.
She nodded.
Reyville insisted, “We meant no harm. To Miss Whitman, or to anyone,” but the old man held up his empty hand for silence.
“Is it not harm to go where you are not wanted?” he said. “Our laws are known by you. By all of you. You have your own lands to mind, your own lives to live. And yet you come here. Bringing secrets, or stealing ours. It's wrong. And we have the right to see you punished. By tooth and claw, by right, by law.”
There were no friends in the assembled faces. Caroline did not know what the punishment entailed, but if their anger was any indication, it would not be inconsequential. And the Brackers could do it. They were allowed, by law.
“Have you anything to say?” the old man asked.
Caroline felt Reyville's anger and frustration seething beside her, his strong shoulders slumped, the blood drying on his lip. She thought of the good man who had given her a safe place to sleep and grieve the night before, and she couldn't let this stand without trying something. Anything.
And so, she said, “Sir, you're right.”
The words were not expected, the unfriendly faces shuffling. She fixed her stare on the old man, even though she could feel Reyville's eyes on her.
“You’re absolutely right. We knew the rules, and we broke them. This is your home. You have every right to defend your home, and every reason to make an example of us.”
The old man's brow furrowed, but he was listening.
“Miss Whitman told us, tonight, about the ways that the scientists at RUMOR have harmed you, over the years,” Caroline said. “We’ve seen it ourselves. Your people taken. Dying alone and lost. A child, kidnapped from her parents and thrown into the sea…”
It was a gamble. But Caroline was willing to take it.
“You should not have to worry about that, in your home,” she added. “We understand. We wish we could make it right. We would do so, if we were free. But you should do what you must.”
Something in Caroline's speech had caused a stir. There was a shuffling at the edge of the circle, off to Caroline’s left, and she turned. One of the Bracker women in a golden linen dress with a green sash had stepped forward, peering carefully at Caroline, as though searching her face for something.
“Forgive me,” the woman said, either to Caroline or to the old man, it was difficult to tell which. “But…are you not the same two who brought Lyla back to us?”
Caroline didn’t know what to say. Lyla? She didn’t know a Lyla.
But the woman persisted. “One of our children, taken, as you said. A daughter. Lyla. Was that not you, who brought her back to us? We’ve heard of the singing woman and the sailor. Is this not you?”
There was more movement in the circle, voices whispering, someone leaving the meeting hall.
The singing woman and the sailor. Caroline turned to look at Reyville, but he was just as lost as she was for what to say.
Moments later, the gathering parted, and there she was. The little wide-eyed Bracker girl from the Shag’s cove, holding the hand of her mother.
Lyla. Looking healthy and happy, safe in the arms of her strange family.
When the little girl saw Caroline and the Captain, she smiled widely, like the dawn shattering the night, and looked up into her mother’s waiting face.
“It's them, Mama,” Lyla said, shy yet resolute. “She sang to me on the blue boat. That's the singing woman. That's the sailor.”
The words of the child broke like a spell over the gathering. It would not do, it would not do at all, to punish such people who would save the life of a Bracker daughter, plucked from the waves!
The repair was swift, for the strangers would be spared but could not stay. There are rules.
“Make it right,” said the old man. “Now that you are free.”
Caroline felt the ropes cut from her wrists, Reyville at her side as soon as his own bonds were removed, pulling her gently to her feet.
In spite of herself, thanks to the rush of relief after the adrenaline and the fear and horrible imaginings of what could have been, Caroline folded into him and he held her.
The two of them leaned on each other while the Brackers decided among themselves who would escort them back to the little beach at the foot of Stella Whitman’s bluff, where the white dinghy was pulled up, away from the tide.
Suspended, they stood breathing together as the room swirled around them, without them. Caroline felt Reyville’s calloused hand shaking as he lightly held the nape of her neck, his fingers weaving through her curls, and she laughed softly like a sob into the navy blue wool of his coat.
They stood like that, and Caroline watched from Reyville's arms as the little Bracker girl was led away into the night to her bedtime, wide dark eyes innocent and unaware of what fate she had just saved her singing woman and her sailor from.
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Oh my goodness.
I loved the way you brought all these stories together, and the girl saving them at the end, and Stella, that was *fantastic*.
Wow. Delightfully chilling, and ominous, and heartwarming, and...wow.
I don’t think I breathed at all for the last half. 😅