I Taught a Siren to Court... Then Became His Mate novel · Chapter 17 of 32

Chapter 17: The Outer Ledge

Margie pulled into her dooryard, shut off the engine and turned on the kitchen light.

"Inside," she said. "Everybody. Boots off."

The two brothers and the loud one filed into her kitchen behind us.

Minnow went straight up the stairs to the bathroom in the bathrobe.

Margie dumped a cribbage board on the table and a deck of cards beside it.

"Sit," she said. "Deal."

The quiet brother dealt.

The light bar swung across the kitchen window, blue and red.

A car door slammed.

Somebody knocked, three hard knocks.

Margie opened the door in her socks with a beer in her hand.

The officer was young and tired, in a green uniform jacket with the state patch on the shoulder.

"Evening, Margie."

"Morning, technically."

"There was a fire alarm up at the marine station." He looked past her at the table. "And the animal they had in the lab is gone. Dr. Barrows says Ms. Colcord took it."

"Took it where?"

"He didn't say."

"How big is it?"

"Dr. Barrows says about eight hundred pounds."

Margie looked at me, five foot six in my socks, and back at him.

"In her pocket?"

He sighed.

"Ma'am, where were you between midnight and one?"

"Here," I said.

"Doing what?"

"Cribbage," said the quiet brother, without looking up from his cards.

"Cribbage," said the other brother.

"Cribbage," said the loud lobsterman, a half beat late.

The officer looked at the three of them.

They looked back at him, deadpan, holding their cards.

"All night?" he said.

"She skunked me twice," said the loud one. "It's humiliating. Don't put it in the report."

The officer looked at my wet jeans, soaked to the knee.

"Why are your pants wet?"

"It's an island," Margie said. "Everybody's pants are wet."

He stood in the door for a long moment.

Then he closed his notebook.

"Don't leave the island, Ms. Colcord," he said. "He's going to file something in the morning."

"I wouldn't dream of it."

When his taillights were gone, Margie turned to me.

"He's right," she said. "Lewis will be in this yard at daylight with a warrant and every camera on the island. You won't be."

"Where will I be?"

"My grandmother's camp," she said. "On the outer ledge."

At three in the morning, she ran me out in her skiff with no lights, a mile off the east shore.

Jet swam beside us the whole way, a dark wake off the bow.

The outer ledge was a hump of granite with a few stunted spruces and one gray shack on it.

One room, a woodstove, a bunk with a faded quilt, an oil lamp.

On a shelf by the door sat an old cookie tin, rusted at the edges.

"That's the bread tin," Margie said. "She'd row out here and fill it, and leave it on that rock by the water."

She left me a can of beans, a lighter, and a jug of water.

"Don't burn it down," she said, and went.

I slept on the bunk until noon.

When I woke up, Jet was lying in the tide pool below the door with his tail in the water and his chin on the rock, watching the door.

We spent the whole day like that.

Me on the doorstep, him in the pool, talking.

He told me about the cove when he was small, and the wrecks, and the first pearl.

I told him about my father, and about sterning on boats for two years in January.

"I watched you," he said. "On those boats. Every winter morning, going out past the cove."

"You never said."

"You didn't remember me. It would have frightened you."

"It frightens me now."

"Does it?"

I looked at him in the pool, his hair drying in the sun, his eyes on me.

"No," I said. "It doesn't."

The sun went down behind the island.

He came up out of the water on legs.

Margie had left her ex's jeans folded on the rock, and he put them on with the button done right for the first time.

He didn't put on a shirt.

I lit the lamp.

He stopped in the door of the shack with the dark behind him.

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