Three Hybrid Brothers Locked Me in Their Tower, and the Man Who Sent Me There Is the Real Monster novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Page
At the November town meeting Dally strikes "by lot" from the minutes, writes "by sale", and walks to the three men by the wall; Magnus tells her she has written herself into the charter.
Cyrus Hemenway drew the slip from the hat and unfolded it with two fingers.
Two hundred people in the church hall went silent, and the clerk's pen stopped moving.
"Pinkham," he read, and then, kindly, "Odalys Pinkham."
Nobody in town had called me Odalys since my mother died.
I was in the fourth row with my father's account book open on my knees, because I never went anywhere without it.
I looked at my father.
He sat three seats down with his cap in both hands and his eyes on the floor.
He owed the selectman the whole mortgage on our salvage yard, to the dollar, and I was the one who knew the number.
I had added it up every month for seven years.
"The fourth clause of the Ledge charter is plain," Cyrus said to the room, in the voice he used at funerals.
"Every thirty years the Ledge men are owed a keeping.
"One unmarried woman of this town, chosen by lot, lives on the Ledge until the spring thaw, so the light is kept and the old bargain holds."
He folded the slip and tucked it in his breast pocket.
"Miss Pinkham, the town thanks you."
The women of the Grange bent their heads.
The man beside me found something to look at on the ceiling.
Nobody had ever said what happened to the woman.
Nobody had ever said she came back.
I stood up.
My father didn't look at me, and that told me what I needed to know.
The lot had been drawn from a hat, but I had seen his face when the slip came out.
He hadn't been surprised.
I walked down the side aisle to the clerk's table.
The clerk was a thin man who had taken the minutes of every meeting since I was in school, and he leaned back as I came.
"May I?" I said, and picked up his pen.
He didn't stop me.
His minutes lay open in front of him, wet ink and all.
I found the line.
It read, in his neat hand: Drawn by lot: Odalys Pinkham.
I drew one straight line through the words by lot.
Then I wrote above them, in the same careful hand I used for the yard's ledgers: by sale.
I wrote the rest in a single breath.
By sale: Enoch Pinkham, mortgage forgiven, Cyrus Hemenway.
I blew on it once to dry it and held the page up for the hall.
"If I go up that Ledge, I go up on the true book," I said.
My voice came out steady.
I was glad of that.
"Say which it is, Mr. Hemenway. A lot, or a sale."
Nobody spoke.
Cyrus Hemenway smiled at me, the smile he gave a child who has said something clever at a wedding.
"Miss Pinkham, you are upset."
"I'm a bookkeeper," I said.
"I'm not upset.
"I'm reading the entry."
A chair scraped at the back.
Three tall men in black wool coats had come in out of the cold and were standing against the rear wall.
I had never been closer than the harbor road to a MacNaughton in my life.
The town left pies at their dock and did not look at them.
The oldest stood in the middle with his hands in his pockets and the snow still melting on his shoulders.
He was big, and dark, with gray coming into his beard, and he wasn't looking at Cyrus.
He was looking at the page in my hand.
Then he looked at me.
It was a long look, and I felt it in the soles of my feet.
"Leave the page as she wrote it, Selectman," Magnus MacNaughton said.
His voice reached every corner of the hall without being raised.
"We will keep what she wrote."
Cyrus turned his head.
For a moment the courtesy slid off his face.
Then it was back, pressed and neat.
"Magnus," he said.
"Of course.
"The clerk will enter it as written."
The clerk bent his head and copied my line into the book.
I laid the pen down on the table.
My father had half risen in the third row.
He opened his mouth.
"Dally."
I turned around and looked at him until he sat back down.
Then I closed my account book, put it under my arm, and walked up the center aisle between the rows of people who had just let a hat decide my life.
Nobody reached for me.
Nobody said my name.
I stopped in front of the three men by the wall.
The one in the middle held out his hand, palm up.
I did not take it.
I walked past him, through the door, down the church steps into the snow, and out to the harbor road where a long black boat sat tied at the town landing.
He was behind me by the time I reached the rail.
He put his hand over mine on the wet wood, to steady me against the swell.
His hand was enormous and warm, and it did not let go.
I had meant to step aboard alone.
I stood there with my hand under his and my heart going, while the hall emptied behind us into the dark.
His brothers came down the landing and untied the lines.
"Nobody has ever struck a line through that charter," Magnus MacNaughton said, low, so that only I could hear.
"You cannot get away from us now, Miss Pinkham.
"You wrote yourself into it."
I looked down at his hand covering mine.
Then I turned my wrist and drew my hand out from under his.
I put my foot on the gunwale, stepped aboard by myself, and sat down in the bow without being told.
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