Freelance and Fishmaids is a supernatural novella, serialized in twelve episodes. This is Episode Eleven. Start Here.
Previously, Caroline enlisted all the help she could get to search for Reyville, and found allies in some unlikely places…
In this episode, Reyville recovers, secrets are revealed, and some plans are made...
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For more tales set on Ferris Island, check out the Ferris Island Index.
The morning light filtered through the Clinic’s west-facing windows in a particular way, a pale greening that testified to the imminent arrival of spring, and Caroline shivered awake under her coat on a time-softened armchair in the corner next to Reyville’s bed.
What had awakened her were creaking footsteps on the old floorboards in the hall outside the bedroom door. Moments later it opened just slightly, and Andy peeked in.
“Oh,” he whispered. “Hey, sorry, did I wake you?”
Caroline stretched her arms out in front of her, neck stiff in that way unique to sleeping upright in a chair, and shook her head. “No, no. Come on in. What time is it?”
“Just before seven,” he said, entering. “I’m making my rounds. How’s he doing?”
He indicated Reyville with a tilt of his head. Caroline glanced over at the pale figure in the bed, lungs filling and expanding.
She had to work, today. She almost forgot. Time no longer existed, after days in this room.
“He slept easy,” she said.
“That’s good.” Andy made a note on a clipboard hanging off the end of the bed. “Doc Mulligan says he’s doing great, considering. Just needs to rest up, let his body bounce back after…all that.”
All that. The shipwreck, the cave, the watching eyes in the darkness, the blood, the tears…
Yes, all of that.
It had been three days since Reyville’s rescue. The Princess of the Weathers was sitting somewhere in Port Salish in drydock, hull smashed to bits, cozy interior quietly mildewing, crusted with salt and muck. Caroline had asked Dan to salvage as many of Reyville’s things as she could, everything that hadn’t been damaged beyond repair. But his home was in tatters, and so was he.
“If you’re going to stay here again tonight,” Andy said, “let me at least get you a room. Sleeping in a chair isn’t going to do anyone any favors.”
“It’s okay. I just…want to be nearby. Just in case.”
Andy nodded, clearly keeping any further thoughts to himself. “Anyway, someone will bring breakfast up in about fifteen minutes. Coffee, too.”
“Hallelujah,” Caroline murmured, smiling. “Thanks, Andy.”
The click of the latch as he left made Reyville stir, and Caroline waited, wondering if she would finally be able to speak to him. He had been in and out for the last few days, but hadn’t said much. Hardly anything at all. After they found him in the cave, he had been near-hypothermic, terribly dehydrated, and had sustained several injuries. His left arm was broken, a grisly wound, and something—a manmade blade, not an animal claw—had slashed him across the face, leaving a deep, jagged cut along one side of his mouth. Despite the careful stitching by Marie Mulligan’s expert fingers, it would certainly scar, a permanent mark.
I don’t want to start over, he had said. I want to stay with you.
Those words had haunted Caroline ever since, the plaintive sound of his voice in the stagnant humidity of the cave, the hollow grief in those words. What could they mean?
Did she want to know?
After a minute or two he did wake up, opening his eyes to look straight at her where she sat curled in the chair. His gaze was clear, for the first time in a long few days.
Caroline sat up, leaning forward on the edge of the seat.
“Hi,” she said.
A flicker of a smile crossed his lips, then, despite the stitches.
“Hi yourself,” he replied.
There he is. Relief flooded through her. “How are you feeling?”
“Oh, well, let’s see…” he sighed, pushed himself up with some effort, his left arm in a cast. “Been better. A bit bashed and fashed, as they say.”
“I don’t think anyone says that.”
“Would you believe me if I told you I’ve had worse?”
Caroline arched an eyebrow with a smile. “Actually…yes. I would believe it.”
He returned the smile with a tentative one of his own. “Are we at the Clinic, then?”
“Yeah. For the last three days. You gave us a scare, you know.”
“Oh.” A cloud passed overhead, darkening the window, reflected in Reyville’s gaze. “It didn’t go exactly to plan. Any of it, really.”
The silence that followed was full of unspoken things. The embers of their last argument had cooled, but there was still warmth under those ashes. All it would take is a spark. Caroline resolved to tread carefully. She wanted to know what happened, when he went to RUMOR. How he ended up shipwrecked in the lair of the fishmaids. She wanted to chastise him, to challenge him. To ask him why he went alone.
But she knew why. It was because she wasn’t there to go with him.
There was never any question that he would go. It wasn’t in him not to.
She said, quietly, “You went alone.”
He nodded. “You weren’t here.” Matter-of-fact.
“Then why go at all?”
“Because it’s wrong, what RUMOR is doing. They can’t keep on without someone shutting it down.”
“It was stupid, to go alone.” She sighed. “You could have died. You nearly did.”
“Yes, nearly. Like I said, it didn’t go to plan.”
“That’s because it was your plan. Our plans usually go fine.”
“Well. You weren’t here,” he said, again. Firmly.
She hadn’t told him about Ida, about the funeral, about Denver. It all seemed like a distant memory, a whole other lifetime.
“What happened out there?” she asked.
The pain that creased his brow made her instantly regret asking, but his voice was lightweight, dismissive. “The lads at RUMOR really rolled out the red carpet for me,” he said. “But that’s a longer story for a stronger man.”
He paused, then said, “How’s the Princess?”
She didn’t even have to answer; it flickered across her face, and he caught it easily.
“Ah,” he said. “That bad?”
“She’s, well…she’ll need some repairs,” Caroline said.
Reyville grunted, trying to downplay his concern for his boat, but it still read in the heaviness of his expression. “When do I get out of here?”
“You don’t. Not yet. You need to rest up.”
“I’m fine.”
She gave him a look, but inwardly, her heart squeezed for him. Despite the usual mischief returning to his eye, the typical fierceness in his speech, she could see that he wasn’t back to normal. He was good at hiding it. But there was still a fragile, tired quality to his skin, to the slump of his shoulders, to the new lopsided way the stitches pulled his mouth.
“Listen,” she said, “if we’re going to get RUMOR—and I mean really get them—then we need you back on your feet, strong as ever. So promise me that you’ll rest up.”
He grunted, not looking at her, but she stood from the chair, reached out, and raised his chin with gentle fingers to look in his eyes.
“Promise me, Captain.”
Ah, there he is again. Those eyes, those eyes, looking straight through her to the wall behind. That frank gaze, not a cloud in sight.
“Well, then,” he said, softly. “I promise.”
“Good.” She straightened, set a hand on his good shoulder. “I have to go to work, so I’ll be back to see you later. Andy says they’ll be sending up breakfast, soon. If I come back and he tells me you haven’t eaten, I’ll need to have a word with you.”
With that, she picked up her bag from the chair and headed for the door. But his voice stopped her.
“They can’t keep doing this, Caroline,” he said. “RUMOR. They can’t keep…hurting people, like this.”
She nodded. “You’re right. And they won’t. We are going to see to it. You and me.”
*******
Caroline had barely left Reyville’s side over the previous three days, and she half expected the world to have disappeared while she wasn’t looking. But Ferris Island was alive in the unseasonable sunshine as she drove from the Clinic back to Seavend, dew dripping from the trees and glittering on the grass, seagulls swooping over the marina and the morning commuters piling up at the smalltown intersections on their way across the island, or heading past Caroline toward the ferry.
Time had stood still for her, while Reyville was sleeping. But not for anyone else.
She went straight to the cottage to shower and change for work. It was quiet and cold when she got there, seemingly a little resentful that she had been absent, that her attention had been elsewhere. Even her ghost lingered somewhere, sulking.
She was only a handful of minutes late for her shift, and her heart simply wasn't in the work. The hours passed as if she was on a sort of autopilot, pouring coffee and serving pie, smiling at the regulars and ringing up the orders. All the while, her mind fluttered through the past three days, the past few weeks, the past few months. Puzzle pieces falling into place and then scattering again, ill-fitting. RUMOR, Reyville, and the whole sordid mess.
When her shift was finally over, she went back to the cottage. She changed her clothes again and sat down at her laptop for the first time in three days, opening it up to check her emails.
It was mostly junk, but one new message caught her eye. It was from Aunt Ida’s lawyer; she recognized the name from their brief interaction in Denver. She opened the email, her eyes landing on one sentence, right near the top of the message.
You have been named as a beneficiary in Ida Henderson’s estate.
Caroline ran her eyes over the words again and again.
Named as a beneficiary.
Aunt Ida had never married, never had any children of her own. It made some sense that she would have left something to her sister’s kids; she doted on them. But Caroline couldn’t imagine how much, couldn’t even consider it.
Unless…
Even a few thousand would be enough. Enough to move back to Denver. To start over, reset her life. Get back into journalism, into writing, into anything she wanted. Would her aunt have left her that much?
She couldn’t imagine.
Caroline felt the ghost reading over her shoulder, so she swatted the air as though she was dispelling a fly from beside her ear.
Named as a beneficiary. The words throbbed on the screen.
Caroline closed the laptop, stared out the window over the desk for a long time at the small boats passing back and forth, the big ships way out on their way up the coast. Half expected to see the Princess bobbing in her usual slip.
It was all wrong. All of it. Something wasn't right. She needed to think. She needed busy hands, to think.
An impulse drove Caroline out of her chair, away from her desk. Something clicked into place, something unnameable. She tied her curls up away from her face. She put the Oasis CD that Reyville had given her into the stereo in the kitchen, and she sang along as she started to tidy up the cottage, top to bottom. She swept and scrubbed, dusted and vacuumed, organized and reorganized, looking on the place with fresh eyes.
Maybe she could leave. Maybe she could stay.
Champagne Supernova came on, her favorite song on the whole CD.
“Someday you will find me, caught beneath the landslide…in a champagne supernova in the sky…”
Reyville had called it nonsense, this song. But it was still her favorite, even so. Pleasant nonsense. The kind that you can feel the meaning of even if it doesn’t make any sense.
The meaning is in the music, if you listen hard enough.
The cleaning took on a manic edge, the longer the afternoon wore on. The CD played on repeat, around and around. The ghost watched from above the refrigerator, at a safe distance, terrified of the vacuum.
And it was only when Caroline found herself scrubbing the shower, listening to Champagne Supernova for the sixth time that afternoon, that the sudden thought slammed into her like a brick, lured out by her busy hands.
I can’t leave.
She tried to push the thought away, but all she could see was Reyville’s face.
I don’t want to live in Denver.
The General Store, the Clinic, the harbor in Port Salish, the Princess in all her glory.
This is home.
She sat back on her knees, threw the sponge down on the shower floor, and leaned into her arm against the bathroom wall.
“I want to stay,” she said, aloud. “In this stupid, haunted house.”
The ghost fluttered on the edge of her vision, too nonplussed to respond.
********
When Caroline finally returned to visit Reyville, the Clinic was quiet, only a handful of patients milling around the common room in the late afternoon. She checked in with the receptionist and climbed the stairs to the second floor, walking in to Reyville’s room.
He was sitting up in bed, his left arm in a sling, and the setting sun sliced through the window, falling across him, turning his beard to spun gold and his eyes bright and unnatural as he watched her enter. There was a strange quality to the light, something off-kilter and brassy.
It turned the whole scene somehow portentous, fizzy with readiness.
“I’m back,” she said.
“I’m glad,” he replied.
She came to sit on the armchair beside the bed, feeling suddenly shy for no reason at all. This morning had been all about the relief of talking to him, of seeing the glint in his eye after days of fevered sleep. But in the hours between, while she was cleaning her house and he was trying to regain his strength, the bits and pieces of where they had left off had fallen back into place. She had so much to ask him, and she had no reason to expect him to answer any of it.
“How was your day?” he asked, clearly trying small-talk on for size.
She thought of her too-clean cottage, the email from the lawyer, the shower floor…decided it was too difficult to explain. “Oh, pretty boring. Work and then…tidying up, a bit.”
She paused, took a deep breath, then said, “I was in Denver, last weekend. When you called me.”
His eyes widened, just a little. This was new information. “Visiting your family,” he said.
“Yeah. My…my aunt passed.”
He looked stricken. “Caroline. I’m sorry. I wish…I wish you had told me.”
“I do, too.” She sighed. “I didn’t…handle it very well. I didn’t handle you very well, either. And I’m sorry, Reyville. I want you to know that I’m sorry. If I had just explained, then you wouldn’t have gone to RUMOR alone, and—”
He raised his good hand, interrupting her. “No, that’s not…that’s not helpful. That’s not the right way to think about it. You had every right to be upset with me for lying to you. We needed to trust each other. I made that difficult. Impossible, really.”
She looked up, then, and the light from the window was behind her; she could feel its warmth on the back of her neck, like his fingers, like his fingers in her curls…
“Reyville,” she said, “you said in your voicemail…no more secrets.”
He was braced for it. He knew it was coming. He nodded.
“When we found you in the cave,” she said, “there was something you said to me. You kept telling me that you didn’t want…to start over. That you wanted to stay.”
His eyes were unreadable in that strange, stern light.
She cleared her throat. “No more secrets, right?”
Whatever she had expected—for his face to shut down, for the clouds to pass over his eyes, for any number of things to happen—she did not expect him to reply, “When I die, I start again.”
There was no wavering in his voice. No flicker of movement in his eyes. He was giving her the gift of his honesty, in all its strange glory. She accepted it, even as her heart pounded within her chest, an increasing rhythm all the way down to the soles of her feet.
“You start again?” she repeated, gently. She wanted him to know that she was believing him. No matter what, she believed him. “What does that…mean?”
“I don’t really know how it works,” he said. “I just know that it…that that’s what happens. I die, and an orphaned baby boy is left on the steps of a church in Lancaster. I grow up, start to remember, and then at some point…the island calls me back. And when I die, as I eventually do, I start all over again.”
I don’t want to start over.
“How many times…has this happened?” Caroline asked, though part of her was terrified to know.
He did not blink, did not even pause to count. “I’ve started again five times.”
Five times. Six different Reyvilles, leaving their footprints through history.
“When did it, you know…start?”
Reyville flinched, eyes leaving hers for the first time. “1815. Was my first repeat.”
She swallowed, her mouth having suddenly gone dry. Two hundred years. She couldn’t even imagine it, couldn’t conceptualize it. But she wanted him to know that she believed him, even though it was impossible.
After all: the impossible—the strange, the weird, the wrong, the ghostly—had been part of their partnership from the very beginning.
She nodded, calmly. “Thank you. For telling me.”
He blinked, his good hand fumbling with the edge of the blanket. “Don’t you want…more?”
After all, Caroline Phelan wants to know everything.
And yes, of course she did. She wanted to know these six Reyvilles, as intimately as she would let him. She wanted to understand all of his lifetimes. She wanted to know if there had been others who had loved him as much as she did.
Yes. She wanted to know everything.
But not today. Today, this was gift enough.
She shook her head. “No, it’s okay. There’s time for that,” she said, sighing deeply to calm her thundering heart, her tingling fingers and toes. “Time enough for more, later, when you want to tell me. When you’re ready. This is enough.”
He had not expected her to say that. He seemed hesitant, unsure, but he smiled, a fleeting thing.
The pleasant nonsense in Champagne Supernova started to make more sense. She had felt it, before she even realized.
How many special people change?
How many lives to live, it's strange…
The sun finally slipped below the treeline, that beam of clarity dimming, and the radiator below the window popped and creaked as it kicked on to fill the room with warmth. Caroline kept her hands curled in her lap, as though what Reyville had given her was a tangible thing, a secret she could hold in her palms. Faceted, like a gem or a puzzle-box, doors yet to open, more to reveal about this man.
This good man. This imperfect gentleman.
Captain of…everything, really.
“I’m glad you stayed,” she said. Her hands were curled in her lap. She could still feel the weight of his head in her lap, the way it was in the cave, the way she wept. He was alive. Haunted, and alive. She didn’t always think they had a lot in common, but they had that, at least.
I love you, I love you, I love you.
“So am I,” he replied, as the slipping sun caressed the trees on its way down, down, down, leaving a trail of gold behind.
*******
The good thing about bones and skin and hearts is that they mend. And as the days passed, Reyville knitted back together under the watchful eye of Doc Mulligan, of Andy, and of every free moment Caroline could spare.
As he was repaired, so too was the Princess in her drydock. It was Zeke and the fishermen at the Wake who passed the hat for the repairs. As Dan explained, “The island’s fisherfolk are a tight-fisted bunch, but not when it comes to one of their own, and Reyville is beloved by those crusty bastards. I think it’ll about cover it. But it’s going to take some time.”
Of all the stories Reyville needed to tell—and as far as Caroline was concerned, there were many—only one would lead them closer to solving the mystery at RUMOR, of setting things right.
So, one day, when Reyville was strong enough, Dan came to visit at the Clinic and they all sat at a table in the common room, together: Reyville with his arm in its sling, Caroline, Dan, and Andy. The stitches had been taken out of Reyville’s lip, but it was shaping up to be a first-rate scar, making his face look just slightly lopsided. If he had not looked like a grizzled pirate, before, he certainly looked a bit closer to one now.
As Andy brought over coffees for all of them and sat down himself, Reyville began.
“That night,” he said, “my plan was to access RUMOR by the waterfront side and just make note of the activity going in and out. I truly had no plan to get any closer. I just wanted to get a sense of the scale of this thing. So I anchored the Princess out of sight around a corner and rowed the dinghy to the compound. I managed to get to the beach and hid the dinghy, making my way over to the dock on foot, but I didn’t count on there being so many cameras. They were everywhere. I got ambushed. In hindsight, I wasn’t…I wasn’t thinking. I shouldn’t have been alone.”
He swallowed, remembering. Under the table, Caroline slipped her hand onto his knee, solidarity. He cleared his throat, continued.
“The thing is, the guys who came after me…they weren't RUMOR security. It was these other blokes, this ragtag group. Not organized. Makes me think this isn’t widespread, that maybe the higher-ups don’t know. Some kind of private militia, hired by someone. Regardless, they didn’t intend to let me live, that much is for sure. In the confusion I managed to slip them, swam for the Princess. They followed me in their own boat. Normally I could out-maneuver them, but…they were faster than my old girl, and I was panicking. I ran aground on the rocks. One of the men boarded, attacked me. Managed to snap my arm and slash my face with his knife before we both fell overboard. Not sure what happened to him, but uh…the maids swarmed us after that, so. I imagine he didn’t last very long. And the fishmaids hid me in the cave, until you found me.”
Dan said, “So someone inside of RUMOR has their own thing going on. Something rotten.”
“That’s what it sounds like,” Caroline replied. “And my guess is that there’s no record of any of it. No payroll, no nothing. If we want to get these guys and figure out who they’re working for, we’re going to need evidence. And a plan.”
“It’ll be tough to get evidence with those goons wandering around,” Andy said. “You would need someone on the inside, probably. Dr. Hawkins, maybe?”
Caroline shook her head. “I’m willing to bet Dr. Hawkins isn’t involved.”
But it was Reyville who said, “What about the fella who kidnapped Lyla. The one going on about the Turning.”
Caroline caught what he threw. “Do you suppose he worked for them?”
“If he did, he might be our in. It’s better than no leads at all. Dan, can you find out what happened with him? Maybe figure out if we can have a conversation?”
“On it,” she said, making a note in her phone, adding sardonically, “it's always such a pleasure to chat with the Brack liaison.”
“What are you planning to do?” Andy asked.
Reyville shrugged. “Not sure, yet. But regardless, these guys do all of their dealings in the shadows. And I’m not going to make the same mistake twice.”
“What mistake?” Caroline asked.
He glanced up at her, and he brought within that look all of the many months of their partnership, the coves and caverns, the haunted houses and nocturnal gardens and black waves, the danger and the desperation and the beauty, too, because they found beauty sometimes in it. The lens of a camera, cutting through the gloom. The clarity of kindness, reaching through the dusk.
Her hand on his knee. His secrets in her curled fingers. The warmth of his touch on the back of her neck, the warmth of his head in her lap, holding her, holding him…
What mistake, Reyville? What mistake?
“I only know one person who can see in the dark. Who doesn't rest until she knows everything,” Reyville said. His eyes never left hers, and his good hand clasped her hand where it still lingered on his knee. “And this time, if I'm going anywhere, I'm going to make sure we go together.”
Thank you for reading! 📸
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Next week's is going to be quite the finale. I almost don't want to read it, because then it will be over. Until the next series. There will be a next series, right? Right? Please?
Awwwww! #TeamReyline! #Caroville #Caplan #shipshipship
But seriously, while part of me really wants to know about Reyville's past lives and more about all of it, I love the way this unfolded. It was so evocatively described I could see it. So well done.