will return, or even what to do about the fee. So Lucky runs back to the boat and finds a pen and paper, writes a note with our names and the time, and sticks it under the door with money for our fee.
“Hope that’s good enough,” he says gruffly. “Would it kill them to have someone on duty here during the summer? I mean, come on. This is peak tourist season. Not to mention that the pier is about to collapse. They need to put some damn money into this place. Why isn’t anyone here?”
Wow. Bad mood descending and fast. What’s up with that?
“Well, we did just sort of show up here without telling anyone,” I remind him. “They had registration online.”
“Fair point,” he concedes, still gruff.
“Should we walk around the island? We don’t need a lighthouse keeper to give us permission for that, right?”
“Guess not,” he says, looking a little less grumpy.
“Besides, we’re supposed to be being a little bad. At least, that’s what someone told me, I don’t know.”
His shoulders relax. “All right, Saint-Martin. You win. We’re outlaws today. We do as we please.”
Whew. Crisis averted.
Inside a little plexiglass holder that squeals when I lift the lid, there’s a small stack of tri-folded maps. They show a walking path around the island and point out several colonial buildings, including a church and a “burying ground.”
I crane my neck to kiss him lightly on his lips. “Take me to the burying ground. I want to snap a million pictures.”
“What about the haunted trading post?”
“It’s hard to decide. But wait. You didn’t even notice something.”
“What?”
“I didn’t get sick once on the way out here. Does that make me an official water rat, or what?”
“Well, damn. It certainly does.” He fist-bumps my hand and then grabs me around the waist and half-kisses, half-tickles my neck, making me shout out in surprise. And after I nearly fall over laughing, we settle down and stop fooling around, and he takes over map duties. Then we begin exploring the island.
Under gray skies, we hike down a sandy path bounded by tall grasses and more beach roses to the first historical site, set away from the coast at the edge of the woods. The settlement of Rapture—religious colony, pig farm, trading post—was torn apart by war and weather, so what remain are merely the outlines of where buildings once stood, stone labyrinths in the dirt that hint at rooms and the spines of fallen fireplaces.
As the skies darken, we loop around the other end of the island—pausing to take pictures of gravestones—and when we’re halfway down the opposite coast, we stop to eat a late afternoon snack at something called the Stonehenge of New England. It’s a mysterious standing stone circle—rather, what was lauded as one in the 1920s, before the last hurricane wiped out several grand summer homes that had been built here by a few pioneering rich people who thought Beauty was too crowded. Those were the last people to live on Rapture Island: One of those survivors admitted later that he built the stone circle as a hoax.
“It’s a pretty good hoax, you have to admit. I would’ve been fooled,” Lucky says. He’s picking up the remainders of our picnic near one of the stones that’s less standing and more leaning while I finish snapping another roll of film. “I think the fact that he built it inside an actual stone wall that’s hundreds of years old added to its veracity. Sort of a fool-the-eye thing. He shouldn’t have told anyone and let the mystery stand.”
“I wonder if guilt finally ate away at him,” I murmur from behind my Nikon. I’m getting a lot of spooky shots out of this trip. It’s getting darker out here, though, with the line of storms veering closer. Not sure how this roll will turn out. I bump up the ISO as far as it’ll go and say, “Speaking of guilt … I broke into my grandmother’s closet.”
“Whoa. Really? You did?”
“I found something. My mom’s old yearbook. And I think I found an inscription from her mystery navy lover. It said, ‘It’s finally over. Only palm trees and white, sandy beaches on the horizon now. Our future is bright and sunny, and I can’t wait for the two of us start it together.’ ”
“Interesting …” He says this like someone who knows way more than he’s letting on, and that frustrates me to no end.
“Know anyone in town named Drew who was once in the navy?”